Despite the risk, the astounding casualties, and the knowledge that they were liable to die at any moment, Marines kept going. There are any number of possible reasons for this doggedly irrational behavior. A sense of comradeship with others in the unit, love of country, a desire to test one’s mettle, of course, but on Iwo the grinding, lengthy nature of the battle argues against any of these as a primary cause. A more profitable avenue to explore is Marines’ conquest of fear and their related discovery that, notwithstanding its hellish, thrilling, or grotesque aspects, war is best treated as a job, one that needs to get done to get home. Once a Marine grasped that war is work—unpleasant, unfair, and unwelcome work, but work nonetheless—he could begin to adapt, rather than succumb, to Iwo’s idiosyncratic battlefield conditions and accept its necessarily harsh realities.
Everyone was always scared on Iwo, but fear subsisted for the most part as a constant, cumulative, corrosive feeling that bred a “bad memory, inability to concentrate, a demanding appetite for liquor, a short temper, a body that tires quickly, a weary, soul-deep resignation.” Men learned to tamp it down and could outwardly appear calm, controlled, and mentally alert—yet the unceasing, low-grade sense of fear chewed “into your body and into your mind like a cancer beyond cure,” as one Marine put it.1
There was no shame on Iwo at being scared. Indeed, as Francis Cockrel wrote, “It was a familiar, almost a friendly topic; it was the stuff guys bragged about to each other—how full of it they were, this time or that.”2 Everyone knew that a breakdown could happen to anyone. On Iwo, it was a “constant inner battle,” said a Marine who had fought at Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian, “to maintain some semblance of sanity, clarity of mind, and power of speech. Everyone tells me they felt as I did.”3
But when fear finally hit full on, there was no mistaking it. Left beyond the lines and believing that he had been forgotten about, Allen Matthews “shivered violently and the shivering was different from anything I had ever experienced at night for I shook not only with the muscles in my legs and arms and fingers and neck but I trembled violently internally, too, and my stomach at the base of my ribs felt as if it were suffering from a great tic; it was caught first in a mighty hand which squeezed so violently that my breath caught and then the spasms eased off gradually, only to clutch me angrily again.”4
The first time a soldier experienced this type of deep fear, he tended to freeze. There were several ways in which a soldier could break the paralysis. First, he could relax and then will himself into action. At one point, Jay Rebstock suddenly stopped and became unbearably thirsty. “Scared shitless,” he “could not move, and I drank almost an entire canteen of water, and only then did my legs move forward.”5 To prevent freezing in the first place, when he detected the clammy claw of fear Bertrand Yaffe would repeat, “If I can just get though the next ten minutes, I’ll be all right. Just a few minutes!” while Jim Craig confirmed every couple of seconds that “I’m still alive and okay.”6 On Iwo, as at Bunker Hill and Gettysburg, stopping meant death.
Alternately, a paralyzed man could be chivvied or embarrassed into action. When Gerald Averill found a sergeant prostrate in the sand, he managed to break fear’s narcotic spell “with a little sweet talk, and some more with considerable sting to it.”7 This technique did not always work. When another sergeant visited Averill’s foxhole and confided that he was liable to crack, he tried to console the man by telling him he “must do his duty,” but the effect was only temporary. The ruined sergeant was evacuated two days later.8
Or third, he could think of home and his earnest desire to return to it. Matthews recovered his mental footing only after he “thought of my family and that was painful. I tried to put the thought aside but could not and they were with me as clearly as if they sat there in the flesh. I knew then more keenly than I’d ever felt before that I did not want to die.”9
As their forebears had similarly discovered in 1775 and 1863, the best way to keep fear in its box was to keep yourself engaged in your immediate task. William Doran advised that when “you’re so busy, and things are happening so fast, you’re disconnected from the fear.”10 For Woody Williams, “I had a job to do, and I suppose I got so wrapped up in it I didn’t have time to think.”11 Charles Chandler, a corpsman, controlled his nerves by “detach[ing] myself and focus[ing] on what I was doing and then when I was through with that something else would come up and I would pass on to that. Later you start thinking about it, but at the time you don’t have the luxury of doing that.”12 Conversely, Francis Cockrel’s worst moments on Iwo came when “I had to lie still for a time, and shells were landing not very far off. I had time to think then: ‘Maybe the next one will come here.’ ” But he managed to fight off mounting apprehensions by occupying his mind trying to work out how to storm a nearby pillbox. Thinking through the problem, Cockrel said, ate up the “time to think about what might happen to you. When known risk is involved, you balance it against the … importance of the pillbox; but you don’t paw it around with your emotions.”13
It was best to focus solely on what needed to be done, not on what might happen. Thanks to his training, Wayne Bellamy already knew what was required to achieve his unit’s objectives for the day, so he just “automatically” went ahead with his task.14 It was often easier, or rather simpler, than even that. “Whatever they wanted you just did,” remembered Domenick Tutalo, a replacement who was initially terrified but succeeding in controlling himself.15 Likewise, Al Abbatiello was scared but “did what I was told to do, and I did it when I was told to do it.”16
When everyone “did what they were told to do” or “did what they were trained to do,” order arose from chaos, persuading scared waverers that events were under control, madness had not triumphed, and death not imminent. Fred Haynes observed that by mid-afternoon of the first day, for instance, even the beach landing zone had slowly begun to transform into a sane place. Marines “were adapting, finding ways to put together fire teams, taking care of the wounded and dead.… In general, we were sorting ourselves out and getting on with the business at hand. Somehow, amid the mayhem, little pockets of order and purpose emerged.”17
Indeed, the key to taming fear, the solution to achieving victory, was to realize, individually and collectively, that fighting is a job. To keep your balance you cannot cast your mind back and wonder why you volunteered, complain that others get to stay at home, or question whether you should have left your family. “You see, you can’t live in that world, at home,” explained Joseph Kropf. “Don’t ever live in that world. You’ve got to live in the world of ‘This is my job.’ ”18 A soldier should never confuse war with “heroics and dramatics, of dash and spectacle,” advised Francis Cockrel. While there are “periods of urgency, certainly, demanding the right decision, made instantly, and split-second timing and desperate effort,” they are but parts of a whole “and the whole is no more or less than dangerous drudgery—mean, exhausting work at which men get shot and blown apart.”19
The “work” had to be executed as efficiently and as effectively as possible to reduce casualties and shorten the time needed to conquer the island. As David Severance put it, “We knew that as soon as we covered all the real estate, they were gonna pull us out. It was just a matter of pushing, trying to get up to the north end.”20 Marines quickly adapted to the necessity of fighting a ruthless battle of annihilation against an equally ruthless enemy. In short order, they waged a war where no quarter was given, asked, or expected.
No act was ruled out of bounds so long as it brought the Marine Corps closer to victory. William Doran, for instance, was amused when a raw lieutenant rebuked him for fashioning dum-dum bullets for his .45 pistol. They were forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, he admonished. Doran, a veteran of several Pacific landings, promised the officer that “we’ll have a little discussion about the Geneva Convention[s] and what’s right and what’s wrong in a war. Well, we never had that discussion.”21
Emotions were fatally tangential to achievement of the objective. Like many others, Patrick Caruso occasionally came eye to eye with a Japanese trying to kill him, and “you [would] freeze for a brief moment, then the adrenaline flows and you quickly try to get him before he gets you. This soon becomes instinctive.”22 When Joseph Kropf found a wounded Japanese soldier, his lieutenant directed him to execute the man. “So I had to bayonet him. And that’s not a nice feeling. You know how you have to bayonet. It’s cruel, and you see the blood gushing out, and you see the eyes. That’s when you say, That could be me.”
In these situations, Marines distinguished between the code of “kill or be killed,” which was eminently rational, and “the lust to kill,” which was a dangerous sign of mental turmoil.23 The relative lack of primeval emotion or outright hate or bloodthirsty desire for revenge on Iwo is striking. Marines spoke instead of “numbing” themselves in order to perform their job of taking the island. Luther Crabtree was surprised to find that “I didn’t have any anger throughout that entire battle; I was numb. As I look back on that, I think I was so well trained that I just did my job.” (Crabtree’s calmness is all the more remarkable considering that on February 26 he came across the corpse of his brother, shot in the head by a sniper.)24 Within only a few days of landing, Charles Lindberg discovered that “I didn’t have any feelings. You’d burn them because they’d do it to us.… I was numb; just doing my job.”25 Howard Baxter, similarly, thought that the best way of staying alive was to “shut down your emotional system,” quash any feelings you might have, and “get the job done.”26
American behavior on Iwo, among other places, has nevertheless been attributed to individual and institutional racism against the Japanese: The Pacific enemy was treated far more barbarically than his Atlantic counterpart, because Germans (and Italians) were white and the Japanese were not.27 Certainly, there was endemic and casual racism among American troops and society (particularly toward blacks), but one could say the same of virtually any country or nation at the time, at least by modern standards, and the American version of racism, despite its noxiousness, was a far cry from the annihilationist style practiced elsewhere. In any case, that one race or another was intellectually, phys ically, and aesthetically superior to others was an evident and universal “truth” taken for granted before 1945 among even the most enlightened citizens of the world. It was a vestige of the “scientific” racism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and we should not be surprised to find it subsisting among members of the United States Marine Corps. Wartime propaganda depicting the Japanese as termites, bats, rats, monkeys, and the like can be dismissed as just that; how seriously it was taken is open to question.
The free use of flamethrowers, the implacable liquidation of Japanese forces, the mass machine-gunnings, the burial of live men in caves—the exterminationist acts so frequently invoked to demonstrate that Pacific combat was allegedly motivated by a racist urge to rid the world of the Nipponese pestilence—were in fact arguably practical, or instrumental, reactions to the particular conditions pertaining on Iwo Jima. Flamethrowers were used because they were found to work spectacularly well, not because the Japanese were ideologically regarded as a lower race than the white Germans.
Indeed, in the 1930s, American military analysts had not treated the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) as an “alien” menace whose personnel existed outside the conventional laws of war and thus could be exterminated like vermin. They instead assumed that the IJA was part of a shared, “civilized” military culture and so naturally dissected its capabilities along the same lines as they did its German and Italian equivalents. By those conventional measures, the IJA fell particularly short. It possessed few tanks, aircraft, artillery pieces, and heavy machine guns—then considered the weapons of the future—and lacked any discernible skill in combined air-sea-land operations—then considered the epitome of martial progress. It was a generation, if not more, behind and something of a joke force, much as the Habsburg Austrian army had existed in the nineteenth century only to be beaten.28 Even Japan’s soldiers were ridiculed as being better suited to some medieval peasant army. In the U.S. armed forces, beards were forbidden and shaving compulsory; boots were polished; uniforms starched. In the peacetime IJA, in contrast, except when they donned dress uniforms for ceremonial duties, men and officers alike went unshaven for days, had dull buttons, dirty boots, ill-fitting trousers, and patched elbows.29 Any number of military analysts confused their relaxed slovenliness with lack of discipline and absence of ability.30
Where the IJA crucially erred, all agreed, was in relying so heavily on infantry, the stodgy combat arm effortlessly overshadowed by the silvery glamour of air forces and the globe-spanning might of navies. It was assumed that Japan, if it came to war, would quickly collapse once the Marines took the outlying Pacific islands and the U.S. Navy sunk its fleet. Any lingering apprehensions of the Japanese army were laid to rest in 1939 at the battle of Nomonhan (sometimes known as Khalkhin Gol).
Unlike Britain, the United States, France, and Germany, which had advanced along a steep learning curve on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, Japan had never fought a first-rank power, only Tsarist Russia and Imperial China. At Nomonhan, that lack of experience became obvious when the IJA was crushed by the Soviet army, itself a force accorded little credit by Western military experts. Put bluntly, regarding Japan’s performance at Nomonhan, it is difficult to think of a battle more incompetently fought, of operations more disastrously executed, of plans more obtusely pursued, of armies more ineptly commanded. Japanese generals displayed, for instance, a bizarre obsession with protecting their regimental colors, a necessity in the nineteenth century to ensure unit cohesion and coordination but an affectation in an era of camouflage, radio communication, and integrated armored, air, artillery, and logistics arms.31 Worryingly, it was not as if Nomonhan was a fluke, a onetime failure by an otherwise sterling force. Throughout Japan’s campaigns in China during the 1930s, foreign observers reported that despite winning in the end the IJA consistently struggled against its much weaker opponent.32
Informing many of these analyses, of course, was an implicit assumption that an Asian army could not possibly compete with a white Western one. One observer reassured readers that “Japanese officers are technically less sound than ours” and that while they possessed “magnificent ‘nerve’ and fighting ardor,” there was little to worry about. After all, a Japanese’s “weakness consists of his failing to remain master of combat,” for “his courage and conception of honor are far more inspired by … passion than by a real and realistic understanding of the necessities of the craft of arms.” American and European officers, in contrast, were rational, masculine, and disciplined—making them more than a match, if it came down to it, for any Japanese soldier, whose “feminine and emotional quality” typically made them “lose control of their nerves.”33 One should not forget either the curious image many Americans had of the Japanese physique before the war. Bucktoothed, compact, and bespectacled—on top of being feminine and emotional—the Imperial Japanese Army simply was impossible to take seriously.
To reiterate, despite these patronizing remarks (typical of the time as regards foreigners of various creeds and hues), the role that outright racism played in American and European evaluations of the IJA was nevertheless minor. The dismissal of Japanese capabilities before the war was partly due to a more prosaic combination of a lack of analysts trained in Japanese—before 1941 there were at most a dozen U.S. Army and Navy intelligence officers capable of making informed evaluations—as well as to Tokyo’s habitual secrecy and its impressively effective security police.34 But the real reason Japan was judged, disastrously, not to be a potentially formidable antagonist in the Pacific is that in order to fill the gaps in their knowledge, American analysts had erred in assessing Japan on the basis of their own yardsticks of progress—a terrible blunder when Japan had already shed its once-shared military culture.
