American Valor Quarterly Issue 2 - Spring 2008 | Page 12

February 19, 1945. At 08:59—one minute ahead of schedule—United States Marines stormed ashore on the black sands of Iwo Jima. The
first moments were eerily quiet, but the calm was not to last. Iwo Jima would become a hell on earth, where a great many heroes were made, and a
great many brave men were lost—nearly 7,000 Americans killed and 20,000 wounded. It would go down as one of the great and tragic battles in
history.
At the 10th Annual Conference, three of the battle’s survivors, who witnessed the horror—and heroism—that was Iwo Jima, recounted their
experience. Chuck Tatum, Donald Mates, and James White were just three of the thousands for whom “uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

Chuck Tatum: Hello, I’m Chuck Tatum, and I was a member of B Company, 1st Battalion of the 27th Marines at Iwo Jima.
And as I look in the audience, I see an awful lot of young people here, some of whom don’t look any older than I was when
I was at Iwo Jima. Well, some people haven’t heard of Iwo Jima; it’s been over 60 years, and has started to fade into history.
Why was there an Iwo Jima? It’s just eight square miles of volcanic rock out in the middle of the ocean. And its only value was
that it was big enough to build a landing strip big enough to land a B-29 on, and if you had a place to land B-29s, you could fly
it all the way to Tokyo and hit it with the big bombers.

National Archives

I don’t know how many of us invaded on that first day, but in the first wave, there were 9,000 Marines involved. By this time
in the war, we had captured the islands of Saipan and Tinian, and from there you could fly the B-29s and bomb Tokyo. But
there was one flaw in the plan: Iwo Jima was halfway between Saipan and Tinian, and Tokyo—600 miles from Tokyo. And on
Iwo Jima, the Japanese had fighter planes that could rise up to