IN JUNE 1944, TWO DAYS BEFORE U.S. FORCES HAD STORMED ASHORE ON Saipan, a new commanding general flew into Iwo Jima. Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi was a stout man of medium height, aged fifty-three, with a small, trim moustache. He was one of the star officers of the Japanese army, having distinguished himself in staff jobs and in the field. While serving as military attaché in Washington in 1928–1929, he had mastered English and traveled widely through the United States. He had commanded a cavalry regiment at Nomonhan, Manchuria, during the undeclared war between Japan and Russia in 1938–1939. After 1941, he had served as chief of staff of the South China Expeditionary Force in Canton. More recently, he had transferred to Tokyo to command the Imperial Guard, a prestigious posting that brought him into direct contact with the emperor. His new command gave him dominion over the 109th Division and the Ogasawara Army Corps, which included all garrison forces in the Bonin Islands. Upon his departure from Tokyo, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo had instructed Kuribayashi to “do something similar to what was done on Attu.”1 That amounted to a suicide order: that Kuribayashi must defend the island to the last man.
Iwo Jima was eight desolate square miles of sulfur-volcanic ash, dusty canefields, and rocky cliffs. It was the largest of the barren little islands of the Volcano archipelago, a sub-group of the Bonin Islands. The pork chop–shaped island lay almost directly on the flight line between Saipan and Tokyo, 625 nautical miles north of Saipan and 660 nautical miles south of Japan. Much of its coastline was steeply angled beaches—but instead of sand, the beaches consisted of volcanic cinder that would not support the weight of heavy vehicles. Mt. Suribachi, a dormant volcano rising to a height of 550 feet, anchored the southern point of the island. On the plain north of Suribachi were two working airstrips, Motoyama Airfields No. 1 and No. 2. A third, No. 3, was under construction. To the north, the island widened as the terrain rose in rocky terraces and alternating ridges and ravines to a dome-shaped rock, 350 feet above sea level, called the Motoyama Plateau. Everywhere on the island, sulfur festered just beneath the ground, and steam vents brought geothermal heat and gases to the surface. It was a dark, desolate, evil-smelling place, but it was the only island in the region with terrain suitable for airfields to accommodate heavy bombers such as the B-29. That made Iwo Jima a prize worth possessing, and Kuribayashi decided to establish his headquarters here, rather than on the more populous and pleasant island of Chichi Jima, which lay 168 miles north.
Immediately upon his arrival, General Kuribayashi toured the island on foot, carrying a wooden walking staff and a canteen slung over his shoulder. At the southern edge of Airfield No. 1, just inland of the beaches, he lay prone on the ground and sighted along his wooden staff, as if it was a rifle. He told his aide-de-camp, Major Yoshitaka Horie, to approach from different directions. Kuribayashi then diagramed the sightlines in a notebook. Within two hours of his arrival, he knew precisely how he would arrange his forces and construct his defenses. Anticipating that the Americans would possess total naval and air supremacy, the general abandoned any hope of meeting and destroying their amphibious force on the beaches. He would concentrate his troops and artillery well inland, in high rocky ground. His army would burrow deep into caves, tunnels, and subterranean bunkers, firing at the enemy through heavy embrasures, blockhouses, and encasements carved into the rock. Mt. Suribachi would be converted into a fortress, and an independent fighting detachment deployed to guard it. The bulk of his forces would be arrayed to the north, in heavily fortified lines bisecting the island from coast to coast—one between Airfields No. 1 and 2, and the second immediately north of Airfield No. 2. At the top of the Motoyama Plateau would be the Fukkaku Jinchi, the “honeycomb defensive position”—Iwo Jima’s supreme citadel.
That summer, U.S. attacks on the island increased in frequency and severity. Task Force 58 carrier planes struck five times in seven weeks. As B-24 bombers began operating from Saipan, they commenced regular “milk runs” over Iwo Jima; eventually, in late 1944, they began visiting the island every day. Japanese cargo ships and troop transports, attempting to bring supplies and reinforcements from the homeland, were intercepted by American submarines. In July, a U.S. cruiser-destroyer task force appeared in the offing and rained 8-inch and 5-inch naval projectiles down on the island. Planes were demolished on the ground; tents were shredded; the headquarters buildings and barracks were leveled. “There was nothing we could do, there was no way in which we could strike back,” recalled a pilot whose Zero was destroyed on the ground. “The men screamed and cursed and shouted, they shook their fists and swore revenge, and too many of them fell to the ground, their threats choking on the blood which bubbled through great gashes in their throats.”2
Kuribayashi was the ranking officer on the island, but army and navy personnel lived in separate camps, and the interservice politics were as contentious as ever. Naval commanders haggled brazenly with Kuribayashi’s headquarters for allocations of food, water, and other supplies. Shortages grew more severe as reinforcements arrived and the size of the garrison swelled. When Kuribayashi arrived in June 1944, there were 6,000 military personnel on the island; nine months later, when the Americans landed, there were almost four times that number. The most pressing issue was water. Digging wells was pointless, because the ground water was salty and sulfurous: the soldiers called it “devil water” or “death water.”3 Cisterns collected rainwater, but not nearly enough to meet the needs of 20,000 men. Thirsty men drank directly from puddles on the ground, a practice that caused outbreaks of paratyphoid and dysentery. Rationing was strict. Bottles were shipped in from Chichi Jima on wooden barges, and the empty bottles shipped back to be refilled. Kuribayashi set an example for his men by shaving, washing his face, and brushing his teeth with a single cup of water.4
Naval officers on the island, backed by their superiors in Tokyo, argued for a “waterline defense” strategy. They wanted to build a chain of 250 to 300 pillboxes around the perimeter of the No. 1 Airfield, with the hope of repelling an American invasion on the beach. The navy would ship the needed construction materials and weapons from Japan, including cement, steel-reinforcing rods, dynamite, machine guns, and ammunition. The waterline defense scheme was at odds with Kuribayashi’s preferred defense-in-depth strategy, but the general badly wanted the materials and arms, so he hesitated to overrule his navy colleagues. At a command conference in October, he presented his arguments. The Japanese garrison, he said, was solely a ground force. It would be pitted against the enemy’s combined ground forces, air forces, and naval forces. A beach-facing strategy would expose the defenders to overwhelming U.S. naval firepower and aerial bombing, ensuring their early destruction.5 But the naval camp was unmoved. Its offer of construction supplies was contingent on its policy of defending the airfield. If the airfield was not to be defended, the navy would not ship the materials from Japan.
Major Horie brokered a compromise. Half of the materials sent to the island by the navy would be employed in building its desired pillboxes above the beaches. The rest would be allocated to Kuribayashi’s fortifications on higher ground. Reasoning that half of something was better than all of nothing, General Kuribayashi agreed.
Kuribayashi brought in a team of military and mining engineers to oversee his excavations. Much of Iwo Jima’s terrain consisted of “tuff,” a porous rock formed by compacted volcanic ash, which was susceptible to picks and shovels. Digging parties worked seven days a week in round-the-clock shifts. They set a pace of three feet per day; if they had dynamite, they could achieve twice that pace. Excavated dirt and debris was hauled up to the surface in rucksacks. It was a labor of the damned. As the workers tunneled deeper into the island, they were tormented by geothermal heat and sulfur fumes. Wearing nothing but loincloths and tabi rubber-soled shoes, they could dig for no more than ten minutes in a shift, before being forced to retreat to the surface for fresh air and a rest. “Our hands were covered in blisters, our shoulders got stiff, and we gasped and panted in the geothermal heat,” recalled an army private. “Our throats would smart, but there was no drinking water to be had.”6
In the fall of 1944, as the great effort progressed, an intricate honeycomb of tunnels, stairways, and bunkers was bored into the rock. Natural caverns could accommodate as many as five hundred men at once. Electrical lighting and ventilation systems improved habitability. Bare rock walls were plastered over. Command posts were interconnected by radio links or underground telephone lines. Eventually, some 1,500 subterranean bunkers were connected by 16 miles of corridors, with widely scattered entrances and exits to the open ground above. In this sunless subterranean city, one found hospitals, bunkrooms, mess halls, and communications centers filled with state-of-the-art technology. The island’s main naval command post, called the Nanpo Shoto bunker, was ninety feet beneath the surface. On the surface, the navy’s labor teams built hundreds of dome-shaped concrete blockhouses around the perimeter of the airfields. Sand was piled around them, both to conceal them from view and to protect them against naval bombardment. Small slit firing ports provided overlapping fields of fire on the landing beaches. Antitank ditches doubled as infantry trenches. The naval engineers also cannibalized aircraft wreckage for improvised fortifications along the runways. Wings, bomb bays, and tail sections were salvaged for use as construction materials. Wrecked fuselages were buried halfway into the ground, and then covered with stones and sandbags to serve as makeshift pillboxes. One officer, inspecting the work, gave his approval: “Good job. These aircraft are serving the country twice.”7
In order to reduce the number of mouths to be fed, General Kuribayashi ordered the entire civilian population of Iwo Jima evacuated to Japan. Between July 3 and July 14, a thousand civilians living on the island were repatriated to the mainland. All men between the ages of sixteen and forty without dependents were conscripted into the army. When Kuribayashi learned that senior officers were lingering at headquarters, with pretended bureaucratic and administrative tasks, he ordered them to “get out on site as much as possible and devote themselves to leading from the front.” Some resented the endless labor, and criticized the general behind his back: “We came here to make war, not to dig holes.”8 Kuribayashi, who had a ruthless streak, purged the dissidents and malcontents. He dismissed several senior officers from their posts, including his own chief of staff, a brigade commander, and two battalion commanders. He promoted younger officers into their jobs, or brought in replacements from the mainland.
