Survivors remember Iwo Jima in doc on PBS

The battle to take Iwo Jima was launched 70 years ago, so those who bore witness are close to 90, or well beyond that. Thus, reduced to a hard reality, broadcasts like Iwo Jima: From Combat to Comrades are a numbers game.

There may or may not be an 80th anniversary reunion among survivors, along with the resulting TV special. The likelihood is remote. That’s precisely what makes From Combat to Comrades, which airs tonight at 8 on PBS, so moving, but also important. We won’t pass this way again. Best to bear witness while you still can.

In March, a few survivors from the battle of Iwo Jima converged on the island to mark a battle — Feb. 19 to March 26, 1945 — where 6,800 U.S. soldiers were killed, and about 18,000 Japanese defenders died, either in combat or by ritual suicide.

There have been many documentaries and movies about this blighted island and what happened there so long ago; Clint Eastwood even made a pair of Oscar winners from it. But this short film’s special claim on viewers’ attention is that these memories and emotions aren’t fogged with the passage of time, but immediate and visceral. “Real Marines don’t cry, at least in public,” says Hershel “Woody” Williams, 92, a Marine and a Medal of Honor recipient who attended the reunion. “I had to flick ’em [the tears] off. Sneaky like.”

Jerry Yellin, a U.S. Army Air Corps P-51 fighter pilot, effectively collapses a lifetime of intense emotion and memory into a few words, then pictures — notably of his son, who married a Japanese woman, and of his three grandchildren.

A spirit of reconciliation seemed to permeate the ceremonies in March, although as Combat to Comrades notes, those who did the actual reconciling were few.

Only one Japanese survivor, Tsuriji Akikusa, 89, an Imperial Navy radio operator, could make the trip.

He offered this observation, which almost had the hushed power of a prayer: “I hope there will always be peace,” he said. Otherwise, those who died on Iwo Jima will have died in vain.