As they crossed the Japanese coastline, the overcast began to break up. Through gaps in the clouds they caught their first glimpses of enemy soil—a snow-covered landscape of hills, rice terraces, and clusters of dark tiled rooftops. McWhorter spotted a Japanese Zero above and to his left. Ignoring the preflight instructions to remain in formation, he banked hard left and gave chase. The enemy plane, evidently not keen to fight, turned away and dove toward the clouds. But the lightly built Zero could not match the Hellcat’s speed in a dive, and McWhorter quickly overtook his quarry. He fired one long burst into the Zero’s engine and wings. It was trailing fire and smoke as it disappeared into the overcast.
Southern Tokyo was socked in, so most of the attacking squadrons diverted to their secondary targets. Diving through gaps in the clouds, they hit airfields north and east of the city. Hellcats fired salvos of 5-inch high-velocity air-to-ground rockets, striking hangars, machine shops, and parked planes. Then they banked and returned for low-altitude strafing runs. Hundreds of Japanese planes were airborne, but many showed little appetite for combat, and weaved in and out of clouds to avoid their pursuers. Evidently, they had taken off only to avoid being destroyed on the ground.
Off the coast, visibility remained poor, and the returning pilots were obliged to follow their respective carriers’ YE/ZB radio homing beacons. Descending through solid overcast, eyes fixed on the instruments in their cockpit panels, many of the young rookies gave silent thanks for the long hours they had logged in the Link Trainer and flying “under the hood” of their training aircraft. The Task Force 58 commanders had expected heavy operational losses, but only thirty-six airplanes failed to return on February 16. Some of those that did return had been badly shot up. One Grumman Hellcat had lost about ten feet of its port wing, but still managed to make a perfect recovery. On the Randolph, sailors clustered around a badly chewed-up Hellcat and marveled at the punishment it had suffered. They counted fifty-four bullet holes in one wing, and “the fuselage appeared as though it had been used for target practice, target practice for the Japs.”23
At first light on the seventeenth, the weather had improved only slightly from the previous day, with intermittent rain showers and a cloud ceiling ranging from 300 to 700 feet. Spruance authorized the morning fighter sweep, but told Mitscher that he expected conditions to remain unfavorable and “if early operations for the day were considered unprofitable, we should retire in order to support the landings at Iwo Jima.”24
The skies over Tokyo were clearer than on the previous day, and Japanese air defenses were on full alert. Air Group Twelve, flying in a single large “vee of vee” formation, was tracked by about a dozen Japanese fighters. The air group leader, Commander Charlie Crommelin, told his fighters to stay in formation; their priority was to deliver the Helldivers and Avengers to their primary target, the Tachikawa plant in Tama. Dive-bombers hit the complex with fifty 500-pound bombs; the Hellcats added another forty-two aerial rockets. The installations at the heart of the complex were reduced to a seething mass of flames. Ensign John Morris, an SB2C pilot, pulled out of his dive and flew a treetop escape route, which seemed safer than climbing back to altitude where the antiaircraft fire was more intense. He flew low over Tokyo Bay, “jinking left and right and up and down. We strafed any ships that happened to be along our flight path, but we didn’t go out of our way looking for something.”25 He returned safely to the Randolph.
At Konoike Airfield, northeast of Tokyo, a dozen Mitsubishi G4M bombers were lined up wingtip to wingtip on the flight line. Konoike was an “Oka” (manned suicide missile) training center, and the bombers were the mother planes that carried and dropped the little rocket-propelled suicide craft. The G4Ms were fully fueled up, as they had been scheduled to fly a training exercise that morning. A squadron of Corsairs flew a low strafing run over the field and riddled the parked planes with .50-caliber incendiary fire. All twelve of the Mitsubishis were destroyed on the ground. One of the Japanese trainee pilots recalled: “The flames lit up everything. Everything that had been bluish-gray a second before was now yellow and orange. If the scene hadn’t been so horrible, I would be tempted to call it beautiful.”26
At 11:00 a.m., Spruance pulled the plug. He told Mitscher to recover all planes and retire to support the landings on Iwo Jima. By 4:00 that afternoon, the task force was speeding away to the south.
Despite the challenges presented by the weather, the Tokyo raids had been a smashing success. Task Force 58 airmen had shot down about one hundred Japanese planes and destroyed another 150 on the ground. Many critical airfield installations and air depots were left in smoking ruins. The carrier bombers had taken the Tachikawa plant off line and demolished about 60 percent of the structures at the Nakajima airframe plant in Ota. Task Force 58 had lost sixty carrier planes in combat and twenty-eight in operations, but the carriers and screening ships were unscratched. The strikes were held up by naval aviators as Exhibit A in their ongoing meta-argument with the USAAF. The navy had argued that dive bombing and low-altitude strafing and rocket attacks could hit targets on the ground more reliably than the high-altitude precision bombing practiced by the Superfortresses. The results at the Tachikawa and Nakajima plants appeared to justify their claims. Mitscher probably had that interservice debate in mind when he called the two-day attack “the greatest air victory of the war for carrier aviation.”27 Task Force 58 (and 38) would return again and again to hit Tokyo and other points in Japan with increasing frequency and ferocity, literally until the last day of the war.
