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From July 7, 2000 |
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WITH A PLACE CALLED IWO JIMA |
of TheColumnists.com
"And
when he gets to Heaven,
To St. Peter he will tell,
"One more Marine reporting, sir,
I've served my time in Hell."
--A poem etched on a grave marker on a Pacific island
THE WAR in the Pacific (1941-45) has always fascinated me, occasionally obsessed me in a personal quest to understand its horrors. It started with a five-year-old's reaction. Something I overheard my mother say one day in the spring of 1945. A woman who lived in the house next door to our apartment in Oakland, Ca., had received a telegram saying her husband had been killed in battle.
I had only a vague memory of seeing the man in military uniform once when he was home on leave, but the idea that he wouldn't be coming back had its effect, even if I was only five. I still remember hearing the island's name: Iwo Jima.
More bad news was to follow a few months later. It was another telegram, this one to my mother, telling her that my dad, Myron Stanley, had been badly wounded on another Pacific island. He was luckier than the man who had lived next door. He came back, badly wounded but alive.
I have a vague memory of visiting Letterman Hospital in San Francisco to see him. He was alive and that was all that seemed to matter. By early 1946 my father was recuperating from his wounds and was starting to tell me about his experiences.
That was one thing about Dad, he was never one who clammed up about the war. He was always ready to talk about what happened to him. And he painted the images in vivid detail, in all the blood and gore that goes with war. He even told me things that didn't sound very heroic or gallant. About shooting enemy soldiers in the back as they ran away from him, screaming for mercy. It was fascinating and repulsive at the same time, and I'd ask my Dad to tell the story again. Over and over, I wanted to hear the story.
It would be a couple of years later, when we were living in Napa Valley, that I learned the whole story of his fateful patrol on an island in the Philippines called Luzon. Not far from the capital city of Manila, somewhere in the surrounding jungles, his U.S. Army unit was "mopping up" elements of the Japanese Army.
"There wasn't much left of the Japs," I remember my dad telling me, "most of them were 16-year-olds who'd been thrown into the line at the last minute as replacements. Most of them ran when they saw us coming, throwing away their rifles. And we killed plenty of them. Shot most of them in the back. Mowed them down. And when we got to their bodies, we'd see that they were just teenagers -- kids. I felt pretty sick the first time, then after that it didn't bother me anymore."
He told this story many times, and it never lost its fascination.
From one of the Japanese "kids," Dad had taken some money -- yen he called it. And he still had it in a drawer in his bedroom. Sometimes I'd sneak in there, as if I was doing something forbidden, and take the money out of the drawer and look at it and wonder what it had been like that day, shooting those men in the back, and what kind of soldier a Japanese was, carrying all that money in a jungle where he couldn't spend any of it. And I wondered why Dad would keep something that would only bring back bad memories. After a while, he didn't talk about it so much and I think he even forgot he had the money in the drawer.
On that patrol, Dad and his closest buddy were walking side by side when suddenly a hidden Nambu machine-gun opened fire. A round caught my Dad's buddy in the eye and killed him instantly. Dead when he hit the ground, according to Dad. The same burst continued on across my father's chest, hitting him once in the upper shoulder and a second time directly next to the heart. The first slug fragmented and several pieces came out his upper back. The second slug was lodged so near the heart it would stay there for the rest of his life, too dangerous to be surgically removed.
It
was the third bullet that struck him that he always talked about
the most, and which was always visible whenever you were looking
at his face. It almost became a joke with him. Because that slug
had hit him right in the middle of his chin, in a place he would
later laughingly call his "Kirk Douglas dimple." He'd
push his finger into the hole and wiggle it around, as if the
whole thing was a joke. No joke: The bullet knocked out several
of his front teeth. Somehow Dad survived the burst, hitting the
ground badly wounded, in need of blood and medical aid.
The medics patched him up and for the next two days he was carried on a stretcher through rugged jungle terrain until they reached an aide station. Over and over through the years, he would tell me the story about tomatoes.
