"I Watched the Flag Go Up"

‘I Watched the Flag Go Up’

Marine veteran Robin Barrett survived the sands of Iwo Jima and helped his country secure victory in World War II. ‘The Almighty was watching out for me,’ he says, ‘because I was too dumb to watch out for myself.’

By Mark Baker, The Register-Guard. Reprinted with permission. With Kathie Dalton, Oregon Veteran News Magazine

Robin Barrett jumped out of the plane on the first flight he ever took. He was 17, on his indoctrination flight as a freshly enlisted Marine and wasn’t really supposed to jump.

“It was a test to see if we would jump,” Barrett explained. “Two big Marines were waiting to catch us before we went out of the plane. But we hit an air pocket and out I went.”

Barrett made his first landing and walked away, as if he had done it a hundred times before.

Born in Pasadena, Calif., Barrett was no stranger to hard work. At the age of eight he was working at his father’s avocado farm. He soon decided “stoop labor” wasn’t for him and got a job as a “printer’s devil” for 10 cents per hours at a local print shop. He did whatever was needed and learned the business from the ground up. He considered himself lucky to have a job during the Depression.

On a Sunday morning in 1941, Robin Barrett was taking a bath and heard the news that would change his life forever. Pearl Harbor had been bombed. One year later, having received permission from his mother because he was only 17, Barrett dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Marines.

He wanted to fly, but at his age and without a diploma, his second — and only — choice was parachutist. After boot camp at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, Barrett was sent with the Fighting Fifth to conduct cleanup at Guadalcanal.

His first impression of the island was that it was once a lush jungle that had been all shot up and was no longer lush. But it was still a jungle.

The next stop was Kolombangara Island and the first firefight for the division.

“You couldn’t see through the jungle. We learned to duck and run fast,” he said. “I am lucky to still be alive.”

The next hop through the Solomon Islands was Vella Lavella, where they were met by the Seabees and spent 14 days mopping up. It was a quick hitting campaign, from one Mahogany tree (30-40 foot in diameter) to the next. They were there for about two months.

In October of 1943, “Operation Bliss” was designed as a decoy to the upcoming raid on Bougainville.

The strategy was to land at Choiseul and force the attention of the Japanese on that island. Because of the dense jungle, the Marines — 658 of them — were unable to parachute in and instead made an amphibious landing. Tokyo Rose announced that 20,000 Marines had landed on the island.

“It was just our battalion heading there and we landed on the beach about 2 a.m.,” remembers Barrett. “We were met by an Australian Navy lieutenant who was a missionary and had trained about 90 natives. They were deadly with a rifle — never missed. They were our sole salvation.

“We found the maps for the minefields at Bougainville and got on the radio to pass on the information. They didn’t lose one craft because we knew where all the mines were. We laid our charges and set the place off. We did away with everything so they couldn’t come back to it.”

But, the Japanese had tracked their radio transmission and were hot on their trail as they left the island, wading out to the awaiting PT boats, one of which was PT-59, captained by then-Lt. Robert F. Kennedy.

The First Marine Parachute Regiment was shipped back to the United States on January 2, 1944, and disbanded. Barret was then assigned to the newly formed Fifth Marine Division.

MacArthur and his boys jumped in New Guinea, and it was decided that any future jumps were to be done by the Army. The parachute troops were sent back to Camp Pendleton in San Diego.

“That’s where we put the whole show together. I was in an 81-millimeter mortar outfit. Eight of us were parachute troops.”

From Camp Pendleton they went to Hilo, Hawaii, for further training at Parker Ranch, where the landscape was volcanic and had lush jungles, similar to where they were headed.

“We loaded up at Hilo one more time, ran circles in the Pacific Ocean for 55 straight days. On day 40-something, we pulled into Guam. We regrouped with a whole bunch of other people and left for Iwo Jima,” Barrett says. “We knew whatever it was we were going to do, the 19th of February was when we were going to do it.”

When dawn broke that morning, there were 700 craft in the water.

“You could have stepped from one to another and never gotten wet,” he recalls. “I’ve never seen that many.”

