CHAPTER 16
(FEBRUARY–MARCH 1945)
U.S. JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
WASHINGTON, D.C.
D-DAY MINUS TWENTY
31 JANUARY 1945
After the Battle of Leyte, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington began to plan for the invasion of Iwo Jima. This tiny spit of land, called “sulfur island” in Japanese, was eight square miles of volcanic rock.
The battle for Iwo Jima would turn out to be perhaps the bloodiest combat in American history. Two out of three of the boys (most of them were just seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen) who landed on the island were killed or wounded. Twenty-two thousand Japanese soldiers defended Iwo Jima. Most were older and more experienced than the Americans, but nearly all of them were killed as well.
To put that in perspective, almost 7,000 Americans were killed in action at Iwo Jima. If the battle had lasted nine months, it would have equaled all those killed in ten years of war in Vietnam. Despite its relatively short duration, Iwo Jima would truly be the bloodiest battle in the Pacific.
The European front in World War II was governed by a set of traditional rules. The two sides fought intensely but simultaneously observed polite protocols. They took time out for each side to collect their dead and wounded and observed cease-fires for “reasonable” causes. On Christmas, both sides would quit warring and mark the season of “peace and goodwill” with a brief interruption of hostilities. Then, with a sense of heavy-handed irony, they would resume shooting after the short respite.
But there were no rules of warfare in the Pacific. Japanese soldiers had been ingrained in the samurai code, which sent them into “heroic” battle with great ferocity and no fear of death. Throughout the war the Japanese would fight until the last man was dead. They knew that there could be no surrender. A Japanese soldier trying to surrender was likely to be shot by his own officers or fellow soldiers. A soldier who surrendered brought dishonor not just upon himself, but also upon his family, his village, and his emperor. Any soldier who surrendered would have his name taken from the village records, and his family would disown him.
The Japanese had also rejected the Geneva Conventions, which prescribed various “rules of warfare.” When the time came to invade the Pacific Islands, both sides understood that it would be a battle of “no holds barred.”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to overrule General MacArthur’s recommendation to swing south and retake the rest of the Philippines as well as the East Indies. They decided to concentrate on Luzon instead, ratcheting up the pressure on the Japanese mainland with attacks by American bombers, some of which would be based on the recaptured territory of Luzon.
But winter monsoon rains foiled American plans to establish air bases on Leyte, thereby making it impossible for U.S. aircraft to operate from there. The 6th Army made steady progress in clearing the smaller islands with offensive assaults, however.
In June 1944, the Joint Chiefs decided to invade and capture the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, which lie in the northern waters between the Philippines and Japan. The strategic value of these two islands was still in flux. MacArthur would have his hands full trying to retake Luzon. The invasion of 9 January at Lingayen Gulf was only the beginning of the hardscrabble struggle to regain control of Luzon. The battle to overcome the 250,000 troops of the 35th Imperial Army would last until the Japanese surrendered in August 1945.
The 35th Imperial Army, led by General Sosaku Suzuki, put up a skilled resistance to the American invasion of Luzon. It was here that the Japanese war plan had changed. The old plan was to throw everything against the American and Allied troops to keep them from getting ashore. The reason was simple: If the Americans took the small outlying islands, it was an easier step to invade the Japanese Home Islands, as they were able to put more bombers and fighter planes within range of Japan.
However, now it was too late for that. The current Tokyo strategy was to save all war matériel and troop strength for defending the Japanese homeland. Hence, General Suzuki was fighting an ongoing “hide and seek” war with MacArthur and General Walter Krueger, not wanting to engage the Americans and risk any major war resources.
In January 1945, the Americans finally landed on the main Philippine island of Luzon. After a bitter battle, they reached the capital city of Manila on 2 February. Over the next six months, the Japanese would lose 170,000 troops in the Philippines, in contrast to the American losses of 8,000.
Meanwhile, the Joint Chiefs began to consider Iwo Jima more seriously after the Japanese showed lighter resistance to the initial U.S. landings on the Philippine islands. Iwo Jima served as an early warning station for the Japanese; from there they could detect approaching aircraft and radio reports of the incoming bombers to mainland Japan. When the U.S. and Allied bombers arrived over Japanese cities, Japanese air defenses could be ready for them.
Japanese aircraft still based on Iwo Jima also continually harassed the Americans in operations across the northern Pacific. The Joint Chiefs believed that taking Iwo Jima could neutralize those air attacks, make other U.S. operations in the region less risky, and provide another launching site for B-24s and B-25s headed for Tokyo.
The Joint Chiefs had postponed the operations to take Iwo Jima and Okinawa because of the monsoons and the difficulties encountered in taking Leyte and Luzon. Now seemed to be the right time to dust off those plans.
Their decision was made: Iwo Jima would be first and Okinawa next. The islands were to be taken rather than bypassed. Recon planes showed that Mount Suribachi was being dug in, with gun emplacements and pillboxes both above and below ground. Because so many enemy troops were dug in and couldn’t be seen by the recon aircraft, reports grossly underestimated the Japanese troop strength. The naval air bombardment would blast away at the island until D-Day for the Iwo Jima invasion.
