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.
About 25,000 fliers were saved there. And that’s just emergency landings. The early warning Iwo could give and the fighters there were also a threat to the B-29s.
My Dad may have been in the same Signal Company as your father-in-law.
He was a Sergeant, a field radar specialist, landed D+1 with his squad and equipment, but only took scattered mortar fire going in.
He fought at Saipan, too, and was scheduled for Okinawa, but was pulled off for training for the main Japanese invasion.
He stayed on Iwo Jima until about June, about the same time that U.S. air operations began to launch attacks against Japan from the Okinawa area.
According to my Dad, fighter escorts were impossible before Iwo Jima - the round trip from all other islands was outside the range of all our fighters.
Iwo Jima became the air base for the P-51 Mustang, as I recall.
I'll guess the P-51 was not stationed there for long, and was moved to Okinawa as soon as the area was pacified.
One more thing - when the Japanese held Iwo Jima, it was a key early warning radar station against B-29 attacks on the Japanese islands.