The FReeper Foxhole Revisits Iwo Jima - February 18th, 2005

http://www.angelfire.com/wa/redwoodsigns/iwojima.html ^

[snippy_about_it]

Lord,

Keep our Troops forever in Your care

Give them victory over the enemy...

Grant them a safe and swift return...

Bless those who mourn the lost.
.

FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer
for all those serving their country at this time.


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The FReeper Foxhole Revisits

The Costliest Operation
in Marine Corps History

On Monday, February 19, 1945, U.S. Marines hit the sands of Iwo Jima.

The battle for Iwo Jima can be described in many ways.

Most simply, 70,000 Marines routed 22,000 Japanese in a 36 day battle. It bore little resemblance to today's modern warfare. It was a fight of gladiators. Gladiators in the catacombs of the Coliseum fighting among trap doors and hidden tunnels. Above ground gladiators using liquid gasoline to burn the underground gladiators out of their lethal hiding places.



The Marines had overwhelming force and controlled the sea and air. The Japanese had the most ingenious and deadly fortress in military history.

The Marines had Esprit de Corps and felt they could not lose. The Japanese fought for their god-Emperor and felt they had to die fighting.



The Marines were projecting American offensive power thousands of miles from home shores with a momentum that would carry on to create the Century of the Pacific. The Japanese were fighting a tenacious defensive battle protecting the front door to their ancient land.

The geography, topography and geology of the island guaranteed a deadly and bizarre battle. The large numbers of men and small size of the island ensured the fighting would be up close and vicious.

Almost one hundred thousand men would fight on a tiny island just eight square miles. Four miles by two miles. If you're driving 60 miles an hour in your car, it takes you four minutes to drive four miles. It took the Marines 36 days to slog that four miles. Iwo Jima would be the most densely populated battlefield of the war with one hundred thousand combatants embraced in a death dance over an area smaller than one third the size of Manhattan island.



From the air the island looked like a bald slice of black moonscape shaped like a porkchop. All its foliage had been blown off by bombs. The only "life" visible on the island were puffs of "rotten egg" stinking sulphur fumes coming from vents that seemed connected to hell. Correspondents in airplanes could see tens of thousands of Marines on one side of the island fighting against a completely barren side of stone.

On foot it was a morass of soft volcanic sand or a jumble of jagged rock. The Marines sought protection in shell holes blasted by the bombardment. Foxholes were impossible to dig, either the sand collapsed in on you or your shovel failed to dent the hard obsidian floor.

Bullets and mortars would come from nowhere to kill. The Marines would come across a cave or blockhouse and shoot and burn all its defenders to death. They would peer into the cavern and assure themselves no one was left there to hurt them. They'd move on only to be shocked when that "dead" position came alive again behind them. The Marines thought they were fighting men in isolated caves and had no idea of the extensive tunnels below.



A surgeon would establish an operating theater in a safe place. With sandbags and tarp he'd build a little hospital and treat his patients away from the battle. Then at night when he lay down exhausted to sleep he'd hear foreign voices below him. Only when his frantic fingers clawed through the sand and hit the wooden roof of an underground cavern would he realize he had been living atop the enemy all along.

The days were full of fear and nights offered terror. The Marines were sleeping on ground that the Japanese had practiced how to crawl over in the darkness, they knew every inch. Imagine sleeping in a haunted man- sion where the owner is a serial murderer who knows the rooms and stairways and trapdoors by touch and you are new. Then you can imagine the tortured sleep of the Marines.

Experienced naval doctors had never seen such carnage. Japanese tanks and high caliber anti-aircraft guns hidden behind walls of rock and concrete ensured that the Marines would not just be cut down, but cut in half or blown to bits.

A seventy five year old veteran of Iwo Jima would still reflexively open his bedroom window in 1999 after dreaming of the battle once again. Fifty four years after the battle the stench of death still filled his nostrils.



The bodies lay everywhere. Young boys who had never been to a funeral became accustomed to rolling another dead buddy aside. Kids full of life worked on burial duty unloading bodies from trucks stacked with death.

Mothers back home would tear open the ominous telegrams with trembling fingers. The survivors would remember sailing away and seeing the rows and rows of white crosses and stars of Davids. Almost seven thousand. Today there are still over six thousand Japanese dead still entombed under the island, dead where they fell in their tunnels and caves. Recently two hundred sixty were excavated, some mummified by the sulphur gases, their glasses sitting straight atop preserved noses, hair still on their heads.

Military geniuses predicted a three day battle, an "easy time." Some of the nicest boys America would ever produce slogged on for thirty six days in what would be the worst battle in the history of the US Marine Corps.

Generals conferred over maps while tanks, airplanes, naval bombs and artillery pounded the island. But it was the individual Marine on the ground with a gun that won the battle. Marines without gladiator's armor who would advance into withering fire. Marines who would not give up simply because they were Marines. A mint in Washington would cast more medals for these Iwo Jima heroes than for any group of fighters in America's history.



