Zeien Lecture Series October 3, 2001
James J. Bradley
Author of Flags of Our Fathers
Leadership and Doing the Impossible
President Kiss: Join me with the Pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. [Dean Roger Compton leads singing "The Star Spangled Banner."] Thank you, Roger, thank you everyone. At times like this I think it's important that we reflect on our blessings and all the good fortune that we have in our freedoms and I think starting off with the Pledge and "The Star Spangled Banner" is for me, right-on at this time.
I'd like to give you all a brief background about how this lecture series came to be. Several years ago a gentlemen by the name of Dr. Alfred Zeien, Webb class of 1952, offered to make a significant gift to Webb Institute, provided that we could agree on a suitable, useful purpose. The useful purpose that we ultimately selected was an annual lecture series that was going to be "for the purpose of broadening the education of Webb students by exposing them to leaders in industry, government, the arts, academia, and other communities as may be appropriate." Dr. Zeien recently retired as Chairman of the Board of The Gillette Company, and we're all very proud of his accomplishments both in the marine industry and outside at Gillette.
Being mindful that we have an auditorium that seats almost one hundred percent more people than we have in terms of student body and staff at Webb, we wanted to share our good fortune, and so I also especially want to welcome the many guests who are here, which include the members of the Webb Heritage Society, our local neighbors, and students from Glen Cove High School. Would the students from the high school please stand up so we can see who's here. Welcome [applause]. We're glad you could join us. Also members of the Chamber of Commerce of Glen Cove, the Navy League, the North Shore Historical Society, and other friends of Webb. I also wish to recognize the Chairman of our Board of Trustees, Mr. Charles Visconti. Charlie, would you stand up and be recognized [applause]. Thank you for coming and representing that important part of our Webb family, the trustees.
Last year Al Zeien gave the inaugural lecture. His subject was "Creating a Global Business." This year we shifted focus to leadership. Given the recent events, I think you would all agree that leadership at the highest levels of our nation is perhaps more important than ever. We've all been touched by the recent tragedy, some more deeply than others, but all of us have been touched. As President Bush has said, we are at war for the first time in quite a while. Our speaker tonight is an author, but first he is the son of a man who appears in what is perhaps the most memorable photograph ever taken — a photo that epitomizes America in World War II. Mr. James Bradley wrote a book about the men in that photo. That book, Flags of Our Fathers, is a New York Times number-one best seller about which historian Steven Ambrose wrote, "It's the best battle book that I have ever read." Steven Spielberg is producing a movie based upon the book, and tonight our speaker's topic is "Leadership and Doing the Impossible." Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming best selling author, James Bradley.
Mr. Bradley: So about three weeks ago America was challenged from across the Atlantic, and we're waiting to see how we're going to react. I'm here tonight to talk about how we reacted many years ago from a challenge that came across the Pacific. My dad was one of those guys who reacted to that challenge. Here he is in this photo. He's not the guy putting the pole in the ground. My dad is the next guy up in front of you.
Now, if I stop right now and put this microphone away and say goodbye and walk out those doors, you know everything I knew about my dad in that photo when I was growing up with him because he wouldn't talk about it. He would always change the subject when it came to Iwo Jima. A few weeks after my dad's funeral in 1994, I telephoned my mom and I said, "Mom I have my telephone headsets on here and my fingers are at the computer. I'd like to take down everything dad told you about the flag raising." She said, "Well that won't take long because he only talked about it once on our first date for seven or eight uninterested minutes." And never again in a forty-seven-year marriage did he say the words Iwo Jima.
It was five days after my dad's funeral that my brother Mark was searching for my dad's will in my dad's office suite. Mark opened the closet door. In that closet we were surprised to find three cardboard boxes stuffed with Iwo Jima memories. At the bottom of one of the boxes was a letter that my father had written home as a twenty-one-year-old boy from Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. It was a letter that he wrote home to his parents. In that letter he wrote he had a little to do with raising the American Flag and that it was the happiest moment of his life. I cried when I read that letter, wondering why my dad had been unable to share that happy moment with me, his son. So I picked up my first book on Iwo Jima and eventually read a number, and I learned a lot. I learned that Iwo Jima is a five-mile-long trivial scab out in the middle of the huge Pacific. But to conquer this tiny five-mile-long island, we sent an armada out of a 110,000 American boys, 880 ships. The line of ships was seventy miles long. A hundred and ten thousand boys. We had enough supplies in those ships to keep the city of Atlanta going for two months. The Marines made sure they packed a hundred million cigarettes. The battle of Iwo Jima in February and March 1945 is still today the worst battle in the history of the United States Marine Corps. I mean, get this, for seventy-two-days before the battle, the Air Force came in, and they dropped enough bombs on this tiny little island to make it the single most bombed spot in the entire Pacific War, and then three days before the battle, the Navy came in with enormous battleships, and they rocked the island, shoving shells the weight of Volkswagens, against the island. They resculpted the mountain of Mt. Suribachi. They didn't kill anyone, they only rearranged the sand. See, the Japanese were not on Iwo Jima. They were underground.
