At 8:59, one minute ahead of the schedule set for February 19, 1945, a first wave of the United States Marines 5th Division came ashore on the southeastern coast of Iwo Jima. This was a small island 750 miles south of Tokyo where the Allies hoped to utilize airfields to refuel B-29s after bombing raids over the Japanese mainland. After the men began to gather on the beach and organize, the Japanese, hidden above within 11 miles of tunnels, emerged and began shooting. The carnage was unimaginable.
One of the survivors is 99-year-old Don Graves of Keller, Texas. He was only 20 at the landing date. In fact, he was just out of the photographer’s view on the 554-foot Mount Suribachi after one of the flags was placed at mid-morning of the third day of full action. He will speak to the World War II History Roundtable in the Greenville, Texas Audie Murphy/American Cotton Museum at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, July 25. Sponsored by the history department at Texas A&M-Commerce, the public is encouraged to hear this part of history 79 years later from a participant.
The eight-square-mile island was bombed, strafed, and machine-gunned. Flame-throwers like Graves had the seemingly impossible task of eliminating an enemy expecting to die but desiring to take many of the allies to death with them. On February 23 a platoon managed to gain the top of the old volcano, found pipes, and rigged up a small flag. Marine Lou Lowery took a photo. This was followed later that afternoon with a larger pipe and flag, and a second photo session. The fighting was not entirely over for nearly a month. The Marines battled so forcefully they were awarded 27 Medals of Honor, one-third of those given for the war’s entire duration of four years and nine months.
Graves watched as six helped raise the second flag. It was hung on a pole left at a Japanese encampment bombed earlier by either Allied aircraft or by ammunition lobbed at the island from ships. When he received messages of the invasion, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was 2,357 miles away from the United States. He was in the Mediterranean Sea onboard the USS Quincy, returning to Newport News from his meetings at Yalta in the Crimea and at Cairo. Writer James Bradley wrote in his book, Flags of Our Fathers, “It was the first time in the war that anyone had seen the President gasp in horror.”
Some of the messages came from Secretary of Navy James Forrestal who was at the attack, landing off Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner’s flagship with General Holland M. Smith. The pair also drew a gaggle of photographers as they sank into the shoreline’s black volcanic ash.
Of the six flag-raisers, only two of those young men walked off Iwo Jima later and a third was carried by a stretcher. Three of them were killed and buried there. One camera was broken but the film saved; the Speed Graphic plates used by Associated Press photographer and war correspondent Joe Rosenthal somehow survived the climb, the action, and the messy volcanic dust that covered much of the island. He took only one image of the flag being raised. He did arrange a postured, staged photo with 18 men who were on the site, placing them by the pole and flag. All but one were from the 28th Regiment, the Marines who first reached the top. Few of that group left the island alive. The second flag flew for three weeks until shredded by the strong winds.
The Pulitzer Prize photo became the icon of WWII. The second flag is on display at the Marine Corps Quantico, Virginia Museum. The photo’s image was replicated as the United States Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.
Graves came home and spent his years preaching, singing, and giving history lessons on the perils of war, hoping the memory will not die.