Iwo Jima, mostly flat and featureless except for Mount Suribachi, translates to “Sulphur Island” in English. The odor of sulphur triggers unpleasant memories to this day, Barrett says.

“There was no beach there, it was all black, volcanic sand,” Barrett says. “And it was very scary. That island was as bare as a church collection plate on a Saturday night. No place to go, no place to hide.

“It wasn’t easy building a foxhole, because as soon as you dug it up, it caved in on you.”

The boats hit the beach, the ramps dropped down and immediately, Barrett was in the thick of it.

“All I could see was smoke and black volcanic sand. It was like entering The Fury of Pure Hell, nowhere to hide,” Barrett later recalled. “Then, I had a little talk with the man upstairs and said, ‘If you get me out of this damn foolishness, I’ll be there when you call one day.’”

Not only would Barrett survive the ordeal, he would also experience history.

“I watched the flag go up on the mountain,” Barrett remembers. “I lay in a shell crater and watched the flag go up. It was my 20th birthday. It was a party to remember.”

This lesser-known photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima actually depicts the first event. The more recognizable flag raising, which won AP photographer Joe Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize, was staged several hours later.

The “flag” was the U.S. flag some of Barrett’s fellow Marines placed atop the island’s highest point, 554-foot Mount Suribachi, four days later.

Barrett and the others were there not for just one flag raising, but two.

Joe Rosenthal’s image of five Marines and one Navy combat corpsman that earned the photographer a Pulitzer Prize, was actually the second flag raising.

James Forrestal, then secretary of the Navy, had landed on the beach that morning and wanted the initial flag placed atop Mount Suribachi as a souvenir. A second, larger U.S. flag replaced it later that day, and Rosenthal captured the moment.

But the flag raising that Barrett remembers best is the first one, which he and everyone else saw that morning, the one that had their fellow Marines down below cheering and ships honking.

“I just happened to be at the right place at the right time,” Barrett says.

Strategically located less than 700 miles from Tokyo, Iwo Jima would be the site of one of the bloodiest and fiercest battles of the war in the Pacific. The 5th Division would fight on Iwo Jima from 19 February until 26 March where they would sustain 2,482 killed in action, 19 missing in action, and 6,218 wounded in action. This was the highest casualty rate among the three Marine divisions involved in the invasion.

“Many of my friends didn’t come home. 68 mortar platoon guys landed, 28 days later, three of us were uninjured and alive,” he says. “You have to have a faith. It was hot. Sulphur beds stunk. You couldn’t sleep because you had to keep moving.”

A photo of Marine veteran Robin Barrett's mortar platoon, taken on Iwo Jima. Barrett is in the back row, fourth from the left.

Then there was the smell of hundreds of dead Japanese troops, “just stacked on the ground, just like cord wood,” he remembers. “Probably nothing worse than the smell of dead bodies.”

The 5th Division began loading onto ships on 26 March, finally leaving Iwo Jima on 27 March 1945 sailing for Hawaii. When the war was over, and he had been part of the Allied occupation of Japan, stationed near Nagasaki after the dropping of two atomic bombs forced the Japanese surrender, Barrett went back to his life in southern California.

Barrett returned to California where he and his wife, Marvel, raised four children, and he resumed his work as a printer. Barrett went on to work with the military for another 20 years through the DAV and VFW before deciding being a father figure should be his primary role.

He worked as a scoutmaster in the Boy Scouts and coached Little League baseball for years.

Barrett eventually fulfilled his promise to the Almighty, becoming an Episcopal minister at St. Barnabas Church in Klamath Falls. He recently lost his wife of 66 years.

Nowadays, Barrett can often be found where he now resides at the Oregon Veterans Home in Lebanon with a ready smile, a wink, and his ever-present orange Gatorade. He has undoubtedly had a very full life, but there is still one more thing on his list — to parachute with his two youngest children.

“Five beachheads and never got a scratch,” Barrett recalls of his time in World War II. “The Almightly was watching out for me, because I was too dumb to watch out for myself. I’ve had a wonderful life. An absolutely wonderful life.”