To Americans, Japan’s unmodern reliance on infantry was ipso facto a deplorable weakness, but to the Japanese, it was a strength. Mass-producing modern armaments required a powerful industrial economy, which they lacked, whereas men would be trained along the mystical lines of such martial values as bushidõ—the warrior’s code emphasizing loyalty, duty, sacrifice, courage, and strength—to multiply their striking force, aggression, and speed. If the entire Japanese economy could produce just 47,900 motor vehicles of all classes in 1941—its peak—and the United States that same year manufactured 3.5 million cars, well, then, the Japanese could excel in lightning-fast surprise infantry attacks executed at night with a suicidally “offensive spirit.” The Amer icans might enjoy overwhelming logistical superiority, matchless heavy weaponry, and advanced technology, but the IJA played to its strengths by marching on a bowl of rice a day, traveling with nothing more burdensome than light machine guns, grenades, and portable mortars, and being second to none in unconventional hand-to-hand combat.35
Japanese propaganda trumpeted the superiority of the spiritual approach to warfare. Soldiers and the civilian population alike were taught that bushidõ was an ancient tradition unique to Nippon, as was worship of the emperor and the glory of self-sacrifice for the greater good of the nation. But really none of this was true: Bushidõ dated from the seventeenth century—hardly “ancient”—and in most respects was almost indistinguishable from traditional Western, even universal, military or chivalric ideals. In any case, the code had long been in abeyance and only in the mid-1920s was it revived, debased, and radicalized for nationalist and imperialist purposes. Conscripts and officers were brainwashed through harsh discipline and rigorous indoctrination into believing that surrender was disgraceful, that lesser breeds must be brutalized, and that fighting to the death was idyllic.
The sea change in cultural attitudes manifested itself most forcefully in the treatment of prisoners of war. In contrast to their despicable behavior in World War II, before the 1930s Japanese soldiers had treated the prisoners they had taken well. Indeed, they used to themselves surrender with nary a complaint, yet by the end of that decade we find nothing but adulation for a Major Kuga Nobura, who had been taken by the Chinese at Shanghai after being wounded. When he was released from captivity, he immediately returned to the battlefield site of his ignominious and unwilling surrender and committed suicide to erase the shame. For this act, all seven Japanese movie companies produced stirring films about his death.36
Just as Americans underestimated (or perhaps, “misestimated”) Japanese skills before the war, in the months following the surprise walloping at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 they swung wildly to the opposite extreme as they watched a mere eleven Japanese divisions conquer Southeast Asia. Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma—all were subdued by their invin cible armies. Allied troops, repeatedly surprised and outflanked by the nimble Japanese, conjured up for the public a pessimistic image of the enemy as fanatical “supermen” brilliantly adept at jungle and island warfare—and seemingly unstoppable, thanks to the very same intangible and “ancient” martial qualities once considered quaintly premodern.37 Thankfully, the reverses at Guadalcanal and New Guinea by the start of 1943 tempered this depressing reaction, and a more realistic evaluation of the enemy ensued.
Analysts began taking a harder and closer look at the Imperial Army’s inflated reputation for invincibility. As a February 1943 intelligence report reminded readers, “With more than a year of war behind us and with experience gained in fighting … we can begin to see how much we have misunderstood the [Japanese].”38
Before the war, the Japanese had been dismissed; after Pearl Harbor, feared. Now, arrogance and terror were replaced by a practical determination to understand this savage and curious foe properly. The acquisition of solid intelligence on IJA doctrine, tactics, and soldiers thus became of prime concern. Rather fortunately, as the Americans assaulted the outer rim of Japan’s empire in 1943 they stumbled upon troves of material. Since every Marine and soldier was instructed to bring in any letter, diary, map, or order they found during the fighting (all of which was passed diligently to intelligence specialists), more than 350,000 documents would fall into American hands by the end of the war. Much of the material was invaluable, a result of Japanese High Command’s blithe belief that the Americans still lacked translators combined with the IJA’s obsession with recording everything in writing and officers’ oddly optimistic reluctance to empty their pockets of sensitive memoranda before embarking on suicidal banzai missions.39
Over the course of 1943 and 1944, thanks to regular bulletins put out by various intelligence bodies summarizing the latest Japanese techniques and a wholesale reorientation of the training system to take account of these findings, American troops became remarkably familiar with Japanese tactics, habits, and tricks. It is important to remember that this transformation was happening at precisely the same time as “race war” rhetoric was heating up among the American public as once-classified news of Japanese atrocities (such as the execution of captured Doolittle Raid fliers, the Bataan Death March, and the famous photograph of an Australian, Leonard Siffleet, being beheaded by a Japanese officer) was released by Allied governments.40 While the latter resulted in a lot of chest-puffing at home about mercilessly terminating the Japanese, soldiers—the ones who had actually been in combat—ignored all the brave talk in favor of practical, concrete, and efficient methods of killing the enemy.
Once so feared, Japanese jungle-warfare tactics, for instance, were revealed as being essentially the same as those printed in the U.S. Army’s basic manual on the subject. Another crucial finding was that Japanese officers were instilled with a credo of blind obedience, remained inflexible, lacked initiative, and consistently underrated their American opponents. If they were killed, sergeants and corporals were reluctant to assume command, and their units tended to collapse into an unthinking mass defaulting to an all-out banzai charge to exhibit the appropriate degree of self-sacrificing spiritual firmness. The enemy, in other words, was discovered to be predictable, the Achilles heel of any armed force.41
In response, the Americans adapted their tactics to counter those of the Japanese. The purpose of many small-scale infiltration attacks, it was discovered, was actually to send individuals to probe the strength and location of American defenses before the main force attacked en masse. Whereas the Americans had been employing the traditional method of establishing isolated lookout posts far ahead to sound the alarm, these were always bypassed by the infiltrators. So the practice was soon abandoned in favor of a perimeter line of mutually supporting foxholes, which was much more resistant to both infiltration and banzai attacks (as the Marines on Iwo Jima would gratefully attest). Once tied-in foxholes became the norm, Japanese charges became, as a late 1944 intelligence report commented, “determined but unoriginal” and hence defeatable.42
American offensive tactics also evolved to offset the Japanese expertise in siting their defensive entrenchments to best exploit the terrain. Soldiers were actively encouraged to try new tactics and report the re sults.43 As data accumulated, it would become standard practice to employ .30-caliber light machine guns for suppressive fire at a distance and to use BARs, once reserved as a support weapon for riflemen, as anti-personnel weapons in their own right. These reforms were originally not top-down instructions outlined in manuals but on-the-ground findings discovered through trial and error by ordinary enlisted men and young officers that were disseminated because they worked.
Another example, soon to be of great importance on Iwo, stemmed from soldiers encountering cave defenses at Biak in May/June 1944. Aerial attacks against these fortified rocks were of little avail, and they were situated in places that were hard for naval gunfire to hit. Troops began to clear them out by pouring gasoline into the entrances and igniting by grenade. Pacific-wide intelligence bulletins noted the method’s success and suggested increasing the use of flamethrowers in subsequent island battles.44
These lessons translated into concrete changes in weaponry. In July 1942, for instance, a regular Marine division had no portable flamethrowers, but by May 1944, no fewer than 243 were standard issue (plus several terrifying flamethrower tanks). At Iwo Jima, a battalion commander would report that “the portable flame thrower was the one indispensable infantry weapon.” In the same period, the number of BARs rose from 513 to 853 and rose from there almost every month until the end of the war. Reflecting the Japanese propensity for hand-to-hand combat, shotguns—which served admirably as close-range weapons—were also distributed; their number accordingly increased from zero to 306.45
It seems evident, then, that the use of flamethrowers was not predetermined by racial animosity but was instead a situational, instrumental response to the facts on the ground. Consider that flamethrowers, until very late in the war, had been regarded as, at best, marginal weapons. First used against the French by the Germans in 1915, they were but rarely employed afterward, and even then whatever limited success they enjoyed was psychological rather than practical. Firing a brief burst of flame (an igniter lit a mixture of light and heavy fuels, propelled by nitrogen) up to just twenty yards—a suicidal distance from the enemy line for any lone attacker—they were sometimes given to condemned criminals to operate. In 1921, General Amos Fries, the head of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, the very man charged with developing the weapon, publicly disparaged flamethrowers as virtually useless.
Only in 1940, when it was reported that German and Italian flamethrowers had been used, did the United States attempt to develop a one-man portable version. In mid-1944, following several unremarkable models, the M2-2 Portable Flame Thrower was belatedly approved. The two factors that rendered it a viable weapon that would quickly be adopted for Pacific use were its new type of fuel and the development of tactical doctrine governing its use.
The earlier, low-viscosity mixture of heavy and light fuels had produced a “bushy” billowing blast of flame accompanied by heavy black smoke—which was fine for the Army, interested as it was in burning away jungle vegetation from defensive emplacements and using the smoke to provide good cover for the follow-up attack. The Marines, however, had different needs. They had found that the prevailing mixture may have provided a roaring blaze outside of a concrete bunker but that it did not kill its occupants. Their preferred method to deal with the problem was to squirt the lit fuel as a stream inside a bunker’s narrow openings from longer range.
Fastening on a new technique in which adding a substance dubbed napalm (“na” from aluminum napthenate and “palm” from the coconut fatty acids used to make it) thickened the fuel mixture, the Marines demanded almost three times as much napalm added to their flamethrowers as did the Army in order to create the desired stream effect at up to forty yards with relatively little smoke. It was this new, high-viscosity combination of gasoline, diesel fuel, and napalm that they took to Iwo.
At the same time, Marines were issued new instructions for the tactical employment of flamethrowers to maximize their effectiveness against Japanese combatants. In mid-December 1944, the Marines conceived specialist assault platoons of about twenty men trained in the use and maintenance of flamethrowers, demolitions, and rocket launchers. They would operate in conjunction with and under the pro tection of riflemen. Less than two months later on Iwo, as we shall see, these assault platoons would prove deadly against their adversaries.46
The new technology interacted dynamically with the improved methods, organizational changes, and the fresh insights into Japanese thinking to produce lethally effective tactical countermeasures and an ahumanized attitude toward their use. On Iwo Jima Americans approached their task with all the emotional investment of exterminators hired to kill some termites, or as a creditor views a debtor—as red numbers on a spreadsheet that need tidying up.47 There was, after all, no existential threat to the continental United States by the Japanese Empire, nor was there significant historical enmity between the two countries, nor was there the ideological-racial witches’ brew characteristic of the Eastern Front fighting between the Nazis and the Soviets.48 Instead, beating the Japanese on Iwo was a job that just needed doing, and they used whatever tools worked most satisfactorily. By the end, the task of slaughtering Japanese was known unemotionally as “processing,” as in a meat factory, and relied implicitly on machinery, engineers, and chemical products for its success.49
Finding the men who could do that job proved simple enough, for the men of the Marines of 1945 were not the same as those who had served earlier. Before the outbreak of war, the Marines had been highly selective, so selective that in 1939, 1940, and 1941 the Corps had accepted just 38,080 volunteers from 205,000 first-time applications—a percentage approaching that of an Ivy League college. Many of the successful inductees, most from poor rural or tough urban backgrounds, had signed up for financial reasons ($21 per month was a lot for a youth otherwise relegated to pumping gas or working in the mines), for adventure, for an escape from Depression-era unemployment, for evading the law after some indiscretions. That all changed on December 7, 1941—Pearl Harbor. What would become known as the “High School Class of ’42” rushed to join the colors. Hordes of seniors, wrathful at Japanese perfidy and filled with righteous idealism, quit school and rushed to the recruitment office. According to Roger Doskocill, “we became Marines by choice, and nobody was going to mess around with us or our country.” Bearing him out are the numbers: In November 1941, the month before Pearl Harbor, the Marines had inducted 1,978 men; in December 1941, that figure soared to 10,224; and in January 1942 alone, 22,686 men volunteered to fight.
Within a couple of years, a very large proportion of them would be dead or crippled, the result of unexpectedly heavy American losses. By the end of 1942, the Marine Corps was having trouble meeting its recruitment goals using increasingly less gung-ho volunteers. After lowering its physical and moral standards that April to make up numbers, it would soon come to rely on a third type of Marine recruit to fill the ranks. In January 1943, the government eradicated purely volunteer enlistments in one’s chosen military service. Henceforth, Selective Service would assign draftees to whichever arm most urgently required manpower. There was one exception—the Marine Corps, which forcefully argued for its traditionally exclusive role—in the sense that a man who received his draft notification could opt to “prefer” the Corps over the Navy and the Army. If there was room in the quota and he passed the qualification procedures, he would become a Marine “enlistee” rather than a conscript. Additional numbers—desperately needed for the increasingly bloody Pacific campaigns—were acquired by targeting seventeen-year-olds (Selective Service covered only men aged 18–36), who would sign up and be activated for duty on their next birthdays. The Corps also, not entirely enthusiastically, took its first women and blacks after realizing that they could fill rear-area and support positions, thereby releasing young white males for frontline combat duty.50
Marines of the 1943–45 period, therefore, were not career Marines, nor were they naive—the bloom had come off that rose at Tarawa, Saipan, and Peleliu—let alone idealistic, though they were natively patriotic. A vivid example of their apathy at the time, as opposed to idealized postwar recollections, can be drawn from their knowledge of the Four Freedoms. In the January 1941 State of the Union address intended to serve as a rallying cry for public support of a possible, or likely, war against Germany and Japan, President Roosevelt had listed the “four freedoms” that everyone, everywhere ought to enjoy. These were Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. After Pearl Harbor, the Four Freedoms be came increasingly central to the war effort against fascism and imperialism. In February and March 1943, the most popular artist in the country, Norman Rockwell, contributed four paintings to the Saturday Evening Post, which were accompanied by widely publicized essays explaining their importance and meaning, while the Postal Service issued a special one-cent stamp. Yet in July 1943 a substantial survey of enlisted men found that nearly half had never heard of the Four Freedoms, that the same proportion had heard of them but could name only one or perhaps two (almost certainly the freedoms of speech and of worship, which were familiar from, and perhaps confused with, those enumerated in the Bill of Rights), and that just 13 percent could name at least three. More than 80 percent—four-fifths—of American soldiers, in other words, were unaware of, unclear on, or uninterested in what they were apparently fighting for midway through the war. That situation was unlikely to change: Two-thirds of the soldiers felt that even understanding what America’s war aims were was of “medium, low, or no importance” and just 4 percent said that they would “like to know more about” the reasons “why we are fighting the war.” Rather, as the researchers concluded, they “were satisfied to regard the war as an unavoidable fact—a fact because it was presented to them as fait accompli, and unavoidable because their love of country required that foreign aggression [e.g., at Pearl Harbor] be opposed.”51
In the Pacific in 1945, few cared about a grand mission to win the war for democracy. They just wanted to do the job they had been handed as quickly as possible so they could go home. While they were young, highly aggressive, justly proud of the Corps, and aware of their elite status as shock troops, no air of romance suffused their task. On Iwo, there was no place for such inefficient martial virtues as valor or honor, marksmanship or sportsmanship. Those quaint relics had been left behind long ago at Bunker Hill and Gettysburg. These Marines were products of a machine age and trained specifically for industrialized slaughter.