Some called Kuribayashi a tyrant, but the general showed genuine concern for the welfare of his subordinates. When visitors from the mainland brought gifts of food or vegetables, he ordered them distributed among his men. He was a family man who doted on his wife and each of his four children. Kuribayashi wrote them each separately, often dwelling on small details of their domestic life, and reminding the children of their particular duties around the house. He prophetically warned of the devastation to come in the bombing raids on Japan. To his wife, Yoshii, in a letter of September 12, 1944, he wrote: “When I imagine what Tokyo would look like if it were bombed—I see a burned-out desert with dead bodies lying everywhere—I’m desperate to stop them carrying out air raids on Tokyo.” Two months later, when the Superfortresses began operating from bases in the Marianas, Kuribayashi and his troops could see the big silver bombers soaring high overhead on their way to Japan. But the garrison could do nothing to stop them, because they were well out of range of the antiaircraft guns. “In this war, there’s nothing we can do about soldiers like me out here on the front line dying,” he wrote Yoshii on December 8. “But I can’t stand the idea that even you, women and children on the mainland, have to feel that your lives are in danger. No matter what, take refuge in the country and stay alive.”9
In January 1945, Kuribayashi and his officers concluded that an invasion was imminent. They had weeks left to prepare, perhaps less. Plans had envisioned linking the Motoyama Plateau to Mt. Suribachi by a long tunnel running deep under the airfields, but there was not enough time or manpower to dig it. The shipping lanes to Japan were no longer safe, and it was even becoming dangerous to navigate small craft between Iwo and Chichi Jima. Renouncing his earlier bargain with the navy, Kuribayashi ordered a halt to pillbox construction around the airfields, and reassigned all laborers and materials to completing defensive fortifications on the Motoyama Plateau. He wanted more effort to camouflage the entrances of both underground bunkers and firing embrasures for guns. Kuribayashi also stepped up the training regimen, with exercises devoted to refining techniques for sniping, night infiltration attacks, and antitank tactics.10
In his radiograms to Tokyo, Kuribayashi lobbied for more arms, ammunition, and supplies, asking that they be flown into the island by air freight. He wanted small craft and even fishing boats to be pressed into service to carry freshwater and provisions from Chichi Jima. But in February, as the island garrison surpassed 22,000 men, working and living conditions degenerated. Underground bunkers were hot, overcrowded, and filthy. Ventilation shafts were added, but subterranean temperatures often surpassed 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and sulfurous vapors made it extremely difficult to breathe. There were not enough latrines on the island, and men with uncontrollable diarrhea had to relieve themselves on the spot. Clouds of blowflies rose from open cesspools near the tunnel entrances. To protect the garrison’s supplies against relentless American air raids, everything had to be moved down into the tunnels and bunkers. Corridors were lined with 55-gallon drums containing freshwater, fuel oil, kerosene, or diesel fuel. Men laid thin mattresses or blankets across the tops of the drums and used them as beds. Infestations of flies, ants, lice, and cockroaches drove men to the ends of their wits. Body odors permeated the airless underground cavities. A soldier wrote in his diary, “In the air raid shelter it is just like staying in the hold of a ship. It is so stuffy from cooking etc. and the temperature rises so, one cannot remain inside for a long period of time without getting a headache.”11
During those same weeks, U.S. intelligence analysts in Guam and Pearl Harbor marveled at the Japanese garrison’s apparent disappearing act. Iwo Jima had been bombed, strafed, and blasted for eight months; it had been shelled from offshore, bombed by B-24s and B-29s based in the nearby Marianas, and visited a dozen times by carrier task forces. Craters upon craters had been punched into the island’s soft volcanic ash. The B-24s alone had hit the island for the past seventy consecutive days, dropping thousands of tons of bombs. But during this same period, Iwo Jima’s underground fortifications and artillery encasements had only grown stronger and more extensive. The bombing and bombardment had made little impression on the island’s defenses; nor had it interrupted the pace of the garrison’s work. Every square yard of Iwo Jima had been photographed by U.S. planes and submarines, producing thousands of high-resolution images from every possible angle. The photos revealed that the Japanese had vacated their exposed barracks and bivouac areas and moved underground. Daily reconnaissance overflights confirmed that virtually no buildings or tentage remained on the island, and scarcely any troops could be seen from the air. Captain Thomas Fields of the 26th Marines put it succinctly: “The Japanese weren’t on Iwo Jima. They were in Iwo Jima.”12
On the eve of the invasion, Iwo Jima was well prepared to receive the enemy. Suribachi and the Motoyama Plateau had been converted into natural fortresses. Implanted in the rocks were a variety of weapons, from big coastal defense guns in sunken casements, to mortars, light artillery, antitank guns, and machine guns. Mortar tubes and rocket launchers were concealed under steel or concrete covers that could be retracted and closed quickly. The best marksmen in the garrison were armed with sniper rifles and positioned in cave entrances with the best sightlines onto the beaches and airfields. Baskets of hand grenades were stashed near bunker entrances. The lanes leading up from the beaches to the terraces and airfields were sown with anti-personnel mines, and the roads and flats were riddled with heavy antivehicular mines that could destroy or disable tanks, bulldozers, and trucks. Food was stockpiled to feed the garrison for two months. Although General Kuribayashi had encountered stubborn resistance in his ranks, he had finally imposed his will on the garrison, and indoctrinated all of his subordinate commanders into his plan. There would be no massed counterattacks over open ground. Banzai charges were strictly forbidden. The Japanese would blanket the landing beaches with artillery and mortar fire when the attackers were most vulnerable, but they would not stage an all-out fight to hold the airfields.
General Kuribayashi did not hold out hope that his men could win the battle for Iwo Jima. They were to fight a delaying action, to inflict maximum casualties on the Americans, and (eventually) to die to the last man. In the final days before the invasion, from his subterranean command bunker near the rocky northwest shore, Kuribayashi wrote out a list of six “courageous battle vows.” These were mimeographed and distributed to every unit on the island, and every soldier was compelled to memorize and recite them. The vows were posted on the walls of bunkers, pasted to the barrels of weapons, neatly copied into notebooks, and kept on folded pages in soldiers’ pockets:
1. We shall defend this place with all our strength to the end.
2. We shall fling ourselves against the enemy tanks clutching explosives to destroy them.
3. We shall slaughter the enemy, dashing in among them to kill them.
4. Every one of our shots shall be on target and kill the enemy.
5. We shall not die until we have killed ten of the enemy.
6. We shall continue to harass the enemy with guerilla tactics even if only one of us remains alive.13
On February 16, 1945, as the American invasion fleet gathered offshore, radioman Tsuruji Akikuisa was in an observation bunker near the lower airfield. Peering through a 3-foot-long firing slit, he saw concentric rings of warships surrounding the island, stretching to the horizon and beyond: “It looked like a mountain range had risen up out of the sea.”14 When the distant battleships opened fire, he saw the flash before he heard the report. A whoosh of warm air came through the slot and blew in his face, and the acrid scent of cordite stung his nostrils. As the first shells struck home, they ejected great mounds of earth and rock. The ground trembled, and the walls of the bunker quivered as if made of marmalade. Corporal Toshiharu Takahashi of the First Mixed Brigade of Engineers was awestricken: “On the island there was a huge earthquake. There were pillars of fire that looked as if they would touch the sky. Black smoke covered the island, and shrapnel was flying all over the place with a shrieking sound. Trees with trunks one meter across were blown out of the ground, roots uppermost. The sound was deafening, as terrible as a couple of hundred thunderclaps coming down at once. Even in a cave thirty meters underground, my body was jerked up off the ground. It was hell on earth.”15
WHEN TASK FORCE 58 LEFT ULITHI on February 10, 1945, about half its pilots were rookies, recently deployed to the fleet. Many of the veteran aviators who had fought through the Philippines campaign had been rotated out of service for a badly needed rest. The newcomers were superbly trained, with an average of six hundred hours of “stick time” in their flight logs, but they had yet to test their skills in air combat.
As the fleet steamed north through gentle seas and mild breezes, rumors abounded. All could guess that another big invasion was in the cards; that much was clear by the multitude of troop transports and amphibious vessels they had seen anchored in Ulithi lagoon. On February 15, the electrifying news was announced on every ship: Task Force 58 was headed for Tokyo, where it would raid airbases and aircraft manufacturing plants before turning south to support an amphibious landing on Iwo Jima. No U.S. carrier task force had attempted to hit Japan since the Doolittle Raid, nearly three years earlier. Attacking the enemy’s capital would be like kicking over a hornet’s nest: hundreds of Japanese fighters would likely challenge them, and antiaircraft fire would be heavy. One young Hellcat pilot began applauding, then stopped, turned to his squadron mates, and asked, “My god, why am I clapping?”16
As the force pushed north into higher latitudes, the weather turned wet, cold, and blustery. Bucketing rainsqualls washed across the decks and splattered against the Plexiglas windows of the bridges and pilot houses. Ships reared and plunged, heaving and shuddering as they smashed through the gray winter seas. Admiral Spruance called it the “damnedest, rottenest weather that I could think of.”17 Heavy wool watch coats, caps, and gloves were distributed to all crewmen with duty topside. But the inclement weather offered a compensating benefit: the task force managed to sneak into Japanese coastal waters without raising an alarm. The enemy’s patrol planes were grounded, or if they were airborne, they could not see the approaching fleet through the overcast. Radar operators kept their eyes fixed on their scopes, but no enemy planes approached. NHK Radio and Radio Tokyo, whose frequencies were monitored continuously in the American radio shacks, continued to broadcast their normally scheduled programs.
On the eve of the strike, Admiral Mitscher distributed a memorandum to all air groups. “The large majority of the VF [fighter] pilots in Task Force 58 will engage in air combat for the first time over Tokyo. This fact will not be too great a handicap if pilots will remember the fundamentals and keep calm. . . . Try not to get too excited. Remember that your plane is superior to the Jap’s in every way. He is probably more afraid of you than you are of him.” Mitscher stressed the importance of sticking together in section formations, and resisting the instinct to peel away to chase individual Japanese planes. That was particularly true at lower altitudes, where the margin for error was smaller and the Zeros could exploit the advantages of their tight turning radius. “When you sight your first Jap resist the impulse to follow your first individual reaction,” Mitscher wrote. “If you are a wingman follow your section leader and never leave him.”18
That night the aviators gathered in their ready rooms. Seated in comfortable reclining leather armchairs, they were briefed by their squadron leaders and air intelligence officers. The target selectors had identified two dozen airfields and aircraft plants in and around Tokyo, and assigned primary and secondary targets to each squadron. Among the top-priority targets were two important factories that the B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force had tried to destroy, without success, for the past ten weeks: a Tachikawa aircraft engine plant in Tama, west of the city, and a Nakajima airframe plant in Ota, southern Tokyo, near the bay.
During the final overnight run-in toward the Japanese coast, the weather remained abysmal, and speed was throttled back from 25 knots to 20 knots. Even so, it was a rough ride. The ships lurched sickeningly, and expansion joints creaked and groaned under the strain. Aboard the Randolph, the young ensigns of VF-12 lay awake in their bunks, staring at the overheads, trying in vain to get some sleep before the big day. A chain was banging against the Randolph’s hull and making an awful racket. One later recalled: “I must have finally dozed off for a while, being suddenly awakened to the blare of ‘General quarters. Man your battle stations.’ This is what we trained two years for.”19
At dawn on the sixteenth, the task force was 60 miles off the coast of Honshu and about 125 miles southwest of Tokyo. A freezing wind gusted out of the north at 30 knots. Hard rain lashed the carrier flight decks. In the bone-chilling cold, the precipitation included sleet and even snow. Visibility was “zero-zero.”20 The plane crews, bundled up in wool coats and hoods, wielding red and green flashlights, guided the pilots through the maze of parked planes. At the Fox signal, the starter cartridges fired and the engines spun to life; they coughed and backfired, and then settled into their familiar throaty roar. An officer watching from the bridge veranda of the Yorktown imagined the scene as “a cross-section of the bottommost level of hell—black, cold and roaring. The thunder of the engines shakes the ship. Pale blue flames flicker from their exhausts and are reflected from the wet deck, until the propellers blast the puddles dry.”21
Task Force 58 launched 1,100 warplanes from seventeen aircraft carriers. They climbed north through the damp gray gloom, each pilot attempting to keep his eyes fixed on the faint blue exhaust flames of the planes ahead. Lieutenant McWhorter of VF-12 recalled: “I had the canopy pulled shut against the icy wind, and I shivered instinctively as blowing rain and sleet splattered noisily against my airplane. The white-capped waves, only a few hundred feet below, had a steely gray, angry look to them—inhospitably cold.”22 At 14,000 feet, the forty-seven Randolph Hellcats suddenly popped out of the clouds into clear sky. Beneath them lay a gray, fleecy carpet stretching to the horizon in every direction. They could see nothing of Japan except the snowcapped circular caldera of Mt. Fuji, about 70 miles to port. It offered a useful point of reference for navigation.
As they crossed the Japanese coastline, the overcast began to break up. Through gaps in the clouds they caught their first glimpses of enemy soil—a snow-covered landscape of hills, rice terraces, and clusters of dark tiled rooftops. McWhorter spotted a Japanese Zero above and to his left. Ignoring the preflight instructions to remain in formation, he banked hard left and gave chase. The enemy plane, evidently not keen to fight, turned away and dove toward the clouds. But the lightly built Zero could not match the Hellcat’s speed in a dive, and McWhorter quickly overtook his quarry. He fired one long burst into the Zero’s engine and wings. It was trailing fire and smoke as it disappeared into the overcast.
Southern Tokyo was socked in, so most of the attacking squadrons diverted to their secondary targets. Diving through gaps in the clouds, they hit airfields north and east of the city. Hellcats fired salvos of 5-inch high-velocity air-to-ground rockets, striking hangars, machine shops, and parked planes. Then they banked and returned for low-altitude strafing runs. Hundreds of Japanese planes were airborne, but many showed little appetite for combat, and weaved in and out of clouds to avoid their pursuers. Evidently, they had taken off only to avoid being destroyed on the ground.
