Deputy Director, Combat Veterans of Iwo Jima; Director, National Museum of the Marine Corps, Docent and Visitors’ Services
In the loading order for the LSTs, you see the list for Graves Registration, you see the items that were needed to process the dead. The crosses and Stars of David were already manufactured and stacked and brought in aboard the LSTs.
I grew acquainted with Patrick Mooney, himself a former marine, during my visit to Guam and Iwo Jima with Military Historical Tours in March of 2006, and spoke with him at length over the course of an Iwo Jima symposium in Alexandria, Virginia, in February 2007. He was invariably gracious and accommodating, and extremely knowledgeable in all aspects of the campaign.
“Every marine wore two dog tags. One was on the main cord, and the secondary tag was attached by a short suspension loop below the other dog tag, and that was the one that went on the cemetery cross.
“We [historians] count five thousand nine hundred thirty-one combat ground casualties on Iwo Jima, consisting of marines, Navy guys, and one coast guardsman. They all were buried on Iwo or lost on the island. The remains of one hundred seventeen are still missing, meaning they have been declared dead but their remains have not been recovered. A lot of them were lost in the sea when their boats were hit or shot as they tried to wade ashore. Others were incinerated by artillery explosions or blown to pieces. A few, like Bill Genaust and others, we know what happened to them, but we never recovered their remains. The actual number of graves in the two cemeteries came to forty-seven hundred.
“The burials began under fire. The battlefield was still proximate, and on Iwo Jima there was no rear area. The Third and Fourth Divisions adjoined each other in one large cemetery that was split in half. The Fifth Division cemetery was separate. The Third and Fourth Division cemetery was just off Blue Beach One and Two. The Fifth Division cemetery was on other side of the island south of Airfield No. 2, just north of Airfield No. 1.
“The first burials I recorded were dated about four days after the battle started. Until that point they were gathering the dead in the beachhead area. The bodies were sprayed with insecticide to keep the bugs off and the odor down, then wrapped in ponchos. There are photographs of them doing that. Then, about D plus three or four, they began to bury the first dead in temporary cemeteries around the regimental hospitals and divisional hospital sites. They established the sites of the permanent cemeteries even before the landing went in.
“In the operational orders, the sites of the hospitals and cemeteries were already established. In the loading order for the LSTs, you see the list for Graves Registration, you see the items that were needed to process the dead. The crosses and Stars of David were already manufactured and stacked and brought in aboard the LSTs.
“After about the fifth day they began to to inter the dead in the permanent cemeteries. The process was very well organized and regimented. You have to realize that by February of ’45 we had been in ground combat for eighteen months and the Marine Corps had suffered sixty thousand killed and wounded. So they were well prepared by this point. About a quarter of that number would have been dead and buried in various places as they moved from island to island. And each island had its own cemetery or several cemeteries. The dead were always arranged by the unit, so you had the different divisional cemeteries, and within the cemeteries at each plot you can look at the burial dates vice the date of death. Date of death can vary by two weeks. There were cases of bodies not recovered for as long as two weeks before they were buried. That’s how the plats go.
“The divisional battalions, mostly black units, would dig the trenches. They’d bring in bulldozers, D8 Caterpillar bulldozers, and dig long trenches. The width of the bulldozer blade was about eight feet. They dug from a sloping height down for a certain length, and then they would slope upward on the other end. The bottom height would be anywhere from four to six feet below surface, depending on the stability of the sand or earth they were on. They would dig down and scoop out that long section.
“The bodies would be arranged, again very regimented, even in death. The bodies were carried in ponchos or in mattress covers. There were no body bags; that was an invention for later wars. The bodies would be laid in these trenches with a uniform width between each body, I think it’s twenty-four to twenty-eight inches depending on the different unit and how they buried. That also dictated later on when the graves were filled how the cemeteries were laid out and how the graves were marked and where the crosses went. Every marine had two dog tags, and a dog tag was left with the body and a dog tag was taken by the Graves Registration personnel. All personal effects on the body were gathered and put in a small green canvas bag with a white linen tag on the front. The white linen tag was filled out as completely as possible with the name, rank, serial number, date of death, any information that could be garnered from the body. All the personal effects on the body would be placed in this bag. All the combat equipment, helmet, weapons, web equipment would be placed in the salvage depots, where they were processed for destruction or reuse. Personal effects were sent home.
“The body was buried in whatever uniform it was in at the time so they would have their boondockers, leggings if they wore them, dungaree trousers, dungaree shirt, and then they were placed in the poncho or the mattress covers. They left the boondockers on. They did not remove footwear or any clothing items. Even if there was a field jacket on, they left that but took all the personal effects. The Marine Corps poncho was big enough to encircle the body. You can see in the photos that if the poncho was spread out from top to bottom, it would cover from head to toe everybody except the tallest individuals. Priority was always given to covering the head and the face, with the boondockers sticking out the other end.
