No war worth winning

An Iwo Jima veteran shares his story after 70 years

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The first waves landed at 9 a.m., we landed at 9:20, and by the time we were coming into the beach, the Japanese had their artillery on Suribachi and on the cliffs to our right and they had every inch of the beach marked, so when we hit the beach, it was in the midst of huge fire from both sides, and it was devastating. People were being killed right and left. So the landing was, for me, the baptism of fire, and I remember our tractor could not get up the beach, the sand turned and was so unstable that the tractors just were stuck at the edge of the beach and there we were, under fire, and so we all jumped out the back and ran around and I ran up and hit the beach and looked over and there was a guy with a big bubble of blood… so it was a moment of seeing what war was about and what combat was about.”

Richard Jessor was among the first U.S. Marines to land on Iwo Jima during World War II for the battle that was then the bloodiest in the history of the Marine Corps. Jessor landed on Blue Beach One, with Mount Suribachi and the Marine division that would head for that summit to his left while his division went to the right to secure the high cliffs that overlooked the airport landing strips. Suribachi, the island’s high point, was the site of that iconic photograph of the Marines raising the flag, which is now one of the most reproduced photographs in history and the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial. The battle has been memorialized in the film Sands of Iwo Jima, starring John Wayne, and two films directed by Clint Eastwood, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

Japanese forces were installed underneath the rocks of the volcanic island, the site of airfields that had been used to launch operations against American outposts in Saipan. American forces were sent to claim the roughly four-by-two-mile island and its airfields to use as a launch strip for aerial missions over Tokyo and a landing strip for damaged bombers returning from Japan.

American bombers had bombarded the island for 70 days before Marines were sent in. The bombing had little effect on the 21,000 Japanese on the island.

Jessor recalls that the send-off the night before the invasion from the colonel was, “‘I want you to know that tomorrow night at this time, a lot of you are going to be dead, and just remember when you get shot, fall forward. We need that extra six feet,’ [then the colonel] turned on his heel, and left. That’s how the Marine Corps was in those days.”

By the end of battle, which continued for more than a month, nearly 7,000 U.S. and 20,000 Japanese soldiers were killed.

Jessor hadn’t grown up thinking he’d join the military. He was a Yale University student who’d enlisted in the Marines only because the Navy recruitment office was closed the day he went to sign up. He’d expected he’d get drafted and thought he might as well enlist and have some choice in the matter.

“I had no idea what it was, what I was getting into, never understood what the Marines were about,” he says. “The Marines have an extraordinary history of… I guess it just has to be called bravery because I didn’t know what I was getting into when I left the ship that morning and was in the amphibious tractor going to the island, but a lot of the guys who were with me had done that before and they knew what they were getting into and they knew what it meant to face fire, and that took a lot of bravery. … 

“It turned out I made, in some ways, I made the wrong choice … But of course, as I look back on it now, I have to say that I’m grateful for that experience. It has had a shaping impact on my life.”

He didn’t become the kind of Marine who paints Semper Fi on his garage door or attends annual reunions for his company as the highlight of each year. Jessor found a very different life, far from his history in the war. He went back to Yale, finished his Bachelor’s degree and came to Boulder with his wife, expecting to “slum around” for a few years before returning to “civilization” on one of the coasts. But then he fell in love with climbing mountains, found a way to pursue the scholarly research he wanted to do at the University of Colorado and became a psychology professor and the founder of the Institute of Behavioral Science, where he still works.

He didn’t talk about the war for more than 40 years.

He recounts the experience now in his soft-spoken, slow cadence, emotionally overwhelmed at times.

Iwo Jima was his first and only battle. He’d done practice landings off the coast of Maui before boarding a troop ship and approaching the black sand beaches of Iwo Jima in an amphibious tractor. He was an intelligence scout in a company responsible for mapping the front lines and gathering intelligence for higher-ranking officers. On the first day on Iwo, he was hit with a piece of spent shrapnel, was fixed up and then sent back to battle. He carries his Purple Heart in a box with his honorable discharge pen and a laminated card that says when he was promoted to corporal.

