Battle of Iwo Jima

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Iwo Jima began on the 19th of February 1945, when the first wave of Marines landed on the southeastern beaches of a small volcanic island eight square miles in area. What they found was not what American intelligence had promised. Planners at Pearl Harbor had described the beaches as "excellent" and the thrust inland as likely to be "easy." They expected the island to fall in a week. It took five weeks of some of the fiercest fighting in the entire Pacific War. More than 26,000 Americans were wounded or killed. And yet the battle's strategic necessity has remained contested ever since. How did a small Japanese-held island become the site of the bloodiest amphibious assault in Marine Corps history? What did the men who fought there discover about the limits of naval bombardment, the ingenuity of an outnumbered enemy, and the cost of optimism in warfare? And why does a black-and-white photograph taken on the 23rd of February 1945 remain one of the most reproduced images ever made?

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• 2. An Island Built for Defense

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  Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi was assigned in June 1944 to command the defense of Iwo Jima. He understood from the outset that he could not win. His aim was to make the Americans pay the highest possible price, hoping the scale of their casualties might discourage an invasion of the Japanese home islands. Drawing on tactics used at the Battle of Peleliu, Kuribayashi abandoned the orthodox Japanese approach of contesting landings at the water's edge. Instead, he built his defenses deep inland and underground. By the time American forces arrived on the 19th of February 1945, his troops had dug 18 km of a planned 27 km of tunnels through the island's volcanic rock. The Nanpo Bunker, east of Airfield Number 2, sat 90 feet underground, with enough food, water, and ammunition to hold out for three months. Around five hundred 55-gallon drums filled with water, kerosene, and fuel oil for generators were stored inside. Gasoline-powered generators kept radios and lights running in complete darkness. Hundreds of artillery and mortar positions were hidden across the island, with many areas heavily mined. Among the weapons deployed were 320 mm spigot mortars and various explosive rockets. Kuribayashi's engineers designed the positions so that every part of the island could be reached by Japanese defensive fire. The tunnel network allowed a pillbox cleared by Marines to be reoccupied hours later by troops moving underground. Colonel Takeichi Nishi's armored tanks were camouflaged and used not as mobile weapons but as fixed artillery platforms. Troops were supplied with only 60% of the ammunition normally considered sufficient for a single engagement by one division, and food for no more than four months. Even so, the physical fortifications that Kuribayashi's men constructed before the landings gave Japanese defenders an advantage that nine months of American naval bombardment would fail to eliminate.

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• 3. The Beach Called a Nightmare

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  At 08:59 on the 19th of February 1945, one minute ahead of schedule, the first wave of Marines landed on Iwo Jima. For just over an hour, the Japanese held their fire, allowing American forces to concentrate men and equipment on the beach. Then, shortly after 10:00, machine guns, mortars, and heavy artillery opened up simultaneously across the entire landing zone. Time-Life correspondent Robert Sherrod described it simply as "a nightmare in hell." The island's beaches were covered in loose black volcanic ash that offered neither secure footing nor any ability to dig foxholes. Marines trained to move rapidly forward could only plod. After crossing the beach, they faced 15-foot slopes of the same soft ash. Amphibious tractors trying to climb the slopes made no progress at all; their passengers had to dismount and advance on foot. Historian Derrick Wright later noted that "in virtually every shell hole there lay at least one dead Marine." The Japanese crews inside Mount Suribachi fired through reinforced steel doors that opened only long enough to discharge artillery, then closed again immediately to prevent counterfire. Bunkers cleared with flamethrowers and grenades were reoccupied within hours by troops moving through the tunnel network beneath. By evening, 30,000 Marines had landed. General Holland M. "Howlin' Mad" Smith, watching from the command ship USS Eldorado and reading the casualty reports, told war correspondents: "I don't know who he is, but the Japanese general running this show is one smart bastard." The 25th Marine Regiment's 3rd Battalion had landed approximately 900 men that morning. By nightfall, only 150 were still in fighting condition, an 83.3% casualty rate from a single day of combat.

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• 4. The Flag and the Photograph

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  By the morning of the 23rd of February 1945, Mount Suribachi had been effectively cut off above ground from the rest of the island. Lieutenant Colonel Chandler W. Johnson sent a reinforced platoon-size patrol from E Company up the volcano under First Lieutenant Harold G. Schrier, handing Schrier the battalion's American flag to raise at the summit if they made it. Despite expectations of heavy fighting, the patrol encountered only light sniper fire. At the top, troops found a length of Japanese water pipe among the wreckage and used it as a flagpole. Marine photographer Louis R. Lowery, the only photographer with Schrier's patrol, photographed this first raising. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had just landed on the beach below and wanted the flag as a souvenir. Johnson, believing it belonged to the 2nd Battalion, refused. He sent a runner named Gagnon up the mountain with a larger replacement flag, which was attached to a heavier section of water pipe. Six Marines raised the second flag as the smaller one came down. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured that second raising in a single photograph. It became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication, and is considered one of the most reproduced photographs ever made. Three of the six men pictured, Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block, and Private First Class Franklin Sousley, were killed in combat within days. Three Marine Corps investigations into the identities of the six men revised the record multiple times: in 2016 it was determined that John Bradley was not in the photograph and that Private First Class Harold Schultz was; in 2019, Rene Gagnon was removed from the list and Private First Class Harold Keller added. Felix de Weldon later used the image to sculpt the Marine Corps War Memorial, dedicated on the 10th of November 1954 adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery.