“Depending on the layout of the different parts of the cemetery, the trenches could contain as many as forty or fifty bodies or as few as twenty bodies. Each segment would be dictated by the quality of the soil they were digging in. The top layers of sand, that volcanic pumice, is very loose, but as you dig down, it gets into sandstone; that was what gave the Japanese the ability to tunnel so extensively. The bulldozer dug right down into the sandstone and gouged it out. It would take numerous passes to get to the requisite depth.
“The Pioneer battalions were all white: the Fifth Pioneer Battalion for the Fifth Division, the Fourth Pioneers for the Fourth Division, and the Third Pioneers for Third. The Pioneer battalions did the road engineering, the building, the construction of what we would normally think of as an engineer unit. In the Marine Corps combat divisions in World War Two, combat engineers performed combat engineering tasks, which were road clearing and demolition of obstacles. On Iwo that would include the demolition of caves and also obstacle clearance like the antitank ditch at Hill 362 Able. That was done by the Fifth Combat Engineer Battalion, the one Al Abbatiello was in. Tom Cox; Colonel Charles Waterhouse, the famous Marine Corps artist: these guys were all Fifth Combat Engineers.
“The Fifth Pioneers were the same guys involved in that shootout the last day when the three hundred Japanese came down and killed all the pilots. One of their leaders, Lieutenant Harry Martin, received the last MOH on Iwo Jima. These guys are often mistaken for being black. In World War One, large Pioneer battalions, mainly black African American units, were used as road clearance. It’s often assumed they operated the same way in the Marine Corps in World War Two. Gentlemen from the Fifth Pioneer Battalion will be quick to tell you it was an all-white outfit. African American units were very limited in the Marine Corps. It was still a very segregated service.
“Getting back to the graves. . . . As the bodies were brought in, they were carried down this long slope, not lowered, but carried in, and then the trench would be back-filled from one end to the other. From the photos and from what I’ve been able to uncover, after every other body was laid, the chaplain would be about two bodies behind the registrar, who was moving along as the bodies were laid to make sure they were put in the right order. So the men would call out, “Smith, John, Sergeant, two-one-four-six-nine-seven-two, and the registrar would make the note that he was in Plat one, Row one, Grave twenty-four.
“Two bodies behind, the chaplain would be giving the appropriate benediction for the Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish faith. So they would move along that line, and once the bodies were all laid in and the appropriate benedictions were made and services and honors rendered, the grave would be filled in from head or foot depending on where the dirt had been pushed and plowed out. That was done mostly by the bulldozers; it was a tremendous task to fill that. The crosses in the photos were placed at the head of the trench so they knew approximately where the body was laid. They knew when they put Private Jones in that his cross was laid here.
“After the trench was filled, they would raise the cross and sink it into the ground. It was wooden construction, a cross or a Star of David. The second dog tag for that individual was affixed to the cross. The first dog tag was on the body. A number was stenciled on the back of the cross. Sometimes you’ll see the dog tag affixed to the front and sometimes to the back of the cross. The name of the individual was stenciled, his service, his service number, and the emblem appropriate to his branch: the eagle, globe, and anchor, a Navy shield, or the Coast Guard emblem.
“The notched dog tag was an Army invention, and the notion that it was designed to be placed in the teeth upon death and then kicked shut was a myth. The notch was meant to hold the tag steady in the machine when it was being made. Throughout World War Two, the Marine Corps by and large did not have the notched dog tags. They used solid aluminum ovals that would either be etched or stamped. By Iwo Jima they were stamped, a flat oval cylinder about the size of a silver dollar, with a single hole. They were affixed around the neck by a linen-coated wire which had a screw fixture. The Marine Corps did not come out with chains to hold the dog tags until very late.
“Starting in 1946, all the graves were exhumed and repatriated by the end of ’47. There was a continuing effort in the latter half of the 1940s to go back and resolve as many missing in action cases, the unknowns, as possible, and a very elaborate process was followed. Burial mistakes were made under combat that might not have occurred in a calm peacetime situation.”
According to Army Graves Registration, the coordinating entity for all services, what it dug up varied from mummified corpses to just bones and other human remains. This depended on the location of the grave, the cemetery, soil conditions. Because it was so dry and there was so much heat on Iwo, there was a wicking effect of moisture into that volcanic pumice that in effect pulled the fluids out and mummified the body.
