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  1. #46
    Recalling Okinawa
    Decatur man tells of raid on Japanese beach in 1945

    By Ronnie Thomas
    DAILY Staff Writer
    rthomas@decaturdaily.com · 340-2438

    Sixty years ago today was not a Friday. It was a Sunday. Easter Sunday. And it was April Fool's Day.

    Emotion can build when such occasions collide.

    For Marine Pfc. Ralph "Jack" Lawson of Decatur, the day during World War II began as a solemn one, in a ship off Okinawa. He doesn't recall Marines exchanging April Fool's jokes.

    They set their minds straight the previous night, when a chaplain led religious services 350 miles from the Japanese mainland.

    On this Easter Sunday morning, they were having a breakfast of steak and eggs, which fighting men know as "the usual feast before the slaughter."

    As Lawson, now 83, scrambled down the cargo net on the side of his ship to board the landing boat for the beach, he was leaving another life.

    He had planned to be a medical doctor like his father, who died when he was in high school. He worked nights while attending college and became a foreman at a foundry making aircraft parts. The government gave him a military deferment.

    "One day in 1942, I got to thinking that I didn't feel good about myself, mentally," he said. "I didn't feel I was equal, because I'm not over there fighting. I decided that I didn't want to go into the Army. So I volunteered for the Marine Corps."

    He stood 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed 155 pounds. The Marines swore him in at Nashville, and he became a "Hollywood Marine," going through basic training at San Diego.

    Lawson was proud when a lieutenant singled him out.

    "Look at 'Little Man.' You don't hear him moaning," the lieutenant said. "Do your job."

    "Little Man" became his nickname.

    In early 1944, Lawson shipped to Guadacanal, where he spent seven months. The military considered the island secured when he arrived.

    "We were in more training there," he said. "They brought Marines from all over to form the 6th Division. I was part of the 29th Marine regiment. We didn't know where we were going. Iwo Jima was under attack, and Guam, Tinian and Saipan in the Mariannas."

    Lawson said his ship became part of the largest armada ever assembled in the Pacific. They rendezvoused in the Ulithi Islands and formed into one group.

    "On the sea, four days from Okinawa, platoon leaders got us together with a map and showed us what the island looked like," he said. "Everybody had been speculating. We thought it was going to be Formosa."

    Lawson said for him, at least, when "you start down that cargo net, you don't know what's in front of you, and that's scary."

    His outfit was in the second or third wave, hitting the beach about 9 a.m. on April 1, 1945, with little opposition.

    "They let us in, because they were dug in, in the mountains and caves," he said. "But that first night was a frightening time. There was so much gunfire in the sky, with Japanese kamikaze pilots attacking the ships. I watched some explode. The Navy lost more men, about 5,000, than at any other time."

    Only about 200 yards inland, the Marines took control of Yontan Airfield and swept north.

    "The airfield was practically in front of us," Lawson said. "We saw an enemy plane land. He didn't know we had control of it. He stepped out of the plane and a machine gun cut him in two."

    The Marines established a perimeter each night, setting up .30-caliber machine guns atop sandbags.

    "A favorite Japanese tactic was to attack at night, storming in, making a lot of noise," Lawson said. "I was an assistant gunner on a three-man team, feeding bandoleers of ammo for the triggerman. The third guy is doing the best he can, keeping the ammo coming and keeping it from tangling."

    That night, Lawson said, the battle lasted almost all night. The next morning they counted 30 dead enemy soldiers within yards of them.

    "You're sitting there, and here they come. It's a moment when you don't have time to be scared," he said. "I don't like to talk about it."

    While Lawson was still in the northern part of Okinawa, news swept the island that President Roosevelt had died.

    "We really didn't dwell on it. We had so much else on our minds," he said. "Some people would say it was a big shock to them, but it wasn't for us anyway. We knew nothing would change. It would continue pretty much like it was."

    After taking the north in less than three weeks, Lawson's outfit moved south to relieve a bogged down 27th Army. On his 82nd day on Okinawa, on June 21, the Americans secured it.

    Lawson was on Guam when the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki on Aug. 9, drawing the war to a close.

    "Sometimes, afterwards is the hardest part," he said, his voice wavering. "Your family don't understand what you've been through. I could talk to somebody, and they didn't know what I was talking about. And the people that do understand, they're somewhere else. They're gone. Your support group is gone. When you have bad dreams and wake up in the middle of the night ... I could almost cry."

