Sure, given what we know now, almost every battle in every war was a madhouse of error and illusion. But the people on the ground at that time, on that particular day of that particular battle, didnt have the luxury of such hindsight.
So, right off the starting line I tend to take such sniping as the first indicator of contempt and disdain.
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.
Iwo Jima, or any other particular base, does not have to reach 'most' potential targets to be useful or strategically necesary. Take a look at a map of the PAcific ocean SE of Japan sometime. There are not a lot of islands to choose from. No one knew if we would be able to take Okinawa, so Iwo Jima might have been all we had available to hit the southern reaches of the Japanese main islands.
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.
Also, we wanted to have fighters capable of shooting down kamikaze pilots to protect our fleet off shore when the invasion started. Islands cant be sunk, so having Iwo Jima would be a great asset in protecting any offshore fleet.
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.
Give me a break.
According to this type of logic, most fire trucks are unecesary unless they go to put out fires most days of the week! What utter nonsense.
I am so sick of these 'myth busters' trying to rewrite history so they can sell some cheap book. The same kind of BS has led some historians to claim that Crocket was captured and executed at the Alamo when the majority of surviving eye-witnesses say he died fighting.
The constant and continual destruction of our national symbols and memories proceeds uninteruptedly due to the kabal of anti-American 'former' Marxist hippies like Ward Churchill that now control our history proffession across this nation.
Dont believe any historical works if they are under 30.
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.
Japanese KNEW that IWO JIMA is strategically important and decided to defend it to the last man in 1944.
Self-sacrifice of ALL defenders was built into the plan from the scratch.
If it was strategically important to defend Iwo Jima, it was strategically important to conquer it.
..."In a postwar study, Japanese staff officers described the strategy applied in the defense of Iwo Jima in the following terms:
In the light of the above situation, seeing that it was impossible to conduct our air, sea, and ground operations on Iwo Island toward ultimate victory, it was decided that in order to gain time necessary for the preparation of the Homeland defense, our forces should rely solely upon the established defensive equipment in that area, checking the enemy by delaying tactics. Even the suicidal attacks by small groups of our Army and Navy airplanes, the surprise attacks by our submarines, and the actions of parachute units, although effective, could be regarded only as a strategical ruse on our part. It was a most depressing thought that we had no available means left for the exploitation of the strategical opportunities which might from time to time occur in the course of these operations. Even before the fall of Saipan in June 1944, Japanese planners knew that Iwo Jima would have to be reinforced materially if it were to the held for any length of time, and preparations were made to send sizable numbers of men and quantities of materiel to that island. In late May, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi was summoned to the office of the Prime Minister, General Hideki Tojo, who informed the general that he had been chosen to defend Iwo Jima to the last. Kuribayashi was further apprised of the importance of this assignment when Tojo pointed out that the eyes of the entire nation were focused on the defense of Iwo. Fully aware of the implications of the task entrusted to him, the general accepted. By 8 June, Kuribayashi was on his way to his toughest and final assignment, determined to convert Iwo Jima into an invincible fortress that would withstand any type of attack from any quarter.
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.