Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas. Our guest in this edition is
Donald Graves. He's a US Marine Corps veteran of World War II and the
Battle of Ewojima, where he served as a flamethrower operator. Today we'll hear
the first part of Don's story from joining the service, to training and eventually
to the top of Mount Suribachi on Ewojima. That's where he was a witness
to the flag raising in the early days of fighting there. In the next
edition, we'll hear about the horrific fighting after the flag raising, countering the
devastating Japanese mortars, and a very real perspective on the cost of freedom.
Today we begin mister Graves's story at the beginning. Donald Graves was born in
Detroit, Michigan, in May of nineteen twenty five. When he was just
four years old, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began, and
his family was significantly impacted. Graves remembers his mother sewing and patching and scrubbing
clothes clean because new clothes and dry cleaning were simply not affordable. As a
kid, Graves sold copies of the Saturday Evening post for five cents apiece,
and he was able to keep one and a half cents of every sale.
The depression also forced his family to move outside of Detroit. I grew up
in Detroit, but I lived in my grandma and grandpa's cottage fifty miles out
of Detroit during part of the depression because we couldn't pay rent. But we
were fortunate that my grandma and grandpa had a cottage on a beautiful lake,
one of the best fish in lakes in Michigan at that time. So that's
where we grew up. We went to a country school. We walked two
and a half miles all the time because we didn't have a car, and
we went through the snow and everything. It was rough, really rough.
Graves also remembers the hope that President Franklin Roosevelt brought to the nation, including
urging Americans not to be fearful. Little did he know that FDR would be
his commander in chief just a few short years later. Graves was sixteen when
the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December seventh, nineteen forty one. He remembers
the day vividly, as well as the process of joining the Marines. It
was the day after Pearl Harbor. It was the eighth of December. And
I remember that the three of us, we were buddies. We grew up
together, we went off to war, we came back home, we got
married, and that seemed to break our fellowship up. But we were sitting
in an old car in front of my house on the eighth of December in
the morning. And you know, that was in the time when the big
bands were going good and heavy, and we loved the big bands, and
we were listening to the big bands recordings. Then all of a sudden,
the announcer came on and he said, ladies and gentlemen, will interrupt this
broadcast. The President of the United States is going to address the nation.
And we didn't know what's he going to say, you know, and on
came the President, and this is what he said. And I have a
habit of talking somewhat like him. Yesterday, December seventh, nineteen forty one,
a date there will live in infamy. United States of America was suddenly
and deliberately attacked upon by the naval and armed forces of the Empire of Japan.
I interpret the will of Congress and of the people. We shall gain
try victory, so help us God. I said to my two buddies,
I'm going to go down. I'm skipping school tomorrow morning. I'm going down
to the Marine Corps office and I'm going to sign up. They said,
you can't. You got me seventeen. You're only sixteen. I said,
I only got six months ago. I'll get the paper, but I'm going
down there. Next morning. I got up and I told my two sisters
and brother, I said, don't say anything to my I'm going. I
told them what I was going to do. They said, okay. So
I went downtown one mile. I practically ran it, got into the Frederal
building, went up on the fourth floor. I knew every building downtown.
I delivered invoices there and on the fourth floor and the GUTTI sergeant met me
in the doorway and he says, what can I do for you, young
fellow. I says, I'm going to sign up. He said how old
are you? I said sixteen. I can't do it. You've got to
be seventeen. When will you be seventeen, I said, I'll be seventeen
and five and a half six months. He said, I'm going to give
you some paper. You take this to your mother and father when you turn
seventeen. You have them sign that, and you bring this to me and
then we can do a business. And he said do you want to do
that? And I said yes, sir. He said go and he gave
me the paper and I ran all the way home. Now I was so
excited. I ran through the back door. My mother was in the kitchen.
She stared at me. She said, what are you doing home?
