Iwo Jima Letter

This letter was written by Lieutenant William Hall to the Lieutenant's wife. Lt. Hall was an officer in charge of the 26 landing craft (Higgins boats, LCVP) on "Blue Beach One" from the USS Sibley, APA206. Captain McQuiston, commanding officer, APA206.

22 March 1945
Dearest -

Enough time has passed so that I can now give you an account of the Iwo Jima operation, not an overall account because censorship regulations won't permit and anyhow you've already gotten more facts from the newspapers and magazines than I know.  But I can give you the picture in terms of my own personal experiences.  Keep that in mind as you read this because otherwise the preoccupation with my own small part in the affair will make you think I've lost my perspective.

I think all of us had a sense of unreality as we steamed in convoy from the advanced base towards Iwo Jima.  Everything was peaceful and calm, even the weather, and there was no sign of opposition from any direction.  We had been warned of the danger of suicide bombing attacks and each morning at our before dawn G.Q.'s were tense and ready but nothing happened.

No one had to be called for D-Day G.Q.  Everyone was up early and I think most of the battle stations were manned before the alarm sounded.  As soon as we got on deck we could see the flashes of naval gunfire.  Battleships, cruisers, and destroyers were giving Iwo a going over.  Occasionally an ammunition or fuel dump would be hit and we'd see a big flash in addition to the smaller one made when the shell hit.  Those big flashes were each an individual comfort because they meant less stuff ashore for the Japs to throw at us.

I thought surely that we would be attacked from the air at this point but we weren't and as a matter of fact I've never laid eyes on a Jap plane.  The air boys did a magnificent job.

As we got nearer the island we could begin to see the real thing that we'd been studying in pictures, charts and relief maps.  Illuminating flares were being thrown up constantly and soon we could see Mt. Surabachi at the southern tip of the island, the low ground immediately north of it where we were to land, and the higher, craggy part of the island on the northern end which was to be so tough for the marines to take.

My interest was concentrated, with an intenseness I've never before experienced, on finding the beach areas on which we would land our troops and the control vessels that would help guide us in.  This was not easy because the transport area was about seven miles from the beach so that even with high powered telescopes we couldn't see too clearly.  Our problem was complicated by the fact that since we were carrying reserves we wouldn't know until the last moment exactly which one of the beaches we'd hit.

The biggest worry I've had in connection with being responsible for the ship to shore movement of troops and cargo has been that of getting on the wrong beach.  That's happened a good many times and causes indescribable confusion on the beach and costly delay while things are getting unscrambled.  It had happened during our practice operations off Coronado and I didn't want to make any such ghastly mistake during the real thing.

Since we were carrying reserves we did not land at H-hour, which was at 0900, but from that time on we were all set to go and were waiting orders.  It was during this time that I was able to see the beaches through the telescope from the signal bridge and I spent the entire morning and early afternoon there waiting for orders.  Finally they came only to be cancelled a moment later.  The suspense was nerve-wracking.  Battleships, cruisers, and destroyers kept up a steady fire and not from over the horizon either.  They stood in close and pounded away at point-blank range.  The airmen were dive bombing and strafing the place from every angle with every kind of stuff planes carry rockets, cannon, machine guns, bombs and napalm.  This was our first sound of battle noise and of course it heightened the excitement and tenseness of the situation.

At last the word came for us to land our troops.  And was I scared?  I certainly was!  But there was too much to think about to worry much about being afraid.  Anyhow we got our boats away with no difficulty, assembled them according to plan and shoved off for the beach.

We threaded our way through the biggest collection of ships I've ever seen; transports, LST's gun boats, destroyers, tugs, net layers, LSM's in such numbers that they obscured the part of the island we were heading for and we had to steer by compass.  Jack had gone on ahead to locate the control vessel to which we had to report before hitting the beach.  Before I'd lead the parade more than halfway there, he was back with precise knowledge of its location so that no time was lost on our seven mile trip.

