This morning a friend texted to say that Alvin Josephy was on public radio at 6:15 this morning, and that I might catch him at the 8:00 hour. It was a two-minute segment on Morning Edition, commemorating—“bringing to life”—the WW II battle for Iwo Jima.
I’m having a hard time moving past it. It was wonderful to hear Alvin’s voice again—still with a bit of a New York accent—and to hear the PBS commentator call it “keeping cool” in a time of “mortal danger.” That broadcast and immediate reminders from friends who were at Fishtrap almost 30 years ago, when we talked about the “Legacy of World War II,” brought more memories of Alvin and War.
At Iwo, Alvin was in the second wave—one of the interviewees says he came ashore on D plus 1. “It was hot, wasn’t it,” Josephy cooly interjects. Hot in more ways than one I imagine.
At Fishtrap, Alvin took the stage and played pieces of his recording from the landing at Guam, where he was in the first wave. The recording was not all clear, but we could tell that Alvin remembered every second of it, the sounds of water and gunfire and artillery, the sloshing across a reef the last ¼ mile to the shore with water sometimes to his waste. He explained that he was attached to the recorder in the belly of a half-track with a 40-foot wire, holding a microphone covered against the salt water by a condom. He told us that 20 of the 32 men walking across that reef were hit going in, that they picked up bodies and put them in a “little rubber boat” that those still walking pulled ashore. The first thing he saw when he hit the beach is a Marine he called a friend lying on his stomach at the edge of the sand, blood pouring from him into the water; he was dead. They were trapped on the beach for two days. In his book, A Walk Toward Oregon, Alvin says that he continued to make recordings and write stories from foxholes.
At the end of his Fishtrap talk, Alvin stood speechless, tears on his cheeks, and muttered that “many of us felt guilty coming home alive.” He stepped off the stage, and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who had grown up in Internment camps and written about it in Farewell to Manzanar, stood to greet him with a bear hug. A signature Fishtrap moment. Jeanne Houston died just a few months ago at the age of 90. I can remember her talking about her grandmother having to bathe in a public space, how humiliating it was.
Ivan Doig was at Fishtrap that year too, having written a book based on an uncle’s letters to his mother from a ship in the Pacific. And the historian Richard White, who gave a keynote on the legacy of WW II. Doig and White came to that Fishtrap event in part to meet Alvin Josephy,
White’s words also ring in my ears like yesterday. The government, he said, knew about any Japanese-Americans or recent immigrants who were dangerous. If there had been real danger, they would have put the Japanese immigrants and Japanese Hawaiians into camps in Hawaii. They—we—didn’t because we needed their labor in Hawaii. The stateside internment camps were for propaganda purposes. White went on to talk about the heroic Japanese who fought for us in Europe.
A woman from Hood River stood to say that we didn’t understand, that she and others in Hood River had had real fears. She left and never returned to Fishtrap.
What to do with all of these memories—Alvin’s memories of war, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memories of internment, the Hood River woman’s memories of fear. And my own memories of it all.
Hard times, courage, and fear: the Hood River woman’s fears; Jeanne Houston’s stories of degradation and survival; and the coolness and calmness and courage that Alvin Josephy displayed in times of great personal and national peril on the beaches at Guam and Iwo Jima.
We’ve come on another time of national—and in many cases personal—fears. Today’s stories can paralyze us with fear and make us leave the room, or they can inspire us to take courage. To persevere and to fight for what is good and right.
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https://library.josephy.org/collections/audio-visual/. Scroll to “Live Guam” for broadcast.