Bill Hudson in 2009 at his Los Alamos home with his Iwo Jima collection, which he later sold to the Pritkin Institute. Photo by Nancy Bartlit

Wars tend to be fought mainly by teenagers. Bill Hudson was just sixteen when Pearl Harbor happened, and thought the war would be over before he was old enough to be in it. But when he turned 18, the war was still going on, so he joined the Marines, wanting to see some action.

As it turned out, this war was not winding down toward the end; in fact, in the Pacific the bloodiest battles were in the last few months.

Hudson was assigned to a platoon in the Fourth Division, which had experienced several amphibious landings already. Hudson’s platoon sergeant from southern New Mexico, Manuel Martinez, had learned from each one. By the morning of Feb. 19, 1945, off the shores of Iwo Jima, Martinez knew pretty well what he was doing. Hudson had been well trained and at least thought he knew what he was doing. Their platoon landed with the first wave of troops and got well on to the beach in the first hour.

As other Marines continued to land, a flare went up, and suddenly nothing was like training or like anything else Hudson had ever experienced. Japanese soldiers who had constructed miles of tunnels and caves all over this island of eight square miles started firing on the beach, and with tens of thousands of Marines on the beach, they couldn’t miss. Within a few hours, Hudson’s platoon lost all its officers, and from that point on through the next several weeks, it was Martinez who got Hudson and the other men across the island. About half the Marines who died on Iwo Jima were killed that first day, but the main force of the Marines made it onto the island.

It was the worst day in the history of the Marine Corps, and it was Hudson’s first day of combat. But he survived, and from that point his platoon moved, on average at the literal speed of a snail, to take the eight square miles from the Japanese whose “Courageous Battle Vows” required them to kill 10 of the enemy before dying – surrender for the Japanese was genuinely not an option.

Iwo Jima was the only battle of the Pacific War in which the US had more casualties than Japan did – but there was a big difference in what that meant. Despite the way movies use the term, “casualties” doesn’t mean the death toll, but rather those unavailable for the next battle, whether because they are dead, wounded, missing, deserted, or just went crazy. At least, that’s what it meant for the US military. But for the Japanese, surrender was something so shameful that soldiers who did surrender often took a dead comrade’s name, so their own family would not suffer the shame of being related to a soldier who neither won nor died for his emperor. As a result, most Japanese would kill themselves rather than surrender, and in many of the battles the Japanese lost, the casualty rate was almost the same as the death toll, and it was over ninety percent of the force.

To conquer a well-dug-in enemy who keeps fighting until each soldier is individually killed makes for a very costly battle. But Iwo Jima was worth the cost to both sides. Iwo Jima had probably never been of any strategic importance to anyone anywhere until WWII, and probably never will be again. It was just at that time, when airpower was advanced enough to reach Japan from the Marianas, but not very reliably, that a landing place halfway inbetween for malfunctioning or damaged airplanes was vital to the US. For Japan, it was equally important to deny that advantage to the US, and then also Iwo Jima was historical Japanese territory, unlike other Pacific islands only recently occupied by Japan. The commanders on Iwo Jima knew their job was to stop the US advance if possible, slow it if not, or die trying.

The Marines, of course, did take the island, although if the battle isn’t over until the fighting stops, then this battle far outlasted the war, since the last known Japanese soldier surrendered years later. Manuel Martinez became Bill Hudson’s personal hero for his bravery in leading the platoon across the island. On the next-to-last day of combat for the division, Hudson was wounded in a grenade duel. Otherwise, he would have been one of only three of all those who landed with the platoon to still be with the platoon at the end of the battle. As it was, Martinez and one other man were all that was left of the original platoon.

That was Hudson’s first and only battle. But in those weeks he experienced more combat than most Marines do in a career. After the war, he studied to be a teacher, and was enticed to teach in Los Alamos by a picture that showed school faculty members not wearing ties. As a lifelong athlete, he promoted fitness for the entire town through a gym for children and the triathlon he established. He was also part of just about everything to do with swimming in the high desert. With Hudson as coach, the swim team dominated state meets for decades.

In that time, “everyone” had a war story. By the end of the Cold War era, the big names from the Manhattan Project had passed on, but the average – and not so average – soldiers of Hudson’s generation were retiring from careers, and many of them had never said much of anything about the war that many felt was the most important part of their lives.

Then in 1998, Tom Brokaw wrote a book naming this the Greatest Generation, and suddenly everyone wanted to interview them. Hudson wrote his memoirs, gave interviews, and started speaking to various groups, wanting to explain to young people the total war that no generation of Americans since has experienced.

Manuel Martinez went back and lived a quiet life in southern New Mexico. Few people who passed him on the street or met him in a grocery store would have realized this was a man who once walked into a cave full of Japanese soldiers and was the only one who walked out alive.

Hudson started a tradition of showing a documentary about Iwo Jima on the anniversary of the landing. The documentary interviewed several veterans, but as a straight-talking Marine, Hudson’s comments were the most memorable. In 2015, after the death of his wife and one of his sons, he said he would be there for the showing if he had to crawl to get there. But he collapsed, and on the day of the showing he was in the hospital and his doctor did not let him out even crawling. On September 11th, 2015, he died, seven decades after some of his closest friends died on Iwo Jima.

The battle is over for Bill Hudson, but some members of the Greatest Generation are still going; at 96 Hudson’s hero, Manuel Martinez, is alive and well in New Mexico.

At 2 p.m., Feb. 24 at Mesa Public Library, the documentary “Uncommon Valor: The Battle of Iwo Jima” will illustrate for younger generations what teenagers were doing 74 years ago.

One of the presenters, Los Alamos Historian Nancy Bartlit, helped to publish memoirs of former State Sen. Steve Stoddard, in The War Years 1943-1946: The Battle of the Bulge in Person, recently launched at the Los Alamos History Museum. She will be assisted by Karen Tallentire, author of Fighting the Unbeatable Foe: Iwo Jima and Los Alamos.