http://www.herald-review.com/articles/2007/07/13/news/local_news/1024927.txt

EFFINGHAM - Bill Genaust never met Marine Sgt. William Genaust, a distant relative who was killed on Iwo Jima, during one of the costliest campaigns of World War II.

As a 13-year-old boy living on a farm near Effingham without electricity, Genaust said he does not remember hearing about the battle for the small Japanese island in the Pacific at that time.

Like most Americans who lived through the war, Genaust recalled that he later saw the startling photograph of the five Marines and Navy corpsman raising a flag on Mount Suribachi, the former volcano overlooking a scene of unspeakable horror.

"It just was a patriotic symbol," said Genaust, a retired Illinois State Police records keeper and Air Force veteran. "It's a memory of the war."

But Genaust did not realize until years later that while Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal was shooting the picture that would come to symbolize U.S. military triumph and valor, a man bearing his name was right beside the photographer, recording the flag-raising with a movie camera.

On March 4, 1945, nine days after shooting the eight-and-a-quarter seconds of color film that was later shown in movie theaters throughout the nation, William Genaust was shot to death on the other side of the island by Japanese soldiers in a cave. U.S. soldiers later sealed the entrance to the cave. William Genaust, of the 28th Marine Regiment, was 38 years old when he was killed, leaving behind a wife to whom he wrote letters every day. The couple had no children.

His body has never been recovered.

Since discovering the family connection, Genaust has been compiling hundreds of documents and photographs about the fallen filmmaker. His determination to find every shred of information about William Genaust has contributed to an effort by a Pennsylvania businessman to recover his remains.

For the past two years, Bob Bolus, who owns a trucking company near Scranton, has been leading an effort to recover the remains of William Genaust for burial in Arlington National Cemetery. Bolus is credited for sparking the first U.S. expedition on the island since 1948. Iwo Jima, the first Japanese territory ever conquered by foreign troops, was returned to Japan in 1968.

More than 6,000 U.S. service members, mostly Marines, were killed on Iwo Jima. The Japanese lost 20,000 soldiers.

A seven-member team led by U.S. Army Maj. Sean Stinchon searched the island for 10 days in June. The team identified two caves on Hill 362A, on the north end of the island, in which William Genaust's remains might be found. Stinchon said the team will recommend that a larger party go in to excavate the caves.

Bolus, who has offered to use his own equipment to search for the filmmaker's body, said Genaust has helped him tremendously in his campaign.

"He had photos. He had everything," Bolus said. "It was all his information. He had letters and things that helped me understand who Sgt. Genaust was."

Bolus, inspired by a cover story on William Genaust in the Feb. 20, 2005, issue of Parade magazine, said it is important to him that he has the approval of William Genaust's family.

Bolus, who has visited the hill on Iwo Jima where William Genaust was killed, has relentlessly worked to contact officials of the U.S. and Japanese governments but has run into several roadblocks. The U.S. government prohibits private citizens from disinterring its military dead, especially in other countries.

The agency in charge of searching for those listed as missing in action is the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command, which is stretched thin searching for the remains of service members from the Vietnam and Korean wars, in addition to World War II.

While on the island last year, Bolus met the grandson of Gen. Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander of the 21,000 Japanese troops who defended Iwo Jima.

"I told him what we were doing there," Bolus said. "I asked for his help, and he said OK. He said he would help support it."

About 280 U.S. troops are listed as missing from the Iwo Jima campaign, which lasted five weeks.

Genaust discovered he was related to the Marine filmmaker about 13 years ago, after his son, a genealogy hobbyist, discovered that a branch of the family moved from the Effingham area to South Dakota at the end of the 19th century. Bill Genaust spoke with William Genaust's sister-in-law in Minneapolis and later obtained copies of letters from the Marine to his wife, who died in the 1980s.

Genaust's research led him to contact Tedd Thomey, a former Marine officer who met William Genaust on a ship en route to Iwo Jima. Thomey later wrote a book about William Genaust and Joe Rosenthal, "Immortal Images."

Thomey, who worked with Rosenthal as a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle after the war was shot in the foot on Iwo Jima. He was on an offshore hospital ship while 11 of his closest friends were being killed.

A supporter of the efforts to recover William Genaust's remains, Thomey is hopeful, because military dog tags were made to withstand the elements.

Thomey, author of 18 books and a Broadway play, said he was inspired to write his book on the images on Suribachi when Rosenthal was falsely accused of staging his picture.

"All of us knew that he did not stage the picture," Thomey said. "He happened to be lucky. It was Genaust's film that proved that his picture was not staged. One of the frames was a match for Rosenthal's picture.

"They happened to find a high point. While standing on a rock, they took their pictures, elbow to elbow. They did not know what they had. The film was delivered on little boats."

William Genaust only had enough film in his 16mm camera to shoot for a few seconds. But that was enough.

"That was the last of the film in his camera at that time," Thomey said. "And he caught it, and it was historic."

Huey Freeman can be reached at hfreeman@herald-review.com or 421-6985.