HQ 5TH AMPHIBIOUS FORCE
VICINITY IWO JIMA
D-DAY MINUS FOUR
14 FEBRUARY 1945
On 14 February, U.S. ships were on their way to an undisclosed location. The Marines aboard had no idea where the battle would be fought, only that it was a top-secret location known as “Island X.”
Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance’s 5th Fleet dominated the air and sea around Iwo Jima, softening up the island for the Marine invasion. The U.S. was sending 72,000 Marines of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions to “Island X”—more troops than were sent to any other Allied island assault. The convoy of 880 American ships—the largest naval armada in history at the time—took forty days to sail from Hawaii to Iwo Jima. Aboard the troop ships, the Marines received communion and prayed during brief services held by the chaplains. Others wrote letters home; some of these letters would contain the last words ever expressed to their loved ones back in America.
D-Day was approaching. This D-Day was not unlike its counterpart in Europe nine months earlier. The invasion of Normandy had been terrible, with appalling costs in dead and wounded troops. But the Normandy assault lasted just twenty-four hours, though to its participants it must have seemed much longer. Yet writer-historian James Bradley said, “Any time a bullet is near your head, that’s a bad battle. Normandy was awful, but at the end of twenty-four hours you and your grandmother could have had a tea party on the beach at Normandy. Iwo Jima, a much smaller beach, had a thirty-six-day battle on a four-mile-long island, and it was the most intense battle of World War II.”
The defending troops figured out that “Island X” was Iwo Jima even without coded messages and intelligence. They saw Admiral Spruance’s ships on the horizon for two and a half months, with troop carriers edging ever closer to the small island.
The average age of a Japanese soldier in World War II was a battle-hardened twenty-four. Most of the Americans were teenagers; many of them at Iwo Jima were seeing combat for the first time. These young Marines had been told by naïve American war planners that the typical Japanese soldier was five feet, three inches tall, wore glasses, and weighed 117 pounds. They were painted as small, inept, and completely unskilled in jungle warfare.
That caricature did not even come close to the reality of the Japanese soldiers. In truth, they were fearless, some of the world’s most effective fighting men, defending their emperor and their homeland.
But what did the Japanese know about the Americans, especially the Marines? Their superiors told them fearful myths: that for a young American to become a Marine he had to kill his parents; that Marines ate dead babies. Japanese leaders warned civilians that if the U.S. Marines ever invaded the homeland, the women would be raped and killed and their children slaughtered and eaten.
No doubt these grisly myths had inspired Japanese civilians on Peleliu to throw their children off cliffs and jump to the rocks below. But if these Japanese civilians had seen the Marines weep when they witnessed these terrible acts—including Japanese civilians being machine-gunned when they hesitated or didn’t jump—perhaps there might have been a little less horror on Peleliu.
The responsibility for killing the Marines on Iwo Jima was given to General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, a sixth-generation samurai personally selected by Emperor Hirohito. Kuribayashi had been a victorious general in the Japanese campaigns in China and Manchuria, and before the war he had been a Japanese military attaché in the United States. He’d traveled throughout the U.S. and returned to Japan with intelligence about America’s industrial and economic might. He wisely told his superiors, “The last country that Japan should ever go to war with is the United States.” But the Japanese political and military leaders never really considered his advice.
But now, here he was, about to defend the island of Iwo Jima against that mighty sleeping giant. General Kuribayashi must have known in his heart that his 22,000 men would not be able to prevail against 72,000 Marines. Tokyo knew. It’s not known if the general was told that this was a suicide mission, but Kuribayashi wrote to his wife that he did not expect to come home. Kuribayashi ordered his troops that they were to each kill ten Americans before they died.
The general inspired his men with talk of the samurai code, the honor of dying for the emperor, and the terrible dishonor of surrender. He told them that this would be a “heroic” battle for the defense of Japan herself. All they had to do was kill ten Americans before each of them died in battle.
Their cause may have been “heroic” in his eyes, but it was also hopeless. The only thing General Kuribayashi had going was that the Americans had underestimated his troop strength on Iwo Jima, which would turn out to be a significant flaw in their battle plan.
Leading the American troops was another hand-picked general, selected by FDR. He was nicknamed the “Patton of the Pacific”—his Marines had never lost a battle at any place they had stepped ashore. He’d directed assaults on Tarawa, Eniwetok, Tinian, Saipan, and Guam, often leading his troops ashore himself. Now he faced the assaults of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He was General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, an Alabama lawyer who had received his commission forty years earlier and had even fought in WW I.
This down-to-earth commander of the Pacific Fleet Marine Forces knew more about amphibious assault landings than any other American officer. General Smith knew that he’d have to sacrifice some of his Marines but he also knew the consequences if he didn’t. Without the use of Iwo Jima for air bases, it might take many more years to conquer Japan. Formosa and Thailand could be enslaved for decades. General Smith believed that most of Asia was already enslaved and he and his Marines had to do something about it.
5TH AMPHIBIOUS FORCE, AFLOAT
VICINITY IWO JIMA
D-DAY MINUS THREE
16 FEBRUARY 1945
Iwo Jima was a stinking hulk of volcanic rock located 650 miles south of Tokyo, between four and five miles long and two miles wide. A car traveling at sixty miles per hour could traverse its entire length in five minutes.
