Battle of Iwo Jima: U.S. Seaman First Class William P. Campbell, Jr. Took Part in the Invasion

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According to the ship’s records, LST-930 moved into an area 5,600 yards off the beach at 0735, began launching LCVPs at 0737 and had completed launching by 0752. Soupy Campbell was at the helm of the first LCVP launched. At 0750, as the last LCVPs were leaving the landing ship, a pontoon barge was launched alongside the starboard side of LST-930. The barge would be used to offload wounded soldiers so they could be lifted to the deck. After the first wave of Marines hit the beach, LST-930 became a hospital ship. We got the troops in the LCVP and started circling, Campbell recalled. The seas were pretty rough, and it was raining, like pouring water out of a bucket, all day long. They would send us in as a group, called a wave, and tell us to go in by radio. When we got the call to go in the first time it was about 0900.

While the LCVPs were circling, awaiting their orders to go in, LST-930 came under fire. The ship’s record reports the first near miss at 0816 hours and states: At 0900 several near hits amidships and at the stern….0954 first casualties brought to ship from shore, casualties continued to come in a steady stream by small boats, DUKWs [amphibious trucks], and LVTs [landing vehicles, tracked].

Campbell was aware that some of the LCVPs were being hit as they approached the beach, but what he remembers most clearly is the difficulty experienced by the tank crews that had already reached the shoreline. It was so rough and the sand so soft that the tanks and things that got to the sand just bogged down, he said. They were having to take bulldozers to pull them off. His first trip was without casualties. We made it in all right, he recalled. We unloaded with no problem. All I did was drop that front door down, and then I got out of there. The coxswain was concentrating on his job so much at the time that today he cannot remember whether there were any near misses for his own landing craft.

We made four or five trips between then and about 7 o’clock that night, said Campbell. I could see other LCVPs getting hit then, but it was hot all night. We made it in all right carrying in troops off the ship. My trouble started when I went back and picked up a load of medical supplies a little after dark. I went in to the beach and couldn’t get off. It was dark. They’d shoot flares and it would light the whole island up, just like it was daylight. We were on the beach unloading supplies. There were men on the beach helping us…to get the supplies off the boat and get off the beach. I was at the back of the boat when a shell or mortar hit the front of the boat. It blew the bow door off of it.

We got off that thing and dug a foxhole about 20 yards off the beach using a little shovel and our hands. It was nearly impossible to do. The sand kept pouring back into it. Every time we would get a little deep, the sand would cave in. Finally, we just piled it up in front as best we could and got behind it. They were shooting at me lying in that trench, and the machine-gun bullets were so close they were kicking sand in my eyes. I remember that like it was today. The funny thing was, I never did think about dying.

Campbell and his three crewmen huddled in their trench under fire for five hours before they finally had a chance to get off the beach. Around midnight we finally found this LVT going by and we managed to get on it as they went back out to their ship, another LST, he recalled. Once we got on that ship we went down to the tank deck and just went to sleep.The four sailors were not in a rush to get back to their own ship. After lunch they went to the bridge and asked that LST-930 send a boat to pick them up. Back on the ship they didn’t know where we were, if we were sunk or killed, said Campbell. They could see the LCVP on the beach, and the Japanese had kept hitting it with fire throughout the night, so it was all torn to pieces. Once he was back on LST-930, the young coxswain turned to other duties. We used the tank deck for an emergency hospital, he recalled. We had seven doctors and 35 corpsmen on board. They’d put the wounded on the barge tied to the side, put them on a stretcher, and we would pick them up with the crane and lower them down to the tank deck. I ran the crane.

It was Campbell’s first encounter with combat, and the carnage made a deep impression on the young sailor. I had seen the wounded being unloaded from my second trip on, although we weren’t carrying any, he said. I can still remember the first guy they brought back to my ship. He had gotten blown up in a tank, and his face was blown off. His nose and his jaw just weren’t there. His tongue was pinned back to his collar. He wasn’t out or anything, and his eyes were okay. He thought it was only his jaw that was broken. He couldn’t put his hands up to touch his face because they were pinned down. Another guy came back blown all to pieces, just burnt up. You’ve never smelled such a scent in all your life as burned human flesh.

There were a lot of burns, a lot of arms shot off, legs broken, just everything you could imagine. They didn’t make a lot of noise, though. As soon as they got on the barge, if they were in pain they’d shoot the morphine into them. Once we were unloading this wounded guy to the barge, and when they started to put him over on the barge, one end [of the stretcher] got loose, and they dropped him into the water. Everyone was just standing there, watching this guy sink. This black cook, Reva L. Jones, dove into the water and pulled him back up. I thought it was a brave thing, but he never got any recognition for it.

Unloading wounded troops was what Campbell did for the next 24 days. LST-930’s crew relayed casualties from Iwo Jima’s beaches to larger hospital ships. The 18-year-old witnessed many deaths. I didn’t pay too much attention to the dead after a few days, but you don’t get used to it, he said. You never get used to it. I’ve slept on the tank deck with as many as 14 dead with just canvas over them, lying off to the side before we could get a chance to go out and bury them. We’d take the ones who died on our ship out for burial, and we’d sew them in canvas, put some weight on them so they would sink, have a chaplain say a few words, and bury them at sea. I didn’t go on many of them [burial details]. I told them I didn’t like it and tried to avoid it as much as I could.

On the fifth day of the battle, Campbell was an eyewitness to the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi. He recalled: We were three or four miles back in the bay when it was raised on top of the ‘hot rock’ — that’s what I called it. I saw them raise it up. I was on the top deck, and someone said, ‘Look, they’re putting the flag up.’ They’d radioed among the ships that they were putting the flag up now, and everyone on the top deck could see it. They didn’t cheer or anything where I was, they just watched.

But even after Mount Suribachi had been taken, LST-930 was not through losing LCVPs. We had a boat that got loose, Campbell recalled. We went over there to get it, and as we brought it up to the side of the ship, it was about full of water. We were towing it, and just as we got to the gangplank with it, it started to go under. It would have pulled us over, I think. One of the boys had a big old knife and cut the rope in two, and it just sank on down.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, World War II

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