To my dismay I found upon reaching the control boat that there were scores of small boats milling around in exactly the area   I needed to dispose my own boats for the final dash to this beach.  Before I could improvise my way out of this we were told to hit the beach.  I had to lag behind for a few minutes to get the word to all my boat officers because the situation was so confused I was afraid the last waves would not get the word and would not  understand the dispatch signals.  The result was that I found myself about half a mile to seaward of my proper position which was ahead of the first wave not a thousand yards in the rear.

I spent the most agonizing ten or fifteen minutes of my life catching up to the first wave and passing through it to take the lead into the beach.  It seemed like hours and although my boat is faster than any of the others I felt as if we were standing still.  If I ever have nightmares about Iwo Jima it will be about this particular part of it.  We did make it however and by that time were close enough to the beach to see the mess that was already there.  It gave me a terrific jolt.  We hadn't encountered much enemy fire on the way in and none of our boats were hit but the beach was so badly littered with wrecked landing craft that I first thought all my boats would not be able to land simultaneously.  There was enough room however and our boat coxswains used perfect judgment in picking their landing spots.  Out poured the troops and the boats began backing off the beach.  Jack stayed a few yards outshore of the surf line and began towing off the few boats that had trouble while I raced seaward to guide the succeeding waves of boats to the beach.  Three of the waves, the last three, had gotten off their course to northward and were headed straight for the northern-most beach which was so hot it wasn't opened up at all for boat landings until two days later.  I thanked heaven for my extra speed which enabled me to do the job of running back and forth, guiding each wave of my little waterbugs to their proper places.

We took in thirty-two boats in about twenty minutes and got them all off the beach and on their way without losing a man or a boat.  Luck was with us because the approaches to the beach had been heavily shelled by mortars and many of the stranded boats had suffered direct hits but outside of a small amount of small arms fire we had no opposition to getting the troops ashore.

By the time the last boat was off the beach and was straightened away for home it was beginning to get dark and then came the very unwelcome word that the transports were ordered to leave the area and that ship would see us in the morning.  So we had to prowl around in our little boats all night long about a mile off Iwo Jima and be ready for business in the morning.

I've never had such a let-down or such a reaction in my life.  It's impossible for me to explain and certainly difficult for you to understand the horror with which I had realized that I was a thousand yards behind my proper position the first time I went into action.  That, plus the natural strain of the day had me pulled as tight as a piano wire and when the pressure was off I did a fancy puking job over the side.  After that was over I felt OK except for being sore at having had such a stupid reaction.

I organized our six man crew into watches for the night and stood the first one myself to see what the situation was going to be.  It was eerie as hell I can tell you.  The night seemed endless and I slept very little.  The fighting ships had been lobbing shells into the island all day and continued through the night.  They were so close that the explosions jarred the boat each time they fired.  We could see the flash of the guns, see the red-hot projectile pass overhead, hear it swish by and then see it hit ashore.  And what a racket!  The noise seemed heightened by the darkness and since we had nothing to do but wait for morning we noticed the noise more than during the day.

Finally daybreak came and after eating a breakfast of canned rations (none of us had much of an appetite) we went back to blue beach to do salvage work  and there was much to be done.  The beach was so littered with abandoned small boats that there was hardly any place left to land the tremendous amount of cargo that had to be gotten ashore to keep the troops supplied.

There wasn't much organization ashore at blue beach one (I found out later the beach party had been very badly shot up not long after they'd landed) so I went ashore with young Bob Bates, one of my crew, to see what we could do.  We didn't accomplish very much about clearing the beach because the boats were so full of water and sand that they were beyond the power of Jack's and my boat to pull them off.  We did find out what a shambles the Japs had made (and were making) out of the beach area.  We also got the pants nearly scared off us when the slant eyes began to drop mortars nearby.  We ducked into the nearest shell holes and kept our fingers crossed.

   Here I saw my first casualties, dead and wounded, they aren't a pretty sight.  Here also I saw quick death for the first time when a mortar hit a group of about fifteen men in a shell hole seventy-five feet from where we were crouching.  They all disappeared.  We saw this sort of thing repeated many times during our ten days at Iwo Jima.