The Japanese, for their part, only obliged the foe by their stubborn adherence to spiritual values as the key to overcoming doctrinal and material deficiencies. The mystical dominated the logistical at every stage. On the small-unit tactical level, bushidõ could admittedly bring victory against unprepared enemies but not against properly trained and lavishly equipped forces. Individual heroics could achieve only so much (or so little) against an industrialized army, and it is sobering to be reminded that in 1945 alone the United States manufactured sixty-one times as much organic high explosive as Japan did even as (the late) First Lieutenant Sadakaji was still being lauded as a national hero for attacking a tank with a sword at Nomonhan.52
By hook or by crook, the Japanese were destined to lose at Iwo Jima. Like a drowning man cursing the sea, they could only rage impotently against the tremendous might of steel and iron, brass and oil, that pressed upon them as they shed their blood. Marines, meanwhile, sustained heavy casualties but whatever they lost numerically in combat effectiveness they more than made up for in improving their mission effectiveness—the ability to execute their tasks and objectives. The reason was that every hour, every day, they spent on Iwo permitted them to enhance their techniques and hone their skills at liquidation. The cost in blood was accordingly high, but despite initial impressions, all was not hopeless and crazy on Iwo: There were ways, it seems, to make Pandemonium more bearable, even beatable.
In the lead-up to Iwo Jima, the Marines benefited immensely from sustained intelligence analysis of Japanese tactics, tics, procedures, and routines while avidly pursuing a course of military adaptation in response to their combat experience. As a result, the Corps had successfully evolved to suit the peculiar realities of the Pacific theater, and adversaries once regarded as fierce and strange had ceased to be either—even if they remained formidable and dangerous.
One manifestation of this trend was the development of a new structure of fire team–based rifle squads (each four-man fire team, led by a corporal, was centered on a BAR and supported by two riflemen). They moved in a diamond formation, with the corporal in front, the BARman and a rifleman five yards behind, and the other rifleman five yards in the rear. There were three fire teams to a squad—twelve men plus a sergeant to command—and a squad in turn advanced in a triangular shape: two fire teams abreast in the front with the third centered in the rear to provide cover. Three squads comprised a platoon of about forty, which was led by a lieutenant. A basic company was made up of three platoons, which again formed into a triangle covering an area of 150 yards. Added in were special-weapons platoons, squads, and teams, all armed with a selection of heavy and light machine guns, mortars, bazookas, explosives, and flamethrowers.1
Unlike the traditional line-and-column formations of previous eras, which required precise coordination and experienced command to avoid entropy, the “rule of three” structure was designed for maximum dispersion, flexibility, and adaptability combined with heavy firepower on call. Whereas his forebears at Bunker Hill and Gettysburg had relied on direct sight and close proximity to comrades to maintain cohesion, on Iwo Jima Pfc. Joe Simms kept his eye on only one man, his squad leader, as a “reference point.” His squad was usually spread out about thirty-five yards apart and up to twenty yards deep. “Some were down while others were up and running,” and Simms “rarely saw all the other twelve men at the same time.”2 Had a Civil War soldier respawned on a battlefield of World War II, he would have been discomfited by its emptiness.
Nor was there any pretense to maintain strict order in combat to preserve forward momentum. When men were told to move out, said Pfc. Don Traub, you were expected to “run forward like hell in a zigzag pattern, then hit the deck while rolling away from the spot where you landed and find some sort of cover.”3 When a platoon as a whole advanced, each Marine “moved from hole to hole, rock to rock,” taking turns to cover and be covered by his mates as he rushed forward in a tactic known as “snoopin’ and poopin’.”4
A critical development was the emphasis on cross-training; that is, a regular Marine rifleman was taught how to operate a broad variety of weapons and so, if necessity called, could serve in any capacity.5 In combat, Marines switched jobs as casually as required. “Anybody who was close, that’s who did the shooting [of the light machine gun] and then got out of the way,” said Bernard Dobbins. He himself was a machine gunner, but he fetched ammunition, threw grenades, brought water, took point, or picked up a rifle without hesitation.6 Weapons nonspecialization and a lack of territoriality allowed units to re-form and divide freely to recover from losses and absorb fresh arrivals. Following heavy casualties, the carcass of Dean Voight’s platoon, for instance, was left with a mixture of machine gunners and raw replacements but was easily regenerated by an influx of mortar men to form a regular, capable unit.7
Marine vertical hierarchies were as fluid as their horizontal organization. If a platoon or squad leader was disabled, said Alfred Stone, everyone knew that “the next man in rank assumes leadership of the unit.”8 The burden of command was shouldered willingly, if with a degree of apprehension. When Dobbins was bumped to squad leader, he confided to his sergeant that he didn’t know what to do. Never fear, came the helpful reply, “your first mistake will be your last.” There would always be someone to take your place.9
For Dave Davenport such instant promotions were key to units remaining organized, self-sufficient, and on the move. “The attack goes on. The [original] plan is carried out or a new plan worked out,” he explained. “The fallen leaders are replaced by a natural move up. When Ludvick was killed I was elevated to squad leader. Mueller and Carson became squad leaders the same way. If we fall someone will replace us.”10
Hence the astonishing ability of American squads, platoons, and companies to continue functioning and fighting despite Iwo’s staggering casualty rates. On Iwo, it was common to see junior lieutenants or sergeants in charge of companies and privates overseeing platoons and squads. Thus, Robert Maiden’s company went through seven commanders, two of them NCOs.11 One platoon in the 28th Marines remained viable even after its leadership changed no fewer than eleven times. (Its final commander was Private Dale Cassell, who lasted for three days before being killed on March 14, D+23.)12
The Japanese, in contrast, had emphasized officer-led command, and it was often remarked that once one of their lieutenants or captains was incapacitated his unit collapsed. According to Dave Davenport, the men “milled around in total confusion if they were not in holes. They didn’t have instant leadership come to the front. They didn’t seem to have any contingency plan. No alternatives were put into effect by anyone. Their inability to adapt and adjust was woeful.” So the Marine response was to target the officers. Rather like at Bunker Hill against the British, the Americans cried, “Pick off the leaders.… Drop that Nip waving his sword or his arms.”13
On Iwo itself, the Marines modified equipment, exploited their unit structures, conceived new methods, and finessed existing techniques to enhance performance and to counter unexpected Japanese behavior. During the fighting itself, senior commanders demanded none of these ad hoc improvements, which were instead passed from man to man, squad to squad, by hearsay, observation, and experience at the ground level.
There were three types of self-guided military improvements. First, material changes. For instance, in Europe, whereas American tanks had to contend with powerful antitank guns, Panzerfausts, and heavy Tiger tanks, in the Pacific the Japanese relied on direct human attacks using satchel charges, magnetic mines, regular mines, and in many cases, explosives strapped directly to soldiers’ bodies. Thus in the Pacific the Sherman tanks were adequate protection against individual Japanese attacks once some singular field modifications were added.14
A typical Japanese attack would involve one man blinding the tank with smoke grenades, the next forcing the crew to close the hatches by throwing fragmentation grenades, a third fixing a mine on a track to immobilize it, and a fourth to place a charge on the hull or turret to blow it apart. To “mod” the Shermans, therefore, sandbags were layered over engine covers to dull the explosions. Spare track blocks were wrapped around the turret side armor for the same reason. Sometimes, tankers welded long nails, pointed end up, to turrets and hatches to impale suicidal Japanese who insisted on holding on to their charges. More effective than nails were “birdcages,” two-inch-high domes of heavy-duty wire mesh spanning the turret and hull hatches that pre vented the enemy from placing explosives directly on top. Each side of a tank was protected by a thick curtain consisting of wooden planks that left four inches of open space between it and the metal skin. Into the void, the crews sometimes poured a secondary wall of reinforced concrete. The concrete diffused explosions; the wood defeated magnetic mines. As an additional measure, as tanks advanced they were surrounded by a screen of riflemen whose job it was to spot hidden threats and to kill suicide runners.15
Taken together, these countermeasures and field modifications drastically reduced tank losses in everyday combat.16 Seaman First Class Koizumi Tadayoshi was a member of an attack team and later recorded his surprise that he was not able to destroy any tanks. After creeping behind enemy lines, for instance, he watched a Sherman for a time before realizing that there was simply no way to get to it. He found a tree branch and eventually pushed a mine toward one of its tracks but was spotted and shot at by the riflemen. They missed, but as he ran away the tank fired its flamethrower (another expedient improvement created by engineers, who added compressed-air cylinders to propel a stream of napalm over a hundred yards) and burned his legs.17 His team was finished, as was he, but the tank remained as dangerous as ever. Indeed, on March 9 (D+18), when Saturo Omagari and a few others sliced open their own dead, stuffed their uniforms with the intestines they’d cut out, and then played dead intending to destroy a Sherman, they managed to attack “the tanks, but it was without avail.”18
On Iwo, much to their surprise, Marines were confronted by the deep, thick defensive system established by Kuribayashi in the final frantic months before they landed. Their planners had not adequately anticipated its scale. The lesson: If the Americans learned from experience and adapted to changing battlefield conditions, then so too did the Japanese, though at a slower pace. By Iwo they had shifted from an exclusively offensive orientation toward a defensive position designed to delay and frustrate the enemy with high casualties in the (vain) hopes of impeding a probable invasion of Japan.
In the early part of the war, Japanese anti-landing doctrine had directed commanders to destroy the enemy at the “water’s edge”—the beach—when he was at his most vulnerable. A thin but potent strip of fortifications on the beach itself would decisively defeat enemy forces as they approached and attempted to disembark. When they landed on Tarawa in November 1943 during the Gilberts campaign, the Marines, as a result, were forced to contend with anti-personnel mines, antitank mines, concrete obstacles studded with iron rails, double-apron barbed-wire fencing, and a hearty coconut-log seawall, from behind which impervious gun emplacements made of reinforced concrete and coral sand blasted their tanks. By nightfall on the first day, twelve out of fourteen tanks had been knocked out, and the Marines were perched precariously on the beach. Had the Japanese vigorously counterattacked that night, when Marine commanders were tremulously reporting that the “issue remains in doubt,” it is possible the landing would have been pushed back into the sea.1
By January/February 1944, when American forces landed in the Marshalls to conquer Roi-Namur and Eniwetok, Japanese defensive doctrine had not changed. The Marines, meanwhile, had learned to focus on heavier and more prolonged supporting naval gunfire to scour the beach fortifications, equipped themselves with armored vehicles and rocket craft, and were sending underwater demolition teams to reconnoiter beaches before the attack.2
In April of that year, Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo issued a manual called Explanation of the Combat Guidance for Garrison on Islands, which continued to stipulate the increasingly discredited water’s-edge strategy. Island defenders, headquarters staff insisted, were to fight and die on the beach.3 When the Americans came to Saipan during the Marianas campaign in June/July 1944, however, the Japanese could not follow Tokyo’s dictates because enemy submarines had prevented much of their defensive materiel from arriving. They had hardly any mines or obstacles, while concrete gun positions were unfinished, and there were dozens of artillery pieces left parked in the open awaiting emplacement when the Americans landed. The general in charge of the island was forced to ignore the manual’s orders: He left just a third of his force to defend the beach and took the rest inland to prepare to counterattack. His forty-eight tanks were kept away from the landing zone and were poised to launch a major assault once the Americans broke past the waterline. In the end, the Japanese counterattacks were beaten back with heavy losses, and the island was taken, but the creation of a “mobile ground defense” located in the interior impressed a beleaguered Imperial Army staff with its ability to extract American blood while buying time.
A hastily revised manual, Essentials of Island Defense, that circulated in August 1944 stressed constant counterattacks supplemented by a series of resistance zones, delaying actions, and defense in depth to offset the advantage of the Americans’ devastating naval gunnery. There would be no more efforts to mount a decisive engagement at the waterline during a landing. The new policy was dubbed fukkaku—an “endurance engagement” that would bleed the Americans white.4 Over the coming battle at Peleliu between September and November 1944, Japanese commanders adopted and adapted the new manual’s instructions. Following a failed counterattack, Colonel Kunio Nakagawa ended the practice of banzai attacks, instituted “passive infiltration” (defenders hid and attacked the Americans from the rear), and ordered his men to set up honeycombed, fortified positions in caves, ridges, hills, and tunnels.
It was at this point, as the Japanese had successfully transitioned from a beach-deployment doctrine to an inland-deployment one, that American strategists made a terrible error.5 They had begun planning the Iwo Jima invasion in the summer of 1944, when Saipan-style “human wave” counterattacks on the first night and a “mobile ground defense” later on were au courant.
Had the landing occurred then, Iwo Jima would today be a lesser example of Pacific warfare—an easy victory. Thus, on April 6, 1944, General Hideyoshi Obata, the 31st Army commander, had inspected Iwo and determined that it required a then-recommended waterline defense. But on May 29 Kuribayashi arrived, when Japanese attention was shifting away from the water’s edge. He stopped construction of beach defenses and started banking on a modish counterattack followed by defense in depth. But by February 1945, when the actual landing took place, Kuribayashi had updated his tactics, and a dangerous fukkaku-style defense instead awaited the Americans.
The United States, in short, had failed to keep up with their enemy. For this mistake, they can be forgiven: The virtually unknown Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi was a starchy cavalryman with a solid combat record distinguished primarily by its conservatism. Unexpectedly handed command of Iwo Jima, he would in fact prove to be an innovative, imaginative foe, the one regarded after the war by his Marine antagonists as the most redoubtable and skilled of any Japanese general. Kuribayashi’s risky decision to favor a variant of the fukkaku endurance engagement amply demonstrates the extent to which the Marines were tangling with a very canny unknown quantity. On Iwo, Kuribayashi created Shukketsu-Jikyu (or Shukketsu and Jikyu Senjutsu—“bloodletting and delay”), a passive-defense system based on interlinked fortifications inland designed to prolong the operation, reduce the will to fight, and impose maximum enemy casualties.6
Hence the Marines’ surprise when they first landed on D-Day on Iwo and there was barely any resistance on the beach itself. The consensus among commanders was that Kuribayashi had, according to the journalist John Marquand, “clearly concluded to wait and take his punishment, to keep his men and weapons under cover, until our assault waves were on the beach. Then he would do his best to drive them off.”7 The consensus was wrong. Kuribayashi was all too pleased to let the assault waves land and not to drive them off.