A few days into the battle, his division was pulled back from the front lines for a day to rest, and he and the soldiers he was with were given a chance to write one letter.

“So I wrote to my parents and said goodbye,” he says. “I thanked them for everything they had done and said there was no chance that I was going to get off alive because everybody around me was killed one day after another.”

On day four on the island, he looked back over his shoulder as they were reaching high ground and saw the American flag on Mount Suribachi.

“I started screaming and all of the other Marines, we were in the front line, ‘Suribachi is captured,’ and it meant that our rear is protected, that we had everything from where we were to the top of Suribachi, so it was a very important achievement, but the real battle was the battle in front of us,” Jessor recounts. “That photograph made it an iconic moment and it was very important for morale, because that was a big issue. We were really so often unable to see the enemy because they were all in caves, and so we were getting fired up and everybody around me was getting killed and yet you couldn’t see the enemy.”

He stood at the mouth of a lot of those caves — never going in because it was never certain that there was no one alive inside. American soldiers stood at the openings, threw charges into the tunnels and followed them with bursts of fire from flame throwers.

“Once we reached the high ground on the right, it was then every day a sort of a war of attrition,” Jessor recalls. “There were hills that were taken and then had to be fallen back from, so it just became an endless experience of each day moving ahead and sometimes holding the ground, sometimes retreating a bit until we got to the north end of the island. And throughout, again, it was this constant frustration because the enemy was almost always hidden.”

Soldiers ran from one bomb crater to the next — making slow progress across the island.

Most of the Japanese soldiers they found were dead (the Japanese commander’s strategy was one that called for no Japanese survivors) and on one such soldier, Jessor found a Japanese flag.

“There’s a picture” he says, turning to the Veterans Speak program to point to a photograph of a group of soldiers around a Japanese flag, and says, “This is me, holding this Japanese flag. … I had taken this flag off a Japanese corpse, and I still remember, when I took that flag, I saw there were letters in the pocket of this Japanese soldier, and I had already… I had letters in my pocket and I’m looking at this Japanese and I’m thinking that he writes to his parents, and I write, and why are we doing this to each other? And the senselessness of the slaughter, it just overwhelmed me, and I made a decision in that very moment that I would never fight again, if I happened to survive, and that I would never go to war again. That it just, it had no meaning. He had never done anything to me, I’d never done anything to him, except we killed him, so there was that moment, which was kind of an epiphany for me.”

Once, they did take a Japanese soldier alive and Jessor was asked to take him back to the beach to meet with interpreters who might be able to gather some information from him. The task meant walking the prisoner through Marines territory.

“They all wanted to kill this guy. And so I had to say, ‘If you touch him, I’ll have to kill you,’” Jessor says. “I had to protect this really valuable asset because he would know things, the hope was. … There was this enormous frustration and wanting to do something, so I mean, if there were corpses around the Marines would — you probably shouldn’t publicize this — but I mean they would urinate on the corpses and they would cut off parts of the body as souvenirs, I mean we’ve all heard about this, but you could see it, and these are some farm kids from Iowa who would never do things like this, but in that situation the brutalization that took place was pretty pervasive.”

War seems designed for making people hard, for toughening them up to the death and destruction of other human beings, for requiring an immunization to empathy. And though he saw the frustration and anger around him bringing out a brutality that likely would never have emerged had these people not been confronted with the horrors of war, that’s not what Jessor found in himself.

“I’ve sort of always felt that if you are really, really tested and pushed to your limits and come out of it, you’ve learned something and been a better person for it, so for me, I think I was a compassionate person before then, but it certainly deepened the sense of compassion for others and the loss of the people I had trained with, and we had eaten together and trained together and so on, and to see them killed was something you just had to assimilate in a way that obviously reverberated through my subsequent life. … 

“So I feel privileged to have survived, but I know it was totally a matter of luck. It was just fortuitous. Who got killed and who survived was just a matter of chance.”

Before he left the island, he saw a plane that had been damaged while flying a mission over Japan landing on the Iwo Jima airstrip.

