The following are some excerpts from the story of U.S. Marine and Iwo Jima survivor Russ Kohloff's chapter in The Hero Next DoorTM
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941, Russ Kohloff, a some of his best friends from high school rushed down to the U.S. Marine Corps recruiter to help their country fight back. The next four years, fighting his way through Pacific Ocean islands and into one of the bloodiest battles in the history of the Marine Corps, the fight for a minuscule, barren island called Iwo Jima.
After his enlistment in 1942, Kohloff spent much of 1943 helping the Allies climb back up the chain of Solomon Island as they tried to drive the Japanese back to their home island. He fought on jungle islands like Vella Lavella, where Marines withstood strafing by Japanese fighters and inland fighting; Bougainville where the jungle proved as ruthless an enemy as the Japanese; and Choiseul in November where they faced little strong resistance.
But, Kohloff doesn't share too many other memories of islands he fought on before he landed with the 5th Division Marines at Iwo Jima in February 1945, not because men didn't die there nor because it wasn't tough going. But, because "once you saw fighting on Iwo Jima every other battle seemed not as bad."
By Feb. 19, 1945, Kohloff was riding in an enormous convoy heading for a mere 7-mile long by 2 ½-mile wide strip of land in the Pacific, called Iwo Jima. Because the small island was less than 800 miles from Japan, it was needed emergency landing strip for bombers and a fighter escort-launching platform for the U.S. Army Air Force. Before Iwo Jima was secured, many planes crashed in the Pacific and hundreds of crewmen died because there was nowhere but water to land on.
Kohloff and some 60,000 Marines would give Allied bombers the sanctuary that over 24,761 B-29 crewmen used for emergency landings by the end of the war. It was a small plot of sanctuary bought at an enormous price.
SO MANY HEROES
"We were going into Iwo on the 9th wave, about 10 minutes after the initial landing... . Our destination was to secure the first airstrip on the island in three days and then we would be relined for Okinawa (invasion)."
The squad soon got into the landing craft and the boat circled between the big ships for protection until they got the signal it was their time to hit the beachhead.
"You've never heard such racket in all your life; the bombardment of the island was incredible. And over it we heard these Navy guys yelling at us, 'Go get 'em you glory hungry bastards!'
"That charged us up even more. I wouldn't say we were afraid, though we sure had that squeezing feeling you get before combat because you don't know what to expect. We should have been much more afraid."
Kohloff almost didn't make it into fight against 21,000 entrenched Japanese. He nearly drowned trying to get there.
"As soon as our landing craft started going fast toward the island, we got hit, not a direct hit but on the side. The force put us on our side and we all went into the water.
"I went under, sinking like a rock with the extra bandaliers, all that ammo and stuff on. I was fighting like crazy to get it off but I made it ashore."
He arrived on the already body-strewn beach battleground, right under Mt. Suribachi with no ammo, no rifle and no helmet. Though the first few waves had gone in with much less resistance than they'd all later endure, Kohloff still had to pick his replacement rifle and ammo from among the "dead guys lying all over the place."
He thought he'd found a helmet too, at first. "I found a guy lying there with his helmet still on so I started taking his helmet off, thinking he was dead. This guy turns around and said 'what the **** are you doing?!' and I said 'oh, sorry, I thought you were dead.'"
Soaking wet, Kohloff eventually headed along the beach just east from Mt. Suribachi to where he knew his unit was supposed to land. He found them dug in as best as they could for cover.
"As soon as you hit the beach you just fell down and crawled around on that soft volcanic ash on your hands and knees. There was nothing to hide behind and you couldn't dig a hole in that soft stuff. And, there were land mines all over the place just in case the bullets didn't get you. But, the soft ash sand did kind of muffle the mortars when they hit so they didn't throw as much shrapnel as they would have."
Kohloff spent most of that first day and night dodging those mortar shells since "it was strictly artillery against us; there wasn't much to fire at.
"I remember that first night was the worst because they just kept dropping mortars all down the beach. Boats were trying to come in with more troops and to take wounded out but it was so clogged with sunken boats and bodies that they couldn't get in."
The dead and wounded were piling up fast, reported The Spearhead (p. 53). "Wounded men were arriving on the beach by the dozen where they were not much better off than they had been at the front. There was no cover to protect them and supplies of plasma and dressings ran low. The first two boats bringing in badly needed litters were blown out of the water. Casualties were being hit a second time as they lay helpless under blankets awaiting evacuation."
