For 37 days, Bill Montgomery fought on the volcanic Japanese island known as Iwo Jima. After all these years, he still wonders how he survived - when most of the men in his unit did not.

“I never understood how I wasn’t hit. I feel guilt yet thankful, too.” 

Now 95, he can still see his distraught fellow Marines on the ground, “hands to their faces, sobbing their hearts out,” he says. “Their minds just snapped. A lot of us just got kind of numb, immune to any shock.”

Montgomery is one of the few Marines to endure the entire ordeal, which began February 19, 1945. Nearly 7,000 U.S. soldiers were killed and 20,000 wounded.

Today the battle is best known for the iconic image of five Marines and one Navy corpsman raising an American flag on Mount Suribachi, four days after the fighting began.  The U.S. Medal of Honor was given to 27 servicemen who fought in Iwo Jima, more than any other battle in U.S. history.