1945 Iwo Jima Eulogy "The Purest Democracy" Discovered
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Chaplain Roland B. Gittelsohn wrote the Iwo Jima Eulogy "The Purest Democracy"
but the rabbi was banned from delivering it by his fellow Christian chaplains.
DEDICATION
To Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn, first Jewish chaplain to serve in the Marine Corps, and to all military chaplains active today, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Islamic, Sikhi, and Lay Person. He led the way and others followed.
Handwritten Iwo Jima eulogy copy discovered in 2022. The story now in ebook on Amazon: "The Purest Democracy" BANNED.
The key to his lost words was found when the handwritten copy was discovered. Since that time a “trifecta” of eulogies has been uncovered that authenticate the wording in the handwritten copy.
- UNCOMMON VALOR, Marine Divisions in Action: KEYES BEECH, 5TH DIVISION, Washington Infantry Press, 1946.
- THE SPEARHEAD: HOWARD M. CONNER, Washington, Infantry Journal. 1950.
- FROM THE BATTLEFIELD, Dispatches of a World War II Marine: DAN LEVIN, Marine War Correspondent, Naval Institute Press, 1995.
In finding the handwritten copy and researching the various printed eulogy versions, the rabbi’s actual Iwo Jima written eulogy words are believed to have been recovered. Only in locating Gittelsohn’s lost 1945 original handwritten eulogy manuscript will we ever know the wording with absolute certainty. Absent that discovery, we can only examine and evaluate the documented evidence before us.
COMING TO AMERICA
When marines on Iwo Jima could get their hands on a eulogy copy, their tears could well be imagined as they read the rabbi’s words. The words must have hit just the right cords, and many sent their copies home to wives and family members. They in turn sent copies to newspapers, magazines, and radio stations. The rabbi’s eulogy became famous, and his hopes and dreams of Democracy were spread around the world.
Time magazine published excerpts of the eulogy in an article titled “The Purest Democracy’’ and the rabbi’s words and name exploded upon such exposure. So impressed with the eulogy, the famed Robert St. John, who had a radio program on NBC, believed the rabbi’s words invoked true American values and an explanation for why they had fought and died for our democratic way of life. Every American needed to hear the rabbi’s speech he thought, so on Memorial Day, May 31, 1945, 61 days after the eulogy was spoken on Iwo he introduced the words the rabbi had spoken on a national broadcast.
He said, “I want to read to you a memorial address, delivered over the graves of some fifth marine division dead, on the island of Iwo Jima, by Chaplain Roland Gittelsohn …” “I think that the words I am about to read to you should be printed in every history book, that millions of copies should be distributed across the land.” He repeated the words for many years on his Memorial Day broadcasts.
Not to be overshadowed, CBS hired the well-recognized actor Fredric March to read the entire eulogy to their national listeners. Even the army released short-wave broadcast to American troops around the world. So exceptional were his words that the State Department sent it’s Jazz Ambassadors to spread the rabbi’s pro-democracy message to faraway lands. They hired leading American jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington to be “ambassadors” for the United States.
The eulogy by Chaplain Gittelsohn amazingly encompasses so many human topics involving our individual humanity, no matter one’s position in life. It relates to so many because it is a personal, real-life, on-the-spot, war-time experience that was lived by many, and we today can only imagine it through documentaries and Hollywood films made recognizable years later just by saying two words…Iwo Jima.
To speak in memory of such men as these is not easy. Of them too it can be said with utter truth “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. It can never forget what they did here.
Perhaps his words written long ago have been forgotten. But, since his message of hope was re-discovered in 2022, his words just might be found to be timeless and apply more to us today in our struggling democracy than in 1945.
GITTELSOHN'S LOST WORDS
Only now, some 79 years after Rabbi Gittelsohn composed his eulogy, are we able to fully recognize the true meaning of what he wrote. Some of what the rabbi expressed in his writing was lost simply because of the technology at the time that could not translate onto paper what apparently was written on his onion-skin sheets. In other cases, authors and editors may have simply changed his words, perhaps believing the rabbi incapable of using proper English. In yet other instances, his punctuation was altered, words were added, and paragraphs combined. Intentional or otherwise, it altered the full and complete message the rabbi so desperately tried to convey to his fellow marines.
