And on December 8, 1944:
In this war, there’s nothing we can do about soldiers like me out here on the front line dying. But I can’t stand the idea that even you, women and children on the mainland, have to feel that your lives are in danger. No matter what, take refuge in the country and stay alive.
Whenever there were air raids, he worried whether his family had gotten through safely without him to take care of them as head of the family. He seems to have been particularly concerned about Yoshii, who was not that tough physically. On September 27, 1944, he wrote to his son, Tarô, and his eldest daughter, Yôko, urging them to look after their mother during air raids.
You must understand that when there is an air raid the most important thing for you to do is to stop whatever you’re doing, get together at the house, and do your utmost to protect your mother by any and every means.
Even if the school has some rule about what you should do, you need to think that our house could be burned down or you might die, and you’ll see there’s no reason for you to blindly obey any school rules. Just imagine that you go out to protect the school (though in reality there’s every chance that either you couldn’t get there or else you couldn’t make it back), leaving your mother alone in the house. How can she take care of herself when she’s by herself? None of us can guarantee that something awful mightn’t happen to Mother if she’s all alone.
Yoshii was adored by her husband; only once did she cross out any of the text of a letter he sent her. The passage occurs at the end of a letter dated January 21, 1945: seven lines of Kuribayashi’s pencil-written text are blocked out with a black pen.
Tarô, the eldest child, deciphered the original text beneath the black ink and copied it at the time. Even now, with a little concentration, you can just about make out what it says.
The lines that Yoshii crossed out read as follows:
One more thing. In an earlier letter talking about cemeteries, I mentioned Gôtokuji Temple among others. That was because at the time it seemed likely we would settle in Tokyo, but now anywhere will do.
There’s every chance that my remains [will] be sent back to you, so we can postpone the whole cemetery issue. If I have a soul, it will stay near you and the children, so enshrining me in the house that you’re living in will be fine. (And then there’s always Yasukuni Shrine.)
Last of all, take good care of yourself and live a long life. I am most grateful to you for being a devoted wife to me for so long.
“I suppose the topic of his grave was just too painful for my mother,” Tarô commented.
As mentioned earlier, Kuribayashi had said in previous letters things like: “Don’t worry about what happens to me” (August 25, 1944), and “As I keep saying, screw up your courage so you can deal with whatever happens to me” (August 31, 1944). Maybe it was the detail with which he wrote to her that made Yoshii lose her calm.
Looking at the original letter, I noticed that there was another section, five lines earlier, where several characters at the beginning of a sentence had been crossed out. Holding the writing paper up to the light, I saw these words under the black ink: “As regards a final message, I have already written to you in detail about all the things you should do after my death, so, no matter what happens, do not be shocked or confused. I need you to be really strong.”
This was the first time that Kuribayashi used the term “final message” in one of his letters. The phrase made his wife realize that the many letters he had sent her previously had been composed as “final messages”—written with the expectation of imminent death.
The Americans launched their assault on Iwo Jima twenty-nine days after he wrote that letter.
*From the series “Wives of the Famous Generals,” Shôsetsu Hôseki magazine, November 1970.
*Murai Yasuhiko, “My Memories of Iwo Jima,” Kaigyô magazine, July 1988.
*SO BOUNDLESS was the reverence that Fleet Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku had for the imperial family that he is supposed to have asked his subordinates about the weather in Tokyo every morning, even when on the front lines at Truk or Rabaul in the Pacific. He was terrified that the Imperial Palace might be damaged by air raids.
CHAPTER SIX
THE AMERICAN INVASION
—
LIEUTENANT GENERAL HOLLAND M. SMITH OF THE U.S. MARINES, the commander in charge of the assault on Iwo Jima, likened the defenses Kuribayashi had constructed on the island to a worm. This, ironically, was the highest compliment he ever paid anyone in the forty years he spent leading men in the front lines of combat. He wrote, in Coral and Brass:
Like the worm which becomes stronger the more you cut it up, Iwo Jima thrived on our bombardment. The airfields were kept inactive by our attacks and some installations were destroyed, but the main body of defenses not only remained practically intact but strengthened markedly.
Smith may have been sixty-two years old and a diabetic, but he was handpicked for the job by President Franklin Roosevelt and sent off to the Pacific. A military man who had worked his way to the top, he was nicknamed “Howlin’ Mad Smith.”
Every force he led won.
They took large casualties on their way to victory, but Smith himself never shrank from danger. He hated military men who played politics and set little store by the lives of the men under their command, and he had no hesitations about airing his grievances to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet.
During the invasion of Saipan, Smith had criticized the officer leading an army division placed under his overall command for “[lacking] aggressive spirit,” and had the officer in question relieved of his command in the middle of the battle, which ignited an acrimonious dispute. He explained that he could not look on in silence while the lives of “my marines” (as he called them) were sacrificed by faint-hearted cowards. An insistence on sharing equally in the joys and sorrows of his men and a detestation of political maneuvering were characteristics that he and Kuribayashi shared.
