GROJEAN PART OF IWO JIMA INVASION

Charles "Sonny" Grojean turns the pages of "Leatherneck," a magazine dedicated to the exploits of the Marines during World War II. Grojean received a Purple Heart on Iwo Jima, and still has two pieces of shrapnel in his chest.

This platoon of Marines would soon ship out for Hawaii, then Iwo Jima. Many would not return alive. Charles Grojean of Gordonville is in the front row, second from the left.

Fifty years ago next Sunday, Charles "Sonny" Grojean was among 60,000 Marines heading for the rocky shores of Iwo Jima in a steel tidal wave of landing crafts.

With his M-1 rifle battle ready, Grojean, 24, stormed out of his craft into water thick with volcanic ash and struggled up a steep embankment as the Japanese defenders of the small Pacific island unleashed a maelstrom of mortar and machinegun fire.

Grojean, who left his Cape Girardeau butcher business and wife and two kids to "do some duty," was felled by a mortar shell two days later.

The Navy doctor who cleaned his wounds and removed some, but not all of the shrapnel in his chest, told him: "That's all I can do for you. The only thing you can do is pray."

Almost 7,000 Americans, 6,000 of them Marines, lost their lives in the month it took to take Iwo Jima. Over 17,000 Marines were wounded.

"Without Iwo I couldn't bomb Japan effectively," declared Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, commander of the Army Air Forces, from his base on Saipan in the Marianas Islands, 600 miles to the southeast.

The war with Japan would end in the fall, and over 2,200 big B-29s would use Iwo Jima for refueling and emergency landings.

Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, commander of the 21,000 Japanese troops on Iwo, had no doubt Americans such as Grojean were coming. He had hidden 800 cannon in caves, and mortars and machinegun nests peppered the volcanic landscape.

He ordered his gunners not to fire until the Americans were ashore.

Grojean remembers the island as a hell hole of volcanic ash, sulfur fumes, heat, misty rain and flies.

"I thought that if anyone ever told me to go to hell, I could tell them I've already been there," said Grojean, who was born in Dutchtown 73 years ago. "And hell was what it really was like.

"There was a lot of fighting, and a lot of the dead bodies were bloated ... flies going in and out of the noses. It made you sick.

"We didn't eat anything but chocolate bars -- because that was the only thing you could keep down. The whole island just stunk something terrible."

Grojean, who attended Notre Dame High School in Cape, was 21 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was not drafted into the Service, but volunteered to fight when he learned some of his best friends were being killed.

On April 4, 1944, he signed on with Uncle Sam and was told he would be in the Navy. But while in St. Louis waiting to be shipped to a naval training station, he volunteered for the Marines -- reluctantly.

"There were a couple hundred men in a big building and a few Marines were sitting at a desk," Grojean recalled with a quirky laugh. "The Marines needed volunteers but nobody would volunteer to be a Marine.

"Well, there was a man beside me as big as any football player, and I'm kind of short, and he looked at me and said, 'Hey shorty, let's you and me volunteer and show these bastards.'

"I said 'no,' and he grabbed me by the arm and picked me off the floor and my feet were dangling, and then I said, 'Okay, okay, I'll go with you.'

"After that 16 men got brave enough to volunteer. Maybe I made the right decision, 'cause I'm here now."

Grojean was sent to Camp Pendleton near San Diego for basic training. After the training, which he described as "plenty hard," he boarded a troop ship and spent three months at sea. He thought he would see action in Saipan and Tinian but didn't.

The troop ship eventually docked at Hawaii where Grojean underwent about three months of amphibious assault training. Around Christmas, Grojean and his fellow Marines boarded the troop ship and set sail for a speck of an island called Iwo Jima.

On the morning of Feb. 19, 1945, as a stark sun rose in the east, Grojean, huddled in a landing craft, prepared to invade the tiny volcanic island -- two-thirds the size of Manhattan, and 747 miles south of Tokyo. It would be the only invasion in the Pacific in which the Americans took more casualties than the Japanese.

Grojean remembers the defenders as fierce: "The Japs waited until we got ashore before they hardly did anything. After we reached the top of an embankment we started going across the island.

"The Japs were dug in and waiting. I remember we went near Mount Suribachi where the boys raised the flag -- that famous photo. But the Japs were mean bastards, they wouldn't give up. You had to kill them.

"They were drilled to think it was an honor to get killed, 'cause they thought they'd immediately go to the beyond where it's wonderful and a better world."

Grojean fought the enemy for two days until a late evening mortar attack tore apart his company. He "hit the deck" but a shell exploded right in front of him. Shrapnel cut into both sides of his upper chest. He was knocked unconscious.

His best friend, Billy Deck of Jackson, was killed in the attack. Deck's buried in Jackson Cemetery.

"The barrage was unbelievable," recalled Grojean, cringing a bit. "It was like the world was coming apart."

Grojean awoke after dark. A misty, humid rain was falling. A Navy medic, called a corpsman, was pulling him through the sand, out of harm's way. He passed out again.

The next morning he awoke on a hospital ship -- it was packed tight with wounded. A black sailor gave Grojean his bunk to sleep in for a few days. He brought him food. Gangrene began spreading in his wounds.

Finally, doctors tended to him. "They took me to the kitchen and laid me down on a kitchen table and four sailors held me down while the doctors operated and cleaned my wounds.

"They had nothing to deaden the pain. I remember that. They dug out all (of the shrapnel) they could but left in two pieces. One piece was too close to the heart. This was just butchery surgery, kind of like on 'MASH.'"

It was following this ordeal that a doctor told Grojean: "The only thing you can do is pray."

Grojean slowly recovered. He was taken to Hawaii, then to the States. He arrived in the States with "a pair of pajamas, my shrapnel, dog tags and a picture of my wife and kids ... all I had."

He spent about six months in hospitals. At Camp LaJeune near Philadelphia he was discharged on Oct. 23, 1945. The Japanese had already surrendered.

Grojean returned to Cape Girardeau and worked again as a butcher. He moved to Colorado, moved back to Cape and worked in a furniture factory on Good Hope Street.

In 1960 he opened an upholstery shop, Cape Upholstery. The motto painted on his truck was: "We hope you recover soon."

In 1970 he moved into his present home on Highway 25 south of Gordonville.

While recovering from his wounds in a hospital, Grojean said he encountered a member of his unit. The man had been shot 16 times in the chest by a machinegun. The man, says Grojean, survived and lives in New Jersey, and in the hospital he told him only 16 out of the 265 Marines in their company survived the battle of Iwo Jima.

Several years ago Grojean attended a Marine reunion in Arkansas. Naturally, they talked about the war, about bloody Iwo. Each was given a poem written by their lieutenant, Walter Bennett, B Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Regiment, 5th Marine Division.

Grojean says it holds a lot of meaning for him:

Our Flag

I know not why God spared me.

This must have been his plan.

For thousands are now resting

Beneath the Iwo Jima sand.

With honor I respect these men.

They've done so much for me.

So I can live in America

The home of the brave and the free.

I love the freedom that I have,

And have had for many scores.

Bought and paid for by the blood

Of many treacherous wars.

I will not disgrace the God I serve.

Nor the flag I love so dear.

The men that want to burn our flag,

Believe me, they were not here.