James Bradley walked to the podium set up before the Iwo Jima memorial yesterday and paused to look at the sculpture, turning away momentarily from the audience that had gathered to commemorate the 55th anniversary of the U.S. landing on the Japanese island.
Bradley's gaze fell on the second figure from the right, one of six men depicted in the sculpture struggling to raise the American flag, rippling in the wind on the brisk, sunny day.
"There's my dad, in a big bronze statue," Bradley, 46, finally said, turning to face the gathering of hundreds of veterans, family members and Marines. "That's about all we knew about him on Iwo Jima, growing up. Any time we asked him about it, he would always change the subject."
John Bradley, a Navy corpsman, died in 1994 at age 70, the last survivor among the six men captured in a World War II photograph shot by Joe Rosenthal showing the American flag being raised atop Mount Suribachi on the fourth day of the battle. The photograph was the model for a memorial that has come to symbolize victory and sacrifice.
It was not until after his death, rummaging through boxes kept in a closet, that James Bradley learned more about the battle's lasting effect on his father. In the years since, Bradley has conducted extensive research among Iwo Jima veterans preparing a book, "Flags of our Fathers," to be published this spring.
"I would like to salute you guys, you ordinary guys, you heroes of Iwo Jima," Bradley said.
His remarks drew many tears from onlookers and captured the significance of a battle that stands at the forefront of Marine Corps history. More Marines died at Iwo Jima than in any other battle in the Corps' history. In all, 6,800 Americans and 22,000 Japanese died in the 36-day battle fought over a volcanic rock in the ocean, a critical stepping stone for U.S. bombers attacking the Japanese mainland.
The commemoration, a three-day event involving 400 veterans that culminated with yesterday's wreath-laying service, may be the last major gathering of Iwo Jima veterans, according to Marine Corps officials and organizers.
"This might never happen this way again," said Cy O'Brien, 81, a Marine combat correspondent from Silver Spring who covered the fighting on Iwo Jima and helped organize the commemoration. "These are all old guys. Look at these guys. Just think: These are the guys Japan feared more than anything else."
The elderly men sitting in metal folding chairs facing the memorial during yesterday's ceremony had been little more than boys when they landed. Many of them were only 18 years old.
One of the men at yesterday's commemoration, Tom Fields, of Hyattsville, had been an All-American middle-distance runner at the University of Maryland who enlisted in 1942.
Fields, 81, was a company commander with the 5th Marine Division when it landed on a volcanic ash beach on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945. "Christ, I was 26, I was an old man," Fields said.
"We hit the beach with 224 of us," Fields said. "Thirty-six days later, 24 of us were left. My heroes are the 18-year-old Marines who day after day got out of their holes and went forward."
Routing the Japanese defenders from their intricate maze of caves and bunkers was bloody and desperate. "So many times I've gone over it, thinking there had to have been an easier way to do it without spilling so much blood on that damn rock, but there was no other way," Fields said.
Kuribayashi demanded the assistance of the finest mining engineers and fortifications specialists in the Empire. Here again, the island favored the defender. Iwo's volcanic sand mixed readily with cement to produce superior concrete for installations; the soft rock lent itself to rapid digging. Half the garrison lay aside their weapons to labor with pick and spade. When American heavy bombers from the Seventh Air Force commenced a daily pounding of the island in early December 1944, Kuribayashi simply moved everything—weapons, command posts, barracks, aid stations—under ground. These engineering achievements were remarkable. Masked gun positions provided interlocking fields of fire, miles of tunnels linked key defensive positions, every cave featured multiple outlets and ventilation tubes. One installation inside Mount Suribachi ran seven stories deep. The Americans would rarely see a live Japanese on Iwo Jima until the bitter end.
American intelligence experts, aided by documents captured in Saipan and by an almost daily flow of aerial photography (and periscope-level pictures from the submarine Spearfish), puzzled over the "disappearing act" of the Japanese garrison. Trained photo interpreters, using stereoscopic lenses, listed nearly 700 potential targets, but all were hardened, covered, masked. The intelligence staffs knew there was no fresh water available on the island. They could see the rainwater cisterns and they knew what the average monthly rainfall would deliver. They concluded the garrison could not possibly survive under those conditions in numbers greater than 12,000 or 13,000. But Kuribayashi's force was twice that size. The men existed on half-rations of water for months before the battle began.
His only tactical error was to authorize the sector commander to engage the U.S. task force covering underwater demolitions team operations on D-2. This became a gift to the attackers, for it revealed to American gunners the previously masked batteries which otherwise would have slaughtered the assault waves on D-day.
When Sara Lister called the Marines "a little extreme" in 1997, I joined the thousands melting DOD phone lines to insure she'd be spending more time with her family.
Jumping ahead to today's evil, Hitlery heaped scorn on SecDef Rumsfeld, seeing no deterrent effect in a "system which doesn't work".
Rumsfeld patiently explained how the cow ate the cabbage; ironic in view of his bovine pupil.
Hitlery's copresidency was only too eager to give her donors Bernard C. Schartz of Loral and C. Michael Armstrong of Hughes a Get Out of Jail Card in the form of a waiver, after the May 1997 DOD report said their 200-page fax giving our guided missile technology to the ChiComs had "damaged national security".
How is it that She Who Must Be Oyveyyed is allowed to express any opinion whatsoever on the national security secured historically by such courageous fighters as those Marines on Iwo Jima.
We had to suffer 42 for 32 minutes of Bosnian bloviating May 1994 in that Navy Marine Stadium with those battles on its walls, with the ear-piece Dick Tracy's and the black-clad countersnipers protecting that military-loathing POS.
Marines forever; Clintonistas never.
