Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego has sat on the north shore of this bay since 1921. It is impossible to miss from the water: Spanish Colonial arcades designed by architect Bertram Goodhue — the same man behind Balboa Park's landmark buildings — pressed between the shoreline and Interstate 5, a campus that looks, from the outside, almost serene. During World War II alone, more than 222,000 recruits trained here before shipping to the Pacific. At peak wartime, 18,000 men arrived in a single month. The depot never slept. Marines graduated, crossed this bay, and boarded ships for islands whose names they often could not find on a map.
The 5th Marine Division landed on the black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, and sustained the highest casualty rate of the three Marine divisions engaged in that battle. On February 23, six Marines raised a flag on the summit of Mount Suribachi. A photographer named Joe Rosenthal pointed his camera at them and took the most reproduced photograph in history. Three of the six men in that image trained at the depot you can see from this deck — Ira Hayes, Harlon Block, and Franklin Sousley.
Ira Hamilton Hayes was born January 12, 1923, on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona — a Pima Indian who enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in August 1942 and completed recruit training here, on this shore. Then, in October 1942, he volunteered for something harder: Marine paratrooper training at Camp Gillespie, in the El Cajon Valley about twelve miles northeast of the city.
He earned his wings. He became the first Pima Indian in history to qualify as a Marine paratrooper. He fought at Bougainville — at the northwest end of the Solomons chain, then under Australian administration — where the Paramarines saw brutal combat in the jungle. When the parachute infantry was disbanded in 1944, he was reassigned to the 5th Marine Division and shipped west toward the next campaign.
On February 23, 1945, Hayes was one of the six men who raised the flag on Suribachi. He survived the battle. Three of the other five did not.
The photograph was on the front page of every major American newspaper within days. The three surviving flag raisers — Hayes among them — were pulled from the Pacific and sent on a war bond tour: stages, speeches, enormous crowds who wanted to touch the men in the picture. Hayes reportedly despised it. By his own account and those of the people around him, he felt the celebration belonged to the men still dying in the Pacific, not to him. He wanted to go back to his unit.
After the war, Hayes struggled with what we now understand as post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism. He was arrested dozens of times. He found no lasting peace. Peter LaFarge wrote a song about him. Johnny Cash sang it: Call him drunken Ira Hayes / He won't answer anymore / Not the whiskey-drinkin' Indian / Nor the Marine that went to war.
On January 24, 1955, Hayes was found near an abandoned adobe hut on the Gila River reservation. The coroner ruled exposure and alcohol poisoning. He was 32 years old.
San Diego trained Ira Hayes. This harbor was among the ports from which the ships of his war departed and to which the survivors returned. The photograph he is in was reproduced on 137 million postage stamps, cast in bronze as a national memorial, and has served for eighty years as the definitive image of American sacrifice in the Pacific. What it could not do was carry the weight for the men inside it — that weight stayed with them, unevenly distributed, for the rest of their lives.
JADA is a classic wooden yacht, built in Stockton in 1938 and sailing San Diego Bay for nearly twenty years. When she passes the recruit depot on the north shore — those red tile roofs, those Spanish arches, the parade deck where generations of Marines stood at attention before crossing this water to war — she is passing the forge where those men were made. The bay remembers more than it shows. Come out and see the shore where it all began.
Sources: Marine Corps University, "Corporal Ira Hamilton Hayes" (usmcu.edu/Research/Marine-Corps-History-Division/People/Whos-Who-in-Marine-Corps-History/Gagnon-Ingram/Corporal-Ira-Hamilton-Hayes/); Wikipedia, Ira Hayes (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Hayes); VA News, "Ira Hayes: Immortal Flag Raiser" (news.va.gov/68545/ira-hayes-immortal-flag-raiser-iwo-jima/); MCRD Museum Foundation, Marines in San Diego Timeline (mcrdmuseumfoundation.org/about-the-museum/marines-in-san-diego-timeline); Wikipedia, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_the_Flag_on_Iwo_Jima); Wikipedia, Harlon Block (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlon_Block); Wikipedia, Franklin Sousley (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Sousley).
Come sail the north shore of San Diego Bay aboard JADA, and look up at the depot where the forge is still burning.
Hear this story where it happened. JADA sails past this very spot. Join the San Diego Bay History Sail →
Wear the story. From the parade deck on the north shore to the summit of Suribachi — the forge is on this bay, and the men it made changed history. The The Forge shirt →