Off the coast, visibility remained poor, and the returning pilots were obliged to follow their respective carriers’ YE/ZB radio homing beacons. Descending through solid overcast, eyes fixed on the instruments in their cockpit panels, many of the young rookies gave silent thanks for the long hours they had logged in the Link Trainer and flying “under the hood” of their training aircraft. The Task Force 58 commanders had expected heavy operational losses, but only thirty-six airplanes failed to return on February 16. Some of those that did return had been badly shot up. One Grumman Hellcat had lost about ten feet of its port wing, but still managed to make a perfect recovery. On the Randolph, sailors clustered around a badly chewed-up Hellcat and marveled at the punishment it had suffered. They counted fifty-four bullet holes in one wing, and “the fuselage appeared as though it had been used for target practice, target practice for the Japs.”23
At first light on the seventeenth, the weather had improved only slightly from the previous day, with intermittent rain showers and a cloud ceiling ranging from 300 to 700 feet. Spruance authorized the morning fighter sweep, but told Mitscher that he expected conditions to remain unfavorable and “if early operations for the day were considered unprofitable, we should retire in order to support the landings at Iwo Jima.”24
The skies over Tokyo were clearer than on the previous day, and Japanese air defenses were on full alert. Air Group Twelve, flying in a single large “vee of vee” formation, was tracked by about a dozen Japanese fighters. The air group leader, Commander Charlie Crommelin, told his fighters to stay in formation; their priority was to deliver the Helldivers and Avengers to their primary target, the Tachikawa plant in Tama. Dive-bombers hit the complex with fifty 500-pound bombs; the Hellcats added another forty-two aerial rockets. The installations at the heart of the complex were reduced to a seething mass of flames. Ensign John Morris, an SB2C pilot, pulled out of his dive and flew a treetop escape route, which seemed safer than climbing back to altitude where the antiaircraft fire was more intense. He flew low over Tokyo Bay, “jinking left and right and up and down. We strafed any ships that happened to be along our flight path, but we didn’t go out of our way looking for something.”25 He returned safely to the Randolph.
At Konoike Airfield, northeast of Tokyo, a dozen Mitsubishi G4M bombers were lined up wingtip to wingtip on the flight line. Konoike was an “Oka” (manned suicide missile) training center, and the bombers were the mother planes that carried and dropped the little rocket-propelled suicide craft. The G4Ms were fully fueled up, as they had been scheduled to fly a training exercise that morning. A squadron of Corsairs flew a low strafing run over the field and riddled the parked planes with .50-caliber incendiary fire. All twelve of the Mitsubishis were destroyed on the ground. One of the Japanese trainee pilots recalled: “The flames lit up everything. Everything that had been bluish-gray a second before was now yellow and orange. If the scene hadn’t been so horrible, I would be tempted to call it beautiful.”26
At 11:00 a.m., Spruance pulled the plug. He told Mitscher to recover all planes and retire to support the landings on Iwo Jima. By 4:00 that afternoon, the task force was speeding away to the south.
Despite the challenges presented by the weather, the Tokyo raids had been a smashing success. Task Force 58 airmen had shot down about one hundred Japanese planes and destroyed another 150 on the ground. Many critical airfield installations and air depots were left in smoking ruins. The carrier bombers had taken the Tachikawa plant off line and demolished about 60 percent of the structures at the Nakajima airframe plant in Ota. Task Force 58 had lost sixty carrier planes in combat and twenty-eight in operations, but the carriers and screening ships were unscratched. The strikes were held up by naval aviators as Exhibit A in their ongoing meta-argument with the USAAF. The navy had argued that dive bombing and low-altitude strafing and rocket attacks could hit targets on the ground more reliably than the high-altitude precision bombing practiced by the Superfortresses. The results at the Tachikawa and Nakajima plants appeared to justify their claims. Mitscher probably had that interservice debate in mind when he called the two-day attack “the greatest air victory of the war for carrier aviation.”27 Task Force 58 (and 38) would return again and again to hit Tokyo and other points in Japan with increasing frequency and ferocity, literally until the last day of the war.
More than half of the fighter pilots who had flown the February 16–17 strikes had had no prior air combat experience. They had acquitted themselves like veterans. Mitscher’s action report concluded: “Too much credit cannot be given to the naval aviation training organization and its methods.”28
THE BOMBARDMENT FORCE, which had arrived off Iwo Jima the same day the carrier planes hit Tokyo, buried the island under an avalanche of high-explosive shells. Wrapped in a shroud of smoke and flame, nothing of Iwo Jima could be seen from the fleet, except (sporadically) the peak of Mt. Suribachi. The projectiles arced toward the island in parabolic trajectories, high and low, according to the caliber of the gun and the distance that each warship lay offshore. The successive explosions merged into a solitary, unbroken roar. Men watching from the rails of the ships felt the blast concussions in their viscera. Warm puffs of wind caused their shirts to flutter against their chests. A formation of B-24s soared overhead, and diagonal glints of steel fell away from their open bomb bays. A series of explosions walked across the heart of the island, and spikes of orange and yellow flame shot above the boiling smoke and dust.29 War correspondent Bob Sherrod, who had witnessed the landings on Tarawa, Kwajalein, and Saipan, called it “more terrifying than any other similar spectacle I had ever seen.”30
The troopships of Task Force 53, embarking the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions, arrived after midnight on D-Day. Minesweepers had cleared the lanes to the beaches, and the frogmen of the underwater demolition teams (UDT) mapped the sea bottom and demolished all obstacles placed there to deter landing craft. As usual in such operations, the assault troops had a front row seat for the climax of the preinvasion bombing and bombardment. To Lieutenant Ronald D. Thomas of the 5th Marine Division, “It didn’t seem possible that anything could be alive. The dive-bombers filled the sky and as they dove, the place was a big dust bowl.”31
The invasion force carried 111,000 troops, including 75,000 troops in the landing force (nearly all of whom were marines) and another 36,000 in the army garrison force. The transports and landing ships carried 98,000 tons of supplies. Many of the smaller amphibious landing craft, such as the amtracs (LVTs) and amphibious trucks (DUKWs), had been preloaded in Pearl Harbor with rations, ammunition, fuel, and other supplies. Surface warships that had been lent to MacArthur’s Seventh Fleet for the Luzon invasion had been obliged to hurry north in time for Iwo Jima. The West Virginia, for example, had put into Ulithi Atoll on February 16, after thirty-five straight days in Lingayen Gulf. She was fueled and loaded in twenty-four hours. The venerable old battleship, a resurrected survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor, made the 900-mile run to Iwo Jima in fifty hours, her best speed. Arriving off the island at 10:30 a.m. on D-Day (February 19), an hour and a half after the invasion had started, she provided counterbattery and call fire for eleven straight days, exhausting all of her 16-inch ammunition.
As awesome as the naval bombardment seemed, it fell far short of what the marines had wanted. While planning Operation DETACHMENT, Major General Harry Schmidt had requested a minimum of ten consecutive days’ bombardment before landing. He had been backed by Lieutenant Colonel Donald M. Weller, the naval gunfire officer on Admiral Turner’s staff, who had made a systematic study of the effects of naval gunfire on Tarawa, Saipan, and Peleliu. Targeting and firepower were important, said Weller—but the time duration of shore bombardment was an equally critical factor. Nothing compared with day after day of relentless big-gun shelling of defensive positions ashore. But Schmidt’s request was rejected by Turner as logistically unworkable; the navy had never attempted such a prolonged bombardment. After several rounds of arguments and bargaining, Admiral Spruance had ruled that the island would receive three days’ bombardment before D-Day. In explaining his decision, he referred to the risk of submarine and air counterattacks on the stationary fleet, and the difficulties involved in replenishing ammunition at sea. Lieutenant General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, the top marine in the Pacific, later vented in his postwar memoir: “We had to haggle like horse traders, balancing irreplaceable lives against replaceable ammunition. I was never so depressed in my life.”32
The command lineup was largely unchanged from that of prior operations in the Gilberts, the Marshalls, and the Marianas. Spruance remained the big boss afloat, in charge of the entire Fifth Fleet, with Mitscher as commander of Task Force 58. Admiral Turner commanded the Amphibious Expeditionary Force, as he had done since the Tarawa operation sixteen months earlier; and in that role he gave orders to the marine ground commanders, as he had done before. Smith commanded the expeditionary troops, comprising the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions and an army garrison force that would land after the island was secured. But Smith would not command the Fifth Amphibious Corps (VAC) directly, as he had done in prior operations; that job would fall to General Schmidt. This arrangement, which raised eyebrows among many of the subordinate field commanders, inserted a new layer into the tried-and-true command table. Smith was shoehorned between Schmidt and Turner, even though Schmidt would really be doing the same job that Smith had done in previous operations. The sixty-two-year-old Smith was facing mandatory retirement from frontline service, and Iwo Jima would be his last battle. As the only senior marine with a track record of working effectively with the irascible Kelly Turner, his job was to remain aboard the admiral’s command ship Eldorado, representing the views and safeguarding the interests of the Marine Corps, while Schmidt went ashore and oversaw the battle on the ground.
Turner was considered irreplaceable, the leading amphibious warfare expert in the U.S. armed forces—and therefore, the world—but he did not always play nicely with others. It was an open secret that Turner had been drinking heavily every night—even while on duty at sea, in violation of standing regulations. “Admiral Turner had great difficulty with liquor,” said Charles F. Barber, flag secretary to Spruance. “And yet he had a great capacity to be inoperative at night and fully operational in the morning. . . . Admiral Spruance stayed with him and valued his services.”33
The 4th and 5th Marine Divisions would land on the island’s southeast beaches. The 4th Division would drive directly inland to take control of the larger of the two airfields, Motoyama No. 1, and then turn north to take Airfield No. 2. The 5th Division would push across the relatively narrow and flat neck of the island, and then turn south to isolate and seize Mt. Suribachi. Once the volcano was in U.S. hands, the 5th Division would advance north up the west coast and form a continuous line across the island with the 4th Division. The 3rd Marine Division would be held aboard the transports offshore as a floating reserve, but Schmidt and Smith expected that it would probably be summoned ashore on the third or fourth day of the battle, to be inserted into the middle of the line. Then the three marine divisions would drive north in a line abreast to overwhelm Japanese defenses in the Motoyama Plateau.
No one expected a walkover. The Americans were braced for a bloodbath on Iwo Jima. In a press conference a week before D-Day, Admiral Turner had told the correspondents: “Iwo Jima is as well defended as any other fixed position in the world today.”34 Another officer judged that storming Gibraltar would be easier. General Smith expected his assault forces to suffer a minimum of 15,000 casualties. The fleet had converted four tank-landing ships (LSTs) into floating medical triage centers, where wounded men would be assessed and treated before being evacuated to the hospital ships Samaritan or Solace. The hospital ships would shuttle casualties back to Saipan and Guam, where 5,000 beds were available in newly built army and navy hospitals. As soon as the airfields on Iwo Jima were made available, Douglas Skymaster “Flying Ambulances” would evacuate the most gravely wounded men to the Marianas, or even directly to Oahu.
On the transports, the first-wave marines climbed down the rope-nets into the Higgins boats and amtracs. The flat-bottomed landing craft pitched and plunged on the rolling swell, and each man had to time his last step carefully, letting go when the boat was at the height of its motion. There were a number of “rough dismounts,” as marines lost their footing and went sprawling into the bottom of the boats.35 Picking themselves up, they took their seats on benches, huddled closely to make room for the others coming down the nets.
Conditions were about as favorable as one could hope for. The wind was moderate, from the northwest, and the sea was as calm as it had been in the three days since the advance elements of the task force had arrived. The naval barrage ascended in pitch, and the 16-inch battleship shells rumbled overhead, sounding like freight trains passing through a tunnel. At least a few Japanese shore batteries were firing back, because whitewater towers erupted periodically around the transport group as the first wave boats assembled behind the line of debarkation. At 8:40 a.m., at the sound of a horn, the coxswains opened their throttles and started their long run into the beach. The boats bucked and reared through the swells, so that from the point of view of those watching from the rails of the transports, they seemed to disappear entirely into the sea before rising to become visible again. It was a rough ride. Men struggled against seasickness, their tailbones bumping uncomfortably on the wooden benches, their dungarees soaked and their eyes stinging from the cold salt spray. Passing the cannonading warships, they felt the blast concussions radiating from the big naval guns. As Lieutenant Thomas’s boat passed near the battleship Tennessee, he noted that the sea directly beneath the muzzles was flattened and smoothed each time the weapons fired.36
As the boats drew closer to Iwo Jima, the steep, sable-colored beach loomed ahead. On the terraces at the top of the beach, a row of wrecked Japanese aircraft marked the southern end of Airfield No. 1. Towers of whitewater erupted among the incoming boats, as the Japanese mortars opened fire. The marines heard the rattle of Japanese machine gun fire and the deeper reports of heavier caliber weapons. Two files of F4U Corsairs flew low over the beach, strafing the pillboxes just inland of the terraces. These were Marine Fighter Squadrons 124 and 213, flying from the carrier Essex—the first Marine Corps aircraft that most of the infantrymen had ever seen. They approached on opposite headings from north and south, then peeled off at the last moment before colliding, to east and west—a “razzle-dazzle” maneuver, as the marine air coordinator recalled, which might have been “more spectacular than effective.”37 One Corsair took a direct flak hit, burst into flames, and crashed in the sea.