Smith was well-known for his foul mouth, and while he calls Admiral Nimitz an opportunist in his memoirs, he does not stint in his praise for Kuribayashi.
Of all our adversaries in the Pacific, Kuribayashi was the most redoubtable. Some Japanese island commanders were just names to us, and disappeared into the anonymity of enemy corpses left for burial parties. Kuribayashi’s personality was written deep in the underground defenses he devised for Iwo Jima.
There is no one better qualified to judge a general than the enemy general he is fighting. They may never actually meet, but seeing how their counterparts fight in the extremes of battle gives them a sense not just of their abilities, but of their character and their humanity.
Lieutenant General Smith chose to compare the almost uncanny resilience of the underground defenses at Iwo Jima to a worm, and the comparison certainly encapsulates Kuribayashi’s down-to-earth realism—his indifference to glory and to the conventional values of the Japanese warrior class—as well as the extraordinary strength of his will.
—
THE UNDERGROUND INSTALLATIONS showed their worth even before the battle started. They protected the soldiers from the massive bombardments inflicted on the island as a softening-up before the ground assault.
On December 8, 1944—almost three years to the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—Iwo Jima was hit by the biggest combined aerial assault and naval bombardment since the start of the Pacific War. For the Americans it was the anniversary of their humiliation.
Kuribayashi wrote a letter to his wife that same afternoon.
After touching on the usual everyday topics—“I told you before that I don’t need you to send me whiskey or anything else and I really don’t, so there’s no need to worry about it;” and “I should be getting paid an end-of-year bonus (2,650 yen, I think). It’s a bore that no matter how much I get given there’s no way to spend it here.” He goes on:
It’s December 8 today. Just as I expected, we were attacked by large planes
that came in thirteen waves from around 8:30 in the morning until about 1:00 in the afternoon. They were followed by a naval bombardment lasting one and a half hours, and I only just came out of the shelter now (3:00 p.m.).
Bombs landed quite close to us, but luckily they didn’t do any damage. The overall number of casualties is tiny.
On this single day, a combined total of 192 fighters and bombers flew over Iwo Jima and dropped more than 800 tons of bombs. Three heavy cruisers and six destroyers fired a naval barrage of 6,800 shells. Aboveground, the Japanese lost 10 planes, but the underground installations were untouched, and casualties were almost nonexistent.
Up to that point the island had been bombarded in fits and starts, but from December 8 until the landing, the bombardment continued for seventy-four days without a single day’s pause. Lieutenant General Smith and the rest of the American leadership were amazed that, despite a greater quantity and density of shells than at any other battleground in the Pacific War, the defensive positions continued to strengthen and increase in number over that period.
The Japanese soldiers would all dive underground when air raids and naval bombardments started, but when they were over, they would come back aboveground and resume their work. The intense bombardment had destroyed every single tree and blade of grass, but their underground world was unharmed.
According to the official history of the U.S. Marine Corps, a total of 6,800 tons of bombs were dropped on the island over the seventy-four-day period. In the five naval bombardments conducted in December and January, 203 16-inch shells, 6,472 8-inch shells, and 15,251 5-inch shells were fired. As far as the Americans were concerned, so intense was the bombardment that they wouldn’t have been surprised if the island had simply ceased to exist. But the aerial photographs taken by reconnaissance planes told a different story: the 450 defense positions that had been in place when the bombardment started had increased to 750 just before the landings.
After the war, in his book The Great Sea War, Nimitz said:
The Seventh Air Force B-24 squadron based in the Mariana Islands carried out continuous air raids for 74 days in preparation for the coming assault. These air raids only served to make the Japanese even more industrious in their efforts to complete their underground defenses….
The Marine commanders were well-known for their toughness and experience but they were flabbergasted when they saw the meticulous preparations of Kuribayashi’s garrison in the aerial photographs.
Despite their lack of materials and drinking water, the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima had built a defense network strong enough to make the frontline commanders of the U.S. forces anxious.
The Americans nonetheless believed that five days would be enough to conquer the island.
On February 16, three days before the invasion, a press conference for seventy war correspondents was held on the command ship USS Eldorado. Marine Brigadier General William W. Rogers predicted that the Japanese army would put up a strong initial defense at the beach in an effort to keep the Americans from landing. He also said that the Japanese were sure to make a coordinated nighttime counterattack—a banzai charge ending in certain death—some time in the first night after the landing. The Japanese that the marines had fought so far in the Pacific had all followed that pattern up until now.
The Americans expected to take high casualties on the beach, but thought that if they could stick it out, everything would go their way.
The Americans were wrong.
From February 16 to February 18, the American forces pummeled Iwo Jima with naval guns and with planes, in preparation for the landing. After the war, Takahashi Toshiharu, a survivor who served as corporal in the First Mixed Brigade of Engineers, wrote a faithful account of his experiences on Iwo Jima based on his diary and notes. He wanted to forget what had happened to him on the island, but he also felt that it would be wrong to just consign it to oblivion. Of the 278 people in his unit, only 13 survived.
After Takahashi died in 1986, the notebook in which he had written his account was left in the hands of his family. It includes a description of the awesome three-day naval bombardment.