What resistance there was had in fact been foisted upon Kuribayashi by his naval counterpart, who insisted on building gun emplacements and pillboxes there. Virtually all of these concrete extravagances were destroyed on the first day: twenty-three of twenty-four naval gun positions were knocked out before the first Marines even landed, as Kuribayashi had predicted, and the Marines overran every single pillbox, all 135 of them, within the first three hours. Nor, despite an intense effort to “button up” Marine positions before the expected banzai charges, were there organized counterattacks to speak of on the first few nights.8 Very occasionally, one of his more zealous and desperate officers would disobey Kuribayashi’s orders and mount a useless banzai charge, mostly for the sake of good form, but their rarity demonstrates only the general’s commitment to passive defense. Indeed, the heavy shelling of the beach began only after the Marines had landed in numbers sufficient to justify winnowing them out.
Despite the initial success of the landing and the establishment of a beachhead, the first two weeks or so of the Iwo Jima operation were characterized by the Marines’ desperate struggle to comprehend the newly altered nature of island combat. As a result, when they headed inland, Marines bogged down. Plans that should have worked, or that had worked before, simply did not, owing to the masterpiece of military defensive science that confronted them.
In the space of several short months and with a minimum of resources, Kuribayashi had created the alpha and omega of island strongholds. With the aid of military engineers imported from Japan, he had fortified his Pacific redoubt to near perfection. Later observers, it was noted, “who had inspected German fortified areas in both world wars testified that never had they seen a position so thoroughly defended as was Iwo Jima.”1
Every square inch of land was exploited to matchless degree. Every position covered its neighbors with interlocking fields of crossfire. In some places they were clustered so thickly that a machine-gun nest would be sited just yards to the rear or flank of its neighbor—and there were tiers of such defenses stacked in the bluffs. In many places, Marines could not tell where bullets or mortars were coming from, or they received more incoming fire from behind and the sides than from the front. According to Sergeant Alfred Edwards, “One of our machine gunners got shot through the mouth. We thought we saw where the bullets came from. We looked over there, and another guy got shot from the opposite direction.”2 Colonel Thomas Wornham likened the situation to being “just like shooting fish in a barrel, and you were the fish.”3
Worse, each position was connected by underground tunnels (one, for instance, was eight hundred yards long with 214 exits), so that the defenders of a destroyed post could emerge minutes later through an undetected one.4 There were sixteen miles of tunnels on Iwo Jima. According to Thomas Williams, “The Japs weren’t on Iwo Jima; they were in Iwo Jima,” and Robert Leader likened their winding, branching subterranean fortifications “to the ant farms we had as children.”5 Each and every hidden position had to be found and demolished before an area could be secured.
It was not just the absolute number of positions that hindered progress but their sheer density. In one area 2,500 yards long and 1,000 wide, the 4th Marine Division had to contend with no fewer than ten reinforced-concrete blockhouses, seven covered artillery positions, and eighty pillboxes that together contained fourteen 120mm guns of various models, a 90mm dual-purpose gun, one 70mm battalion howitzer, six 47mm antitank/antiboat guns, three 37mm antitank/antiboat guns, nineteen 25mm twin-mount machine guns, and a 13mm machine gun. These were just the armaments and positions that were identified; many others were destroyed before they could be catalogued.6 In a single map grid alone of 1,000 square yards—a miniature box about 32 yards by 32 yards—air observers spotted twenty-nine pillboxes, eleven machine-gun nests, and fifteen anti-aircraft guns interspersed with antitank traps, barbed wire, and fire trenches. And the defenses better camouflaged would have been missed.7 Indeed, an otherwise detailed military map of the time notes ominously in its legend: “Thousands of caves used for defensive purposes, personnel, and storage have not been plotted.”8 Iwo, in short, was a place where, as a report of the time noted, a single company of combat engineers “knocked out more than 165 concrete pillboxes and blockhouses; they blasted 15 strong bunkers and naval gun positions, and dug up or exploded 1,000 mines and booby traps, filled in 200 caves with bulldozers, trapping more than 100 Japs in one cave alone. Some of the caves were three stories high and blocked by high reinforced steel doors.”9
Such willpower and effort did not come cheaply. As casualties mounted, a disadvantage of the Marine credo of having the next man in line immediately take the place of the one above him became apparent. As junior-ranking officers unused to handling large formations were promoted to fill “vacated” spots, they resorted to dull, unimaginative, officially sanctioned tactics (the same thing had happened during the Civil War) as they sought to overcome the mare’s nest of Japanese fortifications. For instance, when a company of the 23rd Marines lined up to storm an airfield two hundred yards away, Arthur Rodriguez could only think, as they got the order to “fix bayonets,” that “this is crazy, just like the Civil War. But at least we won’t be bunched up.” When they set off, “we all started to charge and yell. To me this was like a Banzai charge, so that’s what I was yelling. I heard some Rebel Yells.”10 Again, as at Gettysburg, “orders that came down usually w[ere] very elaborate,” recalled Ted Salisbury, “but we’d end up going straight ahead as far ahead as you could go. Sometimes it was yards, sometimes it was more, until you [piled up] casualties so hard that you just had to stop. And then they’d reevaluate the situation.”11 Daily progress up the island slowed to increments of fifty or perhaps a hundred yards, every yard yielding a bloody harvest of Marine corpses, as each morning’s attack predictably began after the inevitable artillery or naval barrage—following which the enemy, just as inevitably, emerged unfazed from their dugouts. Every attack defaulted to a boring frontal assault, and instead of concentrating their efforts on weak points to force a breakthrough or flank the enemy, commanders parceled out their assets equally and strove to advance in a single, steady line spanning the entire island to prevent Japanese infiltrators. According to Robert Hogaboom, the 3rd Division’s chief of staff, at Iwo at first “the Corps appeared to wish to hold hands and to keep the lines dressed abreast, keep the Divisions abreast of each other. This meant that the Division on the left and the Divisions on the right had much more difficult terrain to pass than we did. They had to cross over the ravines and attack across the deep declivities that were across there and I personally believe it slowed up the operation.”12
One can sympathize with commanders’ apprehensions, but the extreme caution might have lost more lives than it saved, as Hogaboom implied. As a result, on many occasions a unit, after sustaining heavy casualties, would return to its original starting point, only to repeat the mistake twenty-four hours later. The official history of the battle noted drily of one such failed assault that the rebuffed unit “continued the attack [the next day] with no change in formation or plan.”13
It took Marines between two and three weeks to reject what had worked in the past, climb the learning curve, rethink their tactics, and adjust their techniques. It was only then that enemy resistance truly began to collapse. Sometimes, even a minor change could shift the advantage to the American side.
March 5 and March 6 (D+14 and 15) were key dates in this respect. Until then, Marines had been attacking the center strongholds of the island to little avail. Each morning at 0730—the Japanese could set their watches by the bombardment ordered to precede the day’s attack—they set out on their assault. And each morning they were halted after a few dozen yards by a “steel wall of Jap mortar and small-arms fire.” On March 5, now exasperated and bleeding heavily from their losses, the Marines hoped to break the enemy by organizing “the greatest artillery barrage of the campaign. Three artillery regiments, massed with V Amphibious Corps artillery, fired approximately 45,000 rounds into the concentrated Jap positions among the rocks.” No one could possibly have lived through such torment, yet by day’s end the Marines had advanced, a report grimly noted, just one hundred yards.14
But then on March 6, one general, who was ordered to jump off the next morning at the usual time, instead surprised the enemy by forgoing any artillery and attacking at 0500. Hundreds of yards were gained at little cost.15 Word of his success spread rapidly. The very next day, Ray Crowder and his company were ordered to launch a surprise attack at 0500 in order to take a ridge that had thus far defied every attempt. Again, there was to be no opening artillery barrage. No one knew whether it would succeed; some of the men grumbled that everyone would be massacred, but in the event they met little resistance. The second platoon encountered some Japanese, but they were asleep, while the first platoon reached its objective without firing a shot.16 It would not always be so easy, especially once the Japanese adjusted their schedules, but still, the Marines had broken free of their straitjacket. As Corporal William McConnell remembered, he received “an unusual order” around this time: “Units that could advance were to do so even if it meant leaving the flanks open and unprotected. This was new to me.” That day, they conquered three hundred yards, a “major” achievement.17 From then on, it was difficult to go back to the old ways.
We can see adaptation in action by reading the official after-action reports of 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines. On February 21 (D+2), as per approved procedure, their patrols attacked active pillboxes and caves bypassed by preceding units. It took another five days (until February 26, D+7) to establish conclusively that rifles were of course useful in this respect, but only hand grenades and antitank guns could be counted as “indispensable weapons in attacking pillboxes and caves.” Corporals Folsom and Trentham of Company F proved the point by using them to destroy five pillboxes. By March 2 and 3 (D+11, 12), grenades had become the weapon of choice against caves because Marines had learned that “flat trajectory weapons [e.g., rifles] were useless except for direct targets of opportunity.” Two days later, as they reached the two-week point on Iwo, the battalion was employing tanks, personally directed by infantrymen, to blow apart pillboxes and seal caves. It was a method that “proved more satisfactory” even than relying on grenades. Unfortunately, by March 10 (D+19) the tanks were coming under heavy attack from Japanese artillery and were highly vulnerable in the craggy terrain. After two days of losses, on March 12 “it was decided that new tactics must be used. Artillery, mortar, and small-arms fire was ineffective, and the terrain unsuitable for air bombardment,” so combat engineers were brought up to clear the tanks’ path of mines while an armored bulldozer leveled a road “through the rocks to the front lines … and tanks were immediately brought up to fire to the front.” Within a day (March 13, D+22), “the infantry-engineer-tank coordination proved to be the solution to breaking the unusual and particularly strong lines of resistance.” As tanks blasted camouflaged positions, infantrymen spread out and “used sniper tactics, firing at all movement to the front.” Then “the assault squad was combined with engineer personnel under Sgt. John Potter, of Co. D, and was used very effectively in close fighting, sealing caves and knocking out pillboxes” that the tanks had not quite finished off.
On March 14 (D+23), all the hard work and deadly schooling paid off. The battalion advanced no fewer than four hundred yards in difficult terrain “in spite of low morale, fatigue, and an average strength of 70 men per company.” That night, a final infiltration attack was beaten back. It was an unmistakable sign that resistance had broken and that the Japanese were at their wits’ end. Two days later the battalion was relieved and departed Iwo Jima on March 27.18
On the other side of the hill, we witness the gradual breakdown of the Japanese as the Marines battered them day by day. In the beginning, the Marines were not facing (despite superficial appearances and movie clichés) a ragtag bunch of fanatics scattered haphazardly about. There was, in fact, a professional, balanced, organized order of battle. Not only did Kuribayashi have such distinct elements as machine-gun battalions, engineer companies, infantry regiments, and military police, but he could also call on expert well-digger, disease prevention, and radar/communications components (plus a “special weather unit”).19
Yet as early as February 23 Japanese organization was falling to pieces under the onslaught by Marines learning and adapting as they went. An official report stated that the plans to stop the enemy advance had “become hopeless,” their fixed defenses “useless” against “the air-sea-land cooperation of the enemy.” By that date, a third of the island was in U.S. hands.
Under incessant attack, units, or what was left of them, were rapidly cut off from communications and left by themselves to work out what to do. Telephone wires had been severed by artillery; since there was no way to repair them, messengers had to be sent—a time-consuming, unpredictable, and dangerous process. In order to deliver and receive a simple order from his command post just a couple of hundred yards away, a Lieutenant Sugihara had to take three runners with him in the hope that one of them at least would get through. The trip took nearly an hour and a half.20 By March 10, according to First Lieutenant Musashino Kikuzo, “during the daytime we hid in caves, and at night we wandered in the battlefields, aimlessly, without hope.”21 Adding to the confusion, most of the defenders had no idea where they were on the island, were sealed off from any knowledge of the outside world (including the neighboring bunker), and were kept in the dark as to Kuribayashi’s plans (aside from a vague admonition to die gloriously) or their degree of success.
A significant proportion of the “fanatical” fighting in the bunkers, blockhouses, pillboxes, and caves after the first few weeks but before the very end, then, we can ascribe to their defenders’ not having an inkling of what was happening or who was winning. In their minds, it was perfectly possible that the Americans were being beaten, so it was rational to keep fighting. As early as dusk of D-Day, Lieutenant Sugihara could gain heart from his estimate that the Americans had failed to land more than two thousand men on Iwo—an easily defeatable force, but one, alas, that Sugihara had drastically undercounted. In fact, V Amphibious Force had brought ashore thirty thousand Marines.22 He was not alone in his fictions. After all, among the defenders it was common knowledge that Japanese “Special Attack Units” had already sunk “six carriers, two battleships, two cruisers, possibl[y] four destroyers,” a belief that, if accurate, would have meant that the U.S. Navy lost more materiel at Iwo Jima than at the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway, the Philippine Sea, and Leyte Gulf combined.23 Senior commanders knew, of course, that the situation was hopeless—and told Tokyo so—but their subordinates’ ignorance was bliss, for then there could be no surrender to the Americans.
From the bloodless official reports and scarce diary entries of Americans and Japanese alike, we cannot extract much impression of what the learning curve actually entailed, in terms of flesh, for Marines (or Japanese). There were four primary types of defenses the average Marine would encounter on Iwo Jima, so to rectify this we’ll examine each of these in turn to discover how they were surmounted.
