Letter from Iwo Jima: How US veteran's war souvenirs found their way home

As a 21-year-old US soldier fighting on the island of Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Second World War, he found them in the pocket of a fallen Japanese soldier and took them as a souvenir.

Until recently, he tried not to think about the battle, the photo and drawing. Then, a few years ago, at his wife's suggestion, he decided to try to give them back.

And for the girl in the photo and her sister, as he would discover, they meant the world.

Mr Hobbs, now 86, returned to Japan this week for the first time since the war and met one of the daughters whose life he changed by returning the items. Chie Takekawa had drawn the image of an air-raid drill Mr Hobbs found on her father - a man she barely knew and whose remains have never been found.

"As a child, I had always wondered when my father would come home from war," Ms Takekawa, 74, said yesterday with Mr Hobbs by her side. "I feel like he has actually come back after all these years. I am very grateful."

The story of the mementos almost ended on Mr Hobbs' wall. Mr Hobbs - himself orphaned as a boy - said he first found them in an envelope on a dead Japanese soldier lying outside a cave on Iwo Jima.

Then an US Army Signal Corps corporal, Mr Hobbs had just survived a gruelling battle on the beachhead, forced to live in a dugout, eating raw bacon with a buddy for three days. When the fighting had calmed enough, he was assigned to drive a truck to help set up communication lines. He was steering up a hill when he came upon several other Americans searching the bodies of three dead Japanese. One of the dead was 36-year-old Matsuji Takekawa.

"I saw the letter sticking out and I said, 'I don't want any swords or anything, but I think I'll take this.' I just picked it up, I suppose out of curiosity."

Mr Hobbs took it with him when Japan surrendered that August, after eight months on the island. He thought himself lucky to survive. The battle for Iwo Jima, which began on 19 February 1945, lasted more than a month, and claimed 6,821 US and 21,570 Japanese lives.

Finding out their loved ones' fates is rare for Japanese families. About 12,000 Japanese soldiers are still missing presumed dead, as are 218 Americans.

Japan's government is presently investigating two sites believed to be mass graves that may contain as many as 2,000 dead.But it could take months to collect the remains, with identification extremely difficult.

The battle for the tiny volcanic island of Iwo Jima became a symbol for the United States after the US flag was raised on its highest ground, Mount Suribachi. For Mr Hobbs, however, it was simply a killing field. "It was just death everywhere, and I hated it," he said. Mr Hobbs later graduated from Harvard Business School, married and raised a family. His wife framed the mementos and put them up in one of their son's rooms. Mr Hobbs never discussed his wartime feats.

"My kids didn't know what the drawing was; they thought maybe their mother had drawn it," he said. He later divorced and married second wife Marge. It was when she was going through his things at their home in Brookline, Massachusetts, that she noticed the mementos and suggested he try to return them. They contacted family friend, Reiko Wada, who could read the address on the envelope. He contacted the Japanese health ministry which keeps pension records and was able to find the family in the northern Japan city of Sanjo. To Mr Wada's surprise, the baby in the photo - Yoko Takekawa - was living in New Jersey, where she worked.

On a trip to Japan two years ago, Mr Wada turned the photo and drawing to officials, who delivered them to the older sister, Chie. She said they are now on the family altar, where she makes daily offerings of water - in her father's letters home, he often spoke of his thirst due to the lack of fresh water.

"It's hard to bring back the emotions that I felt when I first saw the letter," she said. "We were all amazed that this could happen. I was just so happy."