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By Root 859 0

I’ll never leave.” He was killed a few days later. Sometimes, when Japanese perceived their own positions as hopeless, or simply grew weary of enduring bombardment, a handful of screaming figures hurled themselves at the Americans, to be cut down. But most of Kuribayashi’s men obeyed orders to hug their positions and die where they lay. All battles break down into a host of tiny, intensely personal contests, but this was especially true of Iwo Jima. Each man knew only the few square yards of rock, vegetation and stinking sulphur springs where he sheltered, crawled, scrambled and fought with a shrinking handful of companions.

FOR THE MEN aboard the ships offshore, it was a harrowing experience to find themselves so close to and yet so remote from the horrors which their fellow Americans were enduring. True, a handful of kamikaze aircraft broke through to the fleet, sinking the escort carrier Bismarck Sea and damaging Saratoga, but for the most part sailors were embarrassed by the comfort and safety in which they witnessed the battle. Coastguard Lt. Paul George, a twenty-two-year-old from Vinings, Georgia, never experienced personal fear on his LST, because he had no cause to, “other than feeling sorry for the guys509 who were ashore.” Surrealistically, from a distance of a few hundred yards “we could just watch the war going on. Through the glasses I could see tanks trying to get through the sand and not having a whole lot of luck, Marines diving into foxholes.”

Dr. Robert Watkins was operating shipboard: “Sometimes we were so close510 to shore that we could see the infantry and tanks fighting as though they were in our backyards. Some days were clear and lovely; on others the chill wind and fog whipped across the scudding whitecaps, raising waves that almost wrecked our landing boats. Some days the sun shone and I did not know it. Some nights the moon was bright, but not for me. Some sunrises I watched through the portholes as I washed the blood of the night’s work from my hands and clothes.”

Watkins hated operating on men with stomach wounds, because each case took at least four hours, together with many more hours of postoperative care, and half died anyway: “In the time that one belly wound511 is being operated on, I can save half a dozen lives and limbs with other wounds. And I am a lousy belly surgeon.” A man being prepared for the operating table protested as a chaplain removed his watch. “You don’t need my watch512…You’ve got a watch,” he said feebly. Corporal Red Doran, an Iowan BAR gunner from 3/9th Marines, lost his sight to blast. Evacuated, his bedmates had to endure the ghastly experience of hearing Doran join two other young men in similar plight, singing “Three Blind Mice.” The captain of an attack transport was named Anderson. One day, his own Marine son was brought aboard, hopelessly mangled. The boy said: “Dad, I sure hope you’ve got some good doctors aboard.” They were not good enough, for young Anderson died. His father buried him in the American cemetery ashore.

The faces of forward observers, directing naval guns alongside the infantry, remained unknown to ships’ crews, yet their voices became intensely familiar down the radio. An FO’s voice called “Fire!” Shipboard, there were deafening concussions, a pause, then a voice again: “Fan-fucking-tastic,” or perhaps, “Bull’s-eye,” or sometimes, “That was a little close, friends. Back off a blond one.” When one destroyer’s FO at last paid a visit to the ship, its crew cheered him aboard. Ben Bradlee, the gunnery officer, wrote of the Marine: “He turned out to be my age513, and even younger-looking, all jerky gestures and haunted eyes…I didn’t know how to tell a man I loved him in those days, but I sure loved him.” The visitor ate so much ice cream that he threw up.

The concentration of tens of thousands of men fighting over a few square miles of blasted rock and blackened vegetation created all manner of unwelcome problems. Radio nets became entangled. When phone wires were cut, it was often too dangerous to ask linesmen to search for the breaks.