This says it all.
Posted on 03/15/2005 5:07:59 AM PST by billorites
ON FEB. 19, 1945, 30,000 Marines splashed ashore on a small volcanic island in the central Pacific. After four days of bitter fighting, a small patrol reached the peak of Mount Suribachi, where it planted a U.S. flag in an iconic scene captured by photographer Joe Rosenthal. This famous image was hardly the end of the battle. Iwo Jima would not be secure until March 26. Almost all of the 21,000 Japanese defenders elected to die rather than surrender. Rooting them out cost more than 6,000 American dead and 20,000 wounded, making this the costliest battle in the storied history of the U.S. Marine Corps. It is right and proper that there should be 60th-anniversary commemorations of these heroics. For, as Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz famously said, ". . . on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue." Yet it would be a mistake to bury this battle in a haze of "Greatest Generation" sentimentality. Our awe at the bravery of the Marines and their Japanese adversaries should not cause us to overlook the stupidity that forced them into this unnecessary meat grinder. Selective memories of World War II, which record only inspiring deeds and block out all waste and folly, create an impossible standard of perfection against which to judge contemporary conflicts. That is why Marine Capt. Robert S. Burrell, a history instructor at the Naval Academy, has performed a valuable service by publishing in the October 2004 issue of the Journal of Military History an article called "Breaking the Cycle of Iwo Jima Mythology." Burrell examines the planning of Operation Detachment, as the invasion was known, and shows that it was badly bungled. The planners actually thought that Iwo Jima would be lightly defended. Nimitz had no idea that the Japanese had been preparing an elaborate defensive network of caves, bunkers and tunnels. As a result, he failed to allocate enough aircraft or warships to seriously dent the enemy defenses before the infantry landings. This oversight consigned the Marines to what a war correspondent called "a nightmare in hell." And for what? The rationales for taking the island were shaky at the time and utterly specious in hindsight. The original impetus came from the U.S. Army Air Corps, which wanted a base from which fighters could escort B-29 Superfortress bombers on missions over Japan. But Iwo Jima was so far away from most Japanese targets — a 1,500-mile round trip — that even the newest fighter, the P-51D Mustang, lacked sufficient range and navigational equipment for that purpose. In any case, Japanese air defenses were so weak that B-29s didn't need any escort; they were able to reduce Japanese cities to ashes on their own. When the fighter-escort mission didn't pan out, U.S. commanders had to come up with another rationale for why 26,000 casualties had not been in vain. After the war, it was claimed that Iwo Jima had been a vital emergency landing field for crippled B-29s on their way back from Japan. In a much-quoted statistic, the Air Force reported that 2,251 Superforts landed on Iwo, and because each one carried 11 crewmen, a total of 24,761 airmen were saved. Burrell demolishes these spurious statistics. Most of those landings, he shows, were not for emergencies but for training or to take on extra fuel or bombs. If Iwo Jima hadn't been in U.S. hands, most of the four-engine bombers could have made it back to their bases in the Mariana Islands 625 miles away. And even if some had been forced to ditch at sea, many of their crewmen would have been rescued by the Navy. Burrell concludes that Iwo Jima was "helpful" to the U.S. bombing effort but hardly worth the price in blood. In modern parlance, you might say that Iwo Jima was a battle of choice waged on the basis of faulty intelligence and inadequate plans. If Ted Kennedy had been in the Senate in 1945 (hard to believe, but he wasn't), he would have been hollering about the incompetence of the Roosevelt administration, which produced many times more casualties in five weeks than U.S. forces have suffered in Iraq in the last two years. No such criticism was heard at the time, in part because of the rah-rah tone of World War II media coverage but also because Americans back then had a greater appreciation for the ugly, unpredictable nature of combat. They even coined a word for it: snafu (in polite language: "situation normal, all fouled up"). It's a shame that so many sentimental tributes to the veterans of the Good War elide this unpleasant reality, leaving us a bit less intellectually and emotionally prepared for the trauma of modern war. Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Yes, it's always a lot easier in hindsight.
And it was stupid the first time!
I don't think Max Boot is a Brit; this article just happened to appear in the Manchester Union Leader. Max is actually a well-regarded reporter, and frequently writes for the op-ed page of the WSJ. In this article, I think what he's really saying is that better intelligence would have led to less loss of life. Or had we had better intelligence, we could have carpet bombed Iwo before taking it.
