The island, veterans remember, “lived up to its name,” which in Japanese means “sulfur island.” An extinct volcano created it, so it smelled bad. It didn’t have beach sand. It had volcanic ash.
“And you can’t dig a foxhole in ash,” says Jack West, 80, of Umatilla. “It just caves in on you. Can’t walk in it, either. You sink down 6 or 8 inches into it, every time you take a step.”
It was barren, “with no cover, nothing to hide behind,” remembers Abie Gordon, 86, of Longwood. “The Japanese were dug in. They could see us and shoot us. And we couldn’t see them.”
“A terrible, terrible place,” recalls Russ DiMaggio, 80, of Zellwood. “Dead bodies everywhere, and trucks and tanks and guns stuck in that sand.”
West was just 19 and a Marine Corps corporal when he landed with his Marine Corps unit and his BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle, a bulky single-man machine gun) on Iwo Jima. Gordon was 25 and a sergeant. DiMaggio was 19, with the Seabees, the Navy’s construction battalions sent to fix up the airfield, build the fuel tanks and make Iwo Jima worth the blood that was spent winning it. It was to be an emergency landing and refueling airfield for long-range B-29 bombers that were just then pounding the Japanese home islands, prepping for an invasion that never came.
The men move a lot slower these days, a bit more tentatively. But they are some of the “fathers” that Clint Eastwood’s new movie, Flags of Our Fathers is about, the men who fought in one of the Pacific war’s bloodiest, most decisive battles. And they were among the veterans the Orlando Sentinel assembled for a special preview of the movie, which opens Friday.
Like the men portrayed in the movie, they don’t talk about their war experiences much because, “it’s not something you’d bring up at a dinner party, what you did, what you saw,” says Ed Danowitz, 86, of Altamonte Springs.
“I can’t recall Abie and me ever talking about it,” says Joe Phillips, 86, a Pacific War Marine Corps vet and longtime friend of Gordon..
“Some guys treat it like it was the highlight of their lives, go to all the reunions, but not me,” says West, who retired as an Orlando developer. “It doesn’t come up, unless something like this movie comes along.”
Eastwood’s film tells the story of the men in the iconic February 1945 Iwo Jima photo, those who raised the flag over Mount Suribachi. It’s also about the confusion over who did it, and a hectic, guilt-ridden War Bond drive the two surviving Marines and Navy corpsman (medic) endured on returning to the U.S. It’s about the concept of hero — who deserves the title and who doesn’t. It tells these retired servicemen then overseas how strapped the country was for cash in that last year of the war. And it explains that war, their sacrifice, to a new generation.
“Kids today don’t know World War II history, because their teachers don’t know it,” says Danowitz, a Pacific War vet who retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel. Danowitz was prepping for the invasion of Okinawa while Iwo Jima took place, but like many, that image of the flag-raising, captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, felt like “victory.” He found himself wishing Eastwood’s movie was more of a history lesson, explaining, for instance, what a “runner,” which is what Rene Gagnon, the Marine flag-raiser played by Jesse Bradford in the movie, is.
“He’s taking messages to and from commanders in the field,” Danowitz says. “But he was typically a guy who almost always was a bit of a misfit. Not a good soldier, in a lot of ways.
“Rene Gagnon was man enough to admit that’s what he did in the battle. He said that, as the movie shows, in Times Square. But that stigma followed him through his life.”
DiMaggio appreciates the film’s message, that “the real heroes were the ones who never made it off that island, not the rest of us.” But he was also proud that the film showed what the battle was about, “saving the lives of those B-29 crews. I know we saved a bunch of them. My unit, the 90th, took casualties. Saw a guy with a sawed-off shotgun shoot the side off a Japanese soldier during their last banzai charge for the airfield. They wanted to get at those pilots. The 133rd Seabees took like 25 percent casualties. And it wasn’t for nothing.”
West, who was wounded twice on Iwo Jima, the second time seriously enough to get him shipped home, says that one thing Flags of Our Fathers gets wrong is “the quiet. Down on the beach, lines of wounded men getting treated, doctors and corpsmen running and yelling, sailors bringing boats in, new troops wading through the water and sand, the shelling and bullets. It was pandemonium, from start to finish.”
Ten men from West’s unit were killed when a single shell hit them as they were getting water. That’s one reason his favorite image of that battle was of the airplanes, F4U “Corsairs, flying right at that mountain, strafing the Japanese guns, then climbing straight up because they got so close on their runs. I wish the movie had had that.”
Gordon was a 30-year veteran of the Marines who retired as a lieutenant colonel. He survived not only Iwo Jima but the famous Battle of Chosin Reservoir in Korea, and served in Vietnam as well. Eastwood’s movie brought back memories of black sand and ash and “being under fire from the moment we hit the beach. Everything got stuck. Everything. It was a real fight, getting the Japanese out of their holes with flamethrowers.
“But when we could see our B-29s landing, we knew the war was pretty much won.”
