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Josephy, Alvin_WAPA-246_WAPA 4170_OralHist_Video.mp4

Alvin M. Josephy Jr. was born in Woodmere, New York, May 18th, 1915 to Alvin Sr. and Sophia Knopf. He had one brother who served in the Army in Normandy. He was raised in Manhattan and spent a lot of time in Westchester County. Alvin always wanted to be a writer and was infatuated with the field of journalism. He got in with a newspaper in Boston first and then with The New York Herald Tribune. With that paper, Alvin went to Mexico in 1937, the tail end of the Mexican revolution and interviewed Leo Trotsky. He recalls a few memories of Leo Trotsky. Alvin attended Harvard and only finished two years due to financial woes and an offer from MGM to become a junior writer for them. They wanted him to turn a story he wrote into a movie in the summer of ’34. After working with the Herald Tribune, Alvin was hired by Mutual Broadcasting System; WOR, in New York. He became a director of news and special events for them in their key eastern station in New York. They had a leg up on other bigger networks because WOR could interrupt commercials for flashes, for bulletins, the others had to wait until they break. Alvin talks about an assignment flying in a plane over New Jersey, recording live while they cut one of the two engines. He also recalls a few stories of the competition between the stations. On Pearl Harbor day, Alvin was living in Greenwich Village and was tuned to another station. WNYC. He heard an announcer break into the music and read off the ticker that the United States had been attacked at Pearl Harbor. He called his station and made sure they announced it as well. He recalls the panic that occurred and the rumors that spread from East to West about what was happening. Alvin and the interviewer also discuss how the facts of the war in the Pacific seem to have disappeared and not a lot of people know what happened over there since then. That Japan was so thoroughly beaten by one bomb, and that that was the story of this war and nothing else. At first, Alvin tried to get in the Navy but was turned down because he wore eyeglasses. He went in the Office of Facts and Figures, which began the Office of War Information in Washington. He was there for about a year and got to know the Marine Corps and enlisted. Because of his background in journalism, they plucked him out after boot camp in Parris Island and brought him up to the Navy Yard in Washington to become a combat correspondent. He had a Hermes portable typewriter and carbon paper and paper. Just before he went overseas, Dr. Harold Spevak [sp] who was ahead of the music division of the Library of Congress, approached the Marine Corps public information office and said, we would like some of your combat correspondence to take recording machines out and get us the songs the guys were singing in this war, we would like to have them in our collection. Army and Navy said no, Marine Corps said yes, so Alvin got a recording machine to take with him overseas. This brand new machine, experimental, was made by Armor Research Company in Chicago, that had an endless spool of tape that was 35 millimeters wide and it looked like a moving picture tape and it just went round and round. You could get an hour and ten minutes out of these parallel grooves. And to power it, they gave him a 12 volt storage battery, a big truck battery. He also had a converter and a bag full of microphones, all covered with condoms to keep the salt water out and extra spools of tape and so forth. Alvin was assigned then to join the 3rd Marine Division, which was just coming out of Bougainville and going back to its camp on Guadalcanal. He took a train to Oakland and was at Treasure Island and then went aboard a Liberty ship, an ammunition ship, in charge of eight Marines, being a sergeant, he had eight casuals and we stood watch in the gun tubs going across. In New Caledonia he got help with all his equipment. He was sent to an artillery regiment, the 12th Marines and was with them in the mud and heat of Guadalcanal. They assigned him a Jeep and a Seabee to run the equipment. The information and recordings he took were all taken to the Division Headquarters, the intelligence section and they had a public relations officer. That person took it from there and got it back either by plane or command ship. When they went aboard ship to come to the Marianas they were aboard that ship for 54 days. While still aboard ship, Division transferred Alvin to the 3rd Marine regiment, which was an infantry regiment. They put his equipment in a halftrack for the 3rd Weapons Company, which was going to be the first wave to wade ashore. The halftrack had a 75 millimeter cannon on it and machine guns and pulling a trailer with flame throwers and they had a rubber boat for the wounded. They had to wade in to the beach about 800 yards. They landed on the left bank; beach Red One, right near Adelup Point. Alvin had started recording the audio around him and he narrated what was happening from the time they left the ship. They were dropped off at the reef by an LCVP. Alvin had taken all the equipment out and put it in the sand, tried to cover as much of it up and wasn’t able to record for a while because they were trying to get inland. A little later he was able to slither his way back to it and begin to record again the battle going on right around him on the beach and on the hill right ahead of us, at Chanito Cliffs. On the second day, when Division Headquarters were set up on the beach, the PR officer, Captain Ray Henry said, you gotta get over to the 9th, the other end of the beach; they had no correspondent over there. Their correspondent, Blackman had been killed right away. Alvin made his way along the beach, went through the rear elements of the 21st and got up on the 9th and so for about two days he was with the 9th. He then had orders to leave the 9th and