The landing on Iwo Jima

A few minutes before 9 a.m. on 19 February 1945 the first waves of US Marines came ashore on the beaches of Iwo Jima – a small volcanic island in the Volcano Islands (Kazan Rettō), lying halfway between the Marianas and Tokyo. Two divisions were landed side by side on a stretch of about three kilometres of the south-eastern coast: Major General Clifton B. Cates’s 4th Marine Division and Major General Keller E. Rockey’s 5th Marine Division. Major General Graves B. Erskine’s 3rd Division remained aboard ship in reserve. The landing as a whole was directed by Major General Harry Schmidt, commander of the V Amphibious Corps. It was the first day of Operation Detachment and the beginning of one of the bloodiest battles in the history of the United States Marine Corps.

The first minutes seemed to bear out the optimism of some of the planners. The waves of tracked vehicles reached the shore with almost no losses, and the Japanese defences were nearly silent. After about an hour, when the beaches had filled with men, equipment and stranded vehicles, artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire rained down on the landing force from Mount Suribachi in the south and from the plateau to the north. By evening some 30,000 Marines had come ashore. According to the Marine Corps commemorative monograph (Joseph H. Alexander, Closing In), this cost some 2,400 killed and wounded. The island was cut in two at its narrowest point and Suribachi isolated, but the main objective of the day – the whole of the first airfield – remained largely in Japanese hands.

An island halfway

Iwo Jima – in Japanese Iō-tō, “Sulphur Island” – has an area of about 21 square kilometres. At its southern tip rises the extinct volcano of Suribachi, some 170 metres high, while to the north the island broadens into a rocky plateau cut by ravines. Between them lay beaches of black volcanic sand and the first of the Japanese airfields. The island lies about 1,200 kilometres from Tokyo.

Iwo Jima’s importance stemmed from the American air offensive. Since November 1944 Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers from the Marianas had been attacking Tokyo and other Japanese cities, and their route took them over Iwo Jima. The radar station on the island warned Japan of incoming raids, interceptors took off from its airfields, and Japanese aircraft staging through the island attacked the B-29 bases on Saipan and Tinian. Taking Iwo Jima would give the Americans an emergency airfield for damaged bombers and a base for escort fighters within range of Japan. The decision was taken by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 3 October 1944, and the task was entrusted to Admiral Chester Nimitz.

The operation was commanded by Admiral Raymond Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet, who on 19 February was aboard his flagship, the cruiser Indianapolis. The amphibious forces were led by Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, the expeditionary troops by Lieutenant General Holland Smith, and the attack force that actually put the troops ashore by Rear Admiral Harry W. Hill. Some 450 warships and auxiliary vessels were assembled off Iwo Jima. Some 70,000 Marines were assigned to the operation as a whole – according to American historians, the largest concentration of Marines ever committed to a single battle.

Defence underground

The island’s garrison was commanded by Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who had taken command in June 1944. He had some 21,000 army and navy personnel under him; the naval units were commanded by Rear Admiral Toshinosuke Ichimaru. Kuribayashi had learned from earlier battles. On Tarawa in 1943 and in the Battle of Saipan in the summer of 1944, Japanese garrisons had tried to stop the landings on the beaches and had then bled themselves white in massed night counter-attacks. On Peleliu, where Colonel Kunio Nakagawa based his defence on caves and fortifications inland, the fighting lasted more than two months and cost the Americans heavy losses.

On Iwo Jima Kuribayashi gave up defending the beaches. His men dug kilometres of tunnels into the soft volcanic rock, linking underground shelters, stores and fighting positions. Guns and mortars were sited so that they could fire on the entire shoreline, but they were to open fire only when the beaches had filled with troops and equipment. The Suribachi sector, commanded by Colonel Kanehiko Atsuchi, was prepared for independent defence, because Kuribayashi expected the Americans to cut it off quickly from the rest of the island. He also forbade pointless “banzai” attacks: every soldier was to hold his position as long as possible and inflict the heaviest possible losses on the enemy.

Such a defence was largely proof against bombs and shells. From the strike of 8 December 1944 onwards, B-24 bombers from the Marianas attacked the island day after day, and cruisers shelled it several times. As the official Marine Corps monograph records, aerial photographs from early 1945 showed that the number of fortifications was nevertheless growing. Over the winter there was a dispute about the preliminary bombardment: General Schmidt demanded ten days of naval gunfire, Rear Admiral William Blandy agreed to three, and Spruance upheld that decision – partly because Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s carriers were at the same time to strike the Tokyo area and tie down Japanese air power.