Of the quartet, minefields were the most easily dealt with, although, as John Thurman pointed out, because the Japanese did not deign to mark their presence, the first inkling of being in one came when somebody suddenly burst apart.1 When that happened, everyone immediately halted but did not drop deckward (as they would if a mortar had landed). Corpsman Jerry Cunningham was with a squad under Sergeant Smallwood, who ordered the men to freeze one hundred feet along a path. “It seemed like hours, but it was probably a matter of several minutes that we stood there afraid to move,” he remembered. Each Marine then precisely and painstakingly, and of course unhurriedly, retraced his footsteps to exit the minefield.2
If retreat was impossible, the alternative was to plug on and hope for no more casualties. Sharp eyesight and a light tread became critical. Cecil Downey, an assistant machine gunner lumbered down with a 21-pound box of ammunition in each hand, scanned obsessively for any sign of freshly turned dirt (indicating that the Japanese had planted a mine there) and walked on tiptoes. The man directly ahead of him exploded, and two more soon after. But there was no going back. Then it was Downey’s turn: After stepping on a particularly well-hidden mine, he felt himself lifted skyward and hurled back to the ground, “breathless inside a clanging bell of concussion. He couldn’t breathe. His lungs fought for air and it wouldn’t come. He was conscious of the hot surge of blood rushing out of him.” Downey was severely wounded but survived thanks to nearby medics.3
The next step was to call in the engineers for mine-clearing. As the Japanese used non-magnetic materials in their mines, they were invisible to mine detectors, so the job needed to be done by hand. Like many others, Howard McLaughlin learned to “crawl along the rows on your belly, probing the ground ahead of you very carefully with your bayonet.” He slid it gingerly at a 45-degree angle into any suspicious area; if he met the slightest resistance, then he stopped pushing, for some Japa nese mines were set to explode with as little as five pounds of pressure applied. The engineer then gently swept away as much of the sand covering the object as he could and planted a flag, either white (for possible mines) or red (for confirmed ones).4 White meant that you could cross your fingers and take your chances walking there; red entailed death. If there was time to spare, he would unspool a length of cord with mini-charges attached so that it touched every flag. Ignited, the cord would destroy an entire minefield all at once.5
More often, however, engineers did not have time to spare. Mortars sometimes rained in, and slow-moving mineclearers always made tempting targets for snipers. They took shortcuts. “There’s acid inside [a common type of mine], and when you break it, a battery is activated, and that sets off the charge,” explained Al Abbatiello. “But you could grab them by the handle and set them to the side, so everybody could go around them.”6 In these cases, as they cleared the way through the field, the engineers would mark a narrow safe path with white tape to help the infantrymen following behind. When their squad moved up, Robert Maiden told Lonnie Corrazine, a new machine gunner from Texas, to do “double time across, [and] stay on the white tape. If you should receive fire, hit the deck on the tape.” But when the Japanese opened up, Corrazine panicked and strayed outside. “All I saw after the explosion was the upper half of his body about twenty feet in the air,” Maiden sadly recalled.7 It was an iron rule: Stay on the tape. Transgressors would learn their lesson, as happened when Ernest Moreau and his squad were picking their way through a partially cleared minefield. A replacement, seeing an officer’s body with a sword, wandered off to pick it up—a foolish thing to do even when one was not in the middle of a minefield—and promptly stepped on a mine. Despite the man’s hollering for help, their sergeant ordered the rest of the squad to leave him there and walk on. A corpsman would (possibly) come along once engineers had checked out the mines.8
No rifleman liked minefields, but they were a relatively minor threat that engineers, once they had learned their location, could clear without too much trouble. Tanks and other vehicles, however, were particu larly menaced by the Japanese practice of burying aerial bombs and torpedoes in places where armor was likeliest to pass. The explosions were often spectacular. Alvin Josephy saw a halftrack moving along a runway when “there was a burst of earth beneath [it], followed by a sharp crash. The vehicle rose slowly and turned over, settling in a cloud of dust and sand.” Everyone nearby threw himself to the ground to avoid the flying debris. “Five burned bodies lay among the twisted wreckage.”9 When Robert Neiman’s tank company ran into an antitank minefield, losses quickly mounted. “The third tank to my right blew up with a tremendous flash and cloud of dust,” followed by at least two more tanks. From one of them, the entire “turret [flew] through the air, led by the flying figure of Gy.Sgt. Joe Bruno” (who miraculously survived).10
More dangerous still for their crews was when their advance faltered as they warily slowed or halted after mines had gone off. Their hesitation left them vulnerable to the Japanese antitank gunners hidden nearby. As Gerald Averill watched a Sherman “rising slowly, lazily into the air, turning on its side as it fell back, coming [to] rest, turret down” after it had rolled over a torpedo, the enemy was already “reaching for the [other] Shermans” with their “wicked 47mm antitank rounds.” Mortars and artillery finished off any tankers who escaped their burning, shattered vehicles.11
While Shermans were impervious to mere bullets, a single Japanese armor-piercing antitank round could destroy them.12 Sergeant T. Grady Gallant saw a round hit a Sherman’s turret, leaving in its wake a hole “remarkably smooth, clean, and efficient, as if it had been made by a punch, but larger—about the circumference of a banana, and very straight.” Inside, the round whirled around, bouncing off the sides, and after hitting the stack of high-explosive ammunition “acted like a beater in a mixing bowl of eggs, spinning and mixing the contents, splashing the wall of the bowl with whites and yolks until they are no longer recognizable as eggs at all, but are a jellied, liquefied mass blended into a viscoidal, sticky fluid.” A few minutes later another Marine opened the hatch—the metal was still hot to the touch—and “looked at the floor of the tank, into the interior of the big machine, where the crew had been. And he vomited. Vomited over the places where the crew had sat.”13
More often, the round would explode inside the turret, sending shrapnel flying within the tank’s confined space. Pfc. Claude Livingston was a nineteen-year-old gunner in the 5th Tank Battalion whose groin was shredded by metal shards; the shrapnel also sliced through his bladder and colon and tore off his coccyx. Shortly afterward, a wounded Richard Wheeler was lying on the bottom bunk on a plane bound for Hawaii when he smelled something awful emanating from “the man whose body sagged the canvas stretcher bottom eight inches above my nose.” It was Livingston. “They had him full of rubber tubes which dripped urine, fecal matter, and pus steadily into a glass jug beside me on the deck. He was in such agony that his face … was a twisted knot of pain.… A succession of sobs fought their way out through his clenched teeth.” Even the morphine did not work. Against the odds (he’d been wounded on February 10), Livingston survived until July 17.14
The majority of tank hits occurred in the earlier weeks of the battle, when the Japanese had both substantial numbers of buried mines to create opportunities for the antitank gunners and sufficient antitank guns to take advantage of those opportunities. But as Marines learned on the job such opportunities became ever rarer. By the battle’s later stages, tanks traveled in small groups of three or four at the most and were invariably preceded by teams of engineers to clear their way and flanked by infantry detailed with shooting suicidal “Satchel Charlies” before they came anywhere near. At the end, there was no defense left against the Shermans. As a flamethrower tank approached a cave, remembered Frank Caldwell, a group of its hapless defenders emerged and launched one final, impotent bid for glory. “One was an officer and he had his sword pulled, and he charged the tank at maximum range. The range of the flamethrower was about seventy-five feet. This tank guy didn’t do a damn thing—he just sat there. That officer was pissed off; he charged this tank out of desperation. He had his sword up high, and … the tank gave him a blast with the flamethrower, hit the officer right in the crotch, and he jumped up high—still had his sword up high—and then he fell forward flaming, jamming his sword in the ground.”15
“Spider traps” and snipers were other threats that diminished in direct proportion to the Americans’ gradual accumulation of experience, territory, and expertise. A spider trap was a peculiarly Japanese innovation, generally consisting of a modified fifty-five-gallon metal barrel (once used to ship cement) that could fit—tightly—a soldier, a canteen, a gun, and a few rations. Buried, they became a one-man foxhole with a camouflaged steel lid.1 The occupant could lift the lid to either take a shot or to emerge from hiding to stage an infiltration; when closed, it was as if he had simply vanished. Some spider traps were placed adjacent to a tunnel network, allowing the soldier to shoot from one, travel underground, and pop out somewhere else to shoot again.
As was typical on Iwo, the Japanese did not operate individually but instead covered each other. So, even when one was lucky enough to witness, as Bill Faulkner did, a Japanese opening the lid (and, being just as surprised as Faulkner, quickly dropping it and descending), one had to remain alert. When Faulkner ran over and was about to drop a grenade inside, Conrad Shanker stopped him so that he could explore what turned out to the entrance to a tunnel. A few minutes later, he emerged with blood dripping from his knife only to be shot in the head by a hidden sniper.2
Even if spider traps exacted relatively few deaths (at least compared to mortars), they were persistent irritants. In the very center of Gerald Averill’s company there was one stay-behind lurking in a spider trap who “would raise his Nambu light machine gun over his head and, with the selector set on full automatic, would twist the gun in a half-circle over his head and then reverse it, filling the air with lead right at head and neck level as we squatted in the foxholes, keeping us ducking. Then he’d slip through a tunnel into another firing position. He was still putting on his act days later, when we were able to move out of position. No one ever saw him, just heard that gun whacking away, the rustle of its bullets passing close overhead.”3 According to Fred Haynes, other Japanese would take a single shot to poach a victim and then wait a few hours before firing again. That was plenty of time for the original unit to have moved out and an unsuspecting one to have moved up—and to lose another man.4
If the attritional rate was moderate, the ability of snipers to target individuals nonetheless magnified their impact. Being shot by one was never a pleasant experience, of course, and every Marine detested the feeling of being marked out specifically for attention. Dave Davenport was hit in the back “with paralyzing force. I was on the ground, knocked kicking. The pain was spreading over my torso in eddying whirlpools of agony.… I found I couldn’t move. The intense pain was beginning to numb my lower body. There was absolutely no strength in my legs to push my body forward.… I did experience a noticeable stiffening of my body as I flinched, expecting momentarily another shot.”5
It did not come, most likely because Davenport was actually serving as bait. It was common practice to wing a Marine and wait for the litter-bearers and corpsmen—the real targets of value; 827 corpsmen would be killed or wounded on Iwo—to arrive.6 Alvin Josephy watched a four-man stretcher team carrying a wounded man as it came under sniper fire. One bearer was hit in the leg but the rest of the team managed to get under cover before they were killed. The wounded man died before they could get back to him.7 Marked ambulances attracted many a sniper’s eye, as did the medical personnel accompanying the wounded.
Marines tried a variety of ad hoc methods to flush out spider traps. Alfred Stone and a friend worked out one way when they were fired upon and Stone fell, pretending to be wounded. Fortunately, he had spotted the telltale muzzle flash and lay all but motionless for fifteen minutes as he surreptitiously sighted his rifle on the hole. Just after dark the star shells came out and the lid lifted. “The Jap put his head up and was looking at the rocky area where the Marines had gone. Then he began bringing his rifle out to fire, but as he did, I fired twice. Both of the rounds hit him in the head, which exploded. That took care of this problem.”8
In this instance, Stone was successful, but success was costly in terms of time and effort. A better way eventually became standard practice. When a spider trap was discovered, the leader of a four-man fire team stayed back to provide covering fire if necessary while a rifleman sneaked up to within six yards. The two others moved to either side of the lid and waited. Then the first rifleman pulled the pin on a grenade and signaled for them to raise the lid about 45 degrees. The grenade was tossed in, the men dropped the lid, and it exploded before the surprised occupant had any chance of escaping or throwing the grenade back out.9
There was always grim satisfaction when a sniper was killed. After John Thurman and some buddies blew apart a long-troublesome one they took the time to go over and study their late antagonist. “His body was ripped and torn in half,” said Thurman. “His head and chest were lying with his hips and legs about ten feet away. It was still very early in the morning and it was just getting light out … it was chilly. We could see steam coming off his insides. His heart was hanging just below the ribs of his chest in the sand—his heart was still beating.”10
As time passed, that satisfaction became not quite so satisfying. Spider traps were rapidly diminishing in number and, perhaps more important, the snipers manning them were declining in expertise. A “sniper” at the beginning of the battle was far more skilled than one so designated by its end, when a sniper could be defined as anyone brandishing a rifle.
Thus, in the first several weeks there are many stories of their pinpoint accuracy, a large number involving shots to the head—the most difficult shots to make. As they were leaving the beach, especially, Marines were subjected to expert sharpshooting; there were many times, as Thomas Williams found, when one would jump into a shell hole and say hello to the other occupant, only to discover that he had already been precisely assassinated.11 Gerald Averill later came across “a heavy machine gun team, the gunner, feet planted firmly in the sand on either side of the tripod, head low against the rear sight, aiming in on an un known target. To his left, his assistant gunner lay alongside the gun, his hand on the half-empty belt, just short of the feedway. Both of them had been shot exactly between the eyes.”12 When Jay Rebstock dived into a foxhole the two men there stood up to make room. One was instantly shot in the middle of the forehead and the other had a bullet pierce his helmet and come out the other side. Obviously, snipers had been watching that hole closely.13
As U.S. forces advanced up the island, snipers began to miss more often, not only because the Japanese had lost their best-trained marksmen but because the Marines had grown wise to their tricks. For instance, Keith Neilson was running a telephone wire back to a command post when a bullet hit the sand twenty-five feet away. Instead of freezing, as a newbie would do, he immediately jumped into a shell hole. The sniper continued to take shots as he tried to get a bead on the Marine. His next bullet landed fifteen feet away, and the next, ten, and the next, five. Neilson saw that they were landing in a straight line—a rookie mistake—and followed their path with his eyes until he spotted the sniper’s hiding spot. Knowing that the sniper now had him targeted, Neilson broke cover and ran off as the sniper vainly tried to hit him. Once a sniper’s bolt-hole had been found like that, it was not long until a machine gun or tank eliminated it.14
Pillboxes, bunkers, and other emplacements like blockhouses were altogether a different story. (Marines often used the terms almost interchangeably. Technically speaking, a pillbox is a small concrete guard post equipped with apertures from which to fire a machine gun; a bunker is generally a larger structure, mostly underground; and a blockhouse is a thick-walled, aboveground variant of the bunker.) Even after the Marines had reached their highest level of lethal proficiency, every single one of these continued to form a dangerous obstacle.
In the face of scarcity, the Japanese were nothing if not enterprising. Volcanic sand was mixed with imported cement and seawater and rein forced with low-grade steel bars to form decent concrete—it was nowhere near as good as American-made, as there were plenty of air pockets and visible seams, but it was sufficient nonetheless to ward off a limited number of direct hits with artillery and tank guns. Wooden ammunition crates were broken apart and their nails reused to provide additional fortification. Sandbags could be fashioned from the burlap or rice-straw bags used to hold food; a two-deep layer provided adequate protection against small-arms fire. Loose sand piled up and shaped around the walls and roof provided not only camouflage but absorbed projectiles and shell fragments.1
Incredibly, the Japanese managed to build at least fifteen hundred pillboxes on Iwo Jima. They tended to fit two or three men and had walls up to a foot thick. Robert Sherrod found a particularly well-protected one that had an additional ten feet of sand covering its sides.2 Well hidden they were, too: Patrick Caruso received an unpleasant shock when he sat down to rest on a convenient ledge that turned out to be a (thankfully inactive) heavily disguised pillbox.3 Owing to the inland pillboxes’ prevalence and cunning placement, it was hard to knock them out with naval fire. Marines had to tackle each one—one by one.
