Iwo Jima

Replacement, Flamethrowers and Demolition
Twenty-fourth Marines, Fourth Marine Division

Some guys get it, and some guys don’t. That I could never figure out. I’m just thankful it worked out the way it did. There was no way to explain the bullets coming by and other people getting shot and yet they’re not hitting you. Why, I don’t know. I prayed. I prayed one time, I says, “I’m too young.” I says, “I’ll never be bad if you let me live.”

Domenick and his wife, Maryellen, stand in front of the West Orange, New Jersey, home where they have lived for more than fifty years.

Domenick Tutalo holding a carbine at Camp Linda Vista, California, December 1943. On his left cheek is a bandage covering a boil.

Domenick Tutalo turned eighty-two on February 6, 2007, one day before the fifty-ninth anniversary of his marriage to Maryellen. The three of us were sitting at the dining room table, talking over a glass of wine. He was still working, repairing machines for a screen printing business. Domenick gets to set his own hours, though the owner of the printing business keeps calling him back. He is paid twenty-five dollars an hour. “The money’s good; he treats me good,” Tutalo said. Besides, he considers the owner’s two sons good friends. They accompanied him to the drill instructors’ reunion in April 2007. “Yes,” said Maryellen, who turned eighty on November 2, 2006, “he’s giving it to the grandchildren.” Domenick smiled. “I don’t mind,” he said. “It helps them out.”

“I was born February 6, 1925, and I’ve lived in the same house in West Orange, New Jersey, for fifty-one years. I grew up in Jersey. I quit school in ninth grade and went to work for a butcher, for six dollars a week. It was pretty good money, but I had to put in ninety hours, seven days a week. I was thirteen years old. I used to go to the market with him at four a.m., to buy stuff. That’s when they butchered the whole animal. He bought it from Swift, the meatpacking company, hung it, then cut it up.

“My dad worked for the WPA, the Works Progress Administration. He was born in the United States, but my mother came here from Foggia, Italy, at the age of nine.

“When Pearl Harbor came, I was in the Embassy Theater with my uncle. He was in the Army. They stopped the movie and told all the men to report back to base. I don’t remember the movie.

“I joined in March of 1943 as soon as I turned eighteen, a year and a half after Pearl Harbor. I was a fairly good meat cutter by then. The whole family was in the Marines: my cousin Phil Petrillo and Jimmy Zarrilla, my father’s first cousin, who was killed at Roi-Namur. He was in the same platoon with Lee Marvin, who got shot in the butt on Saipan. Jimmy was supposed to get the Congressional Medal of Honor, but he got the Navy Cross. They said it was better if the colonel got the Medal of Honor instead.

“I was five feet five, and I weighed one hundred twenty-six. To me Parris Island, boot camp, wasn’t hard. I was in good shape from being a butcher. We did a lot of running. We trained with sticks, then got the M1. I got out the end of April, and after leave I was put on gate duty at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. I was bored and kept trying to get out. Finally they sent me to New River, which is now Camp Lejeune.

“I joined a replacement outfit, and we trained there, then we took a train to San Diego and the boat to Maui. The Fourth Division went to Roi-Namur, but I went right to Maui. After Saipan they needed machine gunners, so I signed up for that. I was in that about a month; then I volunteered for a demolition outfit being formed by Sergeant Harry Kaff. He was tough. I liked him later, but at that time I thought he was a son of a gun. He was by the book, a Jewish man, but he was religious. You couldn’t curse or nothing. When he was there, you watched what you said. We trained for six or eight months, learning how to blow things up with satchel charges and burn with flamethrowers. They used a naphthalike jelly. It shot about twenty feet. You had to be careful, fire in real short bursts. You could run it all out in maybe ten seconds. It weighed about seventy pounds.

