Iwo Jima remembered: A banner of hope

[thedrifter]

Posted on Mon, Feb. 12, 2007

By RON LIEBACK rlieback@timesleader.com

The nurses had just finished pulling shrapnel from the wounded soldier’s right leg and lower back.

The intense physical pain was overcome by throbbing emotions, resulting from the Marine having just witnessed the appendages detach from three of his comrades after a red glow and a piercing bang -- a bang that still haunts the 81-year-old veteran’s memory.

Multiple metal shards were soon lying on a stainless steel table amid scissors, pliers and fresh packages of synthetic thread ready for closing the gashes.

After the numerous stitches had sealed out the foreign viruses in the warm Pacific Ocean air, a nurse wheeled the 18-year-old out onto the ship’s deck from the medical rooms contained deep within the vessel.

The private first class sullenly peered at the island of Iwo Jima, where nature had witnessed one of the most horrific battles of World War II.

John Pappas’ hard gaze suddenly turned to one of pride as he witnessed five Marines from the 5th Division and a Navy corpsman raise the Stars and Stripes over the scraps of exploded artillery shells remaining from battle on Mt. Suribachi, the highest vantage point on the island.

The extinct volcanic crater ascends 546 feet into the western Pacific sky, allowing the dauntless fighting men on board the ships to observe the symbol of their freedom.

As the silence tightened in the air around him that Feb. 23, 1945, only his second day in the Pacific, he realized the outcome of the battle was weighing towards his country’s side.

“They raised that flag and I knew we had the island,” Pappas said, reiterating the story in his greeting room on Horton Street in Wilkes-Barre. “I knew right then what I was fighting for.”

Everyone can share that same vision, thanks to Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal freezing the moment in 1-400th of a second, but only a few who fought on the island during February and March 1945 survive to explain the scenes behind the famous photo.

Pappas is one of “the few,” as the Marine slogan goes, with an insight into the horrific fighting the picture represents.

But there is more; the Greek-American had some connection with the photograph, but wouldn’t discuss his involvement until he described some battle scenes.

Pappas was a 3rd Division Marine flamethrower, a demolition specialist, who torched out the enemy entrenched in 16 miles of underground tunnels that crisscrossed Iwo Jima, which is Japanese for Sulfur Island.

“We were supposed to take the island in three days,” Pappas said, “but it took 36 days, around 6,000 soldiers and 20,000 (Japanese soldiers).”

Pappas said the 5 ½-mile-long-by-2-mile-wide isle, shaped like a pork chop, was needed for the two airstrips that the Japanese had built. The Japanese almost completed a third airstrip before the fighting began.

The island is 8 miles in area, or about one third the size of Manhattan, an ample space for the B-29 bombers to refuel on missions to strike Tokyo and other Japanese cities.

“We wouldn’t have won the war without those airstrips,” Pappas said. “We did our duty, though the loss of life was great.”

Pappas began fighting on Feb. 22, 1945, when his division landed on shore in the amphibious vehicles. Twenty thousand soldiers from his division rushed the soft sand towards the enemy. Pappas said they crept 300 yards with complete silence, and then the enemy unloaded their weapons on them.

“They slaughtered us,” Pappas said. “Thousands of men died immediately.”

The nonstop mortar attacks and machine-gun fire continued from the Japanese subterranean lairs, the Americans fighting an invisible Japanese army since they landed on the island on D-Day, Feb. 19.

Soon Pappas’ sergeant instructed Pappas and his three comrades to prepare their flamethrowers.

“We went up there and starting scorching,” he said. “I could hear them screaming … I must have burnt about 20 or 25 of them.”

On their way back to fill their gas tanks for the flamethrowers, Pappas and his fellow soldiers were suddenly under fire, cannon fire overwhelming every other sound on the island.

His three fellow soldiers took cover in a crater created by recent bombings, but there was no room for Pappas, which he said was a blessing. He took cover about 10 yards away.

Then the enemy began another mortar attack.

“Guess what …(it was) a direct hit on my buddies,” Pappas said. “Their heads were blown off, and their shoulders and heads rolled down the ground.”

This was the end of fighting in the war for Pappas. He soon could only hear the battle while looking straight into a smoke-filled sky, descending the island on a stretcher towards the ships docked in the Pacific. The ships were close enough to the island so that their 16-inch guns could reach the enemy, but far enough away so that the wounded could be treated aboard them without danger.

Then, after being treated by medical personnel, Pappas observed the 5th Marine Division erecting the flag that made photographic history.

The image is a moving piece of Americana, one which represents the gallantry of the once-young men during a horrendous battle of World War II.

Pappas has a closer connection, though; before he was injured, his platoon delivered the smaller flag that was raised on Iwo Jima before the larger flag in the famous photo. The Marines lowered the smaller flag as the larger one ascended the 100-pound pole, about to be part of the most reproduced image in history.

“My sergeant said ‘Here’s a little flag. Put it up there on Mt. Suribachi,’ ” Pappas said. “He said watch out, there’s hundreds of mines up there.”

But after Pappas was handed the flag, attacks broke out, and he found himself on the torching mission that took the lives of three of his friends.

“You never know, I could’ve been shot while raising it,” he said.

He said his generation was directly responsible for the freedom America has today. But many in the “greatest generation” have endured the greatest psychological scarring.

Almost 67 years later, Pappas, a recipient of a Purple Heart medal, replays the dreadful and joyful war memories as if they were recorded on a tape in his head, the memories sharp and exact.