And I went, oh, my gosh, ma, and I told her
what I did. She said, I'm not going through this again. I
went through one war already, I'm not going to go through this. Throw
that paper away. I went in the dining room and I stuck it in
the top door with papers on top. Six months later, we had a
birthday. I was seventeen. My dad was there. He wasn't always there,
but he was there that time. And I said, Dad signed this.
He said, what is it? I want to go in the room
because give me a pen and he signed it. And he said to my
mother, Vera, come here, sign this. He's going in the Marine
Corps. And she said, I'm not signing that paper. I went through
it with you and I'm not going to go through that again. And he
said, vera, listen to me. The boy walks out of school,
he's been doing odd jobs. He'll probably turn out to be a bum.
And when he said that, I went like this to my mother and she
said, give me a pen. Give me the pen. She signed it.
I'm done with it. I ran all the way back downtown Detroit.
Met the gunny again. He said, how did you? I said,
I'm seventeen. The papers were signed. He said, good, see that
door over there. I said, yes, sir. He said, you're
going in that door and you're going to meet a Navy doctor and that doctor
is going to check you over from the top of your head to the tip
of your toes, and you ain't never going to forget a young man.
You want to go? I said, yes, sir. He said go,
And I went through it and I will never forget that physical. I
still remember it. From there. It was onto training in San Diego.
Grave says he not only remembers the intense training, but a huge sense of
patriotism that swelled throughout the camp. There were so many kids signing up in
the Marine Corps that they had to put tins out along the Boondog, which
is down by the water. All along there there were tents. Kids were
just storming in and the D's they had to they had to make more d
I's drill instructors. That parade grown was not as big as it is now.
I was there three weeks ago. I spent five days there. I
couldn't believe it. But it's big now, and it was small in those
days. And we would all all the platoons would gather up and we would
march in around one another. We never touched. We thought we were going
to crash into one another, but that d I had his left or blink
right or blak. We've brought around one another. Every morning the band came
out and the flag was raised and they played the Star Spangled Banner, and
I remember that every one of us kids had tears coming down our face.
I have to tell you, we were Americans, and we were taught this
in our schools in that day, and we had the national anthem every morning
before classes started. We used to walk out around the flag pole every grade
school, every junior, high school. I can't speak for high school because
I went off to war. But every morning we went around the flag pole.
We sang the national anthem as a janitor was raising Old Glory up on
the flag pole. That's the kind of kids we were. That's what the
schools taught us. As mentioned, the training was intense, and Grebs says,
the young man who finished boot camp were very different than the ones who
arrived in BOOKEMP. We had no idea of this, but when we got
in there, we were somewhat shocked. They took teenage boys and made young
men out of us. They took every bit of nonsense out of us.
We completely changed, and I think that's the only thing in our day.
We didn't have post syndrome. We didn't have any of that after the war.
But we came back to what we left and now we're changed and we
can adjust to this. So that's what war does to young men. When
the training centers that boot camps get through with you, you are in a
different world, you're in a different family, and your language changes, your
respect for things change. The biggest reason for the change is because these young
men knew they would soon be at war and only one side could win.
One of the most serious things that we learned, emphasis on it kill or
be killed. I can remember we did bayonet practice. Now, the First
World War, there was a lot of bayonet practice because you hit head on.
But the Japanese came to us at two o'clock in the morning and we
were fighting. We couldn't go to sleep. We hadn't had sleep for six
weeks on Iwo Jima. And you're trained to fight that, so your whole
outlook, your brain is transformed into fighting the enemy or be killed. After
going through basic training, Graves was thrown a curveball when he was selected to
train and serve as a flamethrower operator. My captain put that on my back.
He said, Graves, you're a new friends. So I said,
why sir, Because you're short. The other boys tallness don't make it.
