THE BATTLE OF IWO JIMA

 

The First Flag Up – Photo by Lowery

 

D-Day and Desperation

 

The ‘softening up’ of Iwo Jima began in December of 1944 with high altitude bombings. The island was battered for 72 consecutive days. It did no good. Intelligence photos showed that the number of defenses actually grew during the massive air strikes. Then it was the Navy’s turn – and it didn’t do a very good job. Commanding the Marines was General Holland ‘Howlin’ Mad’ Smith. A veteran of amphibious landings, he demanded a ten day close-in naval bombardment – but many of the Navy’s big ships were too busy conducting somewhat useless – but good for newspaper headlines – coastal bombardments of the Japanese home islands. They were unavailable. The Marines would get parts of three days of shelling before hitting the beach. Smith would blame the Navy for many of the Marine deaths.

In the words of James Bradley, General Kuribayashi had “transformed Iwo Jima into one large blockhouse.” Steel doors, multiple entrances on gun positions, underground rooms, tunnels, hospitals, command posts, hidden artillery and mortar positions, sniper holes. The list goes on and on. And every inch of the island was covered by cross fire. Hell awaited the young men on February 19^th.

30,000 men and boys of the 4^th and 5^th Marine Divisions hit Red, Yellow, Blue and Green beaches at 0900 hrs, with the 3^rd Division in reserve. The volcanic sands were difficult to move in. Thus, men and equipment stacked up on the two mile wide landing area creating a confusion of landing craft, amphibious vehicles and personnel. Yet for an hour nothing happened. Were all the defenders dead? Then, as more and more Americans unloaded or were seasick in Higgins boats waiting their turn at the beach, all hell broke loose. Kuribayashi had refused to be drawn into a defense at the water’s edge. The Japanese defenders on and in Mt. Suribachi in the south, and in emplacements to the north interlaced the whole area with massive artillery, mortar, rifle and machine gun fire. The results were devastating. Desperate Marines trying to dig foxholes got nowhere in the volcanic ash. Tracked vehicles bogged down. Marines were killed as they left the landing craft. Landing vessels were blown out of the water and the Marines inside vaporized. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal landed with the 4^th Division and ran for his life. He later said that “not getting hit was like running through rain and not getting wet.”

Somehow, the Marines took a toe hold. One by one, pillboxes fell. But time and time again, Marines would be shot down after taking Japanese fortifications. Underground tunnels allowed defenders the ability to re-enter what was presumed to be a secured area. In a suicidal charge, Company A, 28^th Marines, charged across 700 yards of exposed ground and severed Mt. Suribachi from the rest of the island. By noon, there were 9000 Marines on Iwo Jima. Defensive tunnels from Suribachi to the rest of the Japanese defensive network had not been completed, but Kuribayashi had expected this, and Suribachi had been designated a semi-autonomous defensive area.

By noon on D Day, annihilation was no longer an issue. But the shock of the devastation and loss of life was profound. The American public would discover that more American lives had been lost in the first four days than in five months of fighting at Guadalcanal!

At Normandy, the Allies had pushed inland, and the landing zones became safe within a reasonably short time frame. Not so on Iwo. The landing zone would remain ‘hot’ for days. Correspondent Robert Sherrod came in at 1700 hrs on D Day. Another correspondent warned him, “I wouldn’t got there if I was you. There’s more hell in there than I’ve seen in the rest of the war put together.” Sherrod, who was no stranger to combat, was shocked by what he saw. He called the fighting on Iwo “a nightmare in hell.” Writing of the landing, he stated, “About the beach in the morning lay the dead…. They died with the greatest possible violence. Nowhere in the Pacific have I seen such badly mangled bodies. Many were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay fifty feet away from the body.”

 

The Landings and Advances by the Marines

 

Carnage on the Beaches

Yet somehow, as James Bradley states in Flags of Our Fathers, “the Marines kept advancing. Somehow, discipline held. Somehow, valor overcame terror. Somehow, scared young men under sheets of deadly fire kept on the doing the basic, gritty tasks necessary to keep the invasion going.”

Hundreds of Marines Never Got Off the Beach

You Couldn’t Dig in the Volcanic Sand

 

 

 

By D-Day Plus Two the tentacles of American persistence were reaching further from the beachhead. But it was a terrible thing to see. Recalling a doomed charge some 80 years before, “Howlin’ Mad” Smith later told a reporter, “Watching the Marines cross that island reminded me of the charge of Pickett at Gettysburg.”

