Staff Sergeant Alvin Joesphy Jr.'s voice from Iwo Jima is insistent, but collected. It rings through time with bell-like clarity.
"An American dive bombing attack is taking place just ahead of us on the Japanese who are holed up in the northern edges of the island," he narrates, as one of the most ferocious battles of WWII unfolds around him.
Joesphy was a military war correspondent during the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. His voice can be heard frequently in the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Recordings Collection – preserved by the Library of Congress. (The Library's meticulously researched page about the project and its approximately 1,500 recordings made by Marines given audio equipment can be found here.)
Some of the Iwo Jima recordings are so vivid, it sounds as if the war is playing out inside your brain, with sniper fire and bombardments frighteningly audible in the background. The battle resulted in the loss of more than 6,000 American and 22,000 Japanese lives.
"Hearing someone's voice talking about what's going on around them makes history living," says Patrick Midtlyng, head of the recorded sound section at the National Audiovisual Conservation Center in Culpepper, Va. It's part of the Library of Congress.
"Those are the stories that help provide the history of what's important for us to remember," he says. "There are facts and textbooks, but all of these things happen to people."
The U.S. Marine Corps Combat Recordings Collection includes interviews with infantrymen sounding dazed from combat, the ambient noise of battle preparation and music and sermons from church services. The recordings were initiated several years before the Battle of Iwo Jima, beginning in 1943, by the Library of Congress. Originally, they were intended to document soldiers' songs and the music of indigenous people in the Pacific Islands. (A few were recorded by future folk star Pete Seeger, then a young soldier stationed there.) The last recordings in the collection were made in 1945, and included audio from Saipan, Guam and Okinawa as well as Iwo Jima.
Many of the recordings in the collection were painstakingly restored by Nicholas Bergh. He runs Endpoint Audio Labs, a sound preservation company based in Burbank, Calif.
"Tape recording didn't come into use until after the war," Bergh notes. The entire collection was recorded either on Amertape filmstrip embossed with record grooves or on wire recorders developed by the Navy.
"Both of these machines could record upside down, bouncing in a jeep," Bergh says. He had to rebuild an entire machine to restore the Amertape. Restoring the wire recordings was easier, he said.
"Luckily, the fidelity can have a very good sound quality, especially for speech," Bergh says. "Often the problem with all these old recordings is, you know, low expectations of what is on them. But really, they can have a very engaging sound quality."
Like some others who worked on the collection, Bergh became especially fascinated with the life of Alvin Joesphy Jr., whose reporting makes up an essential part of it. The Marine Corps war correspondent ended up with a Bronze Star for "heroic achievement in action." After World War II, he worked as an editor at Time Magazine. Unhappy with its coverage of Native American affairs, he became a respected historian, who wrote hundreds of articles and books with a particular focus on Native American life. Joesphy was one of the founding trustees of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
He also volunteered at the Library of Congress helping to transfer the Marine Corps Combat Recordings Collection to new formats. He wanted to ensure the wartime experiences he documented would be saved for future ears, and inform future generations of Americans.
"I like to think that all of us were very committed to our jobs, to our duties, to our obligations," Joesphy said in an October 2000 interview with the magazine Naval History. "And I have no memory of anybody who let others down."
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