They Raised Their Hands! – So Why Did American Marines Still Refuse to Lower Their Rifles?

By the summer of 1945, a raised hand no longer meant one thing to an [music] American Marine. It could mean surrender. It could mean fear. And sometimes, hidden beneath the wounded man’s tunic, it could mean a grenade. Somewhere in America, there were Pacific veterans who never told their families what happened when a wounded Japanese soldier raised his hands in the sunlight on an island none of the neighbors had ever heard of.

Some had seen surrender save lives. Others had seen it become a weapon. Most of them, when they came home, did not talk about what they had seen. This is one reason some of them could not tell you. By the third year of the Pacific War, many frontline Marines had learned a brutal precaution that appeared in no field manual.

You did not approach until the man had discarded his weapon. You did not lower your rifle until his hands were empty and his tunic was open. An apparently helpless enemy might still be dangerous. This precaution was never printed. It was never handed out in briefings. But by 1945, from the coral of Tarawa to the black sand of Iwo Jima, it had been earned in blood.

And the reason it had been earned began on a beach called Point Cruz on the night of the 12th of August, 1942, when a 46-year-old Lieutenant Colonel named Frank Bryan Gooch stepped off a landing craft with two dozen men and a belief in the rules of war that would be dead before sunrise. A white cloth had moved once in the jungle that afternoon. Just once.

A slow flutter against the black wall of trees west of the Matanikau River. Then it went still. In the palm shadows above Point Cruz, on the northern coast of Guadalcanal, that small piece of fabric was the only thing moving in the world. The Guadalcanal Campaign was six days old for the American Marines.

Six days since the landings on the beaches of Red One and Red Two. Six days of heat that rotted leather, mosquitoes that carried malaria in numbers no medical officer had ever imagined, and rice paddies that turned to sucking mud under a man’s boots. The 1st Marine Division had come ashore expecting a fight.

What they had found instead was silence. The Japanese had melted into the jungle. Nobody knew where they were. And now, someone in that jungle was waving a white flag. Frank Gooch was the intelligence officer of the 1st Marine Division. He had played at Ohio State and later became one of the most celebrated players on the Marine Corps football team.

Professional clubs had wanted him, including the New York Giants. He had remained in the Corps. He had served in China. His decision to lead the patrol himself at his rank suggests that he still believed prisoners could be approached, questioned, and brought in alive. He believed, as his generation believed, that war had rules.

That afternoon, a Japanese naval rating had been captured and brought into the American perimeter for interrogation. The man appeared to be suffering from malnutrition. His account was consistent with information the Marines had already received from Korean laborers taken earlier in the campaign. He told the Marines that a group of Japanese personnel near the mouth of the Matanikau River were starving, demoralized.

Some were willing to give up, and the white cloth in the trees seemed to confirm his story. Gooch decided to go himself. He handpicked 24 Marines. He took Navy surgeon Lieutenant Commander Malcolm Pratt in case any of the enemy needed medical attention. He took the Japanese prisoner as a guide. 26 men in the landing craft, 25 of them American.

They pushed off at dusk. The sea was flat and warm. The engine coughed low across the water. Nobody spoke much. In the failing light, the coastline of Guadalcanal was a black wall of coconut palms above a pale ribbon of sand. Gooch stood near the bow. As the boat neared the shore, the Japanese prisoner grew agitated.

He tried to signal that Gyuch was choosing the wrong landing point. Gyuch did not turn back. The boat scraped the beach. The Marines stepped off into ankle-deep water. Their boots sank into wet sand. The jungle in front of them was absolutely silent. Not a bird, not an insect, just the sound of men breathing and the small waves lapping against the hull of the boat behind them.

They walked forward into the trees. Two shots broke the silence. One struck Frank Gyuch in the head and killed him instantly. The other wounded First Sergeant Steven Custer. Then the jungle went quiet again. There was no roar of overlapping machine gun fire. There was no ambush from three sides at once. There was in that first minute only two shots and the sound of Custer falling.

Malcolm Pratt, the Navy surgeon, crawled forward through the sand and began to treat the wounded man. The patrol was not destroyed in 90 seconds. It was trapped on a beach that offered no cover in the dark with no radio, and it was slowly reduced through an entire night. Whether the white flag had been a genuine signal, a misunderstanding, or bait has never been conclusively established.

The naval rating may not have lied at all. What is known is that Gyuch landed in the wrong place despite the prisoner’s warning and walked into a defended Japanese position that held its fire until the Marines were fully committed to the beach. Platoon Sergeant Frank Few pressed himself flat against the sand. Around him, the shooting came and went in short bursts as the Japanese worked the perimeter of the trapped patrol.