The carnage would continue unabated. There wasn’t time or space to accommodate individual graves. Men were buried 50 at a time in bulldozed graves. Unsure of whether the dead Marines were Catholics, Protestants, or Jews, one chaplain, Gage Hotaling could only recite, “We commit you into the earth and the mercy of Almighty God.” He would do this for 1800 young men.

 

On February 23, 1945, D-Day Plus Four, Mt. Suribachi was finally surrounded. A patrol was told to try to climb to the top, and given a small American flag, told that IF they made it up, to hoist the flag. There was no guarantee they would get up or back alive as the area was still honeycombed with Japanese filled caves. At the top, a piece of pipe was found in the wreckage of a water catchment system, and Sgt. Lou Lowery took several pictures of the men involved. James Bradley says that as the flag became noticed, “Iwo Jima was transformed, for a few moments, into Times Square on New Year’s Eve….Here was the first invader’s flag every planted in four millennia on the territorial soil of Japan.” Lockhart resident Rev. George Goodman was a Coast Guard radio technician on an LST that had run equipment and men into the beach. He saw the flag go up and recalls, “We were thrilled. We knew the island was going to be ours – but taking it was going to be a long way off.”

It only lasted a minute, and all hell broke loose again. But for reasons unknown, the Japanese in caves immediately below the peak didn’t kill the interlopers, even though they outnumbered them in overwhelming numbers.

Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal was with the invasion fleet. Seeing the flag raised on Suribachi, he decided he wanted it as a souvenir. This didn’t set well with Col. Chandler Johnson, the battalion commander of the 2nd Bn, 28^th Marines. “To hell with that,” he said, ordering a larger and more easily seen flag to be brought up. He would secrete the first flag, and a much larger flag, the iconic one whose raising was shot by photographer Joe Rosenthal, was retrieved from a landing ship – tank (LST) at the beach. Fittingly, the flag had been recovered from a ship sunk by the Japanese at the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Marines again braved the hidden Japanese in caves and bunkers, with the new flag and instructions: “Colonel Johnson wants this big flag run up high so every son of a b____ on this whole cruddy island can see it!”

Rosenthal’s Iconic Shot

 

Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal accompanied the second flag up to the top of Suribachi. Rosenthal nearly didn’t get perhaps the most famous photo in history, as he stumbled as the first flag went down and the second one went up. He snapped the picture without looking through the viewfinder, and had no idea whether he’d even caught the raising of the flag. He took several other “gung ho” shots of the Marines surrounding the newly raised flag, and then headed back to the beach to turn in his developed film to be sent stateside. The image of Ira Hayes, Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, Mike Strank, Rene Gagnon, and John Bradley – five Marines and a Navy Corpsman, shoving a flag on a pole into the rocks of an insignificant dot in the ocean would prove symbolic.

It was and is the singular memory many of us have of Iwo Jima. But battle had hardly begun. It would rage for another month, and thousands more Marines, including three of the flag raisers in Rosenthal’s shot, would not leave the island alive.

 

Next: A Battle of Attrition and Its Consequences

 

Much information for this article comes from Flags of Our Fathers, by James Bradley

 

 

THE BATTLE FOR IWO JIMA

 

By Todd Blomerth

 

 

On February 19, 1945, American fighting men invaded one of the Empire of Japan’s ‘Home Islands’ for the first time when the 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th Marine Divisions landed on the volcanic ash beaches of a tiny island called Iwo Jima. This eight square mile patch of desolation in the North Pacific became the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting of the Second World War.

 

This is an account of that battle.

 

Run-up to the Battle

 

By late 1944, it was painfully obvious to the Japanese that the American military juggernaut could not be prevented from striking the heart of Japan’s Empire. Initially hamstrung by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Allies’ “Germany First” policy, and the inevitable delay in ramping up production and enlistments, the United States unleashed its full military potential against the Japanese offensive. In May of 1942, the US dealt Japan its first setback by turning back a fleet aiming to launch an invasion of New Guinea in preparation for the conquest of Australia.. Then, that August, ill-equipped, and poorly supported Marines landed and held onto an obscure island called Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Bloody and protracted fighting over several months resulted in the first land defeat for Japan. Coupled with the brilliant American defeat of Japanese carrier forces at the Battle of Midway, the US (with the help of Australian and New Zealand) was turning the tide against the Japanese offensive wave.

The Allies adopted a two-pronged plan to roll back Japan’s gains in the Pacific. General Douglas MacArthur’s command in the western Pacific would by-pass and isolate as many fortified areas as possible by cutting their supply lines. This proved successful against Japanese bases in New Guinea, the Admiralty Islands and ultimately the Philippines. There were many bloody battles to be sure, but the ability to avoid massive Japanese bases such as Rabaul saved thousands of American lives.

