Iwo Jima Veteran speaks at Library

Editor’s Note: This is part 2 on World War 2 Veteran Fred Harvey. Last week’s part one dealt with Mr. Harvey’s life prior to the second world war and the events that led to his enlistment in the United States Marine Corps. This week's installment deals with his experiences as a marine on Iwo Jima.

The Dripping Springs Community Library hosted World War 2 Iwo Jima veteran Fred Harvey as a speaker on Wednesday Sept. 4.  Mr. Harvey served with the 5thMarine Division and was made available through a program by the National Museum of the Pacific War. Harvey is a native Texan, born in Memphis Texas.

The event began with a short video produced by the National Museum of the Pacific War, which explained the context of the war in the Pacific and the need for Iwo Jima as a forward air base for the U.S. Army Air Force bombers.

A Marine on Iwo Jima

Originally a para-marine, PFC Harvey was transferred to the infantry as a demo man when it was decided by the theatre command not to use parachute assaults in the Pacific after it suffered heavy injuries and losses in mis-handled drop. 

“I enlisted in the paratroopers, but the Marines decided not to drop any more Marines in the Pacific after a horrible tragedy in which some Marines were dropped in twelve-foot-high sword grass,” Harvey said. “I was rolled into the infantry as a demo man. As a demo man, I carried TNT on my back, plus gear in the front.” Because he had too much gear to carry a rifle, Harvey was supposed to have been issued a pistol, but unfortunately the corps had none to issue as supplies were tight. Harvey had to write to his mother and request that she send him a pistol, which she did.

“My mother made me promise not to drink while I was away and come home a drunk,” Harvey said. “Every Tuesday they issued us two beers. Well I didn’t drink so I gave them to my buddy, a sniper, and he stored them up. He wound up with 14 beer cans. When we were getting ready to hit Iwo Jima, he ran out of room packing his beers, so he threw his gas mask out and stored 4 beers in there. As we were listening to Tokyo Rose, she said ‘for you little marines getting to land on one of our islands, you better bring your gas mask.’ Well I turned to him and asked, ‘What you gonna do if you need a gas mask?’ He looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘I’ll just shoot you.’ He was my best friend,” Harvey laughed as he recalled the exchange.

The Iwo Jima landing was different in two aspects. The first is that the island was heavily bombed prior to the beach invasion by the Marines. “I think they bombed the island so that we wouldn’t have to dig fox holes,” Harvey said. “We were used to digging small holes, so living in those large craters was like living in a mansion. They also told us that they expected light resistance due to the bombing. Well things didn’t quite turn out that way.”

The second difference was the unique island defense plan put in place by the Imperial Japanese Army General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. General Kuribayashi decided to let the Americans have the beach, and then use the beaches as kill zones as he prepared defenses further inland. Kuribayashi also decided to fight the battle largely from underground mazes of caves and tunnels, and force the American forces into a battle of attrition. He hoped that by doing so, the United States would have second thoughts of invading the Japanese mainland. It is believed that by this time, the Imperial Command knew the war was lost. “They had 11 miles of tunnels on that island, 1,500 rooms, and fought from canceled positions. No banzai charges,” Harvey said.

When asked if he had in fact been served steak and eggs for breakfast, aboard ship, the morning of the invasion as history books say, Harvey said yes. “Yes, they did give us steak and eggs for breakfast. I tasted it twice. Once when it was going down, and twice when it came back up.”

“When we landed we thought that for once the Navy had been right and that the island was going to be easy to take because of the bombing.” Harvey said. “For about 30 minutes everything was calm, then all hell broke loose.” The official count for the Iwo Jima battle was 7,000 Americans killed-in-action, with 20,000 wounded. For the Japanese the numbers were 19,800 killed-in-action, with 200 prisoners of war taken.

“My buddy with the beers had never been in combat before, and he got wounded. He was stabbed by Japanese bayonets repeatedly in the chest and in the throat,” Harvey said. “But he made a mistake. As the medics were lifting him on a stretcher, he gurgled that he didn’t want to leave his beer behind. The medics, dropped him, and went back for the beers, then drank them themselves.”

“At night, you didn’t leave your foxhole,” Harvey said. “It was understood that is something was outside your foxhole, it was a Jap, and you shot him. In a previous invasion I learned the hard way about that. While in a fox hole, we heard one of our own screaming out in pain. We were getting our gear, getting ready to go out and get him, when one of our lieutenants screamed out an order for everyone to stay in their foxholes. It was a trick. The Japanese were torturing him to draw us out. They tortured him all night. It was horrible to hear his cries all through the night. No one slept. When we finally went out to find him in the morning, we found him dead. The Japanese had skinned him alive. That was the war we were fighting.”

“I finally got wounded by a clever bastard who tossed grenades at me,” Harvey said. “I was in my hole and I heard a ‘thump’ meaning a Japanese had just pulled a grenade. I knew I had six seconds before it exploded. I got lucky, at night, you could see the lit-fuze on the grenade. It looked like a lit cigarette. When you’re scared, time slows down, and I was able to catch it, and throw it back to him. After it went off, I heard the thump again. I knew he had learned from his mistake and was now cooking it off so that I would have less time to react. Sure enough, it came down into my fox hole. I did the only thing I could do. I jammed it as far as I could into the volcanic ash. There was no sand on Iwo Jima, it was all volcanic ash. That saved me, but the grenade still wounded me pretty badly. I crawled out of the foxhole, and crawled to the next hole. I hollered with all my might who I was, ‘don’t shoot,’ and that I was coming in. My last memory was my pulling myself into my buddies fox hole.”

On the beach, when the corps men were prepping him for transport to a ship, Harvey asked the corpsman for his boots. “He said, they’re all torn up, what do you want them for?” Harvey said. “Well those boots had been hard to get. The marines were treated as stepchildren by the Navy, and before the invasion I had finally gotten a pair of boots that actually fit me, so I wasn’t about to give them up. I took them from him, and wrapped my arms around them. That’s how they took me off Iwo Jima.”

When Harvey came to, he was in a full body cast aboard a Navy ship. All the hospital ships had already been filled, so the additional casualties were put ad-hoc into any ships available. “At one point they mistakenly put me with the guys that weren’t going to make it. Luckily the surgeon who worked on me recognized me and ordered me moved to where the living were being kept.”

Harvey wrote a book about his life and experiences as a Marine, “Hell Yes, I’d Do it All Again,” and is available at the Dripping Springs Community Library. The book is also available through the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg.