Born: December 15, 1925
Campaigns Served: Namur, Saipan (wounded), Tinian, Iwo Jima (wounded)
Highest Rank Attained: Corporal
Decorations: Purple Heart with Gold Star
NOTE: Unless otherwise cited, the information in this biography was sourced from two interviews with Mr. Buzzard. The first, conducted by Larry Smith, appears in his book "Iwo Jima." The second, conducted by Gail Chatfield, appears in "By Dammit, We're Marines!"
Glenn Buzzard was born in Chester, West Virginia. He had an eventful childhood; after his mother died in childbirth in 1930, his father Erett - "a bit of a hell-raiser" - dismantled his moonshine still, moved out of his farm, and sent his three sons out to live with other families. "People didn't keep track. Today you couldn't get away with that, but back in them days people farmed kids out and everybody was happy. Nobody stuck their nose in it." In the spring of 1931, five year old Glenn was taken in by Nancy Lee Conkel, a friend of his fathers, and moved up to Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. He lived there for eight years, attending school during the day and helping Nancy with her home-run cloth and jewelry business in the afternoons and weekends. Glenn was expected to attend church every Sunday, and Nancy allowed no playing outside on the Sabbath. He remembered getting haircuts from the future singing star Perry Como, who ran his own barbershop in Canonsburg.
Buzzard moved back to West Virginia in the eighth grade. His father had remarried and gained three step-children; Glenn and his stepbrother would double up on a gelding and ride to school in Clarkson, then walk five miles home each day.
By the age of fifteen, Buzzard had quit school and was working at a local pottery. He'd earned enough money to buy himself a Model A Ford: "It would pull Logan's Hill in high gear. That's how you could tell if it was a good vehicle. I didn't have to double clutch to get over neither." When the war broke out, though, a career in the pottery had lost its appeal. After meeting a local football player who had been wounded with the Marines on Guadalcanal, Buzzard made his decision.
Everybody older than me was going into the service, and I was partying and getting in at two o'clock and having to go to work at six, and I got tired of that.... I took my old Ford truck to Pittsburgh, found the post office building, enlisted on Monday and they said come back up on Tuesday with my birth certificate and paper signed by my dad and the chief of police, and you'll go right straight to Parris Island.... My age, which was sixteen, never came up.
After completing his physical, Buzzard boarded the train to Yemassee, South Carolina. The recruits were loaded onto trucks in the dark of night, and delivered to Parris Island.
Glenn Buzzard adapted well to boot camp. Although underage, he was six feet tall and weighed 144 pounds - and was in excellent shape thanks to his farming background. "Farmers are a little more advanced on common sense I suppose than most people.... That's probably why I didn't have any trouble in the Marine Corps. If you don't go in there with the right attitude, you are going to have problems. But I didn't have any attitude at all." Buzzard managed to keep out of the constant fracas between the West Virginians and New Yorkers of his platoon. One day, though, his sergeant called Buzzard into his room. "I figured boy, something had happened because sergeants were God." Buzzard's age had finally caught up with him, but the sergeant merely asked if Buzzard wanted to get out of the Corps. Buzzard merely said "No," and the sergeant told him to clear out back to his bunk. Nothing more was ever said about his age.
After completing boot camp, Buzzard and his platoon were sent to New River, North Carolina. They trained with M1s until enough men were collected to form a full battalion, designated the First Separate Battalion. After a six day leave, the men boarded a train for Camp Pendleton, California. Buzzard became a member of a heavy machine gun crew with Dog Company.
With Dog Company:
We didn't even train with the riflemen until we went on maneuvers; then we fit in because that was the way we were going to fight. That's how I got to know people in A Company, B Company, and C Company.... They would take First Platoon in D Company, put it was A Company, machine guns. Second Platoon, B Company. I was in Third Platoon, and we'd go to C Company. Next time we went out they'd maybe put us in another company. That's how I got to know those guys.
