Personal stories bring experience of WW II to life
Brookdale producing series highlighting
32 veterans’ service
By sherry conohan
Staff Writer

JERRY WOLKOWITZ Gilmon Brooks of Tinton Falls looks at a book about the role of black military personnel in the Marine Corps during World War II.

Before Gilmon Brooks was a witness to history, he made a little history of his own.

Brooks, who grew up as an Army brat, was in Iwo Jima during World War II when six U.S. Marines raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi, a moment captured for generations to come by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. He watched the flag being unfurled as the pole was uprighted.

But for a then-recent change in policy, Brooks wouldn’t have been there. He is a black man, and the Marines only began admitting black people shortly before he shipped out to the South Pacific.

"To this day, it was quite a sight to see Old Glory on top of Suribachi," Brooks, now 76, says in a half-hour film about his World War II experience produced by Brookdale Community College.

The film is part of Brookdale’s series titled Triumphant Spirit: America’s World War II Generation Speaks.

The series, which captures interviews with 32 World War II veterans, is being aired over Brookdale’s cable channel and made available at the college’s Center for Word War II Studies.

Brooks’ time in the Marines was followed by a career in the Army and Air Force, including serving in the Korean War and ultimately leading him to Fort Monmouth.

Following his uniformed service, he went to Naval Weapons Station Earle as a civilian employee in a job that would send him to Vietnam as the last American troops were being pulled out at the end of the war there.

He subsequently returned to Fort Monmouth as a civilian employee.

Brooks was wounded in action twice — in both Iwo Jima and Korea — and was awarded the Bronze Star.

Paul Zigo, a retired colonel in the Army Reserve and coordinator of Brookdale’s Center for WW II Studies, said at the Jan. 29 premiere of the Brooks segment, the first in the film series to be released, that none of the 32 veterans interviewed felt he or she had a story to tell.

"To the last person, they asked, ‘Why do you want me to come on the show?’" he said in his remarks prior to airing the film. "But when you sit them down, they tell stories about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. They just did not see that being the case."

Brian Hemstreet, the producer of the series and the manager of Brookdale’s cable channel, an educational access channel carried by Comcast, said most students at Brookdale today were born 40 years after the United States entered WW II in 1941.

He said he wanted to produce the series to teach them about the sacrifices their grandfathers made.

He began shooting in January 2001 and finished in August. He said the experience of filming the series was, at times, moving, sad and thrilling.

"It is your stories, captured in our series, that are going to save our country again," Hemstreet told the veterans featured in the series, who were gathered in the audience for the premiere.

Hemstreet said later that he was particularly interested in the series because his father and two uncles served in WW II.

He said his father didn’t see battle action, but both of his uncles did, and his uncle Jim McNamara, who served in Africa, was the only survivor when his ship was sunk by enemy fire.

Hemstreet said only three of the films have been edited and are ready for airing.

He said it takes three weeks to a month to edit one, so it will take two years to complete the series.

"If we had more resources, we could do it faster," he said.

The idea for the series came from Zigo, Hemstreet said.

"He wanted to do a series that would be used for our Center for World War II Studies…to have a library of tapes so that people could come to the center and play them," he said. "At the same time, we wanted to make them good enough to put on our channel."

The first three tapes will be shown Sunday, between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.

The film on Brooks will air at 11:30 a.m. Another film on Al Meserlin of Sea Girt, who served as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s personal photographer throughout Europe, will air at 12:30 p.m., followed by a film on Monmouth County Freeholder Theodore J. Narozanick of Freehold, who participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy and went on to the Battle of the Bulge.

"The veterans were great," Hemstreet said. "The hardest part of interviewing them was getting them to open up, because a lot of them were telling their stories for the first time."

Brooks, in the film and in an interview, recalled growing up at Fort Huachuca Army base in Arizona, where his father, Shelly Brooks, was bandmaster. He also had two uncles in the Army.

"We realized we were fortunate to be in the Army during the depression," he said.

It was during his second year at Los Angeles City College that the Marine Corps announced it was going to accept black people and, Brooks said, he decided to give it a try.

He enlisted in December 1943 and went to Montford Point at Camp Lejeune, N.C., the training base for all black service personnel.

After boot camp, Brooks was assigned to the band because he was originally a music major in college. But after a few months as a bugle player, he said, he found that was not for him.

"They found out I could type," Brooks said, noting that he then became the company clerk of the Eighth Marine Ammunition Company.

His unit was sent to Hawaii in 1944 for further training at Camp Catlin, just outside of Honolulu, where it spent six months before being shipped off in LSTs to the South Pacific.

