After having no breakfast, by the time the Battle of Iwo Jima panel rolled around, I was ready to chew on my notebook. Perhaps that hunger kept me generally grounded in the present, because I find that just looking back through my notes is more emotional than I remember feeling during most of the presentation that day. The panel consisted of: Col. Frank C. Caldwell, recipient of the Navy Cross and CO of F Company, 2nd BN, 26th Marines, whose unit suffered the highest KIA rate in USMC History; Ralph K. Griffiths, veteran of the company that took Mt. Suribachi and raised the flags; Donald Mates, who was severely wounded; and James White, whose actions saved Mates' life.
Much like the Band of Brothers panel, this one was a kaleidoscope of stories and memories--Caldwell in particular spoke that way. He started off by stating with great pride and awe in his voice that on Iwo Jima it had been his honor to command "two hundred and fifty-three of the bravest 19-year-olds you ever saw." He is 88 years old and so the words came slowly, with frequent pauses between sentences.
"The island was like a place out of Hell," he recalled. "The worst 30-some-odd days that I ever spent in my life." He described the smell and the barren landscape, using Hell as a simile rather than a metaphor. In an odd bit of detail, Caldwell talked about how replacements came through at night and everybody looked alike in the dark, so he hit upon the idea of taping a pattern on the helmets to identify F Company Marines and thus "help morale of replacements."
Caldwell said that after seeing the flag go up on Suribachi, "Morale went sky-high all around," but they knew they had a fight ahead. He went on to talk about how his XO was killed in a Japanese bunker when a white phosphorous grenade went off too soon and blew him out of the bunker. He later saw an old friend who had trained him in parachute jumping crounched down in a very natural position... but without a head. By the time the battle was over, he was the only officer in F Company left alive, along with just a handful of NCOs. Like so many veterans, he chose not to speak of the Silver Star he received.
"It was a very noisy place," Caldwell said. "Always fire going on." But one night it was relatively quiet and he heard what sounded like water cans jangling against each other. There would be silence, then the jangling sounds, then silence, over and over again. Finally he heard, "Banzai, Banzai!" followed quickly by an American voice retorting, "Banzai your ass!" as gunfire broke out and the jangling was heard no more. The audience chuckled appreciatively.
One of the most poignant stories Caldwell told was of a Japanese soldier they encountered as he held a grenade. The soldier made a move to activate the grenade by striking it on his helmet, but Caldwell's men shot and killed him before he could do so. They immediately checked his body for booby traps and found a picture in his helmet. It was the soldier, his wife and six young ones all standing at attention. A "crusty" gunnery sergeant broke down in tears. "We know that they were human, too," Caldwell said quietly.
Caldwell also told several more stories of graphic casualties, things I didn't want to record because somehow making them words on a page seemed to turn it into a mere story and thus diminish the simple searing reality of his words. One that stuck with me was his description of attacking the Japanese who had holed up in the caves. Armed simply with his sword, a Japanese officer came out and faced down a flame-throwing American tank. He charged, they used the flame against him, but he kept crawling towards them as he burned.
"I was 23 years old, turned 24 on Iwo Jima," said Caldwell as he concluded with the barest hint of real humor, "It was the most exciting birthday I ever spent in my life."
Ralph Griffith joined the Marine Corps at 17. Even at 80-something he was still energetic, a sprightly and wiry little man. In my notes I wrote, "Still talks like a Marine." He said that when his group of recruits moved to train at Camp Pendleton after boot camp, they were reinforced with "hardened veterans" from disbanded units, and he believed that was what enabled them to fight as well as they did on Iwo Jima. He recalled that taking Suribachi involved covering only 800 yards, but it took four days and 1400 casualties to do it.
Like many of the veterans, Griffith talked little of himself, preferring to tell the stories of those who fell that day, or who survived but are no longer are with us. He told of momentarily escaping the battle with a group of Marines in a little alcove where they could see only the ocean and were thus a bit protected from the battle behind him. His voice wavered as he told of the sergeant who was drawing their plan of attack in the sand... when he was taken out.