    Lawson attended a memorial service in Nashville last fall for his regiment.

    "There wasn't a soul there from my company," he said. "I didn't know anyone."



    DAILY Photo by Gary Cosby Jr.
    Ralph "Jack" Lawson, 83, of Decatur stormed the beaches at Okinawa with the U.S. Marines on April 1, 1945.

    Ellie


  2. #47
    A former Marine finds peace at Montana Veterans Home
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Posted: Sunday, Apr 03, 2005 - 09:20:23 am PDT
    By CHRIS JORDAN
    The Daily Inter Lake

    It's 5 a.m. on a Monday morning and Rudy Matule has already been awake for two hours.

    He's reading the Bible alone in his room at the Montana Veterans Home. He flips back and forth between the Bible and a study guide on Samuel, the book he's currently reading.

    The room is quiet and dark, illuminated by a single, small reading lamp. Around 6 a.m. Matule puts on some warm clothes and heads out for his daily six-mile walk around the south side of Columbia Falls.

    "If you don't get the car greased up in the morning, it's gonna squeak on you all day," Matule says as he grabs his cane.

    Matule, 89, is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps. He fought on four islands in the Pacific Ocean during World War II, including Iwo Jima, a battle Lt. Gen. H.M. Smith, then commander of the Marines in the Pacific, called "the toughest and hardest fight in Marine Corps history."

    Matule sums up the campaign as, "We won, but we sure got the s------ kicked out of us."

    Matule is among a dwindling number of World War II veterans. Of the 16.1 million people who served in the U.S. armed forces during that war, only 5.4 million are still alive. About 1,100 World War II veterans die each day, according to the Department of Veteran Affairs.

    For surviving veterans like Matule, time hasn't erased the memories of war.

    He vividly remembers the fateful day in December 1941 that drew him into service. He was at a local bar when a friend rushed into the room.

    "He told me that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor," Matule recalled. "The next morning we both enlisted."

    Matule was a member of the 4th Marine Division, often referred to as the '"Fighting Fourth." The group spearheaded four major assaults on the islands Roi Namur, Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima. On Saipan, the Fourth lost nearly a third of its men. The battle for Iwo Jima, which raged for over 30 days on an area five miles long and two miles wide, resulted in 9,098 casualties for the division - almost half of the Fourth's men at the time.

    During the war, approximately 80,000 men fought with the 4th Division, and more than 17,000 of them died.

    Matule was one of the original Marines assigned to the division. Over 80 percent of the men who were there with him in the beginning would eventually die in battle.

    "Sometimes when I'm out walking and I'm all alone, I'll start thinking back about everything," said Matule. "I just think about all the great guys that are buried over there, and I feel real bad for them because they didn't get to live life like I did. Somehow God brought me out of that place, and I've tried to do my best every day since."

    Born in Butte, Matule was a miner and a ditch digger during the Great Depression. He fondly refers to his birthplace as "the best town in the whole world." He was the fourth youngest of 13 children and although money was tight, his family always managed to make ends meet.

    After the war he moved back to Butte. In 1947 he married Helen Maki, and they had a daughter, Maryanne. Two years later he opened Matule's Grocery Store on the east side of town and worked there for the next 33 years.

    He moved to the veterans home two years ago. Most of his family and friends, including his wife and daughter, had died, and a late-night medical emergency made him realize he wasn't fully able to care for himself, so he decided it was time to leave Butte.

    Matule shares his room at the home with Indy Halvorson, a fellow World War II veteran, originally from Missoula. The two live together in a 15-foot by 15-foot room divided in half by a curtain. They share a sink with each other, a toilet with two other men and a shower with around 40 others.

    "We're in pretty tight quarters here, but we do our best to get along," Halvorson said. "I think most of us got used to being in close quarters in the service, so we know how to handle it."

    "The bathroom situation could definitely be improved around here," Matule said. "But all in all they are really good to us. The best time of my life was during the Panic [after the stock market crash of 1929]. There was nothing to do and all day to do it in. And that's kind of how I feel about life here."

    Specifically, he enjoys the medical care, the food and the staff at the facility. "All I can say is that I've been here for two years and I haven't gotten any worse."

    Matule's daily routine typically includes Bible reading and walking, as well as two weight-lifting sessions and regular games of pinochle. Cliff "Cotton" Cottongim, a Korean War veteran and fellow card player, says other residents have noticed how active Matule is.