Machine gunners also carried sidearms. Buzzard remembered experiments with the M1 carbine - unpopular for its low muzzle velocity - and shotguns, which were difficult to clean and used paper cartidges which were vulnerable to damp. The M1911 .45 automatic was popular, but there were only enough for squad leaders, so Buzzard wrote to his younger brother, Erett Junior. A few weeks later, an old Smith & Wesson .38 revolver arrived in the mail - straight from the Buzzard family attic. Glenn made his own wooden grips for the weapon, bought lead ammunition and a secondhand holster, and got special permission to carry the weapon.
Glenn Buzzard saw his first combat on Namur. His platoon took their first casualties - Carmen Ramputi, the "company clown," and Carl Cooper, cut down almost beside his younger brother Howard Cooper.
After Roi-Namur they got so low on officers they couldn't shift us around. So they changed that. Put First Platoon in A Company and so on. I was in C Company from then on.
With Charlie Company:
Glenn Buzzard became a member of Charlie Company's machine gun platoon. There were some familiar faces, like platoon leader Lieutenant Alex Santilli and Buzzard's close friend Sergeant William Buller; as well as new friends like Mike Mervosh.
Buzzard landed on Saipan on June 15, 1944. He was designated as an ammunition carrier on the muster rolls, but as casualties began to mount, assignments within the squads began to shift.
He had two close calls on one night. Charlie Company was set up near Saipan's Mount Tapotchau when the Japanese pulled a nighttime banzai attack. Buzzard was watching into the dark when an enemy soldier literally tripped over the barrel of his machine gun. In a flash, Buzzard pulled his .38 and opened fire.
Needless to say, somebody killed him. I don't know whether I did or not. I fired at him with that thirty-eight. I know I had it going at him because it was close quarters. I couldn't get the machine gun on him, but whether I or somebody else did it, I kinda thought maybe I did it, but then it's nothing to brag about, taking a man's life. They was there just like we were, probably didn't know any more than we did. Anyway, that's life.
After the failure of the charge, the Japanese opened up on the Marine line with mortars. Buzzard was slammed to the ground, clutching at his shoulder. A nearby rifleman, Adrian DeWitt, pulled out a packet of sulfa powder and scrambled over to the young gunner to check his wound. DeWitt pulled an eight-inch fragment of shrapnel from Buzzard's shoulder - it had hit at just the right angle between the skin and the shoulder blade and was mostly spent - "otherwise it would have took my shoulder off." His pack had absorbed a lot of shrapnel as well. Buzzard handed off his revolver to a friend and hitched a jeep ride back to the aid station. He was back on the line the next day as one of the walking wounded.
On July 8, 1944, Lieutenant Santilli was ordered to take his platoon to the left side of the company's skirmish line, where a lot of fire was incoming.
The Japs had that fortified; it was about 20-30 feet of tree growth right down to the water's edge.... We were out in the open in a cane field, and about twenty people came out of those trees. They were women and children and the men were holding up babies, just little babies. That was a distraction and the interpreter was trying to talk to them, you know, "comono wouna gay" crap. "Take it off," that's one of the Japanese phrases they taught us. You had to get them undressed because the men would have grenades stuck under their clothes.... Anyway, this was a cane field and they had piles of cane they were harvesting, like farmers do. All at once, one of the piles just opened up and there were men underneath it. They killed Santilli, and they killed Sgt. Buller. They were shot within seconds of each other.
Buzzard was carrying the machine gun in a sling, covering the crowd. Firing the gun from the hip was "a Mickey Mouse thing, but it worked." Devastated by the loss of Buller, whom he considered an older brother, Buzzard swung the gun around, gripped the barrel with his asbestos mitt, and opened fire on the crowd - "neutralized them, let's say." The Japanese soldiers were eliminated and the gunners rejoined the company, bringing along their wounded and dead.
The next day, Charlie Company reached the far end of the island at Marpi Point.
We drove them right into the water, literally. The Japanese soldiers threw the native women and children over the cliff and jumped over after them. We had loudspeakers set up trying to talk them out of it.... If they were still alive, a soldier would go right out over the reef, right into the water, and would swim around and drown them. So we tried to kill the soldiers who were doing the drowning.
Buzzard also landed on Tinian, wrapping up his third campaign at the age of only eighteen years old.
First Battalion rested at Camp Maui until February 1, 1945. They trained up fresh replacements - Buzzard estimated that they had lost twenty-eight percent of their strength in the Marianas. They boarded ship for an unknown destination; two days after sailing, the men were told they were bound for Iwo Jima.