Pratt moved from one wounded man to the next. Few himself was bayoneted through the hands and the arm at close quarters. He tore the rifle away from his attacker and drove the bayonet back into him. A second Japanese soldier came at him. Few clubbed the man to death with a Reising submachine gun that had jammed.

He shot a third with a pistol. Then he crawled back to what was left of the perimeter, and Malcolm Pratt, still alive in the dark, treated his wound. Surgeons Charles Arndt and Joseph Spalding had already slipped away separately and swam toward the American lines earlier in the night.

By dawn, only four members of the patrol remained capable of fighting. When their final position was overrun, the last defenders were cut down. Few reached the water and escaped, swimming and running east until he saw the American perimeter in the gray light before dawn. He was one of three men who came back. Nearly two dozen members of the patrol died on that beach or in its immediate aftermath.

Frank Goettge, Malcolm Pratt, the Japanese language specialist enlisted Marines from intelligence and reconnaissance. Their remains were never formally identified and returned to their families, but the jungle did not hide everything. Later American patrols working the same coast reported severed heads and limbs, shallow sand graves with hands and feet exposed, torso tied to a tree, Pratt’s medical case, and an article of Goettge’s clothing.

Some remains were buried where they were found. Others disappeared before graves registration teams ever reached the site. What happened at Point Cruz became, in the memory of the 1st Marine Division, a wound that never quite closed. But the lesson had not yet been carved deep enough. Nine days later, in the pre-dawn dark of the 21st of August, a Japanese colonel named Kiyonao Ichiki lined up 916 men of the 28th Infantry Regiment on a narrow sandbar at the mouth of Alligator Creek, 3 miles east of the American airfield at Henderson Field. Ichiki was

50 years old. He was a veteran of the fighting in China. He believed that a determined night bayonet charge by the soldiers of the emperor would break any American position on earth. The Marines were waiting for him. When Ichiki’s men came screaming out of the darkness across the sand, [music] they ran directly into interlocking fields of fire from Marine heavy machine guns dug into positions on the western bank of the creek.

Private Johnny Rivers was killed on his gun in the first minutes of the assault. His body slumped forward, his fingers still curled inside the trigger guard. Corporal Lee Diamond stepped over him and took the gun himself. A Japanese grenade exploded near a young Marine named Al Schmidt. The blast blinded him permanently in both eyes.

Schmidt could not see anything. He asked the man next to him where to aim. He kept firing into the darkness. He killed men he would never see. By 5:00 the next afternoon, the battle was over. Approximately 800 Japanese soldiers lay dead on the sand and in the shallow water of Alligator Creek. Colonel Ichiki was among them. It was on paper a complete American victory.

The first battalion of Ichiki’s regiment had ceased to exist as a fighting unit. Marines walked out onto the sand bar in the late afternoon sun to survey what they had done. Some of them stopped to take pictures. Some of them began collecting equipment. Some of them bent down to check the bodies for intelligence, for maps, for anything that might tell the division where the next attack was coming from.

That was when the dead began to move. A Japanese soldier who had been lying face down suddenly rolled onto his back and threw a grenade. He killed a Marine who had survived the entire night’s battle. >> [music] >> Another wounded soldier propped against a coconut log waited until three Marines were standing over him and then pulled the pin on the grenade he had been holding under his tunic.

A Japanese sergeant lunged at a group of officers that included Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Cresswell and tried to draw a pistol before he was shot down. Everywhere along the sand bar, men who looked dead were not dead. Men who were dying refused to die alone. Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, the commanding officer of the 1st Marine Division, sat down in his command post that evening and wrote a letter to the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Lieutenant General Thomas Holcomb.

In his letter, he tried to describe what his men were facing. These people refused to surrender, he wrote. The wounded will wait until men come up to examine them and blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade. Then he wrote the sentence that would shape the way American Marines fought for the next 3 years.

You can readily see the answer to this. He did not write down what the answer was. He did not need to. The answer would be understood on every island that lay between Guadalcanal and Tokyo, and it was not a written order to kill men who raised their hands. It was a warning passed from officer to officer and from sergeant to corporal that a wounded enemy might not be beaten, that approaching him could be the last thing a Marine ever did.

To understand where that refusal to surrender came from, you have to go behind the beaches and into the culture that had shaped the men on the other side of the wire. One important expression of that broader military culture appeared in the Imperial Japanese Army’s Senjinkun, issued by the War Ministry on the 8th of January 1941 and widely distributed throughout Army units.