America would embrace these heroes, but they were enthralled by an image of heroism, by a photo. Millions of words would be written in the US about 1/400th of a second no one on Iwo Jima thought worthy of remark at the time. Thousands would seek autographs from three survivors who felt "we hadn't done much." Battles would be fought over that image, some dying early because of their inclusion, some living bitterly because of their exclusion.

But that would all come later. After two battles were fought on Iwo Jima, one for Mt. Suribachi and the southern part of the island the other for the northern part. And after one hundred thousand individual battles, personal battles of valor and fear, of determination and dirt.

---

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FReeper Foxhole Armed Services Links

[GATOR NAVY]

I went to Iwo Jima for the 50th anniversary of the battle...

I was there on USS SAN BERNARDINO. Were you there as a vet or in the active duty support group?

[snippy_about_it]

Thanks ken.

[snippy_about_it]

Darksheare causing trouble again. LOL.

[snippy_about_it]

I didn't break it!

LOL. Oh sure, you're always the innocent!

[snippy_about_it]

I agree with snippy...

Darn that makes me feel good. Sometimes I go out on a limb here, not being nearly as well read as most of our readers but this one just didn't seem right.

I'd like to believe the story could have been confused in the telling not necessarily in the reporting. We all get confused sometimes telling stories. Perhaps he used the relative 'we' when speaking of Marines as a group rather than meaning he, himself, had been involved in both places.

[snippy_about_it]

Group hug and hello. I hope no one is offended by my 'group' post but we have been so busy at the store we barely have time to catch up on posts and get the next day's thread together. I wanted to make sure you all knew we read the entire thread and appreciate everyone.

[Soaring Feather]

Wonderful news snippy and Sam. WOO HOO! Way to go!!

[snippy_about_it]

LOL. Don't get too excited. The fact that we are busy doesn't translate into making money yet! We are just busy getting ready for our Grand Opening in March, coming up with advertising, event planning, making sure we have the inventory we need, press release, etc.....

[GATOR NAVY]

I'd like to believe the story could have been confused in the telling not necessarily in the reporting...

That's my hope too, but as is, I can't buy it.

[Soaring Feather]

Well, you are gonna be going to the bank with a tank!!

WOO HOO!!

[endthematrix]

Recollection on my part is even fuzzy. He was in the Island campaigns. He was a POW, although he probably was not in the Bataan "Death March." I do recall Bataan in the conversation, his eyes lit up and seemed if he wanted to go out and rough up some Japs right then! He saw plenty of any humans share of death.

The function I met him at was Christmas party for a car club. Most of the others had heard the war stories, I hadn't and he had my ear and I listened! History straight from the man who created it!

[SaltyJoe]

I met a WW 2 US Marine named Jim Hornesby (not too sure of the spelling). I was a 3rd Mate and he was an AB (ablebody seaman) in the merchant marine.

He fought in Okinawa and Peleliu. He didn't remember too much on instruction, but he remembered everything that he did back then. Since he was on my watch, I would just let him talk and talk and talk. He gave me info on everything from the F-4U Corsairs, to infantry weaponry, unit sizes, etc. It was amazing how sharp his memory was.

One of his most horrifying stories of Okinawa was his walking through a kill zone where the Japanese had caught the US Army out in the open. He had to walk over the bodies of dead GIs from one horizon to the next. Since I was stationed in Okinawa (in the 90s), I figured I knew about where he was describing the area.

Since he was stationed in Japan afterward, he got to know them and had no resentment at all against Japanese.

[Valin]

There There...There There. Group Hug!

[PhilDragoo]

This just in.

A Son's Remembrance

James Bradley walked to the podium set up before the Iwo Jima memorial yesterday and paused to look at the sculpture, turning away momentarily from the audience that had gathered to commemorate the 55th anniversary of the U.S. landing on the Japanese island.

Bradley's gaze fell on the second figure from the right, one of six men depicted in the sculpture struggling to raise the American flag, rippling in the wind on the brisk, sunny day.

"There's my dad, in a big bronze statue," Bradley, 46, finally said, turning to face the gathering of hundreds of veterans, family members and Marines. "That's about all we knew about him on Iwo Jima, growing up. Any time we asked him about it, he would always change the subject."

John Bradley, a Navy corpsman, died in 1994 at age 70, the last survivor among the six men captured in a World War II photograph shot by Joe Rosenthal showing the American flag being raised atop Mount Suribachi on the fourth day of the battle. The photograph was the model for a memorial that has come to symbolize victory and sacrifice.

It was not until after his death, rummaging through boxes kept in a closet, that James Bradley learned more about the battle's lasting effect on his father. In the years since, Bradley has conducted extensive research among Iwo Jima veterans preparing a book, "Flags of our Fathers," to be published this spring.

"I would like to salute you guys, you ordinary guys, you heroes of Iwo Jima," Bradley said.