Do you know? I have to tell you the lifespan of the flame tour
in combat four minutes. That's the life span I went through six weeks and
came off the island all by myself. No other flame tours. I'm the
only one that came back in my battalion. That's Don Graves, a US
Marine Corps veteran of World War Two and the Battle of Ewogma. When we
come back Graves will share more of his flamethrower training. He will also tell
us about his first short lived deployment and the build up to EWOGMA. I'm
Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles Sixty Seconds of Service. This sixty Seconds
of Service is presented by T Mobile. T Mobile offers exclusive discounts for a
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and states across the country, is helping veterans become teachers. That program is
having an impact in Hampton Roads. James Kimbrow is a teacher at Cacoutin High
School in Hampton. He's also a twenty two year Army veteran. His journey
to the classroom began while he was still in the Army. He said,
I just grew to absolutely love helping soldiers be better versions of themselves, furthering
their career, furthering their training, and helping them go through that. When
he retired, he reached out to Troops to Teachers for help becoming a teacher.
They've assisted up to three thousand veterans since twenty seventeen. For more great
veterans stories, just go to National Defense Network dot com. This is Veterans
Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this addition is Don Graves,
a US Marine Corps veteran of World War Two and the Battle of Ewojima.
Still Ahead, Graves shares his gripping story of coming ashore at Ewojima and fighting
to the top of Surabachi, where the American flag was famously raised. But
we pick up our story as Graves explains why the flame thrower he was ordered
to operate required a very different mindset than carrying a rifle with the rest of
the infantry. We made a flamethrower operator is entirely different. It's entirely different.
And I thought when we trained, I thought, I'm going to really
be scared with this thing, But you aren't. When I hit the beach
on my back, we hit the sand, I had a man on my
left and a man of my right. They have to take care of me.
If they're gone, I don't know what I'm going to do. And
I had to go through some of that until another buddy caught up with missus
ogle with you. That's what happened. But a flame thrower is number one
when they see the fire. Any of us, you would do it yourself,
everybody would do it. You'd be terrified because fire is rolling at you
consumes, so it's a devastation. But I felt like a lot of power
when I fired that flame tour, But I knew that it was a target.
I never thought about it too much. Though. The flamethrower became a
critically important weapon on Ewojima, as we will learn later on in Don Graves's
story. But how did it work? How long did they last, and
what happened when you ran out of fuel? Graves gives us a quick tutorial.
The flame throw was seventy two pounds full, and you had five gallons
of fuel, two and a half in one tank, two and a half
of the other, one pressure tank in the middle. You had fifteen seconds
if you held the trigger back. That's all you had. What we did,
though, was burst, burst, and we had about six or seven
bursts in your route. And you call for another field wind, they'll pick
up the other wood. Before long, Graves and his fellow marines were sent
about as far south as you can go in the South Pacific, but plans
to finally enter combat had to be delayed. First time I went overseas,
it was nineteen forty two. Later in forty two, after I graduated from
boot camp and we trained, I was with a second anti tank battalion.
I drove a Dodge pickup truck with a thirty seven millimeter mounted right next to
my head. That's why we're hearing aids. I lost a lot of my
hearing. And we went overseas to New Zealand. It took us six weeks
to get there. We could only travel seven knots and curve like this all
the way because of submarines, and we trained there for three months. We
were ready for bear. We were loaded, We were told we were going
to go someplace, and before we board a ship, they canceled out and
we were told we were going to go to mea New Caledonia, another just
off the Solomons. We were there, and then all of a sudden we
got well, we're going to leave there, and all the Mariesia were not
actually in combat at that time, went back to San Diego and we formed
the fifth Marine Division along with some new fresh boots. Graves would be reassigned
to the new fifth Infantry Division of the Marine Corps, and, as he
explains, the division was an interesting combination of troops like him who had not
yet experienced combat along with others who had seen a great deal of action.
What built this division up the raiders They just disbanded, paratroopers, disbanded all
special weapons went into the fifth Division, and that's what they formed the fifth
Division. I would say that three fourths of our troops in that division had
already had combat, rest were fresh boots. And that's the division that I
was assigned to after I went over and we came back to the States and
we were running too that division, and it was a great fighting division.
As the fifth Marines waited for their assignment, war planners were hard at work.