"I'd always hated tomatoes," was how Dad always started the story. "Always used to pick them out of the salad when I was a kid. Hated the sight of a tomato. But on that stretcher, coming back through the jungle, I got to thinking about tomatoes. About how nice and ripe and juicy a tomato must taste, and how good one would taste at that very moment. And I had this incredible urge for a tomato. It was the only thing in the world I wanted. A lousy tomato. And I couldn't have it. And the longer I couldn't have it, the more I wanted the damn thing. And when I got back home, I ate all the tomatoes I could get my hands on. I wanted tomatoes in my salad, on my plate, every night. And today I'll eat as many tomatoes as you want to put in front of me. I'll eat 'em all and still ask for more."
Dad had been one of the last casualties of World War II, wounded in late July 1945. The atomic bomb was dropped a few days later and it all came to a fast end by August 8, 1945.
Dad took me to every war movie that came along until the day he died in 1982. That included "The Sands of Iwo Jima," "The Halls of Montezuma," "Twelve O'Clock High," "In Love and War." In 1950 we saw a re-release of Humphrey Bogart's "Sahara" and Dad raved about it as being the best of the war movies. (Every time it came on TV in later years we would sit and watch it again, much to the amazement of my mother who could never understand our interest in war.)
The most important, and most unforgettable, war movie we saw together was Sam Fuller's "The Steel Helmet." In that 1951 low-budget movie, a gritty, hard-hitting look at how war changes men psychologically, Fuller shows an American sergeant empty his M-1 clip into the body of a Chinese Major. The enemy officer is unarmed and soon afterwards dies. The sergeant slips off into a state of shock. I'd never seen anything like this. Did unarmed prisoners get shot as a matter of routine in war? Dad admitted he had heard stories of it happening, but denied he had ever done it. As for men going into shell-shock, he had seen that happen. Some men held up better under the pressures of combat than others. Dad seemed to shrug the whole thing off as not so important. It was just a movie, after all.
But it was important to me and going to war movies became an obsession. Whether it was about the Pacific or European theater, I was fascinated, especially when I saw a movie called "Attack" in which a tank ran over Jack Palance's arm and he died with his eyes and mouth wide open, staring out at me in utter horror. I even sought out the director of that film, Robert Aldrich, many years later to ask him about his take on war, and the impactful images he had created. We talked for an hour but it still didn't seem to provide a pat answer. And I wondered about my Dad: Coming so close to death when you're still in your 20s, and your buddy standing two feet away dies instantly. And he had to live with all that afterward. As the old song goes, "it was fascination . . . . "
So I think I understand the fascination that James Bradley must have felt as a youngster, growing up and knowing that his father John "Doc" Bradley had been one of the six men who had raised the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi during that terrible battle for Iwo Jima in February-March, 1945. But unlike my father, who had talked about his experiences openly, John "Doc" Bradley had not. In fact, he had rarely mentioned it to young James. His attitude was that the heroes of the battle were the ones who had never returned from Iwo Jima. And he would change the subject, taking about his funeral home business or anything that had nothing to do with war.
John "Doc" Bradley, though wounded in both legs and feet, had survived one of the worst battles of Marine Corps history. One-third of all Marines killed in the Pacific during World War II were killed on Iwo Jima, an island fortified by 21,000 Japanese soldiers hidden away in a complex series of interconnecting tunnel systems. The enemy was not "on" Iwo, it was "in" Iwo, in heavily fortified positions, and the Marines had to dig them out, a handful at a time.
And yet Bradley had been a hero in the eyes of the men he took care of there. As a Navy medic, he exposed himself repeatedly to enemy fire -- to patch up wounded Marines or drag them to safety or sometimes carry them over his back to an aide station. He feared that if he didn't hurry they would die of their wounds before they could be helped by doctors.
