'It means you're going to die'

[thedrifter]

'It means you're going to die' <br />
Joe Combee was among the first ashore at Iwo Jima <br />
By Jason Newell, Staff Writer <br />
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin <br />
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Article Launched:02/19/2007...

[thedrifter]

Yountville man was on Iwo Jima when Old Glory was raised
By NATALIE HOFFMAN
Register Staff Writer
Monday, February 19, 2007

Most Americans recognize the acclaimed photograph of five U.S. Marines and one U.S. Navy Corpsman raising the American flag at the battle of Iwo Jima.

But few can say they were present when American forces took the Pacific island’s Mt. Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945.

James Rogers of Yountville, 80, was there. He saw it happen.

“I was at the foot of the mountain, and all of a sudden, we heard the big ships at sea sounding off. I looked up, and there was the flag, going up at the top of the mountain. We were writing letters home when the ships out in the harbor started tooting their whistles,” he said, adding that witnessing the event stirred up emotion and surprise in him and other men on the scene.

“It made us happy that we could see our flag flying up there. You can imagine what that would mean in a place like that,” he said. Rogers was a private first class in the Marines when the famous photograph was taken at Iwo Jima. He said he entered the Marines at age 17 with his parents’ approval, and was a member of the First Battalion, 28th Marines, 5th Marine Division.

Although Rogers was then a “boot” — fresh from boot camp and without combat experience — he said many in the 5th Marine Division got a taste of the real thing before getting to Iwo Jima. “They gave us a lot of training before we went. But many of the 5th Division had already been out in the South Pacific in combat.”

American forces first arrived at Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945, and Rogers said he arrived by amphibian tractor in an area called Green Beach I, near Mt. Suribachi. “The amtrac ran us right to the beach from the ships,” he said, adding that he was in the second wave of troops reaching Iwo Jima.

Located between Japan and the Mariana Islands, Iwo Jima was important to the Japanese as a warning outpost for potential American attacks on Japan’s main islands. American forces took Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, and all Japanese resistance stopped on Iwo Jima on March 26, 1945.

According to an Associated Press article, the 36-day battle at Iwo Jima resulted in close to 7,000 American deaths and approximately 21,000 Japanese casualties.

“I was armed with a carbine rifle and I had a steel helmet shot off of my head in the northern part of Iwo Jima. I’m lucky to be sitting here today,” Rogers said.

Rogers, who said he played volleyball at Camp Tarawa with one of the men in the famous photograph, returned to Mt. Suribachi with his daughter in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the battle. “It brought back a lot of memories and I saw some of the other people who were there with me,” he said.

Rogers said he stayed connected over the years with his fellow Marines, seeing them about once a year and often traveling to Saipan and spending a few days together. He said he hasn’t seen the men for about 15 years, since many have passed away. “A lot of them were older than I am,” he said.

The flag photographed by Joe Rosenthal was the second one raised atop Suribachi that day. Rogers said the larger flag displayed in the famous photo was brought in from one of the Navy ships. Rosenthal, a well-known photojournalist, received a Pulitzer Prize for the picture.

From Iwo Jima, Rogers returned to Hawaii, where he received further training. With plans to invade Japan, officials there prepared their troops, and three men lost their lives during live ammunition training, Rogers said. But when officials declared the war over, Rogers was sent to Japan for the occupation instead.

Rogers, who later joined the Army, said he remained in Japan for about nine months. He now lives in Yountville near the Veterans Home of California.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Upvalley man recalls war in the Pacific
By JOHN WATERS Jr.
For the Register
Monday, February 19, 2007

Like so many young American men, Lester Brown, a longtime Upvalley resident, signed up to serve his country in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

He was 24, and today, the octogenarian can recall the time he spent fighting the Japanese for control of a “dirty, smelly piece of rock” in the Pacific Ocean called Iwo Jima.

“People forget what war was really like,” Brown said. “Young people today have no idea how bad it can get. People rail about the loss of 3,000 American troops in Iraq today — after four years of fighting — but on Iwo Jima, we lost twice that many in just the first few hours.”

Today is the 62nd anniversary of the battle for the Japanese island, and for some Americans, the fight is still a living memory. It’s also Hollywood fodder for movies like “Flags of Our Fathers,” recently released on DVD.