The division would be sent to Ewo Jima, and Graves says President Roosevelt
and Admiral Chester Nimitz had a very good reason for that. Now, a
Navy admiral told me this. I was speaking to the Navy group and he
stood up and said this. He said. Roosevelt came in in his wheelchair
with this everything on his lece and he had a long stick and he rolled
right up to a board and put the stick on a little spot about five
six hundred miles south of Tokyo, and he said, gentlemen, do you
know where I'm pointing? They didn't know. Admiral Nimmus stood up. He
said, mister President, if I'm not making a mistake, you were right
on an island called iwo Jima. And he says, exactly, I want
that island. It's it's knocking our beat twenty nine out of the sky.
They wire ahead when we crossed over them. It needs to be out of
the way. We've got to do it. And Admiral said, mister President,
I want that Adam too, And that was the reason. That's Don
Graves, a US Marine Corps veteran of World War Two and the Battle of
Ewogima. When we come back, mister Graves shares the gripping story of arriving
at Ewojima, the struggle to get off the beach, and the fighting all
the way to the top of Mount Suribachi. And of course you'll hear about
perhaps the most famous flag raising in history. And Don Graves was right there.
That's next I'm Greg Corumbus, and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is
Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is Don Graves.
He is a US Marine Corps veteran of World War Two and the very
costly Battle of Ewojima. More than two years and nine months after Graves joined
the Marines at age seventeen, he was finally headed into combat on the island
of Ewojima in February nineteen forty five. As we mentioned before the break,
President Roosevelt and Admiral Nimitz decided the island was critical in advancing successfully toward Japan.
Air defenses on Ewojima were taking too many American lives and destroying our planes.
The island needed to be under Allied control, so the fifth Division headed
west across the Pacific. But Graves and his fellow Marines were kept in the
dark about where they were going and what they would be doing for a very
long time. Going to Ewojima, we left San Diego three divisions, and
it took us two and a half weeks to get there. One day out
they finally brought clay models on tables and showed us what e regima looked like
what was underneath, caves and everything. We did not know at the time
what the casidies were. When our air force hammered away on it, very
little. They just went back underground. Let them go ahead and have their
fun bombing. But it didn't tear up their planes and things. They lost
their air force. That's why it was a little bit easy for us.
After training for nearly three years, Graves and the other Marines were more than
ready for the fight ahead, or so they thought. He says. Most
Marines were not afraid as the invasion drew closer. None of us were afraid.
We talked about this. Those of us that made it went back home.
We would sitting in the citty near the PX, having a little party,
and we would talk. But we weren't afraid. Why. I don't
know. We trained so long as so much we wanted to use it,
and here now we're going to use it. I think that's it. The
morning of the invasion, the Marines were greeted with a fancier breakfast than usual.
Some saw it as a special treat before heading off into combat, but
Graves says others had a more cynical approach. The first time I ever had
steak in the Marine Corps was on a board ship. The very morning we
hit the beach. We could see the battle on the oend. We could
see our planes flying over and fighting. And all of a sudden they brought
chawa from down below, and it was steaking eggs. And I had a
kid next to me and says, hey, buddy, what's with the steak
and eggs? You see Graves use your head. What do they do with
convicts before they execute them? And we all kind of laughed. That's the
humor we had. We did not know what we were in for. That
steak and eggs would come back up for more than a few As they climbed
into the landing crafts got information and began the shore, Graves says. The
Japanese resistance began well before they reached the beach. He says, the landing
crafts and the Marines on board suffered through withering fire. Oh. I would
say three four hundred feet away from them the island easily. They tried to
stop us from hitting the sand, you know, And what they did when
we hit the sand and got started walking, it came up just below your
knee. They had taken bulldoozer and powed up all the that's not sand,
it's volcanic ash what we call a sand, and they powded it all up
so that it would sink when we walked in it. See, our half
tracks are tanks. They just sat there. They couldn't get up. They
knew what they were doing. The first wave got the green light to go
ashore, and of course the second wave followed. Then Don Graves and the
rest of the third wave got their turn, and Graves vividly remembers the intensity,
the uncertainty, and the determination to push through the fierce attacks unleashed by
Japanese forces. The Japanese called our vehicles that took us to the beach,
they called them alligators because they had wheels and also tracks, and so that's
what we loaded up and we rallied around the circle. Then all of a
sudden, the commodore dropped the flag and each wave went in. I was
in the third wave, Green Beach one, two three, and that all
three divisions and hit. When we got up towards the shore. As we
were going, I heard something and it was a sound I never heard before.
