Iwo Jima...65 years ago

[DONT TREAD ON ME]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/0 ... ml?hpt=Mid" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

good pics at the link.

(CNN) -- Jerry Yellin has spent most of his life trying to forget about the stench of death on the island of Iwo Jima 65 years ago.

Yellin was a P-51 fighter pilot who had turned 22 a few weeks before he touched down on the island March 7, 1945, amid some of the bloodiest fighting of World War II's Pacific campaign.

"To one side, there were mounds and mounds and mounds of bodies of Japanese soldiers being pushed around by bulldozers into mass graves. And right behind our squadron area was the Marine mortuary, where they'd lay out the bodies, check their dog tags and fingerprint them for identification," recalls Yellin, an 87-year-old retiree who lives in Vero Beach, Florida.

"I've lived with those memories all of my life and it was not something I ever wanted to go back to."

Nevertheless, Yellin was back on the island last week for the first time since 1945 to attend a ceremony commemorating the battle's 65th anniversary. About 22,000 Japanese soldiers died defending the island, along with more than 6,000 Americans, in a battle that was memorialized in the iconic photograph of five U.S. Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi, the island's dormant volcano.

The Americans secured the island on March 26, 1945, marking the U.S. military's most significant advance in its island-hopping strategy to reach Japan. But the battle proved to be longer and deadlier than planners had anticipated, depleting much of the U.S. military's resources. The U.S. abandoned its plan to invade the Japanese mainland and turned to the atomic bomb to end the war.

Since 1995, the Japanese and American associations of Iwo Jima have met on the 8-square-mile island, now known as Iwo To, to commemorate the 35-day battle with a "Reunion of Honor."

Yellin and several other veterans made the day-long trip to Iwo Jima from Guam on March 3 with the tour company, Military Tours. Each man had his own reason for going, but all left united through the shared experience of an event that only a few can understand, says Cyril "Cy" O'Brien, a Marine correspondent who covered the Battle of Iwo Jima, who also made the trip.

"In a way, it's reliving something that happened so long ago that was probably what I would consider some of the most ennobling moments of our lives. I am a writer, too, so going there this time, looking at the terrain and seeing this hill, this cliff, this gorge, opens a whole new page to the memory," he says.

O'Brien, a retired newspaper reporter who is working on a book about his experiences as a war correspondent, has been back to Iwo Jima for the Reunion of Honor four times. But the sense of awe never diminishes as the first sight of the island from the plane, he says.

"When we approached Iwo Jima and saw Suribachi, you would be amazed what happens. Everything became as quiet and as solemn as if we'd entered a cathedral. You could tell the island had captivated everyone, the island had brought them back to their youth. The first moment was a very stirring moment. Always is," he says.

For Yellin, it has been a longer journey back to the battlefield where, as a young airman, he left behind 11 comrades, sparking years of bitterness and racial prejudice. Yellin recalls passing over the flag each time he and his brothers flew a mission to support the Marines on the ground, who faced the formidable task of taking the island from a military force on its last stand.

"I never thought of the people on the ground as people. You can hate somebody so much that you don't see them as people," he says. "I had no desire to go back to Japan. Why the hell would you want to visit the place where your enemy was? Who wants to visit the people you fought against and hated?"

The healing began in 1988, when his son married a Japanese woman whose father was a pilot in the Japanese Imperial Army Air Service, who also flew missions in Iwo Jima. Yellin's son's future in-laws opposed the marriage until the men met and shared their experiences in Iwo Jima.

"I hated him and he hated me. We met for the first time three days before the wedding. And he said, 'Any man that could fly a P-51 against the Japanese and live must be a brave man, and I want the blood of that man to flow through the veins of my grandchildren.'" he says. "Then, my son got married and started having children and my whole life expanded. I saw that human beings were killed in the war, and they were kind people, they were bright people, and now they're my family."

Through the marriage, the two wartime enemies made peace, a process that Yellin documented in a novel published last year, "Of War & Weddings." But he still never considered visiting Iwo Jima until he was offered an opportunity to commemorate his fallen brothers -- 11 in combat and five in training -- from the 78th Fighter Squadron in a ceremony during the Reunion of Honor.

Upon learning of his plans, Yellin's 18-year-old grandson expressed interest in seeing the place where his grandfathers had once fought each other.

"I just didn't want to relive all that, but because I have a Japanese grandson and because he wanted to go, I had to go," says Yellin. "And I'm happy, delighted, thrilled that I went. I cried most of the day, from the moment we landed. Many memories came back, and we did a memorial for the 16 guys. It was like closing the circle."

