Dear Friends:
On March 26, 1945, Marine officer Bill Henderson was told he could finally leave the island of Iwo Jima. He was among the first waves of men to hit the beaches on Iwo’s D-Day, February 19. He would survive thirty-six days of what scholars recognize as among the most brutal combat in the recorded history of warfare. (Historians described the U.S. forces’ attack against the Japanese defense as “throwing human flesh against reinforced concrete.”) During that time, he would continue to fight, would personally inflict serious casualties on the enemy, would watch hundreds of his comrades die, and would even hold the hand of his disemboweled and dying best friend who had less than a minute to live after a shell landed just inches from where Henderson had been sitting. The shell hit everything but Bill Henderson.
The Fifth Division storms
the beach at Iwo Jima
Marines on Iwo Jima raise the
American flag on Mt. Suribachi
The island now secured, Bill Henderson received orders to gather his men, head for the beaches, and disembark the island. But after thirty-six days of non-stop warfare, with the reign of death ever-present around them, most of these soldiers appeared just a broken hull of their former selves.
There are times when words like “physical exhaustion” can trivialize the depths and the magnitude of the toll on men who sacrifice everything for their country, their family, and their brothers-in-arms. This was one of them.
Henderson would recall to me with quivering voice and tears in his eyes, that one of the most beautiful sights he had ever seen occurred when these once-proud and strong Marines, now crumpled with fatigue, could not muster the strength to make it up the rope ladders of the ships that had come to their rescue. Out from the ships jumped the freshly arrived Navy men. The sailors picked up the Marines like small children, cradled them in their arms, and physically carried them up the rope ladders.
Col. Bill Henderson was also among the Marines to hit the shores
of Tarawa on D-Day
The battle for Peleliu Island
“I will never forget those Navy boys,” Henderson told me.
An hour earlier, Henderson’s bedraggled team was still making their way to the beach when, for the first time, they passed the graveyard of the U.S. Marine Corps. Now they saw, in grand perspective, the price for securing Iwo: Before them was a vast sea of markers to their dead companions — more than five thousand white crosses.
The crosses marked the resting place of five thousand of America’s finest — five thousand men whose bodies would forever rest on a volcanic rock in the middle of the Pacific; five thousand men who would never see their mothers and their wives; five thousand men, most of whom would never be fathers or grandfathers, or ever hold a son and a daughter in their arms; five thousand men who would never see the world they helped to preserve or the millions of free Americans who would follow because of their sacrifice.
In front of the Fifth Division graveyard, someone had posted a handwritten sign. It said simply this:
“When you go home, tell them for us and say: ‘For your tomorrows, we gave our today.’”
At this moment, they mustered every last ounce of strength in their beaten bodies, crawled their way into formation, and stood at attention.
No one told them to do so. They simply could not help themselves.
From Whence Do the Bravest Derive Their Strength?
I asked Bill Henderson if he was ever afraid of dying on Iwo Jima. Without hesitation or blinking, he responded in sum:
“No, I never feared death. The only thing I feared was letting down my father.... You see, he was a Christian.”
For nearly sixty years, Bill Henderson never spoke of Iwo Jima. His wife, his children, his family and friends knew he had been there, but little else. Like many of the men of his generation, he found it difficult to speak of such things, and he wondered if anyone really cared...
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