Finally, one night in 1970 when young James Bradley was watching Johnny Carson on TV with his father, he did the unthinkable -- he brought up the subject of Iwo Jima. For the first time, Bradley Sr. told of how his best buddy had been captured by the Japanese on Iwo and horribly tortured. "I've tried so hard to forget all that," he told his son. James just sat there in silence afterward, for the first time realizing why his father had not spoken of his experiences, and realizing the depth of his father's pain.
I can almost sense the excitement that James Bradley must have felt that day in 1994, shortly after the death of his father from a stroke, when he discovered a few sealed cardboard boxes in a closet that contained all of his father's memorabilia associated with Iwo Jima. Documents, letters . . . material that revealed to James for the first time, some of the things his father had done, the emotions he had felt (and then packed away never to reveal for the rest of his life).
But the boxes posed more questions than they answered. And James decided, out of his growing fascination about his father and about the war he never talked about, that he wanted to learn the truth about the flag-raising and all the experiences that had followed it. That included the War Bond drive in the summer of 1945 when Bradley Sr. and the other two survivors of the flag raising -- Ira Hayes and Rene Gagnon -- helped to raise $26.3 billion dollars for the war effort. (The other three flag-raisers had been killed during the battle to take the northern portion of Iwo Jima.)
In the process, whether he realized it in the beginning or not, Bradley went on to uncover and tell one of the most important stories of 20th Century America.
The result is the current best-selling book "The Flags of Our Fathers," a remarkable piece of writing that is both personal and historic. It is one of the most emotionally moving books I have ever read. It is one of the great stories of the 20th Century, and it's destined to be a movie that could -- in the right hands -- become another "Saving Private Ryan."
Bradley traces the lives of his father and the other five young Marines who fatefully came together atop Mt. Suribachi on February 23, 1945, and were captured forever in a single photograph snapped by a wire-service photographer covering the invasion. It's a story of simple rural America before World War II, and how innocent young boys fought and died for their country. It's a very disturbing book, which captures all the pain of the time. For Iwo Jima was one of the great tragedies of the war, where more than 6,000 U.S. Marines, airmen and Navy personnel were killed.
At the time it was taken, that photograph became a symbol of victory, of taking another island in a series of islands to reach Japan itself and destroy an imperialistic enemy. It brought a ray of hope into the lives of those parents who knew their sons were fighting and dying on Iwo Jima and on other Pacific islands, and somehow that photo made it seem necessary and justified. That all the death and destruction and loss and sacrifice was for a great cause. Yes, we were paying a bitter price, but somehow in the end, if you can put a flag atop your enemy's terrain at its highest point, you are going to triumph.
Back then, in 1945, it was a symbol of the sacrifice young, still-freshly-scrubbed Americans were making in a lot of countries and on a lot of islands at a time when democracy was threatened by tyranny, and two would-be conquering enemies had to be militarily nullified.
Today, 55 years later, that single photograph has taken on much different implications. Yesterday's enemy is today's friend, so all that anti-Japanese sentiment is old history. To me that photo of a flag and six Marines has come to symbolize how Americans can stand together when they have to. It's a symbol of determination, a symbol of freedom. As corny as these things sound to modern generations, I don't take a thing like freedom lightly.
Sometimes I worry about the fabric of this country when I see a split opinion about the guilt or innocence of O. J. Simpson or the guilt or non-guilt of President Clinton. We seem to divide down the middle with all the morality lines blurred and indistinct. It's as if we were North and South, ready to split apart and fight it out all over again.
And I wonder if something America had in '45 has been lost and might be irretrievable. We were as one then, but we don't seem to be as one today. If we had a common cause, something to fight for again, would we hold together as we did from 1942-45? Something tells me no, but I hope I'm absolutely wrong. Somewhere in all this the heart of a free nation has got to be still beating strongly, even if the heartbeat sounds faint to my ears.
Given my personal fascination for war, it should come as no surprise that one of the people I wanted to seek out and meet when I was still in my early 20s was that wire-service photographer who had taken the Iwo Jima photo with a Speed Graphic. His name was Joe Rosenthal. It was an easy thing to do because fate had brought me to his very doorstep. When I was just 20 I had joined the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle, where Mr. Rosenthal had been employed for many years, still taking the great kind of pictures he had taken during World War II.