Nearing the beach, the coxswains struggled to keep the little flat-bottomed craft from broaching. Six-foot waves lifted the boats and set them down hard, with a crunch of coarse sand under the hull. The ramps dropped with a bang and the marines trudged up the steep-sided beach. It was a hard climb. The “sand” under their boots was soft volcanic cinder, and their boots sunk to the laces. On the steeper sections, they found themselves slipping and sliding backward. A rifleman with the 4th Marine Division said it was like “trying to run in loose coffee grounds.”38
At first, the situation on the landing beaches seemed manageable. Unit commanders ashore radioed encouraging reports: “Light machine gun and mortar fire. . . . Light opposition on the beach. . . . Only sporadic bursts of mortar fire.”39 Colored flares went up, signaling a successful landing, and the second and third waves of boats followed quickly behind the first. On the Green and Red Beaches, at the southern end of the beachhead, the assault troops overran enemy blockhouses and pillboxes and advanced inland to a distance of 300 yards, taking only minimal losses. Some speculated that the naval barrage and air support had done the trick; Holland Smith guessed that the Japanese “lay stunned under the terrific explosive shock of our naval gunfire.”40 In the first ninety minutes of the battle for Iwo Jima, the marines put eight battalions ashore, including two tank battalions and elements of two artillery battalions.
The hardest fighting that morning was in the craggy terrain at the far northern flank, above Blue Beach 2, in an area the marines called the “Rock Quarry.” Here the gorges and rock faces were seemingly impervious even to direct hits by 1,000-pound bombs and large-caliber naval weapons. The terrain had been improved with prolific use of concrete and rebar, and all possible approach lanes were swept by machine guns. From the moment they landed, the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines were under punishing machine gun and mortar fire. As they advanced over the first terrace, they drew a crossfire from pillboxes inland and to the south. To Lieutenant Colonel Justice M. Chambers, the battalion commander, the Japanese seemed to be targeting them from every direction: “You could have held a cigarette and lit it on the stuff going by. I knew immediately we were in for one hell of a time.”41 The Rock Quarry was the hinge upon which the entire U.S. line would turn. The 25th Marines had a critical job to do, and they knew it. They could do nothing but take the casualties and keep fighting, so they did.
At 11:00 a.m., the Japanese mortar and artillery barrage suddenly intensified. The weapons had been preregistered to hit the invasion beaches, between the surf line and the top terraces, where the American troops were densely concentrated in exposed positions. The naval task forces and support planes did their best to silence this fire, but the Japanese gun emplacements on Suribachi and the Motoyama Plateau were well camouflaged, and many could not be seen even from overhead. Sherman tanks, put ashore from LSMs in the third and fourth waves, struggled to climb the beaches, and they made fat targets for the Japanese artillerymen. Marines landing behind Chambers’s 3rd Battalion on Blue Beach were cut down by machine gun fire as they left their landing boats. Heavy mortar fire also descended on the Red beaches north of Suribachi, where the going had been easier that morning. The marines lay prone in the soft cinder, digging for cover with their entrenching shovels, their helmets, and their bare hands. But the cinder lacked cohesive consistency, and their foxholes collapsed inward. “God damn!” one exclaimed. “It’s like digging a hole in a barrel of wheat.”42
By noon, the landing beaches looked like junkyards. Surveying the scene through binoculars from the Eldorado, about two miles offshore, General Holland Smith compared it to “a row of frame houses in a tornado.”43 Tanks and amphibious tractors failed to surmount the steep beach gradient, or were swamped in the surf, or took direct artillery hits, or ran over mines, or fell into tank traps, or stripped their treads, or could not find a path between other wrecked, stranded, and burning vehicles. Bodies and debris were scattered across the congested beach, and tanks were driving directly over the remains of slain marines. The pileup of wreckage posed a hazard for incoming landing boats. The coxswains steered toward an unobstructed patch of sand between the burning wrecks, but many boats broached in the surf. Pontoon causeways became unmoored and went rogue, surfing uncontrollably on the incoming breakers, colliding with boats or striking marines from behind as they trudged up the beach. But since the marines ashore desperately needed more men, tanks, artillery, ammunition, and supplies, Admiral Turner had no option but to keep sending more boats to attempt landings.
Entire platoons lay immobilized, pinned down in the dark volcanic cinder. The whine and blast of the mortars was earsplitting, and men had to shout to make themselves heard. Those who stood and advanced to a new position risked being cut down by machine gun or rifle fire from the pillboxes at the top of the terraces. But those who remained in their hastily dug holes risked taking direct hits from the relentless mortars. The Japanese were using a giant 320mm “spigot mortar,” which lobbed a 675-pound shell to a distance of 1,440 yards. The marines called it the “flying ashcan,” or the “screaming Jesus.” They could look up and watch the ugly black specks as they approached in high-arching trajectories. One officer recalled, “I’d hold up my finger out in front of my eye, and if it moved left or right I’d know it wasn’t coming down near me. But if my finger blocked it for more than a split-second, then I knew I was in trouble.”44
Medical corpsmen rushed across exposed ground to assist the wounded, but for the men worst hit by mortar shrapnel, there was little that could be done. Flesh was slashed and shredded, limbs severed, faces disfigured, and wounds contaminated by the ubiquitous volcanic cinder. The corpsmen administered morphine shots, applied tourniquets, bandaged wounds, inserted intravenous needles for blood plasma, and dragged the wounded men to cover. Often they were hit by artillery or snipers while crouched beside their patients. On Red Beach, a badly wounded marine—blinded, with both hands blown off—was stumbling back toward the beach through a hail of artillery and machine gun fire. A lone corpsman rushed out over open ground to guide the man to an aid station. Many corpsmen on Iwo Jima paid the price for such selfless service. In the 4th Marine Division, the casualty rate among medical corpsmen was 38 percent.
On the ships offshore, pitching and rolling on the whitecap-flecked swell, the expressions on the faces of senior commanders told the tale. The situation was dire. The later waves were taking heavier losses than the earlier waves. A backlog of casualties on the beach awaited evacuation to the fleet. Warships offshore and carrier planes circling overhead were doing their best to identify and destroy the Japanese mortars and guns, but the enemy’s weapons were mounted in deep embrasures. Nothing but a direct hit could silence them, and sometimes not even that. Carrier planes dropped napalm bombs on the positions they could see, hoping to kill the Japanese gunners or drive them underground. But the rain of mortars continued unremitting, and each successive blast ejected ash, debris, and bodies high into the air. It was vital to get more troops and tanks ashore before dark, because all dreaded a night counterattack in force. The marines on the beach had to push inland as quickly as possible, even if it meant taking heavy casualties, to make space for succeeding waves.
At nightfall, the Americans had 40,000 troops ashore. They held about 10 percent of the island, from the northeast corner of Motoyama Airfield No. 1 to a point farther south where the 5th Division had bisected the narrow isthmus north of Mt. Suribachi. The Japanese held high ground to the north and south, and looked down on the marines from lofty observation posts. All night long—indeed, for every night in the month to come—the battlefield was kept brightly illuminated by starshells fired by the warships offshore. An average of a thousand illumination rounds were expended each night of the campaign. The marines credited the searing, spectral light for deterring Japanese small-unit infiltration attacks. In a letter home, a destroyer sailor described the strange visual effect: “It was interesting watching the shells float downward through a thick white cloud. They would burst in the midst of the cloud and cause it to glow like snow and then drift downward through the layers and finally through the bottom and light up the whole island.”45
Few slept a wink that first night, and lookouts kept their eyes peeled for any sign of the enemy. The night was chilly, even cold—a reminder that this was winter and they were north of the tropics. But no attack came, and by dawn the American commanders were beginning to understand that they were up against a shrewd infantry tactician. There would be no major counterattacks over open ground, where the Americans could bring their superior firepower and air support to bear. The defenders would remain underground, out of sight, and out of range, and make the attackers pay for every inch of territory they gained.
TO THE SOUTH, THE 28TH MARINES looked up at “Hot Rocks”—the name they had given to Mt. Suribachi—a steep-sided mass of brown ash, barren of vegetation, whose sulfuric steam vents jetted foul vapors. The regiment, led by Colonel Harry B. Liversedge, had orders to isolate the little volcano, seal off its caves and bunkers, root out its defenders, and secure the summit. Around the base, at ground level, was a girdle of seventy earth-covered concrete blockhouses manned by the soldiers of Iwo Jima’s southern defense sector, led by Colonel Kanehiko Atsuchi. Before Suribachi could be scaled, the fortifications at the base would have to be cleaned out. They could not be flanked; they would have to be taken by direct infantry assault.
On the morning of D plus 1, under a cold drizzle, a tremendous combined onslaught of field artillery, naval gunfire, and carrier bombers fell upon Mt. Suribachi, and the volcano momentarily vanished behind a mantle of smoke, flames, and dust. At 8:30 a.m., the appointed “jump-off time,” the shelling and bombing abruptly halted. The marines advanced in a running crouch, crossing from rocks to shell craters to rocks. The 2nd Battalion attacked to the left, and the 3rd to the right. Advancing into machine gun and 47mm antitank gunfire, many fell. The 2nd Battalion took the worst casualties of the day. The last 200 yards of their advance was over flat volcanic soil, offering little or no cover. Throwing smoke grenades to blind their enemies, they advanced directly against the enemy firing ports. Private Donald J. Ruhl of Company E fell on a Japanese grenade, trading his life to shield others in his platoon. In recognition of this ultimate sacrifice, he was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.
At Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, the marines had learned and practiced their system. They executed it patiently, meticulously, with devout attention to detail: heavy naval gunfire, napalm bombs dropped by planes, tanks and 75mm halftracks advancing to point-blank range, smoke grenades to blind the Japanese, phosphorus grenades and demolition charges thrown into firing ports, flamethrowers fired into rear exit doors, hand-to-hand combat with bayonets, knives, and even fists. Where the terrain prevented tanks from advancing on the Japanese defenses, 37mm guns were hauled into an advanced position, from which they could take a concrete structure apart, little by little—killing, stunning, or otherwise neutralizing the occupants, so that infantry squads could move in and finish the job. One by one, the blockhouses were converted into tombs. Armored bulldozers pushed mounds of earth against them, so that they could not be reoccupied by the Japanese.
The third day of the battle was gray and blustery, with scattered rain showers. The 3rd Battalion attacked in the center of the line, through broken terrain that stopped the U.S. tanks. To the left, the 2nd Battalion worked to clean out its rear areas, where snipers and individual Japanese fighters had mysteriously appeared. By nightfall, the 28th Marines had surrounded the mountain and silenced all but a few of the enemy firing positions around the base. According to Lieutenant Colonel Robert H. Williams, the regimental executive officer, the fighting tailed off sharply once the regiment overran the enemy lines at the base of Suribachi. He told Major General Keller E. Rockey, commander of the 5th Marine Division: “We figure we’ve killed about 800 Japs down there, but we’d have a hard time finding 100. We must have blown up 50 caves.”46
With the Americans in control at the base of the hill, Colonel Atsuchi now attempted a breakout, ordering his remaining organized forces to try a dash for the northern lines. Nearly all the Japanese were cut down as they came into the open, but about twenty-five somehow crossed through the American lines to the Motoyama Plateau, where the bulk of Japanese fighting forces remained. Kuribayashi was disappointed to learn that his Suribachi detachment had not held out longer. He asked his staff, “I had imagined the fact that the first airfield should fall into the enemy’s hands. But what is the matter that Mt. Suribachi would fall within only 3 days?”47
On the fourth day of the fight, the marines took the summit. The morning was gray and drizzling, as the previous days had been—and it began as the previous days had begun, with a prodigious naval and air bombardment that pummeled Mt. Suribachi until it was enveloped in smoke and dust. Two scouting patrols reconnoitered a footpath to the crater, up the steep and menacing east face. A forty-man patrol followed, reaching the summit a few minutes after ten. Resistance was scattered. A few Japanese emerged from tunnels and caves, including an officer who waved a samurai sword as he charged; all were quickly killed. Wielding flamethrowers and explosive charges, the marines sealed off all cave entrances they could locate. Many Japanese took their own lives, by holding grenades against their chests or inserting their rifles into their mouths and pulling the triggers with their toes. A revolting stench emerged from some of the interior cavities on Suribachi, where the remains of Japanese soldiers were scattered thickly on the ground.