It was a whoomph whoomph, and they were blowing our landing craft out
of the water with our buddies in it. It was terrible, but they
did not hit us. We could not get up on the sand. We
got it was about two and a half three feet of water, and the
boatsman said, all right, overboard, buddy, overboard. I said,
how am I going to get out of here? So my two guys left
and right got me, picked me and pushed me over and went down the
water. They jumped over, picked me up, and we ran to the
sand and hit face down. And I heard everything going on, the scream
and they yelling, the rockets, everything going on out in the water behind
us. And as I looked to my right, every vehicle, every equipment
that tried to get up on there was blown in half and turned upside down,
and marine bodies floating in the water. Terrible sight. The courage to
fight and win was in abundance that day on the black ashy beaches of Ewo
Jima, and so was the will to survive. Marines lying on the ground
all over the beach, thick bump elbow to elbow, some dead, some
alive, some terrified. I've even seen a few guys. I had a
kid crawl back to me from the top and he was shot in the neck
and he said, help me, buddy, help me. You can't.
You can't help. We have Corman for that. And I said, don't
worry abouddy the corner ooka. They're common, they'll take care of you.
Don't worry about it. And he wouldn't. Right on by me. That's
what you tell him. Don Graves was no different as he lugged his flamethrower
with him while trying to advance on the beach. It was right there on
ewo Jima that Graves made a vow to God, a vow that he would
eventually make good on. When I hit the beach, I failed to say
something. I prayed for the first time in my life. We were not
church going kids. We didn't have any decent clothes, we didn't spend time
in church. But I knew there was a God, and I said God,
I said, I don't know much about you, but if you can
get me off this, I don't know, serve you the rest of my
life. Well six weeks later he got me off, but you didn't get
me until nine years later at a belly Graham Meeting. Getting off the beaches
at Ewojima proved difficult for many US forces. The sand, which was really
black ash, made it hard to find footing, and military vehicles bogged down
and became inviting targets for the Japanese. The intense Allied bombing campaign before the
amphibious landing had accomplished very little as the Japanese hid in their caves. Ewojima
is also very rugged and mountainous, meaning the Japanese held the high ground and
often found shooting positions in the clefts of the rock that were virtually impossible for
the Americans to detect. But despite all of those factors stacked against them,
Don Graves and the other Marines who survived the initial invasion found a way off
the beach. It took me about two maybe perhaps to three hours for a
lot of us to get moving because the ones in front of us the first
two waves, they weren't moving. We had to let that this is the
problem. When you hit an island in the South Pacific. You've got to
the first battle is the beach that's number one. Then you got to get
across. You got to take the island that's number two. And if you
don't get number one up there, you can't have number two. And that
was the problem. We couldn't move, They wouldn't let us move, so
we were jammed up. Now it was time to execute their assignments, and
for the fifth Marine Infantry Division, the tasks were very clearly defined. Dog
Company. We had three companies in our battalion. Easy Company was the company
that went around the left and took the patrol look to put the flag up.
We were fighting our way up on the right side in the middle.
If company was over on the right of us, we went right up through
the through the middle, and the Japanese come out of their case waves.
There were caves all over and dropped hangarin is down on us. We had
heavy casualties, heavy and we couldn't throw anything back because it won't go uphill.
