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“No, I did not fear death... My primary concern was that I did not want to disappoint my father.”
Fredericksburg, Texas, March 2003
Dear Friends:
United States Marine Bill Henderson was just twenty-three years old when he crawled upon the blood-drenched beaches of Iwo Jima on D-Day. Over the course of the Second World War, he would survive some of the bloodiest conflicts dished up in the Pacific theater including Saipan
and Tarawa. But nothing compared to the experience on Iwo. Providence decreed that he would survive the horror of the beach, the agony of seeing friend after friend mowed down or literally cut in half, the screaming Bonsai charges, the never-ending month of entrenched warfare, and much more. Most would not have so favorable an outcome. Of the 1,200-plus men in the unit Bill Henderson helped to lead, more than eighty percent would become
casualties in the first day.
Today, Colonel Henderson is an eighty-two-year-old home school grandfather and shepherd of a house assembly. For more than half a century he has remained silent about his experience on Iwo Jima, the conflicts he endured, and the friends he left behind. Like many of the men of his generation, the memories were just too painful to recount. You grow closer than brothers with the men around you when you have to trust each other for daily survival, when you live day and night in a foxhole with enemy mortar raining in around you — and you don’t know which of your comrades will be with you in the morning. It is a terrible thing to hold the hand of a dying friend who is literally missing half of his body and has but seconds left to live. But this was an everyday experience on Iwo. It was a reality of which Bill Henderson has not spoken since, but a reality he can never forget.
For only the second time in nearly sixty years, Colonel Henderson has agreed to speak about the living nightmare which was the battle for Iwo Jima. He has agreed to speak because he now believes he is obligated to do so by the directive of Holy Scripture which compels fathers to communicate the great deeds of God to their children’s children (Psalm 78). For two days, I sat with Colonel Henderson and conducted an interview while the video cameras rolled. For me and the camera crew, it was an emotionally-charged and handkerchief intensive experience we will never forget. His testimony is part of the new feature film by Vision Forum entitled
The Faith of Our Fathers, to be released this fall.
Bill Henderson would go on to become the official Marines historian for the battle of Iwo Jima. He also had the honor of reporting to his captain the successful raising of the American flag on Mt. Sarabachi by the men of his unit. That flag and the image of those courageous men remains forever etched into our national consciousness through the photograph and monument which record and honor the heroism of the men who placed it there.
But Bill Henderson does not want to be remembered as a hero. He significantly downplays his role in all of these events. As he puts it: “I don’t want to appear to be something that I am not.”
Today, he prefers to talk about matters far dearer to him than his own tales of heroism and valor. Today, he wants to talk about his father, a Christian pastor who loved him and taught him what it meant to be a man. After all, it was his father who prepared him for the defining experience in his life as a soldier. Decades have passed now since his father’s death, and even more since Iwo Jima, but the memory of his father’s love is so powerful that he recollects with tenderness and tears as if it had been but yesterday.
“My father was the manliest man I ever met,” says Bill Henderson. His appreciation for his father is all the more evident when I asked him about his fears upon hitting the beach on Iwo Jima and the many other military engagements he endured: “No, I did not fear death,” Henderson explained. “My primary concern was that I did not want to disappoint my father.”
Most remarkable is Colonel Henderson’s discussion of his father’s influence on his own ability to remain chaste while overseas. In a day and age when untold numbers of servicemen thought nothing of visiting “comfort houses” during their stays in the major cities of the South Pacific, Henderson maintained his purity. “I burned with lust like other men,” Henderson explains, but the memory of the relationship between his Christian father and mother prevented him from joining his fellow soldiers. In some cases, he actually followed his comrades with the goal of persuading the prostitutes to give up their profession and preserve “God’s sacred gift.” In two instances he was successful, which resulted in the local “madams” banning him from going near their establishment.
After more than fifty years of marriage to his bride, Bill Henderson looks back and is thankful for the father whose Christian testimony gave a son the strength to survive both the trials and temptations of a time when he, and tens of thousands like him, was forced to face the greatest living nightmare this side of Hell.
IN PRODUCTION: ‘THE FAITH OF OUR FATHERS’
We live in a generation of absentee fathers and generational discontinuity. Not so for Bill Henderson and many of the men of his era. They learned firsthand that the faith of their fathers established the heroism of the sons.
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Ret. Col. Bill Henderson in Footage
from Vision Forum’s Upcoming Film, The Faith of Our Fathers |
This year, Vision Forum is traveling around the country and interviewing some of the remaining survivors of the Second World War. The common denominator of the men of our film,
The Faith of Our Fathers, is that they are all passionate Christians in their eighties and nineties. They are all men whose hearts have been turned to home. Most are home school grandfathers and all are men who have recently embraced a vision to share the story of God’s providence and their own fathers’ faithfulness. Their stories must be told and it is our vision to tell them.
WATCH the TRAILER If you do nothing else today, please download the trailer of our new feature film
The Faith of Our Fathers to hear segments of Bill Henderson’s remarkable testimony. Take out the tissues and download. You won’t regret it.
Click here.
MEMORIAL DAY
Scott Brown is a man with a vision. A home schooling father, local church shepherd, and Vision Forum Ministries board member, Scott has a passion for honoring the faithful fathers who lived and died for the freedoms of this generation. The story of his own father, a WWII fighter pilot shot down over Tokyo, was featured in the Vision Forum catalog in 2001. This year, Scott is opening up his North Carolina ranch for a special Memorial Day celebration to honor the remaining veterans of World War II and the subsequent American wars. The event is open to the public and free of charge. Dr. Paige Patterson and I will have the great honor of addressing the veterans. Dr. Patterson, who serves as President of Southeastern Baptist Seminary, is not only a theologian but a world-class big game hunter and outspoken advocate for biblical manhood. Together, we hope to encourage these men with messages designed to communicate how the vision, heroism, and leadership of the fathers of one generation becomes the legacy and mission of the next generation.
For more information, please visit the Vision Forum Ministries Web site by clicking
here.
For fatherhood, family, faith, and freedom, I am,
Your Friend,
Doug Phillips
President, Vision Forum, Inc.
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