If any of you have ever been to Toronto, there are two cities of Toronto really. You're up above ground there are buildings, it looks like a city. You go underneath, there's a whole other city with five-star restaurants, dry cleaners, subways, grocery stores, people are living underground, just like Iwo Jima — 22,000 Japanese troops underground. Now Steven Spielberg's making a movie about this. and you'll see for the first time that everybody thinks it's like European fighting — throw a grenade they pop up, shoot them. Now these guys were underground on a five-mile-long island. There were sixteen miles of tunnels. These tunnels were shellacked. They had electrical systems, lights, ventilation systems, and they connected 1,500 different rooms. They were alive and well, and bombardment could not get them.
I went to Iwo Jima. I went into the hospital in Iwo Jima. It's forty feet underground. They had hospital beds cut into the rock. You can drop an atomic bomb on Iwo Jima and you're not going to disturb a scalpel.
So how was this impossible battle against an unseen enemy won? You can read the book for the details but I'll give you one hint. You know this country is about 245 years old, and we keep very good records of some things; one of them is American heroism. If you look through those 245 years of history, which is about 2,700 months, you'll find that there's only one month that is our most decorated month. You'll find that there's only one month where we stamped out more medals for American bravery, for American heroism, than any other month in our history, and it's the month that these boys spent on Iwo Jima.
And then there's the photo. When this photo hit the United States, it created an immediate sensation. Nobody knew who they were, but they were the automatic-in-sync boys of 1945. Everybody wanted to know who they were and to get closer to the photo. The President declared them national heroes, ordered them back to the United States to go on a bond tour to raise money for the war effort. Now you might not know what a bond tour was, but back in World War II… see right now President Bush can go fight wherever he wants and just take the money out of the general treasury. Back then war was outside the budget. You had a separate war budget, and we raised money from the American people. We sold them bonds. So you bought bonds to support the war effort. They needed to send heroes out across the country on something like major Rolling Stones tours to appeal to the public.
There are six flag raisers here [Mr. Bradley is pointing to a photo of the flag raising] — four in the front and two in the back. Three got off the island; one was my dad. President Harry Truman sent them on a thirty-three city bond tour. He told them in the White House, to their faces, he said "Your job is to go to thirty-three cities, and I want you to go raise fourteen billion dollars."
Well how big is fourteen billion dollars in 1945? To give you an idea, that represented twenty-five percent of the American budget that year. So these basically teenagers go out across the country. The government was shocked at the response. In Boston, 200,000 people stood in a sleet storm for two hours just to get a glimpse of the boys going by in a jeep. When they went to Houston, the Houston police had to go outside of Houston and put up roadblocks on the roads leading into Houston. They couldn't allow any more people in the city. They were afraid they would gridlock the city of Houston.
You're all familiar with the famous photo of the Martin Luther King "I Have A Dream" speech. Washington Monument, you know that sea of people there, the Washington Park Police estimates that 150,000 thousand people showed up to hear Martin Luther King that day. A hundred and fifty thousand. When my dad spoke there, 350,000 showed up. So how did they do it? Well, they didn't raise the fourteen billion dollars. They ended up raising twenty-six billion dollars. They raised forty-seven percent of the total United States federal budget that year in two months.
And then there are the movies. There have been three movies made so far of this and another one is in the making. The most famous, of course, is Sands of Iwo Jima, and who else but John Wayne could win such a battle? And to give you an idea of what Iwo Jima meant to John Wayne's career, all you have to do is go out to Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, you know that walk of fame. You can see Madonna's footprints and Betty Grable's handprints and when you get to John Wayne's plaque, you'll see that his is different than all the others. John Wayne's plaque is black because our number one movie idol asked for the honor of being memorialized in black cement made from black sand of Iwo Jima.
And then there are the statues, there's a statue to this photo in almost every state in the United States. The tallest one is in Arlington, right outside of Washington — it's the world's tallest bronze monument. How many have seen that statue there outside of Washington? Sixty, seventy percent of the group. Who remembers where the flag raisers names are stamped in that beautiful black marble base? Are they in the front or left side, right side or behind? You can't remember because they're not there. I guess only generals and admirals get their names on statues in this country. You see, but that was my challenge. Everybody knows this photo. I'm not introducing it to you for the first time tonight. Everybody knows the photo, but nobody knows the boys.
I was forty-four years old in 1994. I have a degree in Japanese history. In 1994 my dad was dead in the ground; he was the last survivor of this photo. He had never talked about, I didn't know who these guys were, what they were doing, if they knew each other, if they were buddies… it just stunned me. So in 1994, with my dad gone, I picked up the phone and I called mayors' offices and sheriff's departments all across the United States, searching for the relatives of these guys. My heart would be in my throat as a brother or a sister would pick up the phone, and I thought they would reject me like they had kept out the press for so many years.