    "When he's not around at the card games, we'll talk about him, and I always think it's funny because he's the oldest one of us, and we all sit around and talk about how healthy he is," Cottongim said.

    Other than the card games, Matule spends most of his time alone, and says he enjoys it that way.

    "I get along with everybody up here, but I like my space," he said. "I like to go walking and stay active and be outside. Sometimes it's easier to do that stuff on your own."

    Cottongim called Matule a loner of sorts.

    "He'll be alone all day, but then when he's around the home he's almost overly helpful," he said. "I think that's just second nature from his time as a grocery store owner, though."

    Although Matule's time spent as a business owner may be part of the reason he is so quick to help others, other experiences have certainly made him both introverted and exceedingly helpful. When Matule's daughter was 14 she was diagnosed with diabetes. Matule helped his daughter through the disease, but after 13 years of health problems she died. A month later Matule's wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and for the next 15 years Matule spent most of his waking hours caring for his sick wife. She was unable to speak with him for the last 14 years they lived together.

    "People used to ask me how I do it," Matule said.

    "But I guess you never really know what you can do until you have to do it... I don't know what was more difficult, fighting on Iwo, or those 28 years where my wife and daughter were sick, but I certainly think one prepared me for the other," he said.

    His beliefs about life have evolved from hard-knock experiences.

    "I think a man's life is planned before he's even born, and we're just living out whatever happens. So it ain't what it is, it's what you make of it."

    Staff members around the hospital say that Matule is doing a good job making the most out of his time in Columbia Falls.

    "He keeps himself busy with things he enjoys, and that makes him a nice resident," activity director Bonnie Stutsman said.

    "Every morning when I'm driving into work I'll see him out there walking, and it makes me smile to know that he's still out there doing something that he loves," nursing director Jan McFadden said.

    Morning walks, steak dinners, conversations with friends, nonfiction books, jazz music -- these are some of the things Matule derives enjoyment from these days. He prides himself in finding happiness in the little things, and he says that the little things are enough.

    "I think I've done it all. My generation is the greatest generation there ever was, and I'll tell you why. We went from the horse and buggy to space. We've seen it all, so I guess that makes me pretty content."

    Chris Jordan is an Inter lake staff photographer. He may be reached at 758-4435 or by e-mail at cjordan@dailyinterlake.com


    Ellie


  3. #48
    Battle of Iwo Jima veterans reunite in Branson
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    By Cliff Sain
    Branson Daily News Staff Writer
    April 24, 2005

    In the closing months of World War II, thousands of U.S. soldiers struggled through a particularly violent battle on a tiny Pacific Island. This week, 10 survivors of the Battle of Iwo Jima chose Branson as a place to get together, talk over old times and keep friendships alive.

    "We do this every year," said George Watson, of Alabama. "We decided to come to Branson because of the activities, the convenience of location and the reception that veterans receive."

    Watson said the men and their spouses would enjoy several Branson activities.

    "We want to see a couple of shows," said J.D. Johnson, of San Antonio, Texas.

    For most people, the indelible image from Iwo Jima is that of six American Marines raising a U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi on the island. The image is reported to be the most copied photograph in history, and has come to symbolize the resolve and spirit of those fighting in America's wars.

    Iwo Jima is a small island - two miles by five - with a surface of mostly volcanic rock. After a preliminary aerial attack, the battle began on Feb. 19, 1945, and raged for 36 days with 110,000 American Marines trying to dislodge approximately 22,000 Japanese soldiers fortified in holes dug into the rock. When the battle was over, the U.S. had suffered 25,851 casualties, including 6,825 dead. Almost all of the Japanese soldiers died.

    "The greatest thing about that battle was the day we secured it and left," said Aubrey James, of Cleburne, Texas.

    The island had strategic importance. America had been leading bombing raids on Japan, but the planes had to take off and land from the Mariana Islands more than 1,000 miles away. Iwo Jima is only 650 miles from Tokyo, so it proved a valuable landing strip for B-29 bombers that had been damaged in battle and needed to land. Before Iwo Jima was secured, those planes landed or crashed in the ocean.

    "Within a few months, enough crewman were saved to account for the deaths it took to secure the island," said Jim Quint, of Mobile, Ala.

