Unknown Valor: A Story of Family, Courage, and Sacrifice from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima

By Martha MacCallum and Ronald J. Drez

New York Times Bestseller. The popular primetime Fox News anchor pays tribute to the heroic Americans who sacrificed everything at Iwo Jima during WWII.

Admiral Chester Nimitz spoke of the “uncommon valor” of the men who fought on Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest and most brutal battles of World War II. In thirty-six grueling days, nearly 7,000 Marines were killed and 22,000 were wounded.

Martha MacCallum takes us from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima through the lives of these men of valor, among them Harry Gray, a member of her own family.

In Unknown Valor, she weaves their stories—from Boston, Massachusetts, to Gulfport, Mississippi, as told through letters and recollections—into the larger history of what American military leaders rightly saw as an eventual showdown in the Pacific with Japan. In a relentless push through the jungles of Guadalcanal, over the coral reefs of Tarawa, past the bloody ridge of Peleliu, against the banzai charges of Guam, and to the cliffs of Saipan, these men were on a path that ultimately led to the black sands of Iwo Jima, the doorstep of the Japanese Empire.

Meticulously researched, heart-wrenching, and illuminating, Unknown Valor reveals the sacrifices of ordinary Marines who saved the world from tyranny and left indelible marks on those back home who loved them.

“Even though we all know how the war ends, what we gain from the book is a deeper appreciation for the scope and scale of the patriotism, dreams, and heartache that lived on. Unknown Valor is a triumph.” —Dana Perino, #1 New York Times–bestselling author

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9780062853875

Martha MacCallum

Martha MacCallum is anchor and executive editor of The Story with Martha MacCallum, seen Monday through Friday on Fox News. She is also co-anchor of Fox News Election coverage, moderating town halls and debates with the presidential candidates, alongside Bret Baier and Chris Wallace. Prior to becoming anchor of The Story, MacCallum anchored, “The First 100 Days,” reporting nightly on the first months of the Trump administration and interviewing the President on his 100th Day. She has covered presidential and mid-term elections for Fox News since 2004, as well as extensive reporting from the field on the primary races across the country. MacCallum has reported from Normandy, France during the 75th Anniversary of D-Day, and from Iwo Jima’s “Reunion of Honor.” Prior to Fox News, MacCallum was an award winning reporter for CNBC, covering homeland security and the US economy, and a reporter/producer for Wall Street Journal Television.

Book preview

Map

Dedication

For Dan, Elizabeth, Reed, and Harry

Epigraph

Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue.

—Admiral Chester W. Nimitz

Greater love than this no man hath, said Our Savior, that a man lay down his life for his friends. And the soldier who dies to save his brothers, and to defend the hearths and altars of his country, reaches this highest of all degrees of charity.

—Cardinal Mercier’s Pastoral Letter, as quoted by G. B. Erskine, Major General Commanding, 3rd Marine Division

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Map

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction: War Plan Orange

Prologue: Peekskill, 1971

1. Arlington, Massachusetts, 1938

2. Infamy

3. Outrage

4. The Changing Tide

5. What Hirohito Knew

6. The First Step: Say a Prayer for Your Pal on Guadalcanal

7. 1943

8. Cracking the Inner Ring

9. Willing to Fight

10. D-Day: From Normandy to Saipan

11. Japan’s Doorstep

12. A Ghastly Relentlessness

13. An Island of Sulphur: No Water, No Sparrow, and No Swallow

14. Hell with the Fire Out

15. The Badlands

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Photo Section

About the Authors

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

War Plan Orange

So long as the sun shall warm the earth, let no Christian be so bold as to come to Japan; and let all know that . . . if he violate this command, [he] shall pay for it with his head.¹

—Imperial inscription at mass grave site of Christians

It’s almost impossible to understate how little Americans knew about Japan before World War II.