But they saw me as a family member, and they told me stories that they had never told outside the family home, and they shared with me documents that they had never given to anybody else, and the result is this book, Flags of Our Fathers, about six nice, young boys that I'd like to introduce to you now. So here's my dad. See my dad's helmet? Look right behind my dad's helmet, and you'll see another helmet, that's the helmet of Rene Gagnon. If you took Rene's helmet off at the moment that photo was shot and reached inside his helmet you'd find that there was a picture there. Rene had stuffed a picture of his girlfriend there. Rene put it in there because he felt he needed protection. Rene was scared and nineteen years old. Teenagers won this battle and that war.
There's another guy in the back row that you can't see, but I wish you'd use your imagination with me. He's my hero, and his name is Mike Strank. Mike stands right behind this guy (pointing to picture) and you can't see him at all because he's completely hidden. The only thing you can see is his right hand. and that's all you need to know about Sergeant Mike Strank. Mike was the sergeant of these guys; he was the leader. They called him "the old man" because he was pretty advanced in age, he was already twenty-four. If you look at Mike's position in the photo, his left hand is on the pole, his right hand is not. His right hand comes through the tangle of bodies and his right hand is around the wrist of a younger boy, helping that younger boy in the critical chain of battle push a heavy pole and that was Mike Strank, the great Marine leader behind his guys. Mike maybe didn't have to be on that mountain. Two months before the battle of Iwo Jima his Captain tried to promote him. Mike turned it down on the spot. He wouldn't hear of it. He said, "No, I promised my boys I'd be there for them." Mike Strank died on Iwo Jima. Mike died as he leaned over the sand, drawing a diagram for the safest way for his boys to attack a dangerous position.
The last guy on the photo, the guy whose hands do not reach the pole, that is a dignified Pima Indian from Arizona by the name of Ira Hayes. Ira Hayes walked off that island, but the memories never left him. You know you've got to understand that my dad's platoon had eighty-six percent casualties in this battle. So take everybody in this room, let's go out to battle, sixteen percent of you get out of that battle, eighty-four percent of you are gone. That was Iwo Jima. Ira Hayes got off the island. He was surprised to be flown back to the United States. He was brought to the Oval Office and in front of my father, Harry Truman, President Harry Truman, called Ira "a hero." Ira didn't see it that way. As Ira later said to the press, "How can I feel like a hero when two hundred and forty of my buddies hit the beach with me and twenty-seven of us walked off alive?" If you read the words of Ira Hayes half a century later, you realize you're reading the words of a classic post-traumatic stress syndrome sufferer. Ira Hayes walked around with movies of horror in his head of Iwo Jima. One year before Ira died, he gave an interview to Time Magazine. He said to Time, "I feel like I'm about to crack up, thinking about all those guys who didn't come back, my buddies, those guys who were better than me." Ira Hayes died at the age thirty-two, face down, dead drunk. Ira died almost ten years to the day that this photo was taken.
So this is Ira, that's my dad, the guy in between them right here [pointing to picture], that's Franklin Sousley. Franklin Sousley was a fun-loving hillbilly from Hilltop, Kentucky. Franklin was fatherless at the age of nine, and his mom had a big tobacco farm to take care of. Franklin helped her out all he could, and there grew a special bond between Franklin the oldest son and his mother, Goldie. Goldie was taken aback one day when Franklin came home and said that he had enlisted in the United States Marines. There came that sad morning when Franklin had to say goodbye. He was holding Goldie in his big arms and she was crying, and then he stepped back. He put his hands on her shoulders and said, "Momma don't worry about me, because when I come back I'll be a hero." Well, Franklin was a very good boy. He often wrote letters home from boot camp. In one letter he wrote home, "Dear Momma, you wrote to me that you were sick. Momma I want you to stay out of those tobacco fields because you can grow a crop of tobacco any year but I can never grow another momma like you." Three days after the flag raising, Franklin did what my dad did on Mt. Suribachi he wrote a letter home to his mother. In that letter, Franklin wrote, "Dear Momma, look for my photo in the paper because I helped put up a flag." Well, Goldie was elated back in Hilltop, Kentucky. The neighbors were celebrating, Franklin had fulfilled his prophecy. He would come back a hero and it almost worked out that way, until Franklin Sousley got one bullet in the back two days before the battle ended. Franklin was buried along with 6,824 other American boys on Iwo Jima.
There's a story about the letter that came to Kentucky to tell Goldie that she would never see her oldest boy again. The story is that the telegram came to the Hilltop General Store. Goldie didn't have a telephone, so a barefoot boy ran that telegram up through the Kentucky hills to her farm. The story comes from the neighbors who told me that they could hear her scream all night and into the morning. I went down there and I did a little more research, and I realized the neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away.
