Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 22, 1992 TAG: 9202220093
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
`WAR IS NO GAME': IWO VETS REMEMBER
Forty-seven years ago this week, Joe "Slats" Slattery and some 60,000 U.S. Marines were fighting Japanese soldiers for a pile of sand.Winning Iwo Jima - an eight-square-mile lump of volcanic debris some 660 nautical miles from Tokyo - was to give U.S. troops a foothold near Japan.
The victory also removed a critical air base from the hands of the Japanese, who had launched attacks on U.S. Pacific bases and sniped at passing B-29s from Iwo Jima.
It was the first and last battle for Slattery, an 18-year-old Marine from Brooklyn. He was wounded in action.
Slattery, father of Blacksburg restaurateur Joe Slattery, is 65 now, but he hasn't forgotten Iwo. He drives a Blazer with "Iwo-USMC" on the license plate.
A longtime Port Authority of New York and New Jersey worker who has retired here, Slattery has a Blacksburg apartment sprinkled with photographs of Marine Corps buddies and mementos of the battle - from a metal reproduction of the famous flag-raising on Mount Suribachi to his own Purple Heart.
Slattery took a painful blow to the hip and a mortar fragment in his elbow at Iwo. A bullet slammed into his gun and helmet at one point, sending him cartwheeling.
On the ninth day of the battle, a shell landed near him. The shock knocked the battered Brooklyn teen-ager out of the battle for good.
Slattery woke up on a hospital ship. He remembered thinking - mistakenly - that his legs were gone.
"I thought, `What the hell, I'm alive. I'm going home.' "
U.S. Marines landed on the tiny Pacific island on Feb. 19, 1945.
Sunday is the anniversary of the historic flag-raising on Mount Suribachi - subject of World War II's most famous photograph.
But to those who fought the gruesome monthlong fight, there are plenty of other images just as vivid.
Slattery recalled yanking to the ground a Marine, gone irrational from combat, who was about to stand up in heavy Japanese fire. He also saw a Marine burned completely black and screaming in pain.
Slattery raised his rifle to put the burned man out of his misery - but he died first.
The U.S. victory cost more than 5,000 American and 20,000 Japanese lives.
Harry Larison, a Marine pal of Slattery's who now lives in Wisconsin, took five Japanese bullets at Iwo Jima. One is still lodged near his heart.
Larison - who talks with Slattery often - said Japanese shells came so fast at times that the troops couldn't move.
Larison, Slattery and a third soldier reached a ridge above the beach on the first night of the battle and began lobbing grenades toward the Japanese they knew were all around them in the dark, Larison recalled.
"We held it all night, Joe and I and a skipper," said Larison, reached by telephone from Slattery's home. "They [the Japanese] would throw sticks and stones, and we'd throw grenades. . . . We'd try to make a little joke out of it. `Hell of a war, kid.' Or, `Damned good grenade.' "
Larison, who lost much of the bone in his right arm at Iwo Jima, spent years in the hospital. Larison's legs also were damaged in the battle, he said.
No one, Larison said, left the battlefield untouched.
"Once you were there you carried it around with you, whether you were hurt or not."
To Larison, Iwo Jima held lessons we still haven't grasped.
"War is no game," he said. "But we're such dummies. We're never going to know."
Slattery has strong feelings of his own that are rooted in Iwo Jima.
"See my car out there? I bought American. . . ." His shirts also are American-made, he said.
Slattery, who was out of the hospital and training for the invasion of the Japanese mainland by August 1945, also recalled feeling no misgivings when U.S. B-29s dropped atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He said even children were expected to resist the planned American invasion of Japan.
"It saved a lot of lives, I'll tell you that," Slattery said of the bombing.
NOTE: Ran in Metro January 23, 1992.