 Bates and I worked on the beach most of the morning with our boat standing off shore for us.  I'd been worried about Bates and how he'd behave under fire because he's such a kid but I could have saved my worry.  I never saw him flinch once and as a matter of fact he was so damned curious to see what was going on that I had to bark at him two or three times to keep his head down.  Anyone would have thought him an old hand at the business instead of a perfectly green, eighteen year old kid who'd been home in high school if this mess wasn't going on.  Incidentally he displayed the inevitable souvenir hunter instinct by taking time out to retrieve a big bolo knife he spied in a shot up jeep that was stranded on the beach.

  

Rob Bates (circa 1944)

age 18 on February 19, 1945 

Jack and I confined ourselves strictly to salvage work because that was what was needed most.  We left the traffic control to other ships' officers who did a good job.  My boat and crew (without any replacements) did salvage work every day, all day for nine straight days with three nights aboard the ships six nights in the boats and only six hot meals.  My boys showed the kind of courage and stamina that made me very proud to be in the boat with them.

As I told you before I think one of my most vivid memories of this whole business will be the awful fatigue.  I was so tired I ached all over and when I sat down my back hurt so badly I couldn't relax.  Several times I thought one more throw of a heaving line would make me fall apart.  Fortunately energy seems to flow from some unknown source because just about the time I'd feel I was about to collapse from want of rest I'd begin to feel alive again and before long would be feeling quite fit.

In spite of incessant naval gunfire and air bombing, the Jap positions on the north east coast of the island continued to give the beach and the approaches to it plenty of trouble in the way of mortar and small arms fire.  They didn't bother us very much in the boats because their main interest was in blasting the marines ashore.  What they threw at us was incidental and had only nuisance value.  Their aim was lousy anyway and although they scared hell out of us they never scored a hit on Jack's boat or mine.  We had to scram over and over again because of small arms fire from snipers but they never got closer than close.

It's queer how impersonal the whole business gets after the first few hours.  Making short, full-speed circles to run away from where the little water spouts jumped up got to be as commonplace as ducking under an awning out of the rain.

The mortar fire we could see landing on the beach was really much more personal because we could see what it was doing to the poor devils there.  The casualties were coming off the island in a steady stream, many of them being given plasmas in the small boats as they made their way to the hospital ships.  The ambulatory cases get to you most, perhaps because it's easier to see them, the stretcher cases are usually pretty well covered up.  Those who are unconscious don't have any expression one way or the other but the lads with powder blackened faces and white staring eyes, gaunt with shock and pain, get to you and give you a small idea of what's going on ashore.

We were so cold and so wet for so long that the skin on our hands got white and pulpy as it does after long immersion.  The skin on the under side of my hand has now completely peeled off.  Both Jack and I developed minor trouble with our feet toward the end of the operation.  Our toes got numb and stayed that way for weeks.  My left big toe is still not quite back to normal.

I spend the third night in Jack's boat because I had to send mine back to the ship for repairs and couldn't find it when it returned because of the darkness.  I got a little shelter by lying under a small bow deck but my feet stuck out in the rain and I had nothing to put over me so I didn't sleep to heartily.  The next night (D-3), we had the wonderful pleasure of getting back aboard the ship and getting a hot shower.  We'd not been able to wash, of course, since we left the ship on D-day so you can imagine how that hot shower felt!  After cleaning up we went to sick bay where we got a lovely big drink of brandy and a nice pill to make us sleep.  We had a good dinner and fell into our bunks in a state of sheer ecstasy and exhaustion.  When I think of what the Marines had to put up with on Iwo Jima I'm almost ashamed to write about my own fatigue.  It took them just about a month to finish their job and during that time what they experienced can't be grasped by people who weren't actually there with them.

The next morning the transports returned to the island early and Jack and I were about our salvage business again.  That night there was an air  raid and a terrific AA. barrage.  Every surface craft in sight was banging away with all it had and the color pattern from the tracers in the sky was beautiful.  The beauty of the sight was suddenly destroyed by my realization that a great deal of the fire was converging directly overhead and that we'd be in a shower of steel if we didn't get out from under.  We scrammed in a hurry and ran up the  beach in a northerly direction about a mile and watched the rest of the show from there.  It's a good thing we did because a number of casualties resulted from our own AA. fire.  Everything that goes up has got to come down somewhere and not all the shells explode in the air.