In 1853, the empire of Japan was only known to the civilized world as a shadowy, mist-covered island kingdom somewhere east of China. There lived fierce warriors who brooked no intrusion from outside. Their quarantine was absolute. No one had pried open their door, although many had tried. Marco Polo had regaled his Venetian audiences with enchanting tales of a great island to the east of Cathay. It was 1295, and the explorer beguiled enraptured listeners with tales of that enigmatic, alluring place. They imagined the equivalent of the Lost Continent of Atlantis, the Fountain of Youth, or the Seven Cities of Cibola. Explorers and merchants sought to lift the veil on the Japanese kingdom, but all failed. Even the great armies of Kublai Khan, who had overrun the rest of Asia and terrorized Europe, had been hurled back in defeat when they had dared to storm the Japanese wall.²

Only faith had opened the door, and only a little. Jesuit, Dominican, and Franciscan missionaries had been allowed entry in the 1500s. They had baptized more than 200,000 Japanese as Christians. But in 1639, the door had slammed shut. The imperial establishment deemed Christianity a threat, and the backlash was brutal. Crucifixions, beheadings, and burnings at the stake laid waste to what was seen as heresy against the rulers. When the last Christians had been murdered, the black curtain of absolute exclusion and secrecy again shrouded Japan.³ The Dutch were permitted a small trading post as a reward for having participated in the persecution, using their enormous cannons to batter down the walls of their fellow Christians’ strongholds.

In 1831, a Japanese vessel sailing the eastern Pacific Ocean was engulfed by the wind and waves of a great storm. The battered vessel did not sink but was blown way off course. The crippled ship made landfall near the Columbia River on the coast of the Washington Territory of the United States. Local British and American settlers saved seven desperate Japanese seamen, but a return to their homeland, seven thousand miles away, was hopeless. They lived in exile in North America for six years. In 1837, an opportunity arose: a trading voyage was sailing to a small island off the coast of China. The homesick Japanese seamen would be taken to their motherland, ferried there by humanitarian Americans. The US government believed that the gesture would help soften the Japanese intransigence and pave the way to trade.

The final run to Japan from the island off the Chinese coast would be made by the USS Morrison, specially outfitted for the mission. To ensure that there would be no misunderstanding on the part of the Japanese that it was a peaceful approach, all of Morrison’s guns were removed. As the ship sailed for Japan and slowly entered the forbidden waters of Tokyo Bay, a fleet of Japanese junks appeared as out of nowhere, swarming the ship like moths around a flame. Waves slapped the sides of the ship as the American crew eyed the men bobbing below on the exotic fleet of painted boats with accordion sails of maroon and ocher. They felt a thousand eyes on them from the shore as well. Silence hovered around them. As it became clear that Morrison was unarmed, Japanese batteries opened fire from the shore. Morrison hastily unfurled more sail, moving to another anchorage off the island of Kyushu, but the batteries, firing unrelentingly, found them there as well. Defenseless, the Americans turned tail, leaving the hostile waters behind like so many before them. The long-lost Japanese sailors were still on board, tainted by foreign soil and now considered worthless to their homeland.⁴

Nine years later, President James K. Polk would try his luck. In 1846, Polk sent Commodore James Biddle with two ships on a mission to open trade with Japan. This time, there was to be no peace offering. Biddle would enter Tokyo Bay on the ninety-gun Columbus, the corvette Vincennes by its side, in an impressive show of US force and firepower.

The ships’ entrance into the bay was greeted by swarming primitive Japanese boats loaded with hostile warriors. Vincennes was promptly boarded and proclaimed a Japanese possession. Biddle’s request to go ashore and meet with the imperial ministers was flatly denied. For ten days, Biddle would stay anchored, leaving his ship only to make repeated demands to see the proper authorities. For ten days the Japanese declined.

Defeated, Biddle prepared to depart. As he stepped from a Japanese junk onto his own captain’s barge, a Japanese sailor shoved him, sending him sprawling to the bottom of his own boat. Japanese officers feigned shock at the disrespect but simply looked on.⁵

Two years later, the United States and Japan would meet again. In June 1848, sixteen American sailors on the whaler Lagoda jumped ship off the coast of Japan to escape the treatment of a cruel captain. Staggering ashore on Japanese soil, they quickly realized that they had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. The Japanese arrested and imprisoned them. Close confinement was their fate, and they were forced to humiliate themselves by desecrating a Christian cross and crucifixes.