This photo was taken February 23, 1945, on a Friday. It first appeared on the cover of every American newspaper top of the fold on Sunday, February 25th. On that Sunday morning down in Weslaco, Texas, a little city on the Mexican border, there was a twenty-four-year-old Air Force Lieutenant home on leave by the name of Ed Block. Ed was staying at his parent's house in South Texas. Ed was the first one up that morning, and he went out on the porch. He picked up the Sunday newspaper. It was the Weslaco Midvalley News. Ed walked into the living room, sat down in a family easy chair, and he was holding the newspaper up in front of him admiring the photo. Just then his mother, Belle Block, walked in behind him, and as she was just walking by she saw the newspaper. She did a double take. She looked at the photo and she put her finger on this figure, and she said, "Look at that, there's your brother Harlan." Folks, can you figure out who that is? I mean there's Ed looking at the photo. There was no identification given as he rifled through the newspaper. He said, "Momma, that's the back of a Marine. I mean we don't even know Harlan's on Iwo Jima, you can't say that's Harlan." She looked at him, she slipped the photo out of his grasp and said, "Oh no, that's definitely Harlan, I know my boy."
Well, in the confusion of battle, they couldn't identify who these guys were. Something big was going on called World War II, and it took about two months to have positive I.D., and when they finally identified them, the newspapers were full of biographies, and they had arrows pointing to who they were with their names, and they identified this guy as someone who had died on Iwo Jima, as Harlan did. So Belle Block was never able to discuss her belief with her son; he didn't make it back home. They identified this guy as not Harlan Block from Texas but Hank Hanson from Boston. Mr. Block brought the article to his wife hoping she would give up her crazy dream and said, "Honey look." She read the article about it being Hank Hanson. She looked at her husband and shook her head and said, "I don't care what the government says I know my boy."
Now you have to imagine everybody in the United States knows that that's Hank Hanson from Boston and there's one crazy woman down in Texas who's got this photo up on her wall, and when you come into her house for a cup of coffee, she's telling you that this is her son, and everybody knows it isn't. Months went by when her daughter, Marie, came to her crying. Marie said, "Momma, the neighbors are laughing at us, they are saying that you are crazy and that isn't Harlan and you've got to give it up." Belle Block looked at her daughter and said, "Honey, I changed so many diapers on that boy's butt, I know it's my boy."
It wasn't until 1947, two years after this photo appeared, that there was a congressional investigation to find out who was at the base of that pole. The United States Congress, after six months of work, was able to confirm that yes, Belle did know her boy.
Now you have a little idea of what this photo meant to us family members, but what does this photo really mean to me today in our world 2001? To me it represents the idea, the concept of really doing the impossible. Now when I say that, No, it was not impossible to get a flag up on Mt. Suribachi that day. What was impossible was to even get those guys on the island. You see in the 1930s and the 1940s there were many military experts in West Point and the Army War College in England who said that an amphibious assault was impossible. An amphibious assault is the most difficult thing you can do in the military. What does it mean? It means putting guys in boats and running them up against an island where that island is defended by mechanized weapons. This was truly thought to be impossible.
In World War I we had a new development, mechanized weapons, that were machines spitting out machine guns. Amphibious assaults are very old. That's how Julius Caesar conquered England. But because of World War I and failures at Galipoli the military geniuses said you can no longer put a bunch of guys in a boat and hope to capture enemy territory, cannot be done. You know Patton and Eisenhower in West Point never got their pants wet practicing amphibious assaults. It was impossible. If you went to West Point in the 1930s and walked around the hallways, you wouldn't hear any instructors talking about how to assault an island. You couldn't see it in their schoolbooks. It was impossible. I'm not saying difficult. It was thought to be just impossible, something we should not think about, no reason to teach students.
It wasn't until the early 1920s that a Marine officer by the name of Howland "Mad" Smith foresaw the future. He understood that America's challenge was going to be out in the Pacific, taking islands away from the Japanese. He also understood that to do so we'd have to do the impossible. That we'd have to master this impossible art of amphibious assaults, and he got together his best and his brightest. He laid out his vision, and they thought he was nuts. He looked at them and he said, "I understand what you're thinking, but listen to me, we are going to do the impossible and we're going to do the impossible well." And it was from that meeting that the Pacific war was really won, where one leader stood up and said, "I understand this is impossible, but we're going to jump over that concept and do the impossible well." And what eventually happened out in the Pacific was Howland "Mad" Smith's vision.
Now you might be saying to yourselves, jeez this guy talking about 1945 war, you know that we're in a modern age, high-tech. I'll give you high-tech example, codes. Codes are one of the highest tech things that can happen in war, and you can read the books and see the movies about the code makers and the code breakers of World War II, very exciting stuff. There is a movie coming out in a couple of months about code makers; they have wonderful names like Enigma and Purple and Magic; and if you read these books one interesting thing they don't tell you is that all the codes of World War II were failures. They were all cracked. You see, what all the combatants of World War II did, they got the best minds from Harvard and Oxford and Heidelberg and Tokyo, and they put together these fabulously complex codes, but they all thought within the same box, so the guy who designed the code in Tokyo thought like the guy in Harvard and they were able to crack each others' codes. They were all broken, they were all failures.
