Remembering Iwo Jima, and family

70 years ago my grandfather, a young marine, was on a small volcanic island known as Iwo Jima in the Pacific. The battle there in 1945 was bloody and fierce. My grandfather was with a tank group. Of the 70,000 Marines and Navy corpsmen, etc., 6,821 Americans died and 19,217 were wounded. On the Japanese side, of the 22,060 soldiers on the island, 18,844 died.

My grandfather told me of the difficulty of dealing with tanks in the volcanic sand. And he is the one who told me that the famous photograph of the flag raising was actually the second time the flag was raised on the mountain. As the Wikipedia article puts it:

Using a length of pipe they found among the wreckage atop the mountain, the Marines hoisted the U.S. flag attached to the pipe over Mount Suribachi: the first foreign flag to fly on Japanese soil. Photographs of this "first flag raising" scene were taken by photographer Louis R. Lowery.

As the flag went up, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had just landed on the beach at the foot of Mount Suribachi and decided that he wanted the flag as a souvenir. Popular legend has it that Colonel Johnson the battalion's commander, wanted the flag for himself, but, in fact, he believed that the flag belonged to the 2nd Battalion 28th Marines, who had captured that section of the island. Johnson sent Pfc. Rene Gagnon, a battalion runner (messenger) for E Company, to take a second (larger) flag up the volcano to replace the first flag. It was as the replacement flag attached to a longer second pipe went up that Rosenthal took the famous photograph "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima".

My grandfather survived the battle, and returned to Kentucky, to his wife and young son. He went on to have two daughters, one of which is my mother. He was the best father figure I ever had, and I was very fortunate to know him. He died in 2000 after a long battle with COPD. It's so hard to believe he's been gone for 15 years. While watching the video above, I couldn't help but think of him. I will miss, you, Pa.