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.

Remembering my grandfather

On February 19, 1945, my grandfather, Edgar Craig, from Danvile, Kentucky, was a 21-year-old Marine who worked with tanks. That day was the beginning of one of the most famous (infamous, really) battles of World War II--Iwo Jima--and he was there. At the time he was married with a small son at home. He survived, went on to father two daughters, including my mother, and lived until 2000, dying of emphesema. He was the best role-model I had as a child, and I miss him terribly still. But his experiences at Iwo Jima marked him, although he said very little about it, enough that I can put it all into a small paragraph:

A lot of other Marines never made it off the volcanic beaches which my grandfather described to me as miring the tanks and keeping them pinned down for a long time. The famous photograph, he told me, was actually the second one, one that was staged. A smaller flag had been planted before that. He related to me a story where he was asked to volunteer to go up the hill into some of the worst fighting, and he told his commanding officer that he would go up if ordered, but that he had a family at home and would not volunteer for the duty. It wasn't that he wasn't patriotic; he just wasn't going to throw his life away without orders.

That's it, in a nutshell. He told the story matter-of-factly. I knew he had seen a lot of horrific stuff, but I really didn't understand the scope of what they faced on Iwo Jima. Today I was on a YouTube 'today-in-history' blog and found this interview of two Iwo Jima veterans in the St Louis area. I wish I had interviewed my grandfather; I had taken oral history and have always been interested in it. Here's the St Louis video:



I would like to see Clint Eastwood's films Flags of Our Fathers (from the American perspective) and Letters from Iwo Jima (from the Japanese one). Although each has had some minor criticism, they sound like they were well-done and unusual in that they are companion perspectives of an event from both sides of the war. I think it's important to remember that thousands of lives on both sides were changed during that battle, with ordinary men whose lives interconnected in a twist of fate.

I never heard my grandfather say anything bad about the Japanese in general or the ones they fought against. I remember when Toyota came to Kentucky, he was the one who pointed out to me that many Japanese cars are made in the US, but American cars are also made overseas. He did tell me about the Bataan Death March, of which our neighbouring town of Harrodsburg had many men, but he talked about conditions, not the captors. I think he realised and imparted to me that whilst the leaders may have been hard-core military men, the soldiers were generally conscripts who dreamt of returning to their families just like he did. Or at least that's the impression I was given.

Anyway, on this day of remembering the Battle of Iwo Jima, and the lives lost, I'm also remembering a survivor who went on to play an important role in my life. He was a true father figure, and I miss him.