Iwo Jima

Our flag flies [over Iwo Jima] one day a year. The Marines bring it. We’re not permitted to leave it there when we leave the mountain. We have to take it down.

Colonel John Ripley stands before the Fifth Marine Division Memorial on the summit of Mount Suribachi in 1987. In the colored version of this photo, the flag, on top, and the bas relief of the flag raising, just below, were shining brightly because, Ripley said, “My marines spent the day Brassoing it.” The original flag stood just behind the monument on which now hang dozens of dog tags left by visiting service personnel. Ripley recalls: “This was the end of a number of ‘survey trips’ to Iwo Jima when my small survey party made very detailed explorations of the Japanese defenses; went into bunkers, caves, tunnels all over the island; and helped them with their recovery efforts of the remains of an estimated twenty-two thousand defenders, still in progress. They were most grateful.”

Colonel John Ripley, USMC (Ret.), was five years old when the Marines invaded Iwo Jima. After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1962, he served two years in Vietnam, participating in twenty-six major operations, and eventually was awarded the Navy Cross for almost single-handedly blowing up the bridge at Dong Ha during the 1972 North Vietnamese Easter invasion, a feat for which he should have received the Medal of Honor. He became involved with Iwo Jima as a colonel stationed in Japan and has visited the place more than fifteen times, always sleeping on the summit of Mount Suribachi. He later served as the director of history and museums for the Marine Corps. I was with him on March 5, 2006, as he knelt to pass a coin across the sawed-off circle at the base of the flagpole where the American flag first flew that morning of February 23, 1945. “To the Marines,” he said, “this is Lourdes.” Sacred ground.

“When we returned Iwo Jima to the Japanese in 1968, the Status of Forces Agreement and the treaty made it very clear that we, the Marine Corps, would always have the right to train there and we will always have the right to visit there.

“It all started during my watch, in the fall of 1987 in Okinawa, when I was a colonel, the G3 in charge of operations and planning for the Third Marine Amphibious Force. I said I wanted the Japanese to understand that although we hadn’t been there in quite a while, I wanted them to understand that we were going to do this, establish more of a presence on the island. Prior to this, we would train in Iwo Jima very infrequently. An outbound Marine MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit], a battalion aboard ship, would do a landing, wander around a bit, and then backload and proceed to Okinawa. It was training, but it was very limited.

“The G3 is the mover and shaker of everything that’s happening in the force. So all the operations were set up and planned by my organization. I was responsible for everything the MEF [Marine Expeditionary Force] did. It was the Third MEF, which consists of all the elements—the division, the wing, all of the supply and ordnance. The purpose was to make sure the Japanese knew we were going to reassert our presence there. They were more than a little reluctant.

“The Navy wasn’t all that keen to do it either, and finally the Marine Corps said, ‘These are our MEUs, they need to have amphibious landings, to get as much training as they can, so we’re going to schedule regular landings, training exercises, at Iwo, on the way out to Okinawa or on the way back.’ This was 1987–88.

“So when I went back, the whole purpose of my going back was to walk around there, be seen, not be abrasive or offensive, but to let them know we were going to be around. We did send three Third Marine Division vehicles there. I’ve since made about a dozen trips to Iwo Jima, and I’ve stayed on the island for a couple weeks at a time.

“The Japanese used it for a similar purpose themselves, which is to say their war college and other units would come down and do battle studies at Iwo Jima. Every time I went over there I’d run into these guys. I was very cordial, very nice to them, never interfered with what they were doing. I would always take a party down there, say, three or four of our people, sometimes as many as ten, and we would do our own exploration.

“Soon the Japanese could see we were not a threat, and then two things happened that endeared us to them. One had to do with our using a wider area of the ocean there to practice Navy flights and simulated carrier landings, so we could keep away from Tokyo and Yokosuka. Our wing worked that out for them. The second thing was, their Home Office had just begun to disinter Japanese remains, all twenty-two thousand. That’s a disputed figure, but I point out that at least a couple thousand were Korean laborers, and they’re counted among the total losses on the Japanese side. In some cases they were killed, but mainly they were sealed off the same as the Japanese Army.

“My gang was going down into these caves in the fall of 1987 before the Japanese Home Office even got into it. We knew where they were, and we would go down there and find these incredible scenes. You would not believe the amount of equipment we found down in those caves.