It was a small booklet. It fit in a man’s palm. It was signed by the Minister of War in Tokyo, General Hideki Tojo. Its name meant instructions for the battlefield. Tojo was 57 years old. He was a career officer of the Kwantung Army, a man with round wire-rimmed glasses and the flat, unreadable face of a bureaucrat. He would become Prime Minister of Japan later that year and bear major responsibility as Japan’s government chose war with the United States.

He would be hanged at Sugamo Prison in December of 1948. But in January of 1941, sitting at his desk in Tokyo, he was concerned with a single problem that had troubled the Japanese officer corps for a generation. His soldiers had, in isolated cases, been surrendering. In Manchuria, on the Chinese frontier, men in impossible positions had chosen, at the final extremity, to raise their hands rather than to die.

And to the men who had built the modern Imperial Army in the image of the samurai code, this was a wound in the body of the nation that had to be closed. The Senjinkun tried to close it. Its central passage ran through the document like a black thread. Never live to experience shame as a prisoner. By dying, you will avoid leaving behind the crime of a stain on your honor.

The Senjinkun did not govern every Japanese serviceman. The Imperial Japanese Navy answered to a different command structure. The special naval landing force troops who had ambushed Frank Gichy’s patrol at Point Cruz were not army men, and it was navy personnel who would form the backbone of the defense at Tarawa a year later.

But, the Senjinkun did give formal language to an idea that reached far beyond the army. Capture was shame. Death in battle was preferable to living as a prisoner. It was a belief spread by propaganda, by newspapers, by school lessons, and by decades of military culture, and it shaped men in uniforms of every branch.

The Senjinkun did not instruct Japanese soldiers to fake surr- It did not instruct them to hide grenades under their tunics. It did not order the wounded themselves when Americans came near. It did something more fundamental. It helped harden a military culture in which capture was treated as unbearable shame.

Capture could bring profound dishonor, not only upon the soldier, but upon the family he had left behind. Many men had been taught that returning as a prisoner would disgrace their parents, their ancestors, and the community whose son they were. When that belief met the extremity of a lost battle, some soldiers carried it into their final moments, continuing to fight even when wounded, even when apparently helpless.

The result on the ground looked like doctrine. It was not [clears throat] doctrine. It was something more personal and more difficult to counter than a written order. It was the last decision of a man who believed that his shame would outlive his death. In several doomed garrisons across the Pacific, wounded soldiers who could not be evacuated were, according to survivor testimony and post-war interrogation, encouraged to end their own lives.

In some reported cases, they were killed by their own side. The practice varied by unit, by commander, by circumstance, but the underlying expectation was understood. The wounded were not to become prisoners. The idea existed before the word became official. On the 29th of May, 1943, Imperial General Headquarters used the term Gyokusai for the first time in a public announcement, describing the annihilation of the Japanese garrison on the island of Attu in the Aleutians.

The word came from an old Chinese poem, from a line that spoke of a jewel broken into a thousand pieces rather than allowed to fall into unworthy hands. Shattered jewel. What had happened at Guadalcanal in 1942 already reflected the same refusal to be captured that Japanese propaganda would later celebrate under that name. By November of 1943, whatever it was called, the American Marines were about to meet it in its most concentrated form.

The island was Betio, the main island of Tarawa Atoll. It was less than 3 mi long. It was less than half a mile across at its widest point. It was smaller than Central Park. In November of 1943, it was defended by a garrison of roughly 4,800 personnel under Japanese command, including naval infantry, base troops, construction units, and Korean laborers.

The 2nd Marine Division came ashore on the 20th of November. The battle lasted 76 hours. It was at that point the most concentrated killing ground the United States had ever seen. The coral reef offshore was too shallow for the landing craft, and the boats grounded 300 yards out. The Marines waded through waist-deep water into machine gun fire that came from concrete pillboxes reinforced with palm logs and steel rail.

Men died before they reached the beach. Men died on the beach. Men died in the surf behind the beach. In 76 hours, 1,009 Marines and sailors were killed. 2,101 were wounded. And of the Japanese garrison that had defended Betio, when the shooting finally stopped on the afternoon of the 23rd of November, only 17 Japanese military personnel were captured alive.

Another 129 prisoners were Korean laborers attached to the construction units. Almost all of the Japanese military defenders died in the battle. The final banzai charge had come out of the darkness on the last night. Officers with sabers running at machine guns, enlisted men with bayonets fixed, screaming.

