Iwo Jima

Al Abbatiello was in my squad, the engineers. He was very tough, a tough, tough guy. There used to be an ad in the magazines in the forties, something about shaving cream, how it was “tough but ever so gentle.” That was Al. He was big, and he could break you in half, but he was a tender guy. Very nice guy. We keep in touch.

Colonel Charles Waterhouse, USMC (Ret.), eighty-two, stands beside his painting of a young marine facing a cemetery and Mount Suribachi, one of several works Waterhouse has done on the Iwo Jima campaign.

I spent an afternoon with Colonel Waterhouse in his museum in Toms River, New Jersey. He was extremely gracious and cordial, granting me all the time I wished even though his wife was home and not feeling well. We talked at length, and he gave me a tour. I saw action illustrations of the Medal of Honor recipients Hector Cafferata at Fox Hill in Korea and Mitchell Paige at Guadalcanal, among others. He also had a compelling work of Colonel John Ripley hanging off the bridge at Dong Ha. I said I couldn’t understand why Ripley had not received the Medal of Honor for his feat that day. He said he couldn’t either. I asked how he liked being described as the Norman Rockwell of the Marine Corps. “That’s the ultimate compliment,” he replied.

“The first wave shoved off at Iwo at nine o’clock. The waves came in about five minutes apart, and we were in the seventh or eighth. I came in at 0937. We didn’t expect to go in that fast, but the first couple waves got in so quickly, zip, they sent us in. Kuribayashi opened up while we were in the water: machine guns, mortars, artillery, everything. We were in the left-flank landing craft, Abbatiello too, and the coxswains got mixed up. They saw this marker they thought was in the center, but it was the left end of the beach.

“We were fortunate to be on the left flank because the machine-gun fire and stuff were going over us at boats to our right. We landed much closer to it than we were supposed to. When the ramp went down, there were no footprints, but there were lots of people shooting at us from Suribachi. It seemed like we were getting fire from three directions, from Suribachi, from the neck of Iwo, and from up north, by the Quarry. We were immediately in a firefight, all this shooting, and you could not see where any of it came from.

“We faced a series of at least three terraces. Our orders were to go two hundred fifty yards inland, turn left and dig a hole, and sit there until we had orders what to do. As we went in, we kept edging to the right. We found a nice-sized ridge thirty feet high or so, and that’s where we dug in.

“We saw a few people getting hurt, but luckily nobody from my platoon did. We had a guy named Danaluk from Brooklyn, New York, whose draft number had come up. He wanted to get in the Coast Guard because he lived in Brooklyn and figured he could get a job on a ship patrolling New York Harbor, see? So he said to them, ‘I want the Coast Guard.’ They said, ‘You’re in the Marines.’ ‘No, no, no, I want the Coast Guard.’ They finally convinced him he had no say in the matter and that he was going to be a marine. So every morning, as he threw the blankets off, his first words, the first thing he’d say was, ‘Oh, that effing [fucking] draft board!’ Every day. So, in his honor, when the ramp let down on Green Beach, the whole boatload of us hollered, “Oh, that effing draft board!” That was for Danny. The Japs must have thought: Here comes a bunch of nuts. Guys I haven’t heard from for thirty years, I’ll suddenly get a Christmas card, and it’ll say, ‘I’ll never forget, Oh, that effing draft board!’

“The first day we made our two hundred fifty yards up the beach; the second day we didn’t make fifty yards. The third day we got to the base of Suribachi. Each one of our engineer squads was assigned to a different company in the Twenty-eighth. Harold Pierce was a buck sergeant in my company. The lieutenant said to him, ‘There’s Easy Company. You’re going to support them. Crap out here with your people until I get back and tell you what to do.’

“So the lieutenant’s gone, and somebody walks up behind Pierce and gives him a kick and says, ‘Hey, why don’t you go down there and blow up some pillboxes or something?’

“And Pierce says, ‘Well, sir, I can’t order my squad to do that. My lieutenant told me to stay here with my men until he came back and told us what to do.’

“Well, the guy who gave Pierce the kick was none other than Colonel Chandler Johnson, they called him Jellybelly, and he sent Pierce and some of the squad up to where Easy Company was going to jump off. Pierce caught up to the rear elements of the assault and said, ‘What do you want me to do? I’m a demo man.’ And they said, ‘Well, there’s a big cave over there.’ He’d picked up a BAR from a dead marine, and he started for the cave with that.