There's only one code of World War II that was never broken. It was a Marine code, and when the Marines wanted to make an uncrackeable code. to do the impossible, they didn't go the universities. They went to a high school. The Marines went to a Navaho Indian reservation high school, and locked up a bunch of Indian teenagers, and they told them to write an uncrackable code. These teenagers did not know this was impossible. No one told them they needed millions of dollars and legions of secretaries, and they wrote the only code that was never broken in World War II. They took the Navaho language, and figured only 50,000 people could speak it. It's a very difficult language, irregular syntax, no alphabet, relies on a bunch of sounds to get meaning across, and these Navaho boys on a chalkboard wrote out the English alphabet and then they had corresponding things to that alphabet. So, A was ant, B was a bee, C was a cat in the Navaho language, and then they took military terms, like a submarine was an iron fish owalochu, and they just put terms to all these things and they went out in the Pacific and they had a code that was top secret until 1967.
It wasn't until 1967 in the Vietnam War that we were able to have computers overtake this code. The only code not broken in World War II because some leaders decided to challenge what was impossible. You know, I came here tonight to suggest to each and every one of us to examine your impossibilities. There is some impossibility that each and every one of us has in our lives that we've set aside, we've put in back of our mind. It's not worth thinking about because we've tried once or twice and we've failed. We have proved to ourselves that it cannot be done, and we're letting it lie there. It might be a relationship with a father or a daughter or a co-worker, it might be something you're trying to do in school, a dream you have, somebody you might want to be, and I'm here to suggest that impossible, impossibility is just a concept, and the second it's challenged it falls by the wayside and then a number of people do it. I'm not just here preaching because you know I did a little research when I realized that what these guys had done was thought to be impossible just a couple of years before.
I decided to write a book. And because my dad would be on the cover, I decided to write a good book, and then I thought if I'm going to spend four to five years writing a book, I'm going to make it a really good book, and I had an impossible goal for myself. I started telling people, "I'm going to write a New York Times number one best seller." I wasn't an author, I wasn't a journalist, and I had no connections to that publishing world. So I went to the library and I just went to the military section, and I started taking out books and in their foreword or afterward authors thank their agents, I wrote down the agents' names and I started cold calling across the United States. So you're an agent you pick up the phone and you get a call like this: "Hi I'm James Bradley, my dad helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima and I'm going to write a New York Times number one best seller about that." They knew exactly what to do — they hung up.
For months I cold called agents, and you could hear the disdain in their voice and they just [sound] ah like that, finally one of them felt sorry for me and took me on. He told me to stop saying this is going to be a New York Times number one best seller, you're going to turn people off. I said, "I only want to work with someone who thinks that way, so I don't care." So we went out, we went to you know when you're selling a book to the publishers you've got to just you know you've got to put the proposal out to one or two or three. You can't send it out to fifty. You know you've got to make them feel special. So when you send it out to three publishers, then you've got to wait. It takes them two, three weeks to get around to waiting, and then they write you a letter and so it's like a month for every batch. So we sent it out to three. They all wrote back no and then we tried another two, then we tried another four, so now I'm up to like nine or ten rejections. The publishing business for a big book is really not that big, it's a small community. When you get up to ten or a dozen, you're kind of on the edge. We tried three more, then four more. I'm up to seventeen, eighteen rejections. I'm going in making pitches, I'm saying, "This is the number one photo in the history of photography it's a great story. I think you've got a New York Times number one best seller here — everyone is going to be interested in it." Yeah, right.
Now in business or in school when you're applying, you know you're not used to rejection, but I'll tell you, in the publishing business rejection is a little different. There you get people with master's degrees in literature and in journalism from Columbia and they take out beautiful starchy stationery and they write you a long learned letter telling you what a dope you are. Now I'm nearing like nineteen, twenty rejections. This took over a year. I eventually had twenty-seven rejections, and in each one of those twenty-seven I pitched this as a New York Times number one best seller. Standing here it's like, you know, it sold a lot. I had no hope, and I was all alone. I told my mother I was going to write a book about this, and you know what my own mother said? My own mother hesitated and she said, "Well maybe someone in the hometown will buy it." I was going to family reunions where aunts were saying to me, "James, you write that book and you send me one no matter what it costs, I'll buy it." Like I'm going to sell it out of the basement, you know what I mean? Like here's fifty copies I gotta sell you know, my big dream.
I'm out skiing in Utah with my brother whom I'm close to. We're going up the ski lift and I'm pitching the book... this is a great idea and Stephen Spielberg's going to love it, and you know everyone's going to buy it it's going to be great. We get up on top of the hill, he's adjusting his glasses and he says, "Well I don't see it," and goes down.
The twenty-eighth publisher gave us a break. I don't think they believed for a second this would be a big seller, but they gave me a small advance. We wrote the book, and I turned the book in two years later. I'm out for a martini with the editor and we're celebrating it's all done. This is an editor who has lived with every single word; they know the ups and downs of the book, and she knows it better than anybody other than me. I asked, "What do you think?" She says, "I hope it sells fifty thousand." I couldn't believe it, the first week it was out it was not the number one best selling book in the United States — it was number two. The reason why is because the first week they only measured four days of sale. I wasn't on the playing field for all four quarters. The first week they measured a full-week of sales it was the number one best selling book of the United States. Two weeks later, Mr. Spielberg read it and bought the rights.