When the Marines walked the island in the days that followed, Marine accounts described wounded or apparently dead defenders reaching for grenades when Americans approached. Riflemen learned to fire twice into anybody they passed. Corpsmen learned to hesitate at every stretcher case. Tarawa confirmed something the Marines had already begun to fear.

A wounded or apparently helpless soldier might still be fighting. It did not mean every surrender was false. It meant that approaching one could be fatal. And after Tarawa, whatever the reality on the ground, the working assumption among American infantry began to shift. While Betio was still smoldering in the tropical night, in a house in Mobile Alabama.

A 20-year-old college student named Eugene Sledge was preparing to disappoint his parents. He had washed out of the officer training program at Georgia Tech. He had asked to be transferred to the enlisted ranks. He was leaving the officer training path to serve as an enlisted Marine. In combat, he would become a 60-mm mortar man.

He would be sailing soon, somewhere out in the ocean on an island his family could not have found on a map. 17 Japanese soldiers had just been taken alive out of a garrison of thousands. Eugene Sledge was coming. He went ashore on Peleliu with K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines on the 15th of September, 1944.

He was slender. He was quiet. He was the son of a physician. He had grown up in the American South with a love of birds and a copy of the King James Bible that his mother, Mary Frank Sledge, had given him. He carried a mortar. He carried the pocket New Testament in his breast pocket.

He carried the belief, which he would later describe with something close to shame, that war was a thing that could be understood. K Company went ashore on Peleliu with 235 men. 85 would come back without a wound. Sledge kept notes in the margins of the New Testament. He wrote in the small hand of a man trying not to be seen writing. He wrote down what he had seen.

He wrote down what he had done. He wrote down what the other men had done and what he had watched them do. Decades later, at the insistence of his wife, he would arrange those notes into a book. The book was called With the Old Breed. It remains on the Commandant of the Marine Corps’ professional reading list, and it is, by common agreement among historians of the Pacific War, one of the most unflinching accounts ever written by an enlisted man about what happened on those islands.

Peleliu was where Sledge lost the ability to see the enemy as men. The Japanese defenders were dug into a system of coral ridges called the U Mururoa. They fought from caves. Every cave was covered by another cave. Every position was covered by fire from a position the Marines could not see.

And when the wounded fell and the corpsmen came forward to save them, the corpsmen were shot, too. Sledge wrote about it later in language that has never been softened. The Japs fought like demons, he wrote, and shot our stretcher teams, the corpsmen, and the wounded. We hated them with a passion known to few antagonists. And then he wrote a passage that described his own K Company in words no historian has ever tried to soften.

We never took prisoners, Sledge wrote, even when some few tried to give up. They often tried to throw a grenade at us. After taking a position, we routinely shot both the dead and wounded enemy troops in the head to make sure they were dead. He was 20 years old. 202 prisoners were recorded across the entire Peleliu campaign.

But that total concealed a more revealing fact. Only 19 of those prisoners were Japanese military personnel. Seven from the army, 12 from the navy. The others were laborers, largely Korean, conscripted men who had been forced to dig and to carry and to die alongside the men they had never chosen to serve. 19 out of a garrison of roughly 11,000.

Only 19 Japanese military personnel were captured alive. And the men who came home from Peleliu carried in their pockets and in their duffel bags souvenirs that the Army’s Judge Advocate General would later describe as blatant violations of the 1929 Geneva Convention. Teeth, ears, in a photograph published in Life magazine on the 22nd of May, 1944, a young woman named Natalie Nickerson sat at a desk in Phoenix, Arizona, smiling for the camera, posing with a Japanese skull that her navy boyfriend had mailed to her from New Guinea. The photograph

appeared in one of America’s most widely read magazines, presented with a casualness that is difficult to imagine today. Two months before Sledge landed on Peleliu, something else had happened on another island, and it belongs in this story because it is the moment when the refusal to surrender reached beyond the men in uniform and consumed the civilians they had been sworn to protect. Saipan.

In the early hours of the 7th of July, 1944, Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito, the commander of Japanese forces on the island, ordered what would become the largest banzai attack of the Pacific War. Saito was 53 years old. He was a cavalry officer of the old school. He knew that Saipan was lost. He knew that the American perimeter could not be broken.

Several thousand Japanese soldiers, many of them wounded, ran at it anyway. Lieutenant Colonel William O’Brien’s 105th Infantry Regiment absorbed the charge. O’Brien would die firing a pistol from the hood of a jeep. He would receive the Medal of Honor posthumously. The charge would fail. The Japanese garrison would be effectively destroyed.

