The end of the fighting on Iwo Jima

At 6 p.m. on 16 March 1945 Major General Harry Schmidt, commander of the Marine V Amphibious Corps, announced that organised Japanese resistance on Iwo Jima had ceased. Twenty-five days had passed since two Marine divisions landed on the island’s black volcanic-ash beaches – five times longer than the planners had expected, for they had reckoned on taking the island in less than a week. The news spread quickly through the American papers: Iwo Jima, the most famous battlefield of the Pacific War since the flag-raising on Suribachi, had at last been taken.

The announcement of 16 March, however, was more a declaration than a description of the situation. In the ravines at the north-western tip of the island the 5th Marine Division fought on for another ten days against the last units of Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. The last organised Japanese attack was beaten off only before dawn on 26 March, and only at 9 a.m. that day did the command officially declare the island secured. Even that was not the end: thousands of Japanese soldiers were still hiding in caves and tunnels, to be rounded up over the following months, and the last two surrendered in 1949.

The Meat Grinder

When the Marines planted the flag on the summit of Suribachi on 23 February, the main part of the battle was only beginning. Kuribayashi had concentrated his strongest forces on the rocky Motoyama plateau in the northern part of the island, where his men had carved a network of bunkers, firing positions and tunnels out of the soft volcanic rock. Three Marine divisions – the 5th along the west coast, the 3rd in the centre and the 4th in the east – inched forward there by a few dozen, at most a few hundred, metres a day.

The heaviest fighting fell to the 4th Division, in the area the Marines called the “Meat Grinder”: on Hill 382, in a bowl known as the “Amphitheater”, on the rocky crest of “Turkey Knob” and in the ruins of the village of Minami. Every position was covered by fire from others, and tanks that drove in among the hills were knocked out by mines and anti-tank guns. Hill 382 changed hands several times before the Marines secured it at the beginning of March. The fighting was at close quarters and largely underground: bunkers and cave mouths were tackled with flamethrowers, some of them mounted on tanks, and with demolition charges, and some caves were blown in, burying the defenders alive. At night the Japanese came out on raids and infiltrated behind the American lines.

The breakthrough came in March. On 7 March Major General Graves Erskine’s 3rd Division attacked before dawn without an artillery preparation, surprising defenders who had grown used to attacks being preceded by a bombardment. On 9 March one of its patrols reached the north-eastern coast, splitting the Japanese defence into pieces. On the night of 8–9 March, against Kuribayashi’s orders, Captain Samaji Inouye led about a thousand sailors in the only large night-time banzai-style counter-attack of the battle; in the morning the Marines counted more than 780 Japanese dead in front of their lines. Over the following days Turkey Knob and the Amphitheater were cleared, and the remnants of the Japanese units in the eastern part of the island, with the commander of the 2nd Mixed Brigade, Major General Sadasue Senda, were surrounded.

The announcement of 16 March

The American command was in a hurry to declare victory. On 14 March a flag-raising ceremony was held at the V Corps command post near Suribachi, at which a proclamation by Admiral Chester Nimitz was read out suspending Japanese authority on the island and establishing a United States military government; that day the flag on the summit of the mountain was lowered. The Marines who were fighting in the north at the time received such gestures with bitterness. At press conferences the commanders – Vice Admiral Richmond Turner and Lieutenant General Holland Smith – stressed that the Japanese were losing far more men than the Americans. At home, however, questions about the cost of the battle were growing, and parts of the press openly criticised the Marines’ tactics. On 16 March Nimitz released the casualty figures up to 6 March – more than 4,000 killed, more than 15,000 wounded and several hundred missing – which were still lower than the real ones.

The same day General Schmidt announced the end of organised resistance, and Nimitz issued the statement that contains the most famous sentence about the battle: among the Americans who fought on Iwo Jima, “uncommon valor was a common virtue”. According to Japanese accounts, on 16 March in the eastern sector Major General Clifton Cates, commander of the 4th Division, ordered a two-hour ceasefire and intended to call on General Senda and his men by loudspeaker to surrender, praising their courage; the appeal never took place because the generator failed. Senda died in the days that followed – by suicide, according to some testimony. On 17 March Holland Smith left the island and flew to Pearl Harbor.

Kuribayashi’s last messages

Kuribayashi knew that the island was lost. On 14 March the commander of the 145th Infantry Regiment, Colonel Masuo Ikeda, burned the regiment’s colours so that they would not fall into enemy hands. Towards evening on 16 or 17 March (sources differ; 17 March is the date most often given) Kuribayashi sent a farewell telegram to Imperial General Headquarters. He reported that the battle was drawing to a close, that his men had fought in a way that would make “even the gods weep”, and that ammunition and water had run out; he apologised for having to give up the island and announced a final attack. He added three poems. When the Japanese press published the first of them, it softened the ending: instead of his lament that he was sorry to depart, more soldierly words were printed. The general’s biographer, Kumiko Kakehashi, saw these poems as a quiet protest against a high command that sent men to their deaths so lightly. On the same day Kuribayashi was promoted to full general (taishō) – according to Japanese sources, the youngest officer of that rank in the army; most accounts present the promotion as posthumous.

The telegram of 17 March was not, however, his last word. With several hundred army and navy men, Kuribayashi withdrew to a ravine near Cape Kitano at the north-western tip of the island – a cleft about 640 metres long that the Marines called “Bloody Gorge”. The radio station on the neighbouring island of Chichi-jima went on receiving intermittent reports of fighting from there for several more days. On 21 March Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo announced the “honourable death” (gyokusai) of the Iwo Jima garrison: the communiqué stated that on the night of 17 March the defenders, led by their commander, had launched a final attack and that contact had been lost, and it called on the nation to follow their example. In reality the fighting went on. On the evening of 23 March, according to Major Yoshitaka Hori of the Chichi-jima radio station, the last message arrived: “To all officers and men of Chichi-jima – farewell, from Iwo.” After that Iwo Jima fell silent.

