HomeMy WebLinkAboutEd Eyre Radio Transcription #1City of College Station
Heritage Programs Oral History
Interviewee: Ed Eyre
Interviewer: Tom Turbiville
Place: College Station, Texas
Project: Veterans of the Valley
Transcriber: Brooke Linsenbardt
00:00: Tom Turbiville (TT): Yesterday we started the story of Ed Eyre. U.S. Marine from the Brazos Valley. One of the 22,000 who was wounded in the Battle of Iwo Jima, Feburary 1945.
This weekend movie theatres across the country will raise the curtain on the movie based on the award-winning Flags of our Fathers. While Ed Eyre did not witness the raising of the
flag by those six men. He later indeed see that flag flying. You see while that famous picture was being taken by Joe Rosenthal, the war and the battle for Mount Suribachi raged on.
And Eyre was part of that war. His 28th regimental weapons company had a job to do. He’ll talk more about that later, but first a history lesson on why the taking of this small island,
a third the size of Manhattan, Iwo Jima, was so important to the war effort. It was needed as an essential stopping off point for our aircraft between the Marianas and Japan. Here’s
Ed Eyre.
00:58: Ed Eyre (EE): Iwo is about 750 miles figure from Japan. Our bombers were leaving the Marianas, Saipan, and, and it was quite a long trip for ‘em. And they would bomb Japan and
of course they were subject to mechanical problems. They were subject to enemy fighters, anti-aircraft fire. And just running short of fuel. And so we were losing B-29s and their crews
trying to get back to their base. Iwo is a perfect spot for that. It was a flat island. The Japanese, our enemy already had, some stripes prepared for landing there so it seemed to
be a, logical choice for us, because that way we could station our fighters to join with the, the bombers going to Japan and give them, air cover. And it was also a place where the
bombers could land if they needed to make an unsch-, unscheduled landing.
TT: Previous air battles in the war at Iwo Jima had stripped the island of trees and vegetation, left it pretty barren. No place to hide for the Americans coming on to the beach on that
D-Day and then climbing Suribachi.
02:11: EE: It wasn’t much to look at as you looked over the front of the LCVP—the landing craft that we were in—because it was just a, very flat island on. Didn’t rise up over the water.
More than, seemed like about 10 or 12 feet, no trees whatsoever. Big mountain on the. Turned out to be a volcano on the left, so we just wondered why we had to have this piece of real
estate. But it turned out we did, and we did.
TT: Like I said, Ed Eyre did not see the five Marines and the Navy Corpsman plant that flag at the top of Mount Suribachi. He indeed saw the flag flying later. That flag etched in American
pride by the famous photograph of the Marines who mounded it there. He fought day and night at Iwo Jima for ten days until shrapnel from a mortar round eventually ended
his combat career. Tomorrow, he’ll talk about that. Talk about the flag raising. And more about his service. Ed Eyre of College Station. I’m Tom Turbiville, this is Bravo Brazos Valley.