Family remembers father on Battle of Iwo Jima anniversary

Published 8:00 am Saturday, February 19, 2022

Darrell Hall had not been born when his father, the late Forrest Leon Hall, fought in the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II. Seventy-seven years ago today, on Feb. 19, 1945, U.S. Marines scrapped out a toehold on Iwo and began a strategically momentous campaign that lasted 36 days and freed up room in the skies for Army Air Corps bombers.

Forrest Hall, a native of Murray County who grew up in Tilton and the Threadmill Village of South Dalton, also fought on the island of Guadalcanal in 1942 and later on Bougainville. He was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts during the U.S. military’s Pacific Campaign against the Japanese.

“My dad had a struggle with ‘the blank stare’ as they called it back then, they call it PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) now,” Darrell Hall noted. “He was very humble, and to my knowledge he didn’t open up to anyone but me. It might be because of my experience (fighting) in Vietnam.”

Darrell Hall said on one occasion his father let four Japanese soldiers get within 20 feet of him and then “sprayed them” with a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle).

“He killed them, but one of them got off a hand grenade as he was falling down. He got some shrapnel off that one,” said Darrell Hall.

The encounter is included in a 1945 book, “The U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima” by Capt. Raymond Henri. Darrell Hall said the mention in the book helped his father get disability from the military, and added that records show his father received three Purple Hearts. However, the facility where the records were stored in St. Louis, Missouri, was destroyed by fire.

“They called him PFC Dalton,” Darrell Hall said of his father’s fellow Marines. “He loved his hometown, he loved Dalton — and that was his nickname.”

Forrest Hall’s daughter, Debbie Barnes, recalled her father “never shared a lot with me” because of the horrors of war he witnessed and experienced. Forrest Hall was born in 1925 in the Bracketts Ridge section of Murray County, but soon moved across the Conasauga River to Tilton with his family. He attended elementary school where the Whitfield County Board of Education building is now near the Threadmill community.

“He joined the Army first. He went in at age 15 with his mother signing for him,” she said. “He was on a survey crew for the Corps of Engineers that was building the Alaska Highway. They went hunting and fishing all day and brought back meat that served the crew. He loved to hunt and fish, but the story goes that when it got cold he called Momma to get him out of there.”

Debbie’s husband, Richard “Dickie” Barnes, said his father-in-law was “staged for the invasion of Japan” along with thousands of other U.S. troops after the island campaigns, but two atomic bomb blasts ended the war.

“My Uncle Virgil (Hilbert) was drafted when he was 36 and was also in the Marines, and was at Iwo the same time Debbie’s daddy was there,” he said. “Uncle Virgil actually hid under other dead Marines in foxholes on Iwo. The (Japanese) would overrun them, and were stabbing them to make sure everyone was dead, but they missed him. Otherwise, he’d have been killed. My grandfather Etheridge Miles — he and my uncle were brothers-in-law — was also drafted into the Army Air Corps at the same time at age 36 when the war broke out, but went to Hickam Field in Hawaii to work on the air frames of airplanes.”

Debbie Barnes said when she asked her father about the legendary raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima, he told her he landed a day or two after it occurred.

“They were cleaning it out,” Dickie Barnes said Forrest Hall told him of the mop-up operation. “He talked about the flamethrowers they used burning the (Japanese) out of the caves and stuff like that. He said in your unit somebody usually had to carry the BAR, and that guy usually got hit first because the (Japanese) wanted to take him out. He said he would grab the BAR at that point. He said he didn’t want to carry one all the time because you were a target, but he would usually pick it up because of the firepower it had.”

Forrest Hall revealed another incident to his son-in-law during the island-hopping assaults.

“It was on Guadalcanal or Bougainville, I can’t remember which,” Dickie Barnes said. “Forrest told me he ran smack into a (Japanese) on a trail. and they were both like ‘Uh-oh!’ and took off in different directions.”

“Daddy had a lot of those war memories, and said it affected him so much because of some of the stuff he saw,” Debbie Barnes recalled of her father, who died in 1991. “But he was very proud to march in the Dalton Veterans Day Parade. It was something he truly enjoyed.”