Word: iwo
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...officer and China hand. In May 1942, he was appointed commanding officer of the ist Marine Regiment. With the 1st, he helped seize Guadalcanal. After Guadalcanal, he moved to Saipan, took over command of the 4th Marine Division. Gates led the 4th in its famed assaults on Tinian and Iwo Jima. Military experts have since described the Tinian assault as "the perfect amphibious operation." To get ready for it, Cates personally did aerial reconnaissance over the island. Once ashore, he visited the front lines almost daily to study terrain and boost morale, often alarming his staff by the risks...
...Francisco this week would come the vanguard of the dead from the Pacific: 2,992 from Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Peleliu and Iwo Jima.* From Africa in a few weeks would begin another funeral procession. Soon every U.S. city and town, almost every crossroads hamlet, would have a fresh reminder of the price of peace...
...Allen Matthews was the oldest man in his Marine company, and known to the rest as "Pop." By the twelfth day of the battle for Iwo Jima, only three men were left of his 32-man platoon. Then, from Iwo's craggy, ridge-locked plateau came the whee-ee-eet-whee-ee-eet of the moaning Minnies.* There was a moment of blackness, a scream, and then silence...
...common soldier. Writes Matthews: "Perhaps somewhere on somebody's map the actions of our company made a pretty pattern against the whole picture, but what the readers of those maps probably didn't know was that it was a pretty pattern of desperate little confusions." On Iwo, the "desperate little confusions" prodded many a marine into heroism, many more into death. Author Matthews sums up: "It was easier to go forward than to go back...
Belsen Concentration Camp ("not a prisoner"), Rome (wartime), Shanghai and the North China coast, Kunming, Calcutta, Tokyo (wartime), "parts of the Marshalls, Gilberts and Marianas," Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Tarawa...