05.) Iwo Jima I

Number one New York Times bestselling author of Flags of Our Fathers James Bradley joins us to discuss the Battle of Iwo Jima, a secret the Marine Corps tried to keep, and what the most famous photograph of all time tells us about William Langston.

Episode Transcript

(00:31):
This is the Pacific as you knowit, wide stretches of water. But
this is the Pacific, as theJoint Chiefs of Staff feel. A battlefield,
a vast fortress studded plain on whichkey strongholds anchor a Japanese defense line
guarding the heart of the homeland.The American front lines had advanced to warm

(00:54):
and saipath ahead now stood Iwajima,the most heavily fortified island in the world.
Welcome to the Phantom Marine Podcast.I'm Chris de Rose, author of
The Fighting Bunch and host of thePhantom Marine Podcast. You just heard the
opening to the Shores of Iwashima,a film produced by the Navy and Marine
Corps to explain to the American publicjust what had happened an Iwashima. So

(01:18):
far, we followed the trail ofthe Phantom Marine from Newport and Conway in
Arkansas, to Saint Joseph, Michigan, to Seattle, Washington, and Memphis,
Tennessee. Now we need to searchon the opposite side of the world,
an Iwashima, where William Langston officiallylost his life. We begin our

(01:38):
discussion of the Battle of Iwashima withNumber one New York Times best selling author
James Bradley. I first asked Jamesto help us understand where Iwashima fits into
the larger strategy in the Pacific.How does a boy from Sulfur Rock,
Arkansas end up on what the Japanesecall Sulfur Island. I do want to
warn you before we proceed that theLavi Regima was literally hell on Earth,

(02:01):
and the discussion gets very graphic.So look at the whole Pacific. MacArthur
was down in the South Pacific,way down in the Philippines, far from
Japan. And then we eventually theMarines conquered the Central Pacific, the Mariana
Islands, Guam, Tinian and Saipan. Now the key was that Roosevelt came

(02:27):
up with an idea how to getJapan to surrender without an invasion. That's
key to remember every every war inhistory ended with an invasion of the homeland.
Hitler didn't surrender until troops came intothe heartland, and Roosevelt said,
we can get Japan to surrender throughair power. Well, that had never

(02:47):
been done and many doubted that itcould be done. So the air power
strategy was to put B twenty nineon the Mariana Islands, Guatinian and Japan
Saipan. Now the B twenty nine. You know, people think, oh,
the atomic bomb was the most expensiveweapon of World War two. No
wrong. The B twenty nine wasby far the most expensive weapon of World

(03:13):
War two. Adam bomb two billion, B twenty nine three billions. It
was the Cadillac of the sky.It was like just totally different technology,
unbelievable machine. And they put themin the middle of the Pacific on the
Mariana Island. And then the strategywas we will fly napalm and eventually atomic

(03:35):
bombs and just burn Japan down untilthey surrender. Well, you had a
little problem. Halfway between the MarianaIslands when you're flying to Japan is a
flat island called Iwajima. Didn't havepotable water, was ugly, stinky,
but it had flat airfields, andthe Japanese could intersect the most expensive weapon

(03:59):
of world were two. They couldbroadcast the Tokyo about it, they could
try to shoot the plane. Time. You couldn't burn down Japan and get
and defeat Japan with Equojima alive,so they sent in the Marines. The
Marines thought that the battle might takea day or so because spot or planes
couldn't see anybody. The Japanese werenot on Iwujima, they were in Ewojima.

(04:27):
They were underground, twenty two thousandJapanese on a five mile long So
you're on an airplane looking down andhe's like, wow, there's nobody there,
no barracks, no nothing. Thiswill be a cinch. You land
the Marines, and the Cinch turnedout to be the worst battle in the
history of the United States Marine Corps. The Marines fight for four years in

(04:49):
World War Two, one third oftheir casualties is just on Equojima one month.
It wasn't like you could go tothe Peloplnesian Wars and study an Ewajima
Citadel of Rock with the commander seventyfive underground. You know, that didn't
happen before. You couldn't study thatat West Point or at the Naval Academy.

