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On Saipan, Marshall Harris was struck in the forearm by shrapnel, with the fragment breaking a bone.
On Tinian, he was blown off his floating tank by a mortar round onto a coral reef
where he was cut up so badly that he had to spend a month in the hospital. He almost lost a leg, and since then he's had two knee replacements.
So that should mean two Purple Hearts for Harris, right?
"Naw, I
don't have any. Marines have to get a leg or arm blown off to get a Purple Heart. If they wanted to give me one, that would have been fine, but you never ask. It's no big deal."
Spoken like a true Marine, and
Harris is a true Marine. The license plate on his car says "Iwo1945." A letter from the Marine Corps Commandant is framed and hangs in his office. A picture of President Ronald Reagan looks down on his
desk.
Harris' business card has the famous quote attributed to Reagan: "Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they've made a difference. The Marines don't have that problem."
There was a time,
though, when young Marshall Harris was considering a career in the, pardon the expression, U.S. Navy.
Harris was born in 1925 near New Ulm and spent his early years on a farm. "No matter how young you are on
a farm, there are things you can do. I used to go down the line of cows after the milking machine had been used and strip the cows. I'd try to get the last of the milk out of them. After I'd done all 25 cows, if I
had a bucket of milk, I thought I was king of the hill."
His dad sold the farm in the mid-1930s and moved the family to Floodwood, Minnesota, where he operated a hardware store, gas station and set of tourist
cabins called the Kozy Kamp.
"We did okay, but people forget that the Depression lasted eleven or twelve years. If I asked my dad for a nickel for an ice cream cone, we had to have a family conference."
It was
his and his brother's job to wash the sheets for the cabins, and at one point his brother was complaining. "I told him, 'This beats shoveling cow shit, don't it?' He had to agree."
Harris went to Floodwood High
School until his senior year, when his dad and mom got wartime jobs in California at the Kaiser Shipyards. Harris moved back to New Ulm, where he lived alone in the family house and finished his final year in high
school.
"Before the war started, America was so isolationist. As kids we couldn't understand it. We could see the terrible things Hitler was doing in Europe. But now I understand it better. It had been only 23
years since the First World War, and people just didn't want another war."
Despite the lack of parental control, "I was amazingly good. I don't understand why. I even had the family car, and I never used it. I
rode my bike to school."
Harris had taken tests and had been admitted to the Navy's V-5 program. His intention was to be a Naval aviator, and as soon as school was over, that's where he was headed.
His
brother, though, had joined the Marine Corps just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and he was a scout and a sniper at Guadalcanal. "He was hit with seven machine gun bullets up his leg all the way to the hip. When
I heard about it, I got mad, I got really mad."
Harris marched down to the Marine Corps recruiting office and offered his services. He mentioned that he was qualified for the Navy's V-5 program. "The recruiter
looked at me and said, 'Are you nuts? Why don't you just go in the Navy and fly airplanes?'
"I told him I had my reason, and he said it better be a good one. I told him what happened to my brother and that I
wanted to even the score.
"He said, 'Sit down here, Marine, and let's talk."
The recruiter convinced him to stay in school, and in the spring of 1943, after graduation, he and some New Ulm friends, who were
also joining the military, hopped in the family car and drove to California to enlist.
"I actually signed up in a recruiting office in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel. The next day I was on a bus to San
Diego."
Boot camp went well for Harris, partly because he had been training with the National Guard back in New Ulm on rifle drill, marching and other military skills. He had also studied Morse Code in high
school, and so he got into Marine radio school. "I already could send 16-17 words a minute, so I had to pretend in radio school that I didn't know much about it. The funny thing was, we never used Morse Code in the
war. We had push button radios."
While he was at radio school, the Marines posted a flyer on the bulletin board looking for volunteers for "armored amphibious tanks."
"We thought they were kidding. You know
how they're always trying to pull your leg in the military. Really? Tanks that could float?"
He and his buddies signed up, though, and Harris found himself assigned to the 2nd Armored Amphibian Tank Battalion.
His new ride was an LVT-4-A, also known as a Landing Vehicle Tracked, or an amphibious tank.
There were two types of LVTs. One was designed to bring Marines ashore and had a large compartment they could ride in.
The other, which Harris was assigned to, was more like a tank — with a turret, machine guns and slightly heavier armor. Harris was a radioman and the bow machine gunner, or the man who operated the .30 caliber
machine gun in the front of the tank.
On top of the tank was a 75 millimeter howitzer. Harris sat in the front of the tank, next to the driver. There were seven crew members.
"The tanks were noisy, smelly, and
the hot transmission was right between me and driver. It was often over 100 degrees in there."