I never thought of the people on the ground as people. You can hate somebody so much that you don't see them as people.

--Jerry Yellin, World War II vet

[mctowalot]

I will never cease to be amazed by the courage by our combat troops (then and now). So if you were or are one thankyou from the bottom of my heart. I may regret posting this later (but it won't be the first time) but now that I'm "middle aged", some of the combat footage that I thought was "neat" as a kid now brings tears to my eyes when I watch it, particulary those old D-day clips. God bless our troops, past and present.

[The Annoyed Man]

Last July, I had to go spend a day at my mother's house with my brothers for the purpose of going through all of her papers, photos, letters, etc., pending the future disposition of her estate.

Among those items were two letters my dad wrote regarding Iwo Jima. The first was a letter he wrote to his mom from aboard a Navy transport ship. I haven't got a full copy of it yet, but I will post it some day when I get it. Quoting from memory, the first paragraph said something like:

Dear mother,

I am writing this from aboard a ship somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, offshore from an island. Tomorrow is D-Day.

Dad went ashore at Iwo on D+3.

The second letter, which I quote below is a corker. He wrote it to the publisher of his SOCS class newsletter, and they included it in the next newsletter...

"A long awated letter from David smith and it was a prize winner. Dave checked in with;

I'm inspired to write to you by both the last and the next to last issues. You have tiger by the tail (I know. I'm the editor of the Joseph Conrad society newsletter), but you seem to have a solid grip, for which many thanks. In the latter issue, Jack Bradford mentioned George Todd, and as I was with him when he died in Cushman's Pocket on Iwo, I thought his friends might like to know about it. George didn't have to go, by the way. He had been it in the chest by a hard line drive in a game of baseball that caused one of his breasts to swell up like a melon. He was in the divisional hospital and instructed to stay in bed, but he sneaked out, made the trek over the highest peak on Guam (per the Big E's orders -- the Big E was Graves B. Erskine, commanding general of the 3rd). George and I came ashore together out of that part of the 28th Replacement draft that had been attached to the 3rd Marines, who by then were being held in reserve for Okinawa. We were met on the beach by Ray Folks, who was the exec, and, given orders to join the 2nd Bn, 9th Marines, Lt. Col. Robert L. Cushman commanding. Ray and George and I had all gone through Oxy V-12, the same boot camp, and, of course, SOCS. And George and I were from Glendale. We were assigned to Easy Co., given some replacements and a couple of days to get ready. Fully replaced, Easy Co. consisted of some 46 men and officers divided into two platoons each of which was made up of two rifle squads of two fire groups plus a miscellaneous squad, machine guns, etc. After two days of getting acquainted and bombarded (those lousy rockets), we were sent to the lines (Easy was on the extreme left flank of the 3rd Mar Div, touching the 3rd airfield). Col. Cushman then called George and me back to explain that the next morning early, two hours before the first light, we would attack up the hill which 3 or 4 previous assaults had failed to take. The idea was to surprise the enemy. The point was to get past the end of the third airfield. That way we could join up with the 5th Division, whose right flank touched the airfield. That way we could stop some of the infiltration that had been coming down the airstrip. We went right up the hill without a shot being fired, though of course, we traversed several hundred yards of sleeping or amazed Japanese (we were not known as night fighters) who later, it turned out, were determined not to let us back down the hill. Col. Cushman had warned us, rightly enough, that the men would want to bunch up and not stay out on a line and that they would drift to their right and away from that empty flank. The trip up the hill turned out to be an ongoing effort on George's and my part to push men back to the left, to keep them strung out and not bunched up. We were even partially successful which was amazing, given the handicap of near silence that we had to impose on ourselves. Once there, we had about an hour left to try and settle in, hard to do in the pitch dark. George and I were busy as hell stumbling around in the dark. At one point he and I started to climb up on a mound of dirt in order to get a look toward the flank, but the mound began to throb and then to move. They had nearly perfectly disguised one of their tanks, but when we started scraping around on it, we must have scared the hell out of them, a favor they returned. We found shell holes, trenches, cisterns, what have you, but because of the precipitous ground we couldn't prepare protection over the full 360 degrees. Because of the extreme pitch of the land, protection from the rear and the flanks was the hardest. And we paid the price, particularly as they were mostly behind us; and one son-of-a-bitch amongst them was a first-rate sharpshooter. Within minutes of the first light he had killed my favorite amongst the men, a kid of 18, my sergeant, and George, a bullet between the eyes. It was instantaneous. And he got me in the solar plexus. The ironies abound, for if my rifleman was a kid of 18, George and I were kids of 22, though acting like men, and my sergeant was a kid of 25. The bullet that hit me turned out not to have gone through, though I didn't know it at the time as there was an exit wound on the rear quarter of my left side. It hit a button on my jacket, which broke it up and caused the core to go around my chest cage outside my chest cage outside the ribs but inside the skin.

