Posted on 02/25/2015 3:58:51 PM PST by Kaslin
From Feb. 19, 1945 (when U.S. Marines assaulted its beaches) to March 27 of that year (the day combat officially ceased), the island of Iwo Jima was hell on earth.
In 2009 I began writing occasional columns commemorating the 70th anniversary of key WW2 battles and events. I dedicated them to the WW2 generation. Twenty-year-old Marine vets of February 1945 are now 90, if they are still among us.
Iwo Jima was on my list of must-cover subjects. By sheer coincidence, my wife and I spent this past weekend in Dallas, Texas, with the sister of a Marine F4U Corsair pilot who was shot down near the island in late February 1945. He survived WW2, but is now dead. I thanked her for her brother's service. She said she believed her brother was supporting Marines fighting on Iwo. Then -- eyes tearing -- she added that she wished he was still alive.
Iwo Jima is one of WW2's more memorable battles. Popular culture certainly treats it as an iconic clash. John Wayne's epic Sands of Iwo Jima is one of many Hollywood fictional treatments of Iwo Jima's terrible reality that inform the collective memory of 21st-century audiences.
Nonfiction reporters and film crews thoroughly documented that terrible reality. The savagery on Iwo Jima's eight square miles of beaches, ridges and volcanic rubble produced a trove of combat film and photos. Wartime censors often clamped down on footage they thought too ghastly to include in public theater newsreels. However, the image of Iwo Jima's relentless close battle of infantry and flame-throwing tanks was difficult to cleanse.
On Feb. 23, 1945 photographer Joe Rosenthal followed Marines up Mount Suribachi and snapped his Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of Marines (and a Navy corpsman) raising the U.S. flag on its heights. We later learned Rosenthal photographed the second Suribachi flag-raising, but the dangerous gallantry he recorded was authentic. Three of the men who raised the flag would die on the island.
Which leads to the fundamental reasons Americans should remember the battle: its price in blood and the strategic value of seizing it.
Between Feb. 19 and March 27, the U.S. suffered 25,000 casualties; approximately 6,800 Marines and U.S. Navy personnel killed, another 18,000 wounded.
Pre-invasion, U.S. intelligence estimated the Japanese garrison had 22,000 soldiers. By March 27, the Marines had taken 216 Japanese prisoners. Many Japanese prisoners did not surrender. Marines found them amid volcanic rubble, wounded and unconscious. U.S. commanders believed their forces had killed the other 21,800.
Note this column's first sentence identifies March 27 as the official date the battle concluded. Over subsequent weeks and months, several hundred more survivors emerged. Japan had 25,000 troops on the island. Some of the 3,000 holdouts committed ritual suicide rather than surrender.
The holdouts hid in the island's extensive defensive system, which included machine gun bunkers and concealed artillery positions, concrete-reinforced tunnels connecting underground barracks (some branches extended beneath Mount Suribachi) and hundreds of caves with bunkered or camouflaged entrances. The tunnels and caves were stocked with food and ammunition.
The system was designed to do two things: withstand the hellacious bombardment U.S. air and naval forces always delivered, and then force American infantry to spill blood and die for every inch of the island rock.
Beginning with Peleliu (September 1944), Japan pursued a strategy of strategic attrition. Fanatic resistance on heavily fortified outlying islands would bleed U.S. forces. Rather than suffer horrendous casualties, America would negotiate a ceasefire.
Iwo Jima was, in many respects, a super-Peleliu, a strategic trap.
This is why, among military historians and military planners, Iwo Jima has become one of the war's more controversial operations. The island was supposed to serve as a staging area for invading Japan; it didn't. Some senior officers argued that seizing the island gave B-29 bombers attacking Japan's home islands a safe landing strip. But at the price of 6,800 dead Marines?
At a dinner party in 1998, a Marine vet told me that in 1968, Iwo Jima was still a touchy subject in the Corps. His comment paraphrased: We paid such a steep price, you just didn't raise the issue of utility. I said, as a guy still pulling duty on joint planning staffs, the decision to invade Iwo Jima troubled me. And maybe it should. But that's hindsight. There were several vets at the dinner. We poured another round of drinks and toasted the Marines, every damn brave one of them.
Peleliu was a damn waste, too. A MacArthur boondoggle.
I posted a great Iwo Jima documentary the other night.
My father was in the Marines but did not fight on Iwo Jima--he was in the invasion of Okinawa which began April 1, 1945. My father is no longer living but a friend of his who also fought on Okinawa is going strong at 97. Time is taking its toll--in 12 years the youngest WWII veterans will be 100 years old, so we need to appreciate the ones who are still around while we can.
A few years ago I wrote an Amazon book review for the book, “Flags of Our Fathers”. After I wrote my review giving the book the highest possible score, I read some of the other reviews. What always stayed in my mind was one that said, “This is the best book I’ve ever read, it is the best book I will ever read”.
” Peleliu was a damn waste, too. A MacArthur boondoggle.”
It got my Navy Corpsman dad 2 PH’s, and a long life with physical pain.
My late father-in-law, Gunnery Sargent John “Jack’’ Scharffenberger, 4th. Marine Division was among the wounded. But it got him the hell out of there.
That’s why it’s important to make sure the younger generation knows this history and doesn’t forget it.
Make sure you kids or grand kids don’t go to public schools. They don’t teach history anymore.
My dad was on Iwo and Okinawa with the Air Corps after he left North Africa. He went to A-20 flight school in between and flunked out. He was a supply Sgt. He never saw combat.
His friends who saw combat were very envious of him.
There’d a modern school of though by which almost every tough battle should have been bypassed.
Peleilu is one, Iwo always comes up. And basically, we hit the Philippines because MacArthur said he would return.
But often missed is the cumulative effect of these battles in making the Japanese realize they were beaten. By some theories, we should have tricked them, bypassed everything, and just sailed right into Tokyo bay.
The casualties associated with an actual invasion of Japan were expected to be enormous. Anything that would help with the invasion and reduce those casualties was worth the risk and effort. Therefore, I don’t think one should criticize the decision to invade and conquer Iwo. But I certainly am glad I wasn’t the one who had to make, and live with, that decision.
One thing I still don’t really understand is why our bombardment of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and other places was so ineffective.
I guess you have to give the Japs credit for such formidable defensive positions but even a cave with zig-zag entrance, hundreds of yards deep would seem to be susceptible to 16 inch shells. I mean couldn’t they just block the entrances?
I know they couldn’t but like I said, I don’t understand why. I think America’s military leaders also could not quite fathom how they could withstand such heavy bombing and shelling.
Hindsight is always sharper and if we had known what would happen, I am sure we would have done some things differently.
If we learned one thing in that war it was you had to hit a hardened position right on the button to render it ineffective. The technology to do that just wasn’t there.
That’s true. Most people today don’t know what REAL war is.
Half of our country wanted to run from Iraq over 5k troops lost. We would easily lose that many on a single day, by Noon on some Pacific Island no one has ever heard of during WWII.
We aren’t the same country that we were back then. What’s sad, is I believe in the coming years we are gonna need to be....
“bypassed everything, and just sailed right into Tokyo bay.”
I have always thought that the thing to do would have been to blockade the Japanese islands, i.e., nothing in and nothing out and watch every last one of them starve to death and kill each other for blades of grass to eat until absolutely every one of them was dead.
Maybe that is too harsh.
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