The inside of the tank was all metal, but Harris and his driver painted their compartment white, as did many of the
tank crews, for better lighting. "We had to see what we were doing."
Training was at Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands. "The LVT was very slow, maybe 15 or 20 miles an hour, and we were absolutely no match
for the Japanese tanks. It was not our purpose not to fight as a tank."
Other deficiencies of the LVT include very light armor, and the requirement that the turret had to be turned by hand. "It took us a long
time to turn that turret. In a tank fight, that would be a disadvantage."
The tank was supported on the water by large pontoons on either side, surrounded by the tracks. It was propelled in the water by blades
built into the tracks. Full speed in the water was maybe five miles an hour.
In June of 1944, the tank battalion was moved to Saipan aboard LSTs, larger ships built for carrying tanks. "The Navy guys told us not
to worry because the torpedoes would go right under the flat-bottomed LSTs. Once we got those heavy tanks aboard, though, I don't think a torpedo would have gone under us anymore."
Each LST had about a dozen of
the troop carrying LVTs, and five of the amphibious tanks like Harris served in. The five with firepower would lead the other LVTs into shore from a distance of 4,000 yards.
The date was June 15, 1944.
The
Japanese response at Saipan was strong, and 13 of the 68 tanks in the battalion were sunk on the way in. Two of the five tanks in Harris' platoon were sunk, including a tank with his best friend aboard. "I tried to
contact the tank next to us on the radio, but I couldn't get through. I looked through the slit, and that tank had taken a direct hit. There was smoke coming out of every hatch. It was a bad scene. I went from being
age 18 to 38 in a hurry."
"I just kept firing my machine gun at the shore. The idea was to lay down protective fire for the landing. I went through seven or eight boxes of .30 caliber ammunition until the
barrel melted down. I had been trained, though, in how to change the barrels, and so I got on these big, asbestos gloves and put a new barrel on. It took about a minute."
The entire journey from the LST to the
beach took probably a half an hour, but it seemed much longer. The three advance tanks that made it to shore were supposed to go inland and hold the ground. "Theoretically, we were supposed to go in 100 yards and
hold. But our clutch was burning, and once we got to the beach we stopped. We had to let it cool off."
With the tank grounded, the men left their protection and took on a Japanese bunker on the beach. Harris and
another Marine got to the far side of the bunker, on either side of the doorway. With hand signals, they agreed to turn into the doorway and open fire at the count of three.
"There was a Japanese soldier there,
playing possum with his head down. I fired at him and hit him twice in the helmet. He screamed and rolled on the ground.
"It was my first kill. I was 18 years old. Holy mackerel. I had no idea what it would be
like, but I wasn't ready for that. It shook me up a little bit."
Harris didn't have much time to think about it. The door to the bunker was open, but a hand grenade thrown in, was quickly thrown out again by the
Japanese inside. "Pappy (one of the sergeants) told me to pull the pin, let the spoon fly, count to two, and then throw it in. I did it, and it didn't seem like it took more than a second before it went off."
An
officer wanted to know how many dead Japanese were in the bunker. "I looked at my buddy and he looked at me. He said, '14?' and I said, 'Yeah, that sounds like a good number.' I was damned if I was going to crawl
into that cave and count bodies. That's probably a reason why statistics in war aren't very reliable."
Harris' company had landed quite a distance down the beach from where they were supposed to be. "The whole
thing was pretty discombobulated. Nobody knew where anyone else was."
It was determined that the tank, now that the clutch had cooled off, should be moved down the beach to where the rest of the battalion was
setting up. The tank's driver, though, had gotten sick after the landing.
"The bow gunner is also the assistant tank driver, and so I slid over to his seat. There was no need for the rest of the crew to be
in the tank when it was such a target on the beach, so I drove it down all by myself. Along the way a shell landed right in front of me, and it jostled the tank. I cut my lip a little bit, and it was
bleeding.
"I got there, and they waved me in. When I got out, I had blood all down my shirt, and they thought I was half dead. They asked me where I was hit, and I had to explain I just bumped my lip."
"Major Bevins wanted to know who had driven that tank down the beach, and they told him it was me. He said to make that man a corporal. So I got a promotion on the spot."
Harris' tank was assigned to K
Company of the 8th Marines, and tagged along with that outfit for the rest of the Battle of Saipan. "There were not enough Shermans (the main U.S. battle tank) and so they used us as a heavy tank at times. We lost a
lot of tanks."