The true beauty of the rabbi’s original eulogy that was handwritten on multiple onion-skin sheets would lie in what could not be matched in published versions, the human touch. Not in our Congressional Record, not in our museums or archives, not in our books, nowhere in the public’s eye. Today’s published eulogies read sterile in comparison to the handwritten copy. The rabbi’s strength of feelings never completely conveyed by his intentional capitalizing of words that are not proper nouns and underlined phrases. All were lost in the translation but have now been recovered.
A RARE & TIMELY FIND
Chaplain Roland B. Gittelsohn, the first Jewish chaplain the Navy assigned to the Marine Corps, wrote the Iwo Jima eulogy for the dedication of the 5th Marine Corps Division Cemetery. His eulogy has been titled “The Purest Democracy”. The rabbi’s original eulogy manuscript, handwritten on sheets of onionskin paper, was lost on that island in the Pacific. It was “borrowed” by a fellow chaplain, used to produce 2,000 mimeographed transcripts of the document, and then never returned. His original handwritten manuscript has never been accounted for.
Some 78 years after the battle for Iwo Jima, a handwritten time-period copy of Chaplain Gittelsohn’s eulogy was discovered on 22 April 2022 in San Luis Obispo California by the son of an airman stationed in Guam during the battle. The eulogy was penned by then Army Air Corps Staff Sgt. James C. Regopoulos, CFC Gunner on the B-29 Queen Cathy, 39th Bomber Group.
It appears to be the only handwritten copy of Gittelsohn’s Iwo Jima eulogy known to have survived WWII.
Eulogy copies are exceptionally rare. Besides the recently discovered handwritten copy now in private hands, there are only two typed copies of the eulogy that were donated to the Jacob Rader Center of American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH., and to the US Marine Press Corps. In addition, two eulogies were found in the Marine Corps Journal from Iwo Jima. One of the eulogies from the Journal was published in Uncommon Valor in 1946 and is an authenticating near mirror image of the recently discovered handwritten copy. The second and somewhat different eulogy version found in the Journal was published in The Spearhead in 1950.
The dominant source of eulogy copies came from the 2,000 mimeographed transcript copies of Gittelsohn’s eulogy produced and distributed on Iwo by the same chaplain that borrowed Gittelsohn’s original manuscript. A few typed copies and the one recently discovered handwritten copy constitute the known universe of Gittelsohn’s work. None of the mimeographed transcripts were found while researching the handwritten copy.
Only one published book was found stating their printed eulogy came directly from a mimeographed transcript of the original from Iwo. Marine Combat Correspondent Dan Levin, who participated in the Jewish service on Iwo Jima, “… stashed a copy” while on the island and printed excerpts in his book, From The Battlefield, published in 1995.
The handwritten copy has been found to be the key to discovering Gittelsohn’s true eulogy words that were spoken to only 25 that day on Iwo Jima.
DISCOVERED APRIL 22, 2022, IN SAN LUIS OBISPO, CALIFORNIA
Handwritten eulogy copy penned by Army Air Corps Staff Sgt. James C. Regopoulos
He flew eight bombing missions over Japan before his plane crashed.
TYPED TRANSCRIPT
This is the grimmest, and surely the holiest task we have faced since D-day. Here before us lie the bodies of comrades and friends. Men who until yesterday or last week laughed with us, joked with us, trained with us. Men who were on the same ships with us, and went over the sides with us as we prepared to hit the beaches of this island. Men who fought with us and feared with us. Somewhere in this plot of ground there may lie the man who could have discovered the cure for cancer. Under one of these Christian crosses, or beneath a Jewish Star of David, there may rest now a man who was destined to be a great prophet – to find the way, perhaps, for all to live in plenty, with poverty and hardship for none. Now they lie silently in this sacred soil, and we gather to consecrate this earth to their memory.
It is not easy to do so. Some of us have buried our closest friends here. We saw these man killed before our very eyes. Any one of us might have died in their places. Indeed, some of us are alive and breathing at this very moment only because the men who lie here beneath us had the courage and the strength to give their lives for ours. To speak in memory of such men as these is not easy. Of them too it can be said with utter truth “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. It can never forget what they did here.”
No, our power of speech can add nothing more to what these men and the other dead of our Division have already done. All that we can hope to do is follow their example to show the same selfless courage in peace that they did in war. To swear that by the grace of God and the stubborn strength and power of human will, their sons and ours shall never suffer these pains again. These men have done their job well. They have paid the ghastly price for freedom. If that freedom be once again lost, as it was after the last war, the unforgivable blame will be ours, not theirs. So it is we the living who are to be dedicated and consecrated.
