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Navy Veteran of Iwo Jima and Okinawa


Greg Robinson
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Greg Robinson

I spoke to a man yesterday who had been in the Navy late in WW2. He was one of the sailors assigned to the landing craft that carried the Marines to the beach. 19 Feb 45 was just a few days past his 18th birthday and he spent the next 30+ days on Iwo JIma. He said he scared to death most of the time. He still has memories of the horrible carnage on Iwo and how the Marines, especially the 5th Division, suffered horrible casualties. Then he was at Okinawa and told of the kamikazi planes....he said the destroyers suffered the worst from these attacks and yet he didn't get so much as a scratch during the war. Then in 1950 he was asked re reenlist in the Navy Reserve but tore up the papers saying he'd had enough. Shortly afterwards the Korean War started. So he was one lucky guy and he knows it. He went on to have a career with the Atlanta Fire Department.

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So often in these landings we tend to focus on the solider and Marines hunkered down in the landing craft ready to hit the beach but often overlook the sailors who stood in plain sight, driving the boat.

 

I met a Iwo vet sailor here in Oceanside who was a corpsman - not assigned to the Marines, but rather assigned to the landing craft ferrying wounded back from the beach to the ships. He himself was wounded, bayoneted in the leg, when a Japanese unit did a banzai attack on the beach party.

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Greg Robinson
So often in these landings we tend to focus on the solider and Marines hunkered down in the landing craft ready to hit the beach but often overlook the sailors who stood in plain sight, driving the boat.

 

I met a Iwo vet sailor here in Oceanside who was a corpsman - not assigned to the Marines, but rather assigned to the landing craft ferrying wounded back from the beach to the ships. He himself was wounded, bayoneted in the leg, when a Japanese unit did a banzai attack on the beach party.

 

And once the invasion began these sailors became orphans. They stayed with their landing craft even after the LST that brought them to the island left. So they often left the island on a different ship than the one that brought them. So they became very dependent on their Marines.

 

The man I met yesterday arrived at Iwo three days prior to the landing. He spoke of all that firepower expended in the pre invasion bombardment and how it "didn't kill a single Japanese"....they were that well protected by their caves and tunnels.

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