“Pierce spent the whole day taking out caves. He wasn’t supporting an attack. He was making attacks. Three or four times he came back to get more explosives, and he finally got hit by fragments from a knee mortar. Then a machine gun stitched him up one arm. He wasn’t going to have somebody take him back to the aid station. Instead he helped another wounded guy get back. Chandler Johnson has been watching this all day, and at the end he said, ‘I sent that guy down there to do something, and he did it. Put him down for a Navy Cross.’ A week later Johnson was dead. I think Pierce was from Braintree, Massachusetts.

“Why did I want to join the Marine Corps? When I was twelve years old, they took us to the library for the first time, a real library. Naturally you want an exciting book, and I’m looking and looking, and finally I see something. It says, ‘Fix Bayonets!’ I figured that would be exciting. It was by John Thomason. His writings influenced many, many young men between World War One and World War Two to join the Marine Corps. He treated his characters like they could walk on water. I took it out so often they wouldn’t let me take it out anymore. He drew pictures too, and I’d try and copy his pictures. I wanted to be one of those good guys.

“I was born September 22, 1924, and I grew up in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. I was seventeen when I graduated from high school in 1942. When I got to be eighteen, a group of kids I hung out with, five of us, were going to join the Marines. So we went up to North Jersey to sign up, and we all got separated, and when we came outside, they said, ‘Are you in?’ ‘Yeah, I’m in.’ But they’re all different. One’s in the Air Force, one’s in the Army, one’s in the Navy, one’s in the Seabees. It’s fate.

“It took thirty-three hours to get to Parris Island. They put us on a Higgins boat even though the causeway was built. They wanted to make you unhappy. And while you were going, you’d hear the chant ‘You’ll be sorreee!’ I couldn’t imagine what they meant. But then I thought I was in jail; I thought I signed the wrong papers. Boot camp was twelve weeks. I shot expert with the M1, got an extra five bucks a month.

“After boot camp we got a ten-day leave, then showed up at Camp Lejeune. My application form asked what did I do when I graduated high school. Well, I wrote I’d worked four or five months in the engineering room of a copperworks factory, copying these big old drawings on transparencies to be put in a mountain in Pennsylvania for protection in case the Germans bombed us. So they put me down as a draftsman and said, ‘OK, you’re an engineer.’

“I met Abbatiello right away. We moved to a tent camp out in the woods and did all kinds of things. I remember it snowed like crazy. They had us riding around in trucks shoveling out the officers’ quarters. They issued us long winter underwear, and everybody’s running around singing ‘The Man on the Flying Trapeze.’ A week after New Year’s 1943 we got on a train and went to Camp Pendleton in California. That was where our training really started.

“The Fourth Marine Division was loading its ships to go as we were unloading our trains. They went right into combat while we trained at Pendleton for a year and a half or more and didn’t ship out until September of 1944. We finished training cycles a couple of times, and they still didn’t ship us out. We were going to be reserve for the battle of Saipan, but they never called for us.

“We went to the Second Division’s Camp Tarawa on the big island of Hawaii that September, and here’s something you never read about: We ended our training cycle that September, and we were supposed to hit Iwo in November, but MacArthur had tied up all the shipping in the Philippines and they couldn’t get adequate space aboard ship. This was going be a big deal, eight hundred ships, equipment for three divisions, and we didn’t get it. Now you read about how Kuribayashi in that time doubled the number of tunnels, doubled the number of pillboxes. If we had invaded in November, it might have been a different story. It might not have been the greatest battle in the world.

“It was always the same drill: The Twenty-seventh and Twenty-sixth would be on the right, and we would land in a column of battalions, in a line. We’d train, go so far inland, turn left, and here’s this big hill. We would assault it over and over again. It was Suribachi. It got to be like walking in your sleep. You knew exactly what you were supposed to do: Go two hundred fifty yards and turn left.

“They closed the Green Beaches the afternoon of D-day. A destroyer came damn near into shore, and he kept pumping five-inch shells. There was one huge vertical cave slit in the mountain, and you could see the shells go right inside. The beaches were closed the second day also.

