They are all in their eighties now. They have had occupations, sweethearts, wives, children, even great-grandchildren. But once they stood trembling, hearts pounding, laden with weapons, ammunition, and assault packs as the amtracs and Higgins boats careened over sickening waves toward the black sands of Iwo Jima. They are survivors of one of the great battles of history, the campaign to conquer a small island in the far Pacific. Most were eighteen or nineteen years old when the boats dropped them off at the surf’s edge. They were teenagers charging up those horrible ashy, slippery beaches into a torrent of artillery, mortar, and machine-gun fire, with death and destruction all around them. Hundreds surrendered their lives on the spot while those who were to survive struggled frantically to get off the beach. They were kids. They are old now. They are dying by the hundreds, age taking them instead of bullets or shrapnel. Yet thousands hold Purple Hearts, the decoration of the wounded. Twenty-two of them tell their stories in this book.
February 19, 1945, dawned bleak but manageable. That morning nearly eight hundred vessels, ranging from battleships, cruisers, and destroyers to transports and LSTs (landing ship, tanks), lay offshore. Aboard the transports were seventy thousand marines from three divisions charged with conquering eight square miles defended by twenty-two thousand Japanese soldiers fighting out of caves, bunkers, and tunnels. The Japanese knew the Americans were coming and the emperor personally had sent the brilliant general Tadamichi Kuribayashi to defend Iwo Jima. Implicit in the order was a fight to the death. The general arrived in June 1944, eight months prior to the invasion. Iwo Jima means “Sulfur Island,” and the Japanese had carved an extensive network of mining tunnels that ran in all directions. Kuribayashi had his own soldiers work alongside Korean laborers to widen, deepen, and extend the sandstone tunnels so that there were more than sixteen miles of passageways. Some of the tunnels ran three stories underground. The island is volcanic, and the heat must have been dreadful.
Early that morning the amphibious craft, amtracs and Higgins boats, embarked from a fleet of forty-three transport ships. The fleet was a floating city, serving fifty thousand meals of steak and eggs to marines about to go ashore. The Fifth Marine Division had trained more than a year for this battle alone. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz was in overall charge in the Pacific. Admiral Ray Spruance was in command of the Fifth Fleet. Under him was Admiral Kelly Turner, the commander of the Fifth Amphibious Corps. General Harry Schmidt was in command of the landing force. Superfluous in the command structure but superior to Schmidt was General Holland “Howling Mad” Smith. Planning for the battle had been under way for more than a year. The Marines were on the ground; the Japanese were in the ground, and they were ready for the siege. Each man was told to fight to the death, but not before taking at least ten marines with him. They survived on half a cup of water daily and a handful of rice, yet they held out for thirty-six days. The last five days they had neither food nor water.
On the first day alone the Marines suffered 2,420 casualties, including more than 500 killed. Before the campaign was over, 13 of 24 battalion commanders fell, while 15 doctors were killed, along with 195 Navy corpsmen, who were medics on the battlefields. In those thirty-six days, 28,000 marines and soldiers—American and Japanese—were killed, and 16,000 were wounded. In the first ten days the Fourth Division lost 4,000 marines getting from the landing beaches to an assembly point you could walk to in twenty minutes—if you were not under fire. There have been few more disastrous military encounters in American history. Iwo Jima remains the Marine Corps’s deadliest campaign. Some have compared Iwo Jima with the battle of Gettysburg, where 40,000 died, and with Belleau Wood in World War I, where the casualties, killed and wounded, reached 9,770. At the end of the fighting, the American dead totaled 6,821. It was the only campaign the Marines ever fought in which they took more casualties than the enemy. Every foot of the island was contested, and the fighting was so intense that several battle sites became legendary: Nishi Ridge; the Quarry; Cushman’s Pocket; Hills 362 Able, Baker, and Charlie; the Meatgrinder, consisting of the Amphitheater, Hill 382, and Turkey Knob. Then there were Bloody Gorge and Kitano Point.