“A number of graves were lost in the Fifth Marine Division cemetery because of the ground subsiding and collapsing in different areas because of the vast Japanese tunnel complex. Mortuary specialists and embalmers and forensic people from all the services were recovering bodies, and when they dug down the requisite depth to recover the bodies, they weren’t there. They continued to dig, and they finally found that the tunnels below had collapsed in a particular section and a half dozen bodies had fallen four and half feet below the area where they were originally buried. They were recovered.
“In another case, they went to grave one and dug down where there was supposed to be Private Smith, but he wasn’t there. Then they dug grave two, and there was Private Smith. So a row that was supposed to be fourteen individuals wide was actually thirteen wide, and all the bodies were off by one set. All were recovered. It was just that somehow, in the rush and mix of everything, they had shifted the bodies one down and incorrectly recorded the grave as being marked on another so that number two was actually number one. ID’s were found on the bodies as they were exhumed, and forensic exams were done, compared with extensive personal data from the casualty reports, dental records, everything. They were very thorough.
“So we had fifty-nine hundred guys buried in two cemeteries in a five-week period. They stayed there until 1946, when the War Department began to repatriate the remains of battlefield casualties. At that point we had battlefield cemeteries all across the Pacific. Every island battlefield and base area had a cemetery. So New Caledonia had a cemetery. Ulithi. In New Zealand and Australia. Not only combat areas. An effort was begun to gather these remains, come up with a consolidated cemetery plan, and to repatriate some remains whose survivors wished to have the bodies brought back.
“Family members were given one chance: They could elect to have the bodies brought back to their hometown cemetery or they could have the bodies reinterred at a national cemetery. And the two sites chosen in the Pacific were Honolulu and Manila. Or back to their hometown. You had one chance to do it. It was decided that the remains of those who fought in the central Pacific and northern Pacific would be brought to Honolulu. Those who served in the southwest Pacific or in the Philippines, to include Peleliu, those remains would go to Manila. Those who died in, around, and over Iwo Jima were brought back to Honolulu or back to the States. The vast majority of the Iwo Jima casualties were brought back to Honolulu, where they rest to this day.
“I have not found an instance in the record of a combat casualty who was brought back to Arlington. The family could choose where they buried their marine, and if the family chose Arlington, well, I would assume there are some. Never say never. The Basilones and folks like that and of course one of the flag raisers, Ira Hayes, are at Arlington. He died well after the war. A lot of postwar guys ended up there. You had to be a combat vet. But space is so limited now you have to have a medal of valor, such as a Bronze Star, or a Purple Heart to qualify for interment now.”
Ed White of New York City, a theater critic for the Wall Street Journal for many years, remembers this:
“A small group of us landed on Iwo two years to the day of the first landing, February 19, 1947. I had gone into the Army on an eighteen-month enlistment in the fall of ’46. They kept putting the draft on, then calling it off, and I wanted to get it over with.
“I was put to work in the port director’s office, a Quonset hut, overseeing things that were wrecked just offshore. The Japanese were reclaiming vehicles and weaponry and taking them back to Japan for scrap metal, which was kind of ironic. There was very little to do. I taught myself to type on a manual typewriter there in the office.
“People had advised me get into Special Services, and there was a small radio station in two or three Quonset huts under the shadow of Suribachi. They had generators and played large platter-type records with fifteen minutes of shows that we were getting from the Armed Forces Radio Service, popular music, big bands like Tommy Dorsey’s. It was strictly for entertainment. I volunteered and learned how to run the station. Then the man who had been running it was reassigned to the Philippines, and I was the only man on the island who knew how to run the place.
“It was while I was doing that that the gravedigging unit came in March or April of ’47. They were an all-black unit, come to dig up the graves for movement back to the States or Hawaii. I vividly remember this graveyard of white crosses with a few Stars of David standing out against that black volcanic ash. It was quite an incredible sight, a field of crosses, very stark.
“One of the men in charge, a master sergeant or somebody, came to see me one day at the radio station and said, ‘We got a chorus. We sing spirituals.’ I said, ‘That’s terrific.’ Because we had very few live shows on the station. So I put them on the air every Sunday afternoon. Eighteen or twenty of these guys would crowd into our little studio and do thirty minutes of spirituals and harmony, a cappella, of course. I don’t think we even had a piano.
“They were still working on the graves when I left in July for Guam.”
About fifteen hundred marines of Jewish faith took part in the battle of Iwo Jima. Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn, the first Jewish chaplain appointed by the Marine Corps, was assigned to the Fifth Marine Division, according to an article appearing November 6, 1998, in the newspaper Forward. He was asked by the division chaplain, Warren Cuthriell, a Protestant, to deliver the memorial sermon at a combined religious service dedicating the Fifth Division cemetery in March 1945. But, the article goes on, a majority of Christian chaplains did not want a rabbi preaching over predominantly Christian graves and blocked his participation. Ultimately three separate services took place. The rabbi delivered the eulogy he had written for the combined service. About seventy attended, including three Protestant chaplains incensed by the prejudice displayed by their colleagues.
