The story you aree about to hear is true.

The names have been changed to protect the innocent...or those few that are still living.

On 12 March, 1945 a young marine sergeant was killed in action on the island of Iwo Jima. He was my cousin.

I never knew about him until my aunt gave me a family tree and I saw someone listed as "Died. Iwo Jima, Japan, 12 March, 1945."

I mentioned that to my aunt and she had no details and asked me if I knew how to get them. I said I would do what I could. I knew that on the man's listed death date was during a heated discussion with the Japanese empire over the ownership of that particular island.

A couple of months later I found myself visiting my sister and having time on my hands because she had to go to work so I figured that was a pretty good time to start digging.

The Marine Corps was good to me and sent me his casualty card which listed his outfit, his injuries but had anything identifying like his address blanked out per privacy regulations. Armed with his outfit I went on line and scoured the WW2 Marine websites and hit pay dirt. An old timer knew Jack and we swapped several emails and he even passed me on to a couple of other guys that knew him.

One of them sent me a couple of old black and white pictures of the company and I got lucky. I got a couple of pictures of Jack. I have one of him standing there with a holstered .45, slung cowboy style. The cocky look on his face told me a lot. First of all, it told me he had not seen action yet. 

I managed to contact them and they all said he had been hit by a sniper and passed painlessly. 

Of course, I was smart enough to know that everyone in the infantry that didn't come home was hit by a sniper and died painlessly. No infantryman is ever torn apart, burned to death or died coughing blood as his lungs fill up...

I also knew that a casualty's personal effects were gone through very carefully to avoid causing the family undue grief. 

Those are the unspoken rules. The family has enough to deal with without wondering about some girl's name found in his wallet or some other dumb thing is. The story about his passing is scrubbed by his buddies and they only hear what a great guy he was.

So I had some digging to do and decided to pay someone a visit.

It's about 300 miles to Cincinnati from my place and when I got home I called one of the guys and drove to meet him. He was gracious and had me over for lunch. It was a long haul.

Between that and a couple of long phone calls with two other men, the available service records and casualty cards. I put a lot together. A couple of old photographs helped.

I begin.

Jack was the son of 'a dumb Irishman that worked for the city' according to an old relative. Right after high school Jack landed a halfway decent job just before Pearl Harbor. 

Looking at his photograph I see he was a cocky Irish kid that thought he was a tough guy so he headed straight down to the Marine Corps recruiters and enlisted shortly after Pearl Harbor.

He was nothing more or less than a product of his time. He was simply another patriotic kid that wanted to get even with the Japs for the treachery of Pearl Harbor

He must have done fairly well in boot camp because he was held back at Parris Island, handed a set of corporal's stripes and was assigned duty as an assistant drill instructor. I'm sure this galled a lot of pre war Marines, many of which had two or three hitches under their belt before they made corporal. Still, there was a war on and the junior officers and NCOs had to come from somewhere. Promotions like this were fairly common at the time.

Actor Jimmy Stewart went from private to colonel in the Army Air Corps during WW2. Another 23 year old man was promoted to Air Corps colonel and a 28 year old became a Brigadier General. 

It really was not much different in the Marine Corps. If you could do the job you often got it and the rank that went along with it.


During his time as an assistant drill instructor his kid brother dropped out of high school, followed his brother and enlisted. He was not trained by Jack but when his training was closing Jack quietly approached the Sergeant Major and managed to get his brother assigned as far east as possible.

The brother, whom I spoke with, claims this eventually saved his life. Most of his class headed out to the Pacific upon graduation. Straight into the meat grinder.

Shortly thereafter the cocky Jack put in a request for duty overseas. It was granted and he was assigned to the 4th MarDiv, then assembling in California. They shipped out in January, 1944 and in thirteen months saw four amphibious invasions. Jack was to be in three of them.

I believe it was here that he was assigned a squad and was given sergeant stripes.

On 31 January the 4th MarDiv including Jack hit the beach on Roi Namur and in four days secured the island. One of the guys said he spotted Jack standing at water's edge with a pistol trying to shoot a Japanese soldier in the surf trying to escape. 

 Roi Namur might not have impressed Jack too much because it was a short fight and casualties were light by Pacific standards. While he had just gotten a little taste of war, he actually hadn't seen the worst. In four days the island was secured.

Shortly after the 4th MarDiv left the island and took replacements and began training.

On 15 June, 1944 the 4th MarDiv hit the beaches of Saipan. 

According the one of the guys, Jack never got off the beach. His casualty card confirms this in a way. It says he suffered internal injuries caused by an exploding artillery round and was out of the fight early on.

One of the guys remembered seeing Jack nearby throwing grenades with them at a Japanese position of some sort and then there was an explosion and Jack was out of the fight. Looking at it in 20/20 hindsight and knowing what I do he got off somewhat light in that he survived and recovered. He returned to the unit in time to train for the next invasion.

Jack's injuries kept him out of the invasion of nearby Tinian. Tinian was the island that Enola Gay took of from on the mission that entered the world into the Nuclear age when she dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

Internal injuries caused by explosions are unpredictable. Autopsies of people without a single outward mark on them have found that a person's complete insides have been turned to jelly.

