FORT SILL, Okla. -- When former Marine Pfc. Gunner Johnson watched Marine and civilian runners leave the starting line of the 19th annual Marine Corps Devil Dog Run in September, he was flooded with emotions. Those emotions came from watching family members running in his honor and from remembering all of his fellow Marines who fell around him during the battle of Iwo Jima.
"Marines are so different. It's just, well, all I can say is -- Marines are just Marines," said Johnson, who served with a machine gun crew assigned to Company B, 1st Battalion, 27th Regiment, 5th Marine Division. "A lot of the guys I fought with looked just like these young men out here today. My buddies were something else and fought so hard at Iwo."
Johnson was a high school student in Akron, Colo., when World War II broke out. He and his classmates wanted to get into the war and see some action.
"All of my buddies were joining the Navy in 1943 and '44, but me and my buddy Jack wanted to check out the Marine Corps. So we went up to Denver to see what it was all about," he said, "and, finally they took us.
"I did my boot camp at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. When I got through boot camp, they put me in a machine gun squad, and that's where I stayed for the rest of my time," Johnson said. "They were forming the 5th Marine Division, and that's when I met one of the most famous Marines of all time, Gunnery Sgt. John Basilone."
Basilone was the hero of the battle for Henderson Field on Guadalcanal in 1942. He was a section leader on a defensive line with several machine gun squads under his command. He was credited with single handedly killing 38 Japanese soldiers and saving the lives of the three wounded Marines. For his heroism he received the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross, plus a Purple Heart.
"They put him in 1st Battalion as the gunnery sergeant for Charley Company. I was in Baker Company, and we saw each other all the time while we were getting ready at Camp Tarawa in Hawaii for the invasion of Iwo Jima," Johnson said. "We were on the same LST (landing ship-troop) on Feb. 19, 1945, the day we went ashore at Iwo Jima. I asked Basilone, 'What do you think it will be like?' and he said 'I don't know for sure, but we'll soon find out.' He was right -- it turned out to be hell on earth."
Iwo Jima was a volcanic island covered with a gritty ash that hampered beach landings and made digging foxholes nearly impossible. The Japanese fortified the island with heavy artillery positions, machine gun nests and sniper positions.
"Gunny Basilone went in on the first wave of the invasion. I was attached to 3rd Platoon of B Company and for some reason we went in on the second wave. Most Marines were young like me and hadn't seen combat up to that point. We got pinned down on the beach by Japanese machine gun fire. Basilone was a battle-hardened Marine, so he got up and told everybody to get off their butts and move out, or they were going to die right there on the beach," Johnson said.
Basilone charged up the beach and single handedly took out a Japanese blockhouse with grenades and a machine gun. Then he moved inland to Airfield 1 and helped guide an American tank out of a minefield. When he got back to the airfield he and his machine gun crew were seriously wounded by shrapnel from a Japanese mortar round. Basilone died a couple hours later.
"Basilone had only been on the beach for two hours. A lot of us thought that if someone like him, who was larger than life didn't make it, then we might not make it either. But we kept fighting," Johnson said solemnly.
"Our assignment was to work our way across the island and cut it in two so we could control the lower half. We went out every day in search of Japanese strongholds, but then we would come back to rest near the airfield, and then we'd go back up on the line," Johnson said.
"One day while we were getting ready to move out, Lt. Col. John Butler, our commander of the 1/27th Regiment, came by to check on us. He told us he was going up to the front going by jeep to look around. I thought to myself how stupid that was. We tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn't change his mind. Unfortunately we were right, because a shell hit the jeep and killed Butler and wounded his driver and radioman."
Johnson was wounded 21 days after he landed on the beach. A mortar shell landed near his machine gun squad, wounding him and four other men from his team.
"I got hit on the evening of March 12 just three days before my 19th birthday. I was hit in the abdomen and side, and was lying in a foxhole waiting for a corpsman to come and help me. A couple of our guys came over to check on us and one of them, Pvt. Joe Perry, got hit in the throat by a Japanese sniper. The other Marine, Platoon Sgt. Joseph Julian, was killed instantly and fell on top of me in the foxhole," Johnson said.
The sniper had slipped in very close to Johnson's foxhole. He saw the sniper and started yelling for help, and some other Marines started shooting machine guns and throwing hand grenades.
"Then I really got scared that a grenade would bounce back into the hole where we were lying. Eventually they got the sniper and brought a jeep up there, loaded us all up and took us to a field hospital near the airfield," Johnson said.
Soon Johnson and other wounded Marines were flown to Guam in the first C-47 Skytrain that was able to fly off Iwo Jima. From Guam, the wounded were taken back to Hawaii. Once he had recovered from his wounds he was put on a work detail at Pearl Harbor. Later he was transferred back to his company where the division was preparing for the invasion of Japan. While he was in Hawaii the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Like everybody else, Johnson thought they would be going home, but they were wrong.
"They ended up shipping us over to Japan anyway as part of the occupation force. We went in at Sasebo, where we guarded the dry docks. I have no doubt that we would have been part of the invasion of Japan if it hadn't been called off," Johnson said.
He was discharged a year later and came home to Colorado. He married Carol, his high school sweetheart on Valentine's Day, 1947 and they have been married for 66 years. They eventually moved to Oklahoma where they raised their family, and he worked for the U.S. Postal Service until retirement.
Johnson comes to the Devil Dog Run at Fort Sill every year to watch the Marines run the 5K and 10K races. It is his small way of remembering all of the friends and battle buddies that were lost during those five weeks on Iwo Jima.
"I've thought about those guys every day for 67 years," Johnson said. "It's something that will stay with me for the rest of my life."
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