American Valor Quarterly Issue 2 - Spring 2008 | Page 15

and Lee
Blanchard. We
set up on Hill
362A. The hills
had numbers
because that
was the elevation
above sea level, and
we sat up there to see if
we could see the Japanese
mortars before they were sent out.
At exactly midnight, we were overrun
by the Japanese. Now, I’ve been
criticized in the past about what I’m
going to say, but will say it anyway: the
Japanese were absolutely fearless
fighters. You never, ever saw anything
like it in your life. At night, they’d come
right at you. No monkeying around,
you knew they were there. They were
called “Kuribayashi’s Roving Wolves.”
There were no banzai charges—they
came at you with hand grenades,
bayonets, mines strapped to their bodies,
rifles, and they were after food and water,
and out to kill us. I knew we were in trouble, because
as the Japanese came towards us, on the back of their necks they
had a little phosphorous pin that they wore. And as they came
forward, you could hear their officers from behind, giving them
instructions, telling them to go to the left, to the right, and to stop.
When a star shell went over—one of our flares—you could see
them drop to the ground. When I turned around, and I looked
back, I could see the phosphorous buttons, and I knew we were
in trouble. From midnight until about 2:30 in the morning, there
was a really heated pitched battle. If it hadn’t been for hand
grenades on our side, we would have been completely wiped
out. We almost were.

From March 1, 1945 until August of 1946, I was in Naval
Hospitals. The problem was not with the healing of my legs, it
was that I wasn’t evacuated until the morning of March 3, and
gangrene had set in. I’m allergic to penicillin, and it took years to
clear up. There are a lot of questions that people ask me. There is
one question people invariably ask, and I tell them I have three
children and seven granddaughters, and none of them are adopted.
So things worked out in that department!

General Graves Erskine, Commanding Officer of the Third Marine
Division, directed that the baseball field on Guam be named in honor
of Jimmy Trimble following his death on Iwo Jima.

American Valor Quarterly - Spring 2008 - 15

Top: National Archives; Bottom: U.S. Marine Corps Photo

About 2:30, the Japanese got close enough to bayonet Trimble.
He didn’t make a sound. He turned to me, and the only thing he
said was, “Grenades!” I was laying prone. The Japanese grenades
have to be hit against something—they don’t have a pin like ours
do. You hit them to ignite them, and then throw them. They
lobbed two grenades into our shell hole; one landed between my
legs, and one landed up near Jimmy Trimble. He turned, and felt
the full blast of the hand grenade. The one went off between my
legs, and broke both of my legs. I pulled myself out of the hole,
and was bleeding profusely. And I reached in to give Jimmy
Trimble a hand. He turned, and at the exact same time, a Japanese
had jumped in the hole with a mine strapped on him. He wrapped
himself around Jimmy Timble, and the two of them just
evaporated. Just before that, a Japanese had crept up to the hole,
and he was holding what looked like a stick of dynamite. And I
killed him, took the stick of dynamite which turned out to be a
wooden box, and stuck it in my pocket.

The password that night was “Presidents.” I named every President
of the United States from George Washington to Roosevelt, and
Jim White and Lee Blanchard came out of their foxhole to get
me and drag me about 50 feet back to safety. Jim did a magnificent
job in stopping the flow of blood, and put on a tourniquet. My
bandages were blown off, so he took his bandages, which he
wasn’t supposed to do, took his sulfa drugs, and bandaged me
up and packed me real good. That was about 3:00 in the morning.
In the meantime, Reed—the fellow who had been stationed in
Cuba—was dead. Garrett was dead. McCloskey was missing.
Nietzel was wounded. Trimble was dead. And in the hole was
Jim White, Lee Blanchard, and me. By the way, the only two
survivors today are Jim and I. If I wasn’t there, what Jim White
is going to tell you, you wouldn’t believe. But I know for a fact,
because I saw it. We were ahead of the lines, and behind us were
the mortar platoons. He hollered out for them to move up and
join us. He got a halftrack to come up and fire on the Japanese,
and held them at bay. And in from the left came a Marine from
the 5th Division. His name was Brown. At the same time he came
in, machine gun fire came flying across and hit me in the foot,
fracturing the bone, going through and killing Brown. A hand
grenade came in, but was a dud—thank God. It took 57 years
before Jim White was recognized for what he did, and he was
the first recipient of the Chesty Puller Award from the World
War II Veterans Committee. Anything that I have today, I owe to
Jimmy and Lee Blanchard. There’s no way I can pay them back.
We’re the best of friends, and we have a pact that we’ll go to each
other’s funeral, whoever goes first—he’s older than I am!