After the light casualties of Roi Namur I'd bet it was still a little of the somewhat cocky Irishman that hit the beach at Bloody Saipan. I'm sure he became a wiser man and grateful to simply be alive at this point.

The Marine Corps is big on training and I'm damned sure it was then. At the time there was no fixed infantry school like there is today. A rifleman was shipped from Parris Island or San Diego to his unit and it was expected that the NCOs would train him there. Training ranged from excellent to piss poor, depending on the junior officers and NCOs.

Jack was sent from the hospital back to his unit and the replacement and training cycle started again. The 4th needed an awful lot more replacements than they did after Roi Namur. It was about this time that Jack told a couple of his buddies that when the war was over he wanted to be a math teacher after the war.

FDR had just signed the GI bill of Rights and it had opened a door that Jack and most others never had even considered. To working class Americans like him, college wasn't even a dream before the GI Bill was signed. Jack saw this as an incredible opportunity.

The next target was to be a small island in the Volcano chain and the fight was expected to last only a few days.

Marine intelligence did not know who would be leading the Japanese defense. It was to be Tadamichi Kuribayashi, one smart Japanese officer that knew Americans well. Kuribayashi knew he was not going to be able to hold the island against the Americans. Instead he devised a devious plan to chew up and kill as many Marines as possible.

Kurabayashi had spent five years as a junior officer in North America, three of which were in the United States. He knew what he was up against and he knew Americans well. Instead of fortifications on the island, he went below the surface, creating a huge maze of tunnels and fighting positions.

It must have been a very worried young man that boarded the landing craft on 19 February, 1945 and came onto the beach at Iwo Jima that morning. I'm fairly certain he had learned that the average Japanese was not a buck toothed little guy in thick glasses. He knew they were serious adversaries. He had found out the hard way.

The commanding officer of the invasion, Holland M. "Howlin' Mad" Smith watched as the Marines landed and waited for what was going to happen next. There was no shooting going on to speak of. 

When the soft volcanic ash beach was clogged with men and stuck machines Kuribayashi ordered his guns to commence firing and turned the entire thing into a terrible bloodbath. I have no clue as to where Jack was at this time. I do know he made it ashore and got off the beach.

When Kuribayashi opened up, Holland Smith was heard to comment that "I don't know who he is but the Japanese General running this show is one smart bastard. Smith knew then and there he was in for one hell of a fight.

The predicted four or five day fight actually ended up lasting for five hard weeks. It was the only time in its history the Marine Corps suffered more casualties than they dished out.

The fighting was brutal and on the fourth day the iconic flag raising took place. I'm sure Jack saw it and like most people thought the fighting would soon be over. It wasn't. The predicted four or five day fight turned into a meat grinder that lasted five long weeks.

None of the vets I spoke with gave me a blow by blow description of things. They most likely saw it as one huge blur with days turning into nights turning into days and so on.

Most of the casualties were not from gunfire, but from high explosives. Veterans of other battles reported that they had never seen so many torn up corpses.

One of the vets I spoke with confessed that rather than expose himself, he simply shit his pants. Nobody laughed, it was not funny. Many other men did this also.

They didn't shit themselves because they were scared in the normal sense of it. They shit themselves because they knew what would happen to them if they exposed themselves for even a minute.

Jack managed to survive until 16 March when a Japanese machine gunner brought him down along with his platoon sergeant. Someone had managed to spot the machine gun position and the guys held off briefly until they could get a flamethrower. 

It was a rifle grenade that stunned the Japanese position briefly until they could get that terrible weapon to bear on the position. The Japanese inside were incinerated.

By this time the fighting had gotten so brutal that the Marines often didn't shoot Japanese that had been hit with liquid fire. They simply preferred to let them burn to death.

Jack's casualty card seems to disagree with what was told me by the guys. I tend to go with the forensics over the witnesses but not in this case. At first I wondered and then figured out that the shrapnel injuries on his body had been post mortem. His body laid out there probably for several days until graves registration could recover it. I'm sure it was hit repeatedly by flying shrapnel, explaining the difference between witnesses and the casualty card.

You also have to remember that dead was dead and there was no time to perform autopsies. They simply scooped up the dead and buried them in a temporary cemetery in the island. What else could they do? I'm sure the last notes on his casualty card were simply scribbled in by a very overworked graves registration person that was either sick to his stomach or totally numb because it was the only way to keep from going insane.





Aftermath of Iwo Jima.

The island was declared secure on 26 March, 1945, two weeks after Jack was killed. The term 'secured' meant the end of organized resistance. There were still an estimated 3000 Japanese soldiers still in the caves holding out. Small scale fighting continued for over three months, mostly with Japanese that left the caves at night to forage.

For weeks GIs reported hearing subterranean explosions as the Japanese blew themselves up with grenades. The last two holdouts emerged in January, 1949 and surrendered.

The cost of the battle as opposed to what was gained by it is still disputed to this day. It is pretty clear, however, that cost was seriously taken into consideration by President Truman when he made the decision to drop the bomb on Japan.

Jack was buried in the 4th MarDiv cemetery and rested there until 1948 when he was disinterred and reburied in the veteran's section of his hometown cemetery where he now lies.  



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When you look at the casualties on Iwo Jima and see that we were going to have to invade Japan proper, you thank God for the bomb....
















To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY