On Feb. 23, 1945, six American combatants raised the American flag on Iwo Jima, signifying the capture of the island’s single mountain, Mount Suribachi.

The battle raged for another month and was a pivotal point in the U.S. World War II effort in the Pacific, a war that Gene Bell, an Ashley Lake resident and former Glacier National Park ranger, remembers well.

Bell, now 89, had joined the Marine Corps at age 17 after graduating early from high school.

“Our division was in reserve. They needed us on the fifth day, when the flag went up,” Bell recalled about his Iwo Jima duty. “We were assigned to go ashore, pick up the wounded, fill the ship and sail back to Guam. You couldn’t believe it: We had wounded everywhere, on every deck.”

The American troops paid a heavy price for the strategic island, and retired Gen. Fred Haynes, the only surviving military official involved in planning the attack, has called it “the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history.”

Official sources of Marine casualties in Iwo Jima vary, but Bell says about 7,800 Marines died and an additional 340 are missing in action. A 1995 document published by U.S. Marine Corps headquarters listed 17,372 Marines wounded.

Bell and his division quickly filled the ships with wounded soldiers, who were taken first to Saipan, then to Guam and even as far as Hawaii as vacant hospital beds became harder to find.

Although clearly proud of his service, Bell considers himself lucky and understands that if his division had been one of the first ashore, he could have been one of the thousands of Marines who lost their lives in the vicious battle.

“We still had to go ashore, shooting and all that, but we got a break,” Bell said.

Earlier in the war, Bell had also fought in the liberation of Guam.

“We had dug foxholes and had 12-man tents, and when they were bombing, we had to roll out of the tents into the holes,” he remembers, adding that the ever-present mosquito netting over the beds often complicated the effort. “After the liberation of Guam, they estimated there were 5,000 Japanese still on the island, so we did a sweep, where we started on one side and had to go across all 28 miles of the island.”

In Guam, about 3,000 U.S. combatants lost their lives, with another 7,100 wounded.

Following his honorable discharge from the Marines, Bell joined the Inglewood, California, Police Department, followed by a job teaching at the town’s high school, where his coaching would lead him to a job as a football and track coach at Pepperdine University.

While he was at Pepperdine he began a summer gig as a park ranger in Glacier National Park, where his twin brother, Jerry, already worked.

He eventually moved to Northwest Montana full time and worked in the park for 10 years, retiring in 1987.

“Everything was more or less positive — it wasn’t negative like on a police department,” Bell said. “Everyone’s coming to the park to have a good time. You do have crime, but mostly just little stuff.”

Aside from one traffic fatality, Bell’s most serious encounter in Glacier came during his first year, apprehending a convicted murderer from Arkansas who was involved in a kidnapping. For the most part, though, Bell said it was an enjoyable job that he stayed with until retirement.

Nowadays he prefers to spend his time traveling with his children and grandchildren and volunteering as a board member for the Iwo Jima Association of America.

Last winter, he helped organize the group’s annual “Reunion of Honor” to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the bloody battle.

It was the biggest of the annual reunions to date, with a ceremony in Washington, D.C., in February, followed by a gathering in Iwo Jima in March. Bell said about 49 people arrived on three planes to attend the ceremony.

The Iwo Jima Association of America, started about 40 years ago by retired Gen. Fred Haynes, also helps raise money to help for veterans who don’t have the money to make the journey. Bell said private donations paid for the expenses of 14 of the veterans who attended this year’s ceremonies.

Bell says he had the honor of meeting many U.S. and Japanese dignitaries this year, one of whom was Yoshitaka Shindo, a former Japanese cabinet member and the grandson of Lt. General Kuribayashi, the commander in charge of the Japanese forces at Iwo Jima.

Retired Lt. Gens. Hank Stackpole and Norm Smith were also present, but for Bell, the highlight was Tsuruji Akikusa, a Japanese Navy radio operator, who is the only living veteran among the approximately 1,000 Japanese who survived the battle.

“This was a big honor,” he says, pointing to a picture of Akikusa at the ceremony. “We got together because of the association. He was 17, just as I was, when he went in.”

And while the tragic legacy of World War II is still felt generations later, he said the reunions are a time of sharing memories and not celebrating victories. The ceremonies in the Pacific are held jointly with the Iwo Jima Association of Japan.

“It’s a reunion of honor. We go there to honor the dead and the missing,” Bell explains. “Sure, we shot at each other 70 years ago, but now we’re honoring our lost soldiers together.”

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.