Our boat crews (26 of them) during all this time were giving a grand account of themselves and while we lost a few boats we didn't lose any men.  They were demonstrating their superior skill in boat handling and I know from careful inquiry that not a boat of ours was lost from poor seamanship or lack of courage. The boys throughout the operation took whatever came along in good spirit and did an admirable job.

The following three days were pretty much the same for us, salvage work at the beach line during the day and prowling around during the night.  We all learned to sleep in spite of the big guns.  We were all so tired we couldn't help sleeping I suppose.  But if anyone had told me beforehand that I could sleep with a destroyer 500 yards away firing five inch shells over my head I'd said they were crazy.  I was so dead I think I could have slept right on top of the gun turret.

Every night the Japs would come out of their holes and get tough with mortars until the ships would shut them up.  They mortared the beaches off and on, day and night all the time we were there but  from where I sat it seemed to me that they got particularly nasty every night just after dark.  About D-5 day they began shooting rocket propelled mortars that were supposed to be very large, possibly thousand pounders.  They were big, anyhow, and gave me the willies.  The Jap aim was poor and apparently their launching device was very crude, perhaps the whole device was crude.  Anyhow the damned things would go up in the air leaving an erratic trail of sparks behind so that we could follow their flight.  But when they reached their maximum height the propellant charge apparently exhausted itself and then we could no longer follow its course.  That's where the willies came in, waiting for the damned things to land.  Robert Sherrod in his Time article said that all the rocket propelled mortars landed harmlessly in the sea.  He should have been with me.

Our planes threw thousands of rocket bombs at the Jap gun positions.  They make an unearthly noise when they leave the planes.  Both the rockets and the planes are traveling at such a terrific speed that often by the time the sound reached us the planes would have leveled off and the rockets would already have landed.  I can't describe the sound they make except in terms of a swishing, howling noise that changes in pitch.  The big difference from other kinds of firing is that the noise has duration instead of just being one loud bang.

By the time we were half way through the Iwo operation we had begun to be organized a little in the boat for our personal comfort and of course had begun to get used to it.  We heated our cans of C rations and dried some of our clothes on top of the engine, cadged hot coffee in the morning from nearby LST's and even managed one night to have a chicken dinner.  The latter came as a result of one our boats taking in a load of Hormel canned chicken.  Some of it got spilled out during the unloading and enough cans were salvaged for three or four boat crews to have a special treat.

One of the things we did to try to improve our sleeping arrangement was to get some hammocks from the ship so that we could sleep off the deck.  That didn't work very well for us.  The tarpaulin we had was too short to reach all  the way across the boat and consequently the rain drained off the tarp and into the hammock.  I found difficulty sleeping with my tail in a puddle of water an inch deep.  I tried a hammock later after we'd borrowed a larger tarp but I couldn't get adjusted to the sway-back sleeping position and had to get out and lie on the deck.

I don't think any of us got over the fascination of the big shells floating overhead at night. Floating seems a very odd and inappropriate word I know but in spite of their speed they appear to be moving rather slowly.  I had always thought that a shell went so fast you'd not be able to see it at all.  The projectiles can be followed all the way from the ships that fire them to the target.  Some are red and some yellow and all are very nice to see especially when they're landing on the Nips.