In those situations, tanks were undoubtedly useful. When Mike Ladich’s company was pinned down by a camouflaged pillbox, a tank rumbled up, the hatch opened, and its commander asked him to point out its location. A burst of machine-gun fire that ricocheted off the tank answered the question. The tank’s machine gun poured fire into the pillbox’s six-by-eighteen-inch aperture, followed by three or four rounds from its powerful 75mm gun. “When the shells exploded inside, the pillbox literally rose up from the ground and shuddered.”4
Unfortunately, tanks also attracted unwelcome attention. Their presence could be counted on to prompt a rain of mortars and shells on any infantry nearby. Despite trying to help some beleaguered infantry, one commander was angrily told in no uncertain words to “park those fuckin’ tanks someplace else” by some disgruntled recipients of his largesse.5 Even absent any contribution from the enemy, tanks could be dangerous to be around in their own right. For many reasons, includ ing avoiding hours of deafness when a nearby tank opened fire, Marines quickly learned to stay well to their side or rear. “If the tank fired the 75mm gun while a Marine was lying on the ground in front of the tank, the muzzle blast could hurl a person five or ten feet through the air,” said Alfred Stone.6
Behind them they also left behind a trail of squashed corpses, unpleasant for everybody. Frank Walker was three feet away from a tank that “chewed up a Marine just underneath the surface.… The blood and body fluids sprayed onto me and I carried that on my clothes for the remainder of the 36 days.”7 Jim Craig was trying to crawl back to a command post when he came across a group of Japanese infiltrators run over by tanks. “They had lain all day in the warm sun and some were so badly crushed from the tank treads that their exposed intestines lay like coiled snakes. Others were grossly bloated. A swarm of blue flies buzzed in clusters in their gaping mouths and eyes.”8 If the corpses had been there for some time, they deflated and rotted and looked “perfectly flat just like a paper doll.”9 But the smell was nauseating. Richard Lowe accidentally sat on one while resting and soon “moved upwind about 10 feet [and] faced the other way.”10 George Nations, meanwhile, was trying to cook some rations but could “not enjoy my lunch” thanks to the stench.11
Tanks, in any case, were of limited use against defensive structures other than pillboxes. A fairly standard blockhouse, for instance, had forty-inch-thick concrete walls, measured ten by twenty feet, and had a five-foot ceiling. Inside were three rooms separated by foot-thick concrete walls, and the doorways between those rooms were narrow, to contain blasts. Even a major explosion in one room would leave the occupants of the other two unscathed and still fighting. Blockhouses, too, were protected by a network of pillboxes and were designed to deflect not merely tank guns but high-caliber naval fire. Even by Iwo Jima standards, Kuribayashi’s command blockhouse in the island’s north was gargantuan. About 150 feet long and 70 feet wide with five-foot-thick walls and ten feet of reinforced concrete forming the roof, engineers would need 8,500 pounds of explosives in five separate charges to destroy it. Wes Plummer remembered that “when they blew up that blockhouse, I thought the world had come to an end. I’d been in the midst of heavy fighting since D-Day and it was the loudest damned explosion I’d ever heard.”12
Bunkers, because only their entrances were visible, were also almost impervious to tank fire or artillery. Direct hits with bazookas or a tank gun could blast off chunks of exposed concrete, but infantry needed to perform the “wet work” and the mopping up.13 Early on, grenades were used plentifully. Throw enough in, and sooner or later the occupants would cease fighting. But they always proved stubborn—and dangerous, too, for the Japanese had their own supply of grenades. For every handful of grenades Captain LaVerne Wagner and his men tossed into one bunker, at least a dozen were thrown out. They persisted until none returned. When they finally entered the structure, they found parts of three corpses and seventy-five fresh grenades, neatly lined up.14
It was, in any case, quite simple for the Japanese to mitigate the effects of grenades, as Marines bitterly discovered. Adding a right angle to a rear-entrance passage and using small, slanted apertures hindered grenades from being tossed directly in; a drainpipe-sized ditch scooped in front caught them if they tried to roll them; interior walls reduced concussion and shrapnel; and a deep, narrow “well” at the defenders’ feet allowed them to kick live grenades out of harm’s way.15
The essential problem with using grenades or relying on tank fire was that not every defender was killed instantly. They took time to work, and in the interim if even one Japanese was left alive he was a threat. Outside one bunker, related Bill Faulkner, despite several large explosions, a shower of grenades emanated from the shaken defenders. Then some wounded Japanese charged out and made straight for the Marines, whose rifles had jammed. Fortunately, they “ran right into a machine gun we had set up to cover the attack. We moved around to the front of the bunker and found several Japs, all wounded but jabbering and trying to pull the pins of grenades. [Lieutenant Wesley] Bates tried his Japanese on them, asking them to surrender, but no luck.” They had to shoot them one by one.16
A new alternative technique developed on Iwo to save time and effort was for a Marine to scramble to the top of a structure while his comrades diverted the defenders by firing into the apertures. Richard Wheeler watched one man scrape away the covering sand and plant an explosive charge directly on the roof. After he bounded to safety, there was a loud blast and a hole opened up in the concrete. Another accompanying Marine now thrust thermite grenades through the fissure to create enough heat and smoke to force the occupants outside. As they shoved open the steel door, Marines rushed forward and opened fire, emptying their magazines into the writhing bodies. Three Japanese managed to make it outside “and fell to the ground. One made a feeble attempt to rise, and Ruhl hurried forward to finish the job with his bayonet.”17
Only one weapon was judged capable of annihilating Japanese with certainty, celerity, and economy: the flamethrower. The problem was that their operators were highly vulnerable to hostile fire. They had among the shortest life expectancies of any Marine, according to Robert Lanehart: The lifespan of “a flamethrower man [was counted] in seconds, twenty seconds or something like that, when you’re in combat. Which I can believe. You make a good target. You can’t duck too well with a flamethrower on your back.”18 Flamethrowers were always the largest men physically, as they needed to bear the seventy-two-pound heft of their equipment.19 Husky or hulking replacements, proudly if innocently believing they were being selected for a signal honor, were often chosen to act as expendable operators by their grizzled, and suspiciously friendly, new comrades.20 Whoever they were, they rarely lasted long. During a single attack on a pillbox, said Jay Rebstock, his platoon lost no fewer than three flamethrower men in quick succession.21 Indeed, it was a rare thing to see, as Alvin Josephy did, a wounded one. As he was stretchered to the rear, this remarkably fortunate individual propped himself up on his elbows and giddily exclaimed to everyone he passed: “So long, everybody! I’m going back to the States. I been wounded. I’m saying goodbye to you all. I been wounded!”22
A lone flamethrower operator was a dead flamethrower operator. His weapon worked only at fairly close range and had a short duration (about eight seconds per tank), and so he needed sufficient protection to approach the target safely. Following guidelines set in mid-December 1944, Marines began to send escorts of several riflemen and BARmen along with their flamethrower operator; demolitions specialists also accompanied the team.23
On Iwo Jima, the Marines gradually evolved a three-stage process for destroying emplacements using these new units. First, the BARmen and riflemen would circle to either side of the structure to cover the flamethrower operator. They would fire into the aperture or apertures to give cover and to provide enough time for the flamethrower man to run up and shoot a stream of fuel inside before igniting it with “a metallic click, a whoosh, and a low-keyed roar” to annihilate the occupants.24 It was hitting the aperture that required training and experience. According to Woody Williams, who knocked out seven pillboxes in a single day (killing twenty-one Japanese in the process), “if you fired the thing into the air and you had any air blowing toward you, it’d burn all the hair off your arms and eyebrows. It would kick back at you, so we fired it in two- or three-second bursts and rolled the flame on the ground. It would roll across the ground, twenty to twenty-five yards depending on terrain, and right into a pillbox.”25
At which point began the second stage. Much of the twenty-foot-wide fireball would blow clear outside, “but a lot would penetrate the aperture,” Williams added, giving the demolitions men “time to get up there and throw a satchel charge” inside to finish the job and help render the structure unusable.26 Satchel charges weighed between eight and twenty pounds and contained C2 plastic explosive blocks. As their name indicates, they were canvas bags with a shoulder strap, which made their carriers look like overgrown schoolboys.27
Wise Marines stayed well back from the explosion, which sent chunks of concrete and metal fragments flying outward. Incredibly, too, there were some Japanese who had the presence of mind to hurl the satchel charge back outside. Sergeant Krywicki was covering a demolitions man who threw in the charge, only to have it land right back next to him. He vanished while Krywicki was spun around twice and knocked flat. All the buttons had been blown off his shirt, and he was deafened. (One ear would never regain much hearing.) His late col league’s scalp, “with all the hair still on it, flopped like a mop beside him,” recalled Dan Levin.28
Finally, any survivors had to be killed. For obvious reasons, they were few and far between, as a flamethrower instantly turned a confined space into a super-heated furnace that sucked the oxygen out of the air and lungs. Those inside died of rapid and intense suffocation. (Some Japanese soldiers, ignorant that it was not the temperature but the lack of air that was lethal, hung blankets from the ceilings to reduce the heat.) For occupants not in the immediate vicinity (in the larger structures), their clothes and flesh would catch on fire; if they were able to make it outside, they would either die or be killed in short order. Near Kitano Point, for instance, a Japanese, aflame with napalm oozing over his skin, erupted from an exit holding a grenade in either hand. He threw them both, harmlessly, before expiring. Another time, a few soldiers emerged and “ran straight into the fire from my flamethrower,” said Woody Williams. “As if in slow motion they just fell down.”29 The more veteran flamethrower men, like Williams, kept their igniters permanently lit to deal with the running-survivor problem. Thus, when two soldiers surprised Alfred Stone and began firing, he was fortunate to have a flamethrower man about twenty-five feet away who “calmly pulled the trigger on his flamethrower and covered them both with burning napalm.… The two Japanese were frozen in position when the burning napalm hit them and died instantly.”30
While flamethrower operators rarely, if ever, saw the effects of their weapon on those Japanese trapped in pillboxes and bunkers (though they could hear screams and smell the seared flesh), the soldiers killed outside provided vivid evidence of their effectiveness.31 It was particularly noticeable how men’s heads glowed so brightly, like matches, after being deluged with fuel and set alight. It was their skins that blackened and split apart as liquefied fat burst through. A large fatty bubble often emerged from their rectums. As the flames diminished, the bubble did as well, but it never popped, prompting much curious commentary from passersby.32 If anyone poked his head inside the structure, all he would see would be some “flamethrower-charred and bloodstained concrete walls,” along with a few crispy bodies here and there.33
In Europe, prisoners were habitually taken before or after flame actions.34 There, flamethrowers enjoyed a degree of psychological value in the sense that defenders would be frightened or demoralized into surrendering upon seeing them. In the Pacific, however, while Japanese soldiers were terrified by these fearsome weapons, they still did not surrender. They kept on fighting to the end, necessitating total annihilation.
So ruthlessly deadly was the combination flamethrower/demolition method that there appears to have been just a single prisoner taken on Iwo following its application, though this was more by accident than design. A captain once brought in to the Division Intelligence Section—which was desperately seeking prisoners to interrogate—a small, wiry Japanese who had been burned by a flamethrower. Said a surgeon, “His eyelids were swollen closed. The lips were also cracked and swollen and pouted outwards in a grotesque fashion. The upper teeth could just be seen deep in the tunnel of recently cooked flesh. Shreds of skin were peeling from the ears, nose, and cheeks. The man reeked with the pungent odor of burned flesh.”35 Even if little was gained from him, flame actions provided practical intelligence of a different nature. For Patrick Caruso, it was useful indeed to see the smoke billowing out from the emplacement’s interconnected exits dozens and scores of yards away, now suddenly revealed. They would form the next targets—and so on and on until the Marines reached the caves of Iwo Jima.36
Encountering cave defenses on Mount Suribachi in the first week of the battle, Marines had attacked them with grenades and flamethrowers in an ad hoc manner.1 In those innocent days, some Marines had even entered cave systems to search for souvenirs. Howard Snyder and Chick Robeson actually dug their way into a cave that had been sealed a few days before. Inside, the “stench that met us was so foul we had to put on gas masks. We went in with a small flashlight and found the cave to have sections. Dead Japs lay all about, so thick we had to tread on some.” The good news was that “we found souvenirs galore. I came out with several rifles, a canteen, and a bag full of smaller stuff, including a wristwatch. We also found some maps and other papers we turned over to Schrier. But we really caught hell for being so stupid, and the cave was blown shut a second time, so completely that no darned fools could try such a trick again.”2
As they moved north, Marines found the Japanese defenders ever more firmly entrenched in ever more numerous, ever larger caves. Over the weeks of fighting, an eerie sound—“not unlike someone banging on the radiator in the apartment below,” wrote Robert Sherrod—could be heard when shellfire died down and Marines placed their ears to the ground. It was the faint sound of metal pickaxes striking soft volcanic rocks as the Japanese burrowed deeper into the heart of the island.3
By that time, the process of killing Japanese had become wholly mechanical. For the smaller caves, Marines adapted the now-trusted pillbox method. Squad riflemen and BARmen circled left and right (avoiding the narrow fire lanes of cave-bound machine guns) and fired inside as best they could.4 In the meantime, two demolitions men, having dispensed with their helmets, cartridge belts, and anything else that might clink or hinder them, would sneak to either side, dragging their satchel charges behind them with one hand grasping a .45 pistol (just in case) and a grenade or two in separate pockets. Once stationed on the cave entrance’s lip, they set the thirty-second delay fuses, counted down, and tossed them in at the same moment. The thinking was that even if the defenders managed to throw one back, there would not be enough time to return the other.5
The resulting explosions shattered, disoriented, and shook those inside but did not generally bring down the roof or seal the cave’s entrance with rubble and dirt. Finishing off the defenders was the task of the flamethrower man, who now rushed up and suffocated anyone still alive. Only then did the demolitions men place another charge above the cave entrance and direct its explosive force downward by piling heavy stones on top of it.6 It was this step that finally plugged a cave. The last horrible thing that survivors—men toiling deeper down, away from the blasts and flames, as well as wounded men lying in lower chambers—saw before infinite darkness arrived was, in the flickering light of their lamps and candles, a wall of dirt and smashed rocks blocking their exit. A few might escape by groping their way to another undiscovered entrance, and some you could hear, according to Al Abbatiello, “digging at night, trying to get out,” but most eventually committed suicide.7 The muffled explosions Marines typically heard emanating afterward from sealed caves was the sound of Japanese soldiers holding grenades to their stomachs.8 In one memorable instance, at exactly midnight a colossal explosion rocked an entire ridge, throwing up boulders, temporarily burying wondering Marines in their foxholes, and sending concrete blocks and dirt showering down. Inside a sealed cave system, the defenders had set off their supply of land mines and 125-pound aerial bombs to end their lives in spectacular fashion.9
Those trapped in the caves had long had a miserable existence. For weeks before their deaths they had been crammed inside what many suspected would become their charnel-house. The corpses they had dragged in to hide their true losses from the Marines had long since decayed, and the wounded’s injuries were turning gangrenous. The air was filled with a sickening, fetid stench of pus, blood, and rot, the water reeked of sulfur, the temperature hit 120 degrees, and the humidity level rose to 98 percent. If any of the wounded “groaned with pain, they were told to shut up or strangled,” said Saturo Omagari.10 Men had fought for light and scraps of food as they succumbed to insanity and incoherence, overcome by fear of the coming flamethrowers and the prospect of being buried alive. Now that the nightmare had been rendered real by the Marine Corps, dying by grenade was their last, blessed choice, a final ray of rationality beaming through the murk of madness that had tormented them as they powerlessly awaited processing.
