| Summary: | (7:18) Mr. Miller tells about being on Iwo Jima during the last days of World War II.
Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Paul Miller
July 12, 2011
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 3
Clint Alley: Well did you see the flag raised on Mount Suribachi?
Paul Miller: I did not. I was maybe a mile away. Almost on the other end of the beach. I heard a noise. Everybody started yelling. And I don't remember what I was doing, but whatever it was my foxhole buddy was a little short fellow we called Greek. And I said, "Greek, what happened?" He said, "They just raised the flag." So I saw it seconds after it was raised. Of course, it was far away, but I could see it. But I did not see it being raised.
CA: Yeah. So that was, I bet that was an exciting moment though.
PM: Oh it was, yes. But really, most people think that was the end of the battle. It wasn't. That was D plus 3 or D plus 4, I guess. Like, we landed on February 19 and this was like February 23. The bulk of the fighting was on the other end of the island for the next twenty-six days.
CA: Um. Did you, I've heard a lot made of the cave system and the tunnels the Japanese had.
PM: Oh, yeah.
CA: Did you go into any of those or see any of those?
PM: I foolishly walked into one a little ways one time. It was on the cliffs which was on our extreme right and, ah, the battalion I was attached to took that cliff the first day and they had like a fifty percent casualty rate. But anyway they, later after we secured our positions on the beach and turned, or turned them over, we didn't secure them, we turned them over to the line battalion’s communications teams. Then, uh, they put us in a, sort of a transient group and they would send us up front to replace communications personnel who had been killed or wounded. Up there, by that time they were on top of the cliff, and I did go in one of the caves one day. And there were Japanese bodies all around in front of it. And I walked into it maybe ten feet and came back out. But I never went on into a cave. And a lot of Marines got killed that way.
CA: Yeah.
PM: In fact, one of the, you know there were two flags raised on Iwo Jima. I'm sure you've heard that story. One of the, ah, I think it was the, ah, movie camera operator who filmed the raising of the first flag and I don't think he ever got proper credit for it, but anyway he was killed in one of those caves. And it happened to a lot of people. And I don't know, maybe intuition, maybe fright, I don't know what caused it, but I did not go very far into that one and didn’t go into any more. I did find me a Japanese aviator's leather helmet in there which was the only souvenir I managed to get. And I later sold it on Guam for fifteen dollars cause we were broke and in a transient battalion and didn't know when we’d get paid and we had to have toothpaste and shaving cream. So I sold it to a boot who had just come over for fifteen dollars.
CA: Huh.
PM: So the only souvenirs I brought home was what I always said I wanted to bring, my dog tags and what I, what I hung them around.
CA: Un-huh, yeah. That's worth more than the helmet, I'm sure.
PM: Oh, yes.
CA: Ah, you may have told me this already, how long did you stay on the island?
PM: You know, I'm not sure. The island was quote "secured" after twenty-six days. And I think that was on March the 16th. And there was another ten days of what they called mopping up exercises. Now my, my discharge says I participated in action against the enemy from February 19 to March 16, I guess it was, twenty-six days. So I don't know if I left that day or if I left at the end of the mopping up period. Maybe they considered the island secured after twenty-six days and maybe they thought there was no more combat, so I don't know. I can't be sure.
CA: Yeah, yeah. And where did you go after that?
PM: After the operation we went back to Maui to our rest camp. And I was there when they dropped the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And uh, we of course were quite anxious to know what was going on cause we felt like that the war could end any minute. And I was the only one who had a radio in my tent, in our tent. We, we had electricity only during the daylight hours and until taps, ten o'clock at night. But, no we didn't. We had it just in the evening from dark until ten o'clock, we had electricity. We had our own generator for the company. But we strung some combat wire down the tops of the tents from the switchboard tent which had power twenty-four hours a day of course. And ran the wire down our tent pole and I had a radio in there, we were listening to that. And ah, listening to the news cause we expected the war to end any minute. And we were sitting there listening one day and we were huddled around the radio and in those days you sat around the radio and looked at it like you do television now. But, I did that growing up, too. I saw the company commander walking down between the tents, down the tent row. He stopped in mid-stride and just stood there. And I reached up and jerked, jerked the wires loose. And once, he stood there a second and then he went on and one of the boys in the tent with me said, "What did you do that for, idiot? He wanted to hear it, too.” But I was afraid because I'd had a run-in with him before and I was afraid he would hold it against me.
CA: Take your radio
PM: But I was there on Maui until the war ended. Then our division as a unit had made five combat landings, assault landings in about a year. So they were very experienced. And when the war ended they broke, we, there were rumors that the whole division was coming back to the states. But it didn't. They brought the old salts home as a unit but they let us boots go on to occupation duty in China. I went to Guam and stayed there for – that was where I sold my helmet to get toothpaste and shaving cream. And I stayed there, for I don't know, three, four weeks. And they sent me to Tsingtao, China and I spent about six months there before we got word that we were coming home to be discharged.
CA: Hum. Did you learn any Chinese while you were over there?
PM: A few words. I learned to count to ten and I can now count to yee, uhr, sahn, suh, woo, five I guess.
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