Then in the night, Kohloff adds, it got worse for the wounded.
"That night the tide came in. Since the aid stations had to be set up on the edge of the beach by the waterand there were just so many woundedthe tide washed a lot of them right out to sea."
Casualties that first 24 hours were enormous. "I think everybody got wounded in some way. Iwo Jima was just seven miles long and we had more than two casualties for every yard of it that we took!
"I got wounded on my arm, hit by shrapnel and went into the aid station. They told us we had to bandage ourselves unless you were real bad, which I wasn't. That's when a guy came in dragging his buddy with him and begging them to help his buddy. And, here was this guy, himself shot in the stomach, and he was more concerned that they treat his buddy. There were so many heroes in such a short space that day."
Who survived and who perished in that short space was as much about luck or fate or the grace of God as it was about heroes.
Kohloff still struggles to explain why he was spared when so many died. "As a life member of the VFW, I have met many men that have been in combat in W.W. II, Korea and Vietnam and a lot of us share the guilty feeling because we were lucky to come back and so many were left over there."
That first night he and four Marines from his unit felt especially lucky.
"Sgt. Harris had a nice big hole we dug into on the beach. It was getting dark and all of sudden this captain came running up to it and said we had to get out, that he needed it to set up a command post in.
"We weren't happy about it but he outranked us so we got out. It wasn't maybe an hour later that they took a direct shell hit in that hole. They were all killed and we were left to ask why we were spared."
By dawn the toll of fighting was counted in the bodies covering the beach. There was little let up as Kohloff and company finally scaled that sea wall and made their way to the first landing strip, arriving as planned on the third day.
Though the battle never let up much, by the third day the beach was more secure and Marines like Kohloff were relieved of battle duty for a time, though the task they had was no relief.
"We were helping pick up the wounded and dead. Sometimes that was the worst. We had a burial on the beach and the bodies were stacked like cordwood, 15 to 20 feet high.
"One company had nine people left with all privates first class in command. Some companies were completely wiped out."
And, they weren't finished fighting yet, not by six miles! In all some 6,821 Marines died taking Iwo Jima. the 5th Marine Division alone suffered 8,770 casualties between Feb. 19 and March 26, including nearly 2,500 killed in action. The division buried 7,710 enemy dead, more than half of all enemy dead the landing force interred on Iwo Jima; the Japanese reportedly buried 10,000 of their own as well. (The Spearhead, p.121)
Kohloff and the 5th Division fought 30 more days to secure Iwo Jima. " We were fighting all the time. You had a constant buzzing in your ears and the stench from the dead bodies was just terrible. After a while you actually kind of acclimated yourself to death. I can remember the first four or five days on Iwo Jima like it was yesterday. But then as I try to think after that a lot of the next 30 days or so there seem foggy. I think it's because, by then, we were so tired as we had no sleep for about 100 hours. All the shelling we were under, we were just numb."
BACK TO LIFE
It was nearly a year before Kohloff returned to civilian life after he was discharged in November 1945. All of the high school friends he enlisted with, except one who died on Guam, eventually made it home too.
As good as home felt, Kohloff had a difficult time leaving his military memories behind and getting back to life. He married his high school sweetheart Jeri Streeter in 1946 and they had a daughter in 1948.
"I had bad legs and knees and still had malaria. I was also nervous. I had the shakes real bad when I got home and it got worse after I was out a few months and had time to think. Jeri taught me to knit to help calm my nerves and get me thinking about something else. I knitted a lot, the nicest pairs of argyle socks you've ever seen."
In the meantime, he took a job selling Kirby vacuum cleaners, a job he developed into a 35-year career. In the early 1970s, he and Jeri got divorced and he married Nan Forbes. His job with Kirby took Kohloff to Beloit, Wis. There, Kohloff helped found the Marine Corps League chapter there and served as its first commandant. "I've always been proud to be an American, especially proud to be a Marine. We're so well trained; it's the greatest thing in the world! They're my best friends!"
This is but a small part of Russ Kohloff's story. Read more about his contributions to winning World War II and landing men on the moon in his chapter in The Hero Next DoorTM. Click on the Shop link above to order.