Griffith spent a significant amount of time talking about flag-raiser John H. Bradley. He said with a grin, "Bradley saved more lives in four days than most HMOs in a year!" For that he received the Navy Cross, but Bradley always assumed it had been because he was one of the flag raisers. In 1994, after his death, his family discovered the medal stored away and for the first time opened the seal on the official commendation to learn the details. Griffith exclaimed with sorrow over the idea that Bradley never knew the true honor he'd been given.
With a smile, Griffith recalled someone who seemed to be one of his favorite fellow Marines, American Indian Ira Hayes. The government decided Hayes would be good for the war bond drive, but they had to literally send armed men out to bring him stateside because he defied orders and refused to come; he wanted to stay with his unit. As they traveled across the country, Hayes insisted on getting into trouble and wound up in jail so much that they shipped him back to the front. After that, "he was his normal self," Griffith said with a smile. He then turned sad as he reported that Hayes returned from the war only to die of alcoholism at a relatively young age.
In some ways, Griffith seemed to feel a little out of place among his fellow veterans on the panel. Perhaps it was a sense of pressure in following the report of a senior officer. He concluded with an apologetic shrug, "All I know is what I'd seen there."
Donald Mates began by comparing himself with James White. They're as different as two men could be, he said, then proceeded to detail how true was that statement. "Jimmy's Catholic, I'm Lutheran; he's from the North, I'm from the South; he's a painting contractor, I'm in real estate investment; he'll eat anything and everything, I'm a vegetarian." The list went on and on as the attendees chuckled. Mates called himself a teetotaler and said White loved to drink, which brought a guffaw of agreement from White, who was still sitting in the audience. "But one thing binds us together," said Mates in a warm and serious tone, "our unit."
Mates went on to describe the intelligence unit and the men who comprised it, particularly his dear friend Jimmy Trimble, who had such a bright future ahead of him before he dropped a major league baseball career and joined the Marines. They were the "eyes and ears of General Erskine," with all reports being verbal, not written.
After a pause, Mates said very seriously, "No sane, intelligent person goes into combat unafraid. Based on those conditions, I'm very sorry to report that my friend-- He paused and looked significantly at White --is crazy as a bed bug!" The audience roared and clapped. "One sick puppy!" Mates added with humor.
The full extent of what Mates meant had to wait, for his mind turned to the general experience of the battle. "We didn't see the big picture," he said, "just our pack." He recalled the smell of bodies, the horrifying things they saw, vignettes of the terrible things they experienced. "It was a shock," he said in understatement.
On the most fateful day for his small unit, General Graves Erskine--"appropriate name," mused Mates with what sounded like a touch of bitterness--had sent them on a mission to find the source of mortars that kept some Marines pinned down. Mates said he remembered each one of the men on that mission--two disappeared, three were wounded, Trimble was killed, and White saved the survivors.
At midnight they dug in and "all hell broke loose," Mates said. "We called [the Japanese] roving wolves. Absolutely fearless. You couldn't see them." He told of how the Japanese soldiers had a phosphorous pin on the backs of their shirt collars so that their commanders behind could see them by the reflected light, but of course the pins couldn't be seen by the Americans they faced. "You knew you were in trouble if you turned around and saw pins," Mates recalled.
The thought of seeing those pins shining in the moonlight "gives me nightmares to this day," said Mates with a shudder, describing how the intelligence unit's position was overrun that night. The Japanese were so close that the Marines could hear them banging their grenades together to activate the fuses before tossing them. Trimble took a lot of shrapnel from one grenade, and another exploded between Mates' legs as he lay facedown, breaking both and severing a major artery. A Japanese soldier soon jumped in with an explosive held to his chest and wrapped Trimble in his arms as it went off. "It obliterated him," said Mates, his voice holding a hint of shakiness.
A fellow Marine named Blanchard used his own pack of first aid equipment to apply tourniquets and bandages to Mates, which was against the rules but saved Mates' life. "Everything I have I owe to Jim and Blanchard," he said with great warmth as he looked toward Mates in the audience. "I can never pay them back."