At one point, Harris was closing a hatch on the tank when a shell blew up near him. A small piece of shrapnel entered his left forearm and broke the ulna bone inside. "I got into my seat, but
the tank driver said, 'Hey, you're messing up our nice clean cockpit. I looked and I was bleeding all over the place.
"I went to the aid station, but they didn't have any splints, so they took the scabbard from
my bayonet and used that. They just tied it up and sent me on my way.
"After a couple of weeks, though, it was starting to smell pretty bad. The rest of the guys didn't like my cologne. They made me go back and
get it treated again. The doctors were surprised how fast the bone was mending."
By the ninth of July, Saipan had been secured and the 2nd Armored had a breather of just a couple of weeks before they were put
aboard LSTs again, this time bound for the neighboring island of Tinian. "We only had enough tanks left for two companies."
This time the amphibious tanks went in with the 4th Marines. Now that he had tasted
battle and knew the reality, was he nervous? "You know, we were 18- and 19-year-old kids. We thought we were going to live forever. We didn't know much fear."
The tanks again led the invasion, but this time,
instead of going up on the beach, they went off to the sides, parked on the coral reef, and supplied fire power for the landing from the flanks. "We were in three or four feet of water, standing on the coral rock.
There was very little resistance because the Japanese thought we were going to land somewhere else."
Though they couldn't see the enemy, they could hear them. "They had these little speakers and they would say,
'Amelican Maline. Tomollow you die.' It was supposed to scare us, but all we could do was laugh because they couldn't say their 'r's. We really thought that was really funny.
"About 3 a.m. that night, though, we
were hit pretty hard by a banzai attack. We could hear them coming, yelling 'banzai.' We could hear them screaming. We fired flares into the air.
At one point, a mortar shell hit close by and blew Harris off the
tank. Another crew member was hit in the eye with shrapnel.
"They pulled me out, but that coral is just like a knife, and it cut me all the way up. The tank commander took out his combat knife and was cutting the
pieces of coral out of my leg. Then they put sulfa powder all over it, and I went back to work.
"I was hurting so much, that I don't really remember what happened for the next week. I stayed with the tank for
eight days, and we were in the spearhead of the attack. My mind was a little foggy.
"Finally on the eighth night, I wouldn't go in the foxhole. We always left the tank at night and dug foxholes to sleep in. But I
didn't want to get in a foxhole. I was too sick."
The next morning, his comrades took him back to an aid station. "I had a high fever, and there were red streaks all up my leg. They told me I had blood
poisoning."
Harris was hauled in a Jeep to the beach and was evacuated back to Saipan. "I had lost a lot of weight. They were going to put me out, and the doctor told me that when I woke up, I'd either have one
foot or two. When I woke up, I looked down, and I could wiggle my toes on both feet.
"They said they were going to try something new, and it was called penicillin. They gave me a shot every three hours for
weeks."
The fever finally left Harris and the streaks disappeared. The pus draining from his wounds dried up. He felt better.
After 33 days in the hospital, "I was afraid that some replacement would come in,
and I'd be separated from my crew. I never worried about my health in the hospital, I only worried about losing my crew." Harris left the hospital, and hitched a ride back to Tinian.
"When I got there, the guys
all had these golden tans. I was as white as a sheet. I scared them. They thought I was a ghost. For a while, they didn't want anything to do with me."
The thought of a Purple Heart never crossed his mind. "My
buddy who got hit in the eye, they had to give him a glass eye. He got a Purple Heart. But at that particular time in our lives, nobody cared. It was so common, all the cuts, burns, concussions. You just got over
it."
By February, 1945, the 2nd Armored had been resupplied with tanks and was ready for its next mission, what was to turn out as one of the deadliest battles of the war, Iwo Jima.
Iwo Jima was another
variation on landing tactics for the amphibious tanks. This time they couldn't get the tanks ashore because of the loose, volcanic sand on the steep beaches.
"They told us to just circle Suribachi (the large hill
on one end of the island) and fire at targets of opportunity. But the ocean was wavy, and it was pretty hard to hit something, almost impossible."
The resourceful Marines did come up with a plan. "Every third
bullet in my machine gun was a tracer. I could see where they were going. When we saw a muzzle flash of artillery on the mountain, I would fire at it and keep it marked until the 75 millimeter could zero in. We
probably wasted 10 out of 11 shells, but we kept after them."
The amphibious tanks, circling the island a few hundred yards out, had to stay buttoned up because they were taking murderous small arms fire from the
beach. The bullets were knocking the blades off the tracks, making the tanks difficult to steer, and filling the pontoons with holes. "It was like standing with a tin pail on your head, and people were throwing
rocks at it."
