Sell or Auction Your Iwo Jima Letter for up to $2,535 or More at Nate D. Sanders Auctions
FREE ESTIMATE. To buy, auction, sell or consign your Iwo Jima letter that is for sale, please email your description and photos to [email protected] of Nate D. Sanders Auctions (http://www.NateDSanders.com).
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Here is an Iwo Jima letter we have sold in the past:
Extraordinary Letter by Alan Wood Describing Iwo Jima: “…When they raised a little flag on top of the Mountain the Marines on the beach cheered…a Marine came aboard asking for a larger flag…”
Extraordinary eleven page autograph letter signed by Alan Wood, the naval officer who supplied Marines with the American flag hoisted atop Mt. Suribachi at Iwo Jima. In this letter, postmarked 17 March 1945 just days after the battle, Wood describes in detail the entire Battle of Iwo Jima: leaving for the island a few days before D-Day, patrolling the island as U.S. forces began bombarding it, beaching on Iwo Jima and taking enemy gunfire, watching Marines take cover and fire in foxholes, and finally the triumphant flag raising atop Mt. Suribachi, with Wood famously giving the Marines a larger flag to use, the one used for the iconic photograph “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima”. Wood’s letter to his family reads in part,
“Dear Family / We have all been itching to tell of our exploits at Iwo Jima and now it can be told. So hear [sic] goes. On the way out Eniwetok was our first stopping place. It is a barren atoll with a few palm trees on its string of little islands and there is not much to say about it. From there we went to Saipan which is surprisingly built up but still shows the marks of the bitter fight fought there. There are still a few thousand Jap soldiers on the island but they don’t pay much attention to them unless they start a lot of trouble. These damn Japs just won’t give up. At Saipan we saw the big B29s taking off for Japan. We left Saipan a few days before D-Day (Feb. 19th). We had a fairly calm trip to Iwo and were unmolested by any enemy forces. On the way up we listened in on the radio to the observation planes over Iwo giving directions for Naval gunfire on the island. D-Day was a calm clear day – blue sky and deep blue water but a little chilly. They were bombarding Iwo in preparation for the assault when we rolled up. It looked all very one-sided as swarms of our planes dove and dove again unleashing their deadly missiles without the slightest opposition. Our big ships lay in close to the beach pumping in their huge shells at point blank range. Thousands of tons of explosives were poured into that little two by four island and it seemed hardly possible that any living thing could survive there. In fact from the appearance of things it looked like a push over. There were no enemy ships or planes about. Many times the smoke and dust over the island got so thick that they had to hold their fire very [?] and then to let the atmosphere clear up so they could see what they were shooting at. The first day we spent cruising around waiting to go in and watching the battle through binoculars. We saw a few of our planes go down from antiaircraft fire. On the beach we could see our tanks and amtracks edging up the slope of the beach like slow moving bugs. Every once in a while one would shoot out a long red tongue of flame. Many were burning. But still it looked like a push over. In the afternoon a few bursts of antiaircraft fire spattered the water around us like a bunch of fire crackers. You should have seen everyone duck for some sort of cover. It gave us a scare for a minute but after while we got used to it. None of it hit us fortunately. We had a particular reason to be anxious because we had a lot of 155mm howitzer ammunition on board, some of it on the main decks in the open. We also had barrels of 100 octane gas and diesel oil on the main decks. Sold for $2,535.
Consign your item at Nate D. Sanders Auctions. Send a description and images of your item to us at [email protected].
FREE APPRAISAL. To buy, auction, sell or consign your item that is for sale, please email your description and photos to [email protected] of Nate D. Sanders Auctions (http://www.NateDSanders.com).