PORT ANGELES — The image is etched into America’s memory: Five United States Marines and a Navy corpsman planting the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima on Feb. 23, 1945.
Most people only have seen Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s famous picture or sculptor Felix W. de Weldon’s statue in Washington, D.C.
Bob Willson was there.
Willson — whose doorbell plays the first bar of the Marine Corps Hymn — has no trouble remembering the battle for the Japanese-held island or the other landings he made in the South Pacific.
If his memories are dark, he doesn’t speak of them.
Rather, the 83-year-old Willson shares the impressions of a soldier barely into his 20s who had a job to do.
“Hell, I was probably between a mile and two miles away,” he recalls of the Marines’ iconic image atop Mount Suribachi.
“I was just looking in the right direction.”
Sent to the Pacific theater in 1944, Willson had landed amphibious vehicles on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, on Saipan and on Tinian before his unit shipped out for Iwo Jima.
Americans miscalculated
“It was supposed to be a three-day operation,” he said in his west Port Angeles home last week.
Aerial reconnaissance had shown minimal activity on the 5½-mile-long island.
Landing on Feb. 19, 1945, Marines fought for 36 days to wrest Iwo Jima from the 23,000 Japanese troops who had dug themselves deep underground.
“The day they declared the island secured,” Willson said, “it didn’t sound any damned different from any other day.”
Willson recalled Life magazine artist Tom Lea’s famous illustration of a battle-weary Marine in the battle for Peleliu, titled “That 2,000 Yard Stare.”
“You get kind of punchy from so much time with so little sleep,” he said.
The Marines raised two flags on Mount Suribachi, the 550-foot-high vantage point from which the Japanese directed their artillery.
The first flag came from a Marine’s pack.
It was replaced by one from a U.S. warship in the action photographed by Rosenthal.
Three heroes died
“The order went out to bring out all six (men) back to the States for a bond tour,” Willson said.
Before they could be reassigned to safety, three of the men were dead.
Willson had enlisted in the Marines in 1940 after a military school education.
His early assignments included base security and prison guard duty.
He eventually joined Company B, 10th Amphibious Tractor Battalion, Fifth Amphibious Corps attached to the Fourth Marine Division.
“I figured it would be easier to ride through the war on an amphib than to walk through it as an infantryman,” he said.
The remark was typical of Willson’s self-deprecating recollections.
“I was in a support unit,” he said. “The working people were the infantry and the combat engineers.
“Sure, we got casualties, but our casualties were minuscule compared to the infantry.”
Of 104 men in his company photo, “there were still 52 of us” at the end of the war.
“The workin’ people, they were getting 125 and 135 percent casualties on Iwo alone.”
Willson explained that a unit’s replacements accounted for casualties over 100 percent.
“Hell, replacements had a real short (life) expectancy,” he said. “Most of them were just out of boot camp.”
Tanks ‘shot to hell’
Willson’s unit drove LVTs (Landing Vehicles Tracked), at first armed with 30- and 50-caliber machine guns, later mounted with 75-millimeter guns.
They were pressed into battle as if they were tanks.
“You couldn’t carry that much armor (as a tank) and still float,” he said of the craft that powered through the water and onto the beach.
“The amphibious tanks pretty much got shot to hell.”
Once on Iwo Jima, Willson’s duty was to ferry WAR — “water, ammo and rations” — to the front lines, and carry casualties out.
“The workin’ people used to both love and hate us,” he recalled.
They were grateful for the supplies, but the amphibious vehicles drew heavy Japanese fire.
Willson’s unit had returned to Hawaii after taking Iwo Jima to be re-equipped for another landing, but the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war before the men could ship out.
The battle for Iwo Jima has been recreated in Clint Eastwood’s film, “Flags of Our Fathers,” which is playing now at the Uptown Theatre in Port Townsend.
Tom Watson, manager of Deer Park Cinemas, is attempting to bring the limited release film to Port Angeles, he said Thursday.
No military career
Willson’s LVT had sustained a hit by a mortar round in the battle for Saipan, and an ammo dump blew up while he was walking past it on Iwo Jima.
On Kwajalein, “I stumbled into a nose-to-nose encounter with a Japanese pillbox. Believe me, I would never have done it intentionally.”
He’d planned on a military career, but “after four combat landings in 13 months, I decided there might be a less hazardous job.”
Willson returned to his home in New York State, where he attended forestry school on the GI bill, then graduated from the University of Maine.
He worked for the U.S. Forest Service Montana, then as an industrial surveyor in Hanford, and joined the City of Spokane engineering department in 1954.
That led to a job in Port Angeles in 1958, first as assistant city engineer, eventually as building inspector and zoning administrator.
Willson retired in 1983. Now he lives with his wife, Jane, and daughter, Andrea.
His son, Jeffrey, lives in Tacoma.
A grandson is a Marine who has served two tours in Iraq.
Willson is a past master of the Port Angeles Masonic Lodge and remains active in the Marine Corps League, which honored him with the Chapel of the Four Chaplains award.
It is named for the four military clergymen who gave their life preservers to others and went under with the torpedoed troopship Dorchester in the North Atlantic in World War II.
“I think the reason they put me up for it was that I was an old fart,” he chuckled.
Memoirs for his children
He’s written his memoirs, Ruby Vintage, — “That was at the behest of my kids” — but otherwise downplays what he saw and did more than 61 years ago.
As for his duty in the South Pacific, “whatever happened, you just coped with it at the time. It was just the normal course of events. You just drifted with the tide.
“I was lucky. That’s one of the biggest things in war.
“I was a helluva long way from being a hero.”