His remarks drew many tears from onlookers and captured the significance of a battle that stands at the forefront of Marine Corps history. More Marines died at Iwo Jima than in any other battle in the Corps' history. In all, 6,800 Americans and 22,000 Japanese died in the 36-day battle fought over a volcanic rock in the ocean, a critical stepping stone for U.S. bombers attacking the Japanese mainland.

The commemoration, a three-day event involving 400 veterans that culminated with yesterday's wreath-laying service, may be the last major gathering of Iwo Jima veterans, according to Marine Corps officials and organizers.

"This might never happen this way again," said Cy O'Brien, 81, a Marine combat correspondent from Silver Spring who covered the fighting on Iwo Jima and helped organize the commemoration. "These are all old guys. Look at these guys. Just think: These are the guys Japan feared more than anything else."

The elderly men sitting in metal folding chairs facing the memorial during yesterday's ceremony had been little more than boys when they landed. Many of them were only 18 years old.

One of the men at yesterday's commemoration, Tom Fields, of Hyattsville, had been an All-American middle-distance runner at the University of Maryland who enlisted in 1942.

Fields, 81, was a company commander with the 5th Marine Division when it landed on a volcanic ash beach on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945. "Christ, I was 26, I was an old man," Fields said.

"We hit the beach with 224 of us," Fields said. "Thirty-six days later, 24 of us were left. My heroes are the 18-year-old Marines who day after day got out of their holes and went forward."

Routing the Japanese defenders from their intricate maze of caves and bunkers was bloody and desperate. "So many times I've gone over it, thinking there had to have been an easier way to do it without spilling so much blood on that damn rock, but there was no other way," Fields said.

~~~

Kuribayashi demanded the assistance of the finest mining engineers and fortifications specialists in the Empire. Here again, the island favored the defender. Iwo's volcanic sand mixed readily with cement to produce superior concrete for installations; the soft rock lent itself to rapid digging. Half the garrison lay aside their weapons to labor with pick and spade. When American heavy bombers from the Seventh Air Force commenced a daily pounding of the island in early December 1944, Kuribayashi simply moved everything—weapons, command posts, barracks, aid stations—under ground. These engineering achievements were remarkable. Masked gun positions provided interlocking fields of fire, miles of tunnels linked key defensive positions, every cave featured multiple outlets and ventilation tubes. One installation inside Mount Suribachi ran seven stories deep. The Americans would rarely see a live Japanese on Iwo Jima until the bitter end.

American intelligence experts, aided by documents captured in Saipan and by an almost daily flow of aerial photography (and periscope-level pictures from the submarine Spearfish), puzzled over the "disappearing act" of the Japanese garrison. Trained photo interpreters, using stereoscopic lenses, listed nearly 700 potential targets, but all were hardened, covered, masked. The intelligence staffs knew there was no fresh water available on the island. They could see the rainwater cisterns and they knew what the average monthly rainfall would deliver. They concluded the garrison could not possibly survive under those conditions in numbers greater than 12,000 or 13,000. But Kuribayashi's force was twice that size. The men existed on half-rations of water for months before the battle began.

His only tactical error was to authorize the sector commander to engage the U.S. task force covering underwater demolitions team operations on D-2. This became a gift to the attackers, for it revealed to American gunners the previously masked batteries which otherwise would have slaughtered the assault waves on D-day.

~~~

When Sara Lister called the Marines "a little extreme" in 1997, I joined the thousands melting DOD phone lines to insure she'd be spending more time with her family.

~~~

Jumping ahead to today's evil, Hitlery heaped scorn on SecDef Rumsfeld, seeing no deterrent effect in a "system which doesn't work".

Rumsfeld patiently explained how the cow ate the cabbage; ironic in view of his bovine pupil.

Hitlery's copresidency was only too eager to give her donors Bernard C. Schartz of Loral and C. Michael Armstrong of Hughes a Get Out of Jail Card in the form of a waiver, after the May 1997 DOD report said their 200-page fax giving our guided missile technology to the ChiComs had "damaged national security".

How is it that She Who Must Be Oyveyyed is allowed to express any opinion whatsoever on the national security secured historically by such courageous fighters as those Marines on Iwo Jima.

We had to suffer 42 for 32 minutes of Bosnian bloviating May 1994 in that Navy Marine Stadium with those battles on its walls, with the ear-piece Dick Tracy's and the black-clad countersnipers protecting that military-loathing POS.

Marines forever; Clintonistas never.

[Valin]

When Sara Lister called the Marines "a little extreme"

Sometimes Extreme is just what the doctor ordered.

[Poundstone]

I was at the 50th anniversary as the pol-mil officer at the American Consulate in Okinawa. It was my second visit to the island. The first, in October 1994, was with a Marine Corps historical study group.

[SAMWolf]

Barely, but it is readable. ;-)

[SAMWolf]

Evening CT.

"Quagmire" comes to mind.

[SAMWolf]

By the way, I wonder if the Flag is still there...

It'll always be there. :-)