Memorial Day invites us to reflect on what it means to be a free nation, and on what we have done, what we would be willing to do, to protect that freedom. What would we sacrifice to preserve what we love? I encountered one answer to that question when I was a child, walking with my parents and my great aunt and uncle, John and Ruth Jenkins, through Laurel Hill Cemetery after the Sunday service at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Yonges Island, South Carolina.
St. Paul’s is a sacred place. My sister and I were christened there, and my family attended the church whenever we came to visit “Rufie” and Uncle Johnny. They had helped to raise my mother and were in effect my second grandparents. That spring Sunday, as we walked under the live oaks, Laurel Hill was ablaze with the camellias and azaleas that generations of families had planted on the grounds. Then in her late seventies, “Rufie” was a quiet woman who radiated welcome and kindness. Her more gregarious husband, Uncle Johnny, was known for his smile. But the smile was absent that day when we paused in front of a small tombstone that lay flat against the ground. We stood there for some moments in silence before Rufie said, “Children, this is my son, Marion. He made the supreme sacrifice for our country.”
Born on October 22, 1918, at Summit Plantation on Yonges Island, South Carolina, Marion Innis Jenkins was Rufie and Uncle Johnny’s second son. Growing up in “Toogoodoo,” Marion swam the tidal waters of Swinton Creek and climbed the moss-covered live oak trees. He learned to hunt, to fish, and to love farming. He helped to care for my mother while her own mother worked to support her, and she remembered him as a protective big brother, a young man with a delightful sense of humor who always tried to do what was right and who put principle before expediency. After he graduated from St. Paul’s High School in Hollywood, South Carolina, Marion attended Clemson A and M College, from which he graduated with honors in 1941.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Marion was eager to fight in the war, but his first attempt to enlist was rejected because an arm that he had fractured years before had healed badly. Undeterred, Marion voluntarily underwent painful surgery to correct the problem. His arm was broken again, and this time the limb was properly reset and healed cleanly. He was allowed to enlist and served as a Lieutenant in the Army 77th Infantry Division, where he fought in Guam and the battle of Leyte in the Philippines before receiving orders to go to Iwo Jima.
A tiny spit of land dominated by a volcanic crater known as Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima was a rocky, volcanic island located about 750 miles from the Japanese homeland. As 1945 began, the Empire of Japan and the United States had fought island by island, sea battle by sea battle, through the Pacific for more than three years. Slowly, American forces had driven the Empire back to the point that the Japanese home islands were within range of American bombers. Iwo Jima was strategically important because it provided a base from which Japanese fighters could intercept and destroy long-range Boeing B-29 American Superfortress bombers. If they could capture it, the Allied forces could not only eliminate that threat, but could use its two landing strips as a staging area for “Operation Downfall” to rain down fire on Tokyo and other Japanese cities.
Anticipating attack, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi over the years had turned Iwo Jima into a fortress studded with pill boxes and bunkers. He fortified the hilly, barren terrain with a warren of tunnels extending more than eleven miles and with numerous camouflaged artillery positions, manned by a force of more than 21,000 soldiers. In and under the looming crater of Mount Suribachi, the Japanese lay in wait for the invasion that American intelligence had predicted would take only a few days. American intelligence was wrong.
Three days of fire and thunder preceded the invasion as Allied forces bombarded the island from the sky and from sea. Japanese forces took shelter in the tunnels and caves and some of them were smothered when their hideouts collapsed under the bombardment. On February 19, 1945, forty thousand Marines in five hundred landing craft made an amphibious landing on a beach three thousand yards wide. Soldiers struggled through dunes of coarse, grey, volcanic ash piled as high as fifteen feet that mired the progress of tanks and other military vehicles. As the troops tried to find their feet, Japanese gun emplacements opened fire, stalling their advance and pinning them down on the beach. Many soldiers died as mortars landed directly on their landing crafts. Others perished at dusk when a banzai charge by dozens of Japanese soldiers rushed American troops before ultimately being repelled.
That first night, young soldiers lay awake in their fox holes listening to the blasts and the bullets and the screams of agony from maimed and wounded comrades, young boys who called out for their mothers as life drained from their bodies. Under a brilliant Pacific sky, the red glare of rockets and bombs bursting all around them dimmed the stars, and smoke veiled the moon as hell’s fury visited the earth. Terror gripped the souls of many of those young men so far from home. But after the long night came the dawn, and with it, a new resolve—a renewed determination to fight on.
And fight they did. Facing relentless fire from five-inch guns pointed directly at them from concealed positions, the troops pushed past the beach and by the end of the second day had secured the southern end of the island. They were positioned to take Mount Suribachi itself, cutting it off from the Japanese defenders to the north. Finally, on February 23, 1945, a patrol of marines faced sniper and mortar fire to reach the rocky summit of the volcano. There six American soldiers raised the Stars and Stripes to fly more than five hundred feet above the flat surface of the island, visible to all the troops below.