Then came the mortars, which chewed up what was left of us. We finally were able, thanks to George's sergeant, Thomas Barrow, to withdraw to a small point that the ten of us who remained could defend. I nominated him for a medal, and he was awarded the Navy Cross. We wouldn't have made it without him. He took over when I was still out under morphine, and later, when he was wounded again, I could take over. We were obliged by what you might call circumstances to stay out there for nearly twenty four hours, there being no way that we could get out in daylight hours. Col. Cushman sent tanks up to evacuate us, but he ended losing them and the men in them at a rate that didn't calculate. I think that I have never heard a voice so forlorn as when he told us we were on our own. We finally made it out after several disastrous attempts -- at night, as we had come. We took a terrible pasting just trying to get out the Japanese strong point that we held, but we finally made it down to within proximity of our lines, where we met and killed a Japanese soldier (the only one we met once we had made it out of our little fortress) who might have done us a great deal of harm by setting off the alarm. [I referred to this killing in THIS THREAD a couple of days ago] We had all been wounded for nearly twenty-four hours and had lost a good deal of blood. We were tired and getting slow. I was able to crawl on my back (couldn't crawl on my gut) along those deep tracks the tanks left in the volcanic sand (which is where all the men were stashed), and that way I was able to get down to our lines unseen and in. The lieutenant in charge of the platoon that had taken up our places was Aime Hourcade, also of the SOCS. He was enormously helpful - got stretchers out immediately, covering riflemen, and got the seven others (all wounded, all that was left of the 46) in for me, I haven't seen Aime since. We were all in the same V-12, same boot camp platoon, and then SOCS. Does anybody know where he is?

I read somewhere, perhaps in the History of the Third Marine Division, that General H.M. Smith said that of all the battles of the Pacific, Iwo was the worst, and of all the engagements on Iwo, that at Cushman's Pocket was the worst. I don't want to take away from anyone else's, and "worst" is hard to measure anyway (as my surgeon said to me, major and minor surgery is determined by whether it's happening to me or to you); but it was grim. I should like to add that being an officer in the Marine Corps, serving under Col Robert L. Cushman, and, for that matter, serving in Cushman's Pocket have all been elements in a central core of pride that has governed my life these past forty five years.

Your last last issue brought me up to date on Bill Speary -- the same phenomenon that others have noted. He took on heroic proportions for me at SOCS, where, God knows, we needed heroes. You remember those wonderful night problems? Our turn came and we got dropped in the middle of nowhere (actually it was in the middle of a swamp) in the pitch dark, told to follow an azimuth, and if we were good boys, which the sergeants all doubted we were, we would come out at a given point after several hours, and we would find a truck to take us back to the rifle range. If we weren't good, we would have to find our own way home and would have to be there by reveille. It struck most of us, milling around there in the pitch dark, that the sergeants were probably right. Confusion was the enemy. How were we to get a whole platoon through the swamp in good order when it was hard enough for one. Suddenly Speary asked if anyone had noticed a rotten tree stump. He rooted around till he found one, took the crumbling wood, which glowed in the dark, and passed the chunks out amongst us. A piece of rotten tree stump placed in the web belt let the guy behind know where you were. Then it turned out that Speary had another quality. He could smell water, I mean in terms of feet -- like he could smell it and tell us if it was five feet away or nearly under foot. Anyway, he got us through the problem and on time, thus disappointing our tormentors. Speary had a problem with snakes, though, at least as I recall. On June 6 we were on a bivouac and were listening on the major's jeep radio to the news of the Normandy landings when Speary, who had been dozing on his back, head cupped in his helmet, shot into the air. A serpent had decided to sun itself on his chest. Always wondered if that were natural.

