By BILL WELCH
Morning News city editor
Fifty years goes by.
You've gone to college. You've married. You and your wife have raised a good family and now you enjoy the grandchildren. You've put in a full, successful career at
Hammermill Paper Company and now enjoy retirement.
But still the memories of a few weeks on a blackened piece of rock in the Pacific lurk in the shadows, jumping out at you in dreams or unexpected moments. They
never go completely away.
Then a little ad in veterans magazine catches your eye - the U.S. Marine Corps assault on Iwo Jima will be commemorated in Washington, D.C. in February - the 50th anniversary of the
landing. The word is ""commemorated.'' Not ""celebrated.'' Those who died on the island and the veterans who have died in the years since will be commemorated.
You check it out,
but ... nah ... why get involved in all that. These things can be just too much, you think.
Then Christmas comes and the guy you trained with 51 years ago and kept in touch with all these years says he's
going. You think of your wife and how she might like to travel a bit.
So you go, the two of you, and you arrange to meet your buddy, too.
And it's the best thing you've done in years.
Dick Donnelly,
grandfather, Hammermill retiree and Marine Corps veteran, now speaks in awe and admiration of the commemoration of the Battle of Iwo Jima held Feb. 18-20 in Washington.
The three-day event was organized to the last
detail for the 1,300 people who attended. Veterans and their families were escorted and waited on by Marine privates and lieutenant colonels. They were addressed by the nation's top Marine and by the President of the
United States. When their 33 buses drove through Washington and Arlington, Va., they were saluted and waved at by people along the way, people who knew something about the veterans in the buses and had some idea
what they had done so many years ago.
But only the veterans themselves knew what they had done, what they had all gone through on the small island of Iwo Jima in February and March 1945.
""You know,''
Donnelly said a few days after the commemoration, ""I could sit down and talk about it with someone and try to make them understand what it was like there. And they might get some feeling, but they don't
know; they can't know. Just like I can't know what it was like for someone who was in the Battle of the Bulge.
""But at this event, there were men who had been there and had gone through the same
things. We had had the same experience. We could relate to each other.
""There were a lot of tears. I never saw so many grown men cry as I did at the National Cathedral when we commemorated those who
could not be there.''
When Taps was played at the end of the service at Arlington National Cemetery, Donnelly - tears streaming down his won face _ found himself holding up a new friend he had just made on this trip,
consoling him, urging him to hold on.
The National Cathedral service took place Saturday, Feb. 19, the anniversary of the amphibious landing on Iwo Jima, the day that Donnelly landed as one of eight men whose job was
to run messages in a jeep from the V Amphibious Corps to various units on the island. Their jeep sunk when it rolled off the landing craft. The men got off the craft and ran for cover. Before the day
was over, Donnelly would be pressed into service first as an ammunition carrier and then as an infantryman with the 24th Marines Regiment, Fourth Marine Division.
""You're not going to get the whole story
from me,'' he told the writer. ""I'm trying to put it behind me. I'll tell you a couple incidents and we'll let it go at that.''
Their name lives on
At the Cathedral, Marine Cops Commandant
Gen. Carl E. Mundy read from Ecclesiasticus: ""But these were also godly men, whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten. Their bodies are buried in peace, but their name lives on generation after
generation.''
Mundy's speech dwelled on the values of the men who fought at Iwo Jima. ""The values we were raised with and took there with us and then came home with - now reinforced by what we had
undergone on Iwo Jima. He wishes there were more of those values today,'' Donnelly said.
The Cathedral ceremony was a solemn event, touching all who were there, Donnelly said. Best remembered was the
singing of the Marine Corps Hymn by the congregation. ""From the halls of Montezuma ....''
""The Commandant told us he has heard the Marine Corps Hymn so many times in his lifetime, played by
many kinds of bands and sung by many choruses, and even himself, but he had yet to hear it like it was sung by the guys in that cathedral. It really got to him.
""My first impression of him was that he
was too young, too stiff-looking and too formal to be the Marine Corps Commandant. But I knew when he was finished that he knew what we Iwo Jima veterans were all about.''
After their jeep sunk into the surf off Iwo
Jima at 10:30 a.m. Feb. 19, 1945, Donnelly and the others were without a job to do on a beach under heavy fire from the Japanese. Despite heavy bombardment in the weeks before the landing, they had dug artillery,
mortars and machine guns deep into the rock and caves, making them nearly impregnable. The Marines were left on open ground _ black volcanic sand so softly packed it slid back into holes as soon as you dug
them. It was one of the most deadly fortresses ever attacked by any army.