An archaeological team that opened and explored one such sealed cave in 2010 found that even after seventy years there was “a pervading odour of decomposition, a scent which clung to the team’s clothes, skin, and hair.” Lying scattered around were cooking utensils, rice cookers, opened food cans, mess kits, and bowls as well as personal items like wallets, spectacles, toothbrushes, and even hair pomade. Bones were found embedded in the ceiling, implanted by the blast preceding the flames that had instantly boiled and steamed the contents of torn-apart water canteens. There was a gas mask—they were worn to try to filter the foul air—melted into the wall at head height.11
For the larger cave mouths, terrain permitting, tanks were used in place of infantry. Near the end, recalled Robert Maiden, two tanks armed with the standard 75mm gun were accompanied by a “Zippo tank” equipped with a flamethrower far more powerful than the portable versions. It could spew flame up to 150 yards for about a minute. Near Kitano Point, he added, there was a huge pit at the bottom of which were three caves with openings you could drive a truck through. The tanks descended until they could get a clear shot. Then two 75mm rounds were fired into each mouth followed by a “hot shot” from the Zippo tank.12 In these instances, Japanese soldiers, all alight, would often bolt outside where the tanks’ machine guns were waiting to cut them down. So automatic had become the Marines’ actions by this stage of the battle that even this impressive sight was counted, said Bertrand Yaffe, as “merely a momentary diversion” by those already moving on to the next obstacle.13
There were exceptions to the rule, generally when tanks were unable to assist, a prisoner or two was available, or an experienced demolitions team was sufficiently confident to cut a few corners. Known as the most “cold-blooded, methodical, tobacco-chewing Jap annihilators” in the Pacific, a team comprising G. E. Barber and L. J. Byfield (ably assisted by S. Bencich and E. A. Bennett) “had a system that never failed,” according to William Huie, a Seabee who saw them in action. Barber and Byfield, both Texans, were forty years old, veteran potash miners, and graduates of the Navy’s Mine and Demolition School. Whenever they sallied forth to handle the big caves, they brought along a couple of prisoners. As they covered the entrance with their Tommy guns, a captive, waving a strip of toilet paper (white flags were in such short supply that each demolitions team was equipped with a roll of toilet paper for the purpose) was sent in to ask whether the defenders wished to surrender. If he did not emerge in ten minutes, they assumed he was dead and heaved a huge dynamite charge into the cave’s mouth. Any Japanese who then came running out were machine-gunned before Barber and his mates entered the cave to deal with the rest. In one, he said, “I never seen such a mess o’ Japs. That blast had smashed their backbones, their jawbones, and some o’ their skulls. One of ’em threw a grenade at me, so I finished killing ’em.”
If the prisoner emerged, however, and reported no Japanese inside, they sealed the cave anyway—just in case he was lying. If, on the other hand, he said they refused to surrender Barber and Byfield sent in a second prisoner. “I like to give the little bastards two chances,” the sporting Barber told Huie, “but it makes no difference whether they come out or not.”
On the rare occasions when the defenders decided to come out peacefully, they were told to first remove their clothes, grab a piece of toilet paper, and walk out slowly with their hands up. Once outside, they had to turn around to show that nothing was being concealed. Then the original prisoner went in, retrieved the clothing, shook it out, and brought it all to Barber, who rechecked it. The prisoners could then get dressed and were escorted under heavy guard to a holding area.14
Barber and Byfield captured twenty or so prisoners—quite a haul for Iwo Jima—but their caution regarding surrenders was justified. There were many cases of Japanese ostensibly trying to surrender only to play murderous tricks on unwary Marines. Corpsman Jerry Cunningham was helping a Sergeant Holmes to coax Japanese out of a cave when two came running out next to each other. As Holmes shouted, “Hit the deck!” the pair suddenly parted ways, triggering a grenade tied between them on a string.1 Another squad was approached by three Japanese with their hands raised. As they came closer, “the enemy soldier in the middle went down on all fours and became a human machine-gun tripod—a Nambu light machine gun had been strapped to his back, and one of his comrades fired off half a belt of ammunition, wounding several of the Marines before he was killed, along with his two comrades.”2 It became common practice to order potential captives to strip, even in chilly weather, to confirm that they were not concealing grenades.3
Just as often, Japanese committed suicide—the more public the better, in order to demonstrate the full measure of their commitment to the emperor. Once, a dozen Japanese walked out of a cave holding grenades to their heads. There was no attempt to kill the surprised Marines, only a defiant desire to take the honorable way out.4 Near the end of the battle, Austin Montgomery and Dick Tilghman were awed to “see at least five of the enemy dive head first off the cliffs on the other side of the [Death] Valley, and down to their deaths on the rocks below.”5
Even severely wounded Japanese proved hard to take prisoner. After exterminating a group who ignored their call to surrender, Marines found one still alive, injured and almost completely buried in the sand. A few inches from his right hand was a grenade. Detected, he hesitated as the Marines readied their guns and, thinking better of it, signaled instead for a cigarette before surrendering.6 Marines habitually kept a close eye on “dead” soldiers lying with weapons suspiciously close to hand. Bill Faulkner and Robert Wells saw one such in a crater. They skirted the edge, watching him all the time. Suddenly Faulkner whirled and shot him. Asked why, he answered: “His eyes followed us around the crater.”7
There were, however, times where Japanese soldiers did earnestly try to surrender. Master Sergeant Taizo Sakai, Kuribayashi’s chief code clerk, was more than happy to put his hands up, asserting that he was not one of the “fanatics.” He proved his worth by helping to induce others to surrender, warning when a banzai was likely to erupt from a cave, and providing much useful intelligence on enemy defenses.8 John Lyttle was once startled by a Japanese shouting, in perfect English, “I don’t go for this hari-kiri shit,” and entreating him to accept his submission. It turned out he was from Chicago and had been visiting Japan before Pearl Harbor and found himself conscripted.9
But in a pattern replicated across the Pacific theater as a whole, such cases were isolated ones. Whereas in August 1944, some fifty thousand German prisoners were arriving in the United States each month, just 1,990 Japanese had been captured since Pearl Harbor, two and a half years earlier. A year later, the war over, the U.S. Army held 1,538,837 German POWs and 24,138 Japanese.10 Accordingly, of Iwo Jima’s twenty-thousand-odd (estimates range from 18,060 to 25,000) defenders, every one but 216 died there. Of these, 59 were suborned Korean laborers expected to die with their masters but who had elected instead to disappoint them. Eleven of the prisoners died of their injuries, and 85 percent of the rest had been wounded by the time they fell into American hands.11 Many of them had been unconscious when they were taken in, so they were hardly voluntary captives. So ashamed were they that when they awoke they gave false names and begged for their families not to be notified.12
When Japanese soldiers were captured, because they were indoctrinated to believe that the Americans tortured, beheaded, boiled in oil, and ate their prisoners, they were surprised to find themselves treated to cigarettes, perfunctory questioning, and medical treatment equal to that given to Americans.13 One man, who asked Patrick Caruso not to torture him but to execute him immediately, was taken aback upon learning that neither would happen.14 But that was only if they made it back to headquarters or a hospital ship; not all did. After two immobilized casualties were shot “while trying to escape” from a jeep ambulance by their Marine guards, Dr. James Vedder began ordering a corpsman to accompany POWs on their way to the rear to avoid similar incidents in future.15
By the final stages on Iwo Jima, however, it was easier, safer, faster, more practical, and more fulfilling to kill potential prisoners. One Japanese who had charged William Smith was wounded and lay at his feet. “So I finished him off. I don’t think they could have done anything for him. Wasn’t intentional or nothing, you know what I mean. We hardly took any prisoners, let’s put it that way.”16 According to Ernest Moreau, after a lieutenant spent fifteen minutes coaxing the defenders from a cave by assuring them they would be treated decently and three Japanese emerged, they were immediately machine-gunned by a waiting Marine. No one but the lieutenant cared.17
Marines’ responses to taking prisoners were a cross between calm matter-of-factness and vengeful anger. George Nations related an incident involving the latter:
As our tank maneuvered around a large boulder we saw a Jap sitting down with no clothes on, he appears to be blind and is crying. We fire a burst from the machine gun at him [but] just as we do our tank turns slightly to the right. The burst misses his chest and takes his left arm off at the elbow. His life’s blood is now leaping out in great spurts and in rhythm with his heart beat. Our next burst hits him in the chest and his body slams back against the ground with a great invisible force. I’m not proud of this, but it happened forty years ago. We had a different outlook on these things. We had lost so many young Marines we couldn’t let a Jap live even when trying to surrender. 18
Rage at Japanese treatment of American captives helped provoke these harsh reactions. As no American voluntarily surrendered to the Japanese this late in the war, anyone who ended up in their hands had been taken while wounded or, as likely, kidnapped. Lieutenant Herbert Smith, for instance, had vanished without a trace one day as he walked back from battalion headquarters to his company. It is possible that infiltrators dragged him back to the caves.19
If so, his fate was unenviable. No Marine survived a Japanese interrogation. First Lieutenant Yamakazi Takeshi wrote that during a visit to regimental headquarters one day he noticed that a “Lieutenant Otani [killed in action shortly after] was then in the process of interrogating an American prisoner of war” and left it at that. As Takeshi was too circumspect to later mention, this POW was being tortured to death.20
Dean Winters knew a man who was captured “and pulled into a cave where they tortured him by splitting his finger webs up to his wrists. He was screaming uncontrollably. Our lieutenant got so angry he went in after him and was killed in the process.” It is unlikely that the occupants of this cave were taken alive afterward.21 Other Marines were found with all their fingers broken or their heads smashed open with rifle butts; one was discovered hanging nude by his ankles from the roof of a cave.22 A pile of cigarette butts lay on the floor under his head. The skin all over his body was pitted by cigarette burns. Some were large, some small, some shallow, some deep.23 (Regarding cigarettes, any Japanese caught carrying Lucky Strikes or the like was destined for the high jump. As Barber, the Texan demolitions man, put it: “It always makes me want to kill ’em when I find ’em with American cigarettes. I know that they got those cigarettes off’a dead Marines.” He would not have been the only one to hold this view.)24
While brutal or callous or banal, these are not the words and actions of avowed racists but of men who had reached the end of their emotional and psychological tethers. Unstinting Japanese resistance and culturally shocking deceitfulness, weeks of unrelenting stress and anguish, rising casualty rolls and the loss of friends, the onset of dehumanization and the evolution of processing methods, the overwhelming desire to “just get it over with” and overpowering rage at Japanese atrocities, drove Marines onward to the very end.
Even after the virtual extinction of the Japanese garrison, the battle of Iwo Jima was not quite over. More survivors than anyone suspected still remained on the island. The official American tally was 2,469. Most of them (1,602) were quickly hunted down and liquidated. On April 19, for instance, when Marines discovered a group of 220 haggard Japanese in a cave, they squirted aviation fuel inside and ignited it with a flamethrower, killing 150 within minutes.
The rest (867) were taken prisoner one or two at a time. By early May, the Japanese were spending their days hiding in “the grass, near the bottom of trees, or in the crevices of rocks, and at night they became thieves and burglars, stealing from American supplies,” said Lieutenant Musahino Kikuzo. Occasionally, a couple of fellow survivors would bump into one another and each would talk “about his own hard life” before setting out to “start again on his hopeless wander ing.” Musahino himself camped with a friend named Lieutenant Taki, and they knew these chance meetings were becoming ever rarer. After running into Lieutenant Soma and a companion—survival seemed to hinge on banding together in pairs—they never saw them again. Soma and the other fellow were buried alive in a cave soon after.
On the night of June 8–9, Taki and Musahino found a cave complex “filled with corpses. Hundreds of dead bodies still kept their shape, in a variety of poses.” It had once been a field hospital, and everyone in it had been abandoned by their comrades. “So the wounded died of hunger right where they had been left. Black hair was still growing from some of the dead.… There were thousands of big black flies. Every time you drew a breath, several would fly into your mouth.” Still, it was safe enough, so they stayed there for three days, but a machine gun eventually got Taki.
On June 12 Musahino made his way to the eastern coast to commit suicide by starvation—his sword was long gone, as were his grenades. He fainted and lay beneath a rock, waking a few days later with six or seven soldiers pointing rifles at him. They wrapped him in blankets and brought him to a hospital, where he was given nutritious food, injections, and medical treatment.1
There remained a few holdouts, who came in occasionally over the next several months. The very last survivors surrendered to a rather surprised pair of Air Force corporals driving a Jeep around the island on January 6, 1949—three and a half years after Japan’s capitulation. According to their immediate superior, Sergeant Donald Cook, they had picked up two pedestrians standing by the side of the road “dressed in army fatigues and wearing army field jackets about two sizes larger than necessary.” Originally mistaking them for visiting Chinese personnel (there were Chinese ships offshore removing wartime debris), they drove them to the motor pool and left them waiting while they went inside to the office. Upon the corporals’ return, the hitchhikers had disappeared. Soon afterward, a staff sergeant found them gazing wonderingly at an American flag fluttering in the wind. He recognized them as Japanese and took them prisoner. Under questioning, they revealed the location of their hideout cave and solved the long-standing mysteries of the vanished canned ham that the Air Force men never got to eat the Christmas before and the ongoing disappearance of flashlight batteries. The two men, Matsudo Linsoki and Yamakage Kufuku, both machine gunners and former farmers, had learned, it seems, of the end of the war after stealing a copy of Stars and Stripes featuring a photo of General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito standing together in Tokyo. As MacArthur was not bowing in the divine presence, they had begun to suspect that the war’s outcome had developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.2
In the meantime, the Americans had buried their dead. Unlike at Gettysburg, the procedure was by now well-established and -executed. The Marine Corps had stockpiled thousands of premade crosses and Stars of David, directed personnel to bury by unit rather than by date of death, and had already marked out the location of the planned cemeteries long before D-Day.3 Five days after landing, with at least five hundred bodies collected, the first permanent internments began.