“We found a hospital cave jammed with medical stuff, tons of medical supplies, cooking gear, rifles, Browning automatic rifles, a Lewis gun, records. We could only stay down there for twenty minutes. We had to rope up because it was so bloody hot you would collapse and couldn’t get out of there. An artillery cave was packed with stuff, surveyors’ kits, helmets.

“Then two things happened: We began to show these guys where this stuff was. They had nothing there but a backhoe or a couple diggers, and we never saw more than, say, two of these things with one or two other guys. I don’t know what their progress was, but it was going to take forever to disinter them all. We’d go down there and find some remains, Japanese dead, and we’d go over and tell the guy, bring him over, and show him, and they appreciated that. And of course we were very solemn about it. We would uncover [remove hats] and render a salute, and I think that impressed them.

“The other thing was Hartzell. Staff Sergeant Hartzell was the one who found the body of what we called the chief of staff of General Kuribayashi. It was not so much the remains of the chief of staff, which actually had mummified, as something else he found.

“Everyone knew where Kuribayashi’s cave was. It’s still there, still marked. It was directly across the street from the Coast Guard station, and there was a beautiful mowed grass field right in front of the cave. It’s all jungled up now, but then we stayed at the Coast Guard station. I kept all my vehicles there. Of course we all went over to the cave. Hartzell went in a couple times. He had done a considerable amount of exploring in Okinawa. He had an Okinawan wife; he could read and speak Japanese. He had a real sixth sense. This guy was quite a talent. When he got there, it was a treasure trove for him, and he walked into the cave. To enter, you had to lie on your back and turn around and come up over like a cornice into the main chamber of the cave.

“What wasn’t seen initially was it had planking, kind of like duckboards, all covered with paper. Somebody had gone in there and trashed the hell out of it over the years, just souvenir hunting, I’m sure. Hartzell gets in there. It had a much higher ceiling than most of the caves we’d been in. You didn’t have to stoop down. It was a command bunker. And almost as if he’s getting some message, some divine message, Hartzell gets down and scoops all the paper away, and he’s looking at the boards. Finally he gets all that out of the way, and there’s the mummified remains of Kuribayashi’s chief of staff.

“This was the man who had the honor of helping his chief with seppuku. Of course, knowing the importance of this, we back out. And Hartzell has found not Kuribayashi’s diary but his combat journal, and that was a real treasure. We went right over to the airfield and told the air station commander of the maritime defense force there. He was a very nice fella. He couldn’t speak English, but we showed him, opened it up, and he was dumbstruck.

“He called the Home Office, and they said they were going to send an aircraft down to pick it up and they wanted Hartzell to come with it. They wanted to honor Hartzell, which wasn’t possible. I’ve seen him on a number of Iwo programs since he left the Marine Corps. I think he has some kind of official position in Okinawa at present.

“The last entry in the log was made the day Kuribayashi died. He had diagrams in there, exceedingly well done, with a fountain pen, for heaven’s sake. The only thing we saw were diagrams of the defenses of Iwo Jima. It was in the possession of the chief of staff.

“How do we know the chief participated in seppuku? That brings up another very interesting question. They’re now saying Kuribayashi died leading that last attack of the three hundred on the pilots, and I think all of this is a very obvious reconstruct or revisionist history. They want to somehow glorify Kuribayashi beyond the amazing man that he was. Yet virtually everything, sixty years of history, gives the account of him being killed by proper seppuku, and this chief of staff is mentioned in all this history, most of it Japanese.

“I have read in these various histories, which are translations, myself. I’m sure there’s a degree of interpretation involved. I have never seen an actual Japanese document, and I’m not sure our Marine Corps archives would have it either. But over and over and over you see this account. The chief of staff killed himself. His body appeared to be undamaged, but there might have been a puncture somewhere.

“The thing which is the most irrefutable evidence of all is that Kuribayashi’s body, which was a hot item, was never found. Every single body involved in that last attack was not necessarily identified, but they knew it wasn’t Kuribayashi. Every single one. Because they were looking for him. And he wasn’t there. Period. So that is the premier fact that refutes his involvement in that battle.

“We know the last attack originated in the naval forces area over by the Quarry. They came all the way down, heaven knows how, it had to be through tunnels. Because there was Hill 362 Charlie, Cushman’s Pocket, the amphitheater, amazing fighting still going on over in those places. So how in the world did they manage to get past all these marines? The only way it can be understood is by tunnels. Because the actual fighting took place way over by the airfield on the other side of the island.