More than half of the fighter pilots who had flown the February 16–17 strikes had had no prior air combat experience. They had acquitted themselves like veterans. Mitscher’s action report concluded: “Too much credit cannot be given to the naval aviation training organization and its methods.”28
THE BOMBARDMENT FORCE, which had arrived off Iwo Jima the same day the carrier planes hit Tokyo, buried the island under an avalanche of high-explosive shells. Wrapped in a shroud of smoke and flame, nothing of Iwo Jima could be seen from the fleet, except (sporadically) the peak of Mt. Suribachi. The projectiles arced toward the island in parabolic trajectories, high and low, according to the caliber of the gun and the distance that each warship lay offshore. The successive explosions merged into a solitary, unbroken roar. Men watching from the rails of the ships felt the blast concussions in their viscera. Warm puffs of wind caused their shirts to flutter against their chests. A formation of B-24s soared overhead, and diagonal glints of steel fell away from their open bomb bays. A series of explosions walked across the heart of the island, and spikes of orange and yellow flame shot above the boiling smoke and dust.29 War correspondent Bob Sherrod, who had witnessed the landings on Tarawa, Kwajalein, and Saipan, called it “more terrifying than any other similar spectacle I had ever seen.”30
The troopships of Task Force 53, embarking the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions, arrived after midnight on D-Day. Minesweepers had cleared the lanes to the beaches, and the frogmen of the underwater demolition teams (UDT) mapped the sea bottom and demolished all obstacles placed there to deter landing craft. As usual in such operations, the assault troops had a front row seat for the climax of the preinvasion bombing and bombardment. To Lieutenant Ronald D. Thomas of the 5th Marine Division, “It didn’t seem possible that anything could be alive. The dive-bombers filled the sky and as they dove, the place was a big dust bowl.”31
The invasion force carried 111,000 troops, including 75,000 troops in the landing force (nearly all of whom were marines) and another 36,000 in the army garrison force. The transports and landing ships carried 98,000 tons of supplies. Many of the smaller amphibious landing craft, such as the amtracs (LVTs) and amphibious trucks (DUKWs), had been preloaded in Pearl Harbor with rations, ammunition, fuel, and other supplies. Surface warships that had been lent to MacArthur’s Seventh Fleet for the Luzon invasion had been obliged to hurry north in time for Iwo Jima. The West Virginia, for example, had put into Ulithi Atoll on February 16, afte
r thirty-five straight days in Lingayen Gulf. She was fueled and loaded in twenty-four hours. The venerable old battleship, a resurrected survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor, made the 900-mile run to Iwo Jima in fifty hours, her best speed. Arriving off the island at 10:30 a.m. on D-Day (February 19), an hour and a half after the invasion had started, she provided counterbattery and call fire for eleven straight days, exhausting all of her 16-inch ammunition.
As awesome as the naval bombardment seemed, it fell far short of what the marines had wanted. While planning Operation DETACHMENT, Major General Harry Schmidt had requested a minimum of ten consecutive days’ bombardment before landing. He had been backed by Lieutenant Colonel Donald M. Weller, the naval gunfire officer on Admiral Turner’s staff, who had made a systematic study of the effects of naval gunfire on Tarawa, Saipan, and Peleliu. Targeting and firepower were important, said Weller—but the time duration of shore bombardment was an equally critical factor. Nothing compared with day after day of relentless big-gun shelling of defensive positions ashore. But Schmidt’s request was rejected by Turner as logistically unworkable; the navy had never attempted such a prolonged bombardment. After several rounds of arguments and bargaining, Admiral Spruance had ruled that the island would receive three days’ bombardment before D-Day. In explaining his decision, he referred to the risk of submarine and air counterattacks on the stationary fleet, and the difficulties involved in replenishing ammunition at sea. Lieutenant General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, the top marine in the Pacific, later vented in his postwar memoir: “We had to haggle like horse traders, balancing irreplaceable lives against replaceable ammunition. I was never so depressed in my life.”32
The command lineup was largely unchanged from that of prior operations in the Gilberts, the Marshalls, and the Marianas. Spruance remained the big boss afloat, in charge of the entire Fifth Fleet, with Mitscher as commander of Task Force 58. Admiral Turner commanded the Amphibious Expeditionary Force, as he had done since the Tarawa operation sixteen months earlier; and in that role he gave orders to the marine ground commanders, as he had done before. Smith commanded the expeditionary troops, comprising the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions and an army garrison force that would land after the island was secured. But Smith would not command the Fifth Amphibious Corps (VAC) directly, as he had done in prior operations; that job would fall to General Schmidt. This arrangement, which raised eyebrows among many of the subordinate field commanders, inserted a new layer into the tried-and-true command table. Smith was shoehorned between Schmidt and Turner, even though Schmidt would really be doing the same job that Smith had done in previous operations. The sixty-two-year-old Smith was facing mandatory retirement from frontline service, and Iwo Jima would be his last battle. As the only senior marine with a track record of working effectively with the irascible Kelly Turner, his job was to remain aboard the admiral’s command ship Eldorado, representing the views and safeguarding the interests of the Marine Corps, while Schmidt went ashore and oversaw the battle on the ground.