Iwo Jima had just a few notable characteristics: Mount Suribachi, a small extinct volcano about as high as the Washington Monument, on the south tip of the island, and two crucial airfields, with another under construction. These airfields were needed as landing fields for U.S. aircraft returning from bombing runs, especially planes damaged from AA gunfire or encounters with Japanese fighters, and planes that were running out of fuel. As it was, too many American pilots were becoming casualties. Having no place between Japan and the American-controlled islands to land safely, a number of them could only ditch. Some were picked up but most simply went to a watery grave.
Key to the invasion were the seventy-two consecutive days of bombing by American B-29 Superfortresses and B-24 Liberators. They dropped more than 5,800 tons of bombs on Iwo Jima in a little more than two months. In fact, Iwo Jima would set the record for the most sustained and heavy bombardment in all of the Pacific war.
At dawn on D-4, the gunnery ships, along with escort carriers commanded by Rear Admiral William Blandy, had already arrived on the scene and began to blast the small island in preparation for the invasion.
HQ 3RD MARINE DIVISION
WEST OF KAMA ROCK, OFF IWO JIMA
D-DAY, 19 FEBRUARY 1945
0820 HOURS LOCAL
Nearly 500 Navy ships laid down more shelling of the island from before dawn until just before 0800. Aircraft from Task Force 58, just off the coast of Iwo Jima, sent in their dive-bombers and fighters to bomb and strafe the small island.
Offshore to the southeast, there was a mix of fresh-faced, newly arrived Marines and battle-hardened Leathernecks who’d already experienced combat on other islands in the Pacific. They were waiting for the word to go in. For the Marine combat veterans, this was their fourth assault in thirteen months, and they were ready to take and hold the beachhead’s right flank.
But the Japanese had terraced the beach, and after the Navy guns and bombers had rearranged the coarse, coal-black volcanic sand, it was almost impossible to dig in. When the typical Marine, wearing a seventy-five-pound pack on his back, tried to dig a foxhole for cover it was like digging a hole in a barrel of ball bearings. The best he could hope for was to burrow into the sand like a beetle and hope it was deep enough. As it turned out, the only real practical but grim protection from Japanese bullets was often the lifeless body of a fallen comrade.
The troops from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions began reaching the Red, Green, Yellow, and Blue beach landing zones. The 4th Division would take the quarry south of Airfield 2. The 5th Marine Division would surround and capture Mount Suribachi. The 3rd Marine Division consisted mostly of reserves, but some scouts and headquarters personnel went ashore.
The first troop-carrying Amtracs rode the low waves onto the black sands of Iwo Jima by 0905 on 19 February 1945. For the next hour or so it was a flawless landing. But then all hell broke loose. Marines from the second waves of Amtracs waded ashore amidst unbelievable chaos. There was broken debris from blasted equipment—landing craft, armored vehicles, and supplies—scattered across the beach and washing up on shore.
Scores of dead Marines were also bobbing in the waves and washing onto the black sands. Body parts were almost as commonplace as the chunks of volcanic rock. The scene was one of absolute pandemonium and mayhem. As one eyewitness Marine said, “I can’t describe it to you. All I could think was, this is not the movies.”
General Kuribayashi had waited until several waves of Americans were ashore before letting the Marines know that they had company on the island. Then Kuribayashi’s guns triangulated on the Marines on the beach, mowing them down like a buzz saw. Rockets, anti-aircraft fire, and anti-tank guns were also trained on the landing beaches. The Japanese opened fire from almost everywhere on the island.
Marines everywhere on the island were pinned down or cut down. Casualties began to mount, and it was an impossible mission for the Marines during those first few hours of combat. In fact, in the first seventy-two hours of combat, there was one Marine casualty every forty-five seconds.
U.S. intelligence had pegged the Japanese troop size on Iwo Jima in late 1944 to be somewhere between 4,000 and 11,000. That’s why FDR and the Joint Chiefs were optimistic that the Marines could master the island in short time. No one knew it, but the enemy troop strength was in fact at least twice the highest number given by military intelligence.
General Kuribayashi had constructed his command center with five-feet-thick walls and a ten-feet-thick roof, seventy-five feet underground.
The Americans were not prepared for the horrendous numbers of killed and wounded Marines. Nor had they been prepared for the barbarous ferocity of the Japanese counter-attacks. To General Kuribayashi, this would truly be a “heroic” battle. By that he meant that he expected every one of his soldiers to die, but not before killing 220,000 Marines first—ten for every Japanese soldier, as he had inspired them to do. Kuribayashi would have been even more encouraged if he’d known that the Americans were sending “only” 100,000 Marines ashore—his troops could turn the tide by just killing five Americans apiece.
At the end of the day, the Marines had progressed only a few feet—at a tremendous cost of 10 percent of their forces. Of the first 30,000 men who landed on Iwo Jima that day, 3,000 were already casualties. About 40,000 Marines followed, and were met with the same percentage of casualties. Every one of the nearly 100,000 combatants on Iwo Jima would be caught up in the viciousness of the fighting.
Twenty-four-year-old Marine Captain Fred Haynes was the operations officer for the 28th Marine Regiment as the showdown on Iwo Jima’s beaches drew near.