As a consequence of their anger, copies of Gittelsohn’s talk were widely circulated, including back in the States; it was read into the Congressional Record. The talk remains famous in Marine Corps circles and elsewhere to this day. Here is what the rabbi said:
This is perhaps the grimmest, and surely the holiest task we have faced since D-Day. Here before us lie the bodies of comrades and friends. Men who until yesterday or last week laughed with us, joked with us, trained with us. Men who were on the same ships with us, and went over the sides with us as we prepared to hit the beaches of this island. Men who fought with us and feared with us. Somewhere in this plot of ground there may lie the man who could have discovered the cure for cancer. Under one of these Christian crosses, or beneath a Jewish Star of David, there may now rest a man who was destined to be a great prophet—to find the way, perhaps, for all to live in plenty, with poverty and hardship for none. Now they lie here silently in this sacred soil, and we gather to consecrate this earth in their memory.
It is not easy to do so. Some of us have buried our closest friends here. We saw these men killed before our very eyes. Any one of us might have died in their places. Indeed, some of us are alive and breathing at this very moment only because men who lie here beneath us had the courage and strength to give their lives for ours. To speak in memory of such men as these is not easy. Of them too can it be said with utter truth: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here. It can never forget what they did here.”No, our poor power of speech can add nothing to what these men and the other dead of our Division who are not here have already done. All that we even hope to do is follow their example. To show the same selfless courage in peace that they did in war. To swear that by the grace of God and the stubborn strength and power of human will, their sons and ours shall never suffer these pains again. These men have done their jobs well. They have paid the ghastly price of freedom. If that freedom be once again lost, as it was after the last war, the unforgivable blame will be ours, not theirs. So it is we the living who are here to be dedicated and consecrated.
We dedicate ourselves, first, to live together in peace the way they fought and are buried in this war. Here lie men who loved America because their ancestors generations ago helped in her founding, and other men who loved her with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers escaped from oppression to her blessed shores. Here lie officers and men, negroes and whites, rich men and poor—together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many from each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men there is no discrimination. No prejudices. No hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy. Any man among us the living who fails to understand that will thereby betray those who lie here dead. Whoever of us lifts up his hand in hate against a brother, or thinks himself superior to those who happen to be in the minority, makes of this ceremony, and of the bloody sacrifice it commemorates, an empty, hollow mockery. To this, then, as our solemn, sacred duty, do we the living now dedicate ourselves: to the rights of Protestants, Catholics and Jews, of white men and negroes alike, to enjoy the democracy for which all of them here have paid the price.
To one thing more do we consecrate ourselves in memory of those who sleep beneath these crosses and stars. We shall not foolishly suppose, as did the last generation of America’s fighting men, that victory on the battlefield will automatically guarantee the triumph of democracy at home. This war, with all its frightful heartache and suffering, is but the beginning of our generation’s struggle for democracy. When the last battle has been won, there will be those at home, as there were the last time, who will want us to turn our backs in selfish isolation on the rest of organized humanity, and thus to sabotage the very peace for which we fight. We promise you who lie here: we will not do that! We will join hands with Britain, China, Russia in peace, even as we have in war, to build the kind of world for which you died.
When the last shot has been fired, there will still be those whose eyes are turned backward, not forward, who will be satisfied with those wide extremes of poverty and wealth in which the seeds of another war can breed. We promise you, our departed comrades: this too we will not permit. This war has been fought by the common man; its fruits of peace must be enjoyed by the common man! We promise, by all that is sacred and holy, that your sons, the sons of miners and millers, the sons of farmers and workers, the right to a living that is decent and secure.
When the final cross has been placed in the last cemetery, once again there will be those to whom profit is more important than peace, who will insist with the voice of sweet reasonableness and appeasement that it is better to trade with the enemies of mankind, than by crushing them, to lose their profit. To you who sleep here silently, we give our promise: we will not listen! We will not forget that some of you were burnt with oil that came from American wells, that many of you were killed with shells fashioned from American steel. We promise that when once again men profit at your expense, we shall remember how you looked when we placed you reverently, lovingly, in the ground.
Thus do we memorialize those who, having ceased living with us, now live within us. Thus do we consecrate ourselves the living to carry on the struggle they began. Too much blood has gone into this soil for us to let it lie barren. Too much pain and heartache have fertilized the earth on which we stand. We here solemnly swear: this shall not be in vain! Out of this, and from the suffering and sorrow of those who mourn this, will come—we promise—the birth of a new freedom for the sons of men everywhere. Amen.