U.S. MARINE CORPS

Del Merrill

Thousands of veterans will gather for Memorial Day commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Del Merrill won’t be among them.

As he does every Memorial Day, he’ll slip away from his Hancock home for a long weekend of quiet seclusion in the mountains of Vermont.

“I never stay around for Memorial Day,” he says. “I go away. I have to. It just brings back too many memories of friends lost.”

Now 79 and president of Merrill Blueberry Farms, Merrill was only 19 in February of 1945, when his 5th Marine Division began an amphibious assault on the tiny Japanese island of Iwo Jima.

Wading waist deep through a crimson tide, Merrill hit the beach armed with a flame-thrower, sidestepping body parts of U.S. Marines cut to shreds by relentless artillery and machine gun fire.

“It was brutal,” he says. “Someone later wrote that running across the beach at Iwo Jima — because of the heavy fire — was like trying to run through a rainstorm without getting wet.”

The assault continued, day and night, for 36 days. In the end over one-third of the 70,000 U.S. Marines involved had been killed or wounded.

Merrill’s 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines sustained casualty losses of 95 percent among officers and 98 percent among enlisted men.

With 6,821 Americans killed and another 19,217 wounded, it was the costliest battle in Marine Corps history.

Only one in 20 of the estimated 21,000 Japanese soldiers involved left the 12-square-mile island alive.

Of the 18 men in his assault squad, Merrill was one of only three left alive or without wounds, one of the very few to safely navigate the raindrops.

“Nobody can fathom a guess of what goes on in war unless they’ve been part of it,” he says. “It’s kill or be killed. I saw people dead on the beach, in pieces, and I saw people picked off on both sides of me, but I had been well-trained, and I knew what I had to do.

“Running through that volcanic sand, carrying probably 100 pounds between my flame thrower and my bedroll, I wasn’t scared, but I was concerned.

“The only thing that really worried me was that I would lose an arm or a leg, and I thought, Jesus, I’d rather lose the whole thing. I wouldn’t want to come back half a person, as so many did.”

Remembering what he saw and what he lost in terms of friends killed or horribly maimed is clearly painful for Merrill, even 60 years after the fact.

“There are so many bad memories,” he said. “But, having faced life and death situations, I grew up in a hurry, and I think I look at life a lot differently. I think I have greater respect for people and their ideas. And I know how lucky I am to be here and how much our freedoms mean to us.”

For many Americans, Memorial Day is just a day off from work or an excuse to fire up the grill. Not for those who served, Merrill says, and certainly not for those who never came back.

“It’s too bad that everybody doesn’t have a year or two of military experience,” he said. “Maybe then they might realize how important freedoms are to all of us.”

— Del Merrill