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• 5. The Meatgrinder

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  After Mount Suribachi fell, the harder fighting was in the north. The rocky terrain of the Motoyama Plateau favored defense even more than the volcano had, and the Japanese fortifications there were more formidable. Under Kuribayashi's command remained the equivalent of eight infantry battalions, a tank regiment, two artillery battalions, and three heavy mortar battalions, along with about 5,000 gunners and naval infantry. The Marines named a cluster of overlapping strongpoints, centered on Hill 382, a feature called "Turkey Knob," and a depression between them called "the Amphitheater," as "the meatgrinder." Every apparent breakthrough became a trap. Units advancing through fortifications found themselves raked from the flanks, and tanks were destroyed by interlocking fire or detonated by buried mines. General Erskine ordered the 9th Marine Regiment to attack under cover of darkness with no preliminary bombardment, a significant departure from standard practice. The surprise worked; many Japanese soldiers were killed while still asleep, and Hill 362 was captured. The Japanese organized a counterattack the following night to retake it. On the evening of the 8th of March, Captain Samaji Inouye led 1,000 men in a charge against American lines, inflicting 347 American casualties, including 90 deaths. Marines counted 784 dead Japanese soldiers the next morning. The same day, elements of the 3rd Marine Division reached the northern coast, splitting Kuribayashi's forces in two. The island was declared secure at 18:00 on the 16th of March, 25 days after the landings. But on the night of the 25th of March, a 300-man Japanese force launched a final silent counterattack near Airfield No. 2. Army pilots, Seabees, and Marines from the 5th Pioneer Battalion and the 28th Marines fought them for up to 90 minutes, suffering 53 killed and 120 wounded. It is possible that Kuribayashi personally led this final assault, which would have made him the highest-ranking Japanese officer to lead an attack in person during the entire war.

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• 6. The Code That Could Not Be Broken

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  Six Navajo men working under Major Howard Connor, signal officer of the 5th Marine Division, sent and received over 800 messages during the first two days of the landing alone, all without error. Connor later stated, "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima." The Navajo code talkers had a particular history shaped by contradiction. Before the war, Navajo boys had been sent to boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their own language and punished if they did. That same language became one of the most closely guarded American secrets of the Pacific campaign. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, American forces found themselves outmatched in communications security; Japanese forces had broken the coding system of the Pacific fleet. In 1942, Sergeant Phillip Johnson was assigned to direct code training for Platoon 382, made up entirely of Navajo men. The talkers were trained to relay missions, maneuvers, enemy locations and strengths, and attack timing from air to ground, ship to shore, and tank to command post. On Iwo Jima, code talkers served as forward observers, radioing artillery strike coordinates from the island to command ships offshore, receiving new strike plans, and transmitting orders back to shore without the transmissions being intercepted or understood by Japanese forces. The Navajo language presented a structural barrier to outsiders: only 28 non-Navajo people could speak it at the time, and none were German or Japanese. Japanese forces attempted to bribe Navajo soldiers into deciphering the code; none cooperated.

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• 7. The Contested Ledger

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  Iwo Jima was the only battle in the entire Pacific War involving amphibious island landings where total American casualties exceeded those of the Japanese. The 36-day assault produced more than 26,000 American casualties, including 6,800 dead. Of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers on the island at the battle's start, only 216 were taken prisoner; most of those were captured only because they had been knocked unconscious or disabled. More than 3,000 Japanese troops continued to resist inside cave systems after the island was declared secure, and were hunted down by the U.S. Army's 147th Infantry Regiment over the following three months. The 147th killed an estimated 1,602 Japanese soldiers in small-unit actions while suffering fifteen men killed and 144 wounded. The regiment also captured 867 Japanese prisoners. Two Japanese holdouts from Lieutenant Toshihiko Ohno's unit evaded capture for four years and finally surrendered on the 6th of January 1949. Whether the battle was worth its cost became a lasting controversy. As early as April 1945, retired Chief of Naval Operations William V. Pratt wrote in Newsweek that the island was "useless to the Army as a staging base and useless to the Navy as a fleet base." The primary American justification for the assault, that the island was essential for P-51 Mustang fighter escorts protecting B-29 Superfortress bombers, was undercut by the course of events: only ten such escort missions were flown from Iwo Jima before the bombing campaign switched from daylight precision strikes to nighttime incendiary raids, making fighter escorts largely unnecessary. A later Air Force study found the contribution of VII Fighter Command, based on Iwo Jima, to be superfluous. Author Robert S. Burrell, in his book The Ghosts of Iwo Jima, argued that the battle's enormous cost itself generated a "reverence for the Marine Corps" that embodied what he called the "American national spirit" and helped ensure the institutional survival of the Corps.

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