Eight months later, Captain James Glynn mounted a rescue expedition to liberate the captives. On board his sixteen-gun sloop, USS Preble, Glynn sailed into Japanese waters and was greeted with the now-familiar unwelcoming party of warriors signaling him to turn and leave. Undaunted, Preble bowled through the Japanese boats like a rampaging bull and beat them to a more favorable anchorage near the shoreline.

When the outraged Japanese finally caught up to him, they disembarked and mounted the high ground overlooking the bay, which bristled with sixty cannons. As they trained the guns on Preble, Captain Glynn was unimpressed. He stood tall on his deck and with his booming voice demanded the release of the imprisoned Americans.

The Japanese scoffed and reminded Glynn of the humiliation they had inflicted on the proud Commodore Biddle. Glynn was not to be pushed around, and from his lofty perch, he hurled insults and invectives back at them. The bravado seemed to stun those within the sound of his voice. Seizing on their momentary disorientation, Glynn forcefully demanded the prisoners’ release and proclaimed that the United States had not only the power to protect its citizens but the will to use it.

All beheld the stunning scene. The moments passed slowly, and then the prisoners, one by one, surrounded by their guards, made their way down the winding hill toward Glynn. The triumphant American captain postured on the deck of his sloop and sailed away homeward with his crew.⁶

Glynn’s success turned the tide. He recommended to Commodore Matthew C. Perry to strike with a new mission while the iron was hot. President Millard Fillmore commissioned Perry to lead an expedition. Fillmore penned a personal letter to the Japanese emperor and entrusted its delivery to Perry.

After an eight-month voyage from Norfolk, Virginia, Perry’s squadron, called the Black Ships, bore into Japanese waters. The steam frigate Mississippi, belching smoke, churned the waters white in the wake of its powerful screws. The Japanese marveled at the smoking beast with no sails pushing through a nine-knot headwind and creating open water as the Japanese junks scrambled to get out of the way. Mississippi’s decks had been cleared and rigged for combat, its guns loaded. Marines and other armed sentries stood at the rails.⁷

For the next ten days, Perry frustrated every Japanese demand to leave. He refused to meet with anyone but the governor; no subaltern would be entertained. As if to further aggravate the Japanese, he ordered his crew to man small boats and conduct a complete survey and sounding of Tokyo harbor. It was too much for the Japanese to bear, but despite their vigorous objections, Perry pressed on. When the swarming boats edged closer, he scattered them with the threat of cannon fire.⁸

In the end, Perry won the day. He departed on July 17 with a promise from the governor to give an imperial answer concerning trade upon Perry’s return in the spring of 1854.

Perry’s report revealed the success of his mission: It not only taught the Japanese the folly of attempting to sway the Americans by bravado and sham exhibitions of force, but has proved to the world, for the first time, the practicality of sailing even to the capital of Japan.⁹

When Perry returned, the Japanese agreed to a trade understanding. But they also got something else that would be transformative: before Perry departed Tokyo Bay, to prove his friendly intent, he invited Japanese officials to dine on his flagship. He amazed them as he led them to explore the inner workings of his steam-powered vessel. They were enthralled and took it all in, awestruck at American inventiveness and ingenuity. They saw what it would take to rival the US Navy.

It took them only forty years. In just that time, the swarming junks morphed into one of the most powerful navies in all the world. The reclusive island empire became a global sea power. In 1894, they put that power to work, crushing the Chinese fleet in the Battle of the Yellow Sea. Eleven years later it shocked the world by vanquishing the Russian fleet in the Battle of Tsushima.¹⁰

In 1898, the Americans won their own pivotal battle, the Spanish-American War. The fruits of victory were Guam and the Philippine Islands, and with that, the United States’ naval presence was now in Japan’s backyard.

* * *

The two powerful navies war-gamed all possibilities. If ever a future conflict could be predicted, this was it. The United States’ War Plan Orange became the military strategy to react to an attack by Japan against the United States and its tempting targets of Guam and the Philippines.