“Was Kuribayashi brilliant? No question. It’s an overused term, but nevertheless it applies. He was a brilliant and a very determined strategist. He was chastised very heavily for his nondefense along the beach. This is all written in Japanese memoirs as well. His intent was to permit the landing force to get ashore, to let it get concentrated on the beach and then open up, which he did.

“Another point you never see written anywhere is this: If you stand at Suribachi to the south or at the Quarry to the north and look down that beach, you have linear plunging fire from any kind of weapon. He had both sides enfiladed from one end to the other, multiple lines of fire, and if he could hold that landing force right there, he could do a hell of a lot of damage, and he did.

“He got into a big brouhaha over that eight months beforehand. When he began to fortify the island we had not yet captured the Marianas. His superior was Lieutenant General Hideyoshi Obata, the Thirty-first Army commander, who was trying to get through the Marianas and back to Saipan in order to relieve Kuribayashi. Along comes the battle June the fifteenth, 1944, and he gets stuck in Guam. But his intent was to relieve Kuribayashi because he wasn’t following bushido, the warrior’s code. He refused to defend from the water’s edge.

“That tells you Kuribayashi dug his heels in. He said, ‘I know a hell of a lot about fighting and we damn sure ain’t going to lose what paucity of people I have here by trying to defend at the water’s edge, in open air.’

“Why weren’t our Marine units annihilated on the beach? Several factors were involved. First of all the presumption of Kuribayashi and essentially the whole Japanese force was that we would, under fire, go to ground, dig in. Natural. That’s what people do, go to ground. But that’s not what we did. We kept moving. Our mentality at this point, from Guadalcanal all the way forward, was to get the hell off the beach.

“Well, this was one hell of a big wide beach. You couldn’t get off just by running out of the boat, down the ramp and across the sand. It was too wide. He started that attack at ten-oh-three, fifty-nine minutes, one minute less than an hour after the landing force first came ashore.

“Another factor was we had almost two-thirds of the landing force ashore. That excludes Third Marine Division, which was still division reserve, but in that one hour’s time we had gotten a hell of a lot of people on the beach. And Combat Team Twenty-eight, Fred Haynes’s outfit, was assigned to get off Green Beach and cut the island. His battalion went straight across, in an hour and a half. They were by the airfield, not all the way across, but they were essentially unhampered by the bombardment.

“Those who had business to perform on the beach, beachmasters and mortarmen and artillerymen, were pretty much positioned, and their first reaction was to dig in. Unfortunately a number of them were lost because there was no way to dig in those damn terraces. They said that sand was like walking through wet coffee grounds.

“The Marine Corps never differentiated between the bombardment losses and the total losses, but I would say over half the losses were from the bombardment, anything twenty-five millimeter or greater. We could deal pretty much with infantry small arms, and we did. What Kuribayashi did was restrict the first hour to infantry small arms, and although we lost marines—no question about it—it was only when he started his bombardment an hour later that heavy casualties began to appear, and we’re talking about not just dismounted infantry out of the boats, trying to get up the terraces. We’re talking about the boats themselves; we’re talking about ships, LSTs.

“He had hull-down tanks [buried up to the turret], we call them, which are not terribly effective. A tank weapon is designed for direct fire, so you can’t really fire it like an artillery piece. It doesn’t plunge. All of his eight-centimeter weapons, his big guns, he made the terrible mistake on D minus one of firing on the eight Navy gunboats, thinking that was the invasion. He fired on those gunboats, and we lost every single one, forty-three KIA, one hundred fifty-three WIA. Almost one hundred percent, all the gunboats were lost, and almost one hundred percent of the personnel were killed or wounded. These were wave guide boats, and they were the ones that accompanied the UDT, the underwater demolition teams, into the beach. They were spread all the way across the beach, two miles of beach, eight gunboats, and they accompanied the UDT in, and they were meant to protect.

“Kuribayashi thought this was the landing, so he unmasked his antiboat guns, and as a result, we knocked them out. The one we didn’t knock out was one still standing at the bottom of Suribachi. I think he had eight or ten of those guns. The sacrifice of our boats saved a hell of a lot of lives. What if all those damn shore batteries had opened up on the landing force on D-day?

