Marines re-enact Battle of Iwo Jima

On 60th anniversary, historic scene re-created in Texas
The Associated Press
Updated: 7:32 a.m. ET Feb. 19, 2005

DOSS, Texas - The nation’s largest 60th-anniversary re-enactment of the Battle of Iwo Jima will not occur on an island or, for that matter, anywhere close to salt water.

Some 30 acres on a Hill Country ranch will stand in for the rugged speck of Japanese land in the Pacific Ocean where about 28,000 died during a grueling month of fighting in early 1945 — a battle immortalized in an Associated Press photo of a group of U.S. fighting men raising the American flag over Mount Suribachi.
Jeff Hunt, chief organizer of Saturday’s event, said Marines will re-create that historic scene atop a steep hill, but not before spectators get a taste of what both sides in the battle had to endure.

“We wanted to show how vicious the fight was beforehand,” said Hunt, curator at the National Museum of the Pacific War in nearby Fredericksburg. “It wasn’t troops going forward gloriously to victory. There were a lot of casualties.”

The 90-minute mock battle, to be narrated by retired Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, will begin with the U.S. invasion force landing on a “beach” and then fighting its way up the rising terrain against the entrenched Japanese. Explosive charges have been planted around the field.

The re-enactment was put together by staffers at the museum, which has held a series of 60th-anniversary commemorations beginning with that of Pearl Harbor in 2001.

The action on Saturday will involve about 320 people, roughly 70 of whom will portray Japanese troops defending the hill. Half of the defenders are veteran re-enactors from Japan who have traveled to Texas for the event.

“We were all born after World War II, and we are very interested in the history,” said Takashi Fukuda, a writer from Tokyo who will serve as the Japanese commander.

Bloodiest battle ever for Marine Corps
Almost 7,000 Americans were killed and about twice that many were wounded in the 36-day assault that began Feb. 19, 1945. The battle on the eight-square-mile volcanic island was the bloodiest ever for the Marine Corps. Fewer than 1,000 of the island’s Japanese 22,000 defenders survived. The Americans wanted Iwo Jima’s airstrips for use in conducting long-range bombing raids against Tokyo.

Ed Allis, a part-time movie actor from Houston, will join Fukuda among the Japanese ranks. Allis’ parents were youngsters in the Philippines under a brutal Japanese occupation during World War II.

“I’m doing it for a historical purpose — my parents understand that,” said Allis, who had bit parts in “Pearl Harbor” and “The Alamo.”

Fukuda, wearing a replica uniform with knee-high black boots and a long sword on his hip, said he knows many U.S. servicemen who survived the Pacific war still have not forgiven Japan or its people. But the re-enactment “is just another war game. It’s nothing personal.”

On Thursday he took some loose instruction on how Saturday’s battle scene would play out from Marvin Schroeder, a Fredericksburg resident who is choreographing it.

“If you shoot first, I fall down. If I shoot first, you fall down,” Schroeder instructed. “Let it be natural.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6997804/

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60 YEARS AFTER IWO JIMA
Survivors relive horror of bloody battle
As their ranks thin, this reunion may be their last
By JOHN W. GONZALEZ
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

FREDERICKSBURG - With his rifle jammed and two Japanese grenades about to explode at his feet, Jack Lucas had little time to think. Instinctively, he covered the grenades with his body to protect his fellow troops.
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His heroics at the Battle of Iwo Jima, which began 60 years ago today, almost cost Lucas his life but earned him the Medal of Honor. In 1945, he was among 22 U.S. Marines given the honor for gallantry at Iwo Jima.

Now, he is one of three still standing.

With memories of Iwo Jima fading and with the survivors' ranks thinning, those who fought in the decisive battle have gathered here for what could be their last big reunion.

The anniversary observance, which has drawn nearly 300 Iwo Jima survivors, continues through Sunday. It was organized by the Texas Department of Parks & Wildlife and the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, hometown of Adm. Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific fleet after Pearl Harbor.

Several survivors recounted their harrowing experiences to students on Friday. Some said they're still haunted by grisly memories of one of the bloodiest battles in military history. Others said they have no regrets about slaying their Japanese foes to gain control of the strategic volcanic island.

