By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

SHARONVILLE - Although nearly 60 years have passed, Ray Black can still see him clearly, that young Japanese soldier kneeling before a Shinto shrine on the island of Iwo Jima, his head bowed in prayer.

Sgt. Ray Black, 3rd Marine Division, U.S. Marine Corps, had just led his platoon into a firefight with a platoon of Japanese soldiers. The noise and smoke of battle had died away and the 26-year-old Marine spotted that solitary survivor - his enemy - deep in meditation on the jungle floor.

So he shot him in the head.

Ray Black, 85, spends the afternoon telling a few stories with friends Mike Schube (left) and Roger Partington. (Steven M. Herppich photo)

It is not a story that the now 85-year-old Black tells with any hint of pride or boastfulness as he sits in the lounge of the Cottingham Retirement Community, talking about his service in World War II.

It is, in fact, a story he tells with more than a tinge of regret, a sense of shame that has lingered, even after six decades have come and gone.

"I'm not proud of some of the things I did," said Black. "I'm proud of my service to my country. I'm proud of my fellow Marines. But, in war, you do things you could not have imagined yourself doing.

"War is a hard thing."

Had it not been for World War II, Black might never have left the mountains of eastern Kentucky, where he, like most of the men in his family, worked in the coalfields.

"I know what hard labor is," he said.

But one month after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Black and most of the young men of his county enlisted in the service. He chose the Marines.

After boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., he had a variety of assignments. One was serving on a PT boat patrolling the waters off Cuba and the Florida Keys, on the lookout for saboteurs. Another was working guard duty in Washington, D.C.

One day while on guard duty at Bethesda Naval Hospital, he was called into the room of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was receiving polio treatments. The president had summoned the young Marine after he was told he had grown up in the coalfields of Kentucky.

"He wanted to know what life was like for people in the coalfields," Black said. "He cared about folks like us."

It was not long after his meeting with the president that Black was shipped out to San Diego, where he became part of a new Marine division.

The 3rd Division was sent to the Pacific Theater immediately. Most of them, including Black, had never heard a shot fired in anger, had never seen a man fall in combat. That changed quickly when the 3rd Division was rushed into the battle of Bougainville in the Solomon Islands and encountered its first heavy fighting. By the time it was over, 536 Marines of the 3rd Division lay dead on the field and 1,243 were wounded.

On Christmas Day 1943, the 3rd Division shipped out of Bougainville and headed for Guadalcanal, arriving after the 4th and 5th Divisions had secured the island.

"What was left on Guadalcanal by the time we got there was a bunch of fanatical holdouts," Black said. "They gave us serious trouble."

From there, it was on to another battle at Guam, where Black, by now a platoon sergeant, lost 19 of his 36 men. He came within a hair's breadth of losing his own life, coming face to face with a Japanese soldier who smacked him in the mouth with his rifle butt and then turned and "ran like hell."

Iwo Jima came next, in February 1945, "a horrible battle." The 3rd Marine Division pushed across the beaches and into the interior of the tiny island, 660 miles south of Tokyo, capturing two airstrips.

Black's platoon was hunkered down when he heard the platoon radio crackling with a message from command headquarters: "Suribachi! Suribachi!"

Every head snapped around and looked up at Suribachi, the extinct volcano that rose up over one end of the island. There, Black and his men could see the American flag being slowly raised by corpsmen, the image that was caught by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. It was a picture which became emblematic of the Marines and the war in the Pacific.

"That was an inspiration; our spirits were lifted, immediately," Black recalled. "Everybody on the island, I think, could see that flag going up. I've often thought how demoralizing it must have been for the Japanese."

The 3rd Division continued its push to the far end of the island. Once the battle was over, a tired Marine from eastern Kentucky stood on a high point overlooking the Pacific Ocean, emotions welling up inside him, tears in his eyes, saying a silent prayer.

"There are no atheists on a battlefield," Black said. "I looked back over Iwo and thought of the ones who had not made it to the end with me."

When the war in the Pacific ended that summer of 1945, Black was back in Guam, training for an invasion of Japan that, because of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, never took place.

He went home and settled down to a long career as a mortician, running his own funeral home in Huntington, W.Va. He married and raised a family of two boys and a girl.

Today, the mother of his children is deceased, and his daughter and younger son live near Cottingham. His oldest son, a veteran of the Vietnam War, lives in Massachusetts.

Next month Black will join his veteran son for a trip to Washington for the dedication of the National World War II Memorial, a tribute on the National Mall to all who served and those 400,000 Americans who gave their lives.

"It was a long time coming," Black said of the monument to those who served. "But everything worthwhile takes time. I want to go and honor all those who never came home."

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About this series

On Memorial Day weekend, the National World War II Memorial will be dedicated in Washington, D.C. This is the third of seven weekly Enquirer profiles of local veterans who served their country during World War II.

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E-mail hwilkinson@enquirer.com