Posted on 02/19/2018 8:09:54 AM PST by Oldpuppymax
Seventy three years ago today the United States Marine Corps sent waves of teenaged men onto the black foreboding beaches on a Japanese held island called Iwo Jima. Capturing Iwo Jima was essential to the American war against Japan as it offered a place for battered bombers to safely land which would save the lives of hundreds of airmen returning from sorties over Japan in barely flyable planes.
The average age of these men was just under nineteen. They knew what was at stake and charged up Iwo’s beaches sometimes straight into enemy machine gun fire that would have stopped lesser soldiers. They kept pushing and killing and getting killed, but never stopped; never whined; never “protested” and never thought of disgracing themselves by demanding a “safe space.”
They were the finest America had and they did a job that simply had to be done. They fought to keep us from being the slaves of the Japanese. They made sure the Marine boast that “If it wasn’t for the United States Marines we’d be speaking Japanese,” was backed up not by words but by their blood.
Today the great grandsons of the Men of Iwo Jima are largely an embarrassment to themselves and their country. Their blue spiked hair gold ringing and proud ignorance of how and why America works make them pale shadows when juxtaposed with their hero great grandfathers.
Many of the Men of Iwo Jima had not finished high school when they stepped forward to fight for their country. Many of them had volunteered after the terrible beating the Marine Corps had sustained in battles like Gradual Canal and Peleliu.
Yet they still came. They didn’t have to be told what they had to do. They were men at the age of 16 and 17 and many were handling man size responsibilities before they were sweating it out in Marine Boot Camp.
Now there are only a few of these warriors left. Those who are still with us are frail and not what they once were physically but just as strong in their love of America as ever. Should you have the honor meeting one of these heroes thank him because God knows he deserves our tanks and recognition.
Re My recollection: Lewie Puller lost most of his Bn on
Peleliu.
I saw John Bradley’s name missing and was about to chide you for your mistake, but then I realized that a correction had been made, officially, by the USMC in 2016!
I would have never believed that Bradley would have lived his life without making the correction. He was such an honorable man.
Back in the '90's, I watched "Memphis Belle" and immediately afterwards turned on my VCR and watched the War Department documentary "The Memphis Belle: The Story of a Flying Fortress" (1944). This is the real thing--the cameramen, using 16mm film cameras, shot their footage under enemy fire. The Hollywood production doesn't hold a candle to the documentary, which you can watch on Youtube.
"So Nimitz sacrificed 7,000 Marines to save the lives of hundreds of pilots? MacArthur would have found a way to bypass Iwo Jima."
And if Roosevelt hadn't been so enamored with Stalin we would have had bases in Siberia, on Soviet soil, that we didn't have to fight to gain.
There are some very active discussions on Quora about this by amateur historians, myself included, about this.
Roosevelt was besotted by Stalin. The USA saved the Soviets' bacon with Lend Lease. Still, Stalin claimed that he couldn't let us have bases on Soviet soil, near Vladivostok, which would have made bombing Japan a milk run. And rather than pressing the point, Roosevelt gave in to the tyrant's excuses. Marines fought many, many bloody battles to gain those islands.
And why did Stalin not want to give us bases? Because he was paranoid, and also he was secretly laughing, every day, at how gullible the westerners were.
Vladivostok is only 500 miles from Tokyo. Even Okinawa, which was our last island to capture after 3 bloody years, is 700 miles from Tokyo.
We gave the Soviets everything they needed to finally turn the tide against the Nazis in 1943. All we had to do was hold up a couple months worth of Lend Lease shipments to have our way. Stalin would have caved. He might have been overthrown by the Politboro.
To his credit, Roosevelt revealed on his deathbed that he never should have trusted Stalin. A little too late, I think, to save the blood, effort, and lives of all those Marines.
As for the MacArthur comment? I assume he would have had the fortitude to force the issue. He was already enough of a hellraiser.
From HistoryNet: Over 29 thousand B-29 air crewmen saved because they could land on Iwo. Some 7000 lost taking Iwo.
So I guess the answer is yes it was worth it.
Yep, unbelievable heroism, effort,endurance, patriotism
I just wish they had voted differently
IIRC, Roosevelt never made it to his deathbed. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage; his last known words were “I have such a terrible headache”. I would like to know when FDR expressed remorse for his coddling of Stalin.
Ironically, his third term VP Henry Wallace who was such a commie that he was bumped from the 1944 ticket by Harry Truman, later expressed his regret at how he had been used by the Soviets for propaganda purposes.
Well, of course it was worth it except to the families of the Marines who perished.
But it still would have been better to build fixed bases in Siberia and defend them, rather than fight for islands. Stalin's excuse was that he had a fragile neutrality treaty with Japan that he didn't want to violate. He was concerned that Japanese troops would invade from Manchuria.
But Japan was already over-extended once the Americans entered the war. By 1943 Japan could not have sustained an effective invasion of Siberia; besides, it's not like Siberia is easy territory to conquer anyway. All we had to do was put the air bases a few hundred miles from the border and dare the Japanese to try to invade from Manchuria.
As for "29,000 B-29 crewmen" I think you need to check your facts and your math. A total of 3,000 B-29s were built over the lifetime of the aircraft but only 165 were operational by April 1944 and probably less than 1500 by August 1945 when the bomb was dropped on Japan. I can't easily find month by month statistics but we can make an assumption that 1000 were deployed to the Pacific by the end of the war. This is supported by the fact that the largest B-29 bombing run during the war was only 334 aircraft.
Assuming the loss rate was 25% for these 1,000, and that half of those landed on Iwo instead of putting down in the water, than means 125 aircraft were saved. That's 1250 men, not 29,000.