“One guy I grew up with was with the Twenty-third Regiment. He thought I was nuts. He said, ‘You’re cracking up. Don’t do it.’ He said I had a good thing going, but I wanted to see combat. Why, I don’t know. If I had it to do over, would I still do it? Yeah, I think so. I don’t know why. . . . Maybe I wouldn’t have went into flamethrowers or something like that, but why I did it, I couldn’t tell you. I did believe in serving my country. We were all very patriotic.

“We found out on the transport from Maui that we were going to Iwo, but first we went to Guam, where they put out some smaller boats and let us swim off them. Whoever wanted to swim could just jump in. I did it. I never forgot that because it happened on my birthday, February 6. I was twenty years old.

“We left for Iwo the next day with a company of demolition guys and Harry Kaff. During the landing we were getting shelled as we went in on Higgins boats. There were bodies all over the place.

“What did I feel? Scared. You had the fear, but you didn’t have it. I think it’s a stupid thing to say it, but whatever they wanted you just did. There was no place to hide, and you have to function if you can control yourself. We got off the boats from the front and charged up the beach. There were cannons, artillery, machine guns, mortars. I’m not that good at relatin’ what went on from there. A lot of stuff I forget. I don’t know. What I know is we kept doing things on the right flank, we kept moving up by the Quarry. I do remember we spent six days in the same foxhole on Hill 362.

“We were a company of demolition guys, and if they needed somebody, they’d call. If a platoon was pinned down and needed somebody, you’d go in and help. In our first engagement up on the right flank at Iwo everybody got killed but the sergeant and another flamethrower.

“I knew Mike Mervosh, but I didn’t know him, you know? You never got that close. We got friendly after the war. I was in C Company, Twenty-fourth Regiment. Up near the Quarry. Our squad leader took us up toward the Quarry, and that’s where this sniper just shot nine guys right out in the open dead before a rifleman named Scowie got him. The only reason Jeffries and I survived was we made a run to a cliff where he couldn’t shoot us, but we couldn’t do nothing either. We were stuck there the whole night. We were in the Quarry most of the battle. We kept moving up the island. I heard about the flag going up, but I didn’t see it.

“There was no real strategy on the caves or bunkers. The riflemen gave you cover fire, and your job was to charge as close as you could, then blast it. At a bunker you would try for the slit; if not, the flame would stick wherever it went. You didn’t carry a flamethrower all the time. Sometimes you had to carry a rifle. You only got to be a flamethrower when they called for you. They bring you the flamethrower. Then, when you run out of fuel, you just drop it, and they reload it for you. You don’t have to run back because somebody else followed you. Once you blasted the opening with flame, somebody would run up and throw a satchel charge. They were mostly caves. I only saw an enemy once. It was hard to stomach. He came running out on fire. I saw a lot of dead bodies. Did I see our guys taking teeth and ears? I’d rather not comment. I picked up a couple souvenirs, like a notepad and money, and I got some wooden dog tags. Tell the truth, I haven’t gone through it.

“I was on the island the whole time and was never wounded. I used flamethrowers and threw satchel charges, saw a lot of action, charging tunnels and bunkers. I never went inside.

“They said Iwo was really bad for replacements, who got killed easily because they were green and never had time to get integrated into the units, but I never got hurt. Some guys get it, and some guys don’t. That I could never figure out. I’m just thankful it worked out the way it did. There was no way to explain the bullets coming by and other people getting shot and yet they’re not hitting you. Why, I don’t know. I prayed. I prayed one time, I says, ‘I’m too young.’ I says, ‘I’ll never be bad if you let me live.’ The worst thing I didn’t like was the mopping up. You’d walk the whole island looking for stragglers. That’s where a lot of fellows got killed, I think.

“When it was over, we went back to Maui to train for the invasion of Japan. Meantime whoever had enough points were the first ones to go home. It was figured by combat and total time overseas. After Japan surrendered, it didn’t matter so much. I was overseas twenty to twenty-two months. I got there January of 1944 and did not get back to the States till November of ’45. I was discharged December 10, 1945, in Quantico, Virginia. I still weighed one twenty-five. All my cousins made it through except Jimmy, the one who was killed on Roi-Namur.

