Seaman First Class William P. Campbell, Jr.’s journey into World War II, which would at one point place him at the helm of a landing craft approaching the beach at Iwo Jima, began when he was 15. Like many young men of his day, he learned about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor via a radio broadcast. Campbell, whose mother had died two years earlier, was living with an aunt and uncle in 1941, and he listened to the broadcast with his cousin Euclid Voyles.

As they listened to the momentous news, the two boys made up their minds then and there to join the armed forces as soon as possible. But because of their ages they had to wait. For a time they could only watch as the older boys in their small mountain community outside Murphy, N.C., joined and left home for the war.

Euclid Voyles, who was a year older than Campbell, enlisted in the Navy at 17, hoping to become a pilot. But before he left home, ‘Euc had to go through a long, tedious battle to convince his mother to give her permission for him to enlist, since he was still underage. William Campbell — known as Junior to his family — waited only a few months longer before he joined the war effort, but rather than go through the same hassle to receive permission, he lied about his age. Following his cousin’s example, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy on March 16, 1944.

I was sent to boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center, Campbell recalled. After six weeks I was given a week’s leave and told to report to Fort Pierce, Fla., for amphibious training. I went home to visit for a day or two, and that was the last time I would see home until the war was over.

At Fort Pierce, Campbell was trained to operate a Higgins boat, known officially as the LCVP (landing craft, vehicle, personnel), the most versatile landing craft of the war. In fact, General Dwight D. Eisenhower later said he believed that Andrew Higgins, the boat’s designer, was the man who won the war for us. The howl of the LCVP’s diesel engines when the craft was thrown into reverse after disembarking troops was as familiar to troops in World War II as the whump-whump-whump of a helicopter was to those who later served in Vietnam.

After two months of training, Campbell received orders to go to Boston, where he was introduced to what would be his home for the next year and a half, a vessel known as LST-930. The LST (landing ship, tank) carried four LCVPs. LST-930 had been laid down on June 9, 1944, in the Bethlehem-Hingman Shipyard in Hingham, Mass. Less than two months later, on August 6, the ship was commissioned under the command of Lieutenant F.W. Grabowski, with orders for the Pacific theater.

LST-930 began her journey to the Pacific with Campbell serving as helmsman. By that time his shipmates had given him the nickname Soupy because his last name reminded them of the Campbell soup company. The voyage was not uneventful. We were with 37 other ships when we got into a hurricane off the coast of Florida, Campbell remembered. We went through waves so high that when you went under a wave you would go completely under the water, and then when you went back up, the bow would be out of the water. Then the ship would go through the middle of a wave with the whole ship trembling. When it would turn to go down, the screws would come out of the water.

Steering the 300-foot-long ship was impossible in those conditions. We got between two big swells for four hours; wherever those swells went, we went just rolling along with the ocean rolls, said Campbell. The mighty storm scattered the convoy all over the Caribbean. LST-930 limped into Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on September 16, 1944. After some minor repairs and regrouping with the other ships, LST-930 passed through the Panama Canal on September 22, with Campbell taking the helm through the canal.

Her next stop was San Diego. We were there seven days and never got off the ship, Campbell recalled. We just took on supplies. Ten days after leaving San Diego, LST-930 was in Pearl Harbor, where the ship was further resupplied. Although the LST was supposed to leave the harbor as part of a convoy going to the war zone, her debut in the war effort was delayed by an accident. At Pearl Harbor we were going down the harbor to load up when we fell victim to two bullheaded skippers, one with a big transport and ours in that little LST, Campbell recalled. Neither of them would give the right of way out of the harbor, and that transport rammed us in the side, nearly cutting us in two. We had to go into dry dock for three months.

During his extended stay in Hawaii, Campbell acquired two tattoos on his forearms and one borrowed jeep, compliments of the U.S. Army. While we were there, the captain decided he wanted a jeep, so we went up into town, and they were parked everywhere, Campbell said. We just stole one. We drove it back to the pier. It was an army jeep, but we painted it battleship gray. We used it until we left Pearl Harbor, and just left it sitting on the dock. The crew’s time in Hawaii ended on January 22, 1945, when the 150 men of LST-930 joined a convoy to Eniwetok. They picked up troops on Saipan before heading for Iwo Jima on February 15.

Iwo Jima (which means sulfur island) is named for the numerous ground vents that spit sulfurous fumes on the barren island. The small, pork-chop-shaped island is crowned on its southern tip by Mount Suribachi, a 556-foot-high extinct volcano. Iwo Jima is 650 miles south of Tokyo and 625 miles from Saipan, roughly halfway between the Marianas bases used by Boeing B-29 Superfortresses and their targets in Japan. Iwo Jima was the logical place for the Allies to establish an emergency landing strip for bombers low on fuel or heavily damaged. The Japanese had already built two airstrips on the island and started constructing a third. They were using Iwo Jima as a base from which to launch kamikaze attacks and harass the Allied bombers. The Japanese knew an invasion force was coming and were determined to defend the island with the 22,000 troops garrisoned there. Their commander, Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, planned to inflict such high casualties that an attack on the Japanese homeland would be reckoned too costly. He told his troops: Every man will resist until the end, making his position his tomb. Every man will do his best to kill 10 enemy soldiers.

The U.S. striking force headed for Iwo Jima was the largest assembled in the Pacific up to that time — 450 ships carrying 30,000 men of the 4th and 5th Marine divisions, who would be the first to hit the beach, plus the 3rd Marine Division as a reserve. By the night of February 18, 1945, Iwo Jima had been under attack for 72 days by North American B-25 Mitchell and Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers. The island had also been steadily bombarded for three days by U.S. Navy ships. As Campbell and the rest of LST-930’s crew approached the beleaguered island, they learned what their mission would be. From Saipan we knew we were going somewhere, he recalled, but we didn’t know where. As they neared Iwo Jima, those in command explained to the crew that they were part of an invasion force. They were bombarding when we got there, so we didn’t get a lot of sleep that night, Campbell remembered. H-hour was 0700 the next morning, and when I looked up then the sky was black with planes.

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