Letters From Iwo Jima

From the book "Attack Transport: Iwo Jima. The USS Lowndes": While rummaging through boxes in my family's attic, I would discover a box of items from another era. Photo albums revealed they were from the time my father (Fred Brinkman) served in WWII. Among the items were medical tools and a bottle of black sand with "Iwo Jima" written on it. There were also handwritten Japanese letters and other Japanese documents. And, in a small box, I was stunned to discover a gold tooth with the full root. There were also dog tags of two Beach Party members who were killed in the Iwo Jima battle. An envelope, date stamped 1945, San Francisco, contained a 40-page letter that my father had written to his father. The letter detailed my dad's experience as a Navy Corpsman in a Beach party during the initial invasion of Iwo Jima. I would never be able to erase from my mind the horrific images drawn by my father's account. Respectful of my dad's silence on the ordeal, I never asked questions, but many years later, I jumped on the opportunity to attend a reunion of his father's shipmates. Just months after the reunion, my father was diagnosed with cancer and died within a few months. To honor him, my family and I would attend the reunions each year. Through these experiences, we discovered the greatest generation that has ever lived. These Americans (on the home and war fronts) saved the world. One thing would lead to another, and I became the historian for the reunion group. I would find many missing sailors and solve many significant mysteries. But, there are still mysteries to be solved..

To understand the full story, you need to read Fred Brinkman's letter. The dog tags belonging to Don Bowman and Norman Richards were returned to the families. The piece of concrete was from the battered Japanese pillbox, which the Lowndes Beach Party members used to partially shield themselves from enemy mortor and sniper fire. Despite this bit of protection and the use of foxholes, many of the Beach Party members were still wounded or killed.

This web page looks at the documentation that Fred Brinkman took from the dead Japanese soldier who killed Donald Bowman. It includes a personal letter, newspaper clippings, and a military document. Future work (translations and DNA of the soldier's tooth) could identify the Japanese soldier.

Below is the personal letter that Fred Brinkman took from the Japanese soldier. Around the year 2000, we had a Japanese student attempt to translate the letter. She had difficulty with what she described as being an old style of writing. I think she also became distressed about halfway into the letter and stopped reading without giving a reason. She would only say that it appeared to be a letter from a young man to his girlfriend.

There were also the following envelopes and newspaper clippings:

The most interesting document is below:

I applied Japanese OCR (optical character recognition) to the above document. In "I Hiked Iwo Jima: A Virtual WWII Battlefield Tour" (at: https://youtu.be/k4qnwyyNVTU?t=2691 ),  Jared Frederick (whose grandfather was in my dad's Beach Battalion) talks about Fred Brinkman's account (from the letter) of a Japanese soldier coming out of nowhere (probably a tunnel) and killing Fred's friend and leader of their group of corpsmen. The Japanese soldier did not last long. Besides the gold tooth, Brinkman took documents off the Japanese body. The OCR and Google translations seemed to show this as being a military document. The OCR handled the printed Japanese characters/symbols very well and also got some of the handwritten characters. The title of the document is "Approval of the use of construction materials in the report by Item Accounting Officer." The document had several places where the words "rail" and "tracks" were used. It also may mention the names of two people. Most interesting is the date: "From Showa year month day to Showa year month." Showa is the period of the reign of the emperor Hirohito. The handwritten year shown is 10,  which was 1935 Showa.) So, why would a soldier, in 1945, be carrying a 10-year-old document? Iwo Jima in Japanese means "Sulfur Island". For decades, sulfur had been mined on the Island. In 1935, Japan had already invaded China. Sulfur would have been in great demand for needed gunpowder. In 1944, Iwo Jima's mining engineers were given the job of building underground tunnels for the defense of the Island. Of the 23,000 Japanese on the Island, 22,000 died in the United States invasion of 1945. Of the few survivors, some said living underground was hell. The temperature was unbearable, and the air was toxic. I'm guessing that our mystery soldier may have been one of the underground engineers who had had enough. But following orders, he attempted to take out as many of the enemy before he died. He only killed one and wounded a few. He did better than most. For every dead American on Iwo Jima, there were three dead Japanese.

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