U.S. MARINE CORPS

Richard Godfrey

As dawn broke on the morning of Feb. 23, 1945, six Marines under the command of Sgt. Mike Strank raised a flag atop Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi. The soldiers would do so, said Strank at the time, so that “every Marine on this cruddy island can see it.”

Bucksport resident Richard Godfrey, 79, was a member of E Company, swarming the slopes during the flag-raising. The Marines in the famous flag-raising photo were immortalized. “My first wife says, ‘The next time you see somebody with a flag, run to catch up with them,’” said Godfrey.

The victory was bittersweet. Strank and two other flag-raisers, Harlon Block and Franklin Sousley, would be killed on the island. Godfrey had tented with Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian and one of the flag-raisers.

That day, as it got light, American troops were battling Japanese soldiers in pillboxes who were firing on them and their ships. “After we landed, we cut that end of the island right off, cut it right in half, and then turned toward the mountain,” Godfrey said.

More than 30,000 Japanese soldiers were on the island, Godfrey said. “We used to kill 13 to every one of us,” Godfrey said. Historians would later describe the U.S. attack against the Japanese defense as “throwing human flesh against reinforced concrete.”

Godfrey had soldiering in his blood. His grandfather fought in the Civil War; his great-grandfather fought in the American Revolution.

As a teenager in his hometown of Springfield, Mass., Godfrey had been the head of the shipping department for Milton Bradley. He was that rare worker who was also a reader. He “never bothered” to graduate, choosing to enlist in the Marine Corps in 1942 at the age of 17. He trained at Parris Island, S.C., Camp Pendleton, Calif., and in Hawaii. After time in Saipan as floating reserve, the currents of war took him to Iwo Jima.

There, in the 5th Marine division, Godfrey would spend no time at all with books. “I didn’t read. I smoked, one right after the other.”

He received strong advice about sharing a foxhole with a comrade who was reading the good book. “My first sergeant told me, ‘If you jump in the hole and there’s one of those guys reading a book with the gold leaf on the edges, you get the hell out of there. He’s getting ready to go somewhere and you don’t want to be with him.’”

Godfrey’s specialties were demolition work, equipment maintenance, reloading machine gun belts and minesweeping. Minesweeping was low-tech work, done by crawling along the ground and poking in the sand with a bayonet.

In combat, Godfrey carried a flame-thrower on his back. Enemy caves or pillboxes would be flooded with flaming streams of gasoline or thickened napalm gasoline from 20 to 40 yards.

When the Marines left Iwo Jima, he was one of an extremely small group of the unscathed. ut he did not escape war unwounded; he was shot in both legs. He downplays his injuries: “They were kind of ricocheted, weren’t real bad,” he said. He suffered another injury, near the end of the war. “I was looking over the hole with a pair of binoculars. Didn’t have a helmet on or anything.” Three other demolition specialists were with him when the mortar shell hit. He suffered shrapnel in his head and back. “Killed everybody but me and another guy, and he lost an eye.”

Godfrey was on a ship readied to attack the Japanese the afternoon the peace was signed. “We were all ready to take them anyway, but it was going to be a lot bloodier than that atomic bomb thing.”

After the war, Godfrey returned home with no plans other than having his wounds treated at the Veterans’ Affairs office in Boston. Later, he bought a truck and started a trucking business. In 1947, he got married. Two years later, he re-enlisted in January 1949, in time for the Korean War. He fought until 1953.

After returning home, he divorced and was married again in 1956. He and his second wife had four children: three girls and one boy, who he “couldn’t talk into becoming a Marine.” Instead, his son went on to teach at Harvard University.

In 1969, Godfrey enlisted again, this time in the Air Force. He said the fiber of American life, America itself and the Marines have changed in the 60 years since the battles at Iwo Jima. He shrugs off the reports of under-equipped soldiers in Iraq. “All they need is a rifle and a bunch of ammunition. As long as you don’t run out of ammunition, you’re all right. The Marine Corps always gets secondhand stuff anyway. The Army gets the new stuff.”

As for the sentiment shared by his first wife and most people who hear of his proximity to the famous flag-raising, Godfrey regrets nothing. He played his own part in the theater of war. “Most of those guys were killed anyway,” he said. The survivors were lauded as heroes when they returned to America, but suffered under the word “hero.”

Flag-raiser Hayes drowned his sorrows in drink, still mourning his “good buddies” the night he died at age 32. “The press hounded them,” Godfrey said. “Bradley lasted the longest.” “Christ, they all had trouble after that.”

— Ashley O’Dell