["The Star-Spangled Banner"]
The training was over.
A regiment of Marine Corps artillery stands its last inspection in the Pacific before shelling off for combat.
Combat troops have always christened the weapons they fight with.
You know when an iron lady named 105mm Howitzer Model M2A1 answered roll call as Glamour Gal.
She wasn't just part of another section in G Battery anymore.
Ten men and a gun had become a team of eleven.
There was the section chief, Sergeant Pipes, from the Louisiana Bayou country, and the gunner, an ex-barmer named Bill Smith, Jr.
There was the next stoop, Simulavich, a Wall Street clerk, fired Glamour Gal, and the loader was Chief Jefferson, a Choctaw Indian.
There was Furman Alfonso Martinez, out of old Spain by way of Montana.
And from Cold Valley, Pennsylvania, a one-time welder named Tom Handy.
There was Tommy Pratcher, ammo passer, who dreamt of raising her foods back in Tennessee.
And Tex Kue, who came, strangely enough, from Texas.
Chris Benke, the Dutchman from D.C., with post-war plans in South America.
And the old man of the outfit, Pop Reynolds.
These were the ladies' escorts. They had bullied her and babied her from Camp Pendleton to Pearl Harbor.
While they often wished she'd look like the portrait painted on her shield, they were proud of her.
When the order finally came to shove off, everybody knew where they were going.
From Hermosa, Malaya, French Indochina, every place from Tokyo Yacht Basin to Bremerton Dry Dock.
They all had the straight dope, except Glamour Gal.
From here on out, the division would be in its combat phase.
Many of the men were already veterans, and many had never smelled powder burning except in the range.
The guns were arsenal tested and tried in the field.
But the ultimate proving ground of men and guns together would be the battlefield.
A secret destination sealed in the fighting orders of the task force.
Down in the stuffy hold of a transport, the artillerymen were just passengers.
Bored, breathing last week's air, and reading the print of last year's magazines.
Swapping lies about their hometown girlfriends, and comparing the artistic merits of Oceanside tattooing with that of Honolulu.
But mostly they wondered where they were going.
One morning they found out. The captain gave them the scoop, showed them their objective.
It was the island of Iwo Jima in the Volcano Group.
A godforsaken rock somewhere between the devil and the Dutch East Indies.
He showed them Green Beach, where George Battery would go in.
He showed them where Glamour Gal would fire her first shot in anger.
He showed them where some of them would die.
D-Day.
Iwo had already gotten the roughest preparatory rubdown of any spot in the Pacific.
But it still crawled with jets.
And it looked like the first wave was going to have to fight with its feet wet.
With their guns still below decks, the cannoneers of G Battery waited for the word from shore.
The message that would tell them that the infantry was beached had wanted artillery support.
Following the debarkation plan, Sergeant Pines and half the crew went in with Glamour Gal in an amphibious truck.
While the rest of the section clambered down the scramble nets into landing craft.
It was just like maneuvers, except for that funny feeling around their breakfast.
Crossing the line of departure, the men of the assault force realized that the Japanese artillery had good seaward observation.
As the rain shortened to include small arms fire, they knew the beach was still hot.
And that Glamour Gal would be plenty welcome.
Running a hellfire of sniper shots and mortar bursts, G Battery hit Green Beach.
It was shinned deep with soft volcanic ash that rendered most towage vehicles inoperable.
There was no time to deploy inland.
The order was to set them up on the beach, which had already cluttered with traffic and supplies.
It was exposed to dental on it.
But the infantry was in trouble.
And as quick as they came ashore, the guns were met for their crews moved a few feet and registered on their first combat target.
Menacing Mount Suribachi.
The main observation post of the Japanese defense system.
Glamour Gal fired her first shots like a veteran.
There wasn't much to it.
No mathematical searching for an invisible target.
She rifled them right over the heads of the infantry, almost point blank range.
The whole battery was in there pitching.
And up on the rock, the Japs could practically look down our barrels and read the few settings.
By evening, the casualties had started coming back.
Glamour Gal hadn't lost any of her crew.
But some sections were going to start short handed the next day.
The morning of D plus one, Glamour Gal and G battery still sighted in on the sullen planks of Suribachi.
The beach was still cluttered.
The guns were crammed into a 20 yard front.
The range had dropped to 800 yards, matching trajectory with the M1s of the infantry.
And somewhere inside that 800 yards, the infantry was starting the assault and would put the flag on Suribachi.
But it took teamwork to put it there.
As fast as the firing data reached her pit, Glamour Gal slammed her 33 pound projectiles into the caves and ledges of the big rock.
But the ammunition supply had to be constant, incessant.
It came in a rotating flotilla of ducks and ham tracks and was dispersed in safe, separate and convenient flight out of reach from Suribachi.
There was more fire pouring into that extinct volcano than ever came out of it when it was active.
The mountain fought back.
But gradually the planes and ships and guns filled out the battle pattern that would end with Mount Suribachi once again, an extinct volcano.
