Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is Nils Mockler. He's a US Marine Corps veteran of World War II and the Battle of Iwo Jima, serving as a combat intelligence scout with the fourth Marine Infantry Division. Mills. Mochler was born in Brooklyn in nineteen twenty six. After living in New Jersey for a while, he moved back to Brooklyn until he joined the US Marines.
His father was a World War I veteran who died just as the nation was about to plunge into the Great Depression. Moechler says, it was a very difficult time for the family.
My father was a machine gutteran fress and putting most of the major battle and got a little bit of mustard gas and died in nineteen twenty nine. We stopped eating. We went from being the richest people in the neighborhood who were just as poor as anybody else. The difference was we had an indoor toilet. My father had been
extremely successful. He was a bond trader, a partner in a major oil exploration company, and a financial advis One thing he knew he didn't have many stocks because he knew stocks were overvalued, but he had cars in the farm and a house. In February of nineteen twenty nine, we were rich. By October of nineteen twenty nine, everything was worthless. So we went from steak and potatoes to
potatoes and oat meal. The depression. If you look at the pictures of all the marines on you, well, you see the newspapers always wanted to shot of guys with their shirts off. We all looked like survivors from Auschwitz. You know, one hundred and forty pounds one hundred and forty five pounds was pretty chunky. I was one hundred and twenty two pounds, and the other scout was maybe two or three pounds lighter and a couple of inches shorter.
We were We just had gotten by with minimum food for all of our youth.
Mochler was fifteen years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor December seventh, nineteen forty one. It's a day he still remembers vividly.
I was walking back from the movies with I had, at that point in life, decided that girls were not only pretty good, but that they were anything in the world that we were walking back in Brooklyn, a fairly long walk. There was no air conditioning back then. A lot of people had their windows open. It was not a very cold day. And as we walked back from the movies, we heard people talking about Pearl Harbor. Japanese
attached Pearl Harbor. And we got back and we got the radio and listened to President Roosevelt, who was all there was to politics then, and his you know, this is a day that we're live in infamy.
Mochler enlisted in the Marines at the age of seventeen in nineteen forty four, only after he tried and failed to join a year earlier.
I was one hundred and twenty two pounds and forty three and they wouldn't take me in. I was one hundred and twenty two pounds and forty four and they took me. So I was not supposed to be able to do long marches or anything else. I not only hasted. We ran every morning, and I came in first every single morning. Before. I hadn't been able to join the Corps, but I could join the State Guard. So I wound
up with old Foggy Pay. When I was nineteen years old because they counted that time, so all of a sudden I was getting an extra three or four dollars a month, So officially I was a veteran as of nineteen forty three.
And why the Marine Corps?
What else is there? It's that by far the best, the toughest that I it'd be nice to be someplace where I could go all out, and so the Marine Corps was the only thing. Nothing else.
Soon it was off to boot camp, which was no problem for Mochler.
I looked at boot camp as they're trying to get rid of the guys who can't make it. We had a really tough competent John instructor, combat veteran Guadalcanal Sergeant Kerr Sir. I said, okay, if you could do it, I can do it.
And he did it all shortly after suffering an injury that still bothers him more than eighty years later.
I was injured before I went to boot camp. I went off the roof of the boathouse and Prospect Park and landed on the base of my spine. So I was walking around with a damaged coccas which I have had ever since then, which has hurt ever since I missed one day, I went to Sick Baby because the other guys in the unit figured me and pushed me into going and made the appointment for me, and the cormin naturally took it for granted that I was dog
in it. So they gave me the standard treatment apc ASPERN finobarb and codeine and the shot of mineral oil and pushed me out the door, and I say, to hell with you, I'll never see you again.
Before long, the Marines decided Mochler might be a good candidate for a combat intelligence scout. It was an eye opening experience for him, to say the least.
It was a cycle of six weeks. They would bring in a group of selected from everything east of the Mississippi and come out with a collection of very different individuals. One guy who had shot and killed his sergeant and wound up in Levenworth and then they did a retrial and the rest of He was a Marine raider and he was on guard duty on the beach and his sergeant came down, drunk out of his mind and fired on him with his Service forty five. And the guy
was very proud of himself. He got his rifle off the shoulder. He said, I hit him through the cigar. He was there. We had one other eagle scout. We had a spook being run through the mu Matirebov his father was a general in the Circassian army, and as he said, the Circasians taught the Cossacks how to ride. And he disappeared and was at the end of the year. Training was assigned to the Radar School and the College
of the Ozarks. And forty five fifty years later I saw his name on the first page of the New York Times. Just you know, there couldn't be two people named Matirbof, and there weren't. And I found a woman from the State Department, and she said, there was never any such thing as College of the Ozarks for Radar School. He's just being run through for cover.