    The 10 survivors said they were all members of the same field artillery battery of the 5th Marine Division. Johnson said they were particularly fortunate, because all members of their battery - approximately 45 - survived. Watson said they know of 19 who are still alive today.

    Watson said the group saw each other six years ago at a 5th Division reunion in Lafayette, La. They enjoyed each other's company so much, they decided the battery should get together each year in a different location.

    "It's a great feeling to see old friends after 50 years, especially when you didn't think you'd ever see them again," Quint said.

    James said he has tried to bring some good to his life from his experience on the uninviting volcanic rock. He said when they were leaving the island, they had to march by a cemetery featuring a crude cardboard sign that read: "When you get home, tell the folks we gave up all of our tomorrows for their today."

    "Through these 60 years, that's been my goal, to let people know the terrible price we had to pay - that freedom isn't free," James said. "I know it's a cliche, but it's important to remember."

    Ellie


  4. #49
    Islander retraces late father's steps from Iwo Jima
    Published Tue, May 3, 2005

    By DAVID LAUDERDALE
    The Island Packet
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    HILTON HEAD ISLAND -- Michael Weaver of Hilton Head Island recalls his physical and spiritual exploration of Iwo Jima, 60 years after his father survived one of the United States' bloodiest and most storied battles there.
    For Weaver, a 54-year-old executive vice president of Anderson Communications, the 12,000-mile trip in March was part of a search that began when he was 9 or 10. He has been searching for the truth about a battle the nation always has been intensely interested in, yet his eyewitness father was unwilling or unable to share about it before he died at 49.

    Weaver's father had been a strapping Kansas athlete, and already a dad when he joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1943 at age 28. Michael was only 14 when he died, and his father left him only tiny shreds of recollections about Iwo Jima.

    Books told Michael that 3,400 men came ashore with his father's 28th Marines, 5th Marine Division in February 1945, and only 600 were standing when the battle ended 36 days later. American casualties totaled 26,000; 6,800 American servicemen were killed. Forty-thousand Marines made the initial landing on the desolate Pacific island, suffering 5,320 casualties on the first day alone.

    It was largely hand-to-hand combat, with no real front. They say the Japanese enemy was not on the black volcanic island, but in it, entrapping the Americans and attacking from all directions from caves and tunnels.

    But the lasting image of the battle is much different. It is the famous inspirational photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal of six troops raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi. Before Michael's father got back to Hawaii after the Japanese were vanquished from their own island 700 miles south of Tokyo, that photograph was already on a 3-cent stamp. But half the men in the picture did not survive Iwo Jima. And the picture was taken in the earliest days of the battle.

    Michael's trip to the 60th anniversary ceremony on Iwo Jima was one of exploration. He trained for a week in the jungles of Saipan. He wore Marine gear of the period, and he used his father's own map to retrace his steps on Iwo Jima. Michael did not have time to attend the ceremony. He returned with a vial of black "sand" and a piece of shrapnel from the beach. But he also returned with a new peace, one helped by talking to survivors of the battle and their sons.

    In his words

    Michael has recorded many of his reflections on the trip, and on his lifelong search. Here are excerpts from notes to his older brother and to himself.

    "At first, as I made friends easily with some of the veterans, I tended to drift along with the Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks/Steven Ambrose theory that veterans had become more willing to talk as they reached their 80s. Then I noticed that each of the ones who were talking with me had taken one of three routes to being able to talk.

    "Navajo code talker Teddy Draper was celebrated back into his tribe, where Navajo never have assumed that warriors could just go back to the teepee life without a significant readjustment. For generations, they have undergone a period that includes dancing and singing special songs. A National Park Service historian who accompanied Teddy and his son sang three of them for us, and translated. Two were about courtship. They made light of the clumsiness of courtship and the difficulty of dowries. They were about life and moving on. Teddy is esteemed in the tribe as one of its greatest warriors.

    "Chuck Koehl went to all of the first four reunions of the Fourth Division. He established from the start that he would reunite with the men who could understand what he went through on Roi-Namur, Saipan, Tinian, Guam and Iwo Jima. In contrast, another Fourth Division buddy, Jamie Jackson's son, was quoted in The New York Times story saying of his father, 'Until he went to his first reunion in '85, he thought he was the only one to wake up screaming in the night.'