“But the biggest single reason our force was not annihilated goes to, we like to say, leadership, meaning gunnery sergeants: ‘Get your ass off the beach! Get moving!’ Small unit action at its finest. A very major factor. And if you bounce that off Normandy, they didn’t. Those poor guys, especially the National Guard divisions, Twenty-ninth Division, they just went to ground, and they just got slaughtered because the enemy owned the heights. They just directed all their fire right smack down. These guys went to ground, and they were stuck. The only ones who had any degree of protection were the ones that had come far enough across the beach so they were masked from the cliff there.

“Another big irony was the sand, which intelligence had said would not pose a problem to men or machinery. It turned out to be a partial blessing in disguise because it absorbed shelling. You didn’t get what we call point detonating rounds. That’s a factor a lot of people don’t understand. A point detonating round has all of its splash horizontal right when it hits. The round doesn’t penetrate at all. The softer the soil, mud, or something like that, it’s going to absorb part of that blast. These rounds, especially artillery rounds, even if they were point detonating rounds, still would have gone in deep enough so that almost the whole front end of the round would have been absorbed in that sand. That was a major factor.

“The biggest killer on the battlefield is the mortar. Not small arms. Overwhelmingly. Mortars got a bow end on ’em, and they don’t penetrate. They generally hit pretty much vertically, and they stop right at the deck, and all that splash is horizontal. A sixty mortar’s killing radius is fifteen meters, meaning anything within fifteen meters or forty-five feet is almost assuredly a casualty.

“Another thing to be aware of is this, and it’s very important: There were no such things as snipers on Iwo, although you hear again and again that any man shot individually was hit by a sniper. A sniper is a trained marksman with a scope with a special weapon. Most of the so-called sniper losses on Iwo Jima were nothing more than a rifleman who happened to hit a guy. It’s a good point because you hear it constantly, but these were nothing more than infantrymen doing exactly what they normally do, and they take out people.

“Kuribayashi opposed the attack on the United States. Another aspect of Kuribayashi that is not talked about and I’m not sure how it figures overall, but Kuribayashi was nobility. He was very highly regarded. He had access to the emperor, and that always causes problems with your superiors, and I daresay his were a bit jealous of him. He was sent to Manchuria. He spent most of the war in Manchuria. He was up there and went from there to China. The important thing about that is, these guys he brought to Iwo never had any really serious combat against marines in the Pacific. It was all against an inferior Chinese enemy.

“It [the slaughter in China] was one of the world’s greatest atrocities when you stop to think about it, just the numbers alone and what they did to the Chinese. The Japanese forces up there were very arrogant, very self-assured, tremendously loyal to Kuribayashi. A bunch of them went to Iwo with him. The whole purpose of pointing this out is if you consider his presence in China in the light of the atrocities that took place there, which the Japanese have been very careful not to do, he would not be the hero that he is.

“They have managed to totally wipe over the fact that he was part of the Kwantum Army (Japanese armed forces in Manchuria), which participated in all that genocide. His reputation is almost exclusively Iwo Jima. If we were to make an effort to tie him to the Kwantum Army for the two or three years he was up there, he would probably have been hanged had he survived the war. That also has impact here. None of his troops had any experience in tough warfare such as the ones who had been in the Pacific from the very beginning. None of them. The Chinese were so poorly armed that it was murder. When they got to Iwo Jima, things were radically different.

“It was a great honor to be sent to Iwo Jima by the emperor, who personally wanted Kuribayashi to go there. That’s when he wrote his letter to his wife and said, ‘I shall not return. I know this is my last posting. Don’t expect to see me anymore. Say hello to the kids.’

“Was it an honor to die? Sure. Still, having been washed in victory from all the time they were in China, it had to be a pretty stark change when they were sent to Iwo Jima knowing that this was the last stand. We do have some unit names and identification. They had the equivalent of eight infantry battalions, a tank regiment, two artillery and three heavy mortar battalions, naval infantry, a mixed brigade.

“Kuribayashi arrived at the East Boat Basin in June of 1944. They had been working on Iwo since 1938, fortifying it, building the airfields, getting it prepared. It was totally off-limits to anyone other than military. Kuribayashi got there, and he was unsatisfied with the defenses, and I think he was predominantly unsatisfied with surface defenses, how the artillery was unrevetted, weapons not dug in properly. So he declared Japanese soldiers had to do this in addition to what the Koreans were doing and had already done. He said everybody’s got to work. He made a profound impact on the island’s defenses.