The guns that were trained on the island all spurted fire at the same time. On the island there was a huge earthquake.
There were pillars of fire that looked as if they would touch the sky. Black smoke covered the island, and shrapnel was flying all over the place with a shrieking sound. Trees with trunks one meter across were blown out of the ground, roots uppermost. The sound was deafening, as terrible as a couple of hundred thunderclaps coming down at once.
Even in a cave thirty meters underground, my body was jerked up off the ground. It was hell on earth.
The naval barrage was followed by a truly apocalyptic air raid. The explosions were so fierce that a quarter of the summit of Mount Suri-bachi was blown off.
Next, large planes—many tens of them—came all together. They made a deep rumbling sound as they came. They were silver. Once over the island they dropped one-ton bombs— terrifying things. The sound they made as they fell, one after another, was terrifying. A timid man would go insane.
They made a whistling sound as they fell. Then the earth shook. There were explosions. Rocks, earth, and sand all flew up into the air. Then they fell back down. They made craters ten meters wide and five meters deep in the earth.
No one could survive in these conditions. Any Japanese soldiers, like the runners who went outside, were all killed. The only option was to take advantage of the night and go out then.
With the advent of night, the Japanese came up to the surface and repaired their defenses. When the American ships fired off flares, they would again take refuge in their underground shelters, only to crawl out when darkness returned.
After three days in which the Japanese had endured a bombardment fierce enough to shake the whole island, the day finally arrived: D-day, the day the invasion started.
3:00 a.m., February 19: The beating of the wake-up gong rouses the marines. Breakfast is steak and eggs, the traditional D-Day menu.
6:30 a.m.: The order is given for the landing force to land. The first of the landing craft is lowered into the sea.
6:40 a.m.: The final prelanding naval bombardment begins. Eight battleships, nineteen cruisers, and forty-four destroyers start firing their guns at the same time.
8:05 a.m.: Fighter planes take off from the carriers. A total of seventy-two planes take part in the attack; the navy fighters are Corsairs and Hellcats, the bombers are Dauntless dive bombers. Once they’re back, the forty-eight planes of the marine squadron go up into the air for their turn.
8:25 a.m.: The naval barrage resumes. The scale of this day’s naval bombardment surpasses the Normandy landings to become the biggest in the whole of World War II.
Such was the unbridled ferocity of the bombardment that clouds of dust and debris shot up eight meters in the air. In Iwo Jima: Legacy of Valor, Bill D. Ross, a former marine sergeant combat correspondent attached to the Third Marine Division, described the reactions of the marines who were looking at the island from the sea.
Men on the jammed decks of transports, others in Higgins boats or in amtracs disgorged from LSTs, watched and wondered how any Japanese could survive.
In a similar vein, James Bradley, who interviewed many marine veterans for his book, has the following episode in Flags of Our Fathers:
In these final moments, eighteen-year-old Jim Buchanan of Portland, Oregon, could still view the bombing as a beautiful tableau, like in a movie; the island nearly invisible beneath clouds of gray, yellow, and white dust from all the rockets and bombs. He turned to his buddy, a kid named Scotty, and asked hopefully: “Do you think there will be any Japanese left for us?”
Was it possible that there were any living, breathing people left on the island, which now looked like a burned steak? The marines had a sense that maybe, just maybe, the landing would go off more easily than they expected.
They could not have been more wrong.
/>
H HOUR (THE TIME FOR THE ACTUAL LANDING) was set for 9:00 a.m. on the dot. At 9:02, two minutes behind schedule, the first landing craft hit the beach.
As Kuribayashi had predicted, the landing point was the beach on the south coast of the island. The Japanese allowed the landing operation to go ahead without offering the slightest resistance. Only after 10 a.m., when the beach was jam-packed with marines, supplies, and munitions, did they start their attack. Shells and gunfire rained down onto the beach, while antiaircraft guns and artillery, their barrels lowered, began to pick off the landing craft.
It was funshinhô—rocket guns—that wreaked the greatest havoc. They fired self-propelled shells, and unlike large pieces of artillery, they did not need large launching frames so they could be transported and assembled with ease. The Japanese had been using rocket guns in combat in the South Seas since 1943. They were among the most deadly and effective weapons that Kuribayashi was given by the military central command, and they were a major factor in the robust resistance of the Iwo Jima garrison.
The black sand on the southern beaches was soft volcanic cinders, and the ground was broken into a series of terraces. The marines who had come ashore sank in up to their ankles with every step they took, and with their feet bogging down in sand with the texture of coffee beans, getting beyond the terraces proved difficult. The beach looked like rush hour with all the marines milling about.
Artillery fire came cascading down on them relentlessly. The beach offered no cover and digging trenches was impossible. The Americans could move neither forward nor back, and the casualties mounted. Such was the power of the rocket guns that a direct hit would literally blow someone to bits. The gruesome carnage struck terror into the Americans, and for a short time the beach was a scene of panic and chaos.
So Sad to Fall in Battle Page 11