Joe was a short, rotund and fast-stepping individual who always seemed to be in a hurry to get some place important -- an easy-going guy, who'd stop and talk to me whenever I approached him. I asked him about Iwo Jima a couple of times, but his answers were short because he seemed to be in a hurry to get somewhere. I never heard him bring up Iwo Jima himself. Probably he'd had his fill of hearing about it. I respected that so I didn't bring it up anymore.
I never got to know him well -- he seemed to be the busiest of the paper's photographers and was often gone. Ironically, it was my last meeting with him that was the best, and he did bring up Iwo Jima himself. I'd just written a story about John Wayne's "The Sands of Iwo Jima" after Republic Home Video had brought out a new edition of the film with a Leonard Maltin documentary attached. He had already retired so it was totally by chance that I met him one afternoon in the Chronicle lobby just as I was leaving and he was arriving to visit some of his old cronies in the photography department. He complimented me on my article and its accuracy in recounting all the old stuff about the photo not being "staged" and other little bits of history. He conveyed a warmth and sincerity that I will never forget, even though I never saw Joe again.
Flashback to the '60s: I had quickly learned there was another photographer at the Chronicle who had also been at Iwo Jima, and so I also sought him out. Bob Campbell, as a Marine Corps cameraman, had photographed each day of the 34-day-long battle as a private, and had emerged unscathed.
Campbell
had something to say about his survival that I've never forgotten:
"After a few days of being pelted by machine-gun fire and
mortar shells and artillery fire, you thought you were going
to die. There was no way you could survive such a thing, day
after day, especially when you saw all the men dying around you.
So you accepted the inevitable, and you resigned yourself to
your own death. And you felt there was no way to prevent it.
And you went around like a zombie, figuring this is it. This
is the last day. But then one day I walked off that island, still
alive. I had to pinch myself. And I decided that from then on,
I was going to live each day of my life as best I could, to the
fullest. Each morning I wake up and think that God has given
me this day. It's a gift and I'm going to enjoy it to the max."
Campbell had been atop Suribachi that day the famous Rosenthal
photo was snapped. It all happened so fast, in fact, that Rosenthal
hadn't even been looking through his viewfinder when he took
the picture. Just swung the camera around at waist height and
clicked. Campbell had taken several photos of the flag-raising
from another vantage point, but these photos had never attained
the fame of Rosenthal's one picture. And rumors around the Chronicle
office were that Rosenthal and Campbell were rivals, Campbell
being jealous of Rosenthal.
Maybe it was true but I never fully believed this, because I never saw any signs of jealousy between the two workers. Nor did it seem to fit their personalities. They had too much going for themselves to turn petty over something that had happened more than twenty years earlier.
I would stop and talk to Bob quite often. He'd call me over to his development tank to show me what he had shot that day, or talk about his current assignments. Inevitably, however, our conversation would turn to Iwo Jima.
Once he told me about what had happened atop Suribachi. "Actually, the first patrol to reach the top of the volcano had put up a small flag and a photographer by the name of Louis Lowery, who worked for Leatherneck Magazine, took some pictures, most of which got lost in the shuffle and were superceded by what came next. The order came down that a bigger flag was needed so more men could see it, so another patrol was formed, mainly to string some wire to the top of the volcano for communications. I heard about the patrol and went up with a movie cameraman named Bill Genaust. Joe was there and walked up the slope with us.
"At the top of the volcano, the three of us were standing side by side as they got the flag onto a pole and were getting ready to put it up. Genaust stood beside Joe with his 16mm color movie camera, while I decided to go around to the side of the volcano to get a picture of the old flag going down while the new one was going up in the background. Genaust shot his movie footage as Joe took his single picture. Of course, it was Joe's picture that became famous a few weeks later. Anytime you see a movie of the flag going up, that's the footage Genaust shot. You don't see my shots except in the military history books."