“Rations up until the invasion were satisfactory, and that is a stretch, but it means everyone had a meal. Most of their supplies came down from Chichi Jima. They had an airfield there also. Of course everything was shut off once the battle started. Food was limited, and the soldiers received a half a cup of water per day. There’s no natural water, but they had cisterns and runoff from rain, but even that was inadequate. It’s amazing what you can survive on, and for the Japanese, it literally was survival. All or most of the reports you read about involving night attacks or night activity were Japanese going out trying to take water off American casualties. We put deep wells there when we left.

“Why is the battle significant? It is now considered the most important bloodletting of any battle of that size, of that scale, in the war. We consider seventy-five thousand marines in what was called the Fifth Amphibious Corps, consisting of three divisions, to be veterans of Iwo Jima. Of that number, twenty-five thousand became casualties, nearly seven thousand of whom were killed. Thirty-three percent of all the Marine Corps losses in World War Two took place at Iwo Jima.

“Of eighty-two Medals of Honor earned in World War Two, almost a third of them were earned on Iwo Jima. Of the total losses at Iwo Jima, eighty-two percent were solely marines. If you add the corpsmen and the doctors, we lost over three hundred corpsmen. We had fifteen doctors killed in action. These guys were brutally set upon the whole time they were ashore. There were three hundred sixty-five Seabees lost, and ships lost. The Saratoga, the Bismarck Sea, the Lunga Point, all these were attacked by Kamikazes on D plus one. We lost the Bismarck Sea damn near with all hands. Eight hundred went down. These are stunning figures when you stop to think about it.

“The writer James Bradley, whose father was one of the flag raisers, points out that by noon at Normandy, the day of the invasion, you could have had a picnic on Omaha Beach, whereas on Iwo Jima people were fighting and dying from the very beginning to the end, thirty-six days later. And an additional several thousand Japanese would be killed after we declared victory on the fifteenth of March, when they ran the colors up.

“That of course was subterfuge because Nimitz needed to get all that shipping back to put the force aboard to go invade Okinawa April 1. We’d lose another seven thousand people killed and wounded between there and the end of Iwo Jima, after Nimitz had determined the island was secure enough to pull the shipping out. It was a profound decision. Not only did he secure the shipping and take back . . . Well, the hospital ships left, a lot of the matériel that might have been used, might have been necessary, left.

“Of course we had the airfields in operation by then, and that was important because we could evacuate casualties by air and bring in critical material by air, but under no circumstances would that ever take place today, nor did it prior to Iwo Jima. You just would never do that. And with them went the Third Marines, the reserve. The Third Marines, that’s probably the biggest remaining controversy. The Third Marine Regiment never went ashore. And they were asked for five times. Two division commanders and the force commander, General Schmidt, asked Holland Smith to please bring the Third Marines ashore.

“The kindest thing that has been said about that is Holland Smith expected we would be invading Japan and we needed to have some experienced troops to build a corps around. We had lost the equivalent of an entire Marine division in casualties. There were three divisions, but the Third Marine Division put only two regiments ashore, Ninth Marines and Twenty-first Marines. An entire regiment, the Third, was withheld.

“The biggest problem with that was the replacements. They went in there, honest to God, just like cannon fodder, because there were no real veterans there to show them how to do things. We lost replacements, I would say, on a scale of two to one compared to our veterans. Holland Smith’s not permitting the force reserves, the Third Marines, to come ashore and enter the fight did several things: It relied too heavily on replacements who were untrained, grossly inexperienced, and not attached to the leadership. They had not bonded in their units the way they should have, and therefore their losses were horrendous. In addition, Smith’s decision forced the units that stayed there to become even less combat-efficient, because they never got a break.

“If he had brought that additional regiment ashore, then we could have pulled units off the line and let them rotate and rest and get back in shape, move them in and out, which we always did in every other battle. That was simply not possible without a division reserve ashore.

“I view Iwo Jima as the signature battle in the history of the Marine Corps. There are several things that make Iwo Jima different. One, it was a tiny little three-by-five, eight-square mile island with two airfields on it, every inch of which had to be captured, every inch of which was contested. There was no such thing as Japanese falling back to another line, falling back and giving ground in order to stretch out the forces. There wasn’t any consideration for surrender. They were a ferocious, violent, very, very formidable enemy that had one purpose: Kill Americans. There was no place to get out of their way to cover yourself from their fire. And they had an enormous amount of time to prepare the defenses for the island, which was not the case in several other battles we’d fought.