“I was wounded at one o’clock in the afternoon of the third day. They finally decided to go inland another two hundred fifty yards and make a left turn to support the attack on Suribachi. The two forward holes facing Suribachi were occupied by Barney Barnstein, with the radio, and me. I was thanking God just the other day because if Kuribayashi had said, ‘Hey, banzai banzai banzai,’ mine was the first hole they would have hit.

“Anyway, Barney had a radio aerial sticking up, and the machine guns were really working over us two and the foxholes in back. All this lead was flying right above your nose, and when it stopped, the platoon sergeant come running over. He stood right where the beating zone was, where the bullets were flying. He says, ‘Waterhouse, you follow the lieutenant. Don’t let anything happen to him. We’re moving inland.’ So I got my stuff together, and by the time I got up there I could see the sergeant and the lieutenant. The sergeant got hit in the legs. They ran with blood pumping out of him, and then he fell down. The lieutenant was on top of him, trying to put first aid on his legs, and the sergeant reaches up and yells to the lieutenant to get down. They were very close. The sergeant had been on Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester. He was real tough.

“Meanwhile I get up almost to them, and the lieutenant hollers to everyone to leave their packs in the holes and to come with weapons and shovels. I took my pack off and ran back with it. I’m waving the shovel and the rifle, and I go to jump in the hole, and something hits me in the left shoulder. The corpsman offers to come over, and I say no, but then I figured maybe he’d better because they say if you don’t feel it, it’s bad. And I didn’t feel any pain. I was completely numb in the hand, from the shoulder down. So he ran over and put a dressing on it, and then they had to go. The last guy that went by said, ‘Charlie, give me your carbine,’ and he hands me his rifle, and they were gone into the smoke.

“I got out of there in a quiet time and edged sideways and went down beside a pillbox, and I took this rifle and I’m trying to work it. It’s all coated with ashes, and it won’t work. I wanted to just shoot a clip, just to whom it may concern, you know? At Suribachi. I swore at that guy who took my carbine. If I ever saw him again, I’d kill him.

“So I never fired a shot. At what? I was the best shot in the platoon, expert, and you couldn’t see a thing. It was starting to rain again, so I went down past a thirty-seven-millimeter gun armed with canister, persuaded them not to shoot me, and then made my way down to the beach. It got messier and messier; it looked like a junkyard.

“There was a hole not quite as big as this table, and it had two shelter halves over it. I figured that must be the aid station. I tried to get in, but these two doctors said it wasn’t big enough for any more people. Told me to find myself a spot to crap out. I figured office hours are over, and the doctor’s not in, so I looked around for a spot that wasn’t littered and lay there. I laid there in the rain thinking if they had a barrage or started sending mortars, it wouldn’t look too good. Finally a Higgins boat came in, and they hollered, ‘Casualties! Casualties!’ People started getting up from different piles of stuff with litters and bringing them, so I shuffled down. I think I was the only ambulatory guy. The rest were all on litters. They closed the ramp and started backing off. I’m in the boat water, and it’s red as can be: All the guys are bleeding. I found out what it was like to get seasick immediately.

“Gradually the sound of the motors were louder than what was going on ashore, but then they couldn’t find the ship. They started getting rejection slips from ships that were loaded with casualties, and it was raining. The LCVP [landing craft, vehicle, personnel] crewmen were getting worried. It’s getting dark; it’s raining. They could float out to the sea, you know? We went the whole range of the beachhead, from Green all the way near the end to Blue. The Fourth Division command ship was there with generals on it, and they took us aboard.

“And I’m thinking: How the hell am I going to climb the nets? I’m dead from the shoulder down. They sent down a hoist with five or six wooden things on it and started loading stretchers. I climbed on and held on to a greasy cable. When we got to the top, a corpsman lifted me over the rail, and that was it. I was the first man down because I could walk, and they checked me over, then sent me down a hatch. I went down, found a bottom bunk, and I figured this is it, I’m off that [out of the battle].

“I was in the dark, like, and I felt like an animal licking his wounds in the cave. I went to sleep, and after a while I came to. There’s only one little red light on, and here from the sack above me is an arm with a knife. He’s swinging this thing, and I’m huddled against the bulkhead and the corpsmen are scattered all over. He’s having nightmares: ‘You effing Japs!’