War Plan Orange was an offensive plan to wage war once the inevitable attack on those far-flung outposts of US power took place. It anticipated an attack on those US possessions by any nation and was color-coded depending upon the adversary: Black was Germany, Red was Great Britain, Green was Mexico, and Orange was Japan. But after World War I, the only possible adversary was Japan, so the reaction plan became Orange, officially adopted in 1924. After its adoption, it became dogma at the US Naval War College.

As the historian Ronald H. Spector noted in Eagle Against the Sun, A generation of officers debated, tested, and refined, War with Orange. One hundred twenty-seven times—in chart maneuvers and board games—the American fleet crossed the Pacific to do battle with its Japanese opponents.¹¹ It was axiomatic: the Blue (US) Navy would cross the vast expanse of seven thousand miles of Pacific Ocean for a showdown, or climactic battle, with the Orange (Japanese) Navy somewhere in the western Pacific in a winner-take-all confrontation. The fact that the US Navy had never fought such a battle was not a consideration. Nor was the fact that most planners reluctantly recognized that Guam and the Philippines would be lost in the opening hostilities of a war with Japan.

The only debate was how to bring about the all-out attack and absolute victory.¹² Some thought it would be a mad dash across the Pacific to smite the Orange Navy with superior numbers. Others proposed to march across the central Pacific step by step, securing small islands in succession, each step supported by the previous one.¹³

It embodied the concept of sea power defeating land power. It would be a systematic drive, an irresistible force pressing forward to isolate Japan and bring about her defeat through siege and final bombardment. From the beginning, there was no thought of an invasion of the Japanese homeland. All agreed that would be a strategy that would bring about a mutual bloodbath. The siege would continue relentlessly until Japan was utterly exhausted and sued for peace.¹⁴

War Plan Orange evolved over many years, from 1906 until December 6, 1941. But during all of the additions and modifications made by several generations of war planners, it had occurred to almost no one that there was a possible scenario that had never been explored: that there would be no Blue Navy to cross the Pacific after the first day of war.

It had, however, occurred to General William Billy Mitchell, the Army aviator, who since fighting in World War I had rattled cages up and down the chain of command. He wrote extensive papers and carried out bombing exercises to prove that the future of war was airpower. He had been exiled to a post in Hawaii after his exhortations got him in trouble with the White House and most of his superiors. Mitchell traveled to Europe and Asia to study aviation advances and in 1924 wrote a prophetic document. Mitchell believed that Japan was preparing to do battle with the United States. He predicted that air attacks would be made by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor. The report was largely ignored.¹⁵

Prologue

Peekskill, 1971

Fifty-five Welcher Avenue in Peekskill, New York, is where my grandparents Frank and Helen Bowes lived. My mom was raised there, and my sisters and I went there all the time when we were growing up.

It was a compact house, with three floors, an attic that held hidden treasures, and a basement with Grandpa’s workbench and an icebox. The day my parents were married in 1955, it was so hot, my grandmother said, she had to dress in front of the open icebox. The Bowes family’s home was handsome and had a modest understated elegance, just as they did.

Frank and Helen Bowes had married a bit later than most, in their early thirties. They had one daughter, Elizabeth Jane Bowes, my mother, who as a little girl was known as Betts. She was the light of their lives.

They were middle-class, educated, hardworking people whose lives were filled with friends and church and community. Grandpa was a handsome man with a shock of black hair. He wore a brimmed hat and an overcoat to work every day and attributed the full head of hair that he maintained well into his eighties to consistent hat wearing. In his lightly worn green velvet chair, each evening he would read the New York Times and The Sun or one of his books, such as The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton or the latest novel by Herman Wouk. The house smelled of his pipe, in a good way. He worked for Liberty Mutual Insurance Company in New York. Back during the war, he would take the train to Boston to see clients there and also visit his sister, Anne, and his niece and nephew, Nancy and Harry Gray.

Grandma was a gym teacher at a home for wayward girls. As a kid, I wondered how exactly they’d lost their way, but I knew there was no way they would put anything over on Grandma. She was kind but firm, and on Thanksgiving she could beat potatoes into perfect submission with a masher.

