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Over three decades, I have been lucky enough to interview dozens of WWII veterans. Among the most fascinating were men who survived the fighting on the eight square miles of Iwo Jima, synonymous today with indescribably brutal, unrelenting combat and extraordinary heroism. On the eightieth anniversary of the invasion, it’s my privilege to recount the stories of two Americans from the more than 100,000 service personnel involved in the five-week ordeal.
On 19 February 1945, at 08:59, the first Marines landed on the black sands of Iwo Jima. Progress was slow and extremely deadly. The Japanese had prepared superb defenses and were led by one of the most effective commanders of the war – Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who had been ordered to defend the volcanic island to the last man.
Among the hard-pressed American forces were six Navajo code-talkers who toiled without rest for the first 48-hours of a battle that would eventually incur more than 26,000 US casualties, among them almost 7000 dead. These code-talkers included Thomas Begay - one of just two living Navajo code-talkers today from more than 350 who served in WWII. He and his fellow Navajo tribal members played a critical role, sending and receiving over 800 messages without making a single error. As one senior Marine officer stressed: “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”
Begay, 99, told me that he tried to enlist in the Marines as soon as he could after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At a recruiting office, he was told that because he was just seventeen, he would have to get his parents’ permission to join up. “I took my mother over to the recruiting office,” Begay said. Because his mother could not even write her name, her signature was in fact a thumb-print.
“I didn’t know anything about code talking,” Begay recalled, but he was a fast learner and before long was serving with a a radio section of the 27th Marines of the 5th Marine Division. Begay’s first day in battle was 19 February 1945, when some 30,000 of his fellow Marines landed on Iwo Jima.
To this day, Begay remembers another date – 23 February 1945, when he saw the “raising of the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima…. Boy, I was so proud. We yelled out when they raised the flag.” Famously, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped a second flag-raising three hours later. The image would become the most iconic of the entire war in the Pacific.
Taking Mt. Suribachi cost one Marine unit more than 500 men. Thousands more would lose their lives before the island was finally secured on 26 March 1945. Begay somehow survived, returned home and then joined the US Army, serving in Korea before working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs for 40 years. He had to wait more than two decades, until his work in WWII was finally declassified in 1968, before he could tell his family what he had actually done during the war.
Not long after interviewing Begay, I spoke with Hershel “Woody” Williams, who had the great but lonely distinction of being the last living WWII Medal of Honor recipient until he passed away, aged 98, in 2022. “It’s not possible to describe the hell of Iwo Jima,” Williams told me. “Unless you’ve been through it, there’s no way you can adequately understand it.”
The youngest of 11 children, born in West Virginia, standing just five foot six inches tall, Williams was a 21-year-old flame-thrower with the 3rd Marine Division when he earned the Medal of Honor, taking out several Japanese positions. His Medal of Honor citation reads: “Covered only by four riflemen, he fought desperately for four hours under terrific enemy small-arms fire and repeatedly returned to his own lines to prepare demolition charges and obtain serviced flame throwers, struggling back, frequently to the rear of hostile emplacements, to wipe out one position after another. 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.”
That very same day, 23 February 1945, like Thomas Begay, Williams saw the Stars and Stripes flying atop Mt. Suribachi. He was around a thousand yards away. Wounded on 6 March, he nevertheless fought on until the end of the battle. One of every three of his fellow Marines who landed on the island became a casualty. Other than a few hundred who were taken prisoner, the Japanese forces were annihilated – some 22,000 men. Williams was one of 27 Americans who received the Medal of Honor for actions during the battle.
Williams told me he never doubted for a second that he would survive. “I heard Marines say, ‘I’m not going to make it,’ and they didn’t.” As with so many of his fellow veterans, he struggled for many years after the war with combat fatigue, now known as PTSD. He would go on to serve for 35 years as chaplain of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.
Iwo Jima was so horrific, so brutalizing, that Williams - again like many of his fellow veterans - tried to forget everything about it. “I have attempted to wipe from my mind the bad things that took place,” he told me. He mostly succeeded but there was one memory he could not wipe away. No matter how hard he tried, he could never forget the faces of two Marines who died at the height of the fighting on Iwo Jima. “They sacrificed themselves for me,” he told me. “I have asked the question thousands of times: ‘Why me?’ Why was I selected to receive the Medal of Honor, to have all the accolades, when they gave all they had—their lives.”