“That scared the heck out of me, but they finally quieted him down and then, about two hours later, I wake up, and here’s a guy six feet away, directly across from me, and he’s got a submachine gun. The corpsmen are trying to take it from him, and he says, ‘The goddamn Japs can’t do it. You can’t do it.’ And he’s cocking it, and I’m thinking, holy mackerel. He finally went to sleep with it.

“Two days later two officers came down and said, ‘Guys, we need people on the beach. This is the worst one yet, the very worst, and we need people who think they can go back.’ And everybody started, ‘Oh, my head’s bleeding, oh, my guts, oh, my legs, oh.’ But an hour later this bunk’s empty, that one’s empty, hey, I’m going back. I didn’t want to. It’s only supposed to take five days, you know. They said it would take three days of fighting, like Tarawa, two days to mop up, and off we go to Guam.

“I had to see a doctor for real first. It turned out I had a bullet through the shoulder, under the arm, at an angle that cut these nerves. The first thing the doctor said was, ‘Make up a cast.’ I said, ‘Sir, my arm’s not broken.’ He said, ‘Make up a cast.’ They put me in a cast with my hand up in the air, fingers curled over. I’m still complaining. What the hell do I need that for?

“The bullet had cut the nerves, and he knew it. He punched me with needles. I couldn’t feel a thing. He knew. Anyway, I get two cartons of cigarettes, a fountain pen, and whatnot in a little bag, and I’m going back to the beach. A half dozen guys had got up on deck early, waiting for the boats to come alongside, and I’m there, and then it hit me: How do I get down the nets? They’re not going to lower something just for me.

“It was the only time I ever felt like crying. I prayed: Help me! I never cried again after that. It was a big tragedy for me. I didn’t want to go, but I had it all figured out: I know they’re going to land on the Fourth Division beaches and I’m going to have to make my way down to Green Beach because those people are still filling in the holes around Suribachi. I know you can pick up helmets and guns and all kind of things [so he can get all the gear he needs].

“I was aboard ship when the flag went up on the fifth day. They announced it on the loudspeaker. The ship had been hit that morning, and I went up to get some fresh air and saw splinters on the bulkhead. Looking ashore, I could see demo teams working in the north. We were on the extreme north, right off the Quarry. I could see teams blowing caves, and I’m thinking: Gee, if I can see them, they can see me, but they were busy. I walked up to the front of ship and looked to the south, and I could see a speck of a flag, and I’m thinking: Hey, that’s my people.

“Later, on March 1, the day the Twenty-eighth came north to attack Hill 362, they sent all the wounded topside, and there was a Higgins boat . . . on deck . . . and they just walked us onto it, lifted it up, set it down in the water, and took us out to a Coast Guard boat loaded with wounded, going to Guam. They transferred us same way, just picked up the boat and set it on deck. That ship didn’t have room for anything. It was packed with wounded.

“We left that night, and next day, during a rainstorm, they buried a number of marines at sea. I went out on the deck, getting soaking wet to watch.

“On Guam the first thing you know they got me in a cast with my arm raised up with a brace wrapped around the chest to keep it up in the air. I looked like a secret weapon. You know Bob Dole? He’s got a hand like that. Once they leave it that way, it stays. With the cast I couldn’t get in the sack by myself. I was dangerous. Walking like this, I could knock your brains out. Sleep wasn’t easy.

“I had two operations, one on an artery immediately. This doctor says, ‘I haven’t checked you.’ So he looks me over and says, ‘How long have you been walking around?’ Since it happened. He said, ‘Lie down.’ Twenty minutes later I was in the operating room. Turned out that bullet had nicked an artery, and it could have gone, just like that, any minute. He picked it up with the stethoscope.

“I ended up in a series of hospitals. I flew back to the States, took a medical train to the East Coast, and ended up in St. Albans Hospital on Long Island that July, where they operated on the nerves. I was released from the Marine Corps in May of 1946.

“I had met my wife-to-be, Barbara Andersen, on a blind date in 1945. When I got out of the car to let her out that night, there was no running board, I still had that cast on, and I fell into the gutter. My future mother-in-law said to her daughter, ‘You’ll never go out with that drunken marine again.’ And I wasn’t drunk. We got married June 6, 1948. We had two daughters, Amy and Jane.