But the banzai charge was not the worst thing that happened on Saipan. [music] The worst thing happened at the northern end of the island, at the sea cliffs of Marpi Point. And it happened to people who had never carried a weapon. Japanese military propaganda had taught civilians that capture would bring torture, rape, and disgrace.

For weeks, they had been told that the Americans would kill their children. In some places, soldiers encouraged or coerced civilians to die rather than surrender. The civilians began to walk to the cliffs. American Marines stood at the edge of Marpi Point in the last week of the battle and watched what happened next. Time correspondent Robert Sherrod, standing on the plateau above the water, described one group in particular that he would never forget.

According to his account, approximately 100 Japanese civilians gathered on a broad, flat rock near the cliff’s edge. They bowed to the Marines who were watching them from above. They prepared themselves. They spread a flag on the rock, and then, one by one, they began to pull the pins on grenades.

Sherrod and other witnesses also reported that Japanese soldiers, still concealed in the rocks, opened fire on civilians who hesitated. The surviving accounts differ in detail. They agree on the terror. Hundreds of civilians chose death because they had been taught that capture by Americans would be worse than dying. Among veterans of the Saipan campaign, one story circulated for years afterward.

Two women emerged from a cave on the slopes below Marpi Point, unarmed and apparently helpless, and beckoned to an American patrol. The Marines had come to Saipan from earlier islands. They had seen versions of this before. They opened fire. When the women fell, so the story went, five grenades were found hidden beneath their arms.

The account is difficult to verify, but it reflected, more than any confirmed casualty report, the fear that had taken hold in American units by that stage of the war. It was told and retold, not because anyone could produce the report. It was told because, by the summer of 1944, it had become fully believable. By February of 1945, the war had reached a black island of volcanic rock and sulfur ash, eight square miles in size, 750 miles from the coast of Japan.

Its name was Iwo Jima. The Japanese commander was Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. He was 53 years old. He had studied in the United States as a young officer. He had traveled across America by car. He had written home to his wife that the industrial capacity of the country he was now expected to defeat was so vast that no war against it could be won.

He was a soldier who did not believe in his own mission. Kuribayashi rejected the kind of premature mass charge that had destroyed Japanese garrisons on earlier islands. He believed those charges were a waste of men. Instead of trying to defeat the American landing at the waterline, he built a defense in depth designed to make the Marines pay for every yard.

He gathered his engineers and his laborers, and he began months before the landings to dig. When the Marines finally came ashore on the 19th of February, 1945, Kuribayashi had honeycombed the island beneath their feet with a tunnel system eventually estimated at more than 11 miles of interconnected passages.

His men would not be wasted in early mass charges. They would remain underground, fight from concealed positions, and prolong the battle for as long as it could be prolonged. A final large-scale attack would still come near the campaign’s end in the darkness of the 25th of March. But for most of the battle, the Japanese would appear from concealed apertures in the volcanic rock, kill Marines, and vanish before the Marines could return fire.

Veterans of Iwo Jima later reported that Japanese soldiers had used fragments of English in the fighting. Some called out phrases they had learned. Some imitated the calls a wounded Marine would make. Some, according to survivor accounts, screamed the word “Corpsman” across the ash toward American lines, waited for a Navy medic to come running, and then killed him when he was close enough.

Whether this was a deliberate island-wide tactic or a series of local deceptions is difficult to establish now. For the Corpsman who had to answer those calls in the dark, the distinction offered little comfort. Many Corpsman avoided anything that might make them more visible on the battlefield. Many carried side arms alongside their morphine syrettes and their sulfa powder.

The medical bag identified a lifesaver to the Marines who needed him and a target to the enemy who did not. Pharmacist’s Mate First Class John Harlan Willis was 24 years old. He was a farm boy from Columbia, Tennessee. He was married. He had a young daughter he had barely known before he shipped out. On the 28th of February, on the slopes of Hill 362A, Willis was treating a wounded Marine in a shell hole when a Japanese grenade came in over the lip.

Willis picked it up and threw it back. Then another grenade came in. He threw that one back, too. He kept working on the Marine. He did not stop. He did not run. He treated the wound while grenades landed around him and while he threw each one back into the position it had come from. He threw back eight grenades.

The ninth grenade exploded in his hand. John Harlan Willis was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. His wife accepted it in Tennessee. On a different part of the island on the 20th of February, a boy named Jacklyn Harrell Lucas was in a rifle pit with three other Marines when two Japanese grenades rolled in on top of them. Lucas was 17 years old.