But Michael and many of the others were still barely adults, which means there was still a strong streak of mischief in them, including their work with dynamite during training.
Dynamite was more fun. Dynamite is nitro and you use it and it's you know, Nitro was a vascular stimulant. You wind up with a headache a little bit if you handle it with sweaty hands, but dynamite was more fun to work with. But the TNT, the kind of guys we had. We had the one guy who was the was in Princeton and he swam butterfly no less, and they tried to recruit him for they told him there was a Marine Corps swim team even in nineteen forty four. Ben Sicklin was the name Ronald Van Sicklin
and another not case from California, biker John Dowd. They set us up to we wanted somebody well who'd do a live firing. So they were Dutch Royal rememberings. They were sappers from the Dutch into China. So they instructed us in like fools. They trusted us to take this block of TNT and we'd all practice with the snapping a cap on the fuse and measuring your fuse and timing how much you know, how long, how it would
burn this day and whatever. So we got a very long fuse and they didn't find any fault with that. And there was the dump, and out in the dump there was an old ice box. Because I guess they're getting moodered and getting refrigerators. So one of us was to go out there and the other two go alongside. Right. Well, while they were talking, we all walked over the box and got a few more blocks of TNTs. Fatigue jacket has a good s back pockets. I got one in each.
I think John got two, so instead of one, we had at least four or five blocks of tnt So we went out there and Ronnie was setting his one little charge. We took ours and put it with them, and then you had a fuse lighter you pulled on, you lit it, and then we ran like hell to the group back there. You know, what are you doing one little block and why you were running? But it's cast in stone. If you say hit the deck, you hit the deck. I don't care if you're in general.
So everybody went down and we had an extremely satisfying I mean, the whole area around where that ice box and call it was just nobody ever said a word about it. That was the kind of the nutcases they were looking for.
In the fall of nineteen forty four and his units sailed to Hawaii and trained on Maui until it was time to deploy. He says, everyone knew they were going to Ewojima, even the local newspapers, but nobody knew that much about it. That would change in February nineteen forty five, and we'll hear all about the landing at Ewojima in just a moment. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles.
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This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is Nils Mockler. He's a US Marine Corps veteran of World War II and the Battle of Ewojima. Around Christmas nineteen forty four, he and many other Marines departed Hawaii for Ewojima, fighting would begin less than two
months later. Despite being just eighteen years old, Moechler witnessed the opening of the battle plans aboard his ship, and he tells us about that moment and coming ashore on Ewojima on D plus one, I was probably.
The youngest person to sit in on the ohso secret opening of the document that officially was going to be Abo Jima. And the map of Ebo Jama spread out about like that, and on the map there were two lines like this one all the way up on the north east end of the island. D day we take the beach, we take the airfield, we take the dormant volcano, and about half of the rest of the island. That was D Day D one. We take the rest of the island and we had absolute control of the air.
No worry about any kind of strafing or bombing or anything else. We've got it, and we're going to use a tactic that has not been used since World War One, a rolling barrage. The artillery was set up and fire in a line across the entire sort of plateau. There was no beach on that part of the island, There was just rocks, and the infantry would advance behind this rolling barrage. So they didn't use the term. But what I got out of it is the two easiest days
in Marine Corps history. We would go in dressed like this with a wool blanket, a shelter. Half the two pieces would go together for a pup ten, a poncho, one canteen of water, metal helmet, first aid kit, bayonet, sheath, knife, and your mess kit all hung on the fabric belt. You carried them one rifle, about seven pounds of semi automatic rifle, one or two clips of ammunition.
Some of the.
Guys who were warriors had a couple of bandoliers that they would drape over their shoulder. I don't know that else. We got two k rations, which are inedible. The cardboard boxes looked like they'd been dipped in paraffin, and the story was that the box tasted better than the food inside were terrible. That was our complete preparation. So we came in and we had the Coastguard professionals serfment and the guy put the thing right up. I walked out and stepped into the sand and sank up over the
tops of my shoes, but dried not a drop of water. Perfect. Headquarters was only up two levels. It was not really a beach, should be a level spot and then a wall of what passes percent It's black, heavy, almost like class bees and gets into everything. So the headquarters company was set up in a giant crater, and the headquarters consisted of the captain, the first sergeant, and a guy with a switchboard about the size of a toast orban screen.
The plug in they try to reach the guys who were going to be advancing for another day, and that was it had a fly over the top for a rain and a camfliers net over the top of that, and that was headquarters Company.
Says the Japanese response to the landing was fierce, heavy.
Enough that the you dug a hole as much as you could in the sand and got into it. And there was no real plan for what to do after day d one, so just do without sleep for about two or three days. And the standard was, you know, what the hell is going on? And remember there was no real radio commune communication. The radios weighed about thirty pounds in a rubber pack with six foot antenna, so they were targets and so there was no real communication except you know, you could walk up and yell in
somebody's ear, and that was about it. So the first couple of days it was just get in a hole and stay there.