“It still haunts me every day and night,” he said. “Those memories are as vivid as the day I saw them.”

Today, Pappas begins his third week of retirement from 34 years of service as a Social Security worker, meaning he now has additional time to remember the war.

In order to understand the fighting that replays in his memories, Pappas recommends that people watch “Flags of Our Fathers.” The movie, directed by Clint Eastwood, was released on DVD on Feb. 6.

“Eastwood did an outstanding job recreating the battle,” Pappas said. “(The movie) stirs both good and bad memories of the war, ones people should know about.”

The actors in the movie don the World War II garb of the military, but not as good as an authentic Marine.

Pappas’ original blue Marine uniform still hugs his body the way it did in 1945. He wore the garment while being interviewed inside his quaint home in South Wilkes-Barre, the uniform seeming to animate the 18-year-old soldier still contained within Pappas.

“You see this,” said the native of Roanoke, Va., pointing to his uniform. “A proud Marine, a proud Marine, I say.”

His greeting room is not like a greeting room at all, but more of a historical museum. Newspaper clippings dating from the 1940s, war paintings and photographs consume the space in every direction, pulling the contemporary observer into the world of an Iwo Jima veteran.

Pappas’ words were endless when discussing Iwo Jima, but when asked what he thinks about the current situation in Iraq, few words were spoken.

“Well,” Pappas said, “I know what Truman would have done already… and I wouldn’t disagree.”

ON THE WEB To hear audio clips from the interview with John Pappas, log on to www.timesleader.com
Ron Lieback, a Times Leader staff writer, may be reached at 829-7210.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Photos can help define a war
Article Last Updated:02/11/2007 07:08:40 AM PST

SIXTY-two years ago this month, on Feb. 19, 1945, Marines landed on a tiny volcanic island named Iwo Jima, starting what became the bloodiest battle in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Four days after the landing, Associated Press combat photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped a picture of five Marines and a Navy Medical corpsman raising an American flag on the summit of Mount Suribachi, where it could be seen from the beaches below and from the ships offshore. Although Marines had raised a smaller flag there earlier that day, Rosenthal's spectacular picture eventually became the defining photograph of World War II and, arguably, the most widely recognized war photo of all time.

Over the years, the photograph has been a continual source of interest to the American public. It was used on a postage stamp that sold 137 million copies and was the inspiration for the Marine Corps Memorial adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery. The most recent surge of interest in the photo was sparked by two recent films directed by Clint Eastwood: "Flags of Our Fathers," based on a book by the son of John Bradley, the Navy corpsman in the photo, and its companion work, "Letters from Iwo Jima," which portrays the battle from the Japanese perspective.

All of this interest raises the question of why World War II produced a photo that captured the spirit of the American fighting man so well while Korea, Vietnam, and the current fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have not.

In the case of Vietnam, the best known photos not only failed to capture a true picture of the Americans who fought that war, but many images seem to have been chosen to place the American military in the worst possible light.

Among the most widely recognized photos of the Vietnam War, for example, are the one of a small girl running naked, in terror, from a napalm attack on her village, and another showing a South Vietnamese officer shooting a captured Viet Cong guerrilla in the head during the Tet offensive of 1968.

The two images came to symbolize everything that was wrong with U.S. involvement in Vietnam, yet neither photo depicts Americans.

The second photo shows Brig. Gen. Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese police leader, shooting a Viet Cong officer who had been captured in civilian clothes.

Scholars have been unable to reach a consensus regarding the impact that such photos as the one of Gen. Loan had on the erosion of American support for the war. The problem can be summarized in the chicken-or-egg type question of whether the media drives public opinion or simply reflects it.

Those who believe the latter would probably use their view to explain why WWII was defined by photos that portrayed the military in a favorable way while Vietnam was defined by negative ones. WWII was a popular war; Vietnam, an unpopular one.

That thesis fails, however, because the American public generally supported the Vietnam War until the communist offensive during Tet in early 1968. That support vanished when the North Vietnamese managed to convert their disastrous defeat on the battlefield into a psychological victory. Many commentators point to the photo of Gen. Loan as the key to that propaganda success.

WWII, on the other hand, was not as overwhelmingly popular as might be imagined. Less than half the cost of the war was paid for through taxes. The rest was obtained by borrowing, a significant part of which took the form of voluntarily purchased War Bonds. President Franklin Roosevelt supported that approach because it helped control inflation and, most importantly, because it caused the American public literally to buy into supporting the war.

Selling bonds was a difficult task that required both tough salesmanship and an inordinate amount of showmanship. By 1945, the task was getting tougher, which is why Rosenthal's photo was regarded as a godsend. It became the focus of the seventh bond drive and the centerpiece of a nationwide publicity effort that featured the three of Rosenthal's subjects who had survived the fighting on Iwo Jima.

The drive succeeded, but one can only wonder if it would have if the American public had been subjected to a continuous stream of photos more like the ones of Ngoc Loan and Kim Phuc than the one of the flag going up on Iwo Jima.

The current war has produced photos that range from U.S. soldiers on horseback in Afghanistan and American troops helping Iraqis topple a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, on one hand, to Americans mistreating captured Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison, on the other.

It's probably too early to pick the defining photos of the global war on terrorism, but, given the media's record so far, it's safe to say that they will look a lot more like the ones from Vietnam than those from World War II, including Rosenthal's classic from Iwo Jima.

Col. Theodore Gatchel is a military historian and a professor of operations at the Naval War College. The views here are his own.

Ellie