CAPTAIN FRED HAYNES, USMC
D-Day, Iwo Jima
19 February 1945
0800 Hours Local
I was the tactical control officer on a patrol craft offshore, and it was my job to see that all of the numbered waves of invasion troops were dispatched properly.
As soon as the numbered waves went, I went in with Colonel Williams and landed in the middle of Green Beach. We had two command groups and set up a command post but we were getting a tremendous amount of fire and the casualties were just incredible.
Nobody really knew that the Japanese were in bunkers below ground. We didn’t really wake up to that fact until after we had gone ashore. Our whole regimental staff and their communications people just stood up and went straight across.
It was fairly smooth until the caves on Suribachi opened up. Within about twenty minutes, the Japanese began to pound the beaches with artillery.
When they opened up, we realized we had a problem. We couldn’t call for naval gunfire, air support, or artillery, the critical elements of fire support. We were too close to the Japanese, face-to-face with them. The 105 mm artillery gunfire was more than I had ever seen in any Marine operation.
And from Suribachi, they were firing everything they had—artillery, mortars, machine guns—raking the beach. It was the first real battle I had been in. And it quickly taught me that they meant business.
We, the fighting troops, were really not affected by the number of casualties. We were given the orders to take the island, so that’s what we had to do. There were huge casualties. This was the bloodiest battle that we fought during the Pacific war.
After four days of battle, the casualties dropped off slowly as we got across the ridgeline. Instead of 100 to 200 a day, which my regiment was having, it dropped off to maybe thirty a day.
At the end of the operation in late March, when we were doing a rout march down to get to the beach, a group of Japanese came out of somewhere, probably 200 of them. They came right down the airfield and caught us totally by surprise. The Army Air Corps pilots were sleeping above ground, unfortunately. About thirty-five pilots were killed in that attack.
Lieutenant Martin and our air battalion, which happened to be back in that area, took the challenge and killed all the Japanese, and that was the end of that.
Pacific intelligence did not realize that we were going to fight the devil on Iwo Jima. But we did, and it was a very, very difficult campaign.
U.S. MARINE ASSAULT FORCE
IWO JIMA
D-DAY PLUS TWO
21 FEBRUARY 1945
1100 HOURS LOCAL
When President Roosevelt saw the casualty figures from Iwo Jima D+2 for the first time, he wept. He found it hard to believe that the Marines had lost so many men in just two days ashore. Over 4,000 Marines were wounded and more than 600 were dead. Another 560 were MIA—in just the first two days of battle.
By now the Marines were coming to grips with a painful reality. The enemy soldiers were not on Iwo Jima—they were in it. General Kuribayashi’s island defense plans were ingenious.
He had built sixteen miles of tunnels, some several stories below the ground. These tunnels were wide and tall enough for soldiers carrying rifles to walk or run erect. There were also nearly 1,500 rooms spread throughout the subterranean sprawl, big enough for barracks, ammunition and fuel storage, bunkers and pillboxes, affording plenty of places to hide from American bombs, flame-throwers, naval guns, and other offensive actions. The Japanese had also constructed the tunnels and rooms with electricity, water storage, and even ventilation systems. They were ready to stay put and hold out for many months.
General Kuribayashi also improved on the German D-Day defenses. Instead of trying to blast the invaders while they were still coming ashore, he waited until they were already on the island so as to have more precision in using his guns. He had set up a vast, protected “killing machine.” From inside concrete pillboxes situated all across Mount Suribachi, he could unleash every manner of weapon, including spigot mortars that could hurl a 675-pound shell almost a mile. Heavy machine guns set up a crossfire, and other big guns inside bunkers could fire down on the concentrated American forces. Every square foot of the invasion beach had interlocking sectors of fire where machine guns and small arms fire could crisscross.
Night brought a new kind of nightmarish hell. Mount Suribachi resembled a monstrous Christmas tree, with cannon and mortar fire, tracers, and flares exploding all along the rise of the ancient extinct volcano. When the firing stopped, General Kuribayashi sent out terror in the form of his prowling wolves—each warrior intent on killing his quota of ten Marines.
Some of the Japanese soldiers carried hand grenades in addition to their rifles. Others strapped land mines to their chests. After emptying their rifles at the Americans, and trying to kill others with a grenade, bayonet, or sword, they’d run into a foxhole containing several Marines and throw themselves down onto their enemies. The mine exploded and eviscerated everyone within six feet of the blast.
But despite heavy casualties, the Marines held their ground and kept pushing the enemy back, inch by inch. They attacked the Japanese pillboxes with grenades, satchel charges of TNT, and flame-throwers. Many times this just drove the enemy soldiers deeper underground, keeping them alive to fight another day.
One day after the landing, the Marines took the southern end of Iwo Jima around Mount Suribachi and made plans to take the summit. By the end of the day on 20 February, the Marines had secured one-third of the island and Motoyama Airfield No. 1.
Three days after the landing, a teenage Marine from Cleveland assigned to Combat Intelligence made his own landing on Iwo Jima. Private Don Mates experienced combat, death, and the aftermath of the war.
PRIVATE DONALD MATES, USMC
Iwo Jima
D-Day Plus Three
22 February 1945
I ended up on Iwo Jima on February 22. It was one of the most scary, hellish places on the earth. It sort of looked like a moonscape, with the burning sulfur and haze that hung over it. And when we got ashore it was just absolute chaos.
