Rethinking the Iwo Jima myth on the battle's 60th anniversary

Manchester Union Leader ^ | March 15, 2005 | Max Boot

[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.

[Petronski]

Whoa! Whoa!

I just realized I've made a terrible typo:

The Allies could NOT have won without you.

I left out the NOT. The Allies most certainly could NOT have won without you.

[Citizen Tom Paine]

Some tend to forget Clausewitz's famous statement about "the fog of war" They also forget, as they sit in front of their typewriter or computer keyboard in a nice warm office, that the simple becomes very difficult in war and the difficult becomes almost impossible to accomplish. Yet, they prevailed on Iwo.

One also does not want to forget the lessons projected from such a battle. This battle showed that no foe, no matter how determined, could stand against the Marines (or the US) . A lesson which apparently has been forgotten by some in these times..

[An Old Marine]

Bravery is bravery no matter what or why.

Precisely. Its what wins in the final analysis. Courageous men can make a poorly planned bad idea a winner. I can give you hundreds of examples. Ultimately it wasn't the airmen saved or the effectiveness of fighter cover it was that Americans went to Japanese turf and took it away from them.

[agere_contra]

You forget - it was also nice that the Germans forgot to keep bombing the radar stations.

But the whole idea of the battle of britain being vital to the defence of Britain is a war myth. It was useful, but Seelowe was doomed even if the Germans had not invaded russia, and had spent four years building landing craft. Let me explain.

Four years later, D-day was sucessful against fair german opposition. The germans had little air-power in theatre. They had no heavy mobile armour near the beaches as we know. But the allies weren't facing two hundred destroyers, twenty odd cruisers, twelve battleships - do I need to draw a picture here? The Wermacht would have been fishfood.

[tumblindice]

That's right. I believe at least one crippled B-29 landed on Iwo in the later days of the battle.

[xone]

' I think what he's really saying is that better intelligence would have led to less loss of life.'

Only if we hadn't invaded.

'Or had we had better intelligence, we could have carpet bombed Iwo before taking it.'

Carpet bombing of rocks is ineffective.

[quadrant]

How many is "most of these landings"?
I wonder if this fellow would feel the same way if a relative had been aboard a B-29 that was forced to land because of damage or lack of fuel.

Does anyone take seriously any comment uttered by Ted Kennedy?

[ExtremeUnction]

I am a former Marine and have studied Iwo Jima extensively. The truth is that when most of us debate the subject, we let our emotions cloud our judgement. Most Marines were killed AFTER Suribachi. They made their way across a plain to the island's airfield, dying by the thousands. Nimitz should have stopped, regrouped and then gone forward with a new plan. Too many Marines died unnecessarily. I pay homage to the great sacrafice of our dead and wounded Marines. But Nimitz' leadership was poor.

[ExtremeUnction]

I am a former Marine and have studied Iwo Jima extensively. The truth is that when most of us debate the subject, we let our emotions cloud our judgement. Most Marines were killed AFTER Suribachi. They made their way across a plain to the island's airfield, dying by the thousands. Nimitz should have stopped, regrouped and then gone forward with a new plan. Too many Marines died unnecessarily. I pay homage to the great sacrafice of our dead and wounded Marines. But Nimitz' leadership was poor.

[Petronski]

But the whole idea of the battle of britain being vital to the defence of Britain is a war myth.

I don't buy that. Without fighter resistance, the Luftwaffe could have bombed British cities and industrial centres to smoldering heaps.

I'm not talking about conquering Britain, I'm merely talking about destroying her, both as a fighting force and even as a useful base for future Allied operations.

But a successful landing and invasion of Britain? No. Not by Germany. As you so perceptively point out, the Kriegsmarine was no match for the Royal Navy...the KM was no match for half or perhaps even a third of the Royal Navy (I don't know the actual numbers).

[An Old Marine]

Churchill's plan on Galipoli was actually excellent and the intelligence was not that bad. The execution however was terrible because amphibous doctrine was badly flawed. The Brits at the time were following the theory of beachhead consolidation and lost because of it. This mistake was repested by the Allies at Anzio 24 years later.