“Fighting and dying took place from D minus two (February 17) all the way through March and beyond. The last Japanese gave up in 1949.

“There were anywhere from eleven to seventeen miles of tunnels, also individual chambers, eight hundred of them, used as headquarters command positions, hospitals, barracks, living quarters, and so forth. In some of the tunnels we found mummified casualties lying on litters with intravenous drips still in their arms.

“The chambers were not interconnected. There would be a tunnel leading to this chamber, but it had a totally separate purpose. The tunnels were a combination of what we would call barracks or a position for troops to stay. The chambers, on the other hand, had a very separate purpose. When I went down in the artillery position on Nishi Ridge, the tunnel there was surrounded by maybe fifteen chambers, primarily for ammunition storage. Then there were spokes off that for the troops who supported that position.

“There were three levels of tunnels. I have a diagram of Hill 362 Able, and there are three separate levels thirty and forty feet down. Everyone asks about heat, and I did as well when I first went there. It is ferocious, worse than a damn sauna. I finally figured it out: They found a way to ventilate them, but that was closed off when we got there. We got the Japanese diggers to open one up, and all of a sudden we could feel this breeze coursing through. And that’s the only way you could possibly survive in there.

“They used ladders to reach the different levels. There’s a funny story about one of them. I was coming down a slope with no steps, just a carved slope. This was volcanic rock and sandstone, easy to shape or sculpt. This ramp went down, and at the bottom there was a vertical descent of maybe twenty feet, a big hole, and I could see the tunnel below. Their ladder was gone by this time, but I had us all roped up, and when we got to that point, I just did a seat rappel down to the tunnel.

“When I came back a month or so later, I had the commanding general with me, Lieutenant General Norm Smith. And he didn’t want to rappel; he wanted to jump. I said, ‘General, we don’t know what’s in these damn things. There’s still ordnance in here.’ Well, he still wanted to jump. The surface of the lower tunnel was sort of pebbled. I was down there and shined the light up so he could see when he jumped. He landed, and his foot, the arch of his foot, was right on a Japanese grenade. His boot was right on that damn grenade. And of course the fuse sticks out of the upper end, and it’s a pressure detonator. They’d bang it against their helmet, and it would start the timing chain.

“And I said, ‘Don’t move.’ I got the grenade out from under his foot. So the damn things were full of ordnance. Those caves actually went in one direction to a huge cliff face that looked over Hill 362 Able and Nishi Ridge itself. I have identified that as the location where most of Combat Team 2-28, all the heavy losses, all the flag raisers, were killed in that area.”

I raised the question of atrocities committed by marines during the battle and told Colonel Ripley of one veteran who related to me how he had come home with a jarful of gold-studded teeth and dried ears he had cut off Japanese soldiers. He had said it was not uncommon for those back at Camp Lejeune to tell marines departing for the Pacific, “Bring us back some teeth and ears.” Richard Nummer knew of a marine who collected teeth, and Sergeant McPhatter told of marines driving prisoners into the sea and shooting them.

“Ears didn’t become popular until Vietnam, believe it or not, but teeth definitely. As for actual torture, I would say without question these things probably happened once or twice, but marines have a different focus. We’re here to kill you and get on with the next guy and the next guy. We’re not going to sit here and play cat and mouse with a casualty. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but I am saying it is rare because there are too many other things we are dealing with. Now, at Iwo Jima, the Japanese atrocities that are probably more prominent to me involve James Bradley’s example of his father’s good friend Ignatz, Iggy, who was hideously tortured and mutilated, and then we think Bill Genaust was probably tortured. But he was shot. They saw him get shot. There wasn’t any question that he was down. [See Norman Hatch, Chapter 13].

“I would say there are eighteen thousand soldiers still entombed on Iwo Jima, which the Japanese naturally consider a shrine. An easy way to determine for sure would be to find out how many they’ve shipped back, but I’d be surprised if they’ve even reached five thousand yet. [Some reports say eight thousand have been recovered.] There’s the ossuary, where they store bones, on that little peak just over from 362 Charlie and right in front of Cushman’s Pocket. Over the last five years they’ve built a massive memorial right next to the ossuary. The whole hill is now a very sacred spot. Even Japanese citizens are not permitted to go to the island unless they are the father, mother, or brother of someone who served. This is the Japanese definition of ‘immediate family.’