He had lied about his age to enlist at 14. He had been 5 ft 5 and 1/2 in tall and had weighed 158 lb when they had put him in a uniform. He had stowed away on a troop transport to reach the Pacific because the Marine Corps had discovered his age and had refused to deploy him. He had turned 17 at sea only 6 days before he went ashore.

He threw himself onto the first grenade. He pulled the second grenade under his body. The first grenade detonated. More than 250 pieces of shrapnel would eventually be removed from his back, chest, and arms across many operations. The second grenade did not go off. He did not know that at the time. He believed in the moment he covered them that he was going to die.

He survived. He would receive the Medal of Honor from President Truman at the White House that October. He would become the youngest Marine ever to receive the Medal of Honor. Of roughly 21,000 Japanese defenders of Iwo Jima, only about 200 were captured during the battle. Almost all the others died during the battle or the clearing operations that followed.

A handful remained hidden in the caves long after organized resistance had ended. Two men would not come out to surrender until 1949. There is a story that a father told his son one time and only one time in a private moment in a house in Wisconsin, and then he never told it again for the rest of his life.

The father’s name was John Bradley. He was a Navy Corpsman. He was 21 years old when he went ashore on Iwo Jima on the 19th of February, 1945. He was present on the summit of Mount Suribachi four days later at the first flag raising, the one that was not photographed by Joe Rosenthal. For decades, Bradley was widely identified as one of the six men in Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of the second flag raising.

In 2016, after years of quiet historical work and the recovery of new photographic evidence, the Marine Corps formally corrected the record. Bradley had been on Suribachi. He had helped raise the first flag, but the Marine in Rosenthal’s famous image who had been called Bradley was in fact Harold Schultz. It did not matter to the war John Bradley could not talk about.

It did not matter to the story he told his son one time and never told again. Bradley came home. In later life, he rarely spoke publicly about the combat he had witnessed. He opened a funeral home in his hometown. He buried the dead of Wisconsin for 40 years. He did not speak about the Pacific with his family in any depth.

But according to the account later reconstructed by his son James, Bradley told him once about a boy named Ralph Ignatowski. Ignatowski was 19 years old. Everyone called him Iggy. He was from Milwaukee. He was Polish-American, a Catholic, small and quick and funny in the way that made men forget for a moment where they were.

He was a rifleman in Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, the same company as Bradley. The two of them had trained together. They had shipped out together. They had crossed the Pacific together. According to James Bradley’s later reconstruction, Iggy disappeared on Iwo Jima while his father was away treating another wounded Marine.

Nobody had seen him fall. Nobody had seen him carried away. In the confusion of a battlefield that was more like a mining accident than a battle, a single Marine could vanish and the men next to him would not know it had happened. Days later, Marines found his body. James Bradley wrote in Flags of Our Fathers that his father had described what he had knelt beside only once and only in general terms.

The official record can confirm Ignatowski’s death. It cannot fully reconstruct what happened underground. What Bradley told his son, according to that family account, was that Iggy had been tortured before he was killed and that when his body was recovered, there were things missing from it that made him difficult to recognize. >> [music] >> According to James Bradley, his father never spoke to him about Iggy again.

He carried it for 50 years. He carried it through his marriage and through the raising of his eight children and through the burying of the dead of Wisconsin and through every anniversary of the flag raising when reporters came to his door. He died on the 11th of January, 1994. He was 70 years old.

He had told the story of Iggy Ignatowski once in one moment and then, according to his son, never again. You did not come back from what John Bradley had knelt beside on Iwo Jima. You came home. You worked. You raised your children. You went to mass, but you did not come back. Something began to change in the spring of 1945.

It did not change on the front lines. It changed in the offices of American psychological warfare units in the Pacific, where a small group of officers had spent the better part of a year trying to solve a problem that no leaflet in 3 years had been able to solve. Among the officers thinking hardest about the problem was Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, an Indiana farm boy who had gone to West Point and then had spent much of the interwar period in Japan.

He had studied the country. He had written a monograph on the old Japanese soldier’s psychology before the war. He was not alone in the effort. American linguists, intelligence officers, and psychological warfare teams working within MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command were pulling at the same problem from every direction.

They understood by 1944 that the word itself was a barrier. In Japanese, the standard words for surrender, kosan and kofuku, carried a burden of shame so total that American psychological warfare officers concluded the conventional language of surrender could make their leaflets less effective. The leaflets that had been dropped for 3 years had been asking Japanese soldiers to do something they had been taught was worse than death.