    "Navy hospital corpsman Danny Thomas very nearly died from his memories, and he pulled through just in time by making a pilgrimage. By 1998, Danny told me, 'My nightmares had become all-the-time-mares.' Danny was a pharmacist, and he was studying a way to kill himself that would be foolproof. 'I didn't want to botch the job and live on as somebody people felt sorry for.' He was persuaded to go back to Iwo Jima by 'a young follow I was talking to.'

    "This time, on the beach at Iwo, Danny was giving an interview, and he excused himself. 'Can I have just 10, 15 minutes by myself, please? ... I knelt at the edge of the surf and scooped out a hole in the black sand. I put in some paper where I wrote everything I remembered and all my dreams. I covered it up and watched. The waves smoothed over the sand faster than I thought. After that, things got a lot better.'"

    "So for a while, I thought the veterans I was traveling with had overcome their inability to talk. A couple of days before the end of the trip, I noticed that I was only talking with about half the Iwo Jima veterans. When I turned to the others I heard, more than once, 'I'm only here because of them,' indicating a son and maybe a grandson. 'I never would have come back here except for them. They wanted to do this with me.' So even on the traveling squad, not everybody had been redeemed from his silent suffering and isolation.

    "The 'why' of Dad's silence on the subject had been something I conjectured about. An effort to spare the family, manly self-reliance, the booster-ish positivism of the 1950s, the chance to change life drastically from the Great Depression in which the Marines had grown up or come of age, the determination to replace those memories with a here-and-now that was better than any they had ever known -- all these I tried on as reasons for the silence. Explanations like these had come from some of the Iwo veterans I met over the years.

    "But I got the real story firsthand finally. I was talking with Jerry Russell, one of three battalion commanders who survived Iwo Jima. (Three out of 48 by my rough calculation -- and as you know, battalion commanding officers command 1,200 men; they just don't get killed in World War II tactics. Dad's battalion CO, Chandler Johnson, got blown to pieces at Hill 362A. The largest piece was his rib cage.)

    "Jerry was one of the ones who said that if not for his son and grandson, he would never have made the trip. I asked Jerry, after some extended discussion ... why they never spoke of it. I saw his eyes search. And the answer came quietly, 'Because it was so horrible.'

    "The Times reporter was in a Humvee with Jerry when the Marine historian, Col. John Ripley, pointed out a gully where New York Giants end Jack Lummus was mortally wounded. Jerry Russell said, 'I put a cigarette in Lummus' mouth -- he was going into shock.'

    "I did get little comments like that from Dad. Never a story, and almost always out of the blue. On this trip, I began to see those dozen or so separate things Dad did say as being like looking at a moving scene under a strobe light. Each flash is intense and vivid, yet the blackness in between is absolute. On this trip, those flashes started to form a picture in motion.

    "The Marine Corps casualties on Iwo Jima were simply unprecedented.

    "'The losses were beyond comprehension at the time,' Col. Ripley said. When the president learned of the casualties from the first two days, it is said that he gasped and wept.

    "As I studied the 36-day battle over the years, I sometimes wondered privately if this particular island was worth it. Since the capture of Iwo Jima stopped Japan from intercepting U.S. bombing raids from their fighter airfields there, and since hundreds of disabled B-29s were then able to land on Iwo for repairs, rather than ditch in the Pacific, the victory is sometimes described in the perspective of American air crew saved.

    "But that worthwhile outcome sounded to me a little like a stretched rationale when I considered that even if every life on those planes was counted as saved, it still would be about even with the Marines and Navy personnel lost in capturing Iwo Jima.

    "More comforting to me, once and for all, was to hear this from Col. Ripley. 'Iwo Jima was key to Adm. Chesterimitz's war-winning strategy to go straight for Tokyo,' Col. Ripley said. He reminded us that two competing strategies were at work in the Pacific. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of Allied Forces Pacific, was focused on retaking the Philippines. When pressed for a next step, Gen. MacArthur revealed that he proposed to establish bases in mainland China before attacking Japan.

    "Historians agree that MacArthur's strategy, at best, would have added two years to the war. Adm. Nimitz aimed to go directly at Tokyo, using the emerging technology of strategic bombing. Since neither commander knew of the atom bomb project, this difference was critical.

    "Both senior officers had presented their respective strategies to President Roosevelt earlier in the war, and neither had received undivided support. Col. Ripley emphasized that Nimitz's approach was a war-winning strategy, and contrasted sharply with MacArthur's less-direct proposal. To hear the battle described as essential, by this expert, in person, settled for me the issue of whether the sacrifice had gone toward a goal that was worthy of it.