That's Nils Mochler, a US Marine Corps veteran of World War Two and the Battle of Ewojima. When we come back, Mochler describes combat life in the foxholes and being surrounded by death. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is Nils Mockler. He's a US Marine Corps veteran of World War two and the Battle of Ewojima, serving as a combat infantry scout with the fourth Marine
Infantry Division. We now pick up Mochler's story as he describes getting off the beach and moving inward and upward on Ewojima, and he remembers a devoted chaplain who stood out during the battle.
They moved me up all by myself, following up by the end of the airport and the right about where the ridge started. And with the tunnel system, which we did not know about. We thought they were just hiding out in caves, and we kept waiting for them to come around from the other side of the island and to make a charge at the beach. So I was a trip wire, and so I was just on the
card duty for like six hours at night. But the rest of the night I would be up because we expecting we're going to see a whole line of Japanese come running at us. So who was up And very briefly I had a guy in the next hole to me who had a guitar and he was a chaplain and I found out afterwards he was the chaplain for the whole division. He was there for one day. Earl Dian Sneery the officers had their insignia under their lapels
so they could see was a pin on top. Nobody could tell what rank he was or because he was a chaplain. And he went down to the beach and requisitioned a couple of pocketfuls of little bottles of Napoleon brandy and then went to visit the uh the wounded. There was a giant bunker who was into the hillside, so that's where the high command was and where the hospital had been set up. And he would check with the corman to say, who could use this, you know,
so somebody's just gotta legged it shot up. Bless you, my son. And then he disappeared and we took me. I tried to find him for years. And then guy was in charge of the association in New York Capital District who was really good on computer and he found a way of penetrating the the family site and found it. I don't know what his rank was when he retired. He died in the nineteen nineties.
Milkler also went into detail about the Marines he was attached to as an infantry scout. He says this battle hardened group didn't readily welcome the new guy, but he stayed focused on his job.
For me most of the time boredom, waiting for something to happen and go out and find the freaking tanks to go out. And the tankers had no use for anybody from company headquarters. They were already set. They knew where the CBS had set up. Send somebody out if it was welding or burning, that could fix their tank. But they had set up their own communication for ammunition and fuel and everything else. They had no use for
the headquarters company at all. Is again on Maui, the tankers were down right down by the ocean on the level ground, and the division was halfway up the mountain of Haliokola, and so they had come out as a combat unit. Nineteen forty two, early forty two to Caledonia.
Were all the young men from Caledonia were in England, and the girls welcomed them, and the food was great, and they were all regular marine, so a lot of them were earning over forty five or fifty dollars a month, which was five or six times what Australian soldier, sailor or marine would get. So they loved no cal and they had absolutely no respect whatsoever for the commanding officer of the headquarters company, and no use for me as a buck private. What the hell are you doing here?
But I started off, You just walk out like a block or two. And I was the first tank that was disabled, and they had dropped their skate patch so they could get up and get into it. Because a couple of hundred feet away there were people standing there
with rifles waiting to shoot anybody who looked important. You know what their ideal was to get to wound somebody, get them down and have Corman come out, try to take care of them, and little bears come to pick them up, and then they would have a real target worth working on. We didn't realize that they had telephone conversation between the different supposed caves that we had knocked out the day before. It took a while to get that. Never got to fire or shot. Nobody did I know
of delivery shot at me. I did not want to look important. I didn't walk around carrying a pad or anything like that. I left the rifle on my shoulder the same thing. I don't know about all of the officers, but most of the officers ducked their forty fives and picked up on them one because otherwise you were a target. The carmen took the cross off their helmets and got a regular camouflage cover. That was the only camouflage we had was on the helmets, and they would carry m ones.
They might not know which end the bullet was supposed to come out of, but they know if they didn't have one, that they were different. So I looked unimportant and I'm here.
Battle during the daytime was often difficult because the Japanese were invisible, often hiding in caves and tunnels. Night time was something else, with Mochler and the other Marines keeping a very tense watch in preparation for Japanese attacks on their foxholes.
I was not afraid twice when it came up close and personal, when there's a machine gun fire coming in front of me, and I hid behind something very substantial. And I realized when I was hiding behind his combat wire, which is about as thin as the the wire coat hanger, and I was trying to hide behind that and trying to get down inside the helmet. I laughed about that. I still think it's just funny, but no, you couldn't
really dig a hole. It was cave in. Seventy five millimeter cannon came in cardboard like mailing tubes about about yay long, and they were all over the place and you could take them and put them in keep the hole from so you're not lying in the sand. You're on a couple of these. But the deepest hole I could dig was about that deep. So I was out of machine gun ranger. But at night I would just I would sit up all night, and they weren't really holes.
