Posted on 02/25/2015 3:58:51 PM PST by Kaslin
From Feb. 19, 1945 (when U.S. Marines assaulted its beaches) to March 27 of that year (the day combat officially ceased), the island of Iwo Jima was hell on earth.
In 2009 I began writing occasional columns commemorating the 70th anniversary of key WW2 battles and events. I dedicated them to the WW2 generation. Twenty-year-old Marine vets of February 1945 are now 90, if they are still among us.
Iwo Jima was on my list of must-cover subjects. By sheer coincidence, my wife and I spent this past weekend in Dallas, Texas, with the sister of a Marine F4U Corsair pilot who was shot down near the island in late February 1945. He survived WW2, but is now dead. I thanked her for her brother's service. She said she believed her brother was supporting Marines fighting on Iwo. Then -- eyes tearing -- she added that she wished he was still alive.
Iwo Jima is one of WW2's more memorable battles. Popular culture certainly treats it as an iconic clash. John Wayne's epic Sands of Iwo Jima is one of many Hollywood fictional treatments of Iwo Jima's terrible reality that inform the collective memory of 21st-century audiences.
Nonfiction reporters and film crews thoroughly documented that terrible reality. The savagery on Iwo Jima's eight square miles of beaches, ridges and volcanic rubble produced a trove of combat film and photos. Wartime censors often clamped down on footage they thought too ghastly to include in public theater newsreels. However, the image of Iwo Jima's relentless close battle of infantry and flame-throwing tanks was difficult to cleanse.
On Feb. 23, 1945 photographer Joe Rosenthal followed Marines up Mount Suribachi and snapped his Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of Marines (and a Navy corpsman) raising the U.S. flag on its heights. We later learned Rosenthal photographed the second Suribachi flag-raising, but the dangerous gallantry he recorded was authentic. Three of the men who raised the flag would die on the island.
Which leads to the fundamental reasons Americans should remember the battle: its price in blood and the strategic value of seizing it.
Between Feb. 19 and March 27, the U.S. suffered 25,000 casualties; approximately 6,800 Marines and U.S. Navy personnel killed, another 18,000 wounded.
Pre-invasion, U.S. intelligence estimated the Japanese garrison had 22,000 soldiers. By March 27, the Marines had taken 216 Japanese prisoners. Many Japanese prisoners did not surrender. Marines found them amid volcanic rubble, wounded and unconscious. U.S. commanders believed their forces had killed the other 21,800.
Note this column's first sentence identifies March 27 as the official date the battle concluded. Over subsequent weeks and months, several hundred more survivors emerged. Japan had 25,000 troops on the island. Some of the 3,000 holdouts committed ritual suicide rather than surrender.
The holdouts hid in the island's extensive defensive system, which included machine gun bunkers and concealed artillery positions, concrete-reinforced tunnels connecting underground barracks (some branches extended beneath Mount Suribachi) and hundreds of caves with bunkered or camouflaged entrances. The tunnels and caves were stocked with food and ammunition.
The system was designed to do two things: withstand the hellacious bombardment U.S. air and naval forces always delivered, and then force American infantry to spill blood and die for every inch of the island rock.
Beginning with Peleliu (September 1944), Japan pursued a strategy of strategic attrition. Fanatic resistance on heavily fortified outlying islands would bleed U.S. forces. Rather than suffer horrendous casualties, America would negotiate a ceasefire.
Iwo Jima was, in many respects, a super-Peleliu, a strategic trap.
This is why, among military historians and military planners, Iwo Jima has become one of the war's more controversial operations. The island was supposed to serve as a staging area for invading Japan; it didn't. Some senior officers argued that seizing the island gave B-29 bombers attacking Japan's home islands a safe landing strip. But at the price of 6,800 dead Marines?
At a dinner party in 1998, a Marine vet told me that in 1968, Iwo Jima was still a touchy subject in the Corps. His comment paraphrased: We paid such a steep price, you just didn't raise the issue of utility. I said, as a guy still pulling duty on joint planning staffs, the decision to invade Iwo Jima troubled me. And maybe it should. But that's hindsight. There were several vets at the dinner. We poured another round of drinks and toasted the Marines, every damn brave one of them.
Several things. Peleilu and some smaller island should have been bypassed, just bombed on a continual basis to degrade their forces (and force some into starvation and death by lack of medical supplies). My father-in-law hated McArthur for this tremendous waste of life, and he should know.
Here’s why. We just buried him, Lt. Col. James Lucore (USA ret) at Arlington Cemetery, near Gen. Arthur McArthur (Douglas’ father), another Gen. Arthur McArthur and Gen. Claire Chenneault. If you know WW I and WWII history, I won’t have to write anything else.