“Of course Japanese are on the island full-time, probably not much more than two hundred. And American carrier pilots fly over from Japan and stay there while they practice touch-and-go’s and maneuvers that wouldn’t be possible over Japan because of airspace and noise restrictions. We have an American barracks there that will accommodate two hundred. That took place after I left, but I’m pretty proud of that because I’m sure all the work we did made it amenable to the Japanese.

“Our flag flies one day a year. The marines bring it. We are not permitted to leave it there when we leave the mountain. We have to take it down.

“The Japanese permit Military Historical Tours in Arlington, Virginia, to bring visitors one day a year, usually in March. A support element comes ashore with vehicles and tents and things solely to support this day, which is referred to as a Reunion of Honor. There was a lot of talk in the Marine Corps that after the sixtieth anniversary we’d have to stop doing that because our business now is war [in Iraq] and we can ill afford to be bringing that element over to Iwo Jima. The Navy complains about the shipping. ‘We got a lot of things to do, and we don’t want to have to bring all you guys to Iwo Jima.’ Three ships generally. I would say there is constant complaining about it. One thing indisputable is the Japanese will not permit any other organization, so it’s not as if they were beating out the competition.

“The reason we do it is everyone knows that Iwo Jima is sanctum sanctorum to the Marines, and the value that we get out of bringing those marines there, mainly from Okinawa, is so enormous that the commandant every single year says, ‘Hey, we’re going to continue this as long as we can.’ For current and old marines. There’s no frills associated with this, and it’s the only way these veterans can get back to Iwo Jima. Even so, it would be hard to justify if we were just doing it for these old warriors. We love it, but it’d be damn hard to justify that kind of commitment by itself. But we can clearly justify it for the morale, the reenlistments, the tremendous lift these marines get by getting to go to Iwo Jima and support this reunion.

“Misconceptions? The main one, after you clear up the death of Kuribayashi, would be the battle for Suribachi. You constantly see references to the bloody battle for Suribachi, and it’s always the flag raisers fighting their way up the mountain, fighting their way down, with terrible losses and so on. Well, the battle for Suribachi was at the bottom, and it was a hell of a fight: Nine hundred marines out of one regiment were lost in those first five days. In fact, the most decorated platoon in the Marine Corps was Third Platoon Easy 2-28 that took the colors up the mountain. A Medal of Honor and two Navy Crosses, just getting their way clear to get up the mountain. The greatest Marine of all, the only surviving flag raiser in 2007, was Chuck Lindberg, a flamethrower [Chapter 14]. He won a Silver Star that day.

“So although there was some action at the top of Suribachi, it was the three days prior to the actual patrol that went up on the fourth. The predominance of Suribachi’s threat was really at its base. The USS Pensacola came in there and was whacked right smack in the bridge with an artillery shell fired from Suribachi, killing fifteen men, including the skipper, so Suribachi was lethal, a very tough nut. But it was not a tough trip when the very first patrol, Sergeant Watson’s patrol, and Lieutenant Schrier’s final flag raising patrol, which was a whole platoon, went up there. There are a billion myths and inaccuracies associated with the flag raising. Over a thousand people have laid claim to taking part in it.

“Talk to any veteran of Iwo Jima, and he’s going tell you about his fight and the importance of his fight and the brutality and the difficulty, and, in other words, we had it far worse than anyone else. And you know what? Every single one of these guys is right. Their fight was tough. There wasn’t any such thing as an easy run on Iwo Jima. The way that plays out now is the Fifth Division gets so much attention because of the flag raising, rightly or wrongly.”

Latter-day revisionists have contended that the battle for Iwo Jima was wasteful and unnecessary and that only a small proportion of the 2,251 landings by B-29s afterward were for genuine emergencies.

“One of the things that such contentions overlook is that we lost seventy-seven Superforts before we even took Iwo, flying out of Tinian or Saipan straight to Tokyo and back. We never anticipated that kind of volume. Although American industry was magnificent in war production, they certainly couldn’t sustain those kind of losses. Frankly the biggest issue with Iwo Jima was early warning, so Tokyo knew they were en route, and more important, there was the fighter cover, the CAP, the Combat Air Patrol, that they could put up from Japan to intercept the bombers. This originated when they saw them going over Iwo Jima.