"We had a bilge pump to get the water out of the pontoons, but that would only last as long as we had gas."
Between escorting the landing and the night action, when morning came, Harris' tank
only had six shells left out of the 190 it had brought to sea. The tank landed at the base of Suribachi, out of gas and out of ammunition. They asked the commanding officer if they could gas up.
"Colonel Bevins
took one look at our tank and said, 'Gas? Not for that tank. Go find another one.' "
The tank crew took one of the eight reserve tanks that had been brought ashore, and joined the 5th Marine Division in the
ongoing battle. For 27 days, they did what they could to help the Marines on the ground.
"We'd blow up a pillbox, and at some point we'd have to head back and get gas and ammo. Then away we'd go again.
"One
time we were coming in for gas, and I had my hatch open. I just happened to look up at Suribachi, and they were putting up that flag. All the ships whistles started blowing and everybody was whooping and
hollering."
The flag had been planted by a small unit of Marines including Chuck Lindberg of Minnesota. It was the first flag raising at Iwo Jima.
"Later I looked, and the little flag had been replaced by a
larger flag. Nobody thought much about that. Nobody knew that probably the most famous picture of the war had been taken when they switched flags."
Day after day went by as the Marines tried to dislodge the enemy
from a maze of caves and bunkers.
"I saw all the hell I'd ever want to see at Iwo. I saw bodies cut apart. I saw guys holding their guts in with their hands. I saw heads rolling across the ground. I threw up
more times at Iwo Jima than I did the rest of my life.
"But you can't stop to help. You're in a tank, you've got to keep going. You finally get a little hardened to it. If I hadn't been at Saipan and Tinian, I
don't know if I'd been able to handle it. You just saw guys get hit and blown apart, again and again. I can't even tell the full story to anybody, but there was death and destruction 360 degrees around you."
When
the tank was in a forward position, and needed to go back to get more fuel or ammunition, one of the crewmen would climb out on the back of the tank, despite the danger. "He would tell the tank driver to go left or
go right so that we wouldn't go over a dead Marine. That would be the worst thing we could do."
One morning, the crew got out of its foxholes and got in the tank. It would be another day of the relentless combat
that was needed to secure the island from the determined Japanese.
"We started driving, and the driver said he thought there was something wrong. We got out, and the track on the other side of the tank had been
blown off during the night. We didn't even know."
The crew headed back to the beach and requested another tank. "Colonel Bevins looked at us and said he was sorry, but there were no more tanks. We had gone ashore
with about 75 tanks, and there were only 10 or 11 left. We were through as a fighting unit."
The colonel directed the men to the nearest Higgins boat, and told them to get on board for a trip back to the fleet.
"Oh, we didn't argue with that order."
The 2nd Armored headed back to Hawaii to begin training again – this time for the attack on mainland Japan. In August, 1945, two atomic bombs were dropped on two
Japanese cities, and the war ended.
Harris had enough points to go home, but there were no ships available to take him back to the States. Eventually, he was able to head home on a small aircraft carrier that
was headed that way. He was discharged in San Diego.
For Harris, though, there was one more Marine mission he had to go on.
"My friend, Bob Lewis, and I agreed that if either one of us got killed, the
other one would go and see the parents of the one that was killed. My dress uniform was in pretty bad shape, so I went down and spent $75 on a new set of dress blues. Then I got on the train to Bremerton,
Washington."
"I really had to battle with myself about going, but we had made a pact. I spent two nights with Bob's parents, and I was so glad I did it. They treated me just like their son."
At one point,
Bob's mother took Harris aside. She had one question, and she said it had been bothering her since she got the telegram that informed her of her son's death. Had he suffered? "I was able to tell her that her son had
been killed instantly. There was no pain. I told her that, as God is my witness, he had not suffered. We hugged and cried, and now, 60 years later as a crusty, old Marine, I still cry when I think about
it."
Harris came back to Minnesota and went to Duluth Business College. He worked for a gas company in Bemidji, and as a radio announcer on KBUN radio in that city. His co-worker was Steve Cannon, who later
became a radio legend on WCCO in the Twin Cities.
He did sales jobs, using a small plane that he flew. His dreams of becoming a pilot were fulfilled. Harris bought a natural gas equipment company in Los Angeles
and ran it for several years, and eventually came back to Minnesota where he worked in the heating and air conditioning business until he retired.
He has outlived two wives, whom he loved dearly, and he has two
daughters and a son. He lives in Otsego.
He was the speaker recently at a Marine Birthday event. "I told them I was Marshall Harris, and that I could remember my service number and my rifle number. But I didn't
know my cell phone number."
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