Eulogy spoken by Lt. Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn at the dedication of the 5th Marine Division Cemetery on Iwo Jima, March, 1945

Marine on Iwo Jima.

Photo courtesy of Betty Michels McMahon

When I met Betty Michels McMahon, daughter of Iwo Jima flag-raiser Jimmy Michels, she handed me a portion of this beautiful speech by Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn. In honor of Jimmy Michels and of all the marines who fought on Iwo Jima, I thought I'd share it here.



THIS IS PERHAPS THE GRIMMEST, and surely the holiest task we have faced since D-Day. Here before us lie the bodies of comrades and friends. Men who until yesterday or last week laughed with us, joked with us, trained with us. Men who were on the same ships with us, and went over the sides with us, as we prepared to hit the beaches of this island. Men who fought with us and feared with us. Somewhere in this plot of ground there may lie the individual who could have discovered the cure for cancer. Under one of these Christian crosses, or beneath a Jewish Star of David, there may rest now an individual who was destined to be a great prophet to find the way, perhaps, for all to live in plenty, with poverty and hardship for none. Now they lie here silently in this sacred soil, and we gather to consecrate this earth in their memory.

IT IS NOT EASY TO DO SO. Some of us have buried our closest friends here. We saw these men killed before our very eyes. Any one of us might have died in their places. Indeed, some of us are alive and breathing at this very moment only because men who lie here beneath us, had the courage and strength to give their lives for ours. To speak in memory of such men as these is not easy. Of them, too, can it be said with utter truth: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. It can never forget what they did here.”

No, our poor power of speech can add nothing to what these men and the other dead of our division who are not here have already done. All that we can even hope to do is follow their example. To show the same selfless courage in peace that they did in war. To swear that, by the grace of God and the stubborn strength and power of human will, their sons and ours shall never suffer these pains again. These men have done their job well. They have paid the ghastly price of freedom. If that freedom be once again lost, as it was after the last war, the unforgivable blame will be ours, not theirs. So it be the living who are here to be dedicated and consecrated.

WE DEDICATE OURSELVES, first, to live together in peace the way they fought and are buried in war. Here lie men who loved America because their ancestors, generations ago helped in her founding, and other men who loved her with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers escaped from oppression to her blessed shores. Here lie officers and [privates], [Blacks] and whites, rich and poor…together. Here are Protestants, Catholics, and Jews…together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many from each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men there is no discrimination. No prejudice. No hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy.

Anyone among us the living who fails to understand that, will thereby betray those who lie here. Whoever of us lifts his hand in hate against another, or thinks himself superior to those who happen to be in the minority, makes of this ceremony and of the bloody sacrifice it commemorates, an empty, hollow mockery. To this, them, as our solemn, sacred duty, do we the living now dedicate ourselves: to the right Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, of all races alike, to enjoy the democracy for which all of them have here paid the price.

TO ONE THING MORE do we consecrate ourselves in memory of those who sleep beneath these crosses and stars. We shall not foolishly suppose, as did the last generation of America’s fighting, that victory on the battlefield will automatically guarantee the triumph of democracy at home. This war, with all its frightful heartache and suffering, is but the beginning of our generation’s struggle for democracy. When the last battle has been won, there will be those at home, as there were last time, who will want us to turn our backs in selfish isolation on the rest of organized humanity, and thus to sabotage the very peace for which we fight. We promise you who lie here; we will not do that. We will join hands with Britain, China, Russia—in peace, even as we have in war, to build the kind of world for which you died.

WHEN THE LAST SHOT has been fired, there will still be those eyes that are turned backward not forward, who will be satisfied with those wide extremes of poverty and wealth in which the seeds of another war can breed. We promise you, our departed comrades: this, too, we will not permit. This war has been fought by the common man; its fruits of peace must be enjoyed by the common man. We promise, by all that is sacred and holy, that your sons, the sons of miners and millers, the sons of farmers and workers—will inherit from your death the right to a living that is decent and secure.

WHEN THE FINAL CROSS has been placed in the last cemetery, once again there will be those to whom profit is more important than peace, who will insist with the voice of sweet reasonableness and appeasement that it is better to trade with the enemies of mankind than, by crushing them, to lose their profit. To you who sleep here silently, we give our promise: we will not listen: We will not forget that some of you were burnt with oil that came from American wells, that many of you were killed by shells fashioned from American steel. We promise that when once again people seek profit at your expense, we shall remember how you looked when we placed you reverently, lovingly, in the ground.

THIS DO WE MEMORIALIZE those who, having ceased living with us, now live within us. Thus do we consecrate ourselves, the living, to carry on the struggle they began. Too much blood has gone into this soil for us to let it lie barren. Too much pain and heartache have fertilized the earth on which we stand. We here solemnly swear: this shall not be in vain. Out of this, and from the suffering and sorrow of those who mourn this, will come—we promise—the birth of a new freedom for all humanity everywhere. And let us say…AMEN.

Lt. Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn, first Jewish chaplain appointed by the Marine Corps.

Gittelsohn's speech followed by photos of the event: http://www.ww2gyrene.org/spotlight4_gittelsohn.htm

The First Flag Raisers of Iwo Jima

More from Betty Michels McMahon, in memory of her father, Jimmy Michels, a marine who was one of the first flag raisers on Iwo Jima.