(05:12):
So this was unique because the Japaneselazy death generals up in Tokyo,
who were willing to sacrifice all theirboys, said hey, you got to
go to Fukaku position, and thatmeant just you know, dig in behind
a boulder. Well they should havesaid instead, you know, we're gonna
surrender and save all the use ofJapan. We realize, as you know

(05:38):
sober strategists, we can't win,and we're sorry, and we surrender.
But instead they said, no,we'll just let our boys die. You
know. The order for Saipan thatthey gave to the commanders was, let's
see, we got the military thereabout seven thousand, we got twenty two
thousand Japanese civilians. You know,we looked at it and we're Tokyo and

(06:00):
you guys all have to die.So the three commanders come out, they
give an order everybody fight the Americans. Then they went back in their office
and they killed themselves. The Japanesewere screwed by their Tokyo masters, and
it was a massacre. You know, I've been to Augim a few times,
and when I mean, it's justjust think of walking around your house

(06:23):
and there's a basement under your name, your house, and there's a bunch
of people there. You don't knowwhere they are, you don't know if
they're under your kitchen, and theycan move so as you walk to your
bedroom, they can hear that,and they can move to your bedroom and
shoot you through the floor. TheMarines would see a tunnel an opening,
and they would throw in something,you know, and they'd see smoke come

(06:46):
out, you know, thirty yardsaway at the other end of the tunnel
and realize that's at that's a thirtyyard long tunnel and it has how many
branches. The Marines would see likethree jampings with machine guns in a bunker,
and then they go bur and killthose three Japanese. A LA,
bunker's done, and then they wouldmove around the bunker like it was,

(07:11):
you know, a dead bunker.It's safe, and then within a couple
of minutes there'd be three more Japanesein that bunker, coming up from underground,
getting their hands on that machine gunand shooting it. Next, I
asked James to tell us about thecasualty rates any Regima. The numbers are
funny. It's something like twenty onethousand Japanese, one thousand Korean labors.
You'll see some with their hands upsurrendering. Those are mostly Korean labors.

(07:36):
I'll tell you a story, youknow. To write these books, I
interviewed hundreds and hundreds of veterans,and I interviewed a lot of Iwujima veterans,
and I only interviewed four Japanese Iwujimaveterans. Four. I went to
the eu GiMA Association in Tokyo.I had gone to school in Tokyo.

(07:59):
I had an office and Okyo andI go to the Iwogema Association and they
said, mister Bradley, we're calledthe Ewagema Association, but everybody died on
the Euagima, so we're just peoplewho served there once, but we were
all taken off the island before thebattle. He said, I can't introduce
you to anybody who survived the Yugimabecause there's so few survivors. One year

(08:20):
it goes like that, mister Bradley, we wish you could talk to somebody,
but you know they all died.Well. Then one day I'm at
a luncheon with the Yogi Association.Somebody tapped me on the shoulder and says,
mister Bradley, you can meet someMewgima survivors. So I walk into
the next room and there's four oldguys standing there and we all burst out
crying. You'd have to read thebook to understand why it wasn't you know,

(08:43):
it wasn't moaning and crying like alittle kid. It was just like
just like shared pain. And thenthese guys, without talk, without saying
anything, start pulling up their pants, legs, and they pull up their
shirts and they're pointing to their stomachsand their butts and their legs, and
what they're trying to you know,what they were telling me was that we

(09:05):
didn't surrender. We lived up toour code we were taking. You know,
these guys were unconscious, they feltbad. They didn't die with their
buddies. They didn't follow the code, the code the criminal saint. In
the Russo Japanese War, which wasthe biggest war before World War One,
Russo Japanese War Japan and Russia,a lot of Japanese surrendered. They came

(09:28):
home as heroes. No problem.Samurai surrendered. But Samurai were in a
battle, and you know they weregonna lose. I mean, we surrender,
you know, give us dinner.You could be a pow in Japanese
tradition. But then the geniuses inthe early twentieth century in Tokyo, the
genius generals changed the code and theysaid, you know, you have to

(09:52):
be like a samurai who will commitsuicide. Well, samurai committed suicide traditionally
over a matter of honor, andvery few did it. But but now
the brilliant new generals of the TokyoArmy, of the Japanese Army said no
surrender. That means you're you're gonnadie, and you have to be willing

(10:13):
to die. And they propagated acult of death. So when my dad
and those guys walked up Mount Suribachi, Mount Suribachi had a lot of Japanese,
a lot of Japanese in there thatkilled themselves. When my dad's friends
went into Mount Suribachi with flashlights,there were Japanese, you know, blown

(10:33):
away by their own gername. Howdoes this help you win a war?
To tell your people to die,It doesn't make sense. The Japanese Tokyo
leaders really screwed that, that generationof Japanese soldiers. But Iwujima, See,
if you're fighting someone a won't surrender, that's a difficult thing. And