Similar thinking appeared across American psychological warfare programs. In the Southwest Pacific, leaflets increasingly used phrases such as I cease resistance, not surrender, not defeat, not disgrace. A cessation, a stopping, a neutral statement of fact that a man could speak without erasing himself. The instructions on the leaflets varied by unit and by campaign.

The underlying principle was consistent. Discard the weapon, discard the helmet, approach in daylight, display the leaflet or a white cloth, keep both hands clearly visible. Daylight made an ambush harder. Visible hands gave American troops time gave American troops time to inspect the approaching man and reduce the chance that he could reach a concealed weapon.

The leaflets did not ask American Marines to trust the Japanese soldiers’ honor. They asked the soldier to make his approach so transparent that trust would not be required. On Okinawa, the psychological warfare campaign was enormous. 10th Army units dropped millions of leaflets. Loudspeaker teams broadcast surrender appeals in Japanese.

Captured Japanese soldiers, treated well, were sometimes used to call to their former comrades in the caves. The results were partial. In the caves of the south, where the survivors of General Ushijima’s 32nd Army had gone to ground, the older refusal held. Japanese soldiers still fired on stretcher teams. Civilians still killed their own children with grenades issued by the Imperial Army. The pattern did not end.

On the 29th of June, 1945, two American Marines named John Quinn, Jr. and John Hartman entered a cave in the town of Itoman on the southern coast of Okinawa. They were both members of the 29th Marines. They were both young men. They were never seen alive again and were presumed to have died inside the cave.

Quinn’s dog tag was found near the site in 1993. In 2022, excavators recovered human remains and period artifacts from inside the cave, but none of the remains had yet been formally identified as Quinn or Hartman. Investigators hoped forensic and DNA analysis might one day give both families an answer.

The war has not finished ending. Similar fears would surface again in Vietnam 20 years later in a different jungle against a different enemy. A direct line of transmission from the Pacific War to that later generation is difficult to prove, but the caution itself did not have to be handed down in words. >> [music] >> A hand rising from a ditch is a hand rising from a ditch in any war in any decade.

Something else was also happening on Okinawa in the summer of 1945. Japanese personnel were being taken alive. Not one or two, not just the isolated wounded, whole groups. Men stripped to the waist, walking slowly out of the sugarcane fields with hands visible, and American troops now had procedures for receiving them without exposing themselves unnecessarily.

The proportion of enemy personnel taken alive on Okinawa rose to roughly 11% of the total killed or captured compared to the roughly 1% estimated for earlier Pacific campaigns. The change was driven by many things at once. Loss of Japanese leadership, collapse of the defensive network, starvation, thirst, the number of Okinawan auxiliaries who had never wanted to fight in the first place, the steady work of psychological warfare units and the leaflets they had spent a year rewriting.

American units that had finally developed procedures for accepting a surrender without dying in the process. The new language did not end the culture of death before capture, but it gave some men a way to stop fighting without first having to describe themselves as dishonored. For the first time since the landing craft had grounded at Point Cruz on that August night in 1942, the cycle that had begun there had a crack in it.

A Japanese soldier and an American Marine could stand in the same field in the same daylight, and one could walk toward the other with his hands empty and his life intact. There is a photograph. It is dated the 25th of July, 1945. It was taken on Okinawa by a Marine Corps combat photographer whose name is not on the caption.

It shows an American Marine standing in open ground in daylight with one arm raised. He is signaling his squad out of the frame to hold their fire. His posture is calm. His weapon is lowered. Walking toward him from the mouth of a cave is a wounded Japanese soldier. The Japanese soldier’s hands are raised.

He is moving slowly. His face in the photograph cannot be clearly seen. The official caption, written by a Marine Corps public information officer sometime later, notes something the image itself cannot show. It says that other Japanese inside the cave surrendered soon afterward. That single decision by an unnamed Marine did not save only the wounded man in the sunlight.

It appears to have opened the way for more. The caption also records the numbers. Earlier in the war, Japanese who surrendered amounted to 1% of the total enemy troops killed or captured. On Okinawa, the percentage of prisoners in the total amounted to 11%. If the date on the caption reflects the moment the shutter closed, that photograph was taken about 12 days before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

It shows a young American Marine, whose name we do not know, choosing to hold his fire after 3 years in which repeated acts of deception had taught Marines that a raised hand could not always be trusted. It was a decision that still carried real risk. And the fact that it happened at all after Point Cruz and Alligator Creek and Tarawa and Peleliu and Iwo Jima is one of the small quiet miracles of a war that had very few of them.