At the beginning of the process, a team harvested the dead’s helmets, webbing, and weapons, which were driven to salvage depots to be either reissued or destroyed, and then three or four men sorted through the personal effects to establish identities and package whatever would be sent home to relatives. “There were some things that were taken out of the wallets, because we [understood] all the wallets were going back to the families,” said Gage Hotaling, a chaplain. “So if we found some pornographic literature, that was immediately removed.… There were pictures of Marines with gook girls and so on, in all kinds of poses, and those were always removed.”4
As at Gettysburg, most of the burial details were black units. Black Marines, the first of whom were recruited by the Marine Corps as late as mid-1942, were segregated from combat roles and otherwise restricted to unloading ammunition, operating transport vehicles, guard duty, road construction, lifting the wounded, and moving supplies. Nearly all, nonetheless, would come under fire, given that Iwo was a small island with a lot of artillery action and that they drove supply trucks to the frontline troops.5 The details used bulldozers to plow trenches eight feet wide and between four and six feet deep. The bod ies, enshrouded in ponchos, were interred two feet apart. As each was laid to rest, Graves Registration personnel removed one dog tag and left the other with the corpse.6 Sometimes, there was just an unidentified arm or leg left to bury.7
A registrar then walked the length of each trench to confirm that the bodies were in the correct order. The burial men would call out the name, rank, and serial number of each corpse, and the registrar would repeat the details and write them down. A chaplain followed two bodies behind the registrar uttering the appropriate benediction for a Protestant, Catholic, or Jew. When all had reached the end of the trench, it would be filled in. A cross or star was planted and the dog tag removed earlier would be strung around it with the serial number, name, and service emblem stenciled on the headstone to allow careful cross-referencing later.8 A body count of a hundred would have been registered as a light day, while March 2, with 247 burials, appears to have been the worst, according to Hotaling’s records.9
A year later, relatives were given the choice whether to exhume a loved one and have him sent home for reburial or to leave him among his comrades. Most selected the latter. Unbeknownst to them, and kept a secret, the warm volcanic pumice had in the meantime wicked the moisture and fluids out of the bodies, leaving them as mummies.10 The letters of condolence they received, as well, were models of discretion in certain matters.
Frank Caldwell, a company commander, devoted days to writing to the families of those killed, each letter comprising “three pages per casualty in longhand, in triplicate.” His job was “to tell next of kin how we knew this fellow. Some of them I had to lie a little bit because I didn’t know everybody or how they got killed.”11 Sometimes it was not good enough. A Captain Fields, having informed a boy’s mother of his valorous death in the face of danger—he had stepped on a mine after disobeying instructions to stay within the safety zone—continued to receive querying letters from her for many months afterward. She refused to believe that her son was dead.12 Other families angrily accused officers of causing their loved one’s death through their incompetence and callousness. After Robert Neiman’s tank company was hit by mor tars and Sergeant Russell Lippert was killed, Neiman wrote to Lippert’s wife describing the terrible magnitude of his loss to all his comrades. “She wrote a scathing reply,” he recalled. “She was understandably upset, but she accused me of putting her husband in an untenable position and getting him killed.” (The story has a curious postscript. When Joe Rosenthal, the photographer who shot the raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi, lost his helmet, some Marines told him to pick one from a pile collected from the dead. “He wrote that he had often wondered about the man whose helmet he had. The name written on it was Lippert.”)13
There were, of course, enormous numbers of wounded and debilitated veterans of Iwo Jima. Whether a wounded man survived or not, or suffered more than he ought, largely depended on enjoying a modicum of good fortune in the hours after getting hit. The Marines’ experience of the initial trauma period varied enormously. Thus, Richard Wheeler was shot in the neck and was incredibly lucky, first, that the bullet missed his carotid artery and jugular vein; second, that there was a fine surgeon in the next foxhole with the necessary clamps; third, that there was plasma immediately available; and fourth, that he was taken urgently to the beach and evacuated. Within two hours of being wounded he was lying in a clean bunk aboard a modern hospital ship, tended to by competent nurses and doctors.14
Not so fortunate was Lieutenant John Noe (who died in 1997). When a bullet collided with his lower jaw, it fractured his left mandible and passed out his right cheek. En route it shattered his right mandible, broke his right upper jaw, and ripped out most of the teeth on that side. Bone fragments and bullet shrapnel tore apart and gashed the cheeks up to his eyes. Bereft of a convenient corpsman, he had to walk to the rear holding the shattered parts of his face together while blood gushing into his throat came close to suffocating him. A hundred yards on, a Japanese sniper hit him in the right calf. Upon finally making it to the battalion aid station, where he was at last given morphine, it took several more hours for him to be evacuated to the beach. Even then, as a cold rain fell his litter was placed in the open hold of a landing craft with forty-five others. Their cries rebounded off the metal walls and, with no corpsman aboard, no drugs could be dispensed. Late at night the vessel clanged against the sides of a ship, and he heard shouting. But there was evidently no room, and they had to try several more times elsewhere before space could be found—nine and a half hours after his being wounded. By then, eight of the forty-six men aboard were dead, and another seven died soon after. Thus, fully a third of the casualties became fatalities on their way to what was not even a hospital ship but a transport ship hurriedly converted to emergency care. It took another six days for Noe to be flown out.15
The most serious casualties stayed in hospitals for months, or years, afterward. Keith Wheeler, who visited them in Hawaii, was sure that while Iwo Jima produced no instance of a “living basket case”—men who had lost all their limbs—there were plenty who had lost both of one set.16 Wheeler had himself been wounded during the battle, and on the evacuation flight he met Chuck, who tossed and turned because he could not position his legs comfortably—despite their having been left somewhere on Iwo.17 Among the worst cases, said a nurse, were those with gunshot and shrapnel wounds to the chest. Many others were paralyzed (and so lacked bladder and bowel control) by hits to the spine, and still more had lost much of their abdominal cavity, necessitating frequent colostomy dressings. Nearly all required oxygen, and casual observers to the ward could be forgiven for thinking that the men were held “together with rubber tubes” resembling “experiments à la Frankenstein.”18
In the hospital visited by Wheeler, there was a place called the “quiet room” where there were no mirrors or reflective surfaces. Wheeler saw a youth lying in bed with no face from his nose downward; there was merely a flaring scarlet hole with his tongue lolling across his neck. He would die soon, everyone expected. Until then, it was considered advisable to hide the truth from him.19
Private Harold Lumbert, a former mechanic, was the most disfigured surviving veteran of Iwo. A piece of shrapnel had hit his face, and he had “lost the front of his skull from beneath his eyes down to the lower jaw. His lower jaw was fractured in five places. His nose was gone. There was a red gulch where it had been. Without bony support his whole face sagged and lost its human character. His lower eyelids were pulled down. The cheeks drooped. The unsupported upper lip hung like a rag. The broken jaw sagged so that his mouth lay open and drooled constantly.” Surgeons sewed the remaining flaps of skin together, though when they burst open the wound “gapped open between sutures like a fat man’s shirt.” Cartilage was taken from a “recently killed human cadaver” (Wheeler is vague as to its former owner) and used to build a new nose. Surgeons then bolted an aluminum, face-shaped scaffolding to his skull and anchored with orthodontic bands to the two remaining molars on each side of his mouth a massive prosthetic plate to cover the face and replace his upper jaw and palate. That was just the beginning. After that, Lumbert endured an unending series of operations to tuck, fit, stitch, stretch, compress, and adjust his skin and fascia muscles, followed by years of rehabilitation. In late 1961, Life published Wheeler’s follow-up story detailing a visit to see Lumbert. Wheeler described his return to civilian life and his succor in the arms of a loving family. It was lavishly replete with photographs—all shot from behind. Lumbert died a few years later, still in pain.20
Lumbert’s long suffering is a reminder that Iwo left deep scars. Psychological, not just physical, trauma afflicted veterans for years afterward. A lot of men suffered from “the shakes” in the immediate aftermath of the battle. Alvin Josephy noticed that many soldiers’ handwriting “looked like the jerky scrawl of a drunken man,” and Victor Kleber went so far as to apologize to his family for his poor penmanship.21 “I find it extremely difficult to sit down and write,” he explained, “let alone concentrate my thoughts. This, I am told, is the normal reaction to sustained combat.”22
Most of the time, as with combat fatigue, the shakes subsided after a few days of being away from the battlefield and a couple of good nights’ sleep. Other men, especially if they had been grievously wounded, never quite recovered, and there were significant numbers of suicides after the war. These cases went unacknowledged, unrecognized, or unrecorded, but most Marines would have known, or known of, a comrade who had killed himself. One such was Lou Balog, a flamethrower man whose friend, Joe Czerniawski, was badly hit. He was “completely emasculated by shrapnel from that shell and was injured in one leg so it was shorter than the other. Later he went to California, where he committed suicide.”23
Even after the initial shakes had gone, horrific visions and nightmares continued, though they could long lie dormant. For Dr. Thomas Brown, famed as the most composed man on Iwo, the first inkling that something was wrong came in the winter of 1949, following a long shift at the hospital. Stretched out on the sofa at home while his wife prepared dinner, he listened to a radio program called Columbia Was There, a documentary about the Normandy landings. He heard recordings of dive bombers, screeching shells, and bullets hissing by. All of a sudden, Brown “disintegrated emotionally,” and began shivering and crying uncontrollably.24
Others, like Mike Vinich, were haunted by graphic memories of Japanese soldiers they had killed close-up. There was one youth in particular he had shot, that he “didn’t think too much [of] then, but I’ve thought about it ever since. His face is in my eyes. I see him when I go to sleep at night.”25 The triggering incidents are unknown and unknowable. For Howard McLaughlin, writing only a couple of years ago, at least the visions are “not as bad at night now as it was when I first came home. It was especially bad on Helen when we were first married.” Then she was the victim of
nightmares in which I was trying to get out of the way of a fired sniper round, or to reach some kind of cover as the mortar shells started dropping. In these—to me—very real happenings, my actions were brought on by reflexes learned in combat. In real time if you were lying down, you were always [in] a sort of a crouch, with one foot pulled up for leverage. Then when an emergency arose you were able to instantly jump or throw yourself up and over into another nearby hole for cover. Now, in the middle of the night, I would react to this dreamed threat in the same manner. If Helen was lucky, I went out of the bed on my side, onto the floor. But sometime I tried to jump towards her side of the bed.… At other times I would wildly throw an arm back for some reason and hit her in the face or chest. After all these years sometimes I still have these flashbacks, just as vivid to me as ever. They eventually stopped causing physical damage to Helen, but in some ways they’re worse for me these days. Now they seem to run in a pattern in which I’m unable to do something either to help someone else or to save myself from some impending catastrophe. There is still terror in these dreams, but now much frustration also.26
Even on Iwo, psychiatric casualties could be divided between the “bulkhead stare” type of fatigue and patients suffering from genuine, terrified hysteria. The surgeon James Vedder was nonplussed when one such Marine was brought in to his aid station with no recognizable wounds. Neither was he obviously combat-fatigued, a condition familiar to Vedder since he saw it so often. Instead, the man’s “eyes were rolled upward so only the white sclera were visible. The jaws were so tightly clenched that I could not examine his throat or tongue. Both his arms and legs were held in a rigidly extended position. The elbows could not be bent, and the fingers were so tightly doubled over that the nails were gouging the skin on both palms. His knees were held as stiffly as the elbows, there was no way I could flex them even slightly. In addition, the hips were held rigidly immobile. It was impossible to rotate them in any direction.” Yet his breathing was normal and his bladder was functioning (there was an increasingly large wet spot). Overnight, said the corpsman who brought him, he had “stiffened out like a plank.” Nothing had “happened” to him. Vedder immediately evacuated him.27
Other cases were often taken to base hospitals, their release dates uncertain. Their “disturbed wing,” warned attending corpsmen, was a place where “you never dared turn your back on a patient. They’d climb you without warning.” Hardly a day passed without their having to subdue somebody forcibly. The patients’ symptoms generally conformed: strong and uncontrollable spastic tremors; shoulders, trunk, leg, hands, and neck jerking ceaselessly; anguished expressions on their faces owing, evidently, to physical and mental pain. When they spoke, if they could, they often repeated each word a dozen times, endlessly. Otherwise, they seemed mute or deaf. Amnesia was common, not only of what happened on Iwo but of their lives before the battle. Each night was filled with terror, the victims quivering and cringing, eyes wide with fear, and they would often slip back into childlike poses.
A common treatment at the time was to administer heavy “hypnotic” doses of sodium amytal, a sedative that temporarily quieted the worst physical symptoms. During these periods of lucidity, a psychiatrist would attempt to tease out childhood events and psychological accelerants, with everything said being recorded by a stenographer. Afterward, a nurse would repeat to the patient all the things he had revealed under sedation. “Pounded long enough, insistently enough, with spoken evidence of his past,” wrote a witness to these sessions, he would sometimes begin to recover his memory and speech. “Eventually, usually with surprise, he becomes aware of his strange surroundings” and calms down.
Three months before Iwo, a newer form of treatment for particularly disturbed patients was developed by Lieutenant Commander Ernst Schmidhofer. He hypnotized men until they ceased twitching and jerking, then, talking calmly and monotonously, he asked them to relax by closing their eyes, emptying their minds, focusing on their exhalation and inhalation. He directed them to repeat a line like, “My mind is a blank” or to repeat the letters of the alphabet. Essentially, Schmidhofer was teaching the men to meditate.
An initially skeptical Keith Wheeler watched him treat six patients: two Navy men and six Marines back from Iwo Jima and Okinawa. None had been treated previously, and when they were brought into the room they were trembling, yammering, and contorting so violently that they had to be lifted out of their stretchers. One slumped and cried, “Don’t send me back; don’t send me back.” To Wheeler’s surprise, Schmidhofer helped quiet them, but when he woke them up from the trance, their symptoms returned. “The six were like the writhing of the tentacles of an octopus,” he said—but the writhing was less severe than it had been at the beginning. Each day they got a little better as they practiced exhalations and relaxation exercises until Schmidhofer announced that henceforth they could do it without his help.28
For them and many thousands of other veterans, the battle of Iwo Jima would never really end, but they could still take pride in what the Marine Corps had achieved as they sought to survive and thrive in the new world for which they had fought.
In 1968, the island was returned to Japan.