From the peak, the Americans took in a panoramic view to the north: the airfields, the landing beaches, the naval task force offshore. Their fellow marines were heavily engaged in a firefight on the flat terrain between the two airfields. For the first four days of the battle, the Japanese had commanded this tactically useful observation post. Now the roles were reversed; the Americans owned Suribachi, and they had a flag to prove it. Marines of Company E, 2nd Battalion pulled a 10-foot length of lead pipe out of the rubble—it had connected a water cistern to a bunker beneath the summit—and rigged it as a flagpole. At 10:20 a.m., they raised their battalion flag. Observers to the north, and on ships offshore, were overjoyed. Lieutenant Ronald Thomas recalled, “Everyone yelled and I suppose some cried.”48 Brigadier General Leo Hermle, assistant commander of the 5th Division, called it “one of the greatest sights that I remember in my whole life . . . a terrific cheer went up from the whole island, as far as you could see.”49
Jim Forrestal, the secretary of the navy, had been observing Operation DETACHMENT from Admiral Turner’s command ship Eldorado. Forrestal was a spare man of medium height, with a pug nose and a straight, wide mouth. His sandy brown hair was slicked back and parted high on his head. He was an intense, hard-driving former Wall Street bond salesman who had become one of FDR’s most trusted and influential cabinet advisors. The secretary had chosen this morning, D plus 4, to come ashore for a brief tour of Red Beach. Wearing a helmet and plain green fatigues without insignia, escorted by General Holland Smith and a platoon of marines, he disembarked from a Higgins boat just as the tiny flag was spied atop the southern peak. Forrestal turned to Smith and said, “Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.”50
The navy secretary had been pushing for more fulsome publicity in Nimitz’s theater. He had taken a direct hand in streamlining censorship functions, and had pressured the admirals to guarantee overnight transmission of press copy and photographs to newsrooms in the United States. During his current tour of the Pacific, Forrestal had often reminded the navy and marine brass that an epochal political struggle lay ahead over the reorganization and unification of the armed services, and the postwar status of the Marine Corps was not yet decided. The “ 500 years” remark thus had a contemporary context and subtext: Forrestal meant that the stirring image would strengthen the corps’ claim to an autonomous role in the postwar defense establishment.
According to the scene recounted by General Smith in his postwar memoir, Forrestal sauntered among wrecked boats, tanks, and tractors on the crowded beach, shaking hands with surprised marines, while artillery shells and mortar blasts blanketed the area. Twenty men were killed or wounded within a hundred yards of where they were standing, Smith wrote—“but the Secretary seemed utterly indifferent to danger.”51 Perhaps Forrestal seemed indifferent because the situation was not as the general described it. In his diary entry that day, Forrestal recorded only that “the beach received some shelling during the morning but it was not considerable, although one burst did inflict casualties an hour before we were there.”52
A second and more famous flag-raising occurred three hours later, when a subsequent patrol of the 28th Marines carried a larger “replacement” flag to the summit of Mt. Suribachi. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal was on hand to record the scene. As six marines raised the flagpole, with the flag snapping smartly in the breeze, Rosenthal pressed the shutter button on his camera without even looking through the viewfinder. He sent his undeveloped film roll to Guam, where it was developed by an AP photo editor and sent on to the United States. The hastily snapped photograph, an accidental masterpiece of composition, became the single most iconic image of the Pacific War. Transmitted through copper telephone wires to newsrooms throughout the United States, it appeared simultaneously on hundreds of front pages and magazine covers. Rosenthal received a Pulitzer Prize. The flag-raising was adopted as the thematic showpiece of a national war bonds campaign, and three surviving marines in the photo were recalled to the United States for a publicity tour. The image was re-created as a bronze sculpture at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.
The 28th Marines reported 510 men killed and wounded in the fight for Mt. Suribachi. Including its losses on D-Day, the regiment had suffered 895 casualties in five days. As bad as those losses were, they were no worse than those suffered over the same period by other regiments fighting to the north. At home, many Americans assumed that the flag-raising in Rosenthal’s photograph must have marked the triumphant climax of a victorious campaign. In fact, the conquest of Suribachi was just one early phase of a long and costly battle. The fight for the Motoyama Plateau would eventually claim twenty American lives for every one lost on Suribachi. On D plus 6 (February 25), the 28th Marines were returned to the V Amphibious Corps reserves, and they began moving north to join their brothers on the bloody line bisecting the midsection of the island.
GENERAL SCHMIDT ESTABLISHED his V Amphibious Corps (VAC) headquarters north of the now-pacified Mt. Suribachi. That entire portion of the island, half a mile behind the front line, was gradually assuming the appearance of a working base. The unfavorable weather of past days gave way to lighter winds and calmer surf, allowing cargo unloading to proceed. Supply dumps, assembly areas, motor pools, fuel dumps, administrative command tents, and field hospitals were set up by rear-echelon troops, even while the enemy’s mortars and artillery kept raining down. Bulldozers were improving the road net, and clean-up details were hauling wreckage away from the main transportation arteries. Seabees of the 31st Naval Construction Battalion were at work on Motoyama Airfield No. 1, clearing the runway and revetments of mines and bringing concrete mixers and heavy construction equipment ashore. Schmidt told a reporter that five more days of heavy fighting would extinguish enemy resistance on Iwo Jima: “I said last week it would take ten days, and I haven’t changed my mind.”53
The major combat line now ran through Motoyama Airfield No. 2, which was at slightly higher elevation than No. 1. The runway and taxiways were strewn with airplane wreckage that the Japanese infantry units had adopted as rough and ready pillboxes. The marines called down naval gunfire, heavy artillery fire, and airstrikes on these positions, and then attacked across the open field with tanks and infantry. The dark domed rock of the Motoyama Plateau loomed ahead to the north. Taking it would require ascending a staircase of lava terraces honeycombed with fearsome defenses. Holland Smith described it as a “deep belt of fortifications running from coast to coast, a mass of mutually supporting pillboxes, many of them almost buried underground.”54 The terrain did not offer many prospects for flanking attacks, so the marines were left with no option except direct frontal assault by brute force. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph L. Stewart called it a “grunt and crunch-type operation.”55 Another officer used the inevitable football metaphor: “You can’t run the ends up there. Every play is between the tackles.”56
Schmidt called in the rest of his floating reserve: the 3rd Marine Division (less one regiment), commanded by Major General Graves B. Erskine. This veteran outfit was inserted into the center of the line, with the 5th Division on its left and the 4th on its right—and assigned the tough task of driving directly north through the remains of Motoyama Village and the unfinished Airfield No. 3, up into the tableland at the center of the Motoyama Plateau. Schmidt ordered that 50 percent of VAC artillery fire be directed into this area, with the remaining 50 percent to be divided equally between the flanks facing the 4th and 5th Divisions. With three divisions abreast, the renewed northward offensive was commenced on D plus 5, one day after the flag-raising on Suribachi.
The Americans possessed a three-to-one advantage in troop strength over the defenders, a ten-to-one advantage in artillery firepower (if the naval guns were counted), and total control of the air. But Kuribayashi’s ingenious subterranean defenses effectively vitiated those advantages. Often the tanks had to be left behind, at least in the first stages of an attack, because all routes up to higher terraces had been heavily mined or blocked by tank traps. The infantry led the way, attacking with small arms, flamethrowers, and demolitions. In the center of the line, the 3rd Division took heavy casualties as it drove into some of the most heavily fortified ground anywhere in the Pacific.
For men on the line, the din of battle was inescapable. The rattle of machine gun fire and the ululating roar of artillery and mortars never paused. They kept their heads down, knowing that Japanese snipers posted in higher ground were constantly watching through their rifle scopes. The Japanese even sniped with their larger weapons, particularly their 47mm antitank guns, which could be aimed accurately enough to hit a single man at several hundred feet range. With so many heavy weapons firing, men became fatalistic about mere rifle shots, and even demonstrated their indifference when the bullets snapped through the air nearby. Captain William Ketcham of I Company, 24th Marines, was hit in one arm and one leg, but after having the limbs bandaged, he remained on the line with his company. He scoffed: “Shot at me twelve times and barely broke the skin with two bullets.”57
The infantrymen learned to hate the island almost as much as they hated the enemy. Iwo Jima was “ghastly,” recalled Ted Allenby of the 4th Marine Division: “It was almost like a piece of the moon that had dropped down to earth.”58 Digging into the ground for protection against the relentless enemy fire, the marines released vents of foul sulfurous steam. The sulfur merged sickeningly with the odor of burning and rotting flesh, a stench that could not be escaped anywhere on the island. Land crabs emerged from the cinders at the bottom of their foxholes and scuttled across their bodies as they tried to sleep. Fine volcanic dust, stirred up by wind and explosions, got into men’s eyes, ears, noses, and mouths. The ground was warm to the touch, and it grew warmer the deeper they dug. Elton Shrode buried his canned rations in the ground at the bottom of his foxhole. Half an hour later, he dug up the can and “would have a steaming hot C-ration to consume. This was the only advantage that I could come up with for this miserable rock.”59
With about 80,000 troops concentrated into less than eight square miles, Iwo Jima was one of the most densely populated battlefields in history. Given the amount of firepower on both sides, the carnage was hideous. The worst of it was on the front lines, but there was really no such thing as a rear area on Iwo Jima. Each combatant had the power to direct heavy artillery and mortar fire to any location on the island; consequently, everywhere on the island was in one sense the front line. Rolling barrages raked the beaches, the foxholes, and the command posts. Letups were brief. The marines grudgingly praised their enemy’s diabolical skill. “The Japanese were superb artillerymen,” said Colonel Stewart: “Somebody was getting hit every time they fired.” There was no safe ground, no rear area, and—for the Americans—little natural cover. General Schmidt’s VAC headquarters, a short distance north of Mt. Suribachi, was a cluster of tents surrounded by sandbags. According to Colonel Edward Craig, Schmidt’s operations officer, the post came under intermittent heavy shelling throughout the battle. The sandbag embankments grew steadily higher, but the concussions were still a terror. Whenever it started up, Craig recalled, “we were three-deep on the floor of a small C.P. tent, and there we remained until it stopped.”60 Half a mile north, at the 4th Marine Division command post, the huge 320mm spigot mortars crashed down on every side, the sky glowed an unearthly red, and a fine mist of ash particles hung in the air. The marine howitzers and the warships offshore answered with counter-barrages, but the Japanese seemed unfazed, and their heavy weapons kept at it with undiminished ferocity.
The headquarters remained in touch with the division commands and the front lines by radio or message runners. Insights offered by regimental and company commanders influenced the tactical decisions of General Schmidt and his staff. Many officers and NCOs in the VAC and division CPs were detached for combat duty and sent forward to replace those killed or wounded in action. The wounded were transported south in jeep “ambulances” or by hand-carried stretchers. Trucks, tanks, and bulldozers headed north. Mines were buried all over the island, posing an omnipresent peril. Marines walking along tracks learned to take care to set their boots into the treads made by vehicles. Large antitank mines were buried deep, so that the minesweeping teams did not always find them. They were triggered when a tank or another heavy vehicle passed over. Shrode saw it happen to a heavy DS Cat bulldozer that was widening a road south of the No. 2 Airfield. “There was a terrible explosion and the DS disappeared right in front of my eyes, so I ran for cover. Pieces of that tractor rained down all over the area. Some of those parts weighed at least a thousand pounds. The driver, God rest his soul, landed about ten yards from me.”61
In the first five days of the battle, the marines suffered an average of more than 1,200 casualties per day. The beaches and the flat terrain around the airfields were strewn with dead. Shell craters left records of direct hits; some contained the mashed-up remains of ten or twelve marines. Exploring the terraces above Red Beach, Bob Sherrod observed: “Nowhere in the Pacific War had I seen such badly mangled bodies. Many were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay fifty feet away from any body. In one spot on the sand, far from the nearest cluster of dead, I saw a string of guts 15 feet long.”62 Losses were proportionally higher among officers and NCOs. Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone, a nationally famous marine who had received the Medal of Honor for his heroics on Guadalcanal, was killed on D-Day as he led his men onto Motoyama Airfield No. 1.
