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��ƷSM����ӰƬ distinguished professor and Marine veteran Richard Jessor reflects on what the planting of the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi Feb. 23, 1945, meant for the country and for him personally

Eighty years later, Richard Jessor vividly recalls hitting the beach on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945.

“The island had been under severe bombardment from U.S. aircraft and our Navy ships offshore,” says Jessor. “Both types of bombardment had been going on for quite some time, and the sense was that Iwo Jima could be taken in three or four days because nothing could have survived such a massive bombardment from American forces.”

The first three waves of Marines landed on the beach without taking enemy fire.

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Richard Jessor, a ��ƷSM����ӰƬ distinguished professor emeritus of behavioral science, was a 20-year-old Marine fighting World War II on Iwo Jima in February 1945.

“By the time we in the fourth wave hit the beach, the Japanese—who were concealed, waiting for us—pulled their artillery out of the caves and had every inch of the beach registered, so when our tractor hit the beach, we were under severe fire,” recalls Jessor, then a 20-year-old Marine. “Our tractor got stuck at the beach edge and could not move us up, so we jumped out of the tractor into the water.

“As I hit the beach, I looked over and there was a Marine lying on his back, a bubble of blood coming out of his mouth. He died there, and that was my first exposure to combat.”

Jessor was hit in the back by shrapnel during the first day ashore but was able to continue fighting. After four days of fighting, he and his company were pulled back from the front line and told they could write one letter.

He wrote a letter to his parents, thanking them for everything they had done for him. He also said his goodbyes, “because I didn’t think anyone was going to get off the island alive,” he says, explaining, “there was carnage all of the time, every day, and you felt every day that it was going to be your last day.

“We were constantly being fired upon by the Japanese, who would come to the openings of their caves and fire, and then withdraw, so we didn’t see the enemy, and that was a huge source of frustration,” he adds. As it turned out, the Japanese had heavily fortified the island and had a dense network of tunnels from which they could launch attacks.

The flag raised atop Mount Suribachi

Back on the line the morning of the fifth day, Jessor looked at the opposite end of the island to see something in the distance atop Mount Suribachi, the dominant geographical feature on Iwo Jima.

“As I looked, I suddenly saw the American flag flying. I couldn’t see anything else that was that far away, but I saw the flag flying and I started shouting, ‘The flag is up! The flag is up!’” he says. “The other Marines around me began turning around to look. Seeing that made us realize that our rear was now being covered, because we had been under attack from behind as well as in front.

“For me, it was a moment of being able to say to myself, ‘Maybe I will get out of this alive,’” he adds. “In that sense, it was transformative for me, and I remember it well.”

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Richard Jessor (second from right) and his buddies taking a break behind the line while serving in World War II. (Photo: Richard Jessor)

The flag raising lifted the spirits of the Marines on the island, and later it did the same for a war-weary American public at home, when the image of Marines raising the flag was captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. Rosenthal won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for photography, and the photo has is one of the��

Jessor says the photo symbolized the Marines’ perseverance in the face of one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and it helped shape the public’s sentiment that victory in the Pacific was at hand. However, it also may have inadvertently created a false impression among the public, he says.

“Some people may think that when the flag went up the island was secure—and that was absolutely not the case,” Jessor explains. “When the flag went up, on day five, we still had 31 more days of fighting—and most of the casualties took place after the flag raising. Close to 7,000 Marines were killed in the 36-day battle.”

Meanwhile, as the Marines advanced, they sometimes came across the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers, whom they searched for souvenirs. Marines were particularly interested in Japanese “good luck flags,” which bore well wishes from friends and family and which were often tied around soldier’s waist.

“One morning, when I looked out my foxhole, I saw a dead Japanese soldier. I walked over to him to see whether he had a flag under his shirt, and as I bent over, I saw he had letters in his shirt pocket,” presumably from his family, he says. “Well, I had letters from family in my��pocket—and suddenly I was struck by the fact that in so many ways we shared the same humanity. I couldn’t blame him any more than I could blame myself for being in the same situation. It gave me pause about how stupid it was to be engaged in this kind of activity (war).”

An epiphany amidst combat

Jessor called that moment an epiphany. He made two vows then and there: that he would never go to war again and that he would go on to do something meaningful with his life.

First, though, he had to get off the island alive.

His next challenge came a few days later, when he was ordered to take a Japanese soldier captured at the front lines under his guard to the beach, where interpreters could question the prisoner about the placement of weapons facing the Marines.

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Richard Jessor (holding the Japanese "good luck flag") and buddies from the 4th Marine Division during the battle of Iwo Jima. (Photo: Richard Jessor)

“As I said, there was a great deal of frustration that we could not see the enemy we were fighting, so I anticipated there could be some attempts on my prisoner as I started walking him back through the rear lines,” Jessor recalls. “As we got through the rear of the lines, where our artillery was, a Marine jumped up, running toward me and my prisoner, saying, ‘I’m going to kill that son-of-a-bitch.’