The Boweses delighted in taking my sisters and me on outings and buying us red wool coats with black buttons from Best & Co. They crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary and brought us little kilts from Scotland. In the winter, they would go to Florida with friends for a month and send us a crate of oranges and grapefruits. There was something about the arrival of that box in the middle of a New Jersey winter. You could smell the oranges right through the packaging, all citrusy and exotic with a smiling orange with long eyelashes on the outside.

But before those days, there was the war. It was that part of their story that I searched for in the attic. On Sunday afternoons at Welcher Avenue, I would slip away while the grown-ups talked in the living room about politics, color TV, and life.

My first stop was a spot near the top of the first staircase. Seated there, I could reach the box of Russell Stover chocolates that my aunt kept on top of the secretary desk below on the first floor. I would forage through it, gobble one or two, then replace the top and make my way to the second floor. There were four small square bedrooms: Grandma’s, Grandpa’s, Aunt Jane’s, and Mom’s old room in the corner at the back of the house, overlooking a magnolia tree and a small side lot. There was one shared bathroom in the hall with faded yellow and white tile. I was a nosy kid, and at one time or another, I’d looked through every nook and cranny, finding jewelry boxes with rings with big topazes and tourmalines brought home from a friend’s stay in South America, Mom’s pressed flowers from long-ago dances at West Point, matchbooks with friends’ names written on them, and, on Grandpa’s dresser, dishes with foreign coins and shirt stays mixed together.

To the right of Grandma’s room, the staircase continued up. Behind the door were a rough unpainted staircase and banister, and as I ascended, a hint of cool mustiness and mothballs filled my nostrils, signaling an entry into the past. This place was separate and apart from the bustle downstairs.

Light streamed in through the one big window under the roof peak. Under the long rack of out-of-season clothing covered in plastic bags was a rectangular dry cleaning box with a sketched silhouette of a wedding dress on top. My sister, Lisa, would take me up there, and we would stare at it, knowing that one day, when one of us got engaged, we would get to open the box and try on the dress, but not until then.

On the other side of the room, past the Christmas decorations and boxes of slides and suitcases, was an old brown chest of drawers where the story was kept. On top of the chest was a handsome picture of Grandpa’s nephew, Harry, in uniform, a jaunty smile across his face and sparkly eyes looking out from under his US Marine cover.

My grandfather’s neatly stacked saved newspapers were preserved in plastic bags on top. I visited them over and over, carefully separating them, reading the screaming headlines: Hitler Invades Poland. Paris Falls. Japan Wars on US, Britain; Makes Sudden Attack on Hawaii; Battles at Sea; Heavy Fighting at Sea Reported. Great Britain at War; The King’s Message to the Empire; Fighting to Save World from Bondage of Fear.

They told the story of the war that had consumed the family’s lives from 1941 to 1945. Grandpa followed the movement of Adolf Hitler’s march across Europe with pins on a map on his workshop wall. He, Helen, and their friends listened intently to the radio updates, sat rapt at newsreels at the movie theater, and argued with friends and neighbors about whether or not we should go to the aid of Great Britain; whether Hitler would storm down the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace or even Fifth Avenue in New York, as he had down the Champs-Élysées, where Nazi flags flanked the thoroughfare in the nightmare that crept closer by the day.

In 1971, I discovered a long thin drawer at the top of the chest. In it was a dark green notebook with the gold-stamped Liberty Mutual Insurance Company logo. Inside were yellowed newspaper clippings, photos of Marines crawling up black beaches, and a photo with the headline Wrecked and Abandoned Landing Craft Litter Beach. Toward the back there was a photo of Marines burying their dead in a cemetery. It was all a mystery to me; many of the words I could not read, but the images I could not forget. On the front was Grandpa’s handwriting on a piece of paper slipped inside the plastic, the words in blue ballpoint pen: The Story of Iwo Jima.

* * *

Iwo Jima, March 2019

Forty-eight years later, Frank Bowes’s granddaughter is making her own way across the ocean to Iwo Jima.

I spent hours at the Japanese Embassy in New York getting my visa. It struck me as odd that the bloody battle to secure Iwo Jima ended in its return to Japan and now I need permission to go there.