Armored bulldozers were digging long trenches to serve as mass graves. “We buried fifty at a time in bulldozed plots,” said Chaplain Gage Hotaling. “We didn’t know if they were Jewish, Catholic or whatever, so we said a general committal: ‘We commit you into the earth and the mercy of Almighty God.’ ”63
Warships patrolled off the coast, the destroyers and gunboats close inshore and the cruisers and battleships farther in the offing. Marine coordinators on the front lines could call down accurate naval gunfire on any target, via an open radio net linking them to gunnery officers on the ships. The ships often fired by radar direction alone, as the crews simply entered coordinates into the fire directors. The navy’s guns could not always be employed to good effect on Iwo Jima, because of the close proximity of friendly and enemy troops. Nevertheless, as Admiral Turner reported, there were an “unprecedented number” of naval call fire missions during the operation. High-explosive shells ranging in caliber from 16-inch to 5-inch rained down upon targets across the Motoyama tablelands. Small gunboats—modified landing craft armed with rockets, light mortars, and 20mm guns—patrolled close inshore around the northwestern part of the island, delivering harassing fire on enemy positions. They also deterred movements of Japanese troops along the shores, and intercepted boats attempting to land from Chichi Jima or other islands to the north.
On the destroyer Howorth, the voice of a marine officer ashore was broadcast through the ship’s loudspeakers, so that every man aboard could follow the action. Because the island was often obscured by smoke and dust, the crew could rarely see their 5-inch salvos strike home. Yeoman James Orvill Raines felt proud when the voice on the radio link confirmed that the Howorth was hitting her assigned targets: “Look at those bastards run!” And later, “It might interest you to know your shooting is very good. The results are very gratifying.” Raines peered through binoculars, trying to make out what was happening ashore. When the smoke cleared, he caught a glimpse of a Sherman tank advancing into heavy machine gun fire, with an infantry squad crouching behind it. In a letter to his wife, Raines wrote that he was thrilled to know that the Howorth’s guns were hitting the enemy. “I’m glad, in spite of the sacrifice I feel that you and I are making, that I had something to do with killing some of them. I feel really grand about it. I get a special kick out of killing them. I only wish I were in close enough to see their bodies and parts of bodies go sky high when our shells hit.” On the other hand, Raines admitted that he preferred to watch the action from his relatively safe vantage point on the Howorth: “You couldn’t have dragged me on the beach with a winch.”64
The Japanese air response to the invasion of Iwo Jima was fairly weak, due to a combination of inclement weather and Task Force 58’s suppressing airstrikes on Tokyo airfields. Few Japanese warplanes appeared over the island, and when they did, most were quickly downed by the U.S. carrier fighters patrolling overhead. Only one massed kamikaze attack was attempted. At twilight on February 21 (D plus 2), about fifty twin-engine Mitsubishi G4Ms accompanied by Zeros attacked the fleet in the offing. The carrier Saratoga was hit by three planes, suffering casualties of 123 killed and 192 wounded, and was forced to return to Pearl Harbor for repairs. The escort carrier Bismarck Sea was hit aft by a suicide plane, causing fatal secondary explosions in her hangar. Her fires burned out of control, and she rolled over and sank, taking 218 officers and men down with her. A second CVE, the Lunga Point, was slightly damaged after fighting off four kamikazes. A cargo ship and an LST were also hit and badly damaged.
U.S. ground forces on the island never lacked for close air support. Bombing, reconnaissance, and strafing missions were flown by aircraft of three services—the navy, the marines, and the Army Air Forces. At times, American warplanes were so thick over Iwo Jima that collisions appeared inevitable. Hour after hour, formations of Grummans, Voughts, and Curtiss bombers winged in from the carriers, sun flashing off their wings. The dive-bombers plunged down at 70-degree angles and released their bombs on unseen targets behind enemy lines, causing spurts of flame to leap up from boiling masses of smoke and dust. Low-flying fighters walked .50-caliber tracers across Japanese gun emplacements, or fired 5-inch rockets from 2,000 feet altitude. The flyboys put on an impressive show, the marines agreed. But the effectiveness of strafing, bombing, and rocketry was limited by the same factors that dogged naval gunfire. Much of it had little effect on the island’s brawny caves and sunken casemates, and the pilots were wary of hitting friendly troops—as well they should have been, given the nearness of the opposing lines. The carrier planes provided other useful services, of course, such as aerial spotting for artillery, and deterring Japanese troops from moving over open ground. But the tactical situation on Iwo Jima called for unprecedented teamwork between ground forces and aircrews, a paradigm that took time and experience to refine.
Colonel Vernon E. Megee, the marine air coordinator, came ashore on February 24. He set up his communications tent in the VAC complex north of Suribachi. Eventually he would take over as air commander, Iwo Jima. Megee pioneered a system in which air liaison officers on the front lines could call down airstrikes on Japanese positions as close as 300 yards away. Marine tactical observers flew in the rear cockpits of TBM Avengers, with open radio links to artillery battalions on the ground. Japanese antiaircraft fire was generally moderate, but it burst forth at unexpected times and places. In the course of the month-long battle, it claimed twenty-six American planes destroyed and nine seriously damaged.
On March 6, the USAAF’s Fifteenth Fighter Group—including a contingent of P-51s (Mustangs) and P-61s (Black Widows)—flew into Airfield No. 1. The army airmen had not been trained for close support of ground combat operations, but they were crackerjack pilots with an “eager-beaver attitude,” and they were willing to try whatever Megee asked them to do. The P-51s had the horsepower to carry and deliver 1,000-pound bombs, which had much greater effect than 500-pounders against the sandstone pumice of Iwo’s rocky northern heights. Approaching their targets in a 45-degree glide, the Mustangs flew parallel to the front lines, in order to reduce the risk of misses that would endanger the marines. Half-ton bombs with delayed-action fuses, when dropped into enclosed canyons or recesses in the rocky terrain, exploded with amplified destructive force. In a few memorable instances, said Megee, a bomb dropped by a P-51 “blew the sides of entire cliffs into the ocean, exposing enemy caves and tunnels to direct fire from the sea.”65
When talking to battalion and regimental commanders, Megee stressed that the 1,000-pounders posed a serious hazard to their troops, especially in case of a wide miss in the direction of U.S. lines. As a rule of thumb, he proposed that target distances should be one yard for every pound of bomb, meaning that the 1,000-pounders should be aimed at targets no less than 1,000 yards from the marines: “A 1000-pound bomb going off two or three hundred yards in front of you is no toy.” But the 4th Marine Division, engaged in a bitter, bloody struggle against cave fortifications on the northeast coast of the island, wanted the Mustangs to hit enemy positions directly opposite their lines. One battalion commander told Megee, “Well, you can’t hurt us any worse than we’re being hurt.” With a radio link directly to the cockpits, the marines would take cover just before the bombs were released. “So I went up there and ran all these strikes,” Megee said, “and we jarred the back teeth of a lot of people, including mine, but we didn’t hurt anybody but Japs.”66
GENERAL SCHMIDT’S TEN-DAY VICTORY FORECAST had been far too optimistic. On Sunday, March 4—the two-week mark—major combat remained as intense as it had been at any point in the campaign. The marines held about two-thirds of Iwo Jima, including all three airfields, and had smashed through Kuribayashi’s outer line of defenses on the Motoyama Plateau. V Amphibious Corps had taken 13,000 casualties, including 3,000 dead. The worst-hit units had lost their commanders, their officers, and their NCOs, and then adjusted to the arrival of new commanders, officers, and NCOs, and then lost the replacements. On the eastern anchor of the lines, the 4th Marine Division finally overran the craggy coastal inlet they called the “Amphitheater.” The 5th Marine Division on the west was driving toward Nichi Ridge and Hill 362-B, and running into tough resistance in the rocky cliffs along the coast. In the center, the 3rd Marine Division had fought a punishing offensive into high, broken terrain, advancing by 3,000 yards in nine heartbreaking days. The dark, menacing shape of the “Motoyama honeycomb” loomed directly ahead. This zone of action was only about one square mile in area, but it included a thousand different cave or tunnel entrances to the sophisticated labyrinth that lay beneath.
To the south, in the plains around the airfields, rear-echelon troops were building an advanced operating base. Beach unloading was now progressing with little interference, except an occasional long-range mortar or artillery shell. A cemetery, marked by lengthening rows of white crosses, had been established in the shadow of the pockmarked slopes of Mt. Suribachi. The Seabees of the 133rd Naval Construction Battalion had erected six water distillation units. The energy-hungry machines converted saltwater into potable processed water, which was trucked to the front lines in five-gallon cans. By March 6, the distillers were producing enough drinking water to fill three canteens per marine on the island each day. Meanwhile, in the Japanese caves and bunkers, water stockpiles were rapidly diminishing and men were beginning to succumb to the ravages of thirst.
On March 4, the Superfortress Dinah Might (1st Squadron, 9th Bombardment Group) made an emergency landing at Motoyama No. 1, which the Americans had named South Field. Heavily damaged in a bombing mission over Japan, the aircraft would have been forced to ditch at sea if not for the runway on Iwo Jima. As it taxied to a stop and shut down its four engines, a crowd of perhaps two hundred marines and Seabees gathered around it. Photographers and a motion picture crew recorded the historic scene. The arrival of the big silver bomber was an unforgettable milestone in the campaign, and a timely boost to morale. It dramatized the larger purpose of the bloody island fight—to secure an airbase within easy striking range of Tokyo. A month later, P-51 Mustangs of VII Fighter Command would begin joining up with northbound formations of B-29s, providing fighter escort during their bombing missions. A squadron of navy B-24 (PB4Ys) patrol bombers would begin operating from Iwo Jima on March 16. While fighting still raged a mile and a half north, South Field was beginning to assume the appearance of a major working airbase.
After a command conference at the VAC headquarters, Schmidt ordered a renewed offensive by all three divisions across the line, to be prefaced by a massed artillery bombardment. On March 5, the most worn out and battle-scarred units were pulled back to the rear assembly areas for a short rest, and to integrate replacement troops into the decimated battalions. They were back on the line before dawn on March 6, when the artillery “preparation” started up. This was the heaviest barrage of the battle, a prolonged onslaught by all available field howitzers combined with support from the big guns offshore. The artillery battalions reported the day’s ammunition expenditure as 2,500 155-millimeter “Long Tom” rounds and 20,000 75mm and 105mm rounds. A battleship, two cruisers, three destroyers, and miscellaneous gunboats added 22,500 naval shells. Target coordinates were set at least 200 yards ahead of the U.S. lines, but many shells fell uncomfortably close to the marines, and a few strays fell directly into their lines. The airplanes also did their part, bombing and strafing with exquisite timing. As usual, amateur witnesses doubted that anyone or anything could have survived under the monstrous punishment; as usual, they were mistaken.
As the barrage lifted, the assault echelons advanced against the enemy lines. Where the terrain allowed it, the Shermans led the infantry. The Japanese opened murderous volleys of machine gun and rifle fire; their resistance was seemingly just as stiff as it had been before. Deadly fire poured out of pillboxes and cave entrances, catching the advancing marines in enfilade. White phosphorus shells fell around them, forcing them to fall flat on the ground and dig for cover. New Japanese firing positions, previously undiscovered, opened fire from inconvenient angles. Given the broken and rocky character of the terrain, the tanks could not advance in many places, and the infantry was obliged to go ahead. The forward momentum of the coordinated attack quickly petered out, but the marines did not withdraw; the fighting continued at a fierce pitch throughout the rest of the day. In hopes of breaking stalemates, forward unit commanders called down artillery strikes on positions as close as 100 yards from their own positions. A few caves were sealed off, some pillboxes were taken out by flamethrowers and demolitions, and scores of Japanese were killed. But the defenders rarely exposed themselves by attacking over open ground. They stuck to their entrenchments and fortifications, and circulated through their underground networks, as they had been told to do by General Kuribayashi.
