Chapter Three (b)
Iwo Jima
POWs
Taylor and I went souvenir-hunting in caves by the sulfur
blowhole (iwo is Japanese for "sulfur," and Iwo Jima was
mined for sulfur before the war). The caves were three-floors
deep and the upper two levels had been searched pretty
well, so we went down to the third level. We used flashlights
because the caves lacked lights. The cave consisted of three
tunnels — a long one with a small hole in the cone of the blow-
hole; another ran at right angles to it about 20 feet down from
the end; and the third did an abrupt left from this one.
I was in the lead, so stepped out into the middle of the third
tunnel and shone my flashlight. Three Japanese soldiers
were lying against the near wall. I jumped back and warned
Taylor that there were Japs below. We drew our pistols and
ordered the Japs to surrender. One of them reached around
the corner and waved a white rag. We yelled Ha-daka-ni-
nare ("Take off your clothes!") because it had been the
Marines' experience that some surrendering Japs would
conceal grenades in their clothes. We made them strip to
prevent them from bringing weapons among Marines.
They stripped down to their underwear (a loincloth similar to an Indian breechcloth or king-sized diaper), then we brought them up to the upper level so we could take them outside. I led the way so none of our Marines would blow our prisoners away when we brought them out. We turned them over to Division G-2 for interrogation. Note: In 1996, I saw this very scene in a TV newsreel. I knew at the time it was being filmed but had only seen it once in a movie theater. Only 47 Japs surrendered during the operation. The TV station showing the newsreel (it was part of Victory
in the Pacific — Iwo Jima) didn't have a copy of this, but
they gave me a number to call that had furnished the film.
They told me that it would be shown again about two
months later. I was ready for it and recorded it on tape on
my VCR.
The battle shifted to the northern end of the island. We had
to root our enemy out yard by yard. One day we were
supporting the infantry by tank fire on pillboxes, caves, and
bunkers. Off to our left was a cliff about 10 feet high. I
noticed a Japanese officer sitting against the cliff observing
us through field glasses. His helmet was on the ground by
his side. I eased the turret around and started firing the
co-ax machine gun at him. The barrel of the machine gun
was about burned out and was very erratic. The bullets
were striking all around him. Very calmly, he laid the
binoculars down, picked up his helmet, put it on and then
picked up his binoculars and calmly began observing again.
The 75-mm barrel wasn't burned out. He ceased observing.
Another time we were giving close support to the infantry when I spotted a Jap squad being marched down a road about 500 yards to our front by an officer swinging a sword. A small ridge ahead of the tank masked me, so I couldn't bring them under fire. Suddenly a Marine F4U Corsair came diving out of the sky and one of its 20-mm shells hit the officer in the
stomach and exploded. The top part of his body toppled
backward and the bottom half took two more steps before
collapsing.
The Japanese had a very large mortar that they fired every
day at 1800. The shell was about four feet long and one-and-
half feet thick. It looked like a seabag flying through the air
and gave a shrill whistling scream as it went by. We called
it the Screaming Meemie. They hit the island with it once.
Beloved corpsmen
Admiral Nimitz said of the Marines on Iwo Jima: "Uncommon valor was a common virtue." This was particularly true of the Navy's medical corpsmen. If you wanted to really make a Marine mad, just do something harmful to "Doc." There were more Medals of Honor awarded to Navy medical corpsmen than all other specialties in the Navy, and about 50 percent were awarded while they were serving with Marines. These men
would go out in front of our lines to bring back a wounded
Marine.
There was one weapon we had there that we greeted with
mixed feelings. One-ton pickup trucks were fitted with rocket
launchers, with about 36~40 rockets per launcher. They would
pull into an area and set up to fire. It took them about 10
seconds to fire all the rockets, then the driver would throw
the truck in gear and get the hell out. With good reason —
about half a minute later an artillery barrage would land
where the truck had been. They never got the truck, but
God help any infantry in the area. Finally on 27 March, the
island was declared secure and we loaded back aboard
LSMs for the trip to Hawaii.
