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thedrifter
09-15-08, 08:37 AM
Article published: Sep 15, 2008
Manchester man watched history unfold at Iwo Jima

MANCHESTER The blue ink has faded in the 64 years since Anton "Tony" Anderson had the Marine Corp's eagle, globe and anchor inscribed on his forearm, but his memory of the famous planting of the stars and stripes on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi is as vivid as it was Feb. 23, 1945.

Anderson's Forest Gump-like proximity to one of the most historic events of the 20th century was, like the fictional Gump's encounters, pure chance, the 92-year-old Manchester resident said.

"I just happened to be at the foot of the mountain when they raised the flag. We didn't know it was going to happen. That's just where I was," Anderson said.

Nor did Anderson suspect that Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal would immortalize the event with perhaps the most recognizable image of World War II — five Marines and a Navy corpsman straining in unison to raise the flag.

Anderson's unit, a part of the Third Marine Division, debarked from a Navy landing ship during the initial invasion a few days earlier.

When the flag went up, U.S. troops celebrated the capture of a strategic promontory from which Japanese troops orchestrated artillery strikes, Anderson said.

"The Marines were shooting their rifles, and ships were blowing their whistles. All hell broke loose on the island," he said.

The battle continued for nearly a month after the capture of Suribachi, with nearly 7,000 U.S. troops, mostly Marines, dying in the eventually successful effort to root out more than 20,000 Japanese defenders who kept their pledge to fight to the death.

Anderson, a native of Ledyard in north-central Iowa, was 28 years old, married and the father of a young son when he joined the Marines in 1943.

In those days of heightened patriotism, "you went if you were able," he said.

Anderson, whose only combat was at Iwo Jima, said the battle was accurately portrayed in the recent Clint Eastwood-directed films, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima."

A member of the Marine Corps League, the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, Anderson is well known to attendees of Manchester's annual Memorial Day ceremony as the World War II veteran who recites from memory the poem, "In Flanders Field."

Ellie