| Summary: | (8:31) Mr. Miller describes living on Iwo Jima during 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 5
Rhonda Haygood: Could you describe to us a little bit what the living conditions were like when you were on Iwo Jima?
Paul Miller: Ah, we lived in foxholes most of the time, of course. And ah, the first night I spent after our team found us and took us down to the beach where they were, had set up their communications center, that first night there were always threats of a counter landing behind us on the beach and we were of course near the beach and there were all sorts of concrete pillboxes built into the terraces. Iwo Jima had the beach, maybe fifteen or twenty feet, and then there was a terrace you went up a few feet, and then another level area on top of that, and then another terrace. So we were near the top of that top terrace near a burned out pillbox. And my first night I spent sitting up leaning against the, that pillbox with my rifle in my hand in case we had a counter landing. So that was the first night. After that we moved down the beach a ways and we dug a foxhole, individual, well two, two men per foxhole. You always had a buddy so if anything happened, you know, he would know what it was if he survived and you didn't. So we, the little Greek was my foxhole partner. And we, we dug foxholes, dug a foxhole when we moved down the beach and spent a few nights in it. And ours happened to be between, ah on one side maybe ten feet away was the body of a colonel and on the other side about the same distance away was a lieutenant. But we, I mean you got so you ignored things, bodies like that because they were everywhere. And we, our foxhole we dug between those two bodies. And we stayed there for a few nights. Then we secured our beach communications centers and went to the group to be sent up front. Ah, up front, you know I don't remember anything other than a foxhole. We didn't have any tents, of course. So it was mostly foxholes up there. We had dugouts with sand bags around them to keep our switchboards and communication center. But as far as living quarters it was wherever you could find. You slept on top of the ground or in a foxhole.
RH: What about food?
PM: Food, we lived largely on K-rations for a long time. Ah, I guess maybe it was before we went up front finally they got some field kitchens ashore. And the only food I really remember was a, sort of a C-rations stew. But it was hot and it was good, but we had no bread. Then up near the front lines, I, I don't remember any field kitchens feeding us up there so we ate cold K-rations mostly I guess.
RH: What was that like?
PM: Oh, terrible. They had three different types of K-rations. They came in a box about the size of a box of Crackerjacks. Had a little can of pork veal and breakfast you could get ham- a little can with ham and eggs in it. You had a fruit bar or a chocolate bar, four cigarettes, a package of hard crackers and a little envelope with lemonade powder and powdered coffee. So, that was pretty much our food for a long time.
RH: Well how did you get water?
PM: There, of course, was no, no drinkable water that I’m aware of on the island. There were a lot of little, I don't- sulfuric eruptions I guess where sulfuric water would bubble to the surface. But there was no drinking water. So they brought it ashore in five-gallon cans and we filled our canteens from that. Near the end they did get a distillation plant ashore. And they distilled water but there was never enough water for showers. So, I went twenty-six or thirty-six days without a shower. I don't think I shaved in that twenty-six or thirty-six or whatever days. And then the day that I'll always remember, the day they took us off the island we –the troop transports couldn't get in to dock anywhere. So they had the LSTs, the big sea-going landing vessels had dropped the ramp on the beach and we walked aboard that. And they took us on the LSTs out to the troop transports and then we jumped from one to the other out there. And I'll always remember that first meal, it was one of the best meals I ever had in my life. It was cheese and bologna sandwiches, on stale bread, but boy, that bread was good.
RH: What about medical attention when you were on the island? Did they have the men themselves attend to each other or did they have someone special?
PM: Oh no, we had, we had- ah, the Marine Corps does not have a medical corps so we used the Navy's medical facilities. And they had all kinds of doctors and corpsman, nurses. And in fact, I think, with the line battalions they had a, a squad had its own medical corpsman. Our squad did not, our team did not have one but we had battalion medical centers very near. In our eighteen man team, I think, we had, two were killed the first day and another one was killed later. And we had one, two, three, three others wounded and two cracked up. You know what that means. Went nuts. Battle fatigue. We had two that cracked up and were evacuated. So we had medical attention nearby. We did not have our own corpsman. But they, after a few days, they, as soon as they had space to do it, they had some dugouts and they actually did surgery on the island, emergency surgery. But the main thing was to get them ready to put on a landing craft to go out to ah, they had a couple of hospital ships and every, or most transport ships were converted into hospitals to handle the evacuated wounded. There were about seventy thousand men, Marines, who landed. We had almost twenty thousand wounded and evacuated and we had six thousand, eight hundred and twenty-one killed.
RH: So the ships were out, while you’re on land the ships are out there and they can send transports in to carry people back and forth as needed?
PM: Yeah, sort of a commuter ship I guess. The LSTs which were, well they carried I don't how many men. I was never stationed on one. The only one I ever was on, I guess, was the one that took us out to the ships. But anyway, they were, they were a ship. A boat is a craft that you can load onto a ship. But anyway, it was ocean-going. It was flat-bottomed and nobody wanted to ride on one on rough water. But they, they ran- came up to the beach and dropped the ramp so the whole front end was open and you could walk in. During the landing they had amphibious tanks on those. And the troops that went in on the amphibious tanks.
Clint Alley: All right. Do you have anything else you want to add before we turn the tapes off?
PM: No, I guess not. I would say that I've had many people tell me that, about their experiences in World War II. I wouldn't take anything for the experience but I wouldn't go through it again for a million dollars. I don't feel that way. Too many good people died from my experience.
CA: Yeah.
PM: Mostly eighteen and nineteen year olds.
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