 I'm Greg Wilsbacher. I'm curator of news film and military collections at moving image research collections at the University of South Carolina. Since 2015, we have entered into a partnership with the History Division of the United States Marine Corps, digitizing over 10,000 films from the History Division's film library. Today we're going to look at a few of the films. They have recently been digitized. These are films that were shot on Iwo Jima in February and March of 1945. Sergeant William Gnauss was not a young man when he wrote into combat in February 1945. He was 38 going on 39. Throughout this sequence, we'll see what Bill Gnauss saw on Reels 4, 5, 6 and 7 of his 16 millimeter camera. Well, Gnauss is sitting in a landing vehicle track, which is that LVT, that vessel that we see the Marines in and that the camera runs in with the kind of tank treads running. We can see that Naval vessels kind of bombarding the shoreline and the island of Iwo Jima. They're trying to do a lot of things. They're trying to eliminate very specific installations that they know about. And they're also trying to destroy as many Japanese that are based on the coastline that the Marines are about ready to land on. Mount Sarabachi is an important target because it has large naval guns in it. Shortly after coming ashore, the other Marines around him are digging deeply into the soil to protect himself from shrapnel. And he will spend some time here on Green Beach filming successive waves as they land and the attempts of the Marines to kind of move off of the immediate shoreline and to kind of move across the island. 12 days after the landing on Green Beach, at this stage Gnauss is filmed for almost two weeks. The 28th Marines and the 5th Division with whom he's been fighting have been enduring significant casualties as they work their way up the west coast of the island. The opening of that sequence, Gnauss is focused on the the boots of dead Marines. And it's hard not to see that as a sense of weariness on the part of a cameraman and has begun to see a lot of death. We know probably on the third, D-plus 12, he's filming what is the provisional rocket brigade. The Marines here were deploying what was still a fairly kind of novel weapon from the Marine Corps, which were these mobile rocket launchers. They became very effective in combat, but they were also something that drew a lot of fire from the Japanese when they were used. And so Marines tried to avoid them once they started to shoot. So the Gnauss footage from March 3rd transitions to footage shot by a corporal, Atlee Tracy, who is somebody that was clearly a friend of Gnauss. But this is his work filming an armored assault when these are flamethrower tanks. They were called Zippo tanks. The Japanese fought principally from bunkers and caves and other positions that were well entrenched and engineered below ground. Sergeant Francis Cockrell of the Fifth Marine Division was a combat camera and assigned to initially to work with the Fifth Division's medical units. So Francis Cockrell is here filming at the Field Hospital for the Fifth Marine Division, which would have been the first step back from the front lines for treating casualties. This film doesn't begin with a slate. It's probably shot by Francis Cockrell as all the rest of the films associated with it on this particular reel all come from Francis Cockrell's camera. It's an important reel, I think, because it's shot on March 25th. And then this is 35 days of combat. The 28 Marines in the Fifth Division in general is already preparing to leave the island and will be gone from the island for all intents and purposes within 24 hours. You'll see Marines that are coming ashore with objects that they've picked up on the island, objects taken from Japanese officers that they've killed in combat. Those are the swords that they have over their shoulders sometimes are tucked in their packs. And they're picking up what matters to them in terms of their regular gear and moving on to these landing craft. And really, I mean, they're going to walk away from the island for good. This isn't like Europe where they might, you know, schedule or even imagine that they might come back to France or come see Germany. It's probably March 21st, the day of the dedication of the Fifth Division Cemetery. The elements of the Fifth Division all stopped by the Fifth Division Cemetery. It was their last opportunity to walk in quiet amongst the graves of the young men that they knew that died on the island, knowing at some level that those men would ultimately be returned to the United States and buried in other cemeteries and dispersed. This was the only time that they would all be together.