Nobody Knew Who Was Playing: The Man Behind the Harmonica at Iwo Jima.

Legend has it that some of veterans veterans who survived the Pacific campaigns — the grinding island-by-island advance from Guadalcanal to Guam to Iwo Jima — remember hearing a harmonica. Not at any particular moment they could precisely identify. Just the sound of it, somewhere in the dark, between the landings and the mortar barrages and the long days of floating reserve on ships that smelled of diesel and men and salt water. A harmonica, playing marches and songs they knew. Nobody ever found out who was playing it.

The story of how I found him begins with a phone call from Tom Olsen, a photographer friend of mine in Hollywood, Florida. He told me about an old Marine who would show up for lunch at a nearby diner with his Canadian wife, regular as the tides. The rest, as they say, is history.

His name was William J. Eckert. He was born in Hamburg, Germany, on May 19, 1919. He had a harmonica in his pocket for most of his adult life. And he was there.

Hamburg to Parris Island

William Eckert arrived in the United States around April 20, 1928. He was nine years old. His father died when he was thirteen and he quit school. He went to sea as a ship's boy — the most direct available education in the realities of the world — and waited. When his mother became an American citizen, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on August 8, 1939. He was twenty years old. The war in Europe had begun the previous month. The war in the Pacific had not yet started, but its shape was already visible to anyone paying attention.

Eckert's motivation for enlisting was uncomplicated: he wanted to go to China. The Marines had a presence there, and China represented exactly the kind of distance from everything familiar that a young man who had already crossed the Atlantic once might find appealing. He got through boot camp at Parris Island and spent his first two years as assistant engineer on the Navy tugboat YT-132. By the end of those two years he had made up his mind: he had not joined the Marine Corps to operate a tugboat off the coast of South Carolina.

He requested a transfer. First choice: China. Second choice, with a certain philosophical resignation: New York Navy. Might as well go home if he wasn't going somewhere new. By the grace of God, he got New York Navy.

It is worth pausing on that grace. The Marines who were stationed in China at the time of Pearl Harbor were swept up in the Japanese advance across the Pacific. Many of them ended up in the Bataan Death March. Eckert's consolation prize — his fallback, his second choice — kept him alive for what was coming next.

Guadalcanal, Guam, and the Tin Fish

The Pacific campaign that Eckert eventually joined was among the most brutal sustained military operations in American history. The island-hopping strategy demanded that Marines take territory that had been fortified over years by an enemy who intended to hold it at any cost, on beaches and in jungles that offered no natural advantage to the attacker. Each island was its own world of particular horror.

On the way from Guadalcanal to Guam, Eckert's convoy was hit by a Japanese torpedo attack. The torpedo came in direct — heading straight for his vessel — and was intercepted by an LCI gunboat that took the impact instead. Twelve men on the LCI died. On Eckert's ship, which was carrying equipment and somewhere between three and four hundred men, everyone lived. He describes it with the matter-of-fact precision of a man who spent years thinking about it: twelve men sacrificed to save the rest.

The convoy also survived a kamikaze attack — fifteen suicide planes knocked down — and a subsequent alert of three unidentified aircraft, designated bogeys until they came close enough for visual identification. When one man opened fire, the entire convoy followed. That is what combat does to the nervous system: one trigger pull becomes a wildfire. The planes went down.

Then came the long, strange interlude of floating reserve. The great naval battle forming in the Philippine Sea — one of the largest and most consequential of the war, a confrontation that could have gone either way — pulled the high command's attention southward and left Eckert and his shipmates waiting aboard LST 447 for sixty-four days. Their captain, he recalls with a dry appreciation, resembled Captain Bligh of the Bounty in both appearance and temperament. They floated. They waited. They finally went to Guam.

The Sixth Wave at Guam

Eckert landed at Guam in the sixth wave with C Company, Third Amphibious Tractor Battalion. He had made two or three landings by that point — each one its own education in the arithmetic of survival.

One night on Guam he was assigned to deliver ammunition to a beachhead. His platoon sergeant declined to assign anyone directly to the task and instead made the men draw straws. Eckert drew the short one — or, as he puts it with characteristic understatement, the lucky one. He had always been lucky.

It was pitch black. He went to the designated beach, and while he was waiting the Japanese opened a mortar barrage. His buddy said: here they come. Eckert said: here I go — and jumped off the tractor into a foot of water. He found a machine gun position nearby, set up by another unit, and asked if he could come in. He had forgotten the password. By rights the men inside were obligated to shoot him. He asked anyway. No problem. He was in. The shells kept flying.

This is how the Pacific War was survived: by luck, by nerve, by the willingness to jump first and think second, and by the occasional mercy of strangers who decided, in the dark, to let you in without the password.

Iwo Jima

In late 1944 the U.S. high command decided that Iwo Jima had to be taken. The island was a fortress — a volcanic outcrop eight square miles in area, covered in concrete bunkers and underground tunnels, defended by roughly 21,000 Japanese troops under orders to fight to the last man. The Marine Corps would lose nearly 7,000 men taking it. Nearly 20,000 more would be wounded.

For the assault, Eckert had moved from the tractor group to ordnance. He spent the first three days of the landing aboard LST 70, a Coast Guard vessel operating under Navy command — as the Coast Guard did in wartime. His battalion was running landing craft: taking troops in, bringing the wounded out, managing the logistics of a battle that consumed men and material at a rate that required constant, grinding resupply.

On the second or third day, standing on the beach, he looked toward Mount Suribachi — the volcanic peak at the island's southern tip that commanded the entire landscape. He saw men moving up the side of the mountain, carrying something he initially took for a Bangalore torpedo, an explosive charge used to blow open fortified caves. He kept watching. And then the flag went up.

He saw it happen. He watched the flag rise over Suribachi in real time, from the beach below. And when it went up, a roar went across the entire island — from every man on every beach, from the ships offshore, from the landing craft in the water. A sound that he carried for the rest of his life.

The Harmonica

His father bought him a twenty-five cent harmonica when he was about ten years old. He had a good ear. He started picking out notes, learning easy songs, then harder ones. By the time he enlisted he could play Irish songs, German songs, Italian songs, American standards — if he knew the song, he could put it together. He kept a harmonica in his pocket through boot camp, through the tugboat years, through the Pacific.

In the evenings, between the landings, in the darkness between one island and the next, he played. People gathered and sang. It is the oldest human response to fear and waiting: make music, find company, remind yourself that there is something on the other side of all this.

Veterans from the Pacific campaigns — men who had been on those same ships, those same beaches — have said over the years that they remember hearing a harmonica. Somewhere in the dark. Playing songs they knew. They never found out who it was. Now they know.

A Diner in Hollywood, Florida

I found William Eckert because my friend Tom Olsen, a photographer in Hollywood, Florida, told me about an old Marine who came to lunch at a nearby diner with his Canadian wife. Regular as clockwork. A man with stories.

Olsen was right, as photographers usually are about what is worth looking at. Eckert sat across from the camera and gave us everything: Hamburg and Parris Island and the tin fish heading straight for the ship and the straw he drew in the dark and the password he forgot and the flag going up over Suribachi and the roar that followed it and the harmonica in his pocket through all of it.

He was not a famous man. He did not appear in the history books. He was one of the men the history books were about — one of the hundreds of thousands who were there, who did the work, who survived or didn't, and who mostly went home and had lunch at diners and kept their stories in their pockets like harmonicas, waiting for someone to ask.

We asked. He played.

The Harp of Iwo Jima is a film by Eduardo Montes-Bradley, produced by Heritage Film Project. Available on YourTube.