Most famous of all but no more difficult than these places was Mount Suribachi, where on the fourth day a team of six men went up in the morning and raised the American flag. Then, a few hours later, a second team of six raised a second flag because the first was not large enough. Joe Rosenthal, an Associated Press photographer, captured an indelible image of this moment. Indeed, Rosenthal’s shot became one of the most famous images of all of World War II, if not the entire twentieth century. The photo shows six men straining to raise a heavy pole on a bleak hilltop against a gray sky. None of their faces can be seen, but you can see the flag flapping over them.
The photo also generated considerable controversy. The story has been told more than once, notably by James Bradley in Flags of Our Fathers and by Hal Buell in Uncommon Valor, Common Virtue: Iwo Jima and the Photograph that Captured America. More recently of course, Flags of Our Fathers has been filmed by Clint Eastwood. While the old-timers were glad to see a movie about Iwo finally come to the screen more than sixty years after, they were dismayed by its lack of focus on the battle itself and in its portrayal of A. A. Vandegrift, the commandant, who in obscene terms sends the alcoholic Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian who was one of the flag raisers, back to his unit. They were also disappointed by other liberties taken with the facts. Chuck Lindberg, the last living flag raiser, tells the story from his perspective in Chapter 14. Just before, Norman Hatch, a combat cameraman, explains in Chapter 13 how he clarified for the commandant of the Marine Corps how the flag raisings took place.
Better received was a companion film, Letters from Iwo Jima, based on letters written by Kuribayashi and others, depicting the battle from the Japanese point of view. It was shot almost exclusively inside caves and tunnels like those occupied by the Japanese soldiery. Another film foray that received mixed reviews from veterans was Windtalkers, about the Navajo Indians who served the Marines in radio communication, using their indecipherable tongue in a code the Japanese could not break. One code talker, Samuel Tso, recounts his story in this book. Rather than tell the dramatic story of this elite group, the movie focused on a character who was instructed to shoot the code talker in the event of capture.
Such unwelcome publicity, or perhaps the unwelcome memories, inspired by the film may have encouraged the Japanese in June 2007 to restore to the island its old name of Iwo To, which has the same written characters and meaning. The Associated Press reported that it was known as Iwo To to the thousand or more civilians who lived there prior to the outbreak of the war and that it mistakenly came to be called Iwo Jima by Japanese Navy officers who moved in to fortify it after the civilians were evacuated in 1944.
There were three thousand yards of beach, designated green, red, yellow, and blue, and essentially three axes of attack, right, center, and left, each with its own division, numbering twenty thousand men. Elements of the Fifth Division were to cross the skinny south end of the island, just eight hundred yards. Their mission was to turn left, isolate, capture, and cut off Mount Suribachi, then do an about-face and move up the left, or west, side. The Third Division was assigned to the center of the island, and the Fourth was to seize Motoyama No. 1, the airfield, then pivot and go all the way to the north. One regiment of the Third Division, roughly thirty-three hundred men, was held in reserve and never released for the battle. That remains a sore point to this day because their presence and firepower were so badly needed. Units in combat could not be given any rest, and so many were being killed and wounded that raw replacements were funneled directly into the battle. These green soldiers were slaughtered because there was no time to assimilate them into experienced units.
Colonel John Ripley, USMC (Ret.) (Chapter 24), a former director of the History and Museums Division of the Marine Corps and a leading authority on the campaign to conquer Iwo Jima, is careful to avoid saying that one division or another bore the brunt of the action “because it’s simply not true.” He adds, “All three divisions shared equally in the struggle, along each axis of attack.” The Fifth Division captured Suribachi and raised the flags, he notes, but “nobody talks about the hell it went through after Suribachi. It lost six flag raisers, including Mike Strank, Harold Hansen, and Harlon Block (three from each event), plus the battalion commander, Colonel Chandler Johnson, the commander of 2-28, in the seizure of Hill 362 Able, one of the toughest nuts of all, right off Nishi Ridge.”