I fly fourteen hours to Tokyo and another three to Guam. As we fly into Guam, the night sky is midnight blue and a full moon hangs over the sea, lighting the Mariana Islands. Below lies Tinian, to which the USS Indianapolis brought the parts of the first atomic bomb to be assembled. B-29s flew over these waters on their way to Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Japan.

Tucked into my books are copies of the letters Harry Gray wrote my grandfather. My mother shared them with me as a child, and now I have shared them with my children. Like that of so many Americans, our story is woven into the wars waged and won for our freedom. These letters set me on this journey years ago. Deeper in my bag is a plastic bottle, to carry back sand for my aunt Nancy.

The Japanese open the island to veterans and their families, history buffs, and journalists only one day each year, on the anniversary of the battle in March.

I wake early, too restless to sleep, have coffee, and board the bus to the airport at 5:30 a.m. The security line is ridiculously long, and I’m annoyed by the lack of efficiency until I notice a man in his nineties in navy blazer and blue veteran’s cap. He waits patiently, looking forward, and so will I.

We board the Reunion of Honor United flight. There is a jovial mood in our collection of travelers, most destined for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Some have been here before, though. Bob Clemons is ninety-five and is traveling with his son and grandson. He is small in stature and stares out the window before drifting off to sleep. It will be his first time back since he was nineteen years old. I spoke with him yesterday and asked him what he remembered about Iwo. He said they had told them to kill any Japanese they encountered and to keep pushing until they reached the other side of the island. He also remembered running and tripping over scattered arms and legs. Bob said he loved Harry Truman because he ended the war and saved him from going to Okinawa. He said there was no way he was going there; he would’ve gone A.W.O.L. before he did.

Ronald Rondo Scharfe is standing in the aisle, chatting. He’s ninety-one but moves like a seventy-two-year-old. He faked a baptismal certificate he stole from his church to join the Navy. At the age of sixteen, he drove a Higgins boat in the first wave and hit an underwater obstacle. The steering wheel ripped open his chest and crushed his nose and teeth. His company lost fourteen men.

Bob and Rondo say they never expected to get off the island alive. Rondo tells me that he always feels guilty that he got to have a life and get married and have kids when so many of the other guys did not. I have a dream sometimes where I see two of my buddies as clear as day. I tell them to come on, I’ll trade places with them. But just for the weekend, he says, his eyes brimming with tears. But then I want to come back. Both men say they still have nightmares, seventy-four years later.

As we approach Iwo Jima, the United pilot tells us that we will soon see it on the left. He will fly two low circles over the island so everyone can take pictures and get a good look. There is a buzz of excitement as the gaping volcano Mount Suribachi comes into view, looming over the southern tip of the island. Those in the interior of the plane are passing their phones to the folks at the windows, craning their necks for a glimpse. Bob and Rondo stare down at the monster volcano in silence.

Once on the island, we walk the two-mile dirt road to Suribachi and climb it in the heat. The Japanese memorial stands large in the center. The American one is to the left. Next to it, the sawed-off end of the flagpole, on the spot where the famous flag-raising photo was taken, is in the ground, surrounded by a small patch of cement. People take turns taking photos; some have carried US flags to the spot, and they hold them up for the picture.

I look down at the stretches of black beaches below.

This is where Harry, Dom, Warren, Jay, George, Herman, and Charlie landed, among the sixty thousand boys of unimaginable courage from towns all across the United States, seven thousand miles away. Nearly seven thousand of them would die here on the eight-mile-square patch of nothing in the middle of nowhere in the costliest battle in the history of the US Marine Corps.

Admiral Chester W. Nimitz said after the war, Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue. For these young men and so many others whose tales of unknown valor lie only in their hearts, I tell their stories.

1

Arlington, Massachusetts, 1938

Frank Bowes heads up the hill, riffling in his overcoat pocket for the keys to his brother-in-law’s house.

The always dapper Frank is a bit sweaty under the collar as he trudges north on Center Street. It is bitterly cold on this December night, and he pulls his coat tightly around. It has been a heck of a day. He barely made the train to Boston from Peekskill, then hustled through two meetings that morning: at a textile company north of Boston and the teachers’ union, both his longtime clients at Liberty Mutual.

