Don Honerkamp remembers the third night on the island. He and two other U.S. Marines hadn't slept the first two nights. The pounding, the shelling were constant. The abiding threat of a Japanese counterattack frazzled their nerves.

        “We were exhausted,” said Mr. Honerkamp, his memory reaching back across 55 years to a month of cold, gray days spent on an island of rock and black volcanic ash, with little vegetation, a place “where no sparrow sings,” as one Japanese defender of the island would put it.

U.S. Marine veterans (from left) John Wolber, John Donadio, Don Honerkamp, and Ken Tully fonght on Iwo Jima. (Tony Jones photo) | ZOOM |

        The third night they surrendered to fatigue and slept in a shell hole. When they awoke they discovered an artillery shell buried nose-first in the ash at the lip of their crater. It hadn't detonated, but it was a live shell.

        “You never saw three Marines get out of a hole so fast in your life,” Mr. Honerkamp recalled.

        Iwo Jima was shaped like a pork chop, and after 72 days of aerial and naval bombardment prior to the invasion the tiny island sat smoky and charred in the pan of the Pacific.

        Mr. Honerkamp is among a handful of U.S. Marine veterans living in Greater Cincinnati who can recall the bloodiest battle the Marines ever fought. After 36 days of fighting that began Feb. 19, 1945, on an island just 5 miles long and 2 miles wide, close to 7,000 Americans were killed; there were more than 25,000 U.S. casualties.

        The battle for Iwo Jima — its success was crucial for both shortening the war in the Pacific and saving American lives — is especially poignant this Veterans Day.

        A book published this past spring — Flags Of Our Fathers — has spent much of the year on The New York Times best-seller list; it is an account of the battle and the lives of the six Marines who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi, written by the son of one of them.

Honerkamp

        And the destroyer USS Cole, its hull blown open by a terrorist bomb attack in the port of Yemen, losing 17 of its crewmen, is named for a Marine — Sgt. Darrell Cole — who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism on Iwo Jima.

        And today on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., ground will be broken for the National World War II Memorial.

        Iwo Jima produced the most indelible image of World War II — Joe Rosenthal's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi — and yielded some of the war's most horrific and valorous war stories.

        What happened on Iwo underscored the sacrifices made by that generation. The casualties were staggering; 27 Medals of Honor were awarded in that battle alone, 13 of them posthumously. As much, the victory would soon mean coming home and all that went with it. That's what counted, maintains James Bradley in Flags.

        Home, wrote Mr. Bradley, was “a place of clarity and simple goodness, where people understood one another for who they were and what they actually did. Where hard work, service and love of family counted.”

        “You couldn't imagine that anything survived,” said John Wolber, 74, who lives in Green Township, of the bombardment that preceded the invasion. “Everyone thought it was going to be a cakewalk.”

Wolber

        What they didn't know was that the defense of Iwo Jima lay underground. More than 21,000 Japanese troops would defend the island from a network of blockhouses and pillboxes, and a netherworld of 1,500 underground rooms connected by 16 miles of tunnels.

        “You never saw anybody, you never saw the enemy,” recalled John Donadio, 79, who lives in Park Hills, Ky. “They were always underground. You'd walk right past them and they'd come up behind you and ... boom!

        “There were no front lines. We didn't know where we were ourselves at times. I remember the first time I saw a Marine killed. Young kid. Between the eyes. That kind of puts a little fear in you.”

        “It was terrible,” said Mr. Honerkamp. “I've never seen such body parts in my life.”

        For the most part, there was no time to think, no time for thoughts of fear, said Mr. Wolber.

        “There's so much happening,” said Mr. Wolber. “If you took time to think about what was happening, then that's when the fear would set in.”

        “So much confusion and misdirection,” said Mr. Honerkamp, 74, of Delhi Township.

        “We were shooting and they were shooting,” said Mr. Wolber. “You were trying to stay in contact with the guys in your own unit. It was a case of staying alive.”

        Ken Tully, 77, of Mount Airy, said each day they survived was a blessing.

        “There was nothing good about it,” said Mr. Tully. “The only thing good about it was people finally getting off alive. Every day you lived was a bonus. That's the way I looked at it.”

        John Donadio made it to the top of Mount Suribachi two days after the flag was raised. “I just wanted to see the place,” he said. To his eye it was a blend of red and white ash.

Donadio

        Wounded, he left the island on March 2.

        “It got me right in the back,” Mr. Donadio said. He had heard the shells exploding. Then he was hit. Shrapnel. Two corpsmen retrieved him, placed him and other wounded on a small armored vehicle called a Weasel and took them to the beach. They waited for room on a hospital ship.

        “That was it,” said Mr. Donadio.

        For a long time it was hard to talk about it. Who would understand what they had seen? “It was hard because they wouldn't know what you were talking about,” said Mr. Wolber. That changed with time. Veterans for the most part realize their oral history makes it real.

        “They told us at a reunion a few years ago that you guys better start talking about it because you're all going pretty quick and nobody will know what went on,” said Mr. Honerkamp.

        Mr. Honerkamp graduated from high school in June 1942, enlisted in the Marines that November. Mr. Wolber left high school his sophomore year to help his father, who was losing employees at his grocery store to the draft. On Dec. 7, 1942, the one-year anniversary of Pearl Harbor, he enlisted. Mr. Tully, living in Price Hill, enlisted in 1942.

        Mr. Donadio was 21 years old and living in Niles, Ohio, when he enlisted in April 1942.

        They ended up at Iwo Jima. They didn't know one another.

        They were among 75,000 who came ashore at Iwo Jima. They were among those who returned. Mr. Honerkamp went to Purdue University on the G.I. Bill. But he left school, and spent 36 years in the trucking business. Mr. Wolber went into the grocery business with his father in Mohawk, then took it over himself. Mr. Donadio attended Xavier University, but left before graduating. He married, worked nights at an A&P warehouse, then worked as a salesman in Louisville. Mr. Tully went to work for the Kroger Co.

        They married and raised families. Mr. Donadio has a daughter and nine grandchildren. Mr. Honerkamp had three boys and a girl, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Mr. Tully had eight children and 21 grandchildren. Mr. Wolber had three boys, three girls, 16 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

        Their appreciation for a “place of clarity and simple goodness” was made manifest by Iwo and what it challenged them to see and feel and, finally, savor.

        “It's burned in you,” said Mr. Wolber. “You don't remember what you had for breakfast yesterday, but you know where you was on Iwo.”

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