“How did I get into drawing? They had the GI Bill, and you couldn’t beat it. If you served three years’ time, you qualified for three whole years of study, three hundred and sixty-five days. You could go to college, and they gave ninety dollars a month if you were married, eighty if not. That was a big deal. I had been drawing a cartoon strip of the battle of Iwo Jima, and I went to King Features with it, and they said, ‘Christopher Columbus! We just got rid of four years of war, and you’re drawing a war thing? Why don’t you go to art school?’ So I did. I started school the following January 1947. I found out there was an art school in Newark, New Jersey. I figured, that’s close to home. I studied for three years, didn’t get a degree. I was hired immediately by the Prudential Insurance Company. They had eighteen artists doing everything from cartoons to paintings. It was a marvelous chance for experience. I worked there over five years. Then I figured: Someday I’m going to be an old man, I’ll be in my sixties, I’ll be smoking a cigar, and I’ll have the eighteen people running around, but I won’t be making any pictures, and I’ll say I always thought I wanted to make pictures for magazines. So I talked it over with my wife, and she said, ‘Do it.’

“It was the day my second daughter, Amy, was born. I went to work, and I said, ‘Mr. Gasser’—he was a famous watercolor painter, head of the art department—I said, ‘Sir, I quit.’ His cigar fell right out of his mouth, just like in the movies. Because they had it all figured out: Hey, he’s got another mouth to feed. He’s gotta come in for a raise, and we’ll say, ‘In a little while we’ll see that you get a raise.’ Instead I quit.

“I had an arrangement with the director of the school I had gone to. I taught one day a week, a class in illustration, something to base an income on.

“I had gone out and got some freelance jobs by showing pictures I had done at Prudential. I was working on illustration jobs for three different magazines while Amy was in the hospital with her mother—a story from a detective magazine, a story from a children’s grade school publication, and one for an adventure magazine—and they all were due on the same day. One paid on delivery, one on publication, which was four months later, and one had a different deadline, so you were never sure when you were going to get paid. I did that for twenty-odd years. I didn’t work the slick women’s things, but Saga, Argosy, Man’s True Whatever, True Man’s Whatever. They were always starting magazines. If they caught on in four months, that was OK, but if they didn’t, they dropped them. You always hoped you got paid before they dropped them.

“I belonged to the Society of Illustrators and the Salmagundi Club, and both had connections with the military, and you could get jobs to go paint weather balloons or ships, so when you did something for a magazine about ships, you had some idea of what to do. It was cashless, but you got experience.

“Then one day this friend of mine said, ‘Hey, Charlie, why don’t you go to Vietnam?’ He worked for the Air Force. The war was on then, and he had just come back. He was in the Society of Illustrators. I said, ‘I don’t paint airplanes; I paint marines.’ He said, ‘Well, go down to the Salmagundi Club.’ I sent down a portfolio and got a call from the man who ran the program, and he asked if would go to Vietnam.

“I said, ‘I will if my wife will let me.’ This was in January of 1967, and I went for a month and a half, February and March. I did a book of sketches and things. I figured I could use some of the ideas. Vietnam was just becoming a dirty word, and I had people saying, ‘I shouldn’t look at this,’ or what was I doing? Was I trying to sell the war? I said, ‘No, I’m trying to show that I can draw pictures on the spot.’

“I went a second time for the Air Force, flew on a B-52 mission over Laos, hitting some Ho Chi Minh trails, a thirteen-hour roundtrip from Guam. We refueled over the Philippines. I went a third time for Navy medicine, and the first person I met was a Navy corpsman. He said, ‘Come on down to my village. I’ve got five marine advisers.’ So off I went. There was a patrol boat a hundred yards across a very muddy beach. He said, ‘OK, follow me.’ I’m going in mud sucking up to my knees, slothering in it with my paint stuff.

“Three years later he calls, says he wants to come visit me with his Vietnamese wife. He says, ‘You know, Mr. Waterhouse, I hated you. I thought you were one of those damn media people.’ He says, ‘There was a dock out there we could have walked out on, but I made you walk through the mud.’ I said, ‘You had to walk through the damn stuff too.’