“I had three hundred dollars when I got home, and I took a chance and opened a restaurant, a luncheonette, short-order cooking, hamburgers, coffee. I called it Tut’s. My mother and sister helped, but I couldn’t pay them, couldn’t make ends meet. I bought everything on the black market. It closed after about a year.

“Maryellen McDonough lived upstairs with her parents in the same building where we had the restaurant. Her father didn’t want her dating Italians, but he and I got to know each other before I started going out with her, and I guess he changed his mind. He was a good man, her father. We got married in February 7, 1948, the day after my birthday. We had two boys and a girl. We bought the West Orange house in 1955. We were married fifty-nine years as of February 7, 2007.

“I started excavating after that, burying four-hundred-fifty-gallon fuel oil tanks for fifty bucks each. I had one helper. We dug the hole and the trench by hand. They supplied all materials; I supplied the truck. I bought a brand-new Ford dump truck for twenty-seven hundred dollars. I don’t know why I didn’t go into the butcher business. I guess I thought there was more in trucking. From there we went into hauling dirt for contractors, and then we got into landscaping. Tutalo’s Contracting, we called it. I had my brother John with me. We got into grading and planting trees for towns. We made a good living.

“I went to my first reunion in 1950, but raising a family, I couldn’t afford to go too often. In 1978 I hooked up with Mike [Mervosh] and Glenn Buzzard at the reunion in Philly. We had a little more money and a little more time by then. I didn’t meet Pete Santoro yet. I just met all of C Company. Most of them were there, guys I hadn’t seen in thirty years.

“I enjoy the reunions. All the years we’ve been coming we never even mention the service or combat, even with all my friends. Nothing ever came out. Never talked about it, never really realized what it was. We go to reunions, even Parris Island, and there’s no talking about the war. Whether the mind went blank or what, I don’t know.”

“Tutalo is very modest, and he forgets a lot too. He was a flamethrower and demo man, and that takes a lot of doing. I was in a machine-gun platoon, divided into three sections to support a rifle company. When that became decimated, I became commander of the rifle platoon. The demo men or flamethrowers were available to whichever platoon needed them. They had their own section within the company.

“Tutalo was a replacement. Replacements usually didn’t last long. I had experienced a lot of battle before I went there, and I knew what to expect more than the replacements did. Even if you took care, it was still deadly. Every damn part of the island was covered with something, interlocking fire, artillery, mortars, and rocket fire. You just had to be lucky, damn lucky.

“I seen him in action, applying demolitions and throwing satchel charges in those caves and bunkers. He’d go up to those pillboxes, and we’d give supporting fire, and someone would throw a satchel charge to blow the thing, and then Tutalo comes up and flames it, and anyone left alive comes running out burning from head to toe, you know what I mean? Guys were getting killed left and right, but we considered that routine because hell, that’s the job. We didn’t think there was anything heroic about it. But we said to Tutalo, ‘For what you did, we’re going to give you a reward when we get back to rest camp.’ But he said, ‘I don’t need none of that shit.’ After that island was secured, he said, ‘Hell, I got five medals now: One head, two arms, and two legs. That’s the award I got.’

“We got back to Maui to rest camp and he’s called front and center with several other marines, and we promoted him to private first class, and that was his reward. He was happier than shit. He says, ‘Boy, four dollars more a month.’

“Tutalo was an ordinary marine; that’s the way I looked at it. We were all ordinary. I ended up as the company commander, and what was my reward? I got a handshake from the company commander: ‘Mervosh, well done.’ And that was good enough for me. Hey, we were all ordinary. It was a huge reward just to be alive.

“We built strength among us. We strengthened each other. That’s how we survived. The guys would strengthen me, I would strengthen them, and it worked pretty damn good. That’s the whole key. You’re damn right.”