Cpl. Nicolas Hernandez, 481738, U.S.M.C.

Many years ago, I met World War II Marine Tom Williams, who was originally from Los Angeles. He relocated to Oregon – where I live – in the 1990s. In about 2000-ish, I hosted an exhibit of wartime Marine Corps memorabilia and Tom was one of the visitors. Over the course of time, we developed a deep and lasting friendship based on our shared love for the Marine Corps, one of America’s most cherished institutions.

From my first conversation with Tom, it was clear that his years in the Corps had affected him deeply. He loved sharing stories of his brother Marines in How Company, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines, Fifth Marine Division. Tom was always on the phone with one or another of his old shipmates and he especially enjoyed sharing updates of their doings with me.

Through Tom, I learned about the great Americans that he served with. Chief among them was Tom‘s fire team leader, Cpl. Nicolas Hernandez, also from Los Angeles. Tom passed away several years ago, but I can state without hesitation that Nick Hernandez was the most impactful figure of his long life. Tom told me that many times over the years of our friendship.

Before joining at age seventeen, Tom had quit school and worked in an airplane factory. He yearned badly to get into the war and didn’t want to wait for the draft, so he shipped into the Marine Corps. After graduation from boot camp in April 1944, Tom was trucked along with hundreds of other newly-minted leathernecks to Camp Pendleton, the sprawling Marine base in northern San Diego county. There he joined How Company.

Spearhead – The Fifth Marine Division

The recently activated Fifth Marine Division was growing in strength by leaps and bounds in preparation for its deployment to the Pacific war zone. In addition to posting thousands of new Marines with the division in early 1944, the Marine Corps sent a hard leavening of combat veterans from earlier campaigns in the South Pacific.

Among these experienced troops were at least 2,000 Paramarines from the recently deactivated 1st Parachute Regiment. Many of them had fought with distinction in the brutal campaigns up the ladder of the Solomon Islands in 1942-44.

Cpl. Nick Hernandez was a combat veteran when he reported to How Company. He had served with Able Company, 1st Parachute Battalion, which fought as regular infantry on Bougainville at the top of the Solomons. Nick was born in El Paso, Tex., but his family moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s. Prior to shipping into the Corps on October 20th, 1942, he had worked in a furniture factory, and both parents were immigrants from Mexico.

Tom told me many times, “Mark, I was a smart-aleck kid, and didn’t like other people telling me what to do.” Assigned to 3rd Squad, 1st Platoon in How Company, Tom met his new fire team leader, who he learned was a former Golden Gloves champion that didn’t take shit from anybody.

Typing these words, I can still see Tom sitting across the table in a local greasy spoon. He loved buying breakfast for people he liked, and always told the server to make sure and give him the check. Tom would take a drink of Pepsi – he didn’t like coffee – and say, “Nick was always on my ass, Mark. I’d piss him off and say something dumb, and the fight was on.”

Keep your weapon clean, or else

There was one special story Tom related to me many times. It went something like this: How Company had finished a field problem at Case Springs in northern Camp Pendleton and it was raining hard. The automatic riflemen were detached to shoot a Browning Automatic Rifle range and then hiked back to the battalion area. Tom hadn’t been feeling well to start with, and he and another buddy began straggling behind the column.

As the two Marines marched in the rain, Tom felt a fever building in him and couldn’t carry his BAR anymore. He unhooked the sling, and began dragging the heavy weapon as he trudged along. Finally, Tom and his buddy ran out of steam and sat down beside the road. After a while, a truck driver stopped and gave them a lift back to camp.

Bone-tired and feverish, Tom walked into his squad bay. Nick took one look at the sick Marine and found a Corpsman. The doc took Tom’s temperature, which was very high. The next several hours were always fuzzy in Tom’s memory, but he remembered ending up at the Camp Pendleton hospital. The doctors never figured out what caused the fever, and Tom was released back to How Company several days later.

After confirming that Tom was recovered and unlikely to die, Nick said to come with him behind the barracks. A royal ass chewing followed due to the condition of Tom’s BAR, which had been covered with mud and debris from him dragging it through the mud. While telling me the story sixty years later at breakfast, Tom shook his head and smiled, saying, “I never saw anybody so mad in my life.”

Tom continued, “I should have kept my mouth shut, but I spouted off and never knew what hit me.” Nick offered his hand to help the chastened BAR man up off the ground and the two Marines walked back into the barracks. Tom finished his memory, “I was just a snot-nosed kid, Mark. Nick Hernandez taught me how to be a Marine.”