“As to talk about how only a small portion of the two thousand two hundred fifty-one landings were genuine emergencies? Bullcrap! A landing for whatever reason is an emergency landing. Why the hell touch down on Iwo Jima unless you need to go to Iwo Jima? That wasn’t their home base; they would have achieved nothing by being there. There was no room on the ramp for all these huge damn B-29s. They had to get back to the Marianas, had to get back to Tinian.

“So to hear some latter-day bobby-sox historian come along and say we didn’t need Iwo Jima is just an ultimate insult. It makes no sense. I could go on and on with other examples, but the truth is this was nothing more than an academic exercise by some researcher poring over old unit archives and trying to make a case where none exists. Academics are the only ones that support this, meaning some professor says, ‘Aha! This is recently revealed information.’ They have no combat experience or understanding of our war aims, our strategy at the time. And then sixty years later they take the entire battle out of context and try to find fault with its underlying importance to victory, and even those who fought the battle! There’s nothing new in here.”

A question to Colonel Ripley on whether we were correct in returning the island to Japan led me to the following letter, which he wrote to a friend, Ross Mackenzie, on the night of November 17, 1987, from the summit of Suribachi.

Dear Ross:

From this most unlikely spot I am inspired to write you for reasons I can’t fully explain. Certainly you have received no other letters from here I would wager, and you may find this interesting. It’s the middle of the night—cold, windy, uncomfortable & profoundly moving. I’m looking down on a tiny island three miles wide and five miles long. Down there, and here where I’m writing by flashlight, over 7,000 Marines died. The mountain is Suribachi, the island, Iwo Jima. Of the hundreds of thousands of words written about this place, nothing close to describing its starkness, its inestimable cost and now, sadly, the poverty of its abandonment.

The entire island is a shrine, mostly Japanese, but a few Americans—only a few. Americans don’t seem to care about such things when, as is the case here, it’s inconvenient. And yet this island, its name and most especially this very spot where I sit—where the flag was raised—is immortalized in our national consciousness for as long as there is an America.

The debris and detritus of war remain even after nearly 43 years. Rusty vehicle hulks, wrecked boats, sunken ships, canteens, mess kits, thousands of rounds of corroded ammunition, blockhouses, pillboxes, trenches, abandoned airfields, large naval shore guns, artillery, etc. And beneath my feet remains of 22,000 Japanese defenders, brave men who died at their posts; hated then, respected now.

Rupert Brooke said it perfectly: “Here in some small corner of forgotten field will be forever England.”^* And this brutally stinking sulfuric rock, depressing to see, demoralizing as it has lost its once vital importance and our nation’s once great concern, will be forever America. It will be forever in the memory of those 75,000 Marines who fought here, the 25,000 who suffered wounds here and the 7,000 who gave their blood and lives to its black soil. Again Rupert Brooke. . . . “In that rich earth, a richer dust concealed.” Their hopes, their happiness, their dreams ended here. And if we fail to honor them in our memory and our prayers, we should be damned to hell for such failure.

I brought a small team here to survey the island for future exercise use. The Japanese would prefer we did not exercise here, but that will be over my dead body. I find it hard to believe (and impossible to accept) that our government gave the island back to them. It’s as if we gave them Gettysburg or Arlington National Cemetery. Americans died in such numbers here that in nine and a half months, had the battle lasted that long, it would have equalled our losses of 10 years in Vietnam.

The Marine Corps must never lose its right to exercise here, and I’m damned proud of having something to do with assuring that will be so.

Yours aye,

John

In June 2007 Japan announced that it was going to restore to the island its original name, Iwo To, which means essentially the same thing as Iwo Jima, or Sulfur Island. I asked Colonel Ripley what he thought about that.

“My feeling is that the name change, perhaps important to the Japanese, is disingenuous and ultimately will make no difference. The Burma Road is still the Burma Road, and all of Napoleon’s battle sites bear their original names despite the renaming of each locale. This is replicated worldwide.

“Many years ago the island center in Micronesia called the Gilberts decided to change the name of our famous Tarawa to Kiribati. Well, it has made no difference whatsoever as we, and everyone else, still call it Tarawa. By the same token, Iwo Jima is a hell of a lot more than just a Japanese piece of property. Changing the name sure as hell won’t change the history—especially recent history—of the island. It will forever be Iwo Jima in the hearts of all marines and the American public as well, for all time.”