    "In another sense, though, the worth of the sacrifice cannot be measured. The most enduring result of the battle is inspiration. The photograph that symbolizes the battle quickly found its place among the great symbols of American resolve and collective effort.

    "For some the inspiration is even deeper.

    "'To Marines, Iwo is the most inspiring battle, the touchstone,' Col. Ripley said. 'Marines more than any other service internalize their history. Marines hold Iwo Jima above all other inspirations.

    "In some sense every Marine feels, 'I must live up to the example of the Iwo Jima Marines." And this is still happening today.'"

    Sitting in his brightly colored office on Hilton Head, Michael said he might return to Iwo Jima.

    "The spiritual and psychological mission is accomplished," he said. "The exploration will continue for the rest of my life, but the mystery has gone away. The puzzle is over."

    Ellie


  5. #50
    This Iwo Jima tale was fiction By PHIL REISMAN
    preisman@thejournalnews.com
    THE JOURNAL NEWS
    May 19, 2005

    Old war veterans call them "sea stories," tall tales about bravery in battle that are harmlessly told but wither under the hard light of fact. Another term for them is an unprintable barnyard epithet.

    Almost a month ago, a fantastic sea story made its way into this space. I accepted it as gospel and only later, to my dismay, discovered that it was largely made up.

    Today's column will set the record straight.

    The story in question was a harrowing, personal account of the Battle of Iwo Jima, as told by Alvin Walters, a Navy veteran who served on the command ship USS Estes. Walters convincingly described how he found himself assigned to a landing craft filled with Marines that was launched on the morning of Feb. 19, 1945, the first day of the island invasion. Before the craft reached the beach, it was blown up by a Japanese artillery shell, and everyone on board was supposedly killed except for the 17-year-old Walters.

    In the telling, the dazed and frightened seaman somehow got to shore, where he was pulled from the water by a Marine lieutenant, who then ordered him to join a Marine rifle unit. Because he had no clothes and was unarmed when he reached the island, Walters recalled how he had to take a uniform and rifle off a dead Marine.

    His account was filled with vivid, narrative detail like that. At one point, he described his frustration that he didn't know how to load an M-1 rifle, jammed his thumb and abandoned the weapon in favor of a Thompson machine gun. He said he fought with the Fifth Marine Division for five days and was slightly wounded in the foot, though he didn't know it until he got back to the Estes.

    I first heard about this tale from a Yorktown man who heard the story from Walters at a local supermarket where they both work and enthusiastically urged me to interview him as a follow-up column to an earlier piece I wrote on the battle's 60th anniversary. The Walters story appeared on March 27.

    My doubts were raised several days later when a Marine veteran, who served in the Fifth Marine Division and was wounded at Iwo Jima, told me in an e-mail that neither he nor other survivors of the battle he knew had ever heard of such an extraordinary story. Since the old Marine knew the battle firsthand, he was able to pick out discrepancies about specific dates and events that gave me cause for concern.

    I hoped the story was genuine, more for Al Walters' sake than my own. But after I examined some pages in the ship's log and tracked down and interviewed two veterans who served with Walters on the Estes -Noah Joyner of Weldon, N.C., and Arnold Brandt of North Bellmore, Long Island - it became clear that the story simply wasn't true. Told of Walters' account, Joyner chuckled.

    "This didn't happen there," he said. "I think I was aboard the ship probably as long, maybe even longer than Al was."

    In fact, no one left the Estes and fought on the island during the entire 36-day battle. The ship came under Japanese fire, but only one sailor was hurt.

    "One man was on deck when he wasn't supposed to be," said Brandt, who was a junior ensign. "He got a little shrapnel. Hardly a scratch."

    The odyssey of a stranded shipmate pressed into a Marine fighting unit was just a yarn. It was a sea story.

    Walters finally admitted as much to me yesterday when I confronted him with the facts and gently suggested that after 60 years his memory may have betrayed him. Initially, he said that was possible but then confessed the whole truth. He said he first told the story to his work colleague in a "b.s. session" and that he was too embarrassed to disclaim it when I called him for the interview.

    "It got out of hand," he said apologetically. "That's what happened. I never thought it would get to this point."