Of an estimated 20,000 Japanese troops who were stationed on the island, 18,000 died, and only 216 were captured. Americans sustained more than 26,000 casualties — dead and injured — after nearly 40 days of fighting. Of those, nearly 7,000 died. According to published reports, Iwo Jima was the only large engagement of World War II in which the Allied forces suffered more casualties than their Japanese opponents.

In an assessment of the battle, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz said, “Among the men who fought on Iwo Jima, uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

Talladega days

Brown, considered an “old guy” at the time he volunteered to serve in the Navy, said he recently saw “Flags of Our Fathers” and decided to share his experience with his great-grandsons in Elko, Nev.

“I never talked about it much, but when I was told my oldest great-grandson was studying the war in school, I started digging these old things out to share with him and his brother,” Brown said. “A lot of adults, not only the kids, have no idea what America and the world was going through at the time. They think they’re fighting a war now, and I’m not saying it isn’t bad in Iraq, but they’re just playing with us compared to what the war back then was.”

When “Brownie,” as they called him, joined the Navy, he was working in the family plumbing business in Los Angeles, so he was a natural fit to serve as a plumber on the USS Talladega. It was from that ship that he watched thousands of young American men board Higgins boats to be ferried to their deaths, or brought back wounded, sometimes just hours after they went over the side of his ship.

From May 1942 through November 1945, the plumber kept the hydraulics working and the steam hissing through the pipes that kept the food hot aboard ship.

“You kind of forget what you went through once you pack things away,” he said. “Then you get a chance to bring them out and the memories come flooding back.”

Brown’s rough exterior — his face is a road map of the life he’s lived — combined with his slightly stooped six-foot-two frame and shock of white hair, is the image of a walking fortress, a powerhouse of a man hardened by life’s experience.

He remembers the mortars arching their way toward his ship, which was never hit. Others weren’t so lucky, he recalled. He remembered an 18-year-old Marine, “fresh out of high school,” who was a guard on the football team back home. He was powerfully built, so he was assigned to carry a flame thrower. Brown and the kid had become friends and he recalled watching as the boy boarded the transport to hit the beach. Less than a day later the boy was back, in pieces, and sent to a nearby hospital ship, which Brown said was so overwhelmed by the casualties they had to ship men to another hospital in the Philippines.

“It was hard,” he said. “What was worse was to see men coming back with their clothes filled with excrement, and smelling of urine. What Hollywood doesn’t show you is the humiliation. Men had to use the restroom in their trousers. They would be pinned down and couldn’t move for days, so what are you going to do, stand up, say ‘excuse me’ and to go to the restroom?”

Thank God for Truman

The experiences of Iwo Jima’s “D-Day” were repeated for Brown when his ship, less than two months later, entered into the battle for Okinawa.

Brown’s is moved to tears while reading a letter he wrote to his wife, dated Sept. 3, 1945, the day after Japanese forces signed an unconditional surrender aboard the USS Missouri.

“I never knew I even had a second son until I got the mail on Sept. 2, the day the Japanese surrendered,” he said. “I was given a stack of letters from my wife — she always sent them in pink envelopes — and I learned the news on that historical day.”

According to an official press release for his hometown newspaper, which he was given when he left the service, his ship and many others arrived in Yokohama, Japan, just after the surrender papers were signed. They were so close to the USS Missouri that they could have thrown a stone and hit the men who signed the surrender, Brown joked.

“We were led through a minefield by a coal-burning tugboat driven by Japanese. There was a lot of tension in the air even then. The sky was black with Allied fighter planes, just in case they changed their minds. A lot of the young Japanese men still wanted to kill us off, but the older leaders knew it was a lost cause.

“Thank God for Harry Truman,” Brown said. “If he hadn’t made the decision to drop the bombs when he did, we would have lost many thousands more.”

Indeed, according to that same press announcement, after leaving Okinawa, Brown’s ship was used to train thousands of additional Marines in the Philippines for another planned invasion of Japan by allied forces.

“We can never forget what happened back then,” Brown said. “That’s why it’s become important to talk about it.”

Ellie