There were bodies all over, wounded Marines. There was broken equipment and broken men. They hadn’t picked up the bodies yet. So they were in the water, on the beach, they were on the rise going up from the beach. There were parts of men all over.
Wounded men were being evacuated but they were still on the beach. The corpsmen were working feverishly, the doctors were hacking away, and it was just terrible.
The Japanese controlled the high ground on Iwo. They knew where we were going to come in. They had their big guns, mortars, and everything triangulated. They were able to pick us apart and cause tremendous casualties.
Our Marines were working their way up Mount Suribachi. I remember Jim Trimble turning to me and saying, “If we have to go up that hill, Don, we’re gonna die.”
When we saw that flag go up on 23 February, it was just marvelous, because we knew the hill was secure, and that we wouldn’t have to go up there. It was a relief to see that flag go up, even though we knew there was still much more ahead of us.
From 23–27 February, we just did guard duty. On 28 February, G-2 wanted to find out where the huge rockets were coming from. The Japanese were sending up rockets the size of fifty-five-gallon oil drums. They weighed about 168 pounds, and they had a motor that burnt out, causing the rockets to tumble in the air. Wherever it hit it created absolute chaos. They’d send up five or six at a time and just shoot them towards our lines.
So G-2 and General Erskine sent us out on patrol the afternoon of 28 February, to see if we could spot where these tremendous rockets were coming from. We got north of the second airfield and dug in between Hill 362A and 362B on a ridge.
The radio was at the top of the ridge. I was a secondary radioman. Joe McClusky was first radioman and he was in the hole. So he ran a telephone wire down to my hand, and when he yanked that telephone wire, that let me know that he was coming.
He’d take my spot, and I’d go back up and be the radioman for the second shift with Corporal William Reed.
Just before midnight, a flare went off and there they were! We had maneuvered ourselves to be in front of the lines. The Japanese came up out of their holes and came at us hand-to-hand. You couldn’t use a rifle from where I was. Thank God we had hand grenades. That’s the only thing that stopped them for a while. One Japanese soldier got within two feet of my foxhole while the battle was going on. He was wounded by one of the hand grenades, and he lay there dying.
Fifteen minutes later, Jimmie Trimble was bayoneted, McClusky and Reed were dead, and Nitsell was wounded. Warren Garrett, the old man out of the outfit at twenty-four, was dead.
When Jimmie Trimble got bayoneted he said to me, “Grenades . . .”
He’d heard the clicking of grenades. To ignite a Japanese grenade you have to hit it against something hard. This Japanese soldier hit two of them together and threw them in the hole. I was lying flat when I heard the word “grenades” and Jimmie Trimble was sitting up. He turned and caught the full blast of one of the grenades in the back, and the other one went off between my legs.
I pulled myself out of the hole, and Trimble was still alive. He put his hand out to be helped. At the same time, a Japanese soldier jumped in with a mine strapped to his body, and he wrapped himself around Jimmie. The Japanese soldier just evaporated. If I’d been in the hole I would’ve been behind the Japanese soldier and I would’ve gone up with him.
Jimmie didn’t catch the full blast of the mine, but it was enough to kill him. Lee Blanchard, a seventeen-year-old private who enlisted when he was sixteen, was much smaller than I was. But he crawled out, put me on his back, and dragged me into his foxhole.
Waiting for me was another guardian angel, Jim White from Michigan. Jim took his bandages and Lee’s and wrapped up both my thighs.
That meant they’d used their bandages; if anything happened to either of them they’d be in trouble.
I lay there for about three and a half hours and the Japanese still came at us. Jimmy White got a mortar platoon to move up and fill in the line where we were. And he got a tank to come up, and that’s what saved our skins.
There was another man named Brown, who ended up in our foxhole. A machine gun raked the foxhole and killed Brown and hit me a second time.
About nine-thirty that morning, they got a corpsman to come and give me plasma and morphine. About noon, litter-bearers were able to get to me and move me about 150 yards behind the front lines. I lay there for the rest of the day until a litter-bearing Jeep came for wounded Marines.
There were nine of us in line there. One of the fellows had died. I didn’t make the first trip, but I made the second trip of four to an aid station.
When I got to the aid station, they gave me whole blood. I lay there all that day and into the next day outside the aid station. They didn’t take me down to the beach until 2 March, forty-eight hours later, and gangrene had set in. There were so many wounded men lined up waiting to go aboard hospital ships that they looked like railroad ties. I’d say there were maybe 400 wounded men waiting to go on the hospital ships.
They took me out to the USS Leedstown. I lay on the deck for an hour or two, and then they took me down to the galley and put me on a dining room table.
It turned out that because I had gangrene and fractured legs, they had to do a lot of cutting. I was out for three days.
I stayed on that ship until March 11. Then they took me to Army Hospital 127 in Saipan. It wasn’t really a hospital, but a series of tents on Guam filled with 21,000 casualties.
After three days on Saipan, I was flown to Iea Heights Hospital in Honolulu. Again, the hospital was just jammed full of wounded Marines. They were all over the place—even in the hallway. Ironically I ended up in a VD ward because that’s where the beds were.
