The Battle Of Iwo Jima

• Joshua Elliott, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2013

The Battle of Iwo Jima

The sun was just beginning to show, as I scrambled up the stairs of the USS LHD-7, to get into line.
It was the day that we would be landing on the Island of Iwo Jima. I joined my companions and surveyed the Island before us. Little did we know that we would be fighting one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.

The boat hit the shore and the door slammed down. We raced out with guns loaded on our back but when we reached the sand, an eerie silence rained down around us. We searched the beach to see if there were any trenches, something to give the position of the enemy away. I didn’t know what to do, I looked at my mates around me and we began to run to the bushes to get cover. I looked behind me and saw hundreds of our soldiers also running for the bushes. A loud shot rang out. I looked at the bushes a mere hundred meters and prayed I would reach them. Another shot, another blast and chaos erupted. Men were dropping faster than I could count, bullets showered around me, I reached the slope and dropped to my belly and began to crawl. I knew I had to reach the top. There was about 50 other men also beginning the crawl and we knew we had to distract the enemy somehow, but with what? We could now see the mound of dirt where the bullets were flying from and knew it was the Japanese barricade. I looked to my left and saw that one of the soldiers had a machine gun with him and I knew that was the distraction we needed. If only we can get to a place to set it up. The soldier stopped crawling and whipped the machine gun around; I knew this was my opportunity. I pulled out my grenade and my mates did the same. As the soldier began firing from the slope, which caused the Japanese machine gun to redirect in his direction, we all flung our grenades towards the window where the Japanese machine was. As soon as the grenade left my hand, I began to clamber away as fast as I could to avoid the blast. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, each grenade went off. Sand showered around us and I fell to the ground, our ears ringing from the blast. I looked back and the saw that the machine gun had ceased firing and men were beginning to stumble over the mound to the safety of the bushes behind it. I began stumbling towards the bushes to meet them as fast as my shaking knees would allow me. This minor success was the starting point for the victory in the battle of Iwo Jima.

By Joshua Elliott