About 1943 someone asked General Vandegrift, commandant of the Marine Corps, what kind of Marines he had. He said he had two kinds: the kind overseas and the kind going overseas. So they organized another division, and I was in it: C Company, Fifth Engineer Battalion, Fifth Marine Division.
And we had extensive training at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. This particular unit was the Twenty-second Combat Team, and it was made up of people that could do anything. If you wanted a bridge built, they could build a bridge. If you wanted welders, if you wanted automobile mechanics or tank drivers, or you wanted riflemen, machine gunners, demolition experts, mine disposal—whatever it entailed, that unit was capable of doing it.
We wound up at Camp Pendleton at Oceanside, California. And there we went into further training. Of course mostly it was field training there, night marches and such.
Well, we left there and went to Hawaii. Aboard ship we had five or so cases of polio. It was a Danish ship called the Sommelsteich, and I think it had Dutch officers and Javanese crew. And this was in mid-1943. Since there was polio aboard ship, they changed their plans for us. We made port in Hilo, down on the “Big Island” of Hawaii. They put us on narrow-gauge railroad cars, and we went clear around the island to the north end, where they dumped us all off. They hauled us from there down to the beach, and then we had to walk about four or five miles with all our gear to where they set us up. We were there for a month or six weeks in quarantine, because they didn’t want the polio to spread.
So the Navy brought in all our supplies—tents and all kinds of stuff. We had some bulldozers in there, and we knocked down palm trees back about 50-75 feet from the beach, which formed a kind of cove. They wanted us to work a little bit, so we made a beautiful beach out of it there to keep us occupied. And we setup our quarters there. In years since, our cove is now where there’s a big Hilton Hotel or Sheraton, and they use that beach. When we got there it was nothing but lava rock and sand. But we did find a couple of temples, too, Hawaiian temples that, while not abandoned, were not in use.
Well, from there we went up to the Parker Ranch, up to a place called Camp Tarawa. And we trained at this camp. And then we did further training over at a place called Mountain View. It was a jungle training camp that sits on the side of the Kilauea volcano. There was very thick undergrowth in there.
So one day word came down that we were going to ship out. We went over to Saipan and then headed north for a four-day run to Iwo Jima. That was the first we knew about it. And when we got to Iwo we never saw such ships like that in our lives. Battleships and destroyers just making it like Indians circling round a wagon train. That’s what they were doing at that island, bombarding the hell out of it.
I never had any feelings other than, let’s go in and get the thing done. I can’t think of anyone not really wanting to get on that island and get this thing over with, because it was only going to be a two-day operation. And I was there for thirty-five days.
Of course we’d all been trained and brainwashed and everything else, and we even had courses in Japanese. We learned to speak a few Japanese phrases. One that I remember distinctly was “Hadaka nene array.” It meant, “Take off your clothes. Strip.” If you caught prisoners, you’d keep them out there at a distance in case they had a grenade on them or under the armpits, and we’d have them strip to make sure they weren’t carrying grenades or weapons.
You waited your turn to get on the landing craft, and we climbed down cargo nets on the side of the ship and into the landing craft. Hell, we were just waiting to get in there and see who is dead and who wasn’t. We got into the boats and just circled offshore for quite a while. Some guys got sick. There’s always someone sick, puking in the landing craft. But you could look over the side of the landing craft and see Iwo very plainly. And the battleships were banging away at Mount Suribachi. We were underneath their line of fire. Those shells going overhead made a wiggly, swishing sound. You’d hear a gun blast out back of you from some ship, and then something would go over, “shooowwooowwooo,” like that, and then you’d hear, “Boom!” kind of deep and muffled. But when we went into the island there was no firing right on the beach where we landed. I couldn’t understand why the earlier waves couldn’t get in to Green Beach. They said we were the first ones to land there, but there was a lot of evidence that they had tried earlier. We landed and got right up to the second terrace.
And these terraces were beach terraces, steep volcanic sand and hard to get up. Most of our people were in demolitions, which was my assignment. We were there to take out things like pillboxes and blow up caves. We had explosives, shape charges, and packs of C2 and Compound X.
C2 comes in sticks about 2 x 2 x 10 or 12 inches long. There’s usually four of them in a pack, and that made up a satchel charge. It was like a backpack you could strap over your shoulder and carry. We used to use the full bags, but if you didn’t need a full charge you’d just pull out one stick. You’d punch a hole into it, it was malleable, and put a fifteen-second delay cap and fuse in there, make a ball out of it if you wanted to, strike the fuse, count off about ten, and then throw it. You’d get a hell of a lot bigger explosion than you would from a hand grenade. Then for the C2 you could set the primer cord and wrap the C2 around it. Then you could light the primer cord and the whole goddamned thing would blow.
We also had blocks of TNT. Or you could have shaped charges. We’d blow caves with that stuff. We’d tie these together with primer cord with caps in there, and one would set off another. We’d blow the area right above the cave entrance, and the explosions would cover up the entrance.
The guys in the infantry would carry a stick of C2 with them in their hip pocket. When they got ready to heat a can of pork ‘n’ beans with a K ration there, they’d take three little pebbles and set them on the ground, put a piece of C2 about the size of your little finger between them, open up the can and set it on the pebbles, light a match, and get that little bit of C2 to burn. The intense heat from that would warm up your can of pork ‘n’ beans and even bring it to a boil! They figured this out themselves, and we had a hell of a time keeping the infantry away from the explosives we needed to use, because they cooked with it!
