Mike S wrote: ↑Thu Aug 25, 2022 7:17 pm
Wow! Was Lt Smith your father, or was this a U.S.M.C. screw up sending a notification to the wrong address??
Yeah, he was my dad. The bullet (6.5mm Arisaka) hit him in the solar plexus and struck a brass button on his field jacket first. Then it sprayed brass jacket button and copper jacketing fragments into his left lung, while the bullet core got deflected up and slightly to the left, where it stayed in his rib cage, dissecting between 2 ribs all the way around to his back where it exited next to his spine just below his left scapula.
He was hit within the 1st few minutes after dawn in Cushman's Pocket. He and the other 6 survivors (5 of
them also wounded…a couple quite severely) that were still there with him were trapped in the Pocket until just before sunrise the next morning, when marines from the battalion command element were able to get to them and bring them back through the lines to "safety".
He and the others received initial treatment at the battalion aid station. Well…my dad received initial treatment from a corpsman in the field, who tragically was killed by a 3rd round while my dad was helping
him, after he had been hit twice while rendering aid to my dad. In any event, dad's wounds were probed and a few larger fragments removed, and then he was put on a C47 (Suribachi had already been reduced and the main airfield was already handling US flights) and flown to Guam where he had his surgery and convalescence.
Dad went ashore on D-day+3 (February 22, 1945) as part of a replacement draft from the 3rd Division reserve being held offshore. He was then assigned to E/2/9 and given 1st Platoon. E Co had been in the line and pretty badly shot up. They were given a few days to rest and refit, and for my dad to get to know his men a bit. The irony is that they were "resting and refitting" only about 25 yards back of the lines. 2/9 was continuously in the lines from March 2nd to March 8. Approximately 2500 men came ashore with the 9th Regiment. Of those:
KIA: officers 22, enlisted 486, total 508
WIA: officers 62, enlisted 1402, total 1464
MIA: officers 0, enlisted 7, total 7
DWRIA: officers 4, enlisted 53, total 57
TOTAL LOSSES: officers 88, enlisted 1948, total 2036 out of 2500.
Eventually, the 9th disappears from the rosters, and the remaining men (about enough to make up a company) were redistributed to the 21st Regiment. I’m in possession of a scanned copy of the real-time after action reports written down during the battle. There’s a lot confusion about dates and times, between this report, and follow on reports, not to mention in the official 3rd Division History (of which I possess an original copy, published in 1947.
The only date I can be absolutely certain of is the date my dad went ashore…D-day+3, being 02/22/1945…because he never varied from telling it that way, but whether he was hospitalized on March 6th on Guam, or if that’s simply the date that his "official" status finally caught up with him and so that’s what was put in the telegram to his mother, who knows? In a long letter to his SOCS class reunion committee (which I have previously posted here), he said that he was given 2 days to meet his men and get the platoon organized for the upcoming assault. For absolute certain, he was wounded at least 2 full days, possibly longer, before arriving on Guam via C47. So if he came ashore on the 22nd, had the 23rd and 24th to get his platoon ready, then that would mean that he assaulted into Cushman's pocket early predawn on the 25th, the same day he was shot … which doesn’t seem right if he was hospitalized on 03/06; because working backwards from the 6th, he would have been shot on or about the 3rd or 4th of March. Somewhere in there, we’re missing a week. Either that, or the records aren’t entirely reliable.