From there I went to Oak Knoll Hospital, California, and then to Great Lakes Naval Hospital near Chicago. I spent the next year at the Marine Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. My getting wounded didn’t mean the battle for Iwo Jima was over. There was still a lot of fighting ahead, but D and E Companies, of the 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, they’re the ones that cleaned up that mountain.
In my squad there were ten men, and there were two of us who survived Iwo Jima. Six were killed on Iwo; one died of wounds, and so did another one later. Seventy percent of the casualties of our headquarters company were deaths from our platoon.
U.S. MARINE ASSAULT FORCE
IWO JIMA
D-DAY PLUS FOUR
23 FEBRUARY 1945
0830 HOURS LOCAL
Early in the morning of 23 February, Navy aircraft dropped napalm on Mount Suribachi. Later, the mountain was strangely quiet. At its base, Colonel Chandler Johnson ordered a forty-man combat platoon up the slopes of the extinct volcano. When they landed, the platoon was only 400 yards from Mount Suribachi. It took them four days to cover that scant 400 yards of beachhead.
Led by First Lieutenant Harold Schrier of E Company, 2nd Battalion, the forty Marines of his 3rd Platoon gathered below Mount Suribachi. Their mission was to take Suribachi from the Japanese, and once that was accomplished, to raise the U.S. flag there on its peak.
Among those forty men of E Company’s 3rd Platoon were six Marines and a Navy corpsman that were about to make history, including nineteen-year-old Navy Pharmacist Mate Second Class John “Doc” Bradley, from Appleton, Wisconsin, and USMC photographer Lou Lowery. The men of 3rd Platoon made it to the top at around ten that morning, and by 1020 had fastened a U.S. flag to a long, heavy piece of water pipe they found in the rubble. They raised the Stars and Stripes over that contested Japanese real estate for the first time in history.
Marine photographer Lowery snapped several photos to record the event and headed back down to the combat command area.
“Doc” Bradley was a corpsman assigned to treat wounded Marines in battle. From down below, Colonel Johnson looked up at the flag on Mount Suribachi and felt that it ought to be larger, so it could easily be seen from any part of the island.
Johnson had an American flag from one of the ships that was 96 x 56 inches, and he called over PFC Rene Gagnon. Gagnon had been ordered to go up Mount Suribachi along with four of his buddies to set up a communications post. Joining them were two other Marines and a civilian photographer who had missed the first flag raising.
Gagnon took the flag and the men started up the slippery slopes of the volcanic rock. Joe Rosenthal, the AP civilian photographer, had missed getting the first picture and figured this would be a good opportunity. He was carrying a huge, bulky Speed Graphic camera that used 4 x 5 inch carriers of sheet film. As he was stacking sandbags to secure his camera, the Marines had already gotten to the site and were struggling with the heavy water pipe “flagpole,” which weighed at least 150 pounds.
Rosenthal grabbed his camera and instinctively shot a photo. Within seconds, the flag was fluttering in the wind at the peak of Mount Suribachi. He took another photo with the entire group posing and recorded the names of the men who raised the flag.
“Doc” Bradley had stayed after raising the first flag and helped the five Marines hoist the new one. In that famous Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph, the most published picture in history, were Bradley, Sergeant Mike Strank, Corporal Harlon Block, Private First Class Rene Gagnon, Private First Class Ira Hayes and Private First Class Franklin Sousley.
Strank was the “old man” of the platoon—at twenty-four he was a noncom and the senior in the squad. Block was just eighteen years old, a hardscrabble oil worker from Weslaco, Texas, who had joined the Marines a year earlier along with thirteen graduates of his high school football team who all volunteered together. Rene Gagnon, from Manchester, New Hampshire, eighteen years old and far from home, carried a photograph of his girlfriend in the webbing of his helmet liner to give him encouragement. Ira Hayes was a young Pima Native American from River Indian Reservation, Arizona. And Franklin Sousley, a nineteen-year-old, found himself far from the quiet and peaceful hills of Kentucky.
These young men were just emerging from boyhood, and not quite a year earlier, all of them had been part of a huge wave of more than 21,000 who poured into California’s Camp Pendleton. “Doc,” Mike, Rene, Harlon, Ira, and Franklin became a part of Company E, destined for an appointment at Iwo Jima that would make them all famous.
The man who carried the flag ashore that was raised on Mount Suribachi on 23 February was a young officer from F Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, 5th Marine Division. Lieutenant G. Greeley Wells came to Iwo Jima with that group of 21,000 replacement troops from Camp Pendleton.
LIEUTENANT G. GREELEY WELLS, USMC
Vicinity Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima
D-Day Plus Four
23 February 1945
0800 Hours Local
I hadn’t been in combat. I was called before Colonel Chandler Johnson, and he looked me over and said, “I’m going to make you my adjutant and you’re going to rue the day. Report on time tomorrow.” And that’s how I started in the 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines.
I didn’t know anything about being an adjutant, so I read the manual, and it said, “ . . .the adjutant carries the flag.” Someone asked, “Why the flag?”
I said, “I don’t know, but I’ll have it if you need it.” So everybody kidded me about being this flag-carrying adjutant.
Then the training increased, and we got on board a ship to go into combat.
A third of us were paratroopers, a third were combat veterans, and another third were novices. And we had all our orders. We were on an LST and knew we were to land following the 1st Battalion. There were two battalions to take Suribachi.