    Walters certainly has nothing to be ashamed of, at least not from the standpoint of his honorable military service. Aboard the Estes, he was unquestionably in harm's way at Iwo Jima and later at Okinawa. Both Brandt and Joyner recalled the ship's "hairy escapes" from an assortment of dangers - minefields, bombers, submarines and one particularly frightening kamikaze attack.

    Nevertheless, it's possible that my sappy belief in the Iwo Jima story was a symptom of what the writer-historian Paul Fussell critically refers to as "military romanticism," an over-sentimentalized hero worship of the so-called "greatest generation" of World War II.

    Fussell, who was an Army combat officer during the war and resides in Philadelphia, told me that fake war stories are hardly uncommon, and they're the reason he doesn't attend reunions. No one has anything interesting to say, he said, "so one has to make things up, give each anecdote a plot and so forth."

    He talked about this phenomenon in one of his books, "The Great War and Modern Memory."

    "It's clear that what you remember are narratives that have some kind of literary structure," he said. "If they don't have a structure, you don't remember them. That's always a sign that you're in the presence of something I call quasi-realistic."

    So let this sea story be a cautionary tale, told in the interest of full disclosure and out of respect for 26,000 Americans who were killed and wounded on an unspeakably violent, volcanic trash heap called Iwo Jima.

    Ellie


  6. #51
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    In 1991 while on Okinawa, I had the honor of going to Iwo Jima on a Battle Studies Tour. It was something that touched my soul. To be able to physically touch artifacts, roam the tunnels, feel the volcanic ash that those Marines crawled through, and to view Mt Suribachi, from the waters edge and from the exact spot where our Flag was raised. I wish ALL people had the knowledge of what really took place there. In conversations with "civilians" I tell of my experiences, my feelings while visiting Iwo Jima. I become filled with emotions, and they ask What's the matter? If they only knew...already proud to be a Marine, knowing what I know, and feeling the way I feel, I'm a much, much better person than they can ever be.


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    I can top that. recently i had the honor to go to the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima and i met the Marines that fought there some 60 years ago. It was unbeliveable, to hear the storys of them on invasion beach and on the top of Mt Suribachi as i stood their was unbeliveable. Alot of celeberitys were there and so were top Marines but nobody really cared about them, it was all about the Vet's, and thats how its should be.


  8. #53
    July 24, 2005
    Iwo Jima veterans' war stories live on
    By Orley Hood
    ohood@clarionledger.com

    It has been 60 years since Cecil Matheney and so many of his pals got shot up on a 2-mile-by-6-mile rock in the Pacific Ocean 700 miles south of Tokyo.

    Iwo Jima.

    "There's never been a day since I left that island that I haven't thought about it," he says. "It was just so horrible, it's hard for people to relate to it."

    Hard for everyone but Iwo vets, whose devotion to one another all these years later seems to grow even as their ranks diminish. In 1995, for stories on the 50th anniversary of the battle for Iwo Jima, a dozen Iwo vets related their stories to me in the conference room of an architecture firm in south Jackson. All but three have died, Matheney says.

    The war lives on. The National D-Day Museum in New Orleans will present the International Conference on World War II on Oct. 5-9. The lineup of speakers includes Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, various former U.S. senators and dozens of war heroes.

    Medal of Honor winner Jack Lucas of Hattiesburg, who dived on hand grenades to save his fellow Marines on Iwo, and Matheney, who will be part of a panel discussing island-hopping in the Pacific in the last year of the war, will be among those participating.

    They have so much to tell, and time's running out.

    Ties that bind

    "I didn't think about it for 40 years," says Jim Cannon, 80, a Jackson native who lives in Madison and is retired from the Mississippi Department of Transportation. Then he heard about a reunion in 1985, but too late for him to go.

    "The first reunion I went to was in Jackson at the Holiday Inn downtown," he says. "That was October of 1987."

    He's hardly missed a chance to commune with fellow Iwo veterans since. He joined the Fifth Marine Division Association. He was back with his boys after four decades.

    "It means a whole lot to me," Cannon says.

    Jim Westbrook, 81, a retired independent insurance agent from Vicksburg, has been organizing reunions for 20 years. "All combat veterans share a certain amount of respect," he says. "It's a brotherhood."

    He attributes the loyalty they have for one another "to what we went through together."

    American strategy was to bridge the vast Pacific on the way to Imperial Japan by attacking islands where the Japanese had airstrips. The names of those then obscure atolls hold an honored place in American history today: Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Guadalcanal, Iwo, Okinawa, places Americans paid for with their blood.