And other name, Nowicki. Wasn't he that really sweet guy who decided to get married down there? And didn't he get goosed by an M-1 during one of those stretches where we went single file between attack and defense problems? And wasn't the M-1 loaded with a blank (thank God) that somehow went off and burned Nowicki's nether parts to a crisp in a way that caused a change to his wedding and honeymoon plans? I'm not imagining all this am I? If it wasn't Nowicki, who was it? And Tony (The Nose Knows) Novak? How did I get to know all these N's? Their fame, I suppose.

My dad died about a year after writing that letter. Anyway, I thought you all might find it an interesting read.

I originally posted the above on my own website, and it actually led to my getting an email from someone who identified himself as the son of Aime Hourcade, and who thanked me for putting it online.

[The Annoyed Man]

I should add to the above that my father told me once that his initial impression as he stepped ashore on D+3 was the almost overwhelming stench of death, decay, and fecal matter. Iwo Jima was a nasty, nasty place; and the men who endured it have my undying respect and honor.

[joe817]

TAM, thank you for sharing something so precious to you. I simply cannot imagine the horrors they endured.

[davidtx]

[SNIP]
I never thought of the people on the ground as people. You can hate somebody so much that you don't see them as people.

--Jerry Yellin, World War II vet

We had a two year assignment in Singapore in the mid 90's. Soon after we arrived, there was a (at least) week long remembrance of the 50th Anniversary of the Japanese occupation of Singapore. One day, as I was meeting with my landlord, we started talking about it. His parents lived through that occupation and some of the things he told me were truly horrifying. It was very clear that 50 years later, they haven't forgotten. I think it will take another generation.

If you ever visit Australia, try to make time for a visit to the Australia War Memorial in Canberra.

[longtooth]

My Dad was there too. He took a suicide hit there & was burned some. They shot the plane down & it skidded across the flight deck & glanced off the bridge.

I too have the greatest respect for those who fought there.

All I know to say is Thank you.

[cougartex]

To all of our troops, THANK YOU.

[The Annoyed Man]

[SNIP]
I never thought of the people on the ground as people. You can hate somebody so much that you don't see them as people.

--Jerry Yellin, World War II vet

We had a two year assignment in Singapore in the mid 90's. Soon after we arrived, there was a (at least) week long remembrance of the 50th Anniversary of the Japanese occupation of Singapore. One day, as I was meeting with my landlord, we started talking about it. His parents lived through that occupation and some of the things he told me were truly horrifying. It was very clear that 50 years later, they haven't forgotten. I think it will take another generation.

If you ever visit Australia, try to make time for a visit to the Australia War Memorial in Canberra.

My mother is the same way. She grew up in French north Africa — Algiers and Tunis specifically. She remembers a time when the Germans were retreating and shelling her city from one direction, and the Allies were advancing and shelling her city from the other. They literally ate rats and cats. To this day, even though she is now a very wealthy woman, she lives life as if she is in fear of not having enough money to survive on. And yet, she travels extensively. She has been to Russia 2 or 3 times now, and she gets quite emotional describing the pride of the remaining Russian WW2 generation that she has met, and their sacrifices during the war. I think it is because she identifies with them as victims of the Nazi boot-heel, having been there herself.

My dad, on the other hand, was changed in a different way by the war. Yes, he experienced hardship during the depression, but not nearly as badly as many others. His dad was a dentist, and although his patients often could not pay him in cash, they could pay him in goods and services, so my dad's family never missed a meal because of the depression. And his experience of the war, as horrible as Iwo Jima was, was as a reasonably well fed, very well trained, and highly motivated marine. His combat experience was horrible, but he was not a victim of the war the way my mother was. And so he spent the rest of his life living each day as if it were a precious gift. In fact, he told me that when he was laying in a foxhole waiting for evacuation after having been relieved as described in his letter above, he felt as though he was supposed have died on that hill with the rest of his men; and that since he had been granted life, he resolved to live the rest of his days as if they were an undeserved gift.

The difference in the way my mom and dad each experienced the war, one as victim, the other as warrior, really defined the way they each lived the rest of their lives. My mom was always the dour pessimist, afraid of risk, somewhat self-effacing, and remains so today. My dad was always the charismatic and sunny optimist who took life in big bites and led his family on various adventures right up until he became terminally ill. In fact, he expressed his dying to us as his final adventure.

I took some life lessons for myself from their examples, and it is my belief today that those with warrior spirits always enjoy life more than the timid. I want my own life to end as Beth Moore describes it, "The purpose of life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave with a well-preserved body, but rather to slide in sideways, completely used up, yelling 'what a ride!'"

[joe817]

God Bless you TAM. Thank you for sharing.