Iwo Jima Survivor Documentary

[AmateisGal]

I watched a documentary made during the 1980s last night of survivors of Iwo Jima discussing the battle. It was really well done and quite fascinating. Here it is if anyone's interested.

[video=youtube;sy7hI_xRnnE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy7hI_xRnnE[/video]

 

[2jakes]

I watched a documentary made during the 1980s last night of survivors of Iwo Jima discussing the battle. It was really well done and quite fascinating. Here it is if anyone's interested.

[video=youtube;sy7hI_xRnnE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy7hI_xRnnE[/video]

My dad never said much about his time over there except to say,
" we were so young & had no idea what to expect."
He was with the 27th in the Marianas campaign .
I'm sure he would've appreciated this.

 

[AmateisGal]

My dad never said much about his time over there except to say,
" we were so young & had no idea what to expect."
He was with the 27th in the Marianas campaign .
I'm sure he would've appreciated this.

I was talking to my husband about it this afternoon. He was in the 1st Gulf War and he said that those guys in WWII went through a totally different experience than they did in the Gulf War, and he wondered if he would have been able to do it. It made me think of how warfare can be so different between generations. What soldiers went through in the Civil War is different than what they went through in World War II and so on. I'm sure there could be quite a philosophical discussion on that.

 

[2jakes]

I was talking to my husband about it this afternoon. He was in the 1st Gulf War and he said that those guys in WWII went through a totally different experience than they did in the Gulf War, and he wondered if he would have been able to do it. It made me think of how warfare can be so different between generations. What soldiers went through in the Civil War is different than what they went through in World War II and so on. I'm sure there could be quite a philosophical discussion on that.

Speaking for myself & using a very broad brush .
As a 19 yr. old during the Vietnam conflict, it was my mom & dad and
Mr. Bob Hope that cared about what we were experiencing while the rest of the
world went about their business.

 

[Monsoon]

I heard a lecture from a gent that was a 1LT with the USMC. He was in the third wave heading into Iwo Jima.

First of all, he kidded that if he knew there were 10000+ machine gun emplacements, he'd have gone on sick call.

He said it was cold, so he had on a skivvy tshirt, a Penn State football jersey, his fatigue shirt, then a field jacket.

As they were heading ashore, he was telling his men to keep their heads down while he was looking out. "You know how you get cord wood delivered and they just dump it off in your yard without stacking it? Well, that was what the beach was like but instead of wood, it was dead Marines."

He was hit and when he fell flat on his face. "The front line was where my nose landed!"

The Corpsman gave him morphine, but he said because of the layers he was wearing, he figure it wound up between his fatigue shirt and football jersey.

He also said that years later, he ran into a B-29 pilot. He gave him a hung and said if it wasn't for the Marines taking Iwo Jima, he'd probably be dead when he bomber was tore up and couldn't make it back to base.