Ripley adds, “From this point on these guys are nose down, fighting like hell to get up here to Bloody Gorge at the northern tip of the island and the last pocket of resistance. Then it takes nine full days for an entire division, the Fifth Marine Division, to seize a piece of ground so narrow you could throw a baseball across it. I have been down in there. There are reinforced bunkers opposing each other; the ground is just unbelievable. So the Fifth Division was bled white up here. They never get any credit for that.
“We used damn near four tons of TNT and also plastic and ten thousand gallons of thickened fuel for flamethrowing, predominantly Zippo tanks, every day for nine straight days. Day after bloody day, a whole division. The Fifth Division had four thousand seventy-two casualties trying to take this position. And it’s never talked about. It’s one of the toughest battles ever, for any service, anywhere: the seizure of Bloody Gorge.
“Seldom in Marine Corps history has there been a comparable battle for such a tiny piece of ground, requiring so much effort, so much in the way of casualties, and yet the history books don’t identify it as such. It’s just part of the battle of Iwo Jima, and perhaps that’s as it should be.
“Bloody Gorge alone would convince you of Kuribayashi’s genius. By this time no Japanese had eaten or had any water for five straight days. They never had any sort of sustenance compared to what our marines had, but at the same time they fought and fought and fought, and what a hell of a job they did.”
On March 14, after more than three weeks of horrific fighting, the island was declared secure. The invasion of Okinawa had been planned for April 1, and it was important to get the amphibious shipping back to prepare. So Iwo was declared secure on Day twenty-four. “That’s when they had the ceremonial flag raising down there at Fifth Division cemetery,” Ripley says, “yet we would fight like banshees for another two weeks, including Bloody Gorge.”
Finally, on D plus thirty-four, or thirty-five days after the invasion began on February 19, the island was declared secure for a second time, and various units were directed to turn in their weapons and ordnance, link and ball ammunition, ranging from belted machine-gun rounds to eight-shot rifle clips, all live rounds that could not be taken aboard ship, plus exploding ordnance such as grenades, mortars, rockets, TNT, and plastic explosives. Just when everyone thought the battle was finally over, a force of three hundred enemy made its way down near Motoyama or Airfield No. 1 and slaughtered forty-four pilots sleeping in tents before they themselves were annihilated. Lieutenant Robert Merklein, a P-51 pilot, narrowly escaped death that night. In Chapter 19, he describes what happened.
After the Marines departed, according to Patrick Mooney, another authority on the campaign, Army garrison forces of the 147th Infantry took over. They continued the work of hunting stragglers, recovering weapons and equipment, and disposing of Japanese bodies. More than 1,600 additional Japanese surrendered while at least 800 more were killed. The Marines captured only 216 of the enemy during the entire battle. Perhaps not widely known is the fact that, after March 26, 1945, Army occupation troops captured 867 and killed 1,602 over the next few years. The Japanese would come out at night to steal food, clothing, and water. Many of the later casualties were Korean laborers who had been impressed by the Japanese to carve out the tunnels. On January 8, 1949, the last known enemy walked out and surrendered to a Navy lieutenant. This Japanese soldier had apparently found a copy of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes that showed on its front page Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito standing together in Tokyo. He figured that if Hirohito was standing, and MacArthur wasn’t bowing, the Japanese had lost the war.
I visited Iwo Jima with Colonel Warren Wiedhahn USMC (Ret.) and his Military Historical Tours on March 8, 2006. We met in Los Angeles before flying on to Hawaii and Guam as a unit. “You will never be the same once you set foot on the black sands of Iwo Jima,” Colonel Wiedhahn said. Many Iwo veterans were on the trip, and he had them stand and tell a little about themselves. After several had spoken, he noted how among the veterans there almost invariably recurred the phrase “And then I was wounded.” As I grew more familiar with what had taken place, my old newspaperman’s curiosity got the best of me. A number of questions began to emerge, and I have sought to answer them through the stories of the men in this book. When talking to each of them, I sought to focus on personal experience as well as what I saw as the four major elements to the story: the landing; the raising of the flags on Suribachi; the at times seemingly hopeless attempt to conquer the rest of the island; and the arrival of the B-29s, which had been one of two major objectives of the invasion.