For more on Jimmy Michels and the first flag raising, see the following posts:

http://www.boysofwwii.blogspot.com/2011/04/letter-from-jimmy-michels.html

http://www.boysofwwii.blogspot.com/2011/04/two-flags-of-iwo-jima-i-met-him-in.html

The First Flag Raisers on Iwo Jima

Betty Michels McMahon, daughter of Jimmy Michels, attended a Pillars of Honor program today in Forest Park, IL, in memory of her father, a man who had been part of the first group of marines to raise a flag on Iwo Jima.  She shared some photos of that momentous date which I now share with you.

For more about Jimmy Michels and the initial flag raising, please see the following posts:

http://www.boysofwwii.blogspot.com/2011/04/letter-from-jimmy-michels.html

http://www.boysofwwii.blogspot.com/2011/04/two-flags-of-iwo-jima-i-met-him-in.html



The Flags of Iwo Jima

(Photo by Bob Campbell)

I met US Army vet John Storcel in North Riverside, Illinois, back in 2011 at a WWII veteran's event for which I sang period songs with my husband. After the program, I wanted to shake the hands of as many vets as possible, get them to sign my book, and say something to them that would somehow express my admiration for the fact that they had saved the world from fascism. The last signature in my book that day was that of John Storcel and that's because he had a lot on his mind.

A marine named Jimmy Michels, he told me, had been a good friend and fellow member of the North Riverside Veteran’s VFW Post 6869. He had been one of the marines who had raised the first American flag on Iwo Jima’s strategic Mt. Suribachi during the Marine’s month-long struggle to take the tiny volcanic island from the Japanese in 1945. The second flag-raising, conducted only hours later and immortalized by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal and captured on film as well, had not been staged – the marines had been told to raise a new flag and they did so without acknowledging the presence of those who had come to record the event -- but the second flag-raising was almost a reenactment of the first, completely eclipsing it in the national consciousness.

Jimmy Michels in the foreground. 

First flag raising on Mount Suribachi, February 23, 1945. 

That last item was a constant source of irritation to Mr. Storcel and when he learned that I was a writer, he offered to send me some information on the incident. He also directed me to also watch Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers,” based on the book by James Bradley, son of John Bradley, one of the second flag-raisers. I too have a distinct aversion to the re-writing of history for ulterior motives and, according to Mr. Storcel, the motive in this case had been completely monetary. So I watched the film, ready to be angry. Instead, I came away very sad.

If I had anger, where was I to direct it? At Joe Rosenthal? According to a piece he wrote in Colliers ten years after the fact, when he heard about the initial flag-raising, he climbed up Mt Suribachi in order to capture it on film but when he got there the first flag-raisers were already on their way down and weren’t interested in having their picture taken again; their moment and their flag had already been photographed, thanks very much. As the new flag was going up, Rosenthal snapped it just in time. It hadn’t been staged for his benefit and it hadn’t even been his idea, else he would have taken it from a different angle and captured some faces. But it was a brilliant (if nearly accidental) shot and I’m sure it made him a lot of money but that’s because he happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Should I be angry at Chandler Johnson, the commander who ordered the second flag to be raised? That whole story is merely human foible, nothing more. The Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, was so taken with the excitement of the initial flag-raising that he insisted that the flag should be his personal souvenir. Nothing doing, said Colonel Johnson, in so many words. That flag belonged to the battalion that had risked their lives to place it there, no one else. So he ordered a new flag to be raised on the mountain with the excuse that a larger one would be more visible.

Should I be angry at those in the war department who pressured the three surviving flag-raisers to go on the war-bond tour? Sure, maybe, but money was definitely needed to beat the Japanese, the country that got us into the war by trying to decimate our navy; who had decided that most of Asia existed for the purpose of domination; and who had treated the American POWs of Bataan with barbaric cruelty.  Because Rosenthal’s brilliant photograph created an unforgettable image, and because the young men in the photo went on tour, money was raised and the Americans eventually put an end to the Pacific Theater of WWII.

Who was at fault then? The war, plain . . . but not so simple. War is hell, always has been, always will be, and as long as wars exist, money will be needed to buy weapons with which to kill more of the enemy’s soldiers than he can kill of yours. This was one war where the distinction between the good guys and the bad guys was crystal clear and the good guys won. And as a result -- apart from the shameful Allied allowance of the Iron Curtain -- millions of people were released from oppression. But before the happy ending could occur, the good guys needed money. Three young men, pawns, if you will, of the good guys, were pressured into behaving as if there had only been one flag-raising.

Ira Hayes, a Native American, one of the surviving raisers of the second flag who was taken on the tour against his will -- “kicking and screaming” -- with the other two survivors, couldn’t take the farcical element of the whole thing. Johnny Cash tells us that he died face down in watery ditch, a victim of post-traumatic stress and alcoholism; an excellent marine who couldn’t cope with civilian life. He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last. But his story is heartbreakingly sad, as sad as all of the grey areas in the horrible and sometimes necessary thing we call war.

Photographs

Journalist Dickey Chapelle's reaction to news of the flag raising.