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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.”