Hershel "Woody" Williams, 81, of Ona, W.Va., who earned the Medal of Honor for his flamethrower heroics, said killing a wartime enemy "whose job is to kill you" was troubling. Even so, he said he was trained to survive and to help his comrades survive as well.

"There was no option. If I didn't get him, he was going to get me," Williams said Friday.

"But war is a very terrible thing under any stretch of the imagination and it always leaves an effect, an impact, on you because that is still — although an enemy — a human being," he said.

Lucas looked back on the ordeal with a different view.

"I was directed to go there to kill Japanese. They had killed our people at Pearl Harbor and that was payback for Pearl Harbor," said Lucas, 77, of Hattiesburg, Miss.

"I could not have any sympathy at all for any enemy I shot. It was my passion to kill as many as I could because they were out to do the same to me and my family and the people in America," Lucas said.

They and other survivors said they're convinced that they helped save fellow U.S. troops' lives by matching their "gung-ho" Marine spirit against the fanatical and often-suicidal resolve of entrenched Japanese troops.

"As a Marine, we had a job to do and we did it. We just wanted to get the thing done and get off of there," said Daniel Girdano, 79, of Pittsburgh.

The 36-day assault claimed the lives of more than 6,800 U.S. Marines and wounded about 20,000 others.

Fighting was often at close range — with small arms, machine guns, grenades, satchel charges, mortars and flamethrowers. The 8-square-mile island was heavily fortified and defended by at least 20,000 Japanese, only 1,100 of whom survived.

The U.S. victory became a turning point in the Pacific War and provided one of the most memorable photographic images of World War II — the planting of the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi five days after 61,000 Marines began invading Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945.

After the flag-raising, it took a month for U.S. troops to traverse the land-mine-covered island, capture its airfields and wipe out resistance hidden in bunkers and caves and in an extensive network of tunnels that took decades to build.

The craggy, barren and sulphury island, 650 miles south of Tokyo, was the first native Japanese soil touched by U.S. forces as they fought to gain a foothold from which to strike at the main island.

The island's sandy texture proved a major problem because it limited the use of tanks and other vehicles and hindered Marines when they hit the beach, where they encountered barrages of bullets and mortars from higher ground.

"The volcanic ash that the beach was made of was so loose, you could hardly get footing," Girdano said. "We had a lot of casualties, a lot, and I was fortunate enough to make it off the beach and I was there for 36 days."

"It took a toll," said Girdano, who was wounded several times.

So fierce was the fighting that 22 Marines and five sailors received the Medal of Honor for their heroic acts there, oftentimes for hurling their bodies onto armed grenades to protect fellow troops, and for braving torrential enemy fire to rescue wounded comrades.

Lucas, who lied about his age so he could join the Marines when he was 14, turned 17 just five days before Iwo Jima was invaded. He was seriously wounded on Feb. 20, 1945, when he was in a close-up fight with Japanese troops who threw two grenades at his feet. Lucas said he only noticed the grenades because he looked down when his rifle jammed.

His Medal of Honor citation states he "unhesitatingly hurled himself over his comrades upon one grenade and pulled the other one under him, absorbing the whole blasting force of the explosions in his own body in order to shield his companions from the concussion and murderous flying fragments."

He was hit with 200 grenade fragments, some of which still remain in him, he said, adding that he was hospitalized until his medical discharge in September 1945.

From farmer to role model
Williams' citation states he single-handedly took on several enemy gun positions and intentionally drew their fire on Feb. 23, 1945, so they would reveal their locations.

"On one occasion, he daringly mounted a pillbox to insert the nozzle of his flame thrower through the air vent, kill the occupants and silence the gun; on another he grimly charged enemy riflemen who attempted to stop him with bayonets and destroyed them with a burst of flame from his weapon," the citation said.

Williams said he was "shaking like a leaf" when he went to the White House and President Truman put the medal around his neck eight months later. It ended his previously simple life as a dairy farmer.

From that point on, he said, he was a role model. "I belonged to the public," he said.