(10:54):
they're underground. So it's the worstbattle in the history of the United States
Marine Corps. And the best descriptionI can give of it, it was
American flesh against Japanese concrete. Youknow, Roosevelt got japan to surrender without
an invasion that would have been Imean, if we had invaded Japan,

(11:16):
you wouldn't even know the Battle ofIwajima. The invasion in Japan would have
been the biggest happening in world history. James is one of the few Americans
to have been to Iwajima, andhe's visited numerous times. I asked him
to give us a sense for whatit looks like. It's otherworldly, you

(11:37):
know. The first thing is itis his name, Ewo means sulfur,
so it's belching sulfur, so itsmells like rotten egg. You're a top,
a kind of belching sandy thing withscruff grass. Somebody wrote a Japanese
wrote, it's a place with nobirds and no trees. So there were
sulfur mines on Iwojima and the lavarock it's a lava island. Mount Sarabaci

(12:03):
is a lava cone and that's easyto bore into lava rock. So they
had sulfur mindes bored into lava rock. So the idea of tunnels was already.
I mean, that's what Eugima was, was a bunch of sulfur tunnels.
And then there's a Mount Seravaci,extinct volcanic cone at the bottom,
and then the island's kind of likea pork chop, and it was basically

(12:26):
flat, so they could put airstripsthere. If you look at the Battle
of Tarowa, why would we fightfor that little rock out there. Well,
because it had a flat area,you could put an air strips and
then you know, the Seabees wouldcome in, build the airstrip, the
Air Force would come in, puton a put in planes. They bombed
the next island, and the Marineswould invade, and then they put in

(12:48):
planes. And so really World Wartwo in the Pacific was a strategy just
to get airports to put planes on. I asked James to tell us about
the process for identifying and burying thedeath on Iwashima. You know, all
of the battles of the Pacific,the Marines buried they're dead individually. Here
is James Bradley in this grave.And on Iwajima they buried them in rolls,

(13:15):
and they had drafts when marking thelines, like those guys out on
the highway with those strings that youknow are marking the lines. Long rows
of dead, and there were somany dead they didn't have time to say,
you know, I commit James Bradleyto the earth. They would just
have a mask, not a mask, but they just stand in front of

(13:37):
a whole row of bodies and say, you know, we commit you to
the earth. And they couldn't burythose guys for days because hey, let's
look at Normandy. Normandy, youknow, brave, take nothing away.
I've never seen a bullet near myhead, so I admire everybody who hit
Normandy. But the fact is,after twenty four hours you can have a

(14:00):
tea party on the Normandy beach.It was finished. It was safe Iwo
Jima. No place was ever shapedthe beach. You came in and you
fought for for days. Well,it wasn't safe because the island was so
small. All the underground armaments couldhit any point on the island. So
they'd bring you out of the battleon a hospital cot and put you in

(14:22):
a hospital area and a shell wouldcome and just blow everybody up. The
doctors and you know, injured wouldbe gone. And it wasn't until you
know, way into the battle thatthey were able to start burying bodies,
and then they had to bury alot. It's the numbers, you know,
varied but it's about six thousand andeight hundred dead Marines, twenty two

(14:43):
thousand dead Japanese. The islands smeltof death, of rotting bodies for years.
That was the most significant smell,stronger than the sulta, was the
rotting bodies. It was a massacre. It was not the Battle of e
Would you know, you think ofneat lines, you know, soldiers marching
off. This was a massacre,and it was an important massacre. The

(15:09):
Japanese general looked at it, brilliantguys, and he looked at the deal
and he said, you know,we're all gonna die. This is impossible.
Japan has no navy or air force. America is gonna invade Iugima.
They're gonna win. But what we'regonna do is go underground and make it
so difficult and so costly that theywon't invade Japan. By our sacrifice of

(15:35):
making Euajima such a horrible battle forthe Americans, they're the Americans will think
twice before they'll invade Japan, andthey'll negotiate. So his job was to
make it as terrible for the Americansas he could, and he did a
good job. You know, Iinterviewed guys who saw bodies vaporized. You
know, guys walking along in ahuge shell hits and then there's just a

(16:00):
you know, the guy's writ Theyfind the guy's ring. I mean,
there was a correspondent who said hehit the beach in like the fifth wave
or the second day or something thatgot the detail, and he said,
guys charging ahead were, you know, pushed back sometimes by the rubber bandness

