CHAPTER 5
A moment in time: U.S. Marines attack a Japanese position on Iwo Jima, March 23, 1945.
The Americans’ “island hopping” strategy was remarkably successful, and the final objectives in this advance toward Japan were the two islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. There were three airfields on Iwo Jima, about 650 miles (1,050 km) south of Tokyo, which could be used to provide fighter cover for long-range B-29 bombers attacking Japan from the Mariana Islands.
Beginning in February 1945, 110,000 U.S. soldiers went ashore on Iwo Jima and some 800 warships became involved in an operation that lasted well over a month. The island’s first airfield was taken within forty-eight hours and the second within a week, but the Japanese were securely positioned in the northern part of the island. It was here that the fiercest fighting unfolded.
The geography of Iwo Jima, one of the Volcano Islands, helped to make it the most heavily fortified island that the U.S. had yet attempted to capture. Mount Suribachi, an extinct volcano at the southern tip of the island, provided cover for defenders firing on the beach. Out of twenty-four U.S. battalion commanders who came ashore in the first landing, nineteen were killed or wounded. The volcanic ash on the beaches could be mixed with cement to make a hard concrete and the defenders used this to reinforce their positions across the island. The Marines fought hard to take the island––their courage is symbolized by the famous photograph taken on February 23 of the American flag being raised on Mount Suribachi.
The human cost of fighting for an island only about five miles (eight km) long was appalling: more than one in three U.S. Marines, nearly 4,000 men, were killed; more than 20,000 Japanese died. The casualty rate reached 75 percent in two U.S. Marine divisions. Led by Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s very well-organized defense, the Japanese, desperate to keep the enemy from their homeland, fought almost to the last man. In 1956, all American bodies were exhumed and returned to the United States, but fifty years after the battle, Japanese volunteers were still returning to Iwo Jima to look for the remains of missing soldiers to cremate and return their ashes to Japan.
The Japanese dug in for determined resistance against U.S. advances in the north of Iwo Jima.
A LETTER HOME
Lieutenant General Kuribayashi and his wife Yoshii had three children. He wrote home regularly, concerned for their welfare: “Our officers and men know death very well. I am sorry to be fighting the United States of America, but I want to defend this island as long as possible, and to delay the enemy air raids against Tokyo. Ah, you have worked well for a long time as my wife and as a mother of three children. Your life will become harder and more serious. Be careful of your health, and live long. The future of our children will not be easy too. Please take care of them after my death.”
—From The Battle for Iwo Jima, Derrick Wright
This famous photograph, showing the U.S. Stars and Stripes being raised on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi, symbolizes the determination of the United States to defeat Japan in the Pacific War.
The island of Okinawa was the final stepping-stone to Japan. The island, about 60 miles (96 km) long, had safe harbors and airfields from which an invasion of Japan could be launched. It was vital for the Japanese to defend it. The United State knew this and mounted its most complex operation in the Pacific War to secure its capture. The Allies had such vast resources that it seemed almost inevitable that Japan would lose the war. Allied naval forces received more oil and gasoline between March and June 1945 than Japan imported in all of 1944. One of the U.S. divisions landed on Okinawa with enough food to supply the city of Colombus, Ohio, for a month. Over half a million troops were involved and more than 1,200 warships. Carrier-based U.S. aircraft flew more than 90,000 missions during the campaign and the carrier force remained at sea for three months.
A wounded Japanese officer emerges from a cave and surrenders on Okinawa.
The Japanese knew they could not win. The giant Yamato battleship and eight destroyers left Japan to fight the Allies with only enough fuel for a one-way voyage. Nearly 2,000 kamikaze missions attacked U.S. ships in waves of massed attacks called kikusui (floating chrysanthemums). They inflicted much damage but, in a struggle between U.S. marines fighting to live and Japanese pilots dying in order to fight, the the Allied forces captured the island.
A SOLDIER’S NIGHTMARE
In 1984, John Garcia recalled Okinawa. The Japanese woman he refers to was someone he shot in error, mistaking her for a soldier: “I had friends who were Japanese and I kept thinking every time I pulled a trigger on a man or pushed a flamethrower down into a hole: ‘What is this person’s family gonna say when he doesn’t come back? He’s got a wife, he’s got children, somebody …’ I’d get up each day and start drinking. How else could I fight the war? Sometimes we made the booze, sometimes we bought it from the navy … Oh, I still lose nights of sleep because of that woman I shot. I still lose a lot of sleep. I still dream about her. I dreamed about it perhaps two weeks ago.”
—From “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II, edited by Studs Terkel
ON OKINAWA On Okinawa itself, U.S. forces took three weeks to conquer the Motubo peninsula where the Japanese defenders were concentrated. The other main area of fighting was south of a line between Naha and Yonabaru. On May 27, Naha was fianally in U.S. hands. Out of a garrison force of nearly 80,000 men, only 7,400 Japanese were taken prisoner. Over 7,500 U.S. soldiers died and nearly 5,000 seamen lost their lives on the U.S. side.
The near-suicidal resistance of the Japanese to U.S. advances made the idea of invading Japan itself a fearsome prospect. This bloodiest battle of World War II in the Pacific led to a new policy of bombing Japanese cities, put into effect from March 1945 until the end of the war. It also helped fuel the argument for dropping the atomic bomb, in its very first use, on Japan. Many in the U.S. government hoped that using atomic bombs would stop the war and, in the end, save lives.
Marines of the U.S. 6th Division take cover during the advance on Naha, the capital of Okinawa, where Japanese forces were concentrated.
