Reminds me that I need to add “The Sands of Iwo Jima” to my Netflix queue. One of John Wayne’s finest movies. Yes, at the end of the movie, they show the flag raising on Mt. Surabachi, in very dramatic fashion. Leaves me with wet eyes and lump in my throat every time.
If you haven’t seen it, yet. Watch “The Pacific”, I think it superior to Band of Brothers (and that’s saying something)
“Reminds me that I need to add “The Sands of Iwo Jima” to my Netflix queue.” ....
Comments on “Sands of Iwo Jima”; a review of credits for the film reveals that then Col. David Shoup appears in a fight scene between John Wayne & Forrest Tucker. In the closing scenes, John Bradley, Rene Gagnon and Ira Hayes make brief appearances.
A USNA graduate, correspondent Hanson Baldwin’s dispatches from Iwo Jima, were written in the reality of battle. I respectfully suggest reading a bit of his multiple accounts of the battle. In my mind he summed up the essence of being a U.S. Marine.
February 22, 1945
Marines’ Hardest Fight
They Enrich Traditions of Our Forces Despite Grievous Losses on Tiny Iwo!
New York Times
By Hanson W. Baldwin
Marines were dying yesterday in the toughest battle of the Corps’ long history of valor, but the flag was firmly planted on the volcanic sands of Iwo, gateway to Tokyo
The Marine Corps needs no accolade; its deeds speak in triumphant, rolling phrases - Belleau Wood and Tarawa, Saipan and Iwo. The Marine Corps needs no historian to write with blood-dipped pen of battles past and present and battles still to come; the battle ‘ streamers and the crosses - France and North Africa, China and Bataan. Kwajalein and Guam - tell its tale of courage. The flag flying over the islands of the Pacific is the Corps’ accomplishment and its accolade.
Now the Marines have come to their hardest battle - a battle still unwon. Our first waves on Iwo were almost wiped out: 3,650 Marines were dead, wounded or missing after only two days of fighting on the most heavily defended island in the world, more than the total casualties of Tarawa, about as many as all the Marine casualties on Guadalcanal in five months of jungle combat.
Our losses have been grievous and the greater toll is still ahead, yet the Marines are undaunted: still they come on. To the south, a living wave of men is lapping slowly up the ugly, pocked crater of Mount Suribachi, whose guns and mortars dominate the sand where our beaches lie.
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