Owen Agenbroad Returns to Iwo Jima

DAYTON - On the morning of February 19, 1945, Owen Agenbroad was one of the Marines in the fifth wave of landing craft that hit the beaches on the island of Iwo Jima in the South Pacific. He was 21.

The battle of Iwo Jima lasted 36 days and was one of the deadliest of World War II. More than 10,000 American and Japanese servicemen died and hundreds of thousands were wounded.

This week, Agenbroad, now 90 and a long-time Dayton resident, is returning to Iwo Jima for the first time since the battle. He is part of the "Reunion of Honor" anniversary tour of 24 former Marines who are returning to the south Pacific this year to tour former World War II battle sites. They are honoring soldiers from both sides killed in the battle.

"I'll be back on Iwo exactly 69 years and one month after the invasion," Agenbroad said in an interview the day before he left.

Agenbroad was to fly to Guam over the weekend and spend a few days there, making a one-day trip to Iwo Jima Island on March 19. He will be home Saturday, the 22nd. His son, Steve, who lives in Othello, is accompanying his father on the trip.

Agenbroad's trip to Iwo Jima will be more than a nostalgic tour, however. He will be returning a souvenir he has kept for nearly 70 years to its rightful owner.

One day during the battle, as he was helping move a com­mand post closer to the front line, Agenbroad's group passed an abandoned gun emplacement and he saw a box with Japa­nese writing on it. It contained a soldier's straight razor and sharpening stone. He picked it up. "I thought, well, that's a nice souvenir," he said. He also picked up a small tin cup and a polished shell.

Fast forward to 2012. Agenbroad showed the razor to his friend, Roy Davis, who is a collector of straight-edge razors and communicates with other razor collectors on the internet. Davis sent photos of the razor and its Japanese inscriptions to a fellow razor collector in Japan, who translated the writing. The result was the name of the soldier, his military organi­Ken zation and the name of his commanding officer.

A few months later, two chaperones who traveled to Dayton with a group of students from Yamate- Gakuin High School in Ja­pan examined the razor. They corroborated the writ­ing and took photos back to the school's Vice-Principal, Ichiro Osawa. (Osawa was an exchange student in Day­ton in 1969, during the first exchange between the two schools.)

Through government connections, Osawa was able to locate the family of the soldier who owned the razor. (That soldier had died on Iwo Jima, leaving a young family.) The sol­dier's son is a retired school teacher and principal named Yoshikazu Higuichi.

On March 19, Agenbroad was to meet Mr. Higuichi on Iwo Jima Island and present him with the razor and stone that belonged to his father, near the site where it was found.

"I never thought I wanted to go back to Iwo," Agen­broad said last week. "But when I found out I could meet the son and return his father's razor, I knew I had to go."