The men came home. Eugene Sledge went back to Mobile, Alabama. He earned a doctorate in biology. He taught at the small state college in Montevallo for the rest of his working life. He was a gentleman. He kept birds. He was known to his students as an exceptional teacher, but he could not hunt anymore. He had loved to hunt birds with his father as a boy.

And after the war, whenever he raised a shotgun to a dove on the wing, he found that he was weeping. He put the shotgun down. He never hunted again. He wrote with The Old Breed at his wife’s insistence in the 1970s and 1980s. Manuscript was published in 1981. Eugene Sledge died in 2001. William Manchester, who had been a sergeant in the 29th Marines, was wounded on Okinawa and came home to become one of the finest American historians of his generation.

He wrote biographies of Churchill and MacArthur. He wrote a memoir of the American century. Years after the war, he told his readers that the nightmares had returned. He traveled back to every island in the Pacific where he had fought alone, walking the ground, trying to make peace with what he could not forget.

He wrote a book about it called Goodbye Darkness. He died in 2004. John Bradley rarely spoke of what he had seen on Iwo Jima, and then he died. And Frank Few, who had survived a bayonet fight at Point Cruz, returned to the trap patrol, fought through the night, and escaped into the water at dawn on the 13th of August 1942, lived a long life, and almost never told anyone what had happened.

He would talk about the war in general terms if pressed. He would not talk about the beach. He carried Frank Goege and the men who had died with him for the rest of his days. And when he was gone, he took them with him. These men were not born killers. They were young Americans. They were farm boys and factory workers and college kids and the sons of coal miners.

They had grown up in the Depression. They had been raised by mothers who taught them to say grace before meals and by fathers who taught them to help a stranger who had fallen. They had joined the Marine Corps because their country had asked them to. They had been taught to protect their own wounded and to obey the laws and customs of war.

Beside them served Navy corpsman trained to run toward men everyone else was trying to escape. They believed, when they stepped off the transports at Guadalcanal in August of 1942, that the war they were about to fight would be a war with rules. They were sent to a theater where the rules did not always apply. They learned. They adapted.

They did what they had to do to come home, and most of them did come home, and they raised families, and they went to work on Monday mornings. And many of them never talked about it because there was no language in the country they had come home to that could hold what they had seen.

They died in nursing homes across America in the last 20 years. They died in Wisconsin and in Alabama and in Ohio and in Tennessee. They died quietly, most of them. They were buried with the folded flag, three rifle volleys, and a bugler playing taps. And their grandchildren stood next to the graves and did not know and could not have known what those old men had once knelt beside on a black island of ash.

If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle came home from the Pacific and rarely spoke of it, experiences like these may have been part of what he could not bring into the family kitchen. He was not silent because he had nothing to tell you. In many cases, he was silent because there was no language in your living room, in the country he had come home to that could hold what he had knelt beside on Iwo Jima or Peleliu or Guadalcanal.

He carried it so you would not have to. And when he is gone, the only thing left is for us to say his name. There is one question left. It is not a question that history can answer. It is a question that each man had to answer for himself. And it is the question that many American Marines in the Pacific might eventually have faced on more than one island between Guadalcanal and Okinawa.

Imagine the jungle in front of you. Imagine the darkness. Imagine that you have watched your friends die for 3 years. Imagine that you have heard the account of what happened at Marpi Point, and you have knelt beside a body on the sand at Alligator Creek. And you have heard a voice from a hidden position on Iwo Jima calling out for a corpsman in broken English.

And then imagine that a hand rises out of the shadows in front of you, empty, slow, trembling. Would you trust it? Would you lower your rifle? Would you walk forward across that open ground in the daylight with your one arm raised and choose to believe, after everything, that this hand was the one that meant what a hand raised in surrender had meant for a thousand years? Or would you squeeze the trigger? The Marine in the photograph in the sunlight on Okinawa made his choice.

His name is not recorded. His face is turned away from the camera. He may not have survived the war. He may have lived to be a hundred years old. We do not know, but we know what he did in that one moment. He lowered his rifle. He raised his hand. And he chose, against everything he had learned in three years of war, to see the man walking toward him as a man.

That is where the story of the American Marines in the Pacific ends. Not on the deck of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Not in the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki. It ends in a photograph nobody remembers of two men who never knew each other’s names standing in a field on an island in the summer of 1945 and choosing for one instant to lay down the weapon that the war had put in each of their hands.

The rest of it, everything that came before, was the price of getting to that field. And somewhere in America tonight, there is an old Marine or a family who buried one last year, who paid it.