Now that is an impossible dream, but I'm here to say that if you take it to heart, that dream that you really want, there's a reason for getting it back into focus. Just write it down, in the next twenty-four hours, if you do nothing else, just resurrect that dream that you want to do that you've proven to yourself cannot be done. You know my dad, we didn't think this guy was a hero growing up with him, your own father is not a hero. You know, he was a very quiet, mild mannered guy. After my dad died my mom told me a story that she would often ask him to go for a walk in the woods behind the cottage after dinner at night. He would say, "No," and she asked him why, and he said, "Because the bears might get me." So the hero of Iwo Jima let his wife go walk in the woods alone.
It wasn't until about ten days after his funeral that my dad's captain on Iwo Jima wrote my mother a letter, and in that letter he said, "Mrs. Bradley, are you aware that your husband was awarded the Navy Cross for heroism on Iwo Jima?" My mom said, "No." That was the first we'd heard of it.
Now the Navy Cross is the nation's number two award for valor, right under the Medal of Honor. This is the equivalent of you going out and winning the silver medal in the Olympics and nobody finding out. My dad kept the Navy Cross secret from his wife, family, and community for half a century. When I read this, I went down to Washington to research what he had done to win this Navy Cross. It turns out that two days before the flag raising, my dad's company was in a trench 300 yards away. At that point Mt. Suribachi, was a seven-story, hollowed out killing machine. There were thousands of Japanese who ripped the mountain off basically, put in guns, tanks, seven stories high and then put cement seven feet thick. The Japanese were behind seven-foot-thick cement walls with their gun torts sticking out. My dad and his company had no tanks between them, and the mountain had no brush. All they had for armor was the cotton in their khaki shirts. They were ordered to get up and go attack the mountain. It was a massacre. In that sea of blood and screams, my dad saw a Marine fall, wounded about thirty yards away. His citation says he did not hesitate as he ran through that thirty yards of what they call merciless Japanese gunfire to the wounded Marine's side. He turned his own back to Mt. Suribachi so that he would catch the next bullet rather than this kid getting hit again. Stabilizing him, friends tried to come and help but he waved and he said it was too dangerous. Then he dragged that wounded boy back through those thirty yards, with bullets pinging off the rocks at his feet. My mild mannered dad, out in the Pacific, doing the impossible.
I suggest that you might want to write down your own possibilities. Chuck Yeager, the first guy to break the sound barrier, and you know he was told by doctors that when you hit the sound barrier your molecules are going to disintegrate. I interviewed the guy who ran the first, four-minute mile in England. Doctors told him his circulatory system would collapse. Impossible is a concept that once you overcome it, can be a reality.
You know, when you write those impossibilities down you might be a little embarrassed by what you're looking at, and if you show it to somebody, they might laugh. They fought a battle far out in the Pacific missing their mothers. They did the impossible, and they did it well. [applause]
Thank you. Questions? Yes sir.
Q Did the photographer receive any recognition?
A Oh yeah, very. He won the Pulitzer Prize. The first and only time in the history of the Pulitzer Prize they awarded an immediate Pulitzer Prize. See, that year's Pulitzer's Prize is for a photo taken last year. This photo so stunned the nation that the Board of Directors of Columbia University suspended the rules. For the only time they awarded an immediate Pulitzer to Joe Rosenthal, who is still alive out in San Francisco. He was a civilian correspondent photographer for the Associated Press. It's an Associated Press photo, and yes, Associated Press owns it. Questions? Yes ma'am.
Q What ...
A Okay before you ask the question, I think there are students here and they always think a lot. I'm sure we'll have a lot of student questions too right? I'm kidding, jeez come on. Okay, go ahead.
Q What are you doing now?
A I'm in a halfway house, I'm only joking. I'm writing my second book. It's called Fly Boys and it's about seven Fly Boys, seven airmen who were shot down in World War II.
Q Did you have an interest in history that led you to write the book?
A Yeah, the question is, Did I have an interest in history? I have a degree in Japanese History. I went to school in Japan, I went to Notre Dame where they had programs all over the world. You know, if people see me going to school in Japan as such a brilliant move you know my dad fought there. I'll tell you the truth. To go to Germany you had to have a B average in German, to go to Spain you had to have a B average and you know Japanese is so difficult there was no language requirement so I qualified. [laughter] I had an interest in history at the level of these ordinary guys you know isn't recorded, and I'm fascinated by what was actually happening in the minds and lives of eighteen year olds. Yes ma'am.
Q Do you have any memorabilia?
A My dad's stuff or anything? Well you know, each of the families had their own collection of stuff, and I photographed the photographs. I have copies of that but the uniforms and things are still with the families.
Q What happened to his awards?
A We found my dad's Navy Cross, my dad's Navy Cross in a Crayola box of his grandson. My dad gave it, you know, here John. Never showed it to my mom, we didn't know what a Navy Cross looked like. That's a modest guy I guess. Well thank you, thank you. Any other, where are all these student questions, these nimble minds, these deep thinkers. Any other questions? Yes sir, a student.
Q Have you seen the photo of the fireman raising the flag?