The unit was all black with white officers, he recalled. He said black people hadn’t been in the Marines long enough to achieve rank.

"We were on the water for maybe a month or a month and a half," Brooks said. "We stopped at Guam. They had just secured Guam. We thought we were going into Guam, but we never did. When we left Guam, we thought we were going into Saipan, but that was over. So the next thing we knew we were sitting off the shores of Iwo Jima."

Brooks said his LST went right up on the beach in Iwo Jima. It was February 1945.

"It looked like black ash — it was volcanic ash," he said in describing the landscape.

"You’d sink in the ash," he said in the film. "Suribachi had been and still is a volcano. There are a few trees scattered around. There was not much greenery. We didn’t see much sign of people living there. We later found out the Japanese had vacated it."

Brooks said he had become a platoon sergeant of an ammunition platoon.

He said there were different sites on Iwo Jima for different ammunition, and a supply of ammunition had been unloaded at the incorrect place. His platoon was trying to clear it out because it had tanks that were coming in to pick up their ammunition. The date was Feb. 23.

"We had just about finished the job…and they were just about ready to start on the tanks when…it seemed like everything on the island stopped," he said. "You could still hear shooting on the northern end of the island. I looked up when it got so quiet, and then somebody said, ‘Hey, look.’ And I looked up to the top of the mountain. I am at the bottom of the mountain.

"We knew they were Marines," he continued. "We didn’t know what they were doing until the pole went up. When the pole got high enough, they started to unfurl the flag. The next thing we knew, there was Old Glory flying from the top of the mountain. Then everyone started celebrating. All of a sudden, guns were firing and ships in the harbor were honking their horns.

"I thought the island had been secured," he said. "Then all hell broke loose.

"Little did we know that the Japanese were thoroughly entrenched. And that’s when they opened up and started firing," Brooks said. "I got the impression they were trying to get to our depot because they were zeroing in on our depot, right at the base of the mountain where the flag had been raised with mortar shells. I was trying to get my men out of there. We were all trying to seek cover, and there was very little cover on the whole island. Then it felt like someone was putting a poker in me. The next thing I knew, I was being pulled under the tank."

Brooks had been hit in the back by shrapnel.

"They kept me under the tank, out of the fire," he said. "Then when it calmed down — we were right near the beach, so we weren’t far from the aid station — they took me to the aid station.

"When I woke up, I was on the hospital ship," he added. "When I found I was on clean white sheets, I thought I was in heaven. I hadn’t seen any sheets in ages — not since Hawaii."

The Navy ship plied its way back to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and Brooks and the other casualties were transferred to a naval hospital in Honolulu. When he recovered, he applied for the Navy’s V-12 program and was accepted and assigned to Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., where he arrived in August 1945 for the fall semester. On Sept. 2, the war ended with Japan’s surrender.

"I had more than enough points [to be released]," Brooks said. "At that time, they discharged you according to points. So I was given the option of going to Quantico (Va.) and going through OCS (Officers Candidates School) there or being discharged. At the time, we knew no black person had successfully completed Quantico, and I felt I would be better off just getting out. So…I was discharged."

Brooks left the Marines as a buck sergeant and began the odyssey that would have him touching all the other services before retiring for the last time.

He felt conditions were improving for black people serving in the military at the time because President Harry S. Truman had ordered the integration of the armed forces.

After his discharge from the Marines, Brooks returned to Los Angeles, where he worked for a veterans organization, and then went back to school at Los Angles City College. However, he left the college one semester short of getting his degree after he received a letter from the Army, offering him a rank and a position at OCS if he enlisted.

He got through OCS until the physical examination, when he failed for having asthmatic chronic rhinitis. He nonetheless served in the Army until retiring in 1966 at Fort Monmouth with the rank of chief warrant officer after service that took him to the Korean War, where he became sergeant major of the 3rd battalion, 24th infantry regiment, an all-black regiment, of the 25th division. He was wounded in the legs and ankles at Kunuri and evacuated to Japan.

Before going to Korea, Brooks was detailed by the Army to an engineering aviation group that was assigned to Beale Air Force Base in California as support for the Air Force when it had pilots only.

Brooks said that before retiring from the Army, he took the federal service entrance exam and upon retirement was picked up by the Navy as a recruiting specialist at Naval Weapons Station Earle.

In 1974, he was sent to Vietnam as a civilian employee of the Navy.

After working there four months, he returned to the states and then around 1978 became a civilian employee of Fort Monmouth. He was a personnel officer with a grade of GS 13.

As a wage and classification specialist, Brooks ran the wage surveys for the entire Department of Defense Metropolitan New York area. He retired for the final time, as a civilian Army employee, in September 1985.