The emotion in the room swelled, then ebbed, and Mates continued. His matter-of-fact tone quickly cleared the air. "Was it worth it?" He suddenly looked older before he answered his own question. "The older I get, the more I question it," he said sadly. It was the only battle where American losses were higher than the Japanese, he pointed out, and added with intensity that there are still 75 MIA and 49 unidentified remains from the battle.
Mates lamented that the Battle of Iwo Jima is "only remembered by aging Marines, historians, and the families affected," even though it was "a real landmark of courage and valor." He added, "It's becoming a footnote."
The darker line of thought continued as he said he'd do it again but would never want his son to experience it. "If you owned Hell and Iwo, you'd live in Hell and rent Iwo Jima," he half-joked, referring to Caldwell's earlier thoughts on the difficult terrain and the smell and barrenness of the land. "I spent 10 days in Iwo," he said heavily, "and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about it."
After a pause, Mates turned business-like once more, concluding by referencing a question that he said he is always asked. Without elaborating, he simply pointed out that he'd had a long and fulfilling marriage that produced a number of children, a comment that left his listeners with a light note of laughter after such a serious presentation.
As Mates had promised, White was truly his opposite. Where Mates had been brooding and serious--his tall, sturdy frame and bass voice adding weight to his words, White was shorter and rotund, with a matter-of-fact lightness that brought the attendees to repeated laughter. The phrase that came to mind in watching him was "happy warrior." The man seemed born to fight.
At the height of the battle, White had joined Blanchard and Mates in their fighting hole shortly after Trimble was killed. The Japanese, he said, "were so close I had to throw grenades underhand and count off" before letting them go. Meanwhile, the severely-wounded Mates was in terrible pain and "making so much noise! 'Be quiet, or I'm going to knock you out!'" White reported saying, worried the Japanese would use the sound to zero in on their position. He told Blanchard to "save three shells for us," implying that was to ensure they didn't become POWs. "I just told them that to shut them up," he said confidentially to the audience. "I was a Christian man and I wasn't going to do that suicide stuff."
White was a private, but ended up giving orders that night because "no one else was." His fellow soldiers began calling him sir, to which he snapped "Quit calling me sir!" He paused for effect before he added, "...'cause they shoot officers first!" The attendees roared with laughter.
All night as White crouched down with Blanchard and Mates, he heard Japanese to the left and right, and all around. So he simply shot every single Japanese soldier that popped up and tried to assault their position. "If you're a hunter," White explained, "You have good days and bad days." He paused before he let slip a grin. "I had a good night." The attendees cheered.
White continued lightly, a sense of something akin to wonderment in his voice. "I thought it was pretty funny--[The] dummies kept coming up to get shot!" If they wanted to die, he was more than happy to oblige. He stood there in that small theatre in 2009, acting out lining up on a Japanese soldier and taking him down in a single shot (complete with sound effects and pauses to shout back over his shoulder), something he had done over and over that night on Iwo Jima. When morning came on Iwo, the three Marines found sixty Japanese bodies surrounding their position... and one unexploded Japanese grenade right next to White.
"Kinda funny you being an officer last night," Blanchard later said to him.
"Fix bayonets!" White replied.
"What??!"
"I yelled, 'Charge!'" White recalled, as he led the laughter of the attendees.
I have a little bottle of "sand" (it's more like tiny volcanic rocks) sitting on a shelf nearby as I write this, a gift from one of the descendants of Iwo Jima, a Marine who feels the connection to that blood-soaked island though he was not yet a twinkle in his father's eye in 1945. I thought of that bottle a lot during this panel... tried not to think the more gruesome thoughts of what water and years might have washed off the sand before the little bottle was filled and capped, tried to think instead about the message it was intended to convey. By the time the panel was over, I think I understood it a little bit better--the sorrow, the horror, the spirit, the heroism... The unanswerable question of whether it was worth such sacrifice is beside the point. It simply... was.
[Part I: WWII, racism and courage; Part II: General Petraeus; Part III: Band of Brothers; Part IV: Seabees; Part V: WWII Heroes of the Air; Part VII: U.S.S. Mason; video excerpts from various sessions are posted at navytv.org. photos above are mine or taken from the official Flickr feed.]
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