Hitting the beach is a very intensive thing.
You don't know when you'll get hit.
You know you're gonna get hit, but you don't know when.
I worked on a beach.
I worked with a photographer who did a one hour portrait.
People would come by, sit down,
an hour later they'd come back and get their 2 and 1/4, 3 and 1/4 pictures.
That's how I got my start as a photographer
was Saturdays and Sundays on the beach.
My dad was trying to keep me out of the service.
And that wasn't working.
Well, it was getting closer and closer to draft time,
So I went into the Marines.
Wanting a say in which branch of service he would end up with,
Clifford Brooks enlisted.
Placed with the 1st Marine Division,
Cliff would leave his short photography career behind and head for the Pacific.
Stationed aboard an amphibious transport vehicle,
Cliff's role in the island invasions would be taking weapons and combat troops to the shores.
For their first stop, the Marines would attempt to take control
of a vital airstrip on a small island called Peleliu.
My duty was radioman, on paper.
But really, we had orders that you're gonna land under radio silence.
You're not gonna use your radio.
So my crew chief and I, we had a 30- and a 50-caliber machine gun.
I helped the people get off and he used the 50 to protect us.
The early amphibs were death.
The poor guys that got on, when you got off you went over the side.
And as you went over the side you got picked off.
We had a load of howitzer shells.
The howitzers that they were to go to, all three of them sank.
So, when we got ashore with this ammunition,
we didn't have anything to do with it.
Our Lieutenant says, "Dig in."
That night, a guy by the name of Rivet,
he sat and I sat in a foxhole.
And he had his rifle pointing one way,
and I had my M1 between my knees pointing the other direction.
During that night, the Japanese came down that airstrip en masse.
There was machine gun fire going horizontal all over the place.
Every place you looked there was tracer fire.
And when we got out of the hole in the morning,
we had dead bodies and piles of wreckage.
At that time - D-Day plus one, in the morning -
we had no more than twenty yards of beach.
So it took us about the rest of the day to get off of the beach.
D-Day and D-Day plus one was pretty frantic days for us.
Originally predicted to last five days, the battle of Peleliu continued for over two months
before the island was finally deemed secure.
Learning from previous defeats,
the Japanese Imperial Army had refined their defense tactics and island fortifications.
These refinements would only continue to improve as the war dragged on.
In the early Spring of 1945, Cliff and the 1st Marine Division joined a vast armada,
heading for what was to be their final stop before the eminent attack on the Japanese mainland.
The armada just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
So finally, when we finally left for Okinawa,
it was a huge, huge flotilla.
And of course the Japanese bombed us every chance they got.
It was just crazy.
The island of Okinawa was their next objective.
From there, the Allies would be able to stage air and sea attacks against Japan.
But with each new battle, the Japanese had proved an increasingly formidable foe,
and the 1st Marine Division was expected
to have high casualties in the invasion of Okinawa.
The funny part of it was there was nobody there.
American diversions on the southeast coast
had drawn the Japanese away from the beaches
where the 1st Division made their landing.
With no opposition there to meet them,
there wasn't much for Cliff and the Marines to do but wait for orders.
Just before boredom overtook him, Cliff came across a floating cargo box.
Its contents almost seemed heaven-sent, just for him.
And in it was a 2 and 1/4, 3 and 1/4 combat graphic
and a printing kit with film and paper.
So we went around making photographs.
For Cliff, a return to his favorite pastime was a welcomed distraction.
But the Japanese opposition would not stay away forever,
and distraction was not a luxury the Marines could afford.
Our fighter planes came in.
They came in over the beach.
The last airplane in that formation was a Jap.
And he came down the beach with all his wings blinking at us like this.
It took us a little while to realize that we were being strafed.
The same night, the Japanese, they went running with satchel charges
through the way our airplanes were parked.
The Japanese destroyed about half of the airplanes that were on the ground,
just running and throwing satchel charges.
And then we got bombed that night.
Nobody expected that kind of a thing.
You know, we thought that the beach was secure,
the airport was secure.
Take a nice nap.
Throughout the Pacific campaign,
the Marines would suffer more and more casualties with every invasion
and Cliff was forced to adjust his role on the battlefield.
What we were mostly doing was hauling ammunition and water to the front lines,
and hauling dead and wounded, and we took them all back to the shore.
And the wounded guys, of course, they took out to the ship.
The dead guys they took to the burial grounds.
I saw one guy, he had a hole like this in his chest.
And he asked for a cigarette and somebody gave him a cigarette.
And he took a puff, and when he breathed out,
the smoke came out through the hole in his chest.
I don't know if he made it.
He winked at me.
We had a lot of -
a lot of scenes like that.
But we made it.
But looming over the Marines was their next objective: the invasion of Japan.
And with the brutality and staggering numbers of casualties
they had witnessed through the Pacific,
not one of them had a good feeling about it.
Most of the guys became very superstitious.
They said that, "If I survived Peleliu, and If I survived Okinawa,
there was no way I was going to survive another invasion."
Hitting the beach is a very intensive thing.
You don't know when you'll get hit.
You know you're gonna get hit, but you don't know when.
Fortunately for the Marines, Okinawa would be the last major conflict in the Pacific,
and the invasion of the Japanese mainland never came.
After his return home from the war,
Cliff would go on to a successful, life-long career in photography,
doing commercial work for boating catalogs, NASA, the USO, and major Hollywood productions.
But for Cliff and many of the Marines he served with,
the war did not end in 1945,
but continued to stay with them for the remainder of their lives.
Being in the war was just the beginning for a lot of the guys.
From then on it became a tragic story.
A guy by the name of Finney became an alcoholic and he eventually went insane.
A guy by the name of Rivet -
he came home apparently safe, and within six months,
he had a mental disorder of some kind that put him in an asylum
and he died there.
When I came home, in the middle of the night
the fire alarm at the fire department went off.
This brave Marine went around the living room and dining room, hollering,
"Hit the deck! Hit the deck!"
I think it affected every man who was in combat to some degree.
Some less, some more.
When you tell how bad it was, other people see it as a story,
because it didn't happen to them.
They'd say, "I saw that in a movie."
But what we did was real.
And that part you don't get over.
You had to share it with other people who were there.