The US Marines, of that time (1940's), operated on a hyper aggressive attack approach to seize the opjective at the risk of higher causalities. The theory went that but all out relentless attack and accepting concurrent higher casualities you held the momentum and ended the action quickly. The more methodical approach favored by the British and US Army tended to result in lower initial casualities but frequently lead to lengthly, even bloodier stalemates.

And the evidence to support the Marines as being right is huge. Anzio was a bloody failure although we hung on. Executed in according to Marine doctrine Rome might have been seized within days and the entire year long Italian campaign might have been avoided. A similar arguement could be made about the Hedgerow campaign of Normandy.

[Petronski]

Nimitz should have stopped, regrouped and then gone forward with a new plan....[his] leadership was poor.

An excellent observation.

[Petronski]

You forget - it was also nice that the Germans forgot to keep bombing the radar stations.

Well, I meant to reference that in #53, how the LW switched from military to civilian targets in a fit of pique, and further how the Germans never seemed to understand the extraordinary strategic value of radar-enlightened fighter deployment.

[agere_contra]

Thanks Petronski once again for your insightful remarks. The British certainly could not have won anything without 2/3 of its oil (which came from America), though for food we could (I suppose) had just brought more spam and corned beef from Argentina. Hmm, spam.

I was just militating against this "german lessons" trope. The most important defences of Britain were the English Channel, the Navy and the will to fight. In the very last analysis, even were Britain somehow A-bombed, the government would have moved to Canada and Britain would have continued the fight. Or - historians among you will know that Churchill considered this -, petition the US to become the 53rd (?) state. Anything before defeat.

[xone]

'Nimitz should have stopped, regrouped and then gone forward with a new plan'

What new plan? They were divisions in line, Suribachi was five days into the battle, do you return to the ships? The landing beaches were the only ones not fouled prior to the landing.

[Petronski]

There was a synergy in our efforts. Except maybe for the spam.

I also seem to recall Churchill sent the Royal treasury to Canada for safekeeping, something like that? The gold and gems etc.? They most certainly would have fought on from Canada in that worst case scenario, and of course the Royal Navy is conveniently portable in service of this plan.

[agere_contra]

Very impressive post. I hadn't heard this concept before (accept casualities now rather than bloody deadlock later) but it makes excellent sense.

[Tallguy]

Upon reflection, I think he raises an important point: all wars involve faulty intelligence. Brave men give their lives in a noble cause -- sometimes, even in cases where their sacrifice was not required.

In war, your greatest acts of valor most often occur when the situation seems hopeless. After all, that's when the Plan breaks down and everthing turns brown.

I'm not sure that I 'buy' the argument that Nimitz underestimated the defenses on Iwo. If he did, he shouldn't have. Iwo Jima had been occupied by Japan long before the war. When the war began to turn against Japan, they had ample time to dig-in.

The Navy took a lot of heat for inadequate preparation for the Tarawa landings ('43). They also took a lot of heat for the lack of necessity for the Pelilu landings ('44) -- although that may have been MacArthur (Army) since that was SW Pacific Theater. IF Nimitz DID take Iwo Jima lightly, then it is doubly-damning. I'll have to read this historian's book.

[thulldud]

It is totally NOT necesary for Iwo Jima to be within range of ALL possible targets in Japan to be useful, even required, for an invasion of the southern shores of Japan.

B-29's flying from Saipan to targets in the Japanese home islands would have been able to avoid Japanese fighters based on Iwo only by flying miles out of their way. Sure, they could have done it, but when you're a bomber, your raison d'etre is your ability to deliver lots of loud, bangy things on the enemy. Those loud, bangy things weigh something, but so does the gas it takes to get them delivered. It's very simple: longer trip = more gas = lighter bombload = more missions to do the same thing = more chances to get shot down doing it.

Iwo was necessary. As much so as Okinawa.

[LS]

True. But of greater concern was that the intel was STILL faulty after Iwo and Okinawa: as Richard Frank ("Downfall") shows, in Operation OLYMPIC, we still failed to notice that the Japanese army moved two more divisions to the southern island in anticipation of the invasion, meaning all the casualty estimates---then and now---were way too low. Thank God for the a-bomb.