Three days of bombardment

The preliminary bombardment began on 16 February, but rain and low cloud hampered observation and the first day produced uncertain results. On 17 February landing craft gunboats approached the beaches to cover the frogmen of the underwater demolition teams, who were checking the approaches to the shore. The Japanese gunners concluded that the landing was beginning and – according to American studies, contrary to Kuribayashi’s intentions – opened fire. All twelve gunboats were hit, and the heavy cruiser USS Pensacola took six hits and lost 17 killed. The premature fire, however, revealed to the Americans the positions of many batteries above the beaches, which the battleships destroyed with close-range fire on 18 February.

The last day of the bombardment was again hampered by the weather. General Schmidt later summed it up by saying that out of 34 hours of daylight the Marines had received only about 13 hours of fire support. During the night of 18–19 February Mitscher’s carriers, returning from Japan, arrived off the island, and Spruance with them. Holland Smith was bitter that their aircraft had been bombing the home islands instead of softening up the defences of Iwo Jima.

D-Day

Unlike the preceding days, 19 February dawned fine. At first light the ships opened the heaviest pre-landing bombardment yet seen in the Pacific. B-24s of the Seventh Air Force from the Marianas flew over the island, followed by aircraft from Mitscher’s carriers, including Marine Corsair fighters, which swept low over the beaches. According to Alexander’s monograph, Kuribayashi admitted in a later report to Imperial General Headquarters that “the violence of the enemy’s bombardments is far beyond description”.

The beaches were divided into four sectors, designated by colours from the left: Green, Red, Yellow and Blue. The 5th Division landed the 28th Marines on Green Beach, at the foot of Suribachi, and the 27th Marines on Red Beach. The 4th Division landed the 23rd Marines on Yellow Beach and the 25th Marines on Blue Beach on the right flank, beneath a rock quarry from which the Japanese could rake the whole shoreline. In the lead came 68 LVT(A)4 armoured amphibian tractors mounting 75 mm guns, followed by some 380 amphibian tractors carrying infantry. The ships fired a rolling barrage ahead of the attackers – a curtain of fire that moved inland, staying some 400 yards ahead of the troops. The first wave reached the shore within two minutes of H-hour, set for 9 a.m.

The first obstacle was the terrain. The beaches shelved steeply into the sea, and the surf was short and violent. Beyond the waterline rose terraces of soft black volcanic ash, in places several metres high. Lorries and many tractors bogged down in it; landing craft that had not finished unloading were turned broadside by the waves and swamped. Weighed down by their equipment, the men struggled to move forward. “The sand was so soft that running on it was like running through loose coffee,” a corporal of the 4th Division recalled, as quoted in Alexander’s monograph. Foxholes could not be dug in it, because they collapsed at once. Within minutes some six thousand men were on the shore.

For the first hour the Japanese defence was limited to isolated shots. For a moment American observers on the ships might have believed that the bombardment had silenced it. Shortly after 10 a.m., when the beaches were already crowded, Japanese artillery, mortars and machine guns opened fire simultaneously. Shells fell on clusters of men, vehicles and supplies, and mines exploded. Guns hidden on the slopes of Suribachi fired from behind steel doors that the crews shut immediately after each shot, which made them hard to destroy. Bunkers that the Marines had cleared with flamethrowers and grenades were reoccupied by the Japanese, who reached them through tunnels. Time magazine’s correspondent Robert Sherrod called the day “a nightmare in hell”.

The beaches were turning into a graveyard of equipment. Bulldozers of the naval construction battalions cut roads through the terraces so that M4 Sherman tanks and heavy equipment could get off the beach, but many vehicles bogged down or were hit. That day, after leaving Red Beach in the direction of the first airfield, Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone was killed. Awarded the Medal of Honor for the fighting on Guadalcanal in 1942, he was one of the best-known Marines and had himself asked to return to the front.