First, how did the invading American force keep from being annihilated and driven off the beaches? General Kuribayashi placed his artillery, machine guns, and riflemen from Mount Suribachi on the south end all the way to the Quarry on the north, so that the entire four thousand yards of shoreline were utterly bracketed, enfiladed by guns and artillery from every direction except the east, where the American ships lay offshore. Even after the assault was under way, he waited an hour or more, until several waves of marines had landed, before unleashing his artillery. The carnage was appalling. Joe Rosenthal said later the bullets and artillery were so thick it was like trying to run through rain without getting wet.
Second, what really happened with the flag raisings, and how did it get sorted out? There’s the lingering false assertion that the Rosenthal photograph, the model for the Marine Corps Memorial in Washington, D.C., was faked. And who actually raised the flags? At last count, the number of men claiming to have helped raise them numbered 1,632. The last living flag raiser, Chuck Lindberg (no relation to the pilot), died in Edina, Minnesota, on June 24, 2007, only a few weeks after recounting his story for this book (Chapter 14).
Third, what happened to the twenty-one thousand defenders? And what became of Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander? He had accepted the assignment of defending Iwo Jima, which was considered part of the Japanese homeland, to the death. He knew he could not win; he could only delay the American advance. During his nine months there he inspired his troops, devised a brilliant strategy of defense, and found time to write forty-one selfless and tender letters to his wife and children in Tokyo. No one has solved the mystery of his death. Recent accounts that have him commanding that last attack on Motoyama No. 1 conflict with prevailing knowledge over the previous fifty years. You’ll read about the discovery of Kuribayashi’s chief of staff’s remains in Chapter 22; the general’s remains have never been found.
Fourth, was it worth it? At the time the Allied commanders offered two reasons for the invasion. The Army Air Corps was sending B-29 Superfortresses by the hundreds to bomb Tokyo and other targets in Japan. These planes flew out of Saipan and Tinian, more than a thousand miles one way to Japan, and then back. Iwo, a territory under Japanese mandate, was at the halfway point, 750 miles from Tokyo. Forces there could alert the mainland that the B-29s were coming. That had to be stopped. The Air Corps strategists also knew that Iwo had two fully equipped airfields. These essential strips would provide a place where B-29s damaged or with engine trouble could stop on the way back.
Finally, what has happened to the place since? More than twenty years after the end of hostilities the Johnson administration returned ownership of Iwo Jima to Japan. The American flag was lowered there at 12:15 p.m. on June 26, 1968, and was replaced minutes later by the Rising Sun. Thousands of old marines, including many of those in this book, are still angry about it. Though the Japanese were reluctant to allow it, the terms of what was called the Status of Forces Agreement stipulated that the Marine Corps would have access to the island in perpetuity. I wanted to see how many men had gone back and how they felt about that tiny island they had nearly given their lives for.
The poet William Butler Yeats wrote, “An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick,” and so it is with many of these old vets, some widowed, some getting about with walkers, toting hearing aids, memories uncertain, while many others remain vigorous and feisty, full of energy, their recollections sharp. Many, like Domenick Tutalo and Norman Hatch and Cyril O’Brien, are still working. Mike Mervosh, eighty-two, can still do nine one-handed pull-ups. More than sixty years have passed since they labored onto the beaches of Iwo Jima. It is poignant to see pictures of them as dashing, uniformed, handsome young men and to encounter them now. The war that shaped their lives is far in the past, yet still vivid in their memories. Where relevant, I have supplied specific dates, times, and facts without intruding otherwise. This book does not presume to offer a definitive account of what has been called the thirty-six days in hell of Iwo Jima, although it does strive for accuracy. Rather, it is a series of snapshots offering a glimpse into the lives of twenty-two men who took part in various aspects of the conflict and how they have fared since. Their stories speak for themselves.
Iwo Jima