By the end of the day on March 6, the marines had advanced by about 250 yards in the draws and gorges along the coasts, but in most places their forward progress was limited to 50 yards. Against the toughest part of the line, the marines might have gained only 30 yards—but that was something, after all. Differing rates of advance left exposed flanks and salients on both sides, which offered the prospect of flanking attacks (and even attacks from overhead) against previously unassailable Japanese firing positions. Armored bulldozers cleared paths through the broken terrain, so that the tanks and 75mm armed half-tracks could move forward with the infantry. But it took time and patience to blaze new tank trails, and to sweep out the mines, and all of it had to be done while under enemy fire. General Clifton B. Cates, commanding the 4th Marine Division, summed up the sense of resignation that had taken hold among the brass. “Well, we’ll keep on hitting them,” he told Bob Sherrod. “They can’t take it forever. We’ve got to keep pressing ’em until they break. Don’t let up.”67
On March 7, General Schmidt told the artillery battalions to conserve ammunition, which was running dangerously low after the previous morning’s pyrotechnics. He ordered the 5th Marine Division to turn its attack inland and seize high ground overlooking the sea and the chain of formidable defenses around Kitano Point. But the 27th Marines came under devastating mortar fire just as they were preparing to jump off for battle. Company E of the 2nd Battalion took a direct mortar strike that killed or wounded thirty-five men. Not surprisingly, the attack in that area bogged down almost immediately. To the east, in the 4th Division zone of action, much rearguard cleaning up had to be done behind the lines, in the Amphitheater and Turkey Knob features, where new Japanese fighters suddenly materialized as if by some dark sorcery. The division was in rough shape. Leadership had been compromised by the death of so many officers and NCOs. Symptoms of combat fatigue were observed. The division had encountered problems integrating replacement marines at the company and platoon levels. A report noted that “the result of fatigue and lack of experienced leaders is very evident in the manner in which the units fight,” and estimated that the 4th Division’s combat efficiency was about 40 percent of its D-Day baseline.
The ground north of the Amphitheater was a series of jagged rocky ridges alternating with ravines clustered with heavy underbrush. The 25th Marines continued pressing inland, enveloping the enemy and closing a tighter cordon around a shrinking pocket occupied by the Second Mixed Brigade, commanded by Major General Sadasue Senda. Eyeing the risk of a breakout attack, perhaps even a massed banzai charge, the marines strung coils of barbed wire and planted hundreds of anti-personnel mines between them. They set up weapons of various types and calibers to sweep the terrain over which the Japanese must attack, and registered their pack howitzers and light mortars to hit the no man’s land in front of their lines.
In the 3rd Marine Division’s sector, there had been insufficient progress toward Hill 362C, a promontory of special tactical value, and a key link in the chain of defenses across the high part of the plateau. The only route led through some of Iwo Jima’s most jumbled and rocky ground, where the Japanese had prepared fiendishly strong defenses. It was an ominous landscape, smelling strongly of sulfur. The ground was warm underfoot—so much so that it was uncomfortable to lie flat and even more so to dig a foxhole. Yet the troops who advanced into this killing zone would need to dig for protection against the enemy’s machine guns, knee mortars, and antitank guns. With little prospect of bringing its rolling armor into that broken and confused terrain, the division would have to do it the old-fashioned way, by direct infantry assault.
Never before in the Pacific War had the marines attacked at night. It was not in their doctrine or training to do so. But General Erskine had been arguing for some time that a battalion-sized night infiltration attack would catch the Japanese by surprise. Erskine requested and received permission from General Schmidt to launch his attack before dawn on March 8. At first, the flamethrower-demolition squads moved quickly and silently, penetrating about 500 yards behind the Japanese lines. With the benefit of complete surprise, they sealed off pillboxes and cave entrances before the occupants were prepared to react. Many Japanese soldiers were killed in their sleep, sometimes with bayonets. As dawn broke, the marines lobbed smoke shells into the area, drawing a veil across all sightlines. The 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines had been assigned the job of taking Hill 362C, and at first they believed they had done it. But the smoke could confuse the Americans as well as their enemies, and at about 0600 Company K’s officers discovered to their distress that they had taken Hill 331—not Hill 362C, which lay another 250 yards north. And those were long yards, across an exposed salient swept by Japanese machine gun and small arms fire. Fierce fighting continued throughout the day, with two marine companies trapped and taking heavy losses. However, Colonel Boehm, leading the attack, decided to push on toward the original and correct objective. It was a bloody struggle, consuming all of the morning and the early afternoon, but by nightfall the battalion had established defensive lines around the summit of Hill 362C.
On the same day, also before dawn, General Senda’s besieged forces staged their attempted breakout. This was not a massed banzai charge, but rather a clever series of small unit infiltration attacks all along the line, preceded by a massed mortar, rocket, and artillery fire demonstration. The attackers came stealthily, under cover of darkness, making cunning use of the jumbled terrain. But the 4th Division marines benefited by their defensive preparations. Their pack howitzers poured down shellfire on the advancing force, and many of the attackers detonated mines or were killed while trying to cut through the barbed wire aprons. About a dozen Japanese penetrated as far as the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marines command post, where they were killed quickly. The next morning, 650 dead Japanese were counted on the battlefield. According to Lieutenant Satoru Omagari, one of a handful of Japanese survivors of the battle, the area around the Turkey Knob and the Amphitheater was a charnel house. “I saw torsos with no limbs, dismembered legs, arms and hands, and internal organs splashed onto the rocks.”68
It was a battle pitting men above against men below, an army of surface dwellers against an army of troglodytes. Many Japanese on Iwo Jima did not see the sun at all for the last several weeks of their lives. They heard the rumbling of the tanks overhead; they heard the gaseous thrust of flames even before they felt the heat. A Japanese commander reported that the Americans were “making a desert out of everything before them. . . . They fight with a mentality as though exterminating insects.”69 When the marines seized terrain above their bunkers, the Japanese sometimes set charges and blew themselves and their enemies to Kingdom Come. It was a horror reminiscent of the “mining” attacks along the Western Front during the First World War, or the siege of Petersburg in the American Civil War. Elton Shrode witnessed one such event, on a hill north of Nishi Village: “I saw many bodies blown into the air like rag dolls.”70 Forty-three marines were killed or injured in the titanic blast.
DURING THE FIRST TWENTY-ONE DAYS of the fight on Iwo Jima, the medical corps handled an average of 1,000 casualties per day. By D plus 33, a total of 17,677 cases had been evacuated to hospital ships offshore or to hospitals in the Marianas.71 All took justifiable pride in the outstanding efforts of medical personnel, from the corpsmen on the battlefield, to the forward aid stations, to the field hospitals, to the hospital ships offshore, to the hospitals on Saipan and Guam. Corpsmen and litter bearers, the battlefield’s indefatigable first responders, rushed across terrain exposed to enemy fire. Crouching beside stricken marines, shells bursting nearby and bullets snapping over their heads, the corpsmen reached into their “Unit 3” pouches for morphine syrettes, called “Hypos,” to ease a man’s pain and relieve the symptoms of shock; sulfanilamide powder, to be sprinkled directly into wounds as a disinfectant; hemostat clamps, sutures, bandages, and tourniquets to control bleeding. If a man was losing too much blood, he might receive an intravenous infusion of plasma—a life-giving fluid that mitigated the deadly effects of hypovolemic shock. The plasma bottles were held aloft or perhaps slung from a rifle staked in the ground. If the wounded man was fortunate, four litter bearers arrived quickly and carried him back to his battalion aid station, where his wounds were inspected and redressed by a medic. Here, amidst the roar of nearby artillery, he might also receive a shot of penicillin to cut his risk of infection. A chaplain, wearing ordinary fatigues and a helmet, provided a kind word, a sip of water, a prayer, or the sacrament of last rites.
Stretchers were loaded onto the back of an ambulance jeep, or perhaps a halftrack or tractor, to be transferred down the island to a field hospital. They bounced painfully over rutted roads, plasma bottles swaying on their racks. Field hospitals on Iwo Jima were located on main roads well behind the lines, most in sunken terrain or revetments adjoining South Field—complexes of low, unobtrusive dark green tents surrounded by sandbags. Wounded marines were carried through heavy double-blackout flaps into a long tent serving as the receiving ward, where their stretchers were laid on portable plywood operating tables. Doctors and corpsmen made notations on clipboards affixed to each stretcher. Plasma bottles were often swapped for whole blood intravenous feeds. Bloody or dirty clothing was cut away; wounds were cleaned; preoperative patients were washed and shaved. It was a stifling environment, particularly at night, when the tents had to be sealed against light leakage. The air was stuffy, smelling of blood and antiseptic compounds, and choked with cigarette smoke. Even so, the field hospitals were extraordinarily well equipped, by the standards of mid-twentieth-century medicine—probably the most sophisticated military field hospitals that had ever existed. They were stocked with operating tables, X-ray machines, oxygen masks and tanks, refrigerators for serums, electrical generators, flake ice machines, and banks of whole blood donated by civilians in the United States and flown into the island packed in ice. The more urgent cases were moved directly back into the operating rooms, where surgeons of various specialties went to work immediately. The worst, the doctors agreed, were the “belly cases”—the men who had been shot through the stomach, intestines, or other vital organs. The damaged organs had to be removed, resected, and returned to the wounded man’s abdomen. Such wounds required long, intricate surgeries, often consuming four or five hours, followed by extended postoperative care. Even so, about half of all patients died after surgery, often from sepsis or infection. A sheet was pulled over their heads and they were placed on the ground outside, to await transport to one of the cemeteries.
More than 9,000 wounded marines were evacuated from Iwo Jima by sea. Their stretchers were loaded into specially configured Higgins boats or LVTs, which carried them to one of four LSTs that had been established as floating triage centers. A corpsman in each boat looked after the wounded while they were in transit. The passage was often rough, as swells tossed the boats and spray arced over the side. Hanging plasma bottles swung on their racks, and some of the wounded men became seasick, compounding their other miseries. Those who died while underway were returned to the beach to be buried in the cemetery.
More serious cases were taken farther offshore to transports, or to the dedicated hospital ships Samaritan and Solace, which shuttled patients down to Guam and Saipan in relays. Large red crosses were painted on their sides, with a green stripe around the hull—and unlike virtually all other ships in wartime, they were kept brightly illuminated at night. Stretchers were taken aboard by block and tackle rigs, and moved immediately to a spacious hall serving as a receiving ward. The treatment wards produced prodigious amounts of medical waste—bloodstained bandages and washrags, empty plasma bottles, strips of cut-away clothing, discarded casts and splints—and the cleanup crews moved through frequently, gathering it all up to be jettisoned. Sailors pushed mops over bloodstained decks, stopping frequently to wring the red-tinted water into a bucket.
Yet somehow, most of the wounded marines remained brave and even cheerful. A man whose leg had been blown off told a doctor on the Solace, “Doc, I think I’m going to be all right if I get enough blood.” The doctor replied, “Son, we’ve got all the blood anybody needs.”72 Many deprecated the seriousness of their wounds and urged the doctors and nurses to look after others who had been more seriously hit. Some apologized for having earlier shouted in pain, disturbing the peace. Some joked. A man who had lost his right arm remarked, “Well, anyway, I won’t have to write any letters now.”73 Marines whose pallor was blanched and corpselike could be revived by an infusion of whole blood. Color returned to their faces and they regained consciousness. Some patients were frankly elated, reveling in the knowledge that they had done their duty and survived the war.
Beginning on March 4, Skymaster “flying ambulances” began evacuating about two hundred cases per day from South Field, Iwo Jima. By March 21, D plus 30, a total of 2,393 medical casualties had been flown out of the island.74
Battlefield medicine had taken long strides in the quarter century since the First World War. In the earlier conflict, about eight of every one hundred wounded soldiers evacuated to a U.S. field hospital subsequently died. In World War II, that figure fell to under 4 percent. It was a superb improvement, attributed by medical authorities to better first aid on the battlefield, quick evacuation of the wounded, including by air, and the widespread availability of fresh, type-matched whole blood.75 But despite the excellent capabilities of the medical corps on Iwo Jima, the mortality rate of casualties evacuated from the island was nearly 8 percent. In other words, it was double the mortality rate for all theaters in World War II, and about the same average as for U.S. infantry forces in the First World War.
The disparity is explained by a horrific feature of the Battle of Iwo Jima. Relentless mortar fire literally tore men apart, creating a high proportion of especially grievous wounds. Often they were contaminated by the island’s fine volcanic ash, and could not be easily cleaned. A doctor on one of the transports said: “I was on this ship in the Normandy invasion, and not more than five percent of our cases required major surgery; here, I swear I believe it will run 90 percent. I never saw such nasty wounds.”76 And unlike that in most other Pacific island fights, the carnage continued almost unabated into the second, third, and fourth weeks of the battle. Units involved in the hardest fighting suffered cataclysmic losses. Officers and NCOs were killed or wounded at such a rate that young lieutenants were left in charge of entire companies, and buck privates led platoons. For officers of the 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines, the casualty rate was a staggering 108 percent. The pool included fourteen replacement officers, sent forward from the reserves to take the place of those killed or wounded in the line. Of those fourteen replacements, ten were subsequently killed or wounded.77 Company B of the 1st Battalion, 28th Marines lost eight consecutive company commanders. Company I, 3rd Battalion, 24th Marines landed on D-Day with 133 riflemen; when the company departed the island thirty-five days later, nine remained alive and unwounded.
