City man recalls Iwo Jima [Archive] - Marine Corps

thedrifter

11-06-06, 08:38 PM

What a fight that was’

By STEPHANIE FARR

sfarr@sungazette.com

Like map markers on a human body, the age spots on George DeFalco’s hands represent significant landmarks in the nonagenarian’s life.

But the only key to this map — a map elevated by the protruding tributaries of DeFalco’s veins — exists in the 90-year-old’s mind.

Perhaps the light spots with sanguine-pink undertones represent his life’s blissful moments — several golf championships, three children and two wives.

There are darker, more ominous patches though, spots more appropriately likened to a liver that appear to have sprung from memories that can be just as bruised and battered.

Among the age spots — one of the only types of stains that seem to darken with time — there is one representing a 2-by-5 1/2 mile “nothing rock” in the Pacific Ocean called Iwo Jima.

DeFalco, now a Montoursville resident, was 26 and working in the ready-mixed concrete business with his father in Worcester, Mass. when his draft number came up in 1942 — just several months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

When DeFalco, who classified himself as “a little shrimp,” arrived at the base with all the other young men whose numbers were also up, he watched one by one as many of them got “stamped free” because they didn’t meet physical requirements.

“I was waiting and waiting to get stamped, but I didn’t,” he said.

A graduate of Holy Cross College of Massachusetts, DeFalco opted to enter into officers training with the Marine Corps and was enlisted as private first class in April 1942.

“None of us knew how to even be soldiers,” he said. “The GIs taught us and they didn’t use the king’s English, if you know what I mean.”

DeFalco quickly moved up through the ranks and was sent to photography school to become a military intelligence aerial photo interpreter. He was stationed several places throughout World War II including New Zealand and Guam.

“They say the Marines are tough — that’s an understatement. They absolutely teach you how to fight,” he said. “I wrote a letter home to a friend and the guy didn’t believe it was me writing things like ‘I’m going to kill these guys, whoever they are.’ I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

But DeFalco would need the fighting instincts he learned with the Marines when, as captain and commanding officer of the Third Marine Division, Headquarters Company, he led approximately 100 men onto Iwo Jima five days into the historic battle.

DeFalco’s division was planted on a ship in the Pacific Ocean off the island for the first five days as a reserve force but “everything changed” when military personnel realized that the battle wouldn’t be won as easily as expected.

“We were going to take that thing over in 72 hours — it took five-and-a-half weeks to get it secured,” he said.

DeFalco could see Iwo Jima from his ship and on the fourth day of battle, an announcement was made over the sound system that an American flag had been placed on Mount Suribachi, and DeFalco could see that too.

Little did DeFalco know when he entered the battle on the fifth day — Feb. 24, 1945 — that much like that raised flag, he would be staying on this “nothing rock” for a while.

“You could hear everything from the ship but when you hit the beach you got an eyeful,” he said.

Once on the beach, DeFalco turned to face the ship he had just left and marveled at the “seawall” of military vessels in the harbor — from flat tops to cruisers.

“It must have raised the level of that ocean with all those ships out there,” he said.

DeFalco said he and his men were not “thinking history” when they arrived on the island and that their only hope was that “we were able to save our butts.”

“What a fight that was. There was a lot of screaming and yelling,” he said. “You don’t have time to be scared. You can’t go out there saying ‘I don’t want to get hit.’ When you’re combat-ready you don’t think of getting hurt.’”

One of the more difficult situations the military faced on the island was the extensive network of underground tunnels and facilities built by the Japanese, DeFalco said.

“The biggest thing we had to do is burn them out with flame throwers,” he said. “That’s a tough way to make a living.”

In a 1945 newspaper article from the Worcester Sunday Telegram, DeFalco is quoted as saying that the Japanese concrete work he viewed on Iwo Jima was “poor in structure and crude” compared to average American standards.

“The only thing that prevented the complete destruction of the pillboxes, bunkers and shelters I’ve viewed was their depth under ground and the tremendous amount of dirt the Japs had heaped over them,” DeFalco was quoted as a young man.

The Marines’ main reason for fighting on the otherwise unimpressive piece of land was to take control of the island’s three air strips, DeFalco said. Control of those air fields would provide emergency landing sites for B-29 planes on their way to mainland Japan.

“The first day we saw a B-29 land it was like a football game with everyone cheering around the grid iron ‘They made it back,’” he said.

Like the first flag raising on the island that was overshadowed by Joseph Rosenthal’s picture of the second, DeFalco remembers a particularly moving Easter Sunday sunlight service held atop Mount Suribachi.

“I thought it’d be all over the papers here — but never a word,” he said.

Although he “wouldn’t even know where to start today,” DeFalco said he played the organ at that service more than 60 years ago.

“I don’t know where that organ came from, all I know is that there was a keyboard, you pressed it and it made noise,” he said.

With his biting sense of humor, DeFalco undoubtedly pressed many buttons during his 3 1/2 years with the Marines during World War II. He tells many stories about the lighter times during his service career, including when he picked up his first spoil of war, a “really comfortable” toilet seat he fished out from debris in Guam.

But DeFalco tells no tales of comic relief to break the memories of pain that, like the phoenix from the ashes, spring from the battlefields of Iwo Jima.

“I lost some people up there and some got wounded. Some of my real good friends got buried out there,” he said. “I’ll tell you one thing — nobody wins a war.”

The great hope is that nobody ever forgets a war either and that the memories that exist in the spots on DeFalco’s hands and mind, and the hands and minds of all remaining World War II veterans, will be assimilated into the taut skin and limber brains of contemporary adults and adolescents.

As for DeFalco, he now worries about the “kids in Iraq,” who are experiencing a “whole different story” and developing their own age spots all too quickly.

“Those poor kids over there,” he said, shaking his head at the current war. “I don’t know how they sleep.”

Ellie