U.S. team on Iwo Jima searches for killed Marine

IWO JIMA, Japan – The U.S. search team looking for the remains of a Marine killed after filming the iconic flag-raising on Iwo Jima has found two possible sites and will recommend a larger team to excavate them, officials said Wednesday.\n“Our investigation has been very successful,” said U.S. Army major Sean Stinchion, who has led the search team for 10 days of surveying and digging on the volcanic Pacific island.\n“We found two caves and tunnels. We will recommend a follow-up team be brought in to use heavy equipment,” he said.\nHe said the team did not find the remains of sergeant William H. Genaust, who filmed the flag-raising nine days before he was killed during combat on the island.\n“We are the initial investigation. We surveyed the hill. We will need to return to actually dig for specific remains,” Stinchion said.\nThe seven-man team, including an anthropologist, focused mainly on surveying Hill 362 A where Genaust was believed to have been killed.\nIt was the first U.S.-led search on Iwo Jima, one of the fiercest and most symbolic battlegrounds of World War II, in nearly 60 years.\nThe seven-member team arrived on Iwo Jima on June 17 and began slashing its way through thick, thorny brush on the island’s interior in search of the area where Genaust is believed to have been killed.\nA combat photographer with the 28th Marines, Genaust filmed the raising of the flag atop Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, standing just feet away from Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal as he took the photograph that won a Pulitzer Prize and came to symbolize the war in the Pacific.\nGenaust, then 38, died nine days later when he was hit by machine-gun fire as he was helping fellow Marines secure a cave, said Johnnie Webb, a civilian official with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, headquartered at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii.\nSome 88,000 U.S. service members are listed as missing from World War II, and JPAC conducts searches throughout the world to find them.\nIwo Jima, inhabited only by a small contingent of Japanese troops, continues to be an \nopen grave.\nThough most of the American dead were recovered in 1948, some 250 U.S. troops are still missing from the Iwo Jima campaign. Many were lost at sea, meaning the chances of recovering their remains are slim. But many others died in caves or were buried by explosions.\nJapan’s government and military are helping with the search on Iwo Jima, which this month was officially renamed Iwo To, the island’s name before the war.\nJapan sent its first search parties to the island in 1952 and others have followed every year since Iwo Jima was returned to Japanese control in 1968. They have recovered sets of 8,595 remains, but, to date, no Americans, said Health Ministry official Nobukazu Iwadate.\nThe U.S. officially took the tiny volcanic island on March 26, 1945, after a 31-day battle that pitted some 100,000 U.S. troops against 21,200 Japanese. Some 6,821 Americans were killed; only 1,033 Japanese survived. Of 82 U.S. Medals of Honor won by Marines in World War II, 26 were won on Iwo Jima.