Three of the six Marines depicted in the photograph, Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block and Private First Class Franklin Sousley, were killed in action days later, The photograph of their raising the flag was captured by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press, and remains to this day one of the most iconic images of the tragedy and triumph of the war. But to the troops struggling below, the flag meant even more. If their fellow soldiers could persist and survive to plant the flag, then so could they persist and survive to victory.
The soldiers would need that determination, that persistence, as combat continued for four more bloody weeks. The hidden enemy fired on them from concealed tunnels, caves, and bunkers. Through cracks and crevices, through holes and hollows and hidden pill boxes, invisible Japanese soldiers rained death on the American forces. Slowly, relentlessly, the Marines used flame throwers to burn them out. On March 25, 1945, another banzai attack brought heavy American casualties. The military formally declared that Iwo Jima had been captured that same day, but the fighting continued for many more weeks. Victory over the island came at a terrible price. According to the official Department of Navy Website, "The 36-day (Iwo Jima) assault alone resulted in more than 26,000 American casualties, including 6,800 dead.”
Marion Jenkins participated in the bloody clean-up operation that took place after the flag was raised. It was during that time that he wrote the following letter to his mother, describing not only the hell that surrounded him, but the insight he had acquired from his experiences.
”My own dear Mother,
All you have to do is look at the papers or listen to the news broadcasts and you will know where I am. We are hunting the Japs again. …
In your last letter, you asked me how I am feeling. Physically, I am in top shape; about like I was in college. Mentally, I am happy and at peace with the world. This sounds like a strange statement. It is true, and I will explain it.
I have gained a little understanding of this magnificent universe. I have a deep respect for God’s all powerful ability to control His wonderful and vast creations. I have faith in His goodness. I know that all things are created with a purpose. They have a use and a job to do. I know that mankind has a great fulfillment of this destiny. We do not have much time to think of these things as we walk or run across a field with bullets whizzing all around, with shells falling and no one knowing where the next one will land. But at night, while we lie as close to the ground as possible in as small a space as we can occupy, there is nothing we can do but wait when the bombs start falling and the shells are bursting. Our chances of getting wounded or killed are entirely dependent upon the laws of nature which God has created for controlling all things in this universe. We know someone is going to get hurt, but who it will be we have no way of telling. On such occasions, all men do instinctively those things which will increase his chances of coming through alive, for everyone has an inherent desire to live.
However, I cannot say that we are actually afraid of the death which is striking here and there among us; for we know that death is not destruction. It is only a change of transformation from one form of life to another. Nothing in this universe is wasted or destroyed. Even war has its use. It brings men closer to God. It gives man a greater understanding of his fellow men, a deeper appreciation of his abilities and shortcomings. ...All about us we hear men say they hate our enemies, the Germans and the Japanese. I cannot say I hate these people. Why should we hate them? They firmly believe they are trying to get a better world for their people, to improve their surroundings or obtain better things. We cannot condemn men for having these desires. We may know that the things they are seeking cannot be found in the mere material gains of war. But do these people know this? Do they know of any other methods? Have we shown them and thought them the correct way of life? …We should not hate a misguided people who do not know what they do. We should help them….
I guess you have been wondering why I write all of this. As I lie under the stars at night, I am awed by what it is all about. Although I have not found all of the answers. I have found enough of them to give me a deep sense of peace, happiness, contentment, and Faith.
Your loving son,
Marion”
Although he survived this initial assault on Iwo Jima, Marion Jenkins was killed by an exploding mortar on April 19, 1945. A few days later, Ruth “Rufie” Jenkins was preparing lunch on Toogoodoo when she looked out through a window displaying a Service Flag with two stars indicating her two sons were serving in the war. She saw a young, uniformed man emerge from a dusty car with a letter in his hand. Softly, she called out, “Johnny,” and she and her husband went to the door together to receive the news about their son. After the young man left, they wept in each other’s arms.
Abraham Lincoln best describes this moment of anguish. In 1864, he wrote: “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.” (Letter of Abraham Lincoln to Mrs. Bixby, November 21, 1864)
Posthumously awarded the Purple Heart with three stars, Marion Jenkins was first interred in the grey, volcanic soil of Iwo Jima along with thousands of his fellow soldiers. The next year, at the request of his parents, he was brought home. His remains were reinterred with military honors at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Perhaps because he had a premonition that he was about to die, Marion wrote that last letter to comfort his mother. Ruthie Jenkins did not receive it until after Marion made the supreme sacrifice for his country.
What, then, is the price of freedom? It is a question we should ponder as we consider the sacrifices that have been made in its name. It is a question that calls on the best of us; to guard our freedoms even as we enjoy them, to preserve them, and never to hold them lightly. On this Memorial Day, this question calls us both to remembrance and to action. It calls upon us so to live as to merit such great sacrifice. We must forever treasure and stand ready to defend the freedoms which have been purchased at so great a price.
By David J. Rutledge (edited by Debra Walsh Rutledge)
