Marine recalls stars and stripes on Iwo Jima

Like the rest of the nation, Wayne Fowler was surprised when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

He had been in the Marine Corps for more than a year.

Fowler’s San Diego-based unit, the 1st Marine Division, was given the task of the first amphibious landings in the Pacific, in the Solomon Islands on Aug. 7, 1942.

Fowler went ashore first at Florida Island, then at Tulagi, and later at Guadalcanal, where the 1st Marines fought the Japanese for nearly six months. Afterwards, Fowler was sent to New Zealand for six months to train for another landing at Tarawa in the Marshall Islands in November 1943, which would prove to be one of the costliest amphibious landings the United States had ever seen.

“We had about 2,500 casualties in 72 hours,” Fowler said.

By the time he was a 23-year-old sergeant, the troops were getting younger. “Most of the kids were 17, and I was like an old grandfather,” he recalled. They asked him about combat, and he stuck up for them when officers handed down unreasonable restrictions.

He remembers one young Marine from Boise, a devout Mormon, with whom he talked on many evenings. “He said if he got wounded and somebody would pray for him, he’d be all right.”

In early 1945, Fowler’s Marine unit left Hawaii for Iwo Jima, an island just 670 miles south of Tokyo, which Allied forces had decided was critical to the upcoming bombing campaigns of the main Japanese islands. As he had for other amphibious invasions, Fowler was in a landing craft for the first day of the invasion.

“We actually landed twice in the same day on Iwo Jima,” he said. The first time, the landing craft sped to the beach, but the ramp wouldn’t open to let the ammunition-laden Jeep out. The boat and Marines went back to a larger ship for repairs, then returned to the beach.

They were about a mile from Mount Suribachi when the flag was raised in an event that became the basis for the famous sculpture. “When they were raising the flag, we knew it. They told us on the radio. We were glad, but we knew there was a hell of a lot more to do.”

Iwo Jima was about 5 miles long, and about a half-mile wide where Fowler and his unit came ashore. The landing zone was a couple of hundred yards of flat sand leading to a ridge where the Japanese had dug massive fortifications. “It was tough from one end to the other,” he recalled. “They were looking right down our throats from that high ridge.”

Although Fowler was in some of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific, he was never wounded. “I was knocked down by shells a few times. But I protected myself and the ones around me.”

But one day at dusk on Iwo Jima, the young Mormon from Boise went for water. It was the most dangerous time of day, when the Japanese on the ridges were not being bombed by planes from the carriers, but could still see the Marines moving below them. Fowler later learned the young man only got about 100 yards before being hit by a shell and killed. “I never got to see him, or I would’ve had somebody pray for him.”

Of the 22,000 Japanese troops on Iwo Jima, all but 200 died. U.S. forces lost 9,000 and another 19,000 were wounded.

After Iwo Jima, Fowler and his unit went back to Hawaii to train for the invasion of Japan. It was there they heard about the dropping of the atomic bombs, and the Japanese surrender. He left the Marine Corps in 1946 and started a career as an operating engineer, building hydro-electric dams around the Northwest, California and Maine. He’s been retired almost 25 years.

Now 85 years old and living in Delano near Grand Coulee Dam, when he thinks back on World War II, it’s not the battles that come to mind. He remembers the people.