Flags of our Fathers

My mom and I are planning to go see the movie, Flags of our Fathers when she comes into town next week. It's a special movie for me because my grandfather fought in the Pacific. He served on Tinian Island where Little Boy and Fat Man were held until the bombings. My grandad was a very meticulous man when it came to his job, keeping the airplanes in excellent condition. He never would really share with us about the atomic bomb and being so close to all that, but he did have some amazing stories about the war.

He served a number of years in Enid, Oklahoma at Vance AFB after the war and knew these two guys written about below who fought in Iwo Jima.

Film brings back Iwo Jima memories

By Jeff MullinSenior WriterOn Feb. 23, 1945, a group of U.S. Marines climbed to the top of Mount Suribachi, a volcanic hill nearly 600 feet high on a small Pacific island called Iwo Jima.The Marines encountered little or no resistance, in stark contrast to the brutal fighting that had been taking place on the island since the Marines invaded some five days prior. The flag-raising spawned a book by James Bradley, “Flags of Our Fathers.” That book has been made into a movie, of the same name, directed by Clint Eastwood. The film opens nationally today and can be seen in Enid at Dickinson Theatres’ Oakwood 8. Among the many men on hand the day the flag went up on Mount Suribachi were several from the Enid area.

Here are three of their stories:

Jim Goodrich

Goodrich was an 18-year-old corporal that day, a member of the 5th Marine Division, 27th Regiment.The Garber native joined the Marines when he was 16 and already was a veteran of the bloody battles at Guadalcanal and Tarawa.“I was considered an old veteran,” he said.He was in the first wave of Marines to hit the beach at Iwo Jima Feb. 19, 1945. He was a machine-gunner.Goodrich and his unit fought their way across Iwo Jima. It was brutal fighting, with the Japanese firmly entrenched in caves and foxholes, fighting to the death to retain control of the island.“The other two battles I was in, I thought were pretty intense,” Goodrich said. “But (on Iwo Jima) I never saw so many mangled bodies in all my life. The artillery was just something else.”On Feb. 23, 1945, a member of Goodrich’s machine gun squad said, “Something’s going on on Suribachi.”“I had binoculars because I was the crew leader, so I looked up there, and there it was, they had raised the little flag,” Goodrich said. “Then they took it down, and I said, ‘It didn’t stay up there long,’ but it was very hard to see. After while, I don’t know how long it was, they said, ‘Hey, there’s a bigger flag going up.’ That was the one Rosenthal got his picture of.”When the bigger flag went up, Goodrich said, “Ships out in the bay, I could hear them tooting their horns. I thought I could hear men hollering, even. Everyone was glad to see it up. It was a real morale booster to us.”Goodrich’s stay on Iwo Jima ended 15 days later when an enemy machine gun round passed through a letter from a pen pal he had stuck in his shirt pocket and entered his intestines. He lost three and a half feet of his intestines in surgery performed in a tent on an Iwo Jima beach. Of the 250 men in Goodrich’s unit who hit the beach at Iwo Jima, only 22 walked off the island.“And I wasn’t one of them,” said Goodrich, who still has a framed copy of the letter that bears the bullet hole.Today Goodrich lives in Enid with his wife, Peggy. The couple plans to see “Flags of Our Fathers,” once with their grandson, himself a former Marine, and twice with friends.“We’re going to see it until we’re probably sick of it,” said Peggy, laughing.

Cass Montgomery

The 1940 Enid High graduate was a radarman on the Navy destroyer USS McCall on Feb. 19, 1945, when the Marines began going ashore.“The first report we got back from Iwo Jima from the Marines was, ‘There’s nothing going on, we’re just advancing right up the island.’ The next report was, ‘Help,’ they were surrounded. And from there on it got worse and worse.”The McCall was doing patrol duty around the island. During the day the ship pounded Japanese positions with its five-inch guns, and at night it would light up Iwo Jima with incandescent star shells.“We never let the island go dark,” he said. “Every one minute we’d put a shell out and kept the island lit every night.”The McCall earned the nickname “Lucky McCall,” since it was never hit by enemy fire. During the battle for Iwo Jima, however, a destroyer sitting near the McCall was hit by a Japanese mortar and a number of men were hurt. Montgomery was part of a team dispatched to help the injured sailors.Reading about the incident this week in the log book he kept during the war, “Almost makes you cry,” he said. “I’d never seen a captain of a ship cry, but when he buried those guys at sea he stood there and cried.”On Feb. 23, 1945, the McCall was stationed about 1,000 yards off the beach at Iwo Jima.“I was standing on the bridge of the ship,” said Montgomery. “We had binoculars watching and I looked up and said, ‘Hey, there’s a flag on top of Hot Rocks (the sailors’ nickname for Mount Suribachi).’”After the war Montgomery worked at Vance Air Force Base for more than 40 years, retiring in 1985. He continued his lifelong love of aviation and today, at almost 85, still owns his own airplane.During a trip to a reunion of Iwo Jima survivors, Montgomery and his wife, Louise, met “Flags of Our Fathers” author Bradley, whose father, John, was one of the men raising the large flag on Mount Suribachi. They say they’re not sure whether or not they’ll see the film.“He told us at that time they were thinking of making a movie of the book,” said Louise.