(16:22):
of people's intestines stretched across rocks.So guys are blowing up and they're intestines,
they're stretch, and you're marching forwardand you hit like this rubber band,
you know, and you look downand it's it's entrails stretched across the
rod. I warned you at thebeginning that this was a horrific battle and

(16:44):
the descriptions of it would be graphic. But what we're going to discuss next
is probably even worse. I hadto ask James about something in his book.
It has always been understood that therewere no POWs on Iwajima, that
nobody was tortured on either side.The man with the limb who showed up
in Newport, Arkansas, claiming tobe William Willard Langston said that he'd been

(17:04):
taken captive by the Japanese on Iwujima. In fact, it was the reason
that police Chief More gave for disbelievingthe story of the man with the limp.
He said, it can't be WilliamLangston because nobody was tortured or held
as a prisoner of war on Iwujima. James Bradley proved that that wasn't the

(17:27):
case in his book No, thatthe official line was that there was no
torture on Iujima on either side.But my father wouldn't talk about Iwajima.
And there's a scene in the bookwhere I'm thirteen years old, Scott knows
pimples, you know, genius,And we're watching Johnny Carson. Two easy

(17:48):
chairs were in this family den.It's as comfortable as can be. My
dad's got a neck tie on,but it's open, you know, he's
relaxed, and we're watching Johnny Carson. And for some reason, I say,
hey, Dad, what happened onthe Ujima? I mean, you
always say you forgot everything, butit's a historical fact. You were there,

(18:10):
and I mean, can you remember, like did you have shoelaces?
Can you remember anything? Dad?You know, it's kind of like bugging
them, like why do you keepsaying? And he just looks at the
TV and doesn't say anything. AndI said that, I mean, there
must you know, I don't.I mean, you were on an island.

(18:30):
Did anything? Can you remember onething? And he put his head
back in the easy chair and hishead was like forehead was glistening, and
he closed his eyes and he said, you know, they took my best
friend underground and they cut off hispenis and they put it in his mouth.
And I'm the guy that found them. And then I came home and

(18:52):
I just lied to his mother.I said he didn't stuffer at all.
He died peacefully, missus Ignatowski.I just went to him and my father
saying this with his eyes closed.And I'm thirteen and I'm in a dark
room and it's just like I don'tknow. I mean, it didn't you
know, males at thirteen only havehalf their brain, and it just didn't

(19:15):
compute, you know. I didn'tthink that was very emotional. Later I
realized that his top memory of Iwagimawas the torture death of his friends.
So years later, so I gofrom thirteen and I'm writing the book Flags
of Our Fathers. I don't know. I'm forty forty five years old.
And years later I say to mydad's commanding officers, I won't give his

(19:37):
name because I'm going to tell abad story about him. And I said,
you know, the only thing dadtold me about Iwgima was that his
friend got tortured to death, hadhis penis cut off. And the officers
said, well, that's just nottrue because there was no torture on Iwugima.
Well, my dad, you know, wasn't a big talker, and

(20:00):
we couldn't eat. If you gotthe whole family together, eight kids,
you couldn't nail something where my dadexaggerated or he just wasn't like that.
I said, just a minute,my dad said that his best friend was
tortured to death and he mentioned hispenis didn't happen, didn't happen, didn't

(20:21):
happen. So then I'm interviewing aguy from Indiana who knew my dad well,
a veteran of Bewajima, and hestarts crying about the torture death of
my dad's friend and I said,what day, Hey, what are you
talking about here? This is theguy my dad talked about Oh yeah,
man, your dad had to findhim in his body was all broken up,

(20:41):
and they tortured him for three daysunderground. And it was your dad's
the best friend. And you know, the veteran's just crying. You never
told the story before. Well,they were ordered not to talk about anything
bad, and the official military languagewas that there was no torture on enguage.
So I called this officer and Isaid, hey, you lied to

(21:03):
me about my dad. My dadwas telling the truth. And he just
said, you know, we haveto protect the mothers. Oh you lied
to me. I mean, I'mforty five year lying to me about my
dad's best friend. You're telling mydad. You're calling my dad a liar
like he's I'm a big boy,and you know, it just sounds a

(21:23):
little upset about this. I putit in the book, and the officer
writes to the publisher and says thatI'm lying about Ralph Ignatowski. Then later
this a great Marine officer goes toClint Eastwood personally and says, James Bradley
is lying about Ralph Ignatowski. Well, eventually I get an anonymous email from