While on the way back to Hawaii, we got the news that the President had died at Warm Springs, GA. One wag commented, "You mean Eleanor's dead?"
We went back to the same tent city, even the same tents we were in before. Our first night back, a warrant officer bought each man a six-pack of beer. They took the battalion PX beer fund and bought us another six-pack and everyone in our tent (six of us) went down to the slopchute and bought a case (24 bottles). We started our celebration at 1630 and by midnight we were empty. The next morning we filled two 55-gallon oil drum garbage cans with bottles from our tent. Some headache.
Once I was lying in my bunk feigning sleep when Taylor came in. He'd been drinking and was three sheets to the wind. He was talking to the other guys in the tent and said, "If they told me to go out on a mission where there's only one chance in a thousand of coming back and I could have my choice of one man to go with me, I'd choose that SOB, 'cause he ain't scared of nothing." He was talking of our escapades on Iwo.
Shortly after we returned to Hawaii, the battalion formed a reconnaissance section. Each company formed three teams of three men each. I joined it from our company. Each team had a driver, radioman, and team leader. We were issued jeeps and were training for 10-15 miles ahead of our front lines to scout possible routes for tanks. One of the men in our recon section was Pfc. Hugh Krampe. Some of you probably know him better as Hugh O'Brien (TV's Wyatt Earp, photo right) but back then he was just one more Marine. No one told us, but we knew we were training for the invasion of Japan.
We had to make sketches of terrain features. While we were going through school for this we got an unexpected bonus — Norman Rockwell was on a tour of military bases and spent a day giving us art instructions in terrain drawing. We were to draw an overlay of a road from Kamuela to Kawaihae Beach (eight miles) using only a jeep and a compass and a sheet of overlay paper. It was supposed to fit over a map when we were finished.
We went along using the jeep's speedometer to measure distance and the compass for direction of the turns in the road. At one point, (as I was shooting azimuths), I told the crew that something was wrong, the compass was haywire. They tried to tell me that I was just whistling Dixie but I persisted and walked about a hundred yards away and shot an azimuth parallel to the road. After a few hundred yards, the compass seemed right again. After we turned our overlay in, we found that we were the only ones right, at that particular place. We found that a large piece of iron ore at that point threw compasses off as much as 10 degrees.
In August the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and two days later on Nagasaki, with a combined total of 175,000 casualties. There was a big outcry about this, but the fire bombing of Tokyo killed many more than this, although it required many thousands of planes instead of just two.
As bad as the atomic bombings were, the invasion of Japan (scheduled for November) would have caused the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of Americans plus many hundreds of thousands of Japanese.
I was on tank-park watch one night shortly after the A-bomb destroyed Nagasaki, listening on short-wave radio to Bern, Switzerland when they announced to the world that Japan had contacted them to tell the Allies that Japan agreed to the terms of unconditional surrender.
PFC Hugh Krampe, later known as
Hugh O'Brien and TV's Wyatt Earp
No front lines on Iwo. Marines were above ground and the Japanese below in underground caves. Marines rarely saw an alive Japanese soldier, yet the Japanese could see the Marines perfectly, from the heights. Grenades and flame-throwers were required to oust Japanese from caves.
Iwo from above — The U.S. Air Force pounded Iwo in the longest sustained aerial offensive of the war. Incredibly, this ferocious bombardment had little affect. Hardly any of the Japanese underground fortresses were touched. Some 21,000 defenders of Japanese soil, burrowed into Iwo's volcanic rock, awaited America's Marine invaders.
Mobile arty — Marines fire truck-mounted rocket units against Japanese forces on Iwo. Gunners fired then put pedal to metal to avoid predictable return fire from Japanese arty.
Iwo Jima — the largest armada invasion up to that time in the Pacific War.
