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.
“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.
Several things. Peleilu and some smaller island should have been bypassed, just bombed on a continual basis to degrade their forces (and force some into starvation and death by lack of medical supplies). My father-in-law hated McArthur for this tremendous waste of life, and he should know.
Here’s why. We just buried him, Lt. Col. James Lucore (USA ret) at Arlington Cemetery, near Gen. Arthur McArthur (Douglas’ father), another Gen. Arthur McArthur and Gen. Claire Chenneault. If you know WW I and WWII history, I won’t have to write anything else.
Jim was in the only Army assault unit to hit the beaches at Iwo Jima (75th JASCO, Joint Assault Signal Company), a composite unit numbering at one time about 660 men. Some like Jim fought at Kwajeilin, Eniwetok, Saipan, then Iwo and Okinawa. Reported 75th JASCO casualties sometimes ran as high as 60-75% since they were the ones who ran the telephone wires between the ground forces, conducted shore to ship artillery fire coordination, served as Artillery spotters themselves, and put up radar and other forms of wire communications stations all over the island, often under enemy fire from above.
Jim got at least one of his three Purple Hearts on Iwo.
Army transport ships brought the Marines and Jasco units to their launching spots (as a late friend of mine, Gen. Bruce Jacobs, one of the ship commanders, told me).
Among the dead on Iwo was a Seabee company that was mistakenly sent in, basically unarmed, when a communication was misinterpreted. It asked for ONE Seabee, not one company. They were virtually wiped out by the Japanese.
Misc inform. John Batchelor (Show) - his father was a Marine flier over Iwo. So too was the father of Swift Boat Commander John O’Neill.
The landing strips at Iwo are credited with saving thousands of lives of American flyers, esp. from the longrange B-29’s who had to make emergency landings in order to survive. Each plane carried 8 men so if you had only 200 planes land there, it saved 1600 lives, but I’m told that the actual figures were much highers. Fighter escorts also landed their.
Re the Philippines campaign. Complicated but necessary to clear the Japanese out of those sea lanes. Also we helped liberate tens or hundreds of thousands of American and Filippino soldiers from the Japanese murder camps, men who would have died had we not undertaken this operation.
Small islands could be skipped. The larger one had to be taken for a number of reasons.
You can find the Order of Battle for Iwo in a book of that name “Iwo Jima”. Author’s name skips me but you’ll find the Army’s JASCO units (in part), listed there.