By Jason Millman Thursday, June 21, 2007 - Updated: 11:13 AM EST
Local veterans who survived one of World War II’s bloodiest battles say they are upset by Japan’s decision to go back to using the prewar name for the island of Iwo Jima at the urging of the island’s original inhabitants. Surviving islanders evacuated during the war praised the change back to Iwo To, but veterans said the name change detracts from the sacrifice American soldiers made on the volcanic Pacific island. “We had a bloody battle there,” said Bob Johnston, a 90-year-old veteran from Woburn. “That’s a shame they would change that.” Though Iwo Jima and Iwo To both have the same meaning in Japanese, Johnston said the name of the island has an important meaning to Americans who were there.“We had a tough time taking that place, we lost a lot of guys,” he said. “It was the blooodiest battle the Marines ever had.”
Retired Marine Maj. Gen. Fred Haynes, who was in the regiment that raised the flag on Mount Suribachi at Iwo on Feb. 23, 1945, was surprised and upset by the news. “Frankly, I don’t like it. That name is so much a part of our tradition, our legacy,” Haynes said. The name controversy stems from the evacuation of citizens from the island in 1944 as U.S. forces advanced across the Pacific. Some Japanese navy officers who moved in to fortify the island mistakenly called it Iwo Jima, and the name stuck. Locals were never happy with the Iwo Jima name and took exception to a pair of Clint Eastwood movies last year about the island that reinforced the Iwo Jima label. “In Japan they can still do what they want, but it’s called Iwo Jima,” said Peter Santoro, 90, of North Attleboro, who received a Purple Heart during his service on the island.
- Associated Press Wire Services
Posted by: kwflatbed
Veteran of Iwo Jima remembers more than flag-raising By Joe Fitzgerald Boston Herald Columnist Monday, June 25, 2007
He’s 89 now, living comfortably in San Antonio, but Chet Gould can still feel the withering heat of Iwo Jima, as if once again descending its menacing hills of volcanic ash the way he did as a young Marine from Massachusetts in 1945, literally holding history in his hands. It’s a history Japanese revisionists now hope to wipe away by changing the name of that island to Iwo To, an identity unrelated to the Marines’ bloody conquest of it in World War II, forever symbolized by Joe Rosenthal’s photo of six leathernecks raising an American flag atop Mount Suribachi. “When that flag went up,” Gould recalled, “many guys thought it meant the end of the battle, but it didn’t. It just signified the mountain had been taken. Then all hell broke loose.”
A member of the Fifth Amphibious Corps, Gould had become a Marine at the tail end of the Depression when the General Electric plant in Pittsfield “let a lot of us young guys go and there was no other work to be found.” Life in the military seemed inviting, especially when he wound up stationed at Quantico, “which looked like a college campus with all its beautiful buildings.”
Then came the attack on Pearl Harbor, and he would soon find himself in the belly of the beast in the Pacific, fighting in Saipan, Tinian, Guam, all legendary bloodbaths in the history of the Corps.
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