Farther out with the front line troops, it was dirt and they could dig real fox holes where two or three guys could get in. But on the beach you were basically sleeping in a little shallow trenches.
Mockler says some of the most sobering moments of his time on ewo Jima involved observing the ever growing cemetery of American service members.
The drama was that I had to go down to the company headquarters at least twice a day, so that's four trips back and forth, and the first was before the flag went up. I started in the cemetery was small enough to walk around. The cemetery grew by more than the thousand feet a day. So after about day four or five, Uh, there was a path through what I could go through and smell what somebody who'd been out in the sun for a couple of days after being blown up and wrapped in a poncho and buried
in cinders, what the cemetery smelled like. And the greatest registration guys could sit and eat their really terrible food with that smell. And they were the hardest work and they had the second worst job on it. The worst job was one of the other scout, Drew. He stayed on the ship for seven days. Then when he came in, they put him on a professional group going out and
finding par bodies and body parts. Well in handling parts of what had been an eighteen year old high school kid two or three hours ago was in pieces now and trying to put them together with the dog tags. And the cemetery was shelld regularly, so they have to go back through and try to put the pieces back together. It wasn't you know. They didn't shell the cemetery deliberately. They just shelled everything so but they'd hit it. So these guys would have to go back through these nice
neat trenches. They had made with a white stick with the serial number written on it and put the pieces back together and hope they got the right ones. So I figured that a lot of families got a bus back at the end of the war with something in it. But it might not have been their kid, could have been part of him, been part of somebody.
Else, as you might guess. The most indelible moment of the battle for Mochler and so many other marines was the flag raising on Mount Serabachi four days into the battle.
The most trilling thing in my life. I was as far away from the volka know as you could be and still see it, and I was up probably looking for food or water or whatever. But I don't even know what time of day it was. It was just one more day. And then all of a sudden I realized that everybody out in front of me on the tremendous open beach has stopped moving, and they all have their backs to me. Up there on the volcano is
about half a postage size flag. And to realize that we had that cursed volcano, that we had not just hope, but that we really were gonna make it. And again, I don't know if anybody else had been made a worthy two day battle plan because there was no communication. I mean the way you talk to somebody is you woke up and yelled to him. Whoever got the idea of getting that big flag from I think it was
a wreck to lst. Somebody founded a big piece of pipe, and Joe Rosenthal, who had more combat experience than any of the guys who raised the flag, grabbed his camera and went up. A week or two later, when the film had gotten back to New York City and the retouchers, it sharpened it up so you could see the figures a little better, I know, because that was standard procedure
that that's what they had done. That we got any idea what was going on the way we found out was a the military version of the DC three flew over the whole section of the island, dropping tiny copies of Time magazine about that big with no advertisements, and telling the world all about what was going on on
Ewo Jima. So we found out what was going on on a just how you know, I had an idea because I had to go through the cemetery every day, and I could see each time I would go out, there'd be jeeps coming back regularly with bodies in those special racks, and was ignorance, and we all stunk to high heaven. You put them boots on and eighteenth or nineteenth, and you took them off in April. We came in a bunch of high school kids, and we left as a bunch of old men. And on the way there,
the Navy treated us like dirt. And we got on the ships to go home, and they treated us like as if we were some kinds of damn heroes. But when we came in, the horizon was ringed with ships. It looked like you could walk from one to the other. And we got ready to go back to Hawaii, back to Maui, and we had three small transports Liberty ships filled his cargo ships and they racks the way they stacked you up to sleep, and we waited for the other ships, and then we took off with just the
three we came back with. Out of a tank battalion. We came back with one tank. It could still function. And we got back to Maui and they would take the survivors and put them all in the tents at the end of the tent row, so there'd be a company street with dark tents all the way, and then three or four at the end of the company street.
And this is after they had brought in replacements. One of the battalions in the fifth Division had something like one hundred and fifteen or one hundred and thirteen whatever percent casualties.
Now eighty years later, Nils Mochler emotionally considered what he's most proud of from his service in the Marine Corps during World War Two.
I was a decent part of the best god damn fighting group in the world, and I never took a step back. I never tried to be John Wayne, and I never did anything stupid. And I came through the bloodiest battle in the bloodiest war in history and came out with nothing worse than ringworm. Determination that I couldn't win everything, but I would never step back from any
kind of challenge. So I got myself decent occupation and moved up each time whatever I went any place, and had two excellent wives, and I'm still ready for whatever comes Alone.
Mills Mockler is a US Marine Corps veteran of World War Two and the Battle of the Ugma. He served as a combat intelligence scout with the fourth Marine Division. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles.
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