On our next to the last day at Iwo, Jack and I were ordered to the beach to tow off partly submerged pontoons.  They had been taken to the beach with the idea of using them for loading stations but as a result of a series of mishaps they'd gotten broached on the beach.  We'd seen them there for days obstructing the beach but had not tried to tow them off because they were such tremendous things (about 125' x 20') and appeared to be settled on the bottom at their inshore end.  Anyhow we knew we'd have to try so I had my boat put me aboard the nearest one in order to secure the end of our tow-line.  I'd no sooner gotten on when the boat's screw got fouled up on a piece of line and I had to send it back on the ship for repairs.  I called Jack over but couldn't get his line on because boats kept broaching nearby and he had to leave to pull them off the beach.  It was here that I got my biggest thrill of the ten days.  While I was sitting on the end of the pontoon waiting for Jack to come back the slant eyes let go with a bunch of mortars.  The hits started walking down the beach from about 300 yards away and kept on coming until they were landing on the beach close by.  The nearest one landed on a small dump of ammunition about 75 feet away from me.  I've never felt quite so naked in my life.  I had nothing to hide behind  and no hole to jump in.  So I just sat and waved to Jack to come get me off my unhappy spot.  This he did in nothing flat and we moved off the beach a few hundred feet til things calmed down.  The pontoon never did get hit so I wouldn't have been hurt if I'd stayed there but it was very nice to stop playing duck on a rock with my being the duck.

Things quieted down shortly and I went back on the pontoon, secured Jack's tow-line, and to our amazement the little boat pulled it off.  After we got in out in deep water our elation at having done so died down fast because we then had to figure out what to do with it.  We had no way to sink it and no way to secure it so we finally towed in to within about 1500 yards of the Jap help north east coast and cast it adrift so that it would blow ashore where it wouldn't interfere with our boats.  We got the second one off too and towed that near a cruiser and got them to sink it with gunfire.

The following day, our last at Iwo, Jack and I spend the entire day working on pontoons again, this time on 195 foot sections of pontoon causeways that a net-layer was unsuccessfully trying to place in position on the beach.

Late that afternoon we got word that the ship was leaving the island and after finding a missing boat we all got back aboard.

We formed up with other transports and left the island.  I had had enough and was glad to be leaving.  There was nothing left to do anyway since we had landed all our troops and cargo so we could leave without feeling that we were running out on anybody.

I slept twelve hours that night and it was wonderful not to have to run out to the hard work in the interminable wetness the next morning.

We didn't lose a man or suffer a casualty as a result of enemy action.  We had broken legs and several minor injuries from loading operations but nothing of a really serious nature.  We held our end up satisfactorily and the ship got ?well dones from the Captain, the Admiral, and the Sec'y of the Navy.  If we can always do as well we need never be ashamed.

I'm sending you one souvenir that I value highly and want you to keep.  It's a piece out of the flag I flew in my boat during the operation.  All Boat Group Commanders fly the Zero flag.

Well, this turned out to be a long, rambling account that doesn't half tell the story but this is the best I can do.  Perhaps I shouldn't have written so much but I wanted to put down all I could while things are still fresh in my mind.  Besides it'll keep me from being an awful liar when the war's over and I begin to fight the battle of Iwo Jima all over again!

Pass this around to anyone who's interested because except to mention that I was in on the Iwo Jima operation I shan't write anyone else any details.
 
 

All my love,
 

Bill
 
 
 

**This letter was written by Lieutenant William Hall to the Lieutenant's wife from Iwo Jima. Lt. Hall was an officer in charge of the 26 landing craft (Higgins boats, LCVP) from the USS Sibley, APA206. Captain McQuiston, commanding officer, APA206.
 
 

ADDENDUM: March 2009

"Just thought I'd add a thought or two -- If I repeat, forgive me-- it's been a few years. Our boats -- "LCVP" - Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel -- made of plywood, with a diesel engine -- shallow draft-- about 25' long -- it took a real skilled individual to handle it -- through choppy seas they could change direction instantly, accompanied by strong winds that could change counter to the waves, often either with a Jeep or other vehicle, or 20-25 or more soldiers or Marines. The skill the coxswain had to have was to anticipate the wind, the waves, the type of beach, watch other boats & avoid collisions, anticipate enemy fire at the beach, etc, etc,--Not too many sailors had that ability -- your Dad did -- I never achieved that ability. I have an old article I'll try to find it --it's called "Higgens Boat Skippers." They are the unsung heroes of WWII in the Pacific. There are displays at the Nimitz Pacific museum in Texas, & the Amphibious Museum in New Orleans.  Hope this doesn't bore you."  - Bob Collyer