DURING THE CLOSING STAGES OF THE BATTLE, Japanese artillery and mortar barrages slackened noticeably. The last big shells fell within American lines on March 11. But for units in the vanguard, driving into the northern reaches of the island, the fighting remained as bitter and costly as ever. The terrain was unforgiving, and largely inaccessible to tanks, with alternating boulder fields, rocky outcrops, and plunging gorges. Sulfur steams hung like shrouds over the angry, scarred landscape. Infantry squads with flamethrowers took out pillboxes one by one, advancing to point-blank range and filling the enclosures with fire, then finishing the job with demolition charges. Getting to the northern coast of the island was an important psychological goal, and the breakthrough came on the morning of March 9, when a six-man advance patrol of the 21st Marines climbed down the northern cliffs and plunged into the sea. They filled a canteen with seawater and sent it back to General Erskine marked: “For inspection, not consumption.”78
By nightfall on March 9, Erskine’s forces controlled about 800 yards of contiguous coastline at the northeastern corner of Iwo Jima. That had the effect of cleaving the remaining Japanese forces into two pockets, on the northeast and northwest coasts of the island. The eastern salient was contained by the 4th Division, which had consolidated its grip on the area after the bloody failure of General Senda’s counterattack. A tougher prospect was presented by the rugged coastal terrain around Kitano Point in the northwest, where General Kuribayashi’s command center was in a deep bunker. This strongpoint was well defended, and the natural terrain advantages of the area precluded direct assault. Naval gunfire and airstrikes were directed against it for days, with seemingly little effect. Kuribayashi had anticipated and planned that Kitano Point and the rocky cliffs and ravines to its south would be the final pocket of organized resistance on Iwo Jima. The cave entrances and firing ports were high in a sheer rock face, sweeping a 200-foot-wide rocky gorge. Perhaps 3,000 Japanese troops remained alive and well enough to fight.
Holed up in their caves and bunkers, the defenders were relatively protected from the unending violence of the artillery barrages and aerial bombs. But the noise and blast concussions took a steady toll on their nerves, and many were reduced to a catatonic stupor. Their subterranean world grew steadily more fetid and unlivable. There was no way to bury the dead, so the living simply laid them out on the ground and stepped around them. The stench was unspeakable; the ovenlike heat and the lack of ventilation did not help. Nor did the shortage of drinking water, which grew critical in the fourth week of the battle, as the last of the cisterns was emptied. Men spoke endlessly of water, of the fresh mountain streams and springs of Japan. Whatever water collected on the floors of the caves was quickly lapped up by parched soldiers. They were not above licking moisture off the walls. Some drank their own urine. One soldier of the 20th Independent Artillery Mortar Battalion said, “I don’t think I will ever be able to forget the memory of how sweet the rainwater that formed puddles in the tunnels in the night tasted when we got down on all fours to drink it.”79
General Kuribayashi’s bombproof headquarters was about 300 yards inland of Kitano Point, and about 75 feet beneath the ground. The command bunker was a spacious cave with 9-foot ceilings, large enough to accommodate a conference table, desks, and communications equipment. His personal wardroom, a short walk down a narrow tunnel, was a small stone cavity with a cot, a desk, and a chair. Electric lighting was provided throughout the complex. A labyrinth of tunnels spread out from this nexus, leading by many different routes to the world above, and to pillboxes and firing ports manned and armed with machine guns and other small arms. Directly above, fused into the rock, was a massive steel-reinforced concrete blockhouse, 150 feet long by 70 feet wide, with a roof 10 feet thick.
Final radio signals were received from one outpost after another, as the marines sealed up caves and tunnels. Many subordinate units announced plans for a last banzai charge against the enemy, but Kuribayashi firmly told them to remain in their positions and fight to the last bullet. He said that “everybody would like to get an easy way to die early,” but it was the duty of every Japanese soldier on the island to stay alive as long as possible, to “inflict heavy casualties to the enemy.”80
The Americans set up loudspeakers and began broadcasting surrender appeals in Japanese, including personal appeals aimed directly at Kuribayashi. There was no response, except bullets. General Erskine’s 3rd Division staff sent two Japanese POWs back into the Japanese lines to carry a message to the commanding officer of the 145th Infantry Regiment. The messengers somehow managed to return to the U.S. lines with the report that General Kuribayashi was still alive, and did not intend to surrender.
In a final valediction to Tokyo on March 16, Kuribayashi wrote that “the gallant fighting of the men under my command has been such that even the gods would weep.” His forces had been “utterly empty-handed and ill-equipped against a land, sea, and air attack of a material superiority such as surpasses the imagination.”81 These sentiments transgressed powerful taboos, and the text published in the Tokyo newspapers was heavily edited. The phrase “utterly empty-handed and ill-equipped” was redacted. The last line was changed to a vow that Kuribayashi would launch a final attack “with all my officers and men reverently chanting banzais for the emperor’s long life.”82
Radio contact with Tokyo and other islands became spotty and intermittent. Major Horie, from his post on Chichi Jima, tried to get a message through to Kuribayashi informing him that he had been promoted to full general, but it was not clear that the message was received. A March 21 transmission informed Horie that the remaining force had had nothing to eat and no water to drink for five days. The last word from Iwo reached Chichi Jima on March 23. It said simply, “All officers and men of Chichi Jima, goodbye.”83
Before dawn on March 26, about 300 Japanese troops emerged from their caves and crept down the island’s west coast toward Mt. Suribachi. They surprised a bivouac of marines and USAAF personnel on Hirawa Bay, near South Field. After a firefight of nearly three hours, all the Japanese were killed. The Americans, unprepared for the sudden predawn onslaught, lost 170 killed and wounded. An official Marine Corps history concluded, “This attack was not a banzai charge; instead it appeared to have been a well-laid plan aimed at causing maximum confusion and destruction.”84
No one witnessed Kuribayashi’s death, and his body was never identified. Some Japanese sources maintain that the general led this final attack, and was killed in action; others suggest that he took his own life before leaving the bunker. The Americans searched the Japanese dead at Hirawa Bay, but all rank insignia had been removed, and none carried any documents.
The marines had commenced “loading out”—departing the island—on March 14, 1945. They left in echelon, with the 4th Division first to go, followed by the 5th and the 3rd Divisions. Permanent garrison duty was assumed by the army’s 147th Infantry Regiment, which arrived on March 20. The army took command of the island on March 26, at virtually the same hour that the surprise attack at Hirawa Bay was defeated.
It is safe to assume that not a single American regretted leaving Iwo Jima. A Seabee vowed that he would take no souvenirs from the island: “All I want to take away from this place is a faint recollection.”85 For many, of course, the island was impossible to forget.
The victors had paid dearly for their victory. The marines and naval personnel on the island had sustained 24,053 casualties, representing approximately one of every three men who had landed. Of that figure, 6,140 died. Save a few hundred Japanese taken prisoner, the entire defending garrison was wiped out, numbering about 22,000 men. Taking the sum of killed and wounded on both sides, Kuribayashi’s forces had inflicted more casualties than they had suffered. In view of the many advantages possessed by the attackers, that was a remarkable feat. His troglodyte army had remained disciplined and organized to the very end, making the marines pay for every yard of captured territory. But if any doubt had remained after Tarawa, Roi-Namur, Saipan, and Peleliu, the Japanese now knew with absolute certainty that their enemy could take any Pacific island they wanted, no matter how strongly fortified or zealously defended. Even when the fighting was at its worst, the marines had never doubted that they would win. On Guadalcanal, recalled Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Galer, they had often wondered, “Can we hold?” But at Iwo Jima, “The question was simply, ‘When can we get it over?’ ”86
In the five remaining months of the war, B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force would make 2,251 emergency landings on Iwo Jima. Possession of this vital way station, almost directly on the flight line between the Marianas and Japan, effectively added to the range and payload of the Superforts. It also saved untold numbers of lives. In April, P-51 squadrons based on Iwo would begin providing fighter escort for the B-29 formations as they hit Japan. Approximately 20,000 USAAF aircrewmen made at least one emergency landing on the island; many would otherwise have perished at sea. A B-29 pilot spoke for all of his fellow airmen when he said, “Whenever I land on this island I thank God for the men who fought for it.”87
THE HEAVY CASUALTIES ON IWO JIMA touched a nerve with the American public, and prompted an outbreak of recriminations and second-guessing. Holland Smith, who had commanded the expeditionary troops in the earlier bloodbaths on Tarawa and Saipan, was accustomed to being denounced as a “butcher,” a “coldblooded murderer,” and an “indiscriminate waster of human life.”88 Now more of the same epithets were flung at him and the entire Marine Corps. Letters poured into Washington, and congressmen asked the usual questions. Was the island worth the cost? Could it have been captured with fewer American casualties?
MacArthur, whose Luzon campaign was underway at the same time, did not let the opportunity pass. On February 26, a week after the marines had landed on Iwo Jima, MacArthur’s forces completed the recapture of Corregidor. A garrison of about 6,000 Japanese troops had been almost completely wiped out, at a cost of just 675 Americans killed or wounded. An SWPA communiqué proudly declared: “A strongly fortified island fortress, defended to the point of annihilation by a well-equipped, fanatical enemy . . . was reduced in a period of twelve days by a combination of surprise, strategy and fighting technique, and skill, perfectly coordinated with supporting naval and air forces.”89 No one missed the insinuation. MacArthur was saying that superior generalship could have won the Battle of Iwo Jima with fewer American casualties. The issue was especially salient at that particular moment, because the two prongs of the Pacific offensive must soon merge into one. MacArthur was bidding for supreme command in the Pacific, and his backers in the United States were quick to pick up his cues. At his hilltop castle at San Simeon, on the central California coast, William Randolph Hearst picked up the telephone and dictated an editorial about Iwo Jima to the managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner. On February 27, it ran on the Examiner’s front page: “The attacking American forces are paying heavily for the island, perhaps too heavily. . . . Plainly, what we need in all our Pacific operations is a military strategist.” Hearst nominated MacArthur, because “he saves the lives of his own men.”90
That afternoon, a group of about one hundred off-duty marines filed into the Examiner’s newsroom in the Hearst Building at Third and Market Streets. A flustered employee called the police, but then called back a few minutes later to say that the police were not needed. The marines were calm and law-abiding. They did not threaten the staff or premises, but only wanted to look the editor in the eye as they explained that he did not have the facts.
In the end, however, the Marine Corps won its case in the court of public opinion. Secretary Forrestal, who had once worked as a Hudson Valley beat reporter, had compelled the navy and marines to adopt more press-friendly policies. By February 1945, his efforts were bearing fruit. Dozens of war correspondents reported from Iwo Jima, and their stories were transmitted back to the mainland in less than forty-eight hours. Lavish press coverage ensured a high degree of public interest in the battle, and a better understanding of the unprecedented tactical problems posed by the enemy’s subterranean fortifications. Hap Arnold and other USAAF leaders publicly emphasized the absolute necessity of securing Iwo Jima to support the B-29 campaign. Joe Rosenthal’s stirring photograph of the flag-raising on Suribachi was worth a million newspaper column inches.
MacArthur’s implied criticism had been grossly unjust. The tactical options for seizing Iwo Jima had always been limited, and Kuribayashi’s preparations had been brilliant. For all his undoubted talents as a field commander, MacArthur had never confronted such a challenge as Iwo Jima, and one fails to imagine what he could have done differently. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had served as MacArthur’s protégé in the Philippines, and who had led the largest ground campaign of the war, briefly visited the island (as president-elect) in 1952. As he stepped off his plane and looked around, Eisenhower was astounded to learn that the marines had brought more than 60,000 troops ashore. Comparing the barren little island to the “wide open spaces of Normandy,” Eisenhower said that he could barely visualize a battle on such a scale, in such constricted terrain: “It was just very difficult for him to comprehend.”91