A Yeah, the question is, Have I seen the photo of the fireman raising the flag? Yeah I've seen it, I've had the New York Post interview me about it. It's the same sort of situation, the firemen who were contacted said we didn't raise it to be heroes. They didn't know a photographer was nearby. You know, they were doing it out of sincere emotion and there was no posing going on, and they were just ordinary good guys. I heard an interview with a medic, he's a paramedic who happened to be near the World Trade Center. He rushed in to help and he said, "I'm a paramedic," and the firemen were saying, "Here, and take this guy there," and then as minutes went by they said, "You know, you're better off going to that building." They had a staging building for the wounded, and they said, "You get out of here and you go over there," and he said he turned and he looked at about seventeen firemen who were about to go up a stairwell, and he was crying at this point and said to them, "You guys are going to die," and claimed he could see by their eyes that they knew that they were, and they just turned. They didn't say anything as they walked up the stairwell.
Q Where is the flag now?
A It's down in Washington, DC at the Marine Corps Museum at Eighth and I.
Q How long did the flag fly?
A And how long did it last? The flag was up for about three weeks. What's interesting is, is that this is one of the least significant events in the history of the United States. The first flag went up at 10 AM that morning. My dad was there, he was not one of the flag raisers of the first one. A colonel said, "That's the first flag over Japanese territory," so they wanted that as a souvenir and put another one up. So this is the replacement flag. It was done under battle conditions. I mean there's, you know, they were ordered to do it and they put up a replacement. The first one was up like this, up on the hill, and they said to take that down, so they got the second one ready and they said, "Go." They went like that [gesture] so this was done just like that. They took the first one down, and to the Marines on the island, it was completely unimportant. That was like a replacement bulb — the first one was important. They put that in the safe and if you go to the museum, that one is perfectly preserved because to the Marines on the island, that was the important flag-raising, and this was a nothing event. The photo went back to the United States and "Boom!" You know, everyone in the United States saw this as a vision of victory, but this thing got shredded, so when you go see the two flags, the one you don't know about is perfectly preserved because to the Marines that was the important one. This one wasn't worth much because it's all shredded by the wind in Mt. Suribachi. Yes sir.
Q [inaudible]
A Did I ever what?
Q Did you ever think about joining the armed forces?
A Did I ever think about joining the armed forces? No. You know, we weren't a military family at the time. I broke my neck playing football and couldn't join anything. I was semi-paralyzed in the Mayo Clinic, so I wasn't much good to the military, so I didn't have to think about it. Yes sir.
Q How were you able to determine who the flag raisers were?
A How was I able to determine? I didn't, I mean that's been long, I mean that was determined at the Presidential Oval Office level a long time ago. I mean there's no debate about who the flag raisers were. There were a number of other photos taken around as you can see. There was a film of this see, this photographer Joe Rosenthal is standing here like this, and right next to him is a guy with color film and people say this is posed. You know it's ridiculous, there's a film of it going like that. You know when people a little older than the younger students here you remember when they signed off television at night, you know God Bless America, they would have a flag raising that was this, that was a film taken, I just explained how that was taken and you can see they're just standing there, someone says go, and they go boop, like that. But since he caught this one frame people think they're standing there posing. How do you get that flag to ripple like that, you know? Any other questions? Yes sir.
Q Who planned the amphibious operations?
A The question is, who planned the amphibious operations? I said a general from the 1920s was planning this. My point is, if you went to West Point, there was no amphibious warfare doctrine, and there was no book on amphibious warfare because this was like going to the moon at the time. You can't do it. Over twenty years, the Marines developed an amphibious war assault doctrine and then you know how the Army got theirs? They tore the blue cover off the Marine book and they put a gray cover on theirs. No, I'm serious. That's exactly what they did so then they knew all about amphibious warfare. But the Army D-day at Normandy was basically a Marine inspired operation done by the Army. The Army was trained on amphibious assault in World War II by Marines.
Q How long did it take them to hollow out Iwo Jima and establish this defensive position?
A Iwo Jima means sulfur island, and they had sulfur mines on Iwo Jima. It had many tunnels and they had maps of it. Mining specialists had mapped and tunneled the island already and then about a year and a half before the battle when they got serious, they went in and expanded those tunnels and made them good for the military. There's still about 15,000 Japanese underground in Iwo Jima. That's the burial spot for them. We did not kill the Japanese by shooting them. I interviewed a lot of guys who fought on Iwo Jima who never saw a live Japanese soldier. You understand, they buried the Japanese in Iwo Jima — they were underground. We had to throw in napalm, gasoline, and we bulldozed it shut. The Japanese did not surrender in World War II.
Q If you go to Iwo Jima today what can you see?
A A very stinky ugly island. No really, it is belching sulfur fumes, it's so terrible that really you can't get a tree to grow. There are no birds and it's this strange looking unearthly thing. Iwo Jima today is inaccessible to a civilian, it's a Japanese Naval Base. It's a closed Naval Base like Guantanamo Bay is for us. And once a year an organization in Washington DC brings in civilians. You can pay your money, they fly you from Guam to there and you get to walk around for eight hours. But there's still live ordnance there. I mean they were shooting tons and tons of stuff at each other for thirty-six-days, and it's still lying all over the place. Yes ma'am.
