Veteran Interview Excerpts
50th Year Commemoration of the Battle
of Iwo Jima
March 1995
Donald
Van Inwegen, B-29 Gunner, Army Air Corps
"They were the formative years of our lives. You know, we were young
kids.... I didn't have a normal late teenage life. I went in -- turned 18 in
April and I was in in June. An awful lot of B-29 crews would not 
have made it back [to Tinian and
Saipan], either with battle damage or engine trouble. B-29s were notorious for
having engine trouble. It was a new plane and it was so far ahead of its time.
I could tell you the guns were all computer controlled and you would say c'mon,
that's 1945, but they were. We weren't even close to our guns. We were in remote
turrets."
Lt. General Lawrence Snowden, Company Commander, Fourth Marine Division
"We went, my company,
in LVTs, and we crossed the whole distance from Hawai'i to Enewetok, to Saipan
and Tinian, and then to Iwo in an LST. And it was a jammed LST. Troops slept on
lifeboats on the deck, next to gasoline drums, in hot quarters down below, on
the tank deck, in the LVTs, wherever. On many days, there were two meals. You
stood in line for breakfast and by the time that line was finished it was time
to get in line for dinner because it was a very small galley."
Colonel James Shelton Scales, Battalion Commander, Fourth Marine Division
"As my first wave approached
the beach on Iwo Jima, the Japanese on Suribachi and the high ground saw us
coming. They redoubled their fire. And they were just churning that beach with
artillery and mortar. And the regimental commander said, we don't want to, we
can't land in the 
face of that. He said, 'turn flank
off, don't, don't land!' But my first wave got the word, they flanked off to
the right. Nobody else got it. We went second, third, fourth, fifth, and I was
in the sixth wave. And when that ramp went down, you know, you're supposed to
get out and disperse, get on out and spread out. Well, I thought it was wall to
wall dead men. Almost solid across the black beach there. And 
there were many dead
marines, of course, but many were in combat for the first time and they were
absolutely frozen. They weren't going to lift their head, they were just
burrowed down in the sand hoping the next one didn't get them."
Hugh Jones, Corporal,
Fourth Marine Division
"Out of our company of about 240 that went on Iwo -- I think it was reinforced --only seven of us walked off, and most of them were wounded. One day we had 17 replacements come in on Iwo at noon. The next night not a one was alive. They didn't have experience. When everything's going wrong and you have a disaster, you want to be by somebody, don't ya? So they would congregate in a hole, and the Japanese were looking down from Hill 382 and Suribachi, and that's where the next mortar shell would land. Two or three mortar shells would land right in that hole with them."
Herb Trace, M.D., Medical Corps, Fourth Marine Division
"The corpsmen would go out and
get the injured and bring them back. And we would really stop the bleeding,
splint the bones, and get them out of shock. At Saipan and Tinian, we had serum
plasma, which came in a large box about ten by ten inches and four inches deep.
We had to mix the water with the dried plasma. It took a while, and then we'd
have to find a vein and give them this to restore their blood volume and get
them out of shock. On Iwo, we had a very definite improvement. We had serum
albumen, and that came all mixed in about 100 cc and you could stick that in a
guy's veins and it would bring 'em out of shock fast."
Hugh Jones, Corporal, Fourth Marine Division
"We had a very, very,
very brave man -- Vincent Pugliese -- and he was just, just a real brave guy, one
of these guys who was always up and around. And they told us he was going to go
back aboard ship, and that would be just about 50 years ago today or tomorrow
or something like that. And I waved him over and I was going to have him go
down one flank and I was going down the other. And I told the guys 'Get packed
up, we're going aboard ship.' And he was kneeling by my foxhole and I said 'Get
in here you damned fool'. He says, 'Oh, I'm okay', and laughed at me. He got
shot through the throat. Ten minutes later he was going back. And that's always
bothered me."
Brian Carter, Fifth
Marine Division
"You know, those guys were only 18 or 19 years old. And their lives were snuffed. They never got any more, nothing further. They've gone on and lived their life through us. And our joy or our satisfaction in life has fulfilled some of their promise. It's difficult to express."
Thomas McGuire, Fifth Marine Division
"I can remember kids' bodies, nineteen, eighteen years old, just lying and being piled, waiting to be buried in heaps. And you're saying to yourself, that's somebody's son, that's somebody's brother. You never forget that all your life."
Hugh Jones, Corporal, Fourth
Marine Division
"First you're
fighting for the rest of the guys with you, then the Corps, and then the
country. Naturally, you are fighting for the country first, but you're so loyal
to each other. There's hardly anybody that wouldn't give their life in their company,
for somebody else. They wouldn't hesitate a second."
Jim Johnson, "Tanker," Fourth Marine Division
"[My wife Eileen and I] were married and moved back to California. When I got to the first campaign in the Marshall Islands, I was notified that Eileen was pregnant. I never saw my firstborn until after the campaign at Iwo Jima plus another six months that I had to stay in the Corps."
Charles T. Harton,
Fourth Marine Division
"And then they dropped the [atomic] bomb. Stopped everything. We'd have taken a shellacking if we had landed in Japan. As hard as they fought for places like this and Iwo Jima, to land in their homeland, aww, that would have been something else. Thank God we didn't have to do it."
Anderson Giles, Professor, University of Maine, son of H. A. Giles,
Fourth Marine Division
"Many of these veterans are at the natural end of their life cycle. And literally, many of them came back [to the 50th year commemoration on Iwo Jima] because they see this as the last big journey that they're ever going to do before they die. I mean literally that's the way they see it. This is the last time I'm going to go to the Pacific, this is the last time I'll ever going to have to go back and revisit my youth and touch that time that has occupied so much of my mental capabilities for so long."
Donald Van Inwegen, B-29 Gunner, Army Air Corps
"We're not here to try to rationalize a war. Wars are no good. They don't work. They never will work. But man does this. I don't know how we change it. I pray that we can. I'm not sure that we can though."