Lt. General Ushijima, the Japanese commander of Okinawa, committed suicide when the island was finally taken by U.S. forces.
The bombardment of Japan was carried out by almost six hundred U.S. bombers which eventually could attack almost any target they chose, encountering little resistance. The destruction was immense.
Major General Curtis E. LeMay began the bombardment by abandoning the earlier policy of daytime, high-altitude raids that were meant to hit particular targets. These raids were not proving effective, so his new policy involved night raids flying at far lower altitudes. Areas of cities were now subjected to bombing that caused fires rather than explosions. Densely packed Japanese cities had many wooden buildings and fires spread rapidly. All Japanese cities became targets, and about ten million people were killed, injured, or made homeless.
Tokyo, the capital city, suffered especially from firestorms caused by intense bombing. Fires consumed more and more oxygen, turning the city into one large inferno, with temperatures rising to 1,472° F (800° C), fanned by hurricane force winds. In one raid on March 9, eighty-three thousand civilians died.
REDUCED TO RUINS Between mid-May and mid-June, B-29 bombers reduced six of Japan’s major industrial cities close to ruins. Protected by fighters from Iwo Jima, these huge aircraft also bombed during the day. They shot down so many Japanese fighters trying to hit the B-29s that the Japanese grounded their remaining aircraft, keeping them for use against the expected land invasion. By August, Japan’s economy had been largely disabled by the bombing raids and over a quarter of a million civilians had been killed. Most Japanese now realized that their country could not win the war, but military leaders insisted that further resistance would force the United States to negotiate a peace that was better for Japan.
Men load bombs onto one of the 3,970 Superfortress B-29 bombers built by the U.S. for use only in the Pacific War. The aircraft was based on Saipan Island, in the Mariana Islands.
“BLOWN AWAY”
Schoolgirl Funato Kazuyo, with her two brothers, Kōichi and Minoru, and her younger sister, Hiroko, were in a shelter [in Tokyo] when they realized a fire was heading towards them: “When we went out, we could see to the west, in the direction of Fukagawa, everything was bright red. The north wind was incredibly strong. The drone of the planes was an overwhelming roar, shaking earth and sky. Everywhere, incendiary bombs were falling.… . [They ran from the fire and took shelter elsewhere] “We lay flat on our stomachs, thinking we would be all right if the fire was gone by morning, but the fire kept pelting down on us. Minoru suddenly let out a horrible scream and leapt out of the shelter, flames shooting out of his back. Kōichi stood up calling, ‘Minoru!’ and instantly, he too, was blown away. Only Hiroko and I remained.”
—From Japan At War, Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook
Nearly half of the entire urban area of Tokyo was flattened by U.S. bombing raids between March and June 1945, and still, Japan would not surrender.
World War II was drawing to a close. Nazi Germany had surrendered to the Allies in May 1945, and the U.S. advance toward Japan was reaching a climax. Meanwhile, war still raged in another, less well-known theater in China and Burma (Myanmar).
CHIANG KAI-SHEK
Chinese nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, who had been fighting Japanese forces since the invasion in 1937, were supported by the Allies and supplied with arms and money. The Japanese invasion of Burma early in 1942 cut off the supply line to the nationalists, and fighting developed for the control of Burma. The turning point in this war came in March 1944 when Allied troops, mostly Indians under the British General William Slim, were attacked by the Japanese at Imphal in India. The opposing armies battled it out for months, but the Japanese were gradually worn down, and by July they were forced to withdraw. General Slim pushed into Burma and captured Mandalay and then Burma’s capital city, Rangoon.
The success of the U.S. “island hopping” strategy in the Pacific made the fate of Burma less important to the Allies. The Allies also began to think that Chiang Kai-shek was not an effective ally. It was his communist rival, Mao Zedong, who was more useful in helping to tie up about a million Japanese troops in China.
Fighting in China tied up about one million Japanese soldiers and helped Mao Zedong and his Communist army emerge as the future face of the country. The map shows the area occupied during Japan’s last major offensive in China in 1944.
Mao Zedong addresses a crowd in November 1944. The war against Japan helped bring about, in 1949, the creation of the People’s Republic of China, a communist nation.
The success of Chinese troops against the Japanese, under the command of the U.S. General Joseph Stilwell, only confirmed Chiang Kai-shek’s ineffectiveness. Both Stilwell and Chiang Kai-shek were supplied from India, with U.S. and British pilots flying over a series of mountain ridges, nicknamed the Hump, to make the supply drops. The awful human cost of China’s fight against Japan often tends to be forgotten by countries outside of Asia and in many accounts of World War II. The number of Chinese nationalists who died fighting and civilians who died through starvation and disease is impossible to calculate, but it certainly reaches into the millions.
“ … FOR MY MOTHERLAND!”
Uno Shintaro, fighting in China, recalls a young Chinese prisoner called Cheng Jing who was proved to have stolen some guns: “…He was only sixteen or seventeen. He looked so innocent and naïve that they brought him back without killing him. He soon learned our Japanese songs and some officers put him to work in the regimental armoury repairing weapons. Everyone trusted him. The regiment received twenty to thirty pistols each year. That year they went missing. Cheng Jing had stolen them and passed them along to the guerrillas …When he realized he wouldn’t be spared, his attitude changed … As Cheng Jing passed by the door of my room on the way to his execution, he shouted at me, ‘I will avenge myself on you! I did it for my motherland!’”
—From Japan at War, Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook
General Slim’s Fourteenth Army, composed of British, Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and African soldiers, advances toward Mandalay, Burma, in March 1945.