Admiral Chester Nimitz’ area of command in the vast expanses of the eastern Pacific didn’t have as many options, as island stepping stones were small and far apart. “Island hopping,” or advancing from one chain of islands to another, was an unavoidable necessity. This meant having to make bloody amphibious assaults on island bastions like Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands, Guam, and Saipan and Tinian in the Mariana Islands. American advances caused the Japanese military to begin heavily fortifying islands closer to the heart of the empire. One of the outposts deemed crucial to stopping further American advances was Iwo Jima.

With the Marianas in US hands in 1944, new American B-29 bombers now had bases from which to attack the Japanese homeland.  A massive bombing campaign began to take the war to Japan’s cities and industrial centers.

Iwo Jima was important to the Japanese because it lay athwart the air route from the Marianas to Tokyo, and served both as an early warning site, and an interceptor location for fighter aircraft. To the Americans, Iwo Jima’s location only 650 nautical miles from Tokyo meant it was ideally located to recover disabled or damaged B-29s returning from bombing runs over Japan. It was also close enough to allow P-51 fighters to escort the B-29s all the way to Japan.

 

An invasion of Japan – something inconceivable only two years earlier – now loomed as a real threat to the Japanese high command. . The concept of surrender was abhorrent in Japanese society. This was one of the reasons why most Japanese soldiers, almost to the end of the war, fought to the death. And it was one of the many reasons Allied prisoners of war were seen as ‘cowards’ and horribly mistreated and tortured.  The Japanese leadership felt that beyond the military threat, it meant the demise of the Japanese concept of “self.” The very idea of an invasion of the homeland, governed by a divine emperor, raised fears about the continuation of the Japanese as a race. The loss of their way of life and system of government, in their view, would result in cultural, if not physical genocide. And the Japanese military, which had controlled virtually all aspects of political life since the early 1930s, would not longer be in power

 

As the Allies closed in, the Japanese military made sure that its attackers would known the cost of an attempt to subjugate the empire.

 

On May 27, 1944, Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo selected General Tadamichi Kuribayashi to assume the defense of Iwo Jima. Kuribayashi was a decorated veteran and proved to be an expert at waging defensive warfare. He took his 5000 troops then on the island and set them to work honeycombing Iwo Jima with over 11 miles of tunnels and over 5000 caves and pillboxes. Kuribayashi was also a pragmatist. Shortly after he arrived, what was left of the Japanese naval air forces was destroyed in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in a disastrous rout the Americans called “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”. American submarines, surface ships and airpower had already decimated most of the Japanese Imperial Navy. Iwo Jima would receive more defenders and supplies until the Americans arrived, but Kuribayashi knew that he would get no further support once the invasion began. Kuribayashi realized that without help he and his men were ultimately doomed, so he aimed to make the American invaders pay as high a price as possible for victory.

 

Aerial View of Iwo Jima

Before World War II, Iwo Jima was a backwater island with a civilian population of around 1000, administered as a prefecture of the capital city of Tokyo. The islanders survived by fishing, growing sugar cane, or mining sulfur. There was no fresh water source on the island and those living there had to rely on rainwater cisterns. Rice and other supplies were brought in every month or so on inter-island freighters. There was one policeman, one Shinto shrine, and one primary school. Shaped like an ice cream cone, its one dominant physical feature was Mt. Suribachi at the southernmost tip of the island. This dormant volcano loomed 530 feet over the rest of the island.

            

At first glance, Iwo Jima appeared to be a difficult place to defend. But the Japanese had proved masters of island fighting. The bloodbaths at Tarawa and Peleliu had taught the Americans that.

Intelligence figures estimated that at best the Japanese held the ‘dry wasteland of volcanic ash that stinks of sulfur’ (as James Bradley described it in Flags of Our Fathers) with only 12,000 troops. Hardly a small number, but 70,000 Marines seemed to be more than enough to overcome the defenders. American intelligence estimates conservatively stated that one week was all the time needed to secure Iwo Jima and its three airfields. But those intelligence estimates were wrong, and badly so. The actual number of defenders had grown to 23,000 before the island was blockaded. By the time it ended, the Battle for Iwo Jima had raged for five weeks. And even after the invasion commanders proclaimed the island ‘secured’, on March 26^th, hundreds of Japanese stragglers remained concealed in tunnels, occasionally ambushing US troops. The last holdouts would not surrender until 4 years after the end of World War II.

 

NEXT: D Day and Desperation