War Stories II (68 page)

Early in the morning of 23 February, Navy aircraft dropped napalm on Mount Suribachi. Later, the mountain was strangely quiet. At its base, Colonel Chandler Johnson ordered a forty-man combat platoon up the slopes of the extinct volcano. When they landed, the platoon was only 400 yards from Mount Suribachi. It took them four days to cover that scant 400 yards of beachhead.

Led by First Lieutenant Harold Schrier of E Company, 2nd Battalion, the forty Marines of his 3rd Platoon gathered below Mount Suribachi.
Their mission was to take Suribachi from the Japanese, and once that was accomplished, to raise the U.S. flag there on its peak.

Among those forty men of E Company's 3rd Platoon were six Marines and a Navy corpsman that were about to make history, including nineteen-year-old Navy Pharmacist Mate Second Class John “Doc” Bradley, from Appleton, Wisconsin, and USMC photographer Lou Lowery. The men of 3rd Platoon made it to the top at around ten that morning, and by 1020 had fastened a U.S. flag to a long, heavy piece of water pipe they found in the rubble. They raised the Stars and Stripes over that contested Japanese real estate for the first time in history.

Marine photographer Lowery snapped several photos to record the event and headed back down to the combat command area.

“Doc” Bradley was a corpsman assigned to treat wounded Marines in battle. From down below, Colonel Johnson looked up at the flag on Mount Suribachi and felt that it ought to be larger, so it could easily be seen from any part of the island.

Johnson had an American flag from one of the ships that was 96 x 56 inches, and he called over PFC Rene Gagnon. Gagnon had been ordered to go up Mount Suribachi along with four of his buddies to set up a communications post. Joining them were two other Marines and a civilian photographer who had missed the first flag raising.

Gagnon took the flag and the men started up the slippery slopes of the volcanic rock. Joe Rosenthal, the AP civilian photographer, had missed getting the first picture and figured this would be a good opportunity. He was carrying a huge, bulky Speed Graphic camera that used 4 x 5 inch carriers of sheet film. As he was stacking sandbags to secure his camera, the Marines had already gotten to the site and were struggling with the heavy water pipe “flagpole,” which weighed at least 150 pounds.

Rosenthal grabbed his camera and instinctively shot a photo. Within seconds, the flag was fluttering in the wind at the peak of Mount Suribachi. He took another photo with the entire group posing and recorded the names of the men who raised the flag.

“Doc” Bradley had stayed after raising the first flag and helped the five Marines hoist the new one. In that famous Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph,
the most published picture in history, were Bradley, Sergeant Mike Strank, Corporal Harlon Block, Private First Class Rene Gagnon, Private First Class Ira Hayes and Private First Class Franklin Sousley.

Strank was the “old man” of the platoon—at twenty-four he was a noncom and the senior in the squad. Block was just eighteen years old, a hardscrabble oil worker from Weslaco, Texas, who had joined the Marines a year earlier along with thirteen graduates of his high school football team who all volunteered together. Rene Gagnon, from Manchester, New Hampshire, eighteen years old and far from home, carried a photograph of his girlfriend in the webbing of his helmet liner to give him encouragement. Ira Hayes was a young Pima Native American from River Indian Reservation, Arizona. And Franklin Sousley, a nineteen-year-old, found himself far from the quiet and peaceful hills of Kentucky.

These young men were just emerging from boyhood, and not quite a year earlier, all of them had been part of a huge wave of more than 21,000 who poured into California's Camp Pendleton. “Doc,” Mike, Rene, Harlon, Ira, and Franklin became a part of Company E, destined for an appointment at Iwo Jima that would make them all famous.

The man who carried the flag ashore that was raised on Mount Suribachi on 23 February was a young officer from F Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, 5th Marine Division. Lieutenant G. Greeley Wells came to Iwo Jima with that group of 21,000 replacement troops from Camp Pendleton.

Many of the Marines thought that the famous flag raising was a signal that the battle for Iwo Jima was almost over. However, there were still another thirty-two days of brutal combat ahead as the Marines and General Kuribayashi's soldiers slugged away at each other. Sadly, half of the flag-raisers were among the casualties. A week after planting the flag on Mount
Suribachi, Sergeant Mike Strank was killed by friendly fire from an offshore ship. A Japanese shell exploded near PFC Harlon Block just hours later, killing him. His body was misidentified for two years, and it wasn't until after the war that he was finally identified. Four weeks after the flag raising, Franklin Sousley was picked off by a Japanese sniper while waiting to be shipped out for the trip back home.

Private John Cole, barely eighteen, was a Marine whose only previous combat experience was just prior to Iwo Jima, on Guam. It may have helped him survive. He was part of the new group from the States assigned to the 3rd Marines for graves registration detail. He and his buddies recovered bodies of Marines and soldiers killed on Iwo Jima. It was a grisly task.