60 Years Ago this Week - Iwo Jima

[Brad]

Two modest heroes remember their hell




By Harry Levins

Post-Dispatch Senior Writer

02/17/2005

Sixty years ago this week, in World War II, the Marines assaulted Iwo Jima. The Japanese army made the place eight square miles of hell.

The meatgrinder battle, one of the war's bloodiest and most famous, dragged on for 36 days. The combat killed almost 7,000 Americans and more than 21,000 Japanese. In the end, it gave the United States an island that amounted to an unsinkable aircraft carrier for waging the air war against Japan.

Among the Marines who landed on Day 1 - Feb. 19, 1945 - were Roland DeGregorio of St. Louis and Charles Kohler of Warson Woods.

DeGregorio's Iwo Jima campaign lasted for 21 days. Then he joined the ranks of what would total 18,070 Americans wounded on the island.

Kohler's stint on Iwo Jima ended much earlier. About an hour and a half after he landed, he was evacuated among the severely wounded.

Both men got together recently in Kohler's office at Kohler Print Group in Overland to talk about the experience.

DeGregorio, 82, is a retired postal carrier. Kohler, 83, is chairman of his family's printing business. But in the stuff in life that counts the most, they have much in common.

Both served in the same infantry regiment, the 23rd Marines of the 4th Marine Division. Both were veterans of three earlier island assaults, at Roi-Namur, Saipan and Tinian. Then came Iwo.

Which was the worst?

"Iwo," said DeGregorio.

Kohler paused and said, "The first dead Marine I saw was floating in the water off Roi-Namur. That had to be the worst battle for him.(

"But for me, it was Iwo."

Before the battle, neither man had heard of Iwo Jima. In fact, said Kohler, "I'd never heard of Pearl Harbor, either, until it happened."

The world was smaller then for young men growing up in St. Louis. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, DeGregorio had been once to Chicago, and Kohler once to New York. Within two months after Pearl Harbor, they joined the Marine Corps, which sent them farther off than they could have imagined.

Their seizure of Tinian in 1944 had opened that island up to the B-29s of the Army Air Forces. From there, the bombers launched raids on the Japanese home islands. Right beneath their path sat Iwo Jima, at about the halfway point.

The Japanese stacked Iwo with radar and interceptor planes. The B-29s had to dog-leg around the island. If the Marines could seize Iwo, the airmen could shed a burr. The airmen would also gain a jumping-off base for short-range fighters to escort the B-29s to Japan, plus a haven to land B-29s crippled over Japan.

So 60 years ago, Kohler and DeGregorio found themselves among two Marine divisions assaulting Iwo, with a third in reserve.
As a sergeant, Kohler led a 10-man antitank gun section. About 400 yards inland, he and three of his men jumped into a shell hole as shelter from incoming artillery fire. Finally, Kohler jumped out to urge a lieutenant to move the Marines forward, out of the fire.

"He told me, 'We can't move until we get orders, so dig in,'" Kohler said. As Kohler returned to the hole to do just that, a Japanese shell hit. The blast killed the three men in the hole and hit Kohler in the right foot, severing a key nerve.

Kohler started crawling back toward the beach. "And by God if they didn't drop a mortar shell behind me. It hit me in the left buttock - this piece," he said as he pointed to a small chunk of lead he keeps in a frame, along with his decorations.

"When I finally got to the beach, a Higgins boat landed and dropped its ramp, and the coxswain signaled me to crawl on. And that's all I remember until I woke up and found myself in sick bay on a ship."

(The news from Iwo would soon get worse for the Kohler family. A brother, Marine Pfc. Edwin Kohler, was killed there the next day. He was buried at sea.)

DeGregorio landed that first day as the low man on a five-man machine gun team, lugging boxes of ammunition. But attrition soon moved him up. "By the time I got hit," he said, "I was in charge of two gun teams."

His unit was scheduled to turn over its turf to a replacement unit and board ships on March 12. On March 11, "A mortar shell landed right in front of me. It buried me in the sand, with a piece of shrapnel through my helmet."

A buddy, Bob Jeter of Nashville, Tenn., frantically dug DeGregorio out of the black volcanic sand and got help. "It knocked me out," DeGregorio said. "I woke up three days later in a hospital on Guam."

Unlike Kohler, DeGregorio never got the piece of mortar shrapnel that grazed his head. But he has a vial filled with black sand from Iwo - and a scar on his scalp.

The other woman

Both men's wounds ended their war. Kohler spent about a year in military hospitals before he was discharged early in 1946 as a gunnery sergeant.

DeGregorio was discharged just in time to get home to the Hill in St. Louis to celebrate VJ Day in August 1945.

He left the service as just a private first class - "but a live (one." (His brother Sam, also a Marine, also got out alive and lived until 2002.)

Both said they felt most comfortable talking about Iwo with other veterans of that battle. Otherwise, Kohler said, "I'd rather talk about my children," his three sons.

DeGregorio likes to tell a war story from the lighter side - about Billie O'Day, a nurse who tended to DeGregorio's wound at a hospital in Seattle. He was smitten with O'Day, but she already had a Marine boyfriend. Still, when DeGregorio left Seattle, he took home an 8-by-10 black-and-white photo of him and O'Day.

DeGregorio married a St. Louis girl, Victoria Scariano. Their union produced seven children (and 16 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren). Along the way, Victoria DeGregorio shrugged off the nurse in the 1945 photo.

Until 1992. That's when the DeGregorios went to a Marine reunion in New Orleans. There, Victoria DeGregorio spotted a vaguely familiar face - that of Billie O'Day, by then Billie Jones.

Victoria DeGregorio introduced herself to Jones and pointed out her husband. And the former nurse and the former Marine posed again, this time for a white-haired snapshot that DeGregorio keeps among his war souvenirs.

It's one of the few happy-ending stories from the Iwo Jima experience. Most have a darker edge. At one point in this month's conversation, Kohler asked DeGregorio, "Did you think you were going to get off that island alive?"

DeGregorio said, "No."

Kohler said, "Neither did I."

"Uncommon valor"

Iwo Jima produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo. Joe Rosenthal of The Associated Press was atop Iwo's Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23 when five Marines and a Navy hospital corpsman raised the flag - and electrified America.

In 1954, the photo was recast as a statue (with the flagpole stretching 60 feet) near Arlington National Cemetery. Officially, it's the Marine Corps War Memorial. But most people call it the Iwo Jima Memorial.

Fair enough. In many ways, Iwo Jima represents the heart and soul of the Marine Corps. Adm. Chester Nimitz said that on Iwo Jima, "Uncommon valor was a common virtue."

Mackubin "Mac" Owens fought as a Marine in Vietnam, retired as a colonel and now teaches strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He says, "Iwo Jima has become iconic."

But iconic Iwo hardly resembles the battlefields on which today's Marines fight. Iwo had no streets, no alleys, no sewers, no rooftops, no civilians - nothing like, say, Fallujah.

More and more, Marines fight their battles in Third World cities. More and more, the battles on lonely Pacific islands recede from memory into history.

"Today's Marines have to be ready to fight wherever the enemy is," Owens said in a phone interview. And an adaptive enemy may well choose to fight in cities, he said, all to limit the American edge in firepower and technology.

His prediction: "This time, Iwo Jima will be in a built-up area."

Three months ago, the annual Marine Corps Ball here drew veterans of just such a modern war - local reservists recently home from a stint in Iraq.

But in a hotel ballroom at Union Station, those Iraq vets stood in line to shake the iconic hand of DeGregorio.

After all, he's an Iwo Marine.

Source: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/new...ber+their+hell