We started hitting resistance after we got up the second terrace. And we just dug a hole and stayed there. In this sand, you’d sink clear up to your damn knees, it was so porous. And walking was the big problem, you know? I remember we got the shit shot out of us there up on the second terrace. They started laying a barrage in there on us. There were a couple of fellows that were shot right away. Mortars started to come in, and I don’t know if there was small arms or not, but mortars were the first thing. A lot of people were injured that way.
In fact, right in our area there was a pillbox. We had a Marine gunner in charge of us at the time, Gunner Howell, and I had a friend named George Herman who was an armored ‘dozer operator. So we had this pillbox down there, and Gunner Howell told us not to go near it because it was booby-trapped. Well, George, with his bulldozer, he could knock down anything. So George went in and rammed the shit out of the pillbox with his bulldozer, and all of a sudden, “BOOM,” the pillbox blew up. And it also blew that bulldozer upside down. So George crawled out of it, and he’s bleeding. Well, what we had in the dozers for protection was sandbags. They were laid along on the floor plates to protect from shrapnel ricochets. Well, when that thing went off it blew that sand up under his arms and his chin, little pieces of sand, you know? Which would give you an idea of why he was bleeding profusely. It was only just superficial wounds, but there was a lot of blood coming out. “Christ, what’s wrong with him?” we asked. Well, he was picking sand out of himself for a long time. But he was crying, snot was running out of his nose, and he said, “That son-of-a-bitch.” He said, “You tell Gunner Howell that I’ve neutralized that goddamned pillbox!”
When you spend the night under combat circumstances, you stay awake. First of all, there’s shooting all night, since we were bombarding them all night. You dig the hole for your foxhole, and there was so much sulfur in there that sometimes when it would rain it’d burn you. You know, if you mix sulfur with water you get acid. And some guys had burns over their arms and legs and back and their asses. There were lots of guys that were evacuated because of burns from sulfur.
Almost everybody’s awake at night. There’s two of you in a two-man hole, and there was one of you awake all the time. We had K rations to eat, and I don’t know when in the hell it was that we had our first real meal. I was there over two weeks before I had my clothes off, my shoes and socks and everything. After we secured Suribachi we turned and went up the island to the north. Part of the forces that went across island turned and went up.
But we were in the area around the first airstrip we took, Motoyama No. 1, and while we were there the first B-29 to land on Iwo came in and skidded along the runway there. And this was while the fighting was still going on. The Japs held the north end of the runway, and we had the south end. We were fighting to clear the whole thing when that B-29 all of a sudden comes in for an emergency landing. He landed in our territory, came to a stop in Japanese territory, and quick-turned around and taxied back to our territory!
Another thing we did as part of our demolitions work was clear mine fields. You’d take your combat knife, your K-bar, and you’d get down on your knees and gently probe the very surface layer, just ease it into the sand at a shallow angle and move over it. We’d have a row of guys doing this, and each guy would have about three feet in front of him he’d be probing, and the guys on the outside of the line would have ribbons where they would mark the edges of where we’d cleared.
I had a crew disposing of those land mines we’d cleared. Normally we would defuse them and set them aside. Well, some of the guys on this disposal crew were kind of crazy. They’d pick the mines up by hand, go over to a little cliff there, and they’d throw them over, trying to get them to go off. What a bunch of nuts!
Right near the end we had the Japs bottled up in a pocket way up in the north of Iwo Jima. One of my corporals, Al Abotellio, had a lot of anti-personnel mines left over, and if you don’t use the damned mines you’ve got to account for them, which was a real nuisance. You have to turn them back in and say why you didn’t use them, and all that kind of bullshit. So we went down, and Al set out a mine field just to get rid of these damned things.
Well, shortly after he laid those extra mines out in an area he figured no one would be going into, the Japanese decided to make a counterattack and sneak into the middle of our area. It wasn’t a banzai charge. They did this deliberately to start confusion and panic. They did this before dawn, so we didn’t know what was going on, and we were asleep in our tents up on the higher ground. Then these mines started to go off in the wee hours of the morning. We didn’t know what the hell happened. We thought maybe a chicken got into them or something. All we wanted to do was to get rid of the damned mines anyway, so if they were blowing up that was okay with us. So comes the dawn and there were about thirteen or fourteen dead Japanese out there. They had run into the mine field when their main force pulled out and was going back in a different direction, back to where some Air Corps and other rear-area types were fighting them. There ended up being over 200 Japs killed, but they also killed a number of our pilots, some Marines, and some other support people. So our little minefield inadvertently helped play a role in stopping their attack!
And that was the last of it. That day we went down past the cemetery to the west beach and went aboard ship. I was really tired. I was excited and everything, you know, because I got off the island alive, but we had to climb up those cargo nets to go aboard, and normally those nets were easy to climb. But the closer I got to the top the more tired I got. And when I finally got on the deck of that ship, I felt totally exhausted. Maybe it was because of the feeling of safety on the damned ship. I didn’t need adrenaline any more, and I was just wrung out.
The Japanese were afraid of us Marines more than the Army or the Navy. According to the Japanese, to be a Marine you had to kill your mother and father. That’s what the Japanese told us when we got to Japan. I went into Japan, and we carried shoulder holsters and .45s, but we didn’t carry any visible weapons. It was late summer, and it was sweaty and hot, but we didn’t have any problems with the Japanese.