An island called Iwo

As one of the assault units in the campaign for Iwo Jima, the Fifth Marine Division served in some of the harshest conditions of World War II. No description can do justice to what the combat Marines faced on that hellish battlefield. How Company fought in the thick of action from start to finish. Nearly 250 Marines and Navy Corpsmen landed with the company on D-Day. Only a handful were still with How by the end of the campaign on March 26th, 1945.

2nd Lt. Craig Leman, U.S.M.C.R. – my friend

Tom Williams introduced me to his shipmate Craig Leman, who served as the commander of How Company’s 1st Platoon for six days of grinding combat on Iwo Jima in March 1945. Craig passed away in 2014, and it’s impossible to say how much I respected and admired him. He was one of the kindest and most compassionate people I’ve ever known, and I still feel his loss. He left an indelible mark on my life.

Sometimes you meet someone who you sense is a special soul, and that was Craig to me. I remember sitting with him and Tom at breakfast, the two of them lost in time together as they remembered old friends. Those were times I felt both humble and fortunate to be in their company.

When Craig reported as the commander of 1st Platoon on March 3rd, 1945, Nick was the acting platoon sergeant. In about 2006, Craig wrote an e-mail to me about his time with the platoon:

…about ten days into the operation, first platoon was down to 22 men, (1) and, as a corporal fire team leader, Nick was the senior NCO left. The company commander appointed him acting platoon leader, and he led the outfit ’til I arrived a day or two later. He oriented me efficiently and professionally, introduced me to the fire team and assault and machine gun squad leaders, and worked as platoon sergeant for the next five days. …

The cave – D+16

On March 7th, 1945, How Company – severely reduced in strength – jumped off early in a morning attack without artillery preparation. The terrain was formidable, and the enemy covered every route of advance from concealed bunkers. The company came under fire from a cave emplacement. Craig Leman recalled the firefight:

… [Nick] took a leading role in the fire-fight at the cave, fighting at close quarters. At one point, he and several others engaged in a grenade fight with a larger number of Japanese who were fighting from a trench at the rear entrance to the cave, keeping up a heavy fire against our platoon which was behind a ridge just above the enemy.

The Jap[anese] grenades were flying over our heads and landing in the gully below us, whereas we could roll ours or lob them down the ridge slope to explode in their trench. We held them for three seconds after pulling the pin so they didn’t have time to toss them back.

This was infantry combat at its most basic and intense form. The Japanese had How Company zeroed in, forcing them down behind cover. Nick fought for himself and his shipmates. Again, from Craig Leman:

I remember Nick took off his helmet, hoisted it up, and pulled it back with a bullet hole in it. … [L]ater, he was able to take a quick look over the edge and then, with a terrible troubled expression on his face, fire a couple of quick rounds and follow it with a grenade.

Craig called for fire support and How’s commander, Capt. Donald Castle, obtained the service of a half-track anti-tank gun, (2) which moved forward into the company’s area:

Requesting and receiving a half-track, [Cpl. Hernandez] fearlessly exposed himself to the enemy’s small-arms and hand grenade barrage as he staunchly directed the vehicle’s fire at point blank range in the destruction of three automatic weapons and, when two Japanese suicide-assault soldiers ran from a spider trap in an attempt to plant a magnetic mine on the side of the half-track, C[pl.] Hernandez instantly shot and wounded one and killed the other with an accurately aimed hand grenade. (3)

Buried – the living and the dead

The enemy defensive fire slackened and then ceased as an eerie quiet fell on the battlefield. How Company – about thirty to forty Marines – consolidated atop a small knoll. Beneath their feet was a buried Japanese command post, although they didn’t know it.

Several Marines thought they heard noises from below. Demolition men located entrances and began the dangerous work of sealing off the cave. The official history documented what happened next:

The whole hill shuddered and the top blew out with a roar heard all over the island. Men were thrown into the air, and those nearby were stunned by the concussion. Dozens of Marines disappeared in the blast crater, and their comrades ran to dig for them. Strong men vomited at the sight of charred bodies, and others walked from the area crying. The enemy … inflicted forty-three Marine casualties[.] … (4)

Nick was among the Marines buried in the explosion. Battered and bruised, he dug himself out of the rubble and began reorganizing his Marines. Craig Leman was standing about fifty feet away when the hill blew apart. He later wrote:

When the cave blew up, I was practically buried, and the rocks coming down bent the aerial of my handie-talkie, which I protected with my body, though the aerial stuck out. However, it worked, and I was able to tell [Capt. Castle] to send up all the stretcher-bearers he could find to dig us out.