“I had to point my rifle at his head and say, ‘I have orders to shoot anybody who touches my prisoner,’ and so he stopped and finally backed off. And the same thing happened a second time before I got the prisoner to the beach and turned him over to command headquarters,” he says.

“As I’ve ruminated these 80 years, I’m not sure whether I would have shot that fellow Marine if he had not desisted from his threat, and it worries me that I might have done that.”

Finally, the objective is achieved

After 36 days, the Marines secured Iwo Jima. A short time later, U.S. aircraft were able to use its runway, which—combined with the island’s proximity to the Japanese mainland—made it a strategic military objective.

“Capturing Iwo Jima had immediate consequences for the approach to Japan,” Jessor says. “What was happening was that our bombers were leaving from Saipan or Tinian, and some of those bombers would get hit over Japan and not be able to make it back, so they would have to ditch in the sea, and many were lost. So, the fact Iwo Jima had a landing strip on it was important for that reason, as well as serving as a base for the projected attack on Tokyo.”

But the victory came at a tremendous cost to the Marines.

“We were destroyed. As I said, almost 7,000 Marines were killed on that island,” Jessor says. The scale of the loss was on display when Jessor and fellow Marines retraced their steps to the landing beach, which was arrayed with crosses where Marines were temporarily buried after falling in combat.

The Marines were shipped back to their training grounds in Maui for their next mission—the planned invasion of Japan.

They spent their days practicing landing craft invasions. At night, Jessor says he and a few of his fellow Iwo Jima veterans would gather in their tent to relive details of the battle, which he believes had a cathartic effect.

Jessor also recalls being on Maui when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“When the bomb dropped, we all thought it was a great thing,” he recalls. “We were saying to each other, ‘No more war! We get to go home!’”

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Among Richard Jessor's mementos from Iwo Jima are a deactivated Japanese hand grenade he took home from the battle and a jar containing black sand from the beach where he landed. (Photo: Glenn Asakawa/��ƷSM����ӰƬ)

However, in retrospect, as the scale of the death and destruction in those cities became known, Jessor says he reevaluated his opinion about that fateful decision. At the same time, Jessor says he developed a deep disdain for politicians who were so easily willing to put American troops in combat.

“They talk about it like it’s a game,” he says. “They haven’t the slightest sense of what combat is like and what it does to people and the destruction it causes. Even for the many people who survive the experience, their lives are changed forever.”

After the war

After he was discharged, Jessor made good on his promise to himself to make a difference for the better. After earning his doctorate, in 1951 he accepted a position as an assistant professor of psychology at ��ƷSM����ӰƬ.

During his ensuing 70 years at ��ƷSM����ӰƬ, he co-founded and later directed the (its building was recently renamed in his honor); wrote in January 1970 critiquing the lack of diversity on campus and making suggestions for positive changes; wrote a report in the 1960s that took the CU Board of Regents to task for being unresponsive to students and faculty, which earned him the ire of former Regent Joe Coors; and wrote 10 books. He retired as a distinguished professor in 2021, which makes him the university’s longest-serving professor.

Like many World War II veterans, Jessor rarely spoke of his experiences during the war, even to close friends and his own family. That changed for him after he saw the��World War II movie��,��which opens with a scene of American soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy, France, under intense fire from German soldiers.

“As a trained clinical psychologist, I didn’t want to share my experiences with others, so I didn’t talk much about having been a Marine,” he says. “And then one day, my wife, Jane, and I were in Aspen. It was raining, so we couldn’t go hiking, so instead we went to the movies and saw Saving Private Ryan.

“The Steven Spielberg-directed movie was the real thing,” he says. “When the invasion scenes start at the beginning, I was sobbing, and the tears were running down my face. And while that was happening, I’m saying to myself, ‘You’re a psychologist and you didn’t know that you still had this inside you?’ And obviously, I didn’t.

“The movie brought it all back to me, and so I began talking about it from that point on.”

Jessor had hoped to return to Iwo Jima last year. The�� in New Orleans offered to cover all expenses for him and his wife to attend a Pacific war theater travel lecture tour series it offers to patrons, which was to include a visit to Iwo Jima. However, the island is open to visitors only one day a year, and volcanic activity on the island at the time resulted in the tour being cancelled. Noting his age—he is 100—Jessor says he’s unsure he will ever have the opportunity to return to the island, despite his strong desire to do so.

Reflecting on the past

These days, Jessor keeps some mementos on his work desk to remind him of his time on Iwo Jima: a deactivated Japanese hand grenade he took home from the battle and a jar containing black sand from the beach where he landed. The jar of sand was given to him by a friend who visited the island in 2002.

“Sometimes I’m barely aware they are there, and then other times I’ll look over and see the grenade or the vial of sand and it all comes back to me. It’s a reminder that I value a great deal,” he says.

“I don’t ever want to forget that experience, because it strengthened me in many ways. Sometimes I would say to myself, ‘If I can get through Iwo Jima, I can get through anything.’ But in other ways, it reminds me what war is all about and what has to be done so they don’t happen anymore.”

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