TAM - Was this the post you were looking for?

[Russell]

I saw your comment about losing the post about your Dad's Iwo Jima experience so did a bit of searching. Is this your post your were sad about losing? You'll have to scroll down a bit, the cache doesn't link directly to your post:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/ ... %26t=39987


If it is, you are welcome to of course copy and paste it over here for further archiving!

[The Annoyed Man]

YESS!!!!! Thank you so much for finding it. I’ll copy/paste it here right away......

Re: Battleship Texas perhaps finds her final resting place
Post by The Annoyed Man » Mon Nov 29, 2010 2:20 am

I think I might have posted it elsewhere on this forum before, but this is a letter my dad wrote a couple of years before he died. He makes reference in it to his age and the age of his men. He was neither a bomber crewman nor a sailor. He was a 2nd Lt in the Marine infantry. This letter was written to the organizer of his OCS class reunion, to apologize for not being able to be there. I've highlighted in red the sentence pertinent to age...

I'm inspired to write to you by both the last and the next to last issues. You have a 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 hit 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 of 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. 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.

I used to think that they don't hardly make 'em like that anymore, but what I have seen in young people today in our armed services has changed my opinion. If they're typical, then we're in fine shape. It is interesting to note that Time Magazine war correspondent Robert Sherrod, before the landings on Bettio in which he particpated, once wrote that he didn't think that the nation's young men had what it took to win a war, because he thought they were largely pampered and shiftless. He also didn't think that America back home would truly come to grips with what it was going to take to win the war until after Saipan. Sherrod participated in the landings at Attu, Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. That is a lot of combat.

[Russell]

Awesome! Glad I could find it for you!

I haven't read the whole letter yet, but from what I have read so far it appears to be pretty special.

You are of course welcome to turn it into its own topic here so it's easy for folks to find in the future.

[srothstein]

TAM,

That is a great letter and tells a lot about the war. I know what your father means when he says they were just kids of 18, 22, or 25 because I look back on some of the people I served with or cops I went to the academy with and from this standpoint I refer to us as kids. But to give them the respect they were due, they proved themselves to be men and not kids. There is a Yiddish expression that a person was a real mensch. I guess the closest I can think of in English is a man amongst men. Every single one of them proved this to be true about themselves. My deepest respect to all of them.