The 5th Marine Division, bled white in the fighting since the first day, cleared the gorge metre by metre. On 21 March the Marines blew up a command post in the gorge with four tons of explosives, and on 24 March they sealed the last caves at the northern tip of the island. It was probably during this period, too, that Colonel Baron Takeichi Nishi was killed – the commander of the 26th Tank Regiment and the 1932 Olympic champion in show jumping; the circumstances of his death, like those of many other Japanese officers, remain unclear. The 4th and 3rd Marine Divisions had already begun to leave the island.

The last attack (26 March)

Before dawn on 26 March about 300 Japanese – as many as 400, according to some Japanese accounts – emerged from their hiding places in the north and attacked a camp near Airfield No. 2. It was not a traditional banzai charge with shouting, but a silent, well-prepared assault: the attackers slashed open tents, bayoneted sleeping men and threw grenades. The camp was occupied by fighter pilots of the Seventh Air Force, men of the navy’s construction battalions (the Seabees), Marines of the 5th Pioneer Battalion and units of the 28th Marines. The fight lasted about an hour and a half. On the American side 53 men were killed and 120 wounded; almost all the attackers died. At 9 a.m. on 26 March the island was officially declared secured, and the army took over responsibility for it from the Marines.

The circumstances of Kuribayashi’s death have never been established, and his body was never identified. According to some survivors’ accounts, it was he who led the attack of 26 March, having first removed his badges of rank, and he was killed in it; he would then have been the highest-ranking Japanese officer to lead an attack in person during the war. According to other accounts, accepted among others by the Japanese official history, the wounded general committed seppuku. The commander of the naval forces, Rear Admiral Toshinosuke Ichimaru, was also killed in the last days of fighting. In a cave in the north of the island the Marines found his letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in which he defended Japan’s cause and accused the United States of hypocrisy; the American press published it in the summer of 1945.

The price of the island

The battle for Iwo Jima lasted 36 days – not, as the announcement of 16 March might suggest, less than a month. According to official American figures, 6,821 Americans were killed or died of wounds and about 19,000 were wounded; including cases of combat fatigue, total losses exceeded 26,000 men, most of them Marines. Of the Japanese garrison, estimated at 20,000–23,000 men, various estimates put the dead at between about 18,000 and more than 20,000, and only 216 men were taken prisoner during the battle itself, many of them wounded or unconscious.

From these figures comes the often-repeated claim that Iwo Jima was the only Marine battle in which American casualties exceeded Japanese ones. It needs explaining. It is true of total casualties – killed, wounded and missing together: the Americans lost about 26,000 men, the Japanese about 18,000–21,000. But there were roughly three times as many dead on the Japanese side as on the American, because almost no Japanese soldier survived the battle, while most of the wounded Americans were evacuated and saved. The word “only” itself comes from American tallies and historical studies, which speak of the only such Marine battle or the only major amphibious battle in the Pacific. For their deeds on Iwo Jima 27 Medals of Honor were awarded – more than a quarter of all the Medals of Honor awarded to Marines in the Second World War.

Fighting the holdouts

The declaration of victory did not mean that the shooting on the island stopped. After 26 March about 3,000 Japanese soldiers were still hiding in caves and tunnels. At night they came out for food and water and raided camps and stores. Over the following months they were hunted down by the US Army’s 147th Infantry Regiment, made up mainly of men from Ohio; according to the regiment’s figures, more than 1,600 Japanese were killed and more than 860 taken prisoner, for the loss of a dozen or so of its own men killed and about 150 wounded. Many others died in sealed caves. The last two Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, the sailors Yamakage Kōfuku and Matsudo Rikio, did not surrender until 6 January 1949.

An airfield for the B-29s

The island was taken above all for the sake of air power. As early as 4 March, while the fighting was still going on, the first damaged B-29 landed on Airfield No. 1 – Dinah Might, returning from a raid on Tokyo with fuel problems – and on 6 March the first P-51 fighters arrived. When General Curtis LeMay switched the bombers of XXI Bomber Command to night incendiary raids – on the night of 9–10 March a large part of Tokyo was burned – Iwo Jima became an emergency landing ground halfway between the Marianas and Japan. By the end of the war, according to American figures, 2,251 B-29 landings had been recorded there. After the war this was presented as the main justification for the battle, and the island was reckoned to have saved the lives of thousands of airmen. The historian Robert Burrell has shown, however, that only some of these landings were genuine emergencies, and that the argument about “saving airmen” gained weight only when the losses had to be justified.

What came next

Admiral Raymond Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet, was already preparing the next operation. On 14 March the carriers of Task Force 58 left Ulithi to strike at the airfields and ports of Japan, and on 26 March – the day the last attack on Iwo Jima was beaten off – American infantry landed on the Kerama Islands off Okinawa. On 1 April the Battle of Okinawa began, in which the Japanese, like Kuribayashi, defended themselves from underground fortifications deep inside the island.

Iwo Jima showed what a high price the Americans would pay for every kilometre of Japanese territory. It was the first part of long-held Japanese territory that they had captured, and its defenders fought almost to the last man. The experience of Iwo Jima and Okinawa weighed heavily in the estimates of the cost of invading the Japanese home islands, which were later invoked in the debates over the use of the atomic bomb. For the Japanese, Iwo Jima became a symbol of uncompromising sacrifice; for the Americans, it became the photograph of the flag over Suribachi and Nimitz’s sentence about uncommon valour.