(21:49):
a researcher an independent researcher down atthe National Archives, so doesn't know me,
and she's researching World War Two.She accidentally comes up on the final
photographs of Ralph Signatowski's body. He'sidentified as a torture victim in the middle
of nowhere in the National Archives.So then I get the photos to show

(22:12):
that my dad was telling the truthand Ralph Ignatowski was tortured underground. So,
folks listening to me James Bradley talkabout my dad's best friend, if
you'd like to visit my dad's bestfriend. He's buried in a national cemetery,
Rock Island at Illinois. You know, if you were showing up in

(22:33):
Newport, Arkansas to impersonate William Langston. And the public understanding is that there
were no prisoners of war, therewas no torture on Iwajima. You'd think
he would stick to the public storyso that people would believe you. But
here's an instance where the man withthe limp said that he was tortured,
said that he'd been captured by theJapanese, and he was right. And

(22:56):
now we know that the official storywas wrong. And the only reason we
know about Americans being captured and torturedon Iwajima is because James Bradley wrote this
book and because his dad happened tohave a best friend in the battle who
was captured and tortured, and wesaw what great lengths the Marines went to
to try to keep this official storyfrom being disturbed. For most Americans,

(23:29):
the Battle of Iwajima brings to mindthe image of the Marines raising the flag
over Mount Sarabachi. It's probably themost famous photograph in the history of the
world. It's also connected to oneof the most important questions in our investigation,
which is could William Langston have beenincorrectly identified as killed in action?

(23:53):
And could someone mistakenly have been placedin a grave with his name on it.
I think that photograph and this lineof inquiry are connected. What most
people don't know about this photograph isthat the identities of the flag raisers has
been hotly disputed over the years andhas been revised numerous times. The most

(24:18):
famous photograph in the world, themost reproduced photograph, I mean, Apple
is maybe the number one trademark,maybe Miles picture Tianneman Squares the number one
painting, But the number one mostreproduced photo is the Eugima photo. It
only has six human beings in itdoesn't have cows and sheep, and you
know, it's got six human beingsin it, and the Marine Corps has

(24:41):
been unable to correctly identify them fromnineteen forty five until just recently, and
it took outside experts years to getthe Marine Corps to realize that they had
once again missed. So they misidentifiedthe in the photo in nineteen forty five,

(25:02):
then they reidentified him and I thinkit was forty seven, and then
in two thousand and sixteen, andthen just recently in two thousand and eighteen,
they've moved two people out of thephoto in the last five years and
moved two people in. Well,can you imagine what this does to the
families. Not the families like theymoved out. My dad's not a hero.

(25:26):
How about the families where those guysthey moved into the number one photo
they're dead. They're told about itin two thousand and sixteen, two thousand
and eighteen. But see, thisis not like an obscure photo. More
humans have looked at that photo.Four Hollywood directors made a movie of the
photo. It's in every one ofyour history books. You didn't get out

(25:48):
of the American educational institutions without seeingthe photos. So it's the number one
most eyeballed photo and we are unableto identify who's in it for over two
generations. It's an amazing story.Think about that the Marine Corps is batting
fifty percent at identifying three of thesix flag raisers in the most recognized photograph

(26:11):
of all time. The Battle ofEwhima was a horror show where nearly seven
thousand marines, many of whom werenever recovered, lost their lives. It's
clearly possible that the wrong man couldhave been buried in a grave under the
name William Willard Langston while Langston survived. I want to give a special thanks

(26:34):
to James Bradley for joining us andhelping us understand the Battle of Iwhima.
He is a truly gifted storyteller andhe's still telling stories at his website Untold
Pacific dot com. In the nextepisode of The Phantom Marine, we're going
to talk to a man who wasthere Annie Washima at the engagement at Cushman's

(26:55):
Pocket where William Langston allegedly lost hislife. Until then, please check out
my new book, The Fighting Bunch, and join us on Facebook at www
dot Facebook dot com slash Phantom Marine. If you'd like to get in touch
with me, I'm at www.Chris Durose books dot com. Until next

(27:15):
time, I'm yours for the truth. Chris de Rose. You're right,
Marine, You've taken a tiny island. But it's not just eight square miles
of rock today it's an American portnessonly four hours from Tokyo. Today,
from your little island, giants,striking forces are launched against the heart of

(27:40):
Japan. Today, our fames andships are blasting the enemy into ashes at
the foot of Fujiyama. With companyin our arm proces well the unbounding determination
of our people, we will gainthe inevitable triumph. So help us broad