"The rationales for taking the island were shaky at the time and utterly specious in hindsight."
Uncounted bombers and other aircraft were saved due to our control of that island.
I'm easy... I'm just afraid of what our children and grandchildren will read about what we've done. It will be hard to explain that my friends didn't die for "faulty WMB intel", but for doing their job and protecting there fellow Marines.
"WMD" ... My fingers twitch when I'm pissed.
Very good take on this. The only place I have found where war works is in a Clancy novel. People forget the Rangers climbing the cliffs into German machine guns on D-Day to take out the big guns that were not there.
Bravery is bravery no matter what or why.
Leave it to a British guy to reflect on mistakes in WW2
Yeah I wonder if he remembers the Arnheim Bridge. Now if he wants to write about a "mistake", he should write about that one. It was after all, entirely British
This says it all.
"The rationales for taking the island were shaky at the time and utterly specious in hindsight
hindsight is better than foresight by a damnsite should be the first sentence in this article.
We should consider ourselves, as a country, brave and lucky. The weapons being developed at the end of WWII could have drastically changed the outcome or at the least killed thousands or millions more than the wars toll took. America exists today because of its citizens who have given their lives so that we are free today. We have also given this cherished freedom to millions of non-Americans since WWII and we continue to do so. Freedom is what we stand for and at times we are the only thing between freedom and death in the world. Not everyone appreciates what we do, the ones who appreciate it the most are the ones who actually get to taste the freedom we give and as generations pass some loose their ability to appreciate it. I doubt anyone who faced the blackouts in London during German bombing runs would fail to appreciate our entry into the war to stop Hitler and the ravage he raged on Europe. In the U.S. today we have people who don't support our war effort, don't understand why we must act and when, and whether or not the realize it or willing to admit it, they don't appreciate their freedom, they take it for granted, and in doing so put us all at greater risk.
You could have carpet bombed that rock from Hell to breakfast, and it would not have made a difference. Those positions were dug into the solid rock. The Japanese were not going to be dislodged. The most bombing could do was reduce their numbers somewhat. And more bombing would have just meant more craters and more defensive positions for the enemy.
BTW, Iwo Jima is 650 miles from Tokyo, not 750, and was well within range of fighter cover from that island, particularly with the P-38s, which had a 3,000 mile range.
USMC was also at Okinawa. My uncle was a BAR man and picked up a Purple Heart and Bronze Star there.
This guy appears to be an American. The Manchester Union Leader is a famous conservative paper in New Hampshire.
To add to your argument about the incompetence of Monty, I have but one word:
CAEN
What "myths" of Iwo Jima? This was truly a fight to the death, by an enemy who gave no quarter and expected none.
One does not fight a gentlemanly war against those who consider the art of being a gentleman a weakness. Weak people in those circumstances are simply slaughtered. The "Bushido" training and the "Samurai" code did not allow for this aspect of human nature.
Of course, not all Japanese soldiers were Samurai, and not all the fighting they did was Bushido. But to die in battle in defense of the Emperor was held to be the most exalted form of devotion to the Rising Sun, and enough of the soldiers bought into this version of patriotism, that the diminutive Imperial Japanese soldier could be a most formidable opponent. Not all of them, but you did not know if the next one would turn out to be a total fanatic.
This guy seems to be arguing that Iwo was unneeded because we didn't need it to reach Japan--that we could reach Japan by air from islands further out. This would seem to (foolishly) suggest that all we needed in the Pacific was a chain of islands separated by maximum air range, rather than a chain populated with redundancies and failsafes, as we ended up building.
That's a silly proposition that makes sense only in hindsight.
The taking of the island of Pelelieu by the Marines also resulted in thousands of dead Marines. And according to William Manchester, who was himself a Marine during the war and fought in a number of Pacific battles, (read "Goodbye, Darkness", Manchester's book about serving in the Pacific), Pelelieu was unnecessary and plagued with poor planning. Nevertheless, no matter what one believes about what battles were necessary or unnecessary, all the Marines who fought and died there are heroes. They all contributed to winning the war.
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