go with the 21st, which was up the hill, up on the ridge. They also had had some casualties of the correspondents. So he joined the 21st then and was with the 21st from then on, all through the battle. He got up there just before the day, the late afternoon that ended that evening in the banzai charge and the Seabee joined him with the recording equipment. They shared a foxhole that night. During the banzai attack that night they stayed low while Japanese attacked. By morning, the Japs were all being slaughtered down back at the beach by cooks and bakers and engineers. Everybody had to fall out and fight. The Japs also overran the main aid hospital. The patients had to get up and fight. [change of tape]Part two of the interview with Alvin Josephy starts with the bonzai attack that he started describing at the end of part one. Alvin was part way up the hill, watching and hearing the commotion and fighting that was going on. Some of the Japanese sat in front of the tanks as if they wanted to be run over. The Japanese were doing some very odd things about getting themselves killed. Alvin wrote stories about that, and of the great number of casualties because of that attack. He tells a story about a lieutenant named Ed Mulkahi [sp?] who was right in the front of the lines with the 21st and he had a whole group of men around him and it was like a nightmare for them because his men were being blinded and hanging onto his leg. Alvin had been briefed on what not to say in his articles. He never used town names when talking about a soldier unless it was about something positive like someone receiving a Purple Heart and then it may be printed in that person’s local paper for all to see. The stories were being handed out or made available to AP and UPI and INS, all the wire services as well as The New York Times and Time magazine and Life, anybody could use it if they wanted to and Alvin would be credited. Joe Rosenthal, the photographer, was usually with them. After the bonzai attack, Alvin’s unit moved north, through the jungle. The fighting was much less intense although there were still some ambushes going on. Alvin was with the group that liberated the big camp. He met a lot of guys who were at the camp and wrote about them. When he came back to visit, six years before this interview, he brought a lot of glossy pictures and gave them to the National Park Service to use, some of them were of the Chamorro people. Alvin recognized some of the Chamorro people on his visit because they had come with them on some of the sweeps of the island. Alvin did a recording of the war dogs on Iwo Jima. As far as he knows, the biggest collection of his original recordings are in the Library of Congress and a fellow named Sam Berlowski has been the head of the music division for years. For some reason, the historical section of the Marine Corps has shown no interest in these records and they have been doing their own oral history. Alvin had carbons of every story he wrote and kept them in a packet. He came back to Guam from Iwo Jima from an air evacuation plane, because of orders to get back to Washington as fast as possible. There were five correspondents from the three divisions to speak at the National Press Club, go on bond tours and write magazine articles and a book, which would tell the American people why Iwo Jima was necessary and why was this battle fought? They sent Alvin to the Infantry Journal to do some articles. Two books that were published, using some of Alvin’s stories, This Uncommon Valor and Sempre Fidelis . A book that Alvin himself wrote about his experiences is called, The Long and The Short and The Tall. When he was done writing this book, in August of ‘44, he heard about the dropping of the atom bomb. Most of Alvin’s papers can be found at the University of Oregon library, but he hadn’t sent them very much Marine material. Alvin still had all his field notebooks where he interviewed people and wrote down the stories in note form before writing them. Alvin recalls that when he came home from the war, there was a big emotional division between most of the guys who came home and everybody else. He felt that most veterans did not come home and want to talk to even their family about anything unhappy that had happened over there. They told funny or pleasant stories, but didn’t want to talk about battles and death. He felt that it was a sort of guilt of why they came home and some of their buddies didn’t come home. Alvin had to go home after Iwo Jima and confront a lot of families and tell them about their kid or their husband that wasn’t coming back and he was the first one to tell them that they weren’t coming back.

U.S. National Park Service, War in the Pacific National Historical Park

This digital asset is in the public domain. This digital version was made possible through the National Park Service by a grant from the National Park Foundation through generous support from the Mellon Foundation. When using this asset for any purpose, including online, credit 'Courtesy U.S. National Parks'.

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War in the Pacific National Historical Park, Code: WAPA

Guam , Guam
War in the Pacific National Historical Park, Guam , Guam
Latitude: 13.3905000686646, Longitude: 144.654006958008

ICMS (Interior Collection Managment System) : WAPA-00246
NPS Museum Number Catalog : WAPA 4170

War in the Pacific Oral Histories

2025/03/07

T. Stell Newman Visitor Center, Collections room, Safe and Shelf SLF D-01

Public Can View

Rose Manibusan, Jennifer Craig

Organization: American Memorial Park
Role: Chief Interpretation
Address: Micro Beach Road, Garapan, Mp 96950
Email: wapa_interpretation@nps.gov

Saturday, April 5, 2025 2:51:42 PM

Saturday, April 5, 2025 2:51:42 PM

Josephy, Alvin_WAPA-246_WAPA 4170_OralHist_Video.mp4

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4060.9 MB

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