We dedicate ourselves, first, to live together in peace the way we fought and are buried in this war. Here lie men who loved America because their ancestors generations ago helped in her founding and other man who loved her with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers escaped from oppression to her blessed shores.
Here lie officers and men, Negroes and whites, rich and poor – together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith or despised him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many men from each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men there is no discrimination, no prejudices, no hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest Democracy.
Any man among us the living who fails to understand that will thereby betray those who lie here dead. Whoever of us lifts his hand in hate against a brother, or think himself superior to those who happen to be in the minority, makes of this ceremony and of the bloody sacrifice it commemorate an empty, hollow mockery.
To this, then as is our solemn, sacred duty, do we the living now dedicate ourselves to the right of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, of white men and Negroes alike, to enjoy the Democracy for which all of them here have paid the price.
To one thing more do we consecrate ourselves in memory of those who sleep beneath these white crosses and stars. We shall not foolishly suppose, as did the last generation of American’s fighting men, that victory on the battlefield will automatically guarantee the triumph of Democracy at home. This war with all its frightful heartache and suffering is but the beginning of our generation’s struggle for Democracy. When the last battle has been won, there will be those at home, as there was last time, who will want us to turn our backs in selfish isolation on the rest of organized humanity, and thus to sabotage the very peace for which we fight. We promise you who lie here: we will not do that! We will join hands with Britain, China, Russia, in peace, even as we have in war, to build the kind of world for which you died.
When the last shot has been fired, there will still be those eyes that are turned backwards not forward who will be satisfied with those wide extremes of poverty and wealth in which the seeds of another war can breed. We promise you our departed comrades, this too we will not permit. This war has been fought by the common man; its fruits of peace must be enjoyed by the common man. We promise, by all that is sacred and holy, that your sons, the sons of miners and millers, the sons of farmers and workers, will inherit from your death the right to living that is decent and secure.
When the final cross has been placed in the last cemetery, once again there will be those to whom profit is more important than peace, who will insist with the voice of sweet reasonableness and appeasement that it is better to trade with the enemies of mankind than, by crushing them, to lose their profit to you who sleep here silently, we give you our promise: we will not listen! We will not forget that some of you were burnt with oil that came from American wells, that many of you were killed by shells fashioned from America steel, we promise that when once again men seek profit at your expense, we shall remember how you looked when we placed you reverently, lovingly, in the ground.
Thus do we memorialize those who, having ceased living with us, now live within us. Thus do we consecrate ourselves, the living, to carry on the struggle they began. Too much blood has gone into this soil for us to let it lie barren. To much pain and heartache have fertilizes the earth on which we stand. We here solemnly swear: this shall not be in vain!
Out of this, from the suffering and sorrow of those who mourn, this will come – we promise – the birth of a new freedom from the sons of men everywhere.
Iwo Jima – 750 miles south of tokio
8 square miles – Garrisonned by 23,000 Jap troops
Casualties – 26,000
Dead – over 6,000
TRIBUTE TO "POPS"
**HANDWRITTEN EULOGY CAN BE COPIED**
COURTESY OF JIM REGOPOULOS
Suggested Viewing
In The Shadow Of Suribachi: Sammy’s Story. Free viewing at TheArchive.tv Sammy was assistant to Rabbi Gittelsohn and he describes his experience of being a Jew in the Marines in WWII. The Gittelsohn part starts at minute 23 but the entire film is worth viewing.
Suggested Reading
Here Am I – Harnessed to Hope by Roland B. Gittelsohn, published by Vantage Press Inc. 1988.
Pacifist TO PADRE, The World War II memoir of Chaplain Roland B. Gittelsohn, Edited by Donald M. Bishop, published by Marine Corps University Press, 2021. Free through Marine Corps University Press.
IN HONOR OF JOHN BASILONE
John Basilone was awarded the Metal Of Honor for action on Guadalcanal. He could have sat out the war selling War Bonds. Instead, he joined his fellow Marines on Iwo Jima and was killed in action on the second day of fighting. He received the Navy Cross for action on Iwo Jima. He was the only enlisted man in WWII to have earned both metals.
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