Close by Glamour Gal's gun pit was the surf washed wreckage of hundreds of our landing craft, many of them gunned to pieces, bringing shells to the artillery.
When they were hit, the three wounded our gunners.
The litter of derelicts made subsequent landings dangerous.
But we owned the beach, an unshakable foothold on Iwo Jima.
With the southern spit of Iwo in our hands, we still had to blast the Japs from the remaining three quarters of the island.
The action was moving northward toward the Jap held airfields and there was no rest for G Battery.
No place on the island was safe from the searching Jap fire.
So Glamour Gal had to be dug well in, in her new position.
The men moved cautiously because the sniper fire was heavy.
And besides, the infantry was waiting.
A change of positions meant an uneasy lapse in artillery support.
The firing lag had to be kept to the absolute minimum.
The enemy was expert at infiltration and local security was important.
While Glamour Gal was digging in, her little sisters carried the ball.
Traditional to the Marine Corps, the highly mobile 75 millimeter pack howitzers delivered continuous fire to the north in the face of heavy losses from Jap counter battery fire.
Any level ground that the Japs weren't using served as an airstrip for our grasshoppers.
Aerial observation aided the ground batteries by identifying targets, spotting bursts, and radioing corrections back to the guns.
At the southern approach to the first airstrip, another battalion of 105s was set up on Glamour Gal's flank.
Since the afternoon of D-Day, these two outfits had shared range and target.
When Glamour Gal was properly emplaced in a well-protected pit, her alignment was checked.
All guns in the battery had to be as parallel as an aiming circle and a lieutenant's mathematics could make them.
Forward observers landed with and deployed ahead of the infantry, spotted a large concentration of Japanese.
They phoned the target data back to the regimental fire direction center who would pass it down to battalion and battery positions.
From the front to the gun pits, the Japanese troops and installations traveled down the chain of artillery command,
fired a jumble of grids and decimal points, and emerged at G-Battery as a fire mission.
A synchronized barrage with the entire regiment backing up Glamour Gal as she blistered the paint off her tube
and sent her quota of effective rounds into the target area.
The forward observers kept each section supplied with fire data.
On this mission, the gun crews couldn't observe the effect of their own fire,
but knew that within 25 yards of every one of their bursts, no jet could live.
Up ahead, the infantry watched the smoke and bursts of the barrage.
When alerted, they were going in.
The area neutralized, our riflemen moved in, but the Japs had managed to pull a few of their cliffside guns back out of our barrage.
Enemy mortars and artillery were still zeroed in on the path of our advance.
The rocket and tank team delivered direct artillery and flame against the fortified bridges and into the firing ports and embrasures of the Japanese caves.
From the air, observers directed the execution of the order that came down through the division to burn out the entire area.
A lull in the fire requests meant no rest for the gun sections.
The glamour gal had to be cleaned and ready for the next mission the infantry might call for.
And the ammunition had to be unpacked during spare moments, for there would be no time when the firing started.
Whenever possible, it was prepared in advance as well.
The shell casings were loaded with powder bags, the number depending on the probable charges to be used.
On the projectiles, fuses had to be set, set for everything from super quick to come next Sunday.
Everything was prepared swiftly and with mathematical precision.
Anything else might mean the loss of seconds in serving the guns, and seconds counted on Iwo Jima,
where the Japanese, in the desperation of their last ditch, were pouring everything they had into our lives.
They tried to stop us. The air was full of hot iron and purple hearts.
Our advance continued on.
A few days after glamour gal had hit the beach, the corps artillery had landed its 155 millimeter howitzers.
Not as fast or as mobile as the 105s, they had greater range and destructive power.
And they were just the answer to the long-range JAP coastal guns.
The nights were often very warm for February, when a high trajectory artillery duel was on.
It was give and take until the JAPs had a lucky shot in the division ammo dump.
After that, things got strictly high trajectory,
and the division and corps artillery threw everything but the galley stove and the general's jeep into the JAP battery.
In the morning, the Japanese guns were scrap ironed.
All over the island, the enemy defenses were crumbling.
For the first time in almost a month, the artillery could stop to pick up its brass.
The campaign was over.
After 28 bloody days of fighting, the name of Iwo Jima went into the battle honors of three marine divisions
and into the glorious traditions of the United States Marine Corps.
Glamour gal was now a veteran.
It had taken a paintbrush to name her and 28 days of blood and fire to baptize her.
Now she and the boys were getting ready to shove off again, getting ready for the next operation.
This time, too, everybody knew where they were going.
Korea, Omosa, Manila, French Indochina.
But they didn't know that their next landing would be on Japan itself.
They didn't know that inside of seven months, the war would be over
and that glamour gal's next mission would be as a policeman's club to help keep order in greater East Asia.
Some of them would never know.
Bob Reynolds, the old man, was still back there, back on Iwo, and so was the captain.
They will be there forever.
Just a small part of history, the story of ten men and a gun.
Music