“Eventually I went all over. I ended up on missile cruisers, carriers, destroyers. They lowered me in a monsoon from a helicopter to the fantail of a destroyer, and when my feet hit the deck, a wave hit me this high. I thought: I’m not going to like this. I was seasick from that moment until the next morning, when a helicopter came, dropped a life preserver, and took me off.

“The pay was terrible, fifteen dollars per diem in the States, and when I got to Vietnam it was nine dollars and fifty cents, and then, when I got back, the Navy Department docked me four dollars fifty cents for chow and a buck a night for quarters, even though I slept in foxholes at times, five hundred yards from the demilitarized zone. I didn’t go with the idea of making money, but I always thought at least Barbara would get a check while I was gone, to buy some groceries. It didn’t happen.

“Finally I get a call from a Major Dyer at the Marine Corps Museum in Washington, asking me to paint something for the bicentennial. I said sure. Then he said, ‘Write us a letter saying you can’t. We want to convince the powers that be that this has to be funded.’ So I wrote a letter to General Simmons, said I was thoroughly professional, had worked at all the magazines and I had a wife, two daughters, two cats, and a dog, and we all ate, and while I would love to do this, I could not accept the job unless it was funded.

“I had a double-page book jacket for the Rutgers Press showing Washington and his men slogging through the snow, going to fight the battle of Princeton. This thing arrived while I was writing the letter, so when I finished, I folded up one of the proofs and put it in there. The general was impressed, thank God. If it had been Chesty Puller, he would have said, ‘What the hell do we need pictures for?’

“A week later Major Dyer calls and asked me to make seven paintings. I said, ‘Last week it was paint one, then don’t do any, and now it’s seven. I’m confused.’ He said, ‘So are we.’

“Then he says, ‘Could you come on active duty?’ I said, ‘Well, if my wife doesn’t mind.’ So now I’m forty-seven years old, and I’m going to the draft board in Newark to get drafted and all these eighteen-year-old bushy-headed kids are standing in line. It was just like a TV show. ‘What the hell do you want?’ I says I come for my physical. You know how Jack Benny used to do double takes? Everybody’s head turned. They thought it was Candid Camera. It took four months, paperwork, FBI checks, all kinds of junk.

“And then it was, ‘Oh, by the way, sir, we can only make you a major.’ At the end of the war, I had been a corporal, just like Hitler and Napoleon had started, and I thought if they can do it, I can do it. They weren’t marines, though.

“I didn’t have to do any training. I’d have been dead. First day I came down, they drove me to lunch and there’s thirty marines running in their red skivvies, and they say, ‘Here’s what we do at lunchtime, Major.’ I said, ‘You do that to me, and I’ll be in Arlington, not running through it.’

“I became the only artist in residence the Marines ever had. I always loved historical things, and I did over five hundred paintings for the Corps. When I came on duty, they asked me what I liked to paint, and how big. I said I paint historical pictures, and I like ’em big. The first picture had fifty-three people in it. All my work went to the museum from that point on. It is not on exhibit, however. It’s in Washington, D.C., in the archives.

“The new museum at Quantico? They’re exhibiting one picture, probably. I had a wonderful relationship with the Marine Corps. I did dozens of covers for the Marine Corps Gazette, for officers, for Leatherneck, which was for enlisted, and for the Marine Corps League magazine.

“Everything is acrylic. Sometimes it’s thin, like watercolor; sometimes it’s black and white, it’s just black acrylic instead of ink. It’s the magic medium for me. All art students and artists look for the one that works; well, this works. Acrylic won’t turn black; it won’t crack and eat the canvas.

“I retired for the second time 19 February 1991. I had seven guys from my platoon at retirement at the museum in Washington, D.C. The commandant, Al Gray, made a surprise visit, gave a speech. He knew more about me than I did. He was very nice to us.

“My museum in Toms River opened six years ago. I needed a place to hang stuff. It’s all supported by contributions. I’m working now on a series featuring Marine Corps recipients of the Medal of Honor.

“I’ve been back to Iwo Jima three or four times. I spent at least a week there on two occasions. I painted a number of little pictures on the spot, including the admiral’s cave. I got friendly with some Japanese who were there, including one who had been wounded twenty-seven times. He had an artificial nose. He said it was ‘made in the USA.’ ”