Cutting the island and fighting on the flanks

On the left flank Colonel Harry B. Liversedge’s 28th Marines carried out the most important task of the day. The regiment had trained beforehand on similar volcanic terrain on the island of Hawaii. Despite losses among the company commanders, its sub-units pushed on on their own initiative across the narrowest part of the island, some 700 yards (roughly 650 metres) wide. Within about 90 minutes of landing, men of the 1st Battalion reached the west coast. Suribachi and its garrison were cut off from the rest of the island – “like cutting off the head of a snake”, as one Marine put it. According to Alexander’s monograph, cutting the island cost the regiment nearly 400 killed and wounded that day.

In the centre the 27th Marines reached the southern and western edges of the first airfield, Motoyama No. 1, before noon and beat off a counter-attack there by more than a hundred Japanese. The 23rd Marines on Yellow Beach took the first blow of the Japanese fire; beyond the second terrace they came up against two large concrete blockhouses that had survived the bombardment, and it took them many hours to gain a few hundred metres towards the eastern edge of the airfield. The tanks the regimental commander asked for could not get through the crowded beaches.

The going was hardest on the right flank. The 25th Marines were to take the quarry, which the 4th Division commander, General Cates, had from the outset considered the most difficult objective of the day. Before the landing he is said to have remarked that if he knew the name of the man on the extreme right flank, he would recommend him for a decoration before he even went ashore. Lieutenant Colonel Justice Chambers’s 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, which had landed that morning some 900 strong, had by evening – according to figures cited in the literature – only some 150 men fit to fight in the line. Even so, the Marines took the rim of the quarry and held it, covering the whole beachhead from the north-east.

Night on the beachhead

By the evening of 19 February the V Amphibious Corps had some 30,000 men ashore, and the beachhead – according to Alexander’s monograph – was more than 4,000 yards wide and up to 1,000 yards deep, roughly 3.7 by 0.9 kilometres. The Americans had taken part of the first airfield and isolated Suribachi, but they were far short of the objectives set for the first day. Losses, according to the same source, came to some 2,400 killed and wounded, or about 8 per cent of the force landed; more than 500 of them – according to various studies – were killed or died of wounds. By way of comparison, on the first day of the landing on Saipan in June 1944 the losses of the two Marine divisions exceeded 2,000 killed and wounded.

Aboard the command ship Eldorado, Holland Smith read the reports of casualties and slow progress. According to correspondents’ accounts, he said at the time that he did not know who the Japanese general in charge of the defence was, but that he was “one smart bastard”. The Marines expected a massed counter-attack during the night, as on Saipan or Guam. It did not come. Instead, Japanese artillery and mortars shelled the beaches all night, and small groups infiltrated between the American positions. This was to be the rhythm of the whole battle: no great Japanese surges, but unceasing fire from concealment and a fight for every bunker.

Place in the war

The landing of 19 February opened a five-week battle, the costliest in the history of the US Marine Corps. On 21 February Japanese kamikaze aircraft sank the escort carrier Bismarck Sea off Iwo Jima and badly damaged the carrier Saratoga. On 23 February men of the 28th Marines planted the American flag on the summit of Suribachi, and Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the second flag-raising became one of the symbols of the war. In the north of the island, where the 3rd Division also entered the fight, the Marines spent weeks taking Kuribayashi’s fortifications – Hill 382, the “Amphitheater” and “Turkey Knob”, together known as the “Meat Grinder”. On 4 March the first B-29 made an emergency landing on Iwo Jima. Organised resistance was declared broken on 16 March, the last Japanese attack came on 26 March, and Kuribayashi died in the last days of the fighting, in circumstances that remain uncertain to this day.

According to American figures, 6,821 Americans were killed and some 19,000 wounded; according to American historians, it was the only major battle in the Pacific in which total American casualties exceeded Japanese. Of the roughly 21,000 defenders, between 18,000 and more than 20,000 were killed, according to various estimates, and 216 were taken prisoner. Twenty-seven Medals of Honor were awarded for the fighting on Iwo Jima. The value of the prize remains a matter of dispute among historians: according to the official history of the US Army Air Forces, 2,251 B-29 landings were recorded on the island by the end of the war, and escort fighters flew from its airfields; but some researchers argue that many of these landings were not necessary to save the crews, and that fighter escort played a smaller role than had been expected.

The first day of the battle showed that Kuribayashi’s concept worked: a defence hidden in the rock had survived the bombardment and inflicted on the landing force losses unprecedented in the Central Pacific. That experience weighed heavily on the preparations for the Battle of Okinawa in the spring of 1945 and on American estimates of the cost of invading the Japanese home islands themselves.