""I found a hole and stayed there until about 1 p.m. A sergeant came up and told me to haul ammunition from the beach.''
Donnelly found himself lugging ammunition boxes and tubes to the 3rd Battalion, 24th Marines, then helping walking wounded back to corpsmen (medics) at the beach.
""But there was no safe place there. I
left some men with a corpsman and then took some more ammunition up. When I came back, the wounded men and the corpsman were gone. There was nothing there. They had been blown away.
""About 4
p.m. that day, that same sergeant found me again. The man who had been operating their Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) was dead. The sergeant looked at him and looked at me. And for the next three or four
weeks, I operated that BAR and lugged ammunition.''
Trained as a coast defense radar operator, assigned to the invasion task force as a message runner and pressed into service as a BAR man and ammunition carrier,
Donnelly spent those next three or four weeks like the rest of the Marines on the island did. He dodged incoming mortar and artillery fire, ducked machine gun bullets and wondered where the Japanese would fire
from next.
""I didn't see my first live Japanese until the fourth day, the day they raised the flag on Mount Suribachi.''
After the war, when he first got home to Sharon, Pa., his mother fidgeted nervously
at the welcome home party. Thinking his mother feared he might suffer from the shell shock she had seen in World War I vets, the young Marine said, ""It's OK, Mom, I'm all right.''
""She told
me she knew that. Then she asked me where I was when the flag went up.''
Donnelly told her he and another Marine had gotten to a safe spot and were splitting the bar of Velveeta cheese that he had recently received in
the mail. ""We were darned hungry, and we needed it to bind us up.''
"" "I knew it,' Mom said. "History was being made and you were sitting there feeding your face.'''
The Marines
found that the only way they could stop the enemy fire from their bunkers and caves was to burn them out with flamethrowers or blown them shut with satchel charges. It was deadly work, ranking with the
September-November battle of on the island of Pelileu. The death toll on Iwo would be the worst in Marine Corps history with 5,931 dying. Another 900 personnel from other services also died there. The Marines also
had 17,272 wounded.
What took Donnelly out of the front line with the 24th Marines was jungle rot that he had contracted earlier and now reappeared. His hands became too infected, too swollen to operate his
weapon. He was sent back to the beach.
""It was the jungle rot, on top of the fact that I was just plain burned out _ and I'm not ashamed to say it. I just had no more fight left in me,'' Donelly
said.
But when he got back to the beach, where he was supposed to get on a boat and get to a hospital ship, Donnelly looked for his communications unit and returned to it, finishing up the campaign there. He
postponed the recovery from jungle rot.
At the Washington commemoration, Donnelly wouldn't find any of the men from either of the units he spent time with _ neither the 3rd Battalion, not Headquarters Company, Signal
Battalion, V Amphibious Corps.
He did find Bob, the old buddy he had talked to at Christmas, who helped persuade him into going to this event.
The two men planned to meet each other at the Marriott registration
desk. Donnnelly and his wife, Edna, were in the hotel coffee shop when the man he instantly recognized as Bob walked by.
""He didn't recognize me at first, but when he did we were in each other's
arms. There wasn't a dry eye in the place.''
In that weekend, Donnelly:
_ Saw Captain Bobby Dunlap, one of the Medal of Honor winners from Iwo Jima. Dunlap, he said walked into the National Cathedral
plainly dressed, but there around his neck hung the blue-ribboned Medalof Honor.
_ Stopped and talked to Felix de Weldon, the sculptor of the Marine Corps Iwo Jima flag-raising memorial in Arlington.
_ Had a
close-up seat to view Preisdent Bill Clinton during his sppech at the memorial on Feb. 20. Though there was much kidding among the veterans before his arrival, ""he did get from all the Marines the
respect his office deserves. But my impression was that his speech was very stiff, very mechanical.''
It was a weekend to share an experience these men had in common from 50 years ago, one they can't share
with others, much as they might want to or try.
""My wife said that just listening to all the stories and seeing the men and their emotions, it was the first time she realized what I had been saying all
these years. She really, finally understood what we had undergone.''
Pray that no one will undergo it again.
