70th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima: Bloody fight is seared in the memory of 3 North Jersey Marines
February 18, 2015, 11:06 PM Last updated: Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 11:26 PM
By TODD SOUTH
Aboard ship, 21-year-old Gene Iaconetti watched as mammoth Navy guns pounded the tiny island of Iwo Jima into a puff of dust in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
The impending landing would be “a piece of cake” Iaconetti heard his officers say, as the young Marine tried to imagine how anyone could have survived the shelling.
Gene Iaconetti, 91, of Teaneck, who served on Iwo Jima
Anthony Lechniak, 92, of Oakland looking at military honors and a photo of himself in the Marines. He recalled seeing a Marine on fire the day he landed at Iwo Jima. “You never forget that,” he said.
Frank Hall, 91, of Teaneck, a veteran of the Iwo Jima fighting
But 22,000 Japanese soldiers had taken refuge in an intricate web of fortified tunnels, waiting for the battle to come, one of the bloodiest in American history.
The first thing young Anthony Lechniak saw when he stepped off the landing craft onto the beach at 9:05 a.m. on Feb. 19, 1945 — 70 years ago Thursday — was a Marine burning alive. “You never forget that,” Lechniak said. It was his first time in combat.
Frank Hall was 21 and had been in the thick of the brutal battles in the Pacific campaign, witnessing the slaughter for relentless months. Three days into the fight on Iwo Jima, the young Marine was sent back to a ship offshore for medical treatment, where he heard a whistle sound from the embattled island and caught a glimpse of a bunch of Marines raising an American flag.
“My first thought was, ‘Those poor guys are going to get killed putting that flag up,’” Hall said.
Hall and Iaconetti, both now 91 and living in Teaneck, and Lechniak, 92, of Oakland, are among an ever-dwindling number of Marines who survived that hellish battle, in which 6,800 Americans and nearly every Japanese soldier on the island died — killed by the Marines or by their own hands, refusing to surrender.
The raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi, a most enduring image of World War II, still inspires the three veterans and returns their minds to those weeks of fierce fighting. Seven decades ago, the image gave war-weary Americans hope even as the fighting dragged on in Europe and intensified in the Pacific.
Lechniak and Iaconetti, who were combat engineers, each had the job of sneaking up and hurling satchels loaded with explosives into Japanese machine-gun nests and caves. Lechniak, with bullets whizzing past him from all sides, would get so close to his targets that sometimes blood and pieces of flesh from the carnage would stain his uniform.
Clean water and food were so scarce that Marines would collect and carry rainwater to drink later, Lechniak said. When his grandkids used to ask him why he wasn’t hungry when he didn’t finish his dinner, he said, “I haven’t been hungry since I got out of the Marines.”
Iaconetti recounted how the trained dog he was sent out with once saved his life. He was about to blow up what looked like an enemy-occupied cave, but the dog, handled by another Marine, reacted to something, and Iaconetti looked around. The cave, it turned out, was a decoy; two machine-gun nests were trained on its fake entrance. Iaconetti carefully backed away.
He recalls spending 48 hours with his unit as it was pinned down under a rain of Japanese mortar and artillery rounds. To this day, he has two vials stored in the basement of his home containing the black sand from Iwo Jima that he poured from his boots.
Hall was reunited in the Marines with his friend Rudolph “Midge” DeCanio, an all-Bergen County basketball player in the early ’40s who was killed a few hundred feet from where Hall was fighting in an assault on an island airfield.
A onetime Boy Scout, Hall could read maps and move about in darkness, so he got the job of locating Japanese machine gun sites as a Marine scout. He’d walk out in front of infantry units amid camouflaged enemy gunners and mortar emplacements. “I’m waiting for them to shoot at me so I know where they are,” he said.
Robert Spector, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and a professor of history at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., said the military command’s strategy was to make Iwo Jima a base for refueling B-29 bombers during a planned bombing and expected invasion of mainland Japan.
In retrospect, the fight for Iwo Jima wasn’t as critical in ending the war as earlier battles, Spector said, though the unexpected resistance and heavy casualties of the battle and the fight for Okinawa that followed served as an omen for the sort of fighting that might await the Allies in an anticipated invasion of Japan.
Iaconetti was fighting on the island when someone told him to look up and he saw the flag being raised.
“I thought, ‘Now, all we’ve got to do is mop up,’” he said.
Lechniak, too, saw the wind-whipped flag in the distance. On the fifth day of battle, that sight gave him comfort that it would all be over soon.
But it would drag on murderously for 31 more days.
Lechniak each day looks from a window of his Oakland home to see the waving American flag just outside. At ballgames and other events, the national anthem still gives him “goose pimples.”
“That flag means something to me,” he said.
Thinking about Iwo Jima, Hall pointed to the men who raised the flag. “The spirit of those guys and what they symbolized when they put up that flag – unknowingly — was the spirit that won the war,” he said.