So we got out into the water, waded, and ran up forward. There were a lot of wounded, and a lot of dead—it was mayhem. The beach was completely covered with Marines, struggling, crawling, trying to go up in the black sand, that slowed everything down. It was difficult. People were in shock. We were told to get off the beach as fast as we could, and then suddenly we were hit with a barrage that knocked everybody down.
There was complete confusion and it took us several hours to get settled. I had my blanket and my ammunition and hand grenades, so we were loaded down, and it was tough.
The Japanese hoped that they could make things so bad that we would withdraw. We landed over 30,000 men and a lot of the supplies that first day, but at a terrible cost.
When I first got out of my LST, with artillery shells and everything going off, I hit the deck. The man next to me was dead. Another guy was wounded; machine gun fire was going, and so we just got up and said, “We’ve got to keep moving.”
I turned and was shot through the arm and across my back. The bullet went through my arm but didn’t touch the bone. I felt lucky.
But there was all kinds of gunfire and activity going on all over that island. We had to fire star shells that illuminated and use them all night long, because when we didn’t we found some of our men had had their throats cut in the dark.
Our planes were dropping napalm on Mount Suribachi. Suribachi got an awful beating, and our naval vessels were pounding away at the side of it. It took us two and a half days just to get to the base of Suribachi. It was only a short distance, but it was slow going.
Colonel Johnson sent a patrol from F Company to go up and reconnoiter. He didn’t say, “When you get to the top, raise the flag.” He said, “If you get to the top, raise the flag.”
So we got up there, looked around and found a pole, and started to put up the flag, which then was raised.
People on the hundreds of vessels around us, plus the Marines ashore, had heard that we were going to raise the flag that day. And when we did, all the ships’ horns and whistles blew. It sounded like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The whole battle suddenly stopped for a moment and you could hear Marines cheering. It really was an amazing scene.
We can never forget the tremendous battle that the Marines fought on Iwo Jima. They went in heroically, without hesitation, at an enemy that they couldn’t see, buried below the surface of the island. They were almost impossible to get out, and we spent thirty-six days accomplishing the mission. I think that we can also never forget the flag raising—but as far as the Marine Corps and the people who fought there, we can never permit anything to overshadow their heroic actions.
U.S. MARINE ASSAULT FORCE
IWO JIMA
D-DAY PLUS FIVE
24 FEBRUARY 1945
1330 HOURS LOCAL
Many of the Marines thought that the famous flag raising was a signal that the battle for Iwo Jima was almost over. However, there were still another thirty-two days of brutal combat ahead as the Marines and General Kuribayashi’s soldiers slugged away at each other. Sadly, half of the flag-raisers were among the casualties. A week after planting the flag on Mount Suribachi, Sergeant Mike Strank was killed by friendly fire from an offshore ship. A Japanese shell exploded near PFC Harlon Block just hours later, killing him. His body was misidentified for two years, and it wasn’t until after the war that he was finally identified. Four weeks after the flag raising, Franklin Sousley was picked off by a Japanese sniper while waiting to be shipped out for the trip back home.
Private John Cole, barely eighteen, was a Marine whose only previous combat experience was just prior to Iwo Jima, on Guam. It may have helped him survive. He was part of the new group from the States assigned to the 3rd Marines for graves registration detail. He and his buddies recovered bodies of Marines and soldiers killed on Iwo Jima. It was a grisly task.
PRIVATE JOHN COLE, USMC
Iwo Jima, D-Day Plus Eighteen
9 March 1945
Most of us had only been in the Marine Corps six or eight months. When I landed it was the sixth day of the battle. The beachhead had been occupied for almost a week. I went back down to the beach, where the first supplies unloaded were ammunition—machine gun ammo, rifle bullets, mortar shells, and shells for the howitzers. Then all kinds of rations.
After a week in shore party, we were sent to various regiments of the 3rd Marine Division. When we did that, we came under mortar fire almost immediately, which was a frightening experience.
Some of us went off with an NCO and we were blowing caves. Our task was to take white phosphorous grenades, throw them into the caves through whatever openings there were, and follow that up with blocks of TNT, which we used to collapse and seal the openings of the caves. And if that didn’t kill them, the smoke and the fumes would asphyxiate them. Sealing the caves prevented them from climbing or digging out.
Then a group of us were assigned to work with the graves registration detail. We did not dig graves or put people in graves; we never saw the graves the bodies ended up in. Our task was to carry the dead off the battlefield and get them back to regimental headquarters, where they could be identified, if possible. We checked their dog tags, their last name stenciled on the breast pocket of their uniforms, and sometimes their equipment, packs and so on. Besides that, and by means of their personal effects, identification was generally established.
We had a four-wheel-drive truck with an open bed in the rear. It carried about a dozen stretchers, which were so stained with blood and bodily fluids from the wounded that they were no longer suitable for that purpose. These were given to us to carry out the bodies. So our task was to climb aboard the truck and ride as close to the line as we could get. Then we’d park the truck and get somebody to tell us where the last known men had been killed. We’d take the stretchers and walk until we found them.