    Westbrook was part of the invasion of the Marshall Islands. Later, he was wounded on Saipan. He missed Tinian recovering, then rejoined his unit in time for Iwo, where he spent 30 days with the 4th Marine Division securing the island. "I'd get up in the morning and say, 'Well, I made it through the night. Now if I can just make it through the day.' "

    On Iwo Jima, Japanese forces hid in caves awaiting the invasion. On Feb. 19, U.S. Marines hit the beaches without resistance. Soon after, the Japanese unleashed hell on Earth. The battle lasted 36 nightmarish days. Jim Cannon's war lasted less than an hour.

    "I was hit on the beach within 10 or 15 minutes, through my jaw and down my arm. I was evacuated within an hour or two."

    They weren't much more than boys, these soldiers who crawled up on black-sand volcanic beaches in 1945. Cannon was 18, with one semester under his belt at Millsaps College, when he enlisted. Matheney was a month shy of his 18th birthday.

    He was born in Meridian and raised in York, Ala. By January of 1945, high school football season was in the books — he played quarterback and linebacker — and he was itching to join the Marines.

    "President Roosevelt had signed an order that made it OK for you to get your diploma if you were scheduled to graduate. I went to a recruiter in Meridian and he sent me to Jackson."

    The Marine recruiting station was at Mill and Capitol streets, above the Jefferson Grill. He joined on Jan. 27, 1944, two years to the day after his brother Les had signed on with the Marine air corps.

    Barely more than a year later, a week after his 19th birthday, Matheney was on a Higgins boat circling the beaches of Iwo, looking for a place to put in. It was so congested with soldiers, equipment and corpses they couldn't get in until the third day. American dead were stacked on beaches like cordwood.

    'Eyeball to eyeball'

    For 30 years Matheney, 79, operated the first auto appraisal company in Mississippi. He sold that in 1985. He owned the Ford dealership in Raymond. He lives in retirement in the home he shared with his wife, Lynn, in a shady corner of northeast Jackson. Lynn died in 1997. They were married for 52 years. He has two daughters and three grandchildren. And memories and relationships from 60 years ago that go bone deep.

    One of his friends, the late Steve Rimmer of Canton, was wounded three times on Iwo. He was lying on a stretcher in a medical tent when Japanese burst in with machetes and machine guns. A corpsman picked him up and carried him to safety.

    The battle, in many ways, was almost medieval. "It was eyeball to eyeball," Matheney says.

    His first night, he slept in a Japanese gun emplacement.

    Soon after, he was wounded in his right calf by a hand grenade. "Six of us from our company were wounded on the same day trying to take a machine-gun nest. We went to a hospital ship and stayed about a week. While we were in there, a fella asked for volunteers to go back. When nobody volunteered, he started pointing. 'You volunteer. You volunteer. You ...'

    "We were supposed to get jobs on the beach, but five of the six of us wanted to go back to our company. All of them but me got killed. So I have been living on borrowed time ever since."

    A few days later, after providing cover for the withdrawal of wounded soldiers, he raced to rejoin his company, trying to speed up by throwing away his backpack that contained an ID bracelet given to him by his high school sweetheart.

    He never made it.

    "I got hit across the chest and in the left leg." Several soldiers near him were killed. It was 3 a.m.

    "A guy said, 'Are you OK?' I said no. They got a corpsman down there who gave me morphine. I thought I was going to die. He did, too. Everytime my heart beat blood shot out of my chest. I felt ventilated."

    They moved out at daylight, taking fire. "They put me down and hid behind rocks," Matheney says. "I had a few choice words for them. But they got me on a Jeep ambulance."

    He went to Guam on the hospital ship USS Samaritan. "On April 1, I was released. They needed the beds." It was Easter, the invasion of Okinawa. One more rock. One more island in an endless sea. "They anticipated casualties."

    A rifle company had 240 men and seven officers, Matheney says. He was one of 27 to survive.

    He made it back to the United States on Aug. 11, 1945, three days before V-J Day, the end of the war.

    But for countless veterans six decades later, it is a conflict that has never left them, an experience that casts its reflection across the expanse of their lives. They have their memories and they have one another. They share a bond that can't be broken in this life.

    Contact Columnist Orley Hood at (601) 961-7213 or e-mail ohood@clarionledger.com.

    Ellie


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