Everything rolled back at you. But while the objectives were clear, completing
them proved more difficult. As Graves just suggested, the Marines had to go
uphill and then fight their way over to Mount Surabachi, and the Japanese used
every possible obstacle to slow them down. When we got up to the top
from the beach and made a left turn. Those of us that were left,
we moved and dropped in foxholes. And I have to tell you the
Air Corps which is now the Air Force, the Air Corps, when they
dropped those bombs made a great, big, beautiful hole, just like Tailor
made for three marines. You crawl in and you could live in that.
We could not dig at ourselves because it would cave in on us. That
brew that right out of there, and that's what that's what we hid in
all the way five hundred and seventy five feet on the third day, and
when we reached the base, they were you could see them run back and
forth behind rocks. They had rocks. They had a real good fortification.
So we sat there for almost a day trying to get over that thing.
We called for aircraft cover and they came in and pounded it, and then
we just went right in and that was it. Now, I didn't have
a bayonet because I had the gun, you know, so, but the
boys used their bayonets if they had to. Fortunately, they went back in
the cave down below and headed towards the north. On February twenty third,
nineteen forty five, four days after coming ashore, the Marines reached the summit
of Mount Surabachi, but Graves had no idea that one of history's iconic moments
would soon follow the flag raising. We finally reached the crest and as we
got up on the hill on top of Mauser Rabachi, they're raising that flag.
And the first thing we said was, how in the world did they
put a flag up. We didn't know anything about a flag. We had
nothing. We didn't know about putting a flag up. I tell you how
that happened. Our battalion commander Chandler Johnson had a flag that the captain of
the transport gave him and said to him, Chandler, he said, when
you get up there, try and put this up for me. Will you
do that? And he said yes. Well, he gave him the flag,
but we had no pole, We had nothing to tie a flag on.
But when they got up around the top they met a few Japanese.
They had a skirmish, they killed them, and they started rigging up something.
It was a pipe. Now, when people see that flag of a
mouts Rabachi, that's not a flag pole. That is a drain pipe put
together. They found it on top, so they had the mast. Now
I wondered what they tied the flag on with. It was wire. They
found wire and they tied it with wire. So that's how the flag got
up. And I tell you there were five hundred ships out in that bay.
When that flag went up, every ship sounded off with rockets in the
air. It was a spectacle. Our boys that got ahead of us on
the north end, they were throwing tracers up in the air. It was
a wonderful sight. Brought tears to her eyes. Six Marines would soon become
famous for raising the flag in the Joseph Rosenthal photo, but Graves says that
moment was made possible by thousands upon thousands of brave Americans who took the island,
and far too many who paid the ultimate sacrifice. You know, we
heard so much about five or six fellows putting the flag up. That's not
true. Three division put it up. We all did our job. We
all put it up, and that should have been said. We all fought
that battle so that that flag could be up. That's Don Graves, a
US Marine Corps veteran of World War II and the Battle of Ewojima. In
our next edition, Graves will walk us through the rest of his six weeks
fighting against the Japanese on Ewojima. He'll explain the devastating impact of Japanese mortars,
how he successfully calculated where the Japanese had positioned a key mortar so the
US could take it out. He'll also share the stories of loss, from
the sheer numbers of American lives sacrifice there to the tragic personal story of one
young man in his own foxhole. In addition, Graves will explain why the
flamethrower was such an effective tool against the Japanese on Ewojima, and we will
hear about a very lighthearted moment involving Graves, his fellow Marines and enemy Japanese
soldiers. He will also explain how the Battle of ewo Jima ended, in
what it was like to leave the island after so much devastation and loss over
those six weeks. You'll hear his thoughts on the end of the war and
President Truman's decision to drop two atomic weapons on the Japanese in order to end
the war. And you'll hear his reflections nearly eighty years later on the Greatest
Generation and how critical it is that younger generations understand and appreciate the sacrifices necessary
for freedom to survive. Please don't miss part two of Don Grave's story.
I'm Greg Corumbus. Join us next time for Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this
is Greg Corumbus and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the
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