The Battle and the Damage Done

Editor's note: In honor of the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima, I'm posting this story I wrote a few years back that appeared in the Register Star newspaper in a slightly different version. 

Marines storm the beach at Iwo Jima.

It was 1945 and Fred Doty was on a transport leaving Iwo Jima. Looking back at the 21-square mile volcanic island, he could see the seemingly endless rows of graves of his fellow Marines on shore, and he wept. 

“I’m alive,” he thought. “I’m coming home.”

He had survived one of the toughest battles of World War II and now he was heading back to the U.S. and to safety, but for years afterwards the horrors he experienced stuck with him, a wound that refused to heal. 

During his time on Iwo Jima one of his jobs had been to help bury his fellow soldiers.

“It was pretty rough,” he recalled recently, his emotions rising to the surface. “They had crewcuts just like me. It could have been me.”

Doty had been on the island for months, beginning in February 1945 when his ship, the USS LST 84, a tank landing craft, was among the nearly 900 vessels in the largest armada invasion of the Pacific War up to that time. Doty was a corporal attached to the 5th Amphibious Corps of the Fleet Assault Marine Force.

Doty had volunteered to stay on the bridge to watch for enemy aircraft as the armada made its way to the target since he had a cracker jack ability to spot enemy aircraft. He slept on the bridge in all kinds of weather and kept a look out for the Japanese suicide pilots, known as Kamikaze, who crashed their planes into U.S. ships.

“The worst was the suicide pilots,” he said. “They were very scary.”

Thirty miles from Iwo Jima, his ship came under fire. He alerted the crew and began feeding ammunition to both the gunners helming the 40 millimeter weapons and the gunner at the 50-caliber machine gun.

“We got credited with shooting down three or four (suicide pilots),” he said. “I got a Bronze Star for it.”

Doty said they were lucky. At one point the ship had been the last in the convoy, but traded spots with another ship, the USS LST 477. On Feb. 21, 1945 a Kamikaze pilot managed to slam into the side of LST 477, dropping a bomb on deck just before doing so.

“It got hit broadside,” he said. “I wouldn’t be here today…Someone was looking out for me.”

A few days later Doty disembarked onto the beach, just before the famed raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi by Marines and a Navy corpsman.

He recalled the incessant shelling of the beaches by the Japanese who were extremely well dug in at Iwo Jima, with a honeycomb-like defensive position with 16 miles of tunnels connecting 1,500 separate rooms dug out of the rock.

“It was a lot of hell,” he said of the battle that raged for more than a month, from Feb. 19 to March 26, 1945.

The island was considered home soil by the Japanese, while the Americans thought it vitally important as a strategic position due to its location.

Long range B-29 bombers were executing bombing raids on Japanese cities, but the U.S. had no fighter escort planes with the range necessary for the long flights. Iwo Jima, which had three airfields, was perfect for a fighter escort station.

“That’s why we were there,” he said. “For the airfield.”

While Doty liked combat—“I was young and crazy,” he remarked—often going out with a buddy to shoot Japanese snipers with their .45s when troops were “mopping up,” he also found his time there to be frightening.

The nights were the worst. There were always two men to a fox hole to guarantee a modicum of safety.

“One slept while the other kept look out,” he said. “The Japanese would sneak up on you in the middle of the night, cut your throat and take your canteen.”

On one of these long, often mundane nights, a nearby ammo dump suddenly went up with an earth-shaking blast that jolted those lucky enough to get some sleep awake. Doty was just a few yards away from the blast. Clouds of white sulfur blanketed the area requiring the use of gas masks, which clouded the soldiers vision  and made it that much harder to see if an enemy attack was on the way. 

None came that night, but Doty, scared by what happened, had a terrible night. 

He was still on Iwo Jima on Victory over Japan Day, Aug. 15, 1945, when the end of the war was announced.

“We were getting ready to go to Japan,” he said. “I guess they figured if (the Fifth Amphibious) could take Iwo Jima, we could take anything.”

The planned invasion of Japan, code-named Operation Downfall, never materialized, due in part to the U.S. dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, followed by the detonation of another over Nagasaki on Aug. 9.

Doty had heard rumors of a new weapon.

“There were a lot of Air Force men flying in and out of Iwo Jima,” he said, and they told him about “something special. A special bomb.”

With the war over, Doty was returning to Columbia County, N.Y. where he was born and raised, but while the fighting had ended he continued to suffer the effects of his experiences.

Back home in Columbiaville he took a boat out to the Hudson River, but when a seagull swooped down close to him he began to suffer flashbacks from the war.

“That’s when it all started,” he said.

“He hated to go to sleep,” recalled his wife of more than 60 years, Shirley. “We’d be getting ready to go to bed and he’d just be starting a project around the house.”

Doty wasn’t alone. He said several of his friends also suffered from their experiences.

For him, joining the Civil Air Patrol after the war and working with young people helped him.

“It eased my mind,” he said.

Even with his harrowing war time experiences, Doty said he would do it all again.

“I’m proud of what I did. I’m proud to have served,” he said. “This is the greatest country in the world.”