When Buzzard's company landed on Iwo, they found the first wave lying on the beach - "we just ran over the top of them." Even for a veteran of four campaigns, the devastation on the beach was appalling. "You can figure it out for yourself, nine thousand guys and they weren't more than three hundred feet off the beach. It was devastating, just carnage everywhere."
The only thing that took us on further without being completely wiped out was pure raw gunts and the fact that we weren't going to get kicked off there. We did what we had to do to survive, but we didn't take any prisoners. That's one thing that I never saw.... we just did what we had to do.
For the first three days, Charlie Company faced off against Japanese defenders in the Rock Quarry. February 20 and 21st saw some of the heaviest friendly fire incidents as men on the ground struggling to take out gun emplacements were accidentally hit by naval shells and air strikes. Even the Marines were not immune to mistakes.
I saw one marine shoot another marine bone dead right in my squad because he went around this way and the other went around that way... you don't have a split second. You just pull the trigger. Shoot first. Whoever does, they're one's going to win. We had to take the guy that shot the other marine, take him clear out because he just went berserk.
On March 1, Charlie Company took part in the attack on Iwo Jima's Hill 382. A group of marines took cover in a shell hole as Japanese shells came howling in. They were calling encouragement to their friend Jack Coutts, who had been hit in the legs, and were trying to pull him in to cover. Seeing this, the Japanese zeroed in on their crater. A single shell scored a direct hit.
Gunner Ottis Boxx died instantly - "the only thing left of his head was his lower jaw." Sergeant Philip Baldwin, who had joined the company five days before, was also killed, along with Private Harold Davis, Private James Parker, and some seven others. Somehow, Buzzard survived.
I was shocked, no question about it. I come up out of the hole, and somebody grabbed me, and I was just blood everywhere. They thought I was hit worse than I was, but they started getting my dungarees off me and seen that I wasn't really hurt, but my mind was gone. I couldn't hear. I remember giving my .38 away to Elmer Neff...
The corpsmen scraped parts of other Marine bodies off of Buzzard, and guided him back to a hospital ship. They gave him clean dungarees, a bath, and picked shrapnel out of his left arm and leg. Buzzard recovered from his concussion that night, and the next morning snuck out of his berth, climbed down a cargo net, and took a boat back to the beach. His vision and hearing were still impaired, he had "a hell of a headache," and "no idea" why he went back, but go he did. Buzzard knew he was lucky not to have been killed by the concussion of the shell; he had seen it happen to others, seen them "roll along the ground like a ball." His most serious problem was a nasty cut on one of his fingers that seemed likely to get infected, but daily treatment from corpsman Virgil Deets kept the wound from becoming septic.
Glenn Buzzard finished out Iwo Jima with his company. He was only nineteen years old and still a private first class, but said "I came back from wounded and evacuated to walking wounded and finished out the campaing with no more trouble than an infected fingernail." He made Corporal on Maui in the spring if 1945. "Everyone in the platoon moved up but to make it special they'd fall us out on the parade deck... have a ceremony, blow smoke in your ear, you know, and you're a corporal."
Corporal Buzzard was discharged at the end of the war. He married his wife Needra in 1947, they had five children. Glenn worked as a farmer, enjoying the solitary life until a fall from a hayrick fractured three vertebrae in his neck; he took up a career as a caster using his G.I. Bill. Today, he lives in Hubbard, Ohio.
In 2007, Larry Smith asked the former corporal why he had survived the war.
When I stop to think about it, I have no idea. I'm a Christian. I believe in God. I believe in the hereafter. But why me? I was no better or no worse than Cooksey or Elmer Neff or Bowman or any of those guys. But yet they took it, you know what I mean? They're gone. Why, I don't know.... I wasn't a better scholar, I wasn't a better... anything. They say every hair of your head is numbered. Well, the fellow who's got that kind of account is in charge, and if he's in charge, then maybe he can answer that question. I don't think God created man to do this to each other, although men have been doing it ever since Christ walked the face of the earth. Otherwise I have no idea. I cannot answer it.