Even History.net says that there were only "hundreds of emergency landings on Iwo." Let's assume 500. Let's also assume that only half really required the Iwo landing, and half could have made it further to another base. 250 aircraft x 10 men equals 2,500. Certainly not 29,000. And that's not necessarily "lives saved" but merely lives that didn't have to be pulled out of the water.
Bravo to you for trying, but your math really needs some work. And when you make a claim you ought to give it a sanity check.
Can't remember where I saw it. I expect you can find it if you look for a bit. It's not one of those factoids it's easy to find, apparently.
But I've always believed that, in his weaker moments, Stalin was laughing at how gullible Roosevelt was to give the USSR all that materiel only with a "promise to pay."
Stalin never intended to pay us back for Lend Lease materiel andhe never did.
But -- yes, he did pay us back in other ways. The Cold War, the Berlin blockade, the Iron Curtain, the fomenting of communist revolution throughout the globe, the abrogation of the terms of Potsdam, and the suppression of freedom in all of Eastern Europe.
I'm one of those guys who contemplates whether the world would have been better off -- not Europe, but the world -- had the Nazis beaten the Soviets.
Some years ago, FReeper Homer_J_Simpson ran daily posts of that days NYT news articles from WWII. The following excerpt is from a post of one article by correspondent HANSON W. BALDWIN. Baldwin was an Annapolis graduate who after serving became a writer. To me, his writing of Marines on Iwo put to words the essence of being a Marine. Though not the entire article, it is a lengthy post. Worth it though on this anniversary day.
I had a good friend who was an Iwo Marine and later walked out of Chosen with 3/5. An outstanding Marine and better husband and father.
February 22, 1945
New York Times
Marines’ Hardest Fight
They Enrich Traditions of Our Forces Despite Grievous Losses on Tiny Iwo!
By HANSON W. BALDWIN
Marines were dying yesterday in the toughest battle of the Corps’ long history of valor, but the flag was firmly planted on the volcanic sands of Iwo, gateway to Tokyo
The Marine Corps needs no accolade; its deeds speak in triumphant, rolling phrases - Belleau Wood and Tarawa, Saipan and Iwo. The Marine Corps needs no historian to write with blood-dipped pen of battles past and present and battles still to come; the battle ‘ streamers and the crosses - France and North Africa, China and Bataan. Kwajalein and Guam - tell its tale of courage. The flag flying over the islands of the Pacific is the Corps’ accomplishment and its accolade.
Now the Marines have come to their hardest battle - a battle still unwon. Our first waves on Iwo were almost wiped out: 3,650 Marines were dead, wounded or missing after only two days of fighting on the most heavily defended island in the world, more than the total casualties of Tarawa, about as many as all the Marine casualties on Guadalcanal in five months of jungle combat.
Our losses have been grievous and the greater toll is still ahead, yet the Marines are undaunted: still they come on. To the south, a living wave of men is lapping slowly up the ugly, pocked crater of Mount Suribachi, whose guns and mortars dominate the sand where our beaches lie.
Northward the rising tide of men creeps painfully up the tangled, jagged sulphurous plateau of Iwo. From the thick fastnesses of which more Japanese guns enfilade our lines. Not until these heights are won, Suribachi’s caves and craters are mopped up and our foothold on the northern plateau is firm and well planted will the crisis be past and the casualties drop.
They Expected It
The Marines know this; they expected Armageddon on Iwo. There was no other way. Iwo is an island honeycombed with caves and crevices. Its only landing beaches are dominated by cliffs and rearing craters, its gun position so protected that months of shelling and bombing could not knock them out. Iwo had to be ours, however, and the Marines will take it. They will pay the price, and it will be high. The tide of men will rise on and on, higher and higher. The ranks will be riddled and winnowed by enemy fire, but the Marines will go on to ultimate victory.
Some call this spark that drives men to victory or to death “tradition”, others “esprit de corps”; the Marines put it simply: “We are ‘United States Marines.”
if FDR had regret about stalin, he never would have said it during the war. The war was about defeating germany not pointing out Stalin’s evil deeds. Since FDR died during the war, he just wouldn’t have done it at any time he was alive. After Hitler fell, he still needed Stalin to show force to Japan.
I didn’t compile the 29000 number I got it off HistoryNet. If you have an issue with it take it up with them.
My father was a Marine on Iwo, he thought it was worth it.
It seems to me putting bases in Siberia would have been a huge logistic, re-supply & infrastructure problem particularly in 1943. I don’t have the time, nor inclination to research it.
It would have meant trading a huge infrastructure and supply effort to the South Pacific with a huge infrastructure and supply effort to Siberia. The only difference is we wouldn’t have had to fight for the territory.
History.net is obviously wrong too.
When Amazon was very new I wrote book reviews for fun. After reading “Flags of Our Fathers” I wrote one and then read what others had written. One fellow wrote, “This is not the best book I have ever read...it is the best book I will ever read”. Somehow I think he may have been there.
More lives lost at Okinawa, than at Iwo Jima.
My father enlisted in the Marines at age 17, and was discharged after two years including Okinawa, before he turned 20 yrs. of age.
Purple heart war wounds.
When young men like me, their sons, went through basic at the peak of Vietnam, just a few cried.
Today I sincerely believe most young males, would break down crying in basic. (Army basic, not AIT infantry. )
I visited the same place at the Navy yard. I tend to prefer out of the way places, which that was.
Bttt.
5.56mm
My dad was on USS West Virginia, she poured hundreds of 16 inch and 5 inch projectiles into the island to support the landings
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