Jim was in the only Army assault unit to hit the beaches at Iwo Jima (75th JASCO, Joint Assault Signal Company), a composite unit numbering at one time about 660 men. Some like Jim fought at Kwajeilin, Eniwetok, Saipan, then Iwo and Okinawa. Reported 75th JASCO casualties sometimes ran as high as 60-75% since they were the ones who ran the telephone wires between the ground forces, conducted shore to ship artillery fire coordination, served as Artillery spotters themselves, and put up radar and other forms of wire communications stations all over the island, often under enemy fire from above.
Jim got at least one of his three Purple Hearts on Iwo.
Army transport ships brought the Marines and Jasco units to their launching spots (as a late friend of mine, Gen. Bruce Jacobs, one of the ship commanders, told me).
Among the dead on Iwo was a Seabee company that was mistakenly sent in, basically unarmed, when a communication was misinterpreted. It asked for ONE Seabee, not one company. They were virtually wiped out by the Japanese.
Misc inform. John Batchelor (Show) - his father was a Marine flier over Iwo. So too was the father of Swift Boat Commander John O’Neill.
The landing strips at Iwo are credited with saving thousands of lives of American flyers, esp. from the longrange B-29’s who had to make emergency landings in order to survive. Each plane carried 8 men so if you had only 200 planes land there, it saved 1600 lives, but I’m told that the actual figures were much highers. Fighter escorts also landed their.
Re the Philippines campaign. Complicated but necessary to clear the Japanese out of those sea lanes. Also we helped liberate tens or hundreds of thousands of American and Filippino soldiers from the Japanese murder camps, men who would have died had we not undertaken this operation.
Small islands could be skipped. The larger one had to be taken for a number of reasons.
You can find the Order of Battle for Iwo in a book of that name “Iwo Jima”. Author’s name skips me but you’ll find the Army’s JASCO units (in part), listed there.
1.
My dad landed at Iwo Jima, Green Beach on D-Day. 5th Marine Division; Pioneer. Stayed until the end. He left us in 1999.
I sure miss him.
Yes you did! Thank you.
Honestly, they really should have gassed that whole island. Many of those islands took a shell on every square yard. But on Iwo, they were deep deep in the rock in their tunnels.
They had a very long time to prepare.
About 25,000 fliers were saved there. And that’s just emergency landings. The early warning Iwo could give and the fighters there were also a threat to the B-29s.
The fact that the Japanese prepared such formidable defenses on Iwo and Peleliu makes me think they knew very well that those islands were extremely important.
Once when I was visiting him, the movie Sands of Iwo Jima came on and we watched it together. He thought it was a realistic depiction of combat (of course he had not been on Iwo Jima himself).
Semper FI to a Marine family.
more people died (to include civilians)in the Battle of Okinawa, than died in the combined a-bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima
Maybe someone should have told the Japanese?
They invested staggering amounts of equipment, food, construction materials, men, conscript Korean labor, and naval transport to fortify and defend Iwo Jima.
Why would they risk that level of resources if the island could have been safely bypassed by the Americans?
Re: “We poured another round of drinks and toasted the Marines, every damn brave one of them.”
Don't forget to toast the U.S. Army.
My Dad was an Army Sergeant, a field radar specialist.
He landed with his squad and all their equipment on D+1.
My Dad may have been in the same Signal Company as your father-in-law.
He was a Sergeant, a field radar specialist, landed D+1 with his squad and equipment, but only took scattered mortar fire going in.
He fought at Saipan, too, and was scheduled for Okinawa, but was pulled off for training for the main Japanese invasion.
He stayed on Iwo Jima until about June, about the same time that U.S. air operations began to launch attacks against Japan from the Okinawa area.
According to my Dad, fighter escorts were impossible before Iwo Jima - the round trip from all other islands was outside the range of all our fighters.
Iwo Jima became the air base for the P-51 Mustang, as I recall.
I'll guess the P-51 was not stationed there for long, and was moved to Okinawa as soon as the area was pacified.
One more thing - when the Japanese held Iwo Jima, it was a key early warning radar station against B-29 attacks on the Japanese islands.
I had a dear friend who was at Iwo Jima. Russell died a few years ago, but was one of the most stalwart and salt of the earth people I’ve ever know.
Some pics of the p-51 Mustangs on Iwo at post #29.
One of our Freepers has been posting images of the New York Times from the World War 2 time frame, posting them on the same date they were published. Right now, he is posting articles on the assault on Iwo Jima as well as the assault into Germany. Makes for fascinating reading. You can find these postings by searching on worldwarii.
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