Gene Christie

Gene P. Christie, 28th Marine Regiment, Marine Corps

Gene served in the Marine Corps in the Pacific

1942-1946

I am 90 years old.

(Gestures to his wife, Georgia, who is sitting next to him) We were sweethearts during the war and freshmen together in 1938 at Amundsen High School. Our lockers were close together and we ended up on a bus together. It’s all in the book. Every school I went to was on Foster Avenue – Budlong Grammar School, Amundsen High School, and North Park College. I played basketball and football at North Park College and then I joined the Marine Corps. I signed up for the duration of the War as a Marine in the Pacific.

I was in Boot Camp in Southern California in San Diego. There was nothing there in 1941 and all the way to LA you could smell the odor of orange groves.

It was a joy being a kid and growing up in the streets of Chicago. Also enjoying California for the first time or any State at all. When I signed up I ended up at Great Lakes and then went by train to California. The train took weeks stopping all along the way to pick up trainees or future Marines. It was a pleasure, a vacation, for a guy that never got out of Chicago. We ended up in San Diego where there was nothing but sunshine and beautiful weather. The orange groves were all the way up the coast. Now there are no groves at all.

How old were you?

18, 19, 20, 21. That’s the history of my Marine Corps life. Except the history of my Marine Corps life was one war, one battle, one company – the 28th Marines. The 28th Marines raised the flag on Suribachi Iwo Jima. A couple of weeks after that, I got shot up and ended up recovering at the Pearl Harbor Naval Hospital. And that was fun because there were no phones or people, just sandy beaches. Now it is nothing but people and buildings. But it was fun, fun, fun. Then I got back and married my bride right away.

For those who have not read your Bio, can you go into where you lived and served etc.

I grew up in an orphanage in Chicago run by the Episcopal Church. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. There were 125 boys. As you grew up, you became bonded with that age group. Fr. John W. Norris was kind enough to keep me there after I got out of high school as the Athletic Director for the younger kids so that I could attend North Park College. I went down with some of the buddies I grew up with to sign up for the Army. They rejected me but took all of my buddies that I grew up with. I didn’t have to fight if I didn’t want to. But the governor of Illinois said, if anyone needed surgery of any kind, to sign up and the state would pay for it. I said “okay, sign me up.” I had a hernia which I didn’t know about. I had the operation and then I joined the Marine Corps. For the duration – from 1942 to 1946. My tour of duty was with the 28th Marines in the 5th Division which was commissioned in 1942 in California. We trained to invade Iwo Jima which was sovereign Japanese owned territory in California and Hawaii from 1942 to February 19, 1945. That’s when we made the assault on Iwo Jima. We were commissioned to separate the Japs from their operations. They were all underground. Twenty thousand Japanese had dug tunnels under the entire island. They even had motorized transportation so they could go from one place to another underground. Interspersed throughout were covered concrete sections with no access to the tunnels. Mount Suribachi was encased in concrete and survived months and months of bombing from ships and planes. I was in the third wave of Marines to land on the island. No one fired on the first and second waves. When the third wave landed, they opened up fire with cannons and guns. There were thousands of Japs on Mount Suribachi. Within 1.5 hours, 2000 Marines were killed. I luckily got from hole to hole to hole. You could not see anything because of the smoke. They stayed in the caves and eliminated all of the weapons and tanks and Marines. We took all day to get more equipment and people to replace those lost in that kind of assault. That was the beginning of Iwo Jima as I know it and as it has been recorded in so many books.

After that, the 28th Marines secured Suribachi and raised two flags. The first flag was too small. They wanted a larger flag. They got a larger one from a ship and raised the flag that you know of now. It became the icon for the Marine Corps. I am proud of it as a 28th Marine. I took my 4 boys to see the monument located in Washington, D.C.

A few weeks later, we were at another location called Hill 362. It was just like Mount Suribachi which was 500 feet high. Hill 362 was 200 feet high. The Japs were inside and the same thing happened. It took us a long time to start digging in and we lost a lot of Marines.

Did you realize before you went that they were in there?

Only after we were shot up all over the place did we find out. There were ugly stories about how we thought we had closed up the caves and found out we hadn’t. They just opened them up and put more people out there. We didn’t know the extent of the cannons, etc. that were encased in the concrete. But the end result was that at Hill 362 I got a bullet in the right arm and was incapacitated. I couldn’t get off for a few days. And then they put me on a hospital ship where they took the bullet out. I was finished. A few days later the commander of the operation decided that the 28th Marines 5th Division had lost too many people and could not replace any more so they pulled them all out of the operation. If they had done that a few days earlier, maybe I wouldn’t have got shot. I am proud of it even though it is the bloodiest battle in the history of the Marine Corps in 238 years. The Marine Corps was approved by the Continental Congress in 1775.

So you went to Hawaii to recuperate and then you went home?

No. After I got out of the hospital, we trained to invade Kyushu, the southernmost island in Japan. We landed the day they signed the armistice in August 1945. We had a small contingent of Marines and we landed at Sasebo. We traveled for 6 months from town to town letting everybody know we were not there to eat them. Everyone had been indoctrinated to the point that they believed when the Marines landed they are there to eat them. This was believed because out in the Pacific the Japanese did cannibalize the captured enemy. This happened because the US Navy isolated all of the islands including the Philippines and Guadalcanal and cut off their food supply.

We were supposed to invade Kyushu if the atomic bomb was not dropped. Thank God that Truman did order the bomb to be dropped because this convinced the Japs that they should surrender unconditionally because everyone would have been annihilated otherwise. By doing that, Truman saved one million US troops and one million Japanese because they wouldn’t have given up and the Marine Corps wouldn’t give up. I think it would have been a blood bath for the entire country of Japan.

Because I had signed up for the duration, I got out before some of the other guys. Because they signed up for a four or five year hitch, they had different time schedules depending on the tour of duty they had. Because the war was over, they shipped me all the way from Japan back to Great Lakes Chicago. I got home to Georgia in a few months. She waited for me. We have been lucky ever since. We had nine beautiful children – five girls and 23 grandchildren. The girls all have teaching degrees and run a very successful preschool thanks to their mother who started it at the Episcopal Church and then moved to the Presbyterian Church. The four boys are doing a great job. We have a family business, which was started by Georgia’s father after the war, where we manufacture plastic bags.

Gene Christie

28th Marine Regiment, Marine Corps