[ken5050]

I've written this a few times here in the past, but it bears repeating.....When I was going through Quantico in 1968, we had several senior NCOs on their last duty assignment...as instructors....lifers...30 year Marines, who had fought in the Pacific, and many also in Korea and Vietnam. They talked as lot about the Pacific war...Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo..and we listened..The key point is that anyone who wasn't there has absolutely no idea of what that battle was like..it's virtually incomprehensible to people today. No quarter was given to the enemy, the Marines expected none from the Japanese.

In recent years, some revisionist historians have questioned if the Iwo campaign was even necessary. Just blockade the island, and starve the Japanese out. No invasion needed.

Before the island was seven secure..a severely damaged B-29 ditched off shore. The next day, several more crash landed on the newly captured airstrip, even before the SeaBees could make it operational. Some 3,000 B-29's made emergency landings on Iwo before the war ended. As each plane had a crew of ten...do the math.

[21twelve]

My Uncle (still alive) was a radioman for the Airwing at the time. He was setup on the runway something like 2-3 days after the original landing.

“Wow - that must have been hard.”

“Not really. The Marines had cleared the area. The Japs would take potshots at us, but they were in the jungle across the runway, so they wern’t very succesful.”

[kearnyirish2]

I believe many of those historians (and several people in the military at the time) felt many of the other island campaigns were unnecessary. Other islands certainly could have been bypassed rather than attacked, and the Japanese would have eventually been starved out. I’ve never seen anyone suggest that for Iwo Jima.

When they finally surrendered, Japan still had over one million armed men in China; we didn’t have to go root every one of them out.