PARRIS ISLAND, S.C. -- The valor of the men who fought at Iwo Jima is a source of pride for Marines and a testament to the value of the Corps.
The Depot’s Iwo Jima Monument has served as a daily reminder of that historic battle in its emulation of Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the legendary flag raising at Mount Suribachi.
Although the memorial has been a Depot icon for most of its life, it has a history that extends far beyond Parris Island.
Felix de Weldon, an Austrian Jew who escaped Nazi persecution and served in the U.S. Navy, cast the statue from plaster and concrete before World War II even ended.
“De Weldon understood the significance of Rosenthal’s photo immediately,” said Rodney Hilton Brown, an author and art collector from New York who is currently composing a biography of the renowned sculptor.
He crafted several sculptures, small and large, of the five Marines and the Navy corpsman from the photo. The monument on the Depot was one such piece.
It was carried around the nation on a transport truck to promote the WWII bond drive. The statue actually predates the larger and more famous Marine Corps War Memorial, in Arlington, Va., said Stephen Wise, the Depot’s Museum Curator.
Its national tour ended with Parris Island and it stayed here, said Wise, of Toledo, Ohio, though it is unclear exactly how the monument was obtained.
According to Eugene Alvarez, a former drill instructor and history professor, the statue was erected at the parade deck in 1952 in front of about 8,000 spectators, and dedicated to all Marines by Maj. Gen. Merwin H. Silverthorn.
In a phone interview, Alvarez, from Jacksonville, Fla., said the original statue had a light green color, and early on, it served as an inspirational force on the Depot.
“When I worked as a drill instructor, I used to really enjoy marching platoons out to the monument at the end of the day,” he said. “It was a good way of building their morale.”
The statue eventually endured several inconceivable acts of vandalism in the 1950’s. The worst of them, according to a police report, happened in 1956 when a group of Marines from Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort used a car and a rope to dismount the statue.
By the late 1950’s, the monument had deteriorated to a drastic extent.
Plans developed to replace the statue by relocating “Iron Mike,” or with an artillery weapon, Alvarez said.
“Another recommendation was to replace the statue with a bell!” he added.
But Depot commanders Maj. Gen. Homer L. Litzenberg and Brig. Gen. Wallace M. Green wanted to retain the monument, according to Alvarez.
“It is uncertain what immediate preservation was done to the monument,” writes Alvarez. “However the then sea-green colored statue was painted with a preservative epoxy paint in 1961.”
Renovations further improved the statue in 1964, when the statue underwent an eight-week renovation as reported in an article in The Boot. Depot officials believed it would need only minimal attention after that.
“They thought they would paint it with this miracle epoxy paint, and it would last forever,” said Dave Woodward, the Parris Island public works architect.
“But the material is just plaster,” he said. “Water gets into it, and heat expands it. It’s just not made to be outdoors.”
Woodward, from Beaufort, S.C., said he has been exploring the possibility of having the statue redone, and restoring the current monument to be showcased in a museum.
To make a mold of the monument and recast it in bronze would cost around $1.5 million said Brown, who recently restored the first large-scale Felix de Weldon memorial sculpture.
“The effort to restore it isn’t something we could appropriate funds for,” Woodward said. “Someone would have to champion the project, like a non-profit, or a historical society.”
The Iwo Jima Monument has had an honorable history, embodying the Marine Corps by living like a Marine.
It served its country in WWII by generating war bonds, it was broken off at Parris Island and for more than half a century, it has spent every day on the parade deck. Nothing less would be expected from such a stalwart symbol of the U.S. Marine Corps.