He told me about what happened to Genaust. "We'd moved off Suribachi and a couple of days later were covering the battle going on to the north. It was hell, even worse than taking Suribachi. Thousands of Japs dug into a tunnel system you couldn't beat with artillery. The only way was to send in Marines with rifles and grenades and flame-throwers. Anyway, we were moving forward. Genaust was ahead of me, and some gunfire broke out and he turned to move back toward my position. He was standing between two rocks when a machine-gun opened up from a cave. I could see the muzzle blast. The bullets struck him in the back and killed him. He fell between the rocks. I emptied my .45 into the mouth of the cave but I never knew if I hit anything or not. After that everything quieted down. And Bill lay there, dead."
Over the years, stories had persisted that the flag-raising was "staged" or posed for by the men, with the photographers telling the soldiers how to stand and what to do, as if they were all on some kind of PR holiday.
"Those stories are pure bullshit," Campbell told me more than once. "It was all spontaneous. The men were there to string wire, which they did. And they were there to put up a bigger flag and take down the old one. They found this iron pole, put the flag on it, and hoisted it into position. We knew they were about to do it so we were ready with our cameras. It all happened naturally. We didn't tell those Marines to do anything. There were still plenty of Japs hidden away beneath our feet inside the volcano. There was still the war going on around us. Staged, hell. Nothing was staged. We were in the middle of the goddamn war."
Campbell's picture, taken just after Rosenthal's, shows a small group of Marines bringing down a U.S. flag. In the background, the new destined-to-be-famous flag is upright, already fluttering in the wind, and the men are securing it, bunched up at the base of the pole. The foreground shows the top of the volcano, the ground littered with burnt and broken debris.
I saw this photo and all the others Campbell had taken at Iwo one day when he brought out a box of negatives and asked me to go through them. If there was anything I wanted, he'd be glad to print it up. The only one he wouldn't print, he said, was a double exposure. He'd come in with the third wave of Marines on Invasion Day and got so scared when the Japanese opened fire that he'd exposed the same piece of film twice.
One evening in 1968 Campbell and his wife went to a movie, then he went home. He told his wife he didn't feel so hot, and he went to bed. He was dead the next morning. I missed my meetings with Bob after that. I missed talking about Iwo Jima. I hoped he had lived out his last days the way he had described. Right up to that last day. Living it to the max.
Bob Campbell's photo taken on the morning of the Iwo Jima landings.
One of Bob's pictures in particular had fascinated me. It was taken on the morning of the landings. More than half the picture is the sky over Iwo Jima, black with smoke from an artillery barrage and rising columns that blot out the sky. In the background you can see the first wave of young Marines that went in, dug in or crouched down into one of the terraces that led up from the beach. They're not moving, just gazing ahead toward the Japanese lines. Back about 100 feet is another line of men, lying in the sand, also not advancing. In the foreground is a young man who has just turned to look at Campbell.
"The Marine Corps didn't like this picture," he explained, "because most of the men are not moving. The Corps only wanted pictures where the men were attacking or taking an aggressive stance. This one, I personally liked it, it got squelched."
Campbell studied the picture for a minute. "Those are the first three waves of men to go in, and they're still fresh. It was the 25th Regiment. They hadn't been hit by the mortar and sniper fire yet. But they soon would be. Most of them were killed or wounded that morning. After this, it really hit the fan. You want it?"
Bob printed the picture for me and I still keep it up on a wall in my study, where the face of that young Marine, crouched down in the right hand corner of the frame, is always staring at me from under the tip of his helmet. He knows he's in the middle of Hell. You can see it in his eyes.
I
keep that picture where I can glance up at it once in a while,
as a reminder of my fascination for war, and all the unanswered
questions that go with its great mystery. In the future when
I look at that photo of the 25th Regiment hitting the beach,
I'll think of James Bradley, and how he went looking for the
answers to satisfy his fascination, and how he found them on
Iwo Jima.
©2000 by John Stanley
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