Q Do you see a parallel between Bin Laden hiding in Afghanistan and the guys in Iwo Jima?
A Yes and no. I've been to Afghanistan, so the earth is a difficult place to beat. You know there is someone in a tunnel forty feet below so I guess there's a parallel but you know we're talking about the Japanese Army. There were four million people in the Japanese Army that was a country that had a couple hundred million people under their boot you know. Supported by a government with a god-king, I mean that was a war. Here we're talking about twenty-six guys with beards. You know there's no nation state, so in terms of them hiding in the ground there's no similarity in terms of us fighting a war where we can go out and weaken munitions factories and blow up boats and ports and win. It's no comparison. Yes sir.
Q Didn't the second flag go up because the first was too small?
A It's generally written that way. The question is this gentlemen said he read that this flag was put up because the first one was too small. It's generally written that way but that's not true. What is true is that he said, "Get me another flag," and then as Lieutenant Tuttle ran off to the shore to get another flag, he said, "and get me a bigger one while you're at it." So yeah, he wanted a bigger flag, but the motivation was not a bigger flag — the motivation was a souvenir. So if you hear that, you can isolate that quote, "make it bigger," but that was not the motivation for raising the second flag. Yes ma'am.
Q Did the flag raising signify Victory?
A To the American public it did, but to the Marines on Iwo Jima, see Iwo Jima is flat and it's got this thing on the end called Mt. Suribachi, so we didn't know Japanese were underground and logically if you take the high point you won the battle, so my dad's regiment hit the beach and cut off the island and they went against the mountain. My father and thirty percent of his friends were casualties at the point they put this flag up. So when they put it up we won the mountain. We did what we were supposed to do. We conquered the high ground, we're all done. They were so happy they thought the battle was over, but what they didn't know was that the Japanese were underground and that the battle was just about to begin. They raised the flag on the fifth day of the thirty-six day battle, they had thirty-one more days to go. If I could put one more thing into perspective, this is the worst battle in the history of the United States Marine Corps. It lasted thirty-six days. You know, if they cut the battle off after four days, it would be the worst battle in the history of the United States Marine Corps. That gives you an idea of the enormity of this thing.
Q Why was Iwo Jima so important that it had to be captured so late in the war?
A Okay, in late 1945, you see, Japan's an island surrounded by a lot of water, so we couldn't send Private Ryan out there to run around France to get to Berlin. We had to send lieutenant somebody up in an airplane to go burn Japan down with B29's, so that's what we were doing. We were sending B29's full of napalm. In one night we killed a hundred thousand Japanese in Tokyo. Just to give you an idea of the enormity of this thing, five thousand people died in the World Trade Center. We were killing in one night, March 10, 1945, one hundred thousand Japanese. And they weren't surrendering, so that's what we were doing… B29's boom, boom, boom. Well right in between the airfields down here in Guam and Tinian and Tokyo is Iwo Jima, right in between Iwo Jima they had a radar station that could give advanced notice that the B29's were coming. Also, planes would come up and pick off these lumbering B29's on their way in and their way back, so the joint Chief of Staff said, "You've got to take Iwo Jima out of there, we're losing too many airmen." See, that's what my next book is about. It's called Fly Boys. What's the most expensive thing that happened in World War II? The Atom Bomb right? No, the B29's. The Atom Bomb cost us about two billion dollars, the B29's cost us three billion dollars. We killed many more people with the B29's, burning Japanese to death than we did with Atomic Bombs. You know, very interesting what was really going on out there. Any other questions? Thanks a lot. [applause]
President Kiss: James, I thank you very much from my heart. I was very moved by your talk and I was glad that we got into something that was a little bit less heavy because one of my hardest jobs here sometimes is to follow people like you and be able to speak somewhat coherently. I think there's a message in James's talk tonight about leadership and doing the impossible. I think in many ways when you think about this so called war, it is almost an impossible war, and I hope that our people have the wisdom, the intelligence, and the capabilities to do the impossible in solving that issue. I couldn't help but think about the Webb students when James said to think about something that's impossible and write it down. Sometimes getting out of Webb is deemed impossible, at least with a degree after four years, so some of you might want to go write that down and go do that one. Unfortunately, one of the tasks that I've got as President here is to try to figure out who to get next year, and to try to get somebody that will top James is probably going to be close to doing the impossible. I'll go to work on that one. That's probably the first thing that I'll write down. So in closing, I just want to tell you that there are books for sale on the right hand side of this lecture hall as you're going out. Mr. Bradley is going to be up in the reading room that you walked through, and he will be available to sign any books that you'd like. And the last thing I'd like to do is, Dean Compton started us off with a song, and I think given the subject matter tonight and the issues in the country, I'd like to close with a song, and ask if you would join me in singing God Bless America. And refreshments are upstairs too. [singing God Bless America]. God Bless you all. [applause]
