Local WWII veteran to revisit Iwo Jima
Before Dick Jessor spent 70 years on the faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder, he was a Marine who fought in and survived one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.
Jessor enlisted in the Marines after the U.S. entered the war following the attack on Pearl Harbor. At a mere 20 years old, Jessor saw his first and only action at the Battle of Iwo Jima in February 1945, where the Marines suffered the most losses in a single battle in the branch’s history.
“My whole experience in being a 20-year-old kid in one of the fiercest battles ever, I’ve grappled with that throughout the rest of my life,” said Jessor, now 99. “I’ve tried to understand what I did, how I felt, what impact it made on me, how my life might have been different.”
As one of the few remaining survivors of the battle, Jessor was asked to record an oral history with the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.
He will also be returning to the battle site in March for the first time for a ceremony of honor to observe the 79th anniversary of the battle.
Landing on the beach
Jessor was part of the fourth wave of Marines that hit the beach at Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945. The beach was under heavy fire when he landed and he immediately jumped out of the tractor he arrived in and began to fight.
His first sight of war was watching a fellow Marine die in front of him as artillery exploded everywhere.
“It was terrifying,” Jessor said. Jessor ran uphill from the beach and found a bomb crater to jump in for cover. Throughout the battle, he said, he and other Marines took cover in craters until there was a lull in the bombardment from the Japanese. Then, they’d get out and run to the next bomb crater while continuing to fight.
Jessor said he ate when he could and got very little sleep. Day after day the relentless battle continued, and each day the U.S. forces gained more ground.
The plan was for U.S. forces to take control of Iwo Jima in three to five days and sail to invade Japan. However, things did not go according to plan, and the fighting lasted 36 days.
Over those 36 days, almost 7,000 U.S. Marines were killed and another 20,000 were wounded. Roughly one-third of the Marines who landed became a casualty..
Jessor said the Japanese had
weapons and troops underground, which was why the battle lasted so long. Bombardment from Navy ships and aircraft didn’t touch them. He said Japanese soldiers would emerge from caves, bring artillery out, attack, and go back into the caves.
“You are under attack all the time and you see casualties of people you had trained with,” Jessor said. “It was a quite frightening experience, but you had been trained to just do what you were supposed to do. So we kept going.”
After four or five days into the battle, Jessor said, he had a chance to write one letter home. He wrote to his parents, thanked them for everything they’d done for him and said goodbye, writing: “I don’t think I’ll get off the island alive.”
Jane Menken, Jessor’s wife, said he never talked about Iwo Jima for many, many years. She said his children are only now learning about his experiences.
Menken said the two went to see “Saving Private Ryan” when it was playing in theaters. During the long opening scene about the Battle of Normandy, she said, Jessor was shaking, with tears pouring down his face.
After the movie, he told her Steven Spielberg got it right and that he “didn’t know I still had it in me.”
“After that, he was willing to talk more about his experiences on Iwo Jima,” she said.
End of the war
Five days after the Marines landed, Jessor’s division was fighting to reach higher ground. As he faced enemy forces with his rifle, he happened to look over his shoulder and see the American flag on top of Suribachi.
The flag-raising was captured in an iconic image of World War II by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press. The picture won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1945 and inspired the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington County, Virginia.
In that moment, Jessor said, he was overjoyed because he knew it meant the Japanese couldn’t attack them from behind.
“It gave us a sense we might be moving toward the end of the battle, but we still had a lot of territory ahead of us to capture,” Jessor said.
Finally, Jessor said, after 36 days they reached the end of the island and that was it. The battle was over.
Jessor returned to Maui for training, and that’s where he was when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, essentially ending the war.
“We were thrilled,” Jessor said. “We had no account of what horrific events the bombing of two cities really were. We were thrilled because that meant the end of our engagement in war.”
Once he understood what had happened, Jessor said, his feelings changed.
“I thought there would’ve been alternative ways of not having to use the bomb in the way in which we did it,” Jessor said.
For example, he said, the U.S could’ve demonstrated its power on an empty island somewhere in the Pacific to show the Japanese what would happen, rather than immediately bomb cities and cause such huge devastation.
Jessor was discharged in February of 1946 and returned to college. He said his focus on learning and dedication to becoming a clinical psychologist is what “saved him” and kept him on track.
“The experience of being in battle and seeing its destructiveness (gave me) the feeling that I wanted to do something that was good and to make a difference as a way of compensating for what war had done,” Jessor said.
Once he obtained his doctoral degree, he came to Colorado to join the CU Boulder faculty in 1951, when there were only about 5,000 students on campus.
Jessor is a distinguished professor emeritus of behavioral science at CU Boulder, and served on the faculty for 70 years before retiring in 2021. He co-founded and later directed the university’s Institute of Behavioral Science, and he wrote an influential 1970 report on the lack of ethnic diversity on campus.
Returning to Iwo Jima
As a trained psychologist and behavioral scientist, Jessor has reflected many times about his experience on Iwo Jima and how it shaped him throughout his life.
“In some strange way, having survived Iwo Jima, in a way made me stronger,” Jessor said. “I’ve sort of felt throughout my life, if I could survive Iwo Jima, I could survive anything.”
The death and brutality he experienced on Iwo Jima also meant shaped his perspective on war.
“It also made me hypersensitive to the ugliness of war and makes me angry when I see our politicians talk about war as quickly as they often do,” Jessor said. “It’s pure brutality, no matter how morally correct it might be.”
Throughout his life, he said, he’s been committed to seeking peaceful resolutions of conflict.
“My thinking about war really was shaped by my experience during those 36 days and seeing some of my close buddies that I trained with never leave the island,” Jessor said. “It was a lesson for me that made me think of war as not an instrument of policy, but as something to be avoided at all costs.”
Menken said all life has been a gift after Iwo Jima. Although he doesn’t talk about it often, he keeps reminders of the battle on his desk, including pictures, a vial of black sand from the beaches and disarmed Japanese hand grenade.
Menken said Jessor has “a gratitude for being alive and a commitment to doing things in the world that could benefit other people.”
When Jessor returns to Iwo Jima in March, he will meet a fellow Marine and several Japanese soldiers who are also survivors of the battle.
“They are people, just like us, and I want to establish the fact that while they were our enemies at the time, they share the humanity that we share,” Jessor said. “I want to emphasize that they are not my enemy and that they are like us.”
Menken said the opportunity to meet and recognize their joint humanity is something that’s really important to both of them.
“I think it will be an amazingly emotional experience,” Menken said. “There will be tears. It will be a return to a place that has played an enormous role in his life.”
Jessor said the Japanese, like him, did what they were told to do during the battle.
“We will meet on the beach we landed on, and there will be a reunion of honor on that beach,” Jessor said. “And we will meet some Japanese soldiers who were on Iwo when I was on Iwo, and I can’t wait to meet them and embrace them and treat them like they are my comrades.”