As long as there was light, and there were bodies to be found that could be gotten out, we’d go get them. Carrying the bodies down the terrain was difficult. The ground was completely broken by all the shell-holes and gouges. The terrain was rugged and rough to begin with so it was a physical burden to carry these guys.
And then we’d roll them or lift them onto a stretcher, typically two men on a stretcher. We’d go back to the truck, load the bodies, maybe eight men, and we’d have to hold and balance the load as the truck bounced along.
Typically the bodies that we picked up had been dead for anywhere from three to six days. It wasn’t until that ground was taken and held that anyone could get in and recover the bodies.
Because of that delay, the bodies were bloated and crawling with maggots. The maggots were under the skin and crawling in their eyes, and beyond that, bodily fluids leaked out and skin was separating. Things would swing against you, and you’d get these fluids on your body, on your uniform. And we only got to wash them once in thirty days. So we learned to live in that atmosphere, eat our food, ignoring the flies buzzing off the bodies and onto our food.
But the smell was probably the worst. It’s so intense that sometimes you’d literally gag and have dry heaves. You shut down your emotions and your feelings to the extent that you can, because you have a task to do. It is shocking, and at one point or another you say to yourself, “I wonder if they’d send me to the line, it might be better to be dead than to be doing this.”
It was mind-boggling to see the destruction. It gives a feeling that life is cheaper than dirt. And since I only dealt with the dead, all I saw was the inevitability of death.
I did that from about 3 March through 27 March, the day I left the island. By the time we came under fire and started to deal with the dead, the idea of war as a romantic adventure was long gone.
If I had been one of the guys who ended up in a line company, I heard that the probability of being wounded or killed was ten times higher.
Yes, the worst is the smell. When I finally left the island, I escaped the smell but not the memory of the smell. I promised myself never to forget that smell, never forget the men, and never let it happen again.
U.S. MARINE ASSAULT FORCE
IWO JIMA
D-DAY PLUS FORTY
31 MARCH 1945
1330 HOURS LOCAL
The total of thirty-six days of fighting on Iwo Jima resulted in 19,000 U.S. troops wounded or MIA and 6,825 killed in action. The Marines had been fighting in combat for four years, but here—in just a month—the U.S. Marines suffered a third of all their casualties of World War II.
“Doc” Bradley, the Navy corpsman, in a letter home to his folks, wrote: “I never realized I could go four days with no food, sleep, or water, but now I know it can be done.”
Bradley was the only one of the three surviving flag-raisers on Iwo Jima who resumed a normal life after the war. He summed up his assessment of the battle when he told his nine-year-old son upon his return, “James, I want you to always remember—the heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who did not come back.”
Bradley returned to America to a hero’s welcome by President Harry Truman, who sent Bradley and the other two survivors of the Iwo Jima flag raising on a war bond tour of thirty-three cities. Truman gave the men the impossible task of raising $14 billion in war bonds, which represented 25 percent of the national budget. The men accepted the responsibility and raised not $14 billion but $26 billion in two months—amounting to 47 percent of the U.S. budget.
Iwo Jima was one of the bloodiest battles in modern history. More Marines died there than in any other battle in the Pacific in WWII. And more U.S. Marines earned the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima than in any other battle in U.S. history, while thousands of Marine veterans of that battle were awarded the Purple Heart. Twenty-seven Medals of Honor were awarded to Marines and sailors of Iwo Jima, many of them posthumously. Admiral Nimitz would remark after the battle, “Among the men who fought on Iwo Jima, uncommon valor was a common virtue.”
The Navy also lost two of its carriers at Iwo Jima. The famed USS Saratoga was hit by a kamikaze aircraft and sank. The escort carrier USS Bismarck Sea was likewise sunk. The Navy lost more than 1,000 sailors to the kamikaze attacks.
The Japanese defenders suffered 21,000 casualties, most of whom were killed in action. Surprisingly, in contrast to other island battles, more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers surrendered, despite their strong adherence to the samurai code.
And, as was the case on Tarawa and Peleliu, some Japanese stragglers hid in the caves until well after the war ended. The last two Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima surrendered four years after the battle.
After the initial assault, the Marines didn’t break through the last Japanese lines until 9 March. Iwo Jima wasn’t declared secure until 26 March, following a banzai attack near the beaches. The Army’s 147th Infantry Regiment relieved the Marines and assumed ground control of the island on 4 April.
After Iwo Jima was declared secure, more than 2,000 B-29 aircraft were able to make emergency landings on the island during later bombing raids of the Japanese mainland. These actions saved as many lives as there were total casualties in the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Chaplain Roland Gittelsohn said it best during the dedication of a battlefield cemetery on Iwo Jima:
Somewhere in this plot of ground, there may lie a man who could have discovered a cure for cancer.
Under one of these Christian crosses, or beneath a Jewish Star of David, there may rest now a man who was destined to be a great prophet. Now they lie here silently in this sacred soil, and we gather to consecrate this earth in their memory.
Here lie officers and men, black and white, rich and poor... here are Protestants, Catholics and Jews. Here no man prefers another because of his faith, or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many from each group are admitted or allowed. Theirs is the highest and purest form of democracy.
Unfortunately, at the end of March, although the Marines of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions had secured Iwo Jima, they had no time to celebrate or even catch their breath.
The next island assault landings—on Okinawa—were just days away.