He walks and thinks, as the snow squeaks under the soles of his wing tips. Christmas wreaths are hung on the lampposts. Arlington is decked out. But it is going to be a rough Christmas. The red bows leave him unsettled, not merry.

Standing at the front door, he grips the key in his hand, separating it from his pocket change, his handkerchief, and his pipe. The worn black leather fob softened over time in another man’s hand, in another man’s pocket. On it are the worn words Olmsted-Flint, where his brother-in-law, Harry Gray, Sr., worked. Olmsted made industrial belts for machinery, including the leather belts that powered the tallest wooden roller coaster at Revere Beach. Last summer, Harry Sr. went there to take the first test ride, to prove the belts would work.

Better you than me, Frank joked. He wasn’t much for rides, but Harry Sr. loved anything fast and thrilling. As a boy in Long Island City, he spent his summers on the water on his fifteen-foot sailboat. He loved that boat, loved the water, remembers Frank.

Last winter, Harry Sr. made a model of it for young Harry. Frank could still smell the wood shavings, as the radio crackled and Harry Sr. hummed in the basement. It took him all of February to finish, but when it was done, Frank had to admit, it was a beauty.

She was two and a half feet long, with a tall mast and a little cabin with tiny benches inside. She had a wooden ship’s wheel that turned and two perfectly scaled lifeboats with varnished seats. Harry Sr. made a polished stand, and Anne sewed three beautiful sails that hung on the mast, waiting for an imaginary wind. When Harry Sr. was done with it, he made a smaller one for little Nancy.

The two young families were as close as could be: four young parents with three little ones between them, starting their lives. The Great Depression was mostly over, and things were picking up. After years of angst and doubt, people were starting to feel pretty good about the future again.

Frank and his wife, Helen, and their four-year-old daughter, Betts, along with Harry Sr. and Anne and their two children, Harry Jr. and Nancy, often drove to Horseneck Beach to rent cabins for a week in the summer. Harry Sr. kept them laughing and singing, playing his mandolin in the kitchen after dinner. He was one of those guys, pretty good at most everything he tried. He played golf with his pals on Saturdays and Sundays, and with his family he was always the first one up, eagerly packing up the car. Then he’d scoop up Harry Jr. and Nancy from their beds, loudly announcing Point of Pines or bust!

There they’d run, laughing and shouting, on the paths until they all collapsed for lunch on a picnic blanket. Frank could still feel the mattress of thick pine needles under the wool plaid blanket. They were all in heaven under the umbrella of those heavily scented, towering trees.

They lay on their backs as the sun streamed down through the big bushy branches, and the world seemed just about perfect. When the day was over and they piled into the car, Harry would always have one more treat: Who wants ice cream? Sticky and drowsy, Harry Jr., Nancy, and Betts would fall asleep on one another’s shoulders in the back seat

Reviews for Unknown Valor

[deaconbernie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the best book I've read in a long time. The author, of course, is the Martha MacCallum who hosts "The Story with Martha MacCallum" on the Fox News channel at 7 PM EDT and 6 PM CDT. The story is about what led up to the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945 and some of the Marines who fought and died there.This long after the fact, Martha had the benefit of lots of research not available who wrote in the 20 years immediately after the battle. She has many interesting tidbits ... perhaps the most fascinating is that immediately after the flag was erected on Mt. Suribachi, a Catholic Chaplain offered Mass on the spot.MacCallum also quotes John Stuart Mill as to fighting to hard to win else don't fight at all. Knowing how the battle ended before I began to read, it was quite surprising for me to find no sense of triumph at the conclusion. No, I had a different read as I read how the many families who lost sons and husbands dealt with the notification of death and then had to make a decision about a permanent burial: either in the Pacific War Memorial in Hawaii or to bring the bodies home.One last point, although I've always thought Harry Truman was correct to use the two nuclear devices, I am now unalterably convinced it was the right thing. The Japanese will to honor the Emperor (who is not entirely the nice guy depicted in the picture with McArthur or in the amazing economic recovery) would have caused an incredible number of deaths without the bombs. That he was directly involved in the war time decisions is something that has been covered up nicely.