Marine witnessed famed flag-raising
By JOHN GOODALL Tribune Chronicle

HUBBARD — Russell B. Evans smiles weakly and shakes his head at the memory.

He had a wife and baby at home while fighting raged around him as a teenaged Marine on Iwo Jima in World War II.

‘‘It didn’t make it easy,’’ the 88-year-old Hubbard man said. He refused to take advantage of breaks in the battle to write home.

A fellow Marine had written and was killed soon after. Evans was horrified that his letter was going to arrive at its destination, giving his family false hope, and vowed that he wouldn’t be responsible for anything similar.

Iwo Jima was a dangerous place.

Twenty-one thousand deeply entrenched Japanese soldiers awaited the Marines. They had dug 1,500 rooms into the rock of the island, connected by 16 miles of tunnels.

Their strategy was not to survive, each striving to kill 10 Marines before they perished.

The invading Marines rarely saw a Japanese soldier, historians have said. They fought from above ground, and the Japanese, entirely from below.

Every Marine anywhere on the island was always within range of hidden enemy gunners, historians said.

‘‘There was no safe place,’’ Evans remembered. ‘‘Damn right I was scared. I was as scared as anybody, but I never showed my feelings.’’

While trying to make his way back to the ship to be treated for a shrapnel wound of the knee, the Marine was pinned down on the beach by a sniper. He threw his helmet to draw fire away and ran back to where his unit was fighting.

Once, he and two other Marines were blown out of their foxhole by what Evans believes was a mortar shell. One of the trio was never found.

When he came to, Evans was covered in blood. He said he was relieved to find the gore was only from a tooth that had been knocked from his mouth.

The young Marine was quick to snatch every assignment he could. Then he carried them out at top speed.

‘‘I figured it was harder to hit a moving target,’’ Evans said.

He drove a female newspaper reporter in a Jeep to Mount Suribachi, the volcanic cone from which the Japanese trained their heavy guns on both landing beaches on Iwo Jima. Evans didn’t wait around.

When he saw her later, she complained about the bees constantly buzzing around her head. Evans told her those were bullets, not bees.

Evans witnessed the famed flag raising on Mount Suribachi through his binoculars.

There were others, including where his unit had been fighting elsewhere on the island. It had been pinned down by Japanese gunners before being freed by other Marines.

He said there were rumors after the battle that the big Japanese guns had been silenced when the U.S. forces trained their flamethrowers on their barrels. Most of the enemy soldiers perished and are entombed on Iwo Jima.

‘‘They never got out,’’ Evans said.

There were 25,851 U.S. casualties. One in three Marines on the island were killed or wounded.

Evans’ unit returned to Hawaii where it was assigned as a floating reserve for Japan, which still continued the war. On the ship, the chaplain noticed he seemed down.

The youngster replied that he was having trouble facing the prospect of going back into action. The chaplain promised to take care of him and was true to his word.

Evans was taken off rifleman duty and trained as a cook. He worked for two months in that position on Hawaii before the war ended and his unit was sent home for discharge.

The Hubbard man doesn’t consider his service or the Purple Heart that he earned as anything special.

‘‘I was just a guy who wanted to live and wanted to go home,’’ Evans said. ‘‘I did the best I could.’’

jgoodall@tribune-chronicle.com

Ellie