“We saw then the importance of what we had been through. We were saving these planes that couldn’t make it all the way back to [American outposts on] Saipan or Tinian,” he says. “Then once we reached the north end of the island, we turned around and were marching back to board ships that were just off the island, but I still remember getting back to the beach, and seeing all these temporary crosses because all the bodies had been taken back to the beach and buried in the sand with marked graves and you just got a visual sense of how many people had died.”

Jessor’s division had been scheduled to go on to Japan after Iwo Jima, but it was, as Jessor says, so destroyed that they were instead sent back to Maui where they reopened a rest base. Five veterans of Iwo were in a tent, and one replacement soldier who was training for a landing in Japan. Every night, the five veterans would go to the PX — the military base convenience store — he says, buy a case of beer and bring it back to the tent.

“We would drink beer and would review essentially minute-by-minute the invasion of Iwo Jima, and so somebody would say, ‘Remember on the third day we were in this bomb crater and the bomb hit on the rim and so-and-so’s intestines flew across and hit so-andso, remember that?’ and we’d say ‘Yeah,’ and we were doing that every night. And as I look back on it, it probably was a cathartic experience for us, but after a while, this replacement, this new guy, finally blew up at us and said he was sick to death of hearing over and over the same stories and he didn’t want to hear it anymore,” Jessor says.

Decades later, a phone call from a fourth division corporal — a close friend of Jessor’s during the war who had gone on to become a high school history teacher and told this story to his students when he taught them about World War II — reminded Jessor what he’d said in response: “Red said to me on the phone, he said, ‘You may not remember, but you stood up and you lectured him about why we were fighting — for freedom of speech — and nobody was going to tell us that we couldn’t talk.”

Jessor, who is Jewish, went into the war thinking that it was for a good cause, that the Nazi expansion of power and the scapegoating of Jews in Europe needed to be stopped — people didn’t know, at the time, the extent of the Nazi operations to exterminate Jews.

“I felt that when I was in the war, what I really was aware of was what was going on in Europe with the Nazi threat and I felt that, and in many ways still feel, that that was a good war, and it’s so hard to justify any war, but especially now, learning what went on there and I was invited to give a talk in Germany and I visited Dachau, the concentration camp and saw what… So I felt when I was fighting that I was fighting for a just cause, but after being on Iwo, as I said earlier, I determined that I would never go to war again,” Jessor says.

He’s been careful in the years that followed never to participate in an event he saw as glorifying war.

“Part of what patriotism is about that worries me is that it does celebrate our wars and our successes in war, and we have a pretty miserable history for a long time from what we’ve done to the Native American population here and then so many of our wars have been just for exploitative purposes,” Jessor says.

He agreed to participate in Veterans Speak because it had a very different mission, one of honoring those who have sacrificed their lives or been disabled in service of their country, and he thinks, particularly in the face of our ongoing foreign policy, it’s important to tell these stories, to remember what war is and what it does to people.

“I didn’t talk about it very much until recent years, but it’s important to remember and talk about what war is about, and I’m not sure it does any good, but we have people in Congress that can say nothing except ‘Let’s get the troops out there,’ and they’ve never been there. They don’t have kids there, and they’re happily sending others to… So.”

He looks now at his 19-year-old grandson — at that age, Jessor was training to go into battle — and says, “When I think now what it is to take 20-yearolds and 19-year-olds and have them do it, it just doesn’t make any sense.”

“I think veterans are not fully appreciated and we saw that particularly in the Vietnam War, which we all hated the Vietnam War but the veterans didn’t merit that hatred, and separating that was difficult and so they had a particularly bad time. And I just think that when you think of everyday citizens who have no knowledge of what combat is about, and then of course the politicians who speak so easily about we need to fight this, or fight that, there isn’t that appreciation of what is really entailed, and so my hope is that some better appreciation will come out of this.”

Of the effort Veterans Speak organizer Stephanie Rudy has put into gathering and presenting these stories, Jessor says, it’s a good thing to do for the community, and adds, “It just makes me feel that there are people out there who do have some understanding or who are seeking some understanding.”

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