By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Robert Hall's image is reflected in his wartime photo. (Michael E. Keating photo) | ZOOM |

BATAVIA - Robert Hall, like thousands of American war veterans, has already been to hell.

Some might wonder why he wants to go back.

But the 81-year-old retired pipe fitter wants to do just that - to go back to see the tiny piece of volcanic rock halfway around the world where, as a young 23-year-old Marine nearly 58 years ago, he fought his way inch-by-inch across black sand beaches, where he saw thousands of his fellow Leathernecks die.

"I want to see Iwo Jima one more time," Mr. Hall said, sitting in his living room along the banks of the East Fork of the Little Miami River. "I left some good friends there."

Next March, he will. He and his son, Robert Jr., will join more than 100 other veterans and their families on the 12,000-mile trip to the little island 500 miles south of Japan. They will walk the same beaches where they fought for 36 days in February and March 1945 to take what the U.S. command considered to be a key to crippling Japan's armed forces.

And when he arrives, he expects to meet some of the surviving Japanese soldiers who defended that island. They, too, make pilgrimages to Iwo Jima.

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Numbers of Tristate veterans

Mr. Hall wonders how he will feel about coming face-to-face with men who, in 1945, would have shot him dead if he didn't shoot them first.

"It's going to be kind of strange," he said.

The island Mr. Hall will visit is one that the young man from the Clermont County village of Tobasco probably could have avoided all those years ago, if that is what he had wanted to do.

By the time the war in the Pacific broke out, Mr. Hall was already married to his wife, Jean, and they had two small children. Back then men with families to support could easily avoid military service, but Mr. Hall joined the Marines after Pearl Harbor.

Hall collected two Japanese swords on Iwo Jima. (Michael E. Keating photo) | ZOOM |

By February 1945, he found himself with the 5th Marine Division, spending 60 days on board ship off Iwo Jima, as the Army Air Force pounded the tiny island in hopes of wiping out most of the Japanese forces before the Marines landed.

"Bombs rained down night and day on that island for months; it was an incredible bombardment," said Mr. Hall. "We couldn't believe there could possibly be a Japanese soldier left alive on that island."

But there were Japanese left - more than 20,000 of them. They were cut off from supplies and living in squalid conditions in nearly unbearable heat. But they survived because they were hidden deep in the caves and tunnels that honey-combed the volcanic rock of Iwo Jima.

"We thought this was going to be a 72-hour operation, just in and out," Mr. Hall said. "But it turned out to be one of the bloodiest battles of American history."

Of the more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers on the island, only 1,083 survived. Nearly 6,000 Marines were killed, while more than 17,000 were wounded - including Mr. Hall, who earned a Purple Heart.

As he sat in his living room recently, surrounded by the trophies of his passion for deer hunting, he didn't mention his medal until Mrs. Hall pointed it out. Like many veterans, he is reluctant to talk about his own heroism; he talks more freely about what others around him did.

But with some prodding, the story comes out.

Of heroism and shrapnel

Several days after the initial landing, while the Marines were still trying to root out Japanese from the Iwo Jima caves, he came within 30 yards of a Japanese soldier aiming a rifle at him. Mr. Hall shot first.

"As soon as I fired, a grenade he had on him exploded; I guess I must have hit it," Mr. Hall said. The shrapnel hit him in the leg and shoulders.

"It wasn't that big a deal," he said.

In the landing, Mr. Hall was part of a three-man crew manning a 50-millimeter machine gun. After the Marine invasion began in the wee hours of the morning of Feb. 19, 1945, Mr. Hall and his Company C of the Pioneer Battalion came in on the eighth wave at what Marine planners designated as Green Beach.

"It was inch-by-inch fighting," he said. "There was no front line. Everyplace was front line. It was brutal, from start to finish."

His unit spent seven straight days in combat before they could fall back. During that time, he saw what has become one of the most lasting images of the war - the moment when five Marines and a Navy corpsmen raised the American flag on Mt. Suribachi, the 550-foot high promontory that dominated the island's landscape.

"I was down below firing on that mountain when they raised that flag," Mr. Hall said. "I'll never forget it."

Today, Mr. Hall - the father of six, grandfather of 11 and great-grandfather of five children - is counting the days before he can return to a place that is at the center of his youth.

Unlike some other battle sites of the Pacific theater, Iwo Jima has not been overgrown with development, the vestiges of battle washed away by time.

"It is still pretty much the way it was the day we left," Mr. Hall said. "It's like going back in time."

E-mail hwilkinson@enquirer.com