At the end of this scrap, my platoon was down to eight Marines, so we were combined with 3rd platoon and advanced about 500 yards through level open terrain, killing a couple of Jap[anese] in foxholes, left behind to slow us up, and then moved into rough country and heavy fire.

The day wore on and finally, darkness fell on the battered Marines. They scraped out shallow foxholes and ran barbed wire in front of their positions. All night long, Japanese infiltrators tried unsuccessfully to breach the wire. But as the hours passed, they rained grenades onto How Company’s thinly stretched defensive line.

D+17. One Marine dies, another is wounded

March 8th saw a renewed attack into the teeth of fanatical resistance by the Japanese. Capt. Castle sent up an armored dozer to clear a path for attached tanks. The crew was promptly wounded by point-blank fire. As it turned out, the ground was too broken for the tanks, which were unable to push forward.

The attack that morning was preceded by a short mortar barrage. As the rounds fell around the enemy positions, Nick told Craig, “Only my faith in God has kept me alive through all this.” Seconds later, a Japanese bullet hit Nick in the head, punching through his helmet. He fell, dead on the spot. (5)

How Company was a shadow of itself by this point. Craig radioed Capt. Castle, who gave the order to move out. Craig took the lead, and was almost immediately hit in the head by a bullet. The round punched through his helmet, slicing around his skull. Although severely wounded, this brave Marine stayed with the platoon for nine hours until a replacement arrived. (6) He later received a hard-earned Silver Star for gallantry in action.

Craig recommended the Navy Cross for his gallant platoon sergeant. Nick’s parents were presented the award in an informal ceremony at Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro, Calif., in December 1946. First interred in the Fifth Marine Division Cemetery, Nick was repatriated to the U.S. for burial in Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Requiem for the fallen

Nick Hernandez was one of 6,140 Marines and Navy medical personnel who died on Iwo Jima in 1945. (7) Although he has been gone for over 75 years, Nick left behind a legacy among the Marines who served beside him. They are nearly all gone now, so now it’s our job to keep his – all of their – memories alive.

Many people talk about Marines being heroes, seemingly larger than life. That’s true. But every Marine on Iwo was a man with a family, with hopes and dreams. They wanted to survive, and look out for their shipmates. But they were Marines first, and they knew the deal: Marines do not fail. And they didn’t. Day after day, they went forward against incredible odds.

Iwo Jima was just a place, but what happened there during 36 days in 1945 was something special. On a hellish machine-age battlefield, young men under fire accomplished the impossible; they hammered their bodies against concrete and steel. Against all odds, the concrete and steel gave way. It could not hold against a few good men.

I believe it fitting that Craig Leman should have the last word. Himself an outstanding combat officer, Craig recognized – and never forgot – what a fine American Nick was:

Nick was efficient and intelligent and courageous throughout this fierce encounter. I thought [he] deserved the Navy Cross if anybody did. He did his job well and, in my eyes, manifested extraordinary heroism.

Semper Fidelis, Never forget,

Mark

Notes:

1. Under the table of organization in effect at the time of Iwo Jima, the rifle platoon had an authorized strength of 46 Marines and one Navy Corpsman. So when Craig arrived at 1st Platoon, it was functioning at half-strength.
2. Under the table of organization in effect at the time of Iwo Jima, an organic heavy weapons company was assigned to the Marine infantry regiment. One of the company’s platoons was equipped with four M3 Gun Motor Carriages.
3. Posthumous Navy Cross citation for Cpl Nicolas Hernandez.
4. The cited passage is from page 636 of Western Pacific Operations – History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II by George Garand and Truman Strobridge, Historical Division, U.S.M.C., 1971.
5. The events of Nick’s death are reconstructed with information from page 23 of A Marine Goes to War in the Battle in the Battle of Iwo Jima, a personal monograph by Craig Leman.
6. Ibid. Pages 23-24.
7. Casualty figure extracted from appendix H (page 797) of Western Pacific Operations – History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II by George Garand and Truman Strobridge, Historical Division, U.S.M.C., 1971.