Turner was considered irreplaceable, the leading amphibious warfare expert in the U.S. armed forces—and therefore, the world—but he did not always play nicely with others. It was an open secret that Turner had been drinking heavily every night—even while on duty at sea, in violation of standing regulations. “Admiral Turner had great difficulty with liquor,” said Charles F. Barber, flag secretary to Spruance. “And yet he had a great capacity to be inoperative at night and fully operational in the morning. . . . Admiral Spruance stayed with him and valued his services.”33
The 4th and 5th Marine Divisions would land on the island’s southeast beaches. The 4th Division would drive directly inland to take control of the larger of the two airfields, Motoyama No. 1, and then turn north to take Airfield No. 2. The 5th Division would push across the relatively narrow and flat neck of the island, and then turn south to isolate and seize Mt. Suribachi. Once the volcano was in U.S. hands, the 5th Division would advance north up the west coast and form a continuous line across the island with the 4th Division. The 3rd Marine Division would be held aboard the transports offshore as a floating reserve, but Schmidt and Smith expected that it would probably be summoned ashore on the third or fourth day of the battle, to be inserted into the middle of the line. Then the three marine divisions would drive north in a line abreast to overwhelm Japanese defenses in the Motoyama Plateau.
No one expected a walkover. The Americans were braced for a bloodbath on Iwo Jima. In a press conference a week before D-Day, Admiral Turner had told the correspondents: “Iwo Jima is as well defended as any other fixed position in the world today.”34 Another officer judged that storming Gibraltar would be easier. General Smith expected his assault forces to suffer a minimum of 15,000 casualties. The fleet had converted four tank-landing ships (LSTs) into floating medical triage centers, where wounded men would be assessed and treated before being evacuated to the hospital ships Samaritan or Solace. The hospital ships would shuttle casualties back to Saipan and Guam, where 5,000 beds were available in newly built army and navy hospitals. As soon as the airfields on Iwo Jima were made available, Douglas Skymaster “Flying Ambulances” would evacuate the most gravely wounded men to the Marianas, or even directly to Oahu.
On the transports, the first-wave marines climbed down the rope-nets into the Higgins boats and amtracs. The flat-bottomed landing craft pitched and plunged on the rolling swell, and each man had to time his last step carefully, letting go when the boat was at the height of its motion. There were a number of “rough dismounts,” as marines lost their footing and went sprawling into the bottom of the boats.35 Picking themselves up, they took their seats on benches, huddled closely to make room for the others coming down the nets.
Conditions were about as favorable as one could hope for. The wind was moderate, from the northwest, and the sea was as calm as it had been in the three days since the advance elements of the task force had arrived. The naval barrage ascended in pitch, and the 16-inch battleship shells rumbled overhead, sounding like freight trains passing through a tunnel. At least a few Japanese shore batteries were firing back, because whitewater towers erupted periodically around the transport group as the first wave boats assembled behind the line of debarkation. At 8:40 a.m., at the sound of a horn, the coxswains opened their throttles and started their long run into the beach. The boats bucked and reared through the swells, so that from the point of view of those watching from the rails of the transports, they seemed to disappear entirely into the sea before rising to become visible again. It was a rough ride. Men struggled against seasickness, their tailbones bumping uncomfortably on the wooden benches, their dungarees soaked and their eyes stinging from the cold salt spray. Passing the cannonading warships, they felt the blast concussions radiating from the big naval guns. As Lieutenant Thomas’s boat passed near the battleship Tennessee, he noted that the sea directly beneath the muzzles was flattened and smoothed each time the weapons fired.36
As the boats drew closer to Iwo Jima, the steep, sable-colored beach loomed ahead. On the terraces at the top of the beach, a row of wrecked Japanese aircraft marked the southern end of Airfield No. 1. Towers of whitewater erupted among the incoming boats, as the Japanese mortars opened fire. The marines heard the rattle of Japanese machine gun fire and the deeper reports of heavier caliber weapons. Two files of F4U Corsairs flew low over the beach, strafing the pillboxes just inland of the terraces. These were Marine Fighter Squadrons 124 and 213, flying from the carrier Essex—the first Marine Corps aircraft that most of the infantrymen had ever seen. They approached on opposite headings from north and south, then peeled off at the last moment before colliding, to east and west—a “razzle-dazzle” maneuver, as the marine air coordinator recalled, which might have been “more spectacular than effective.”37 One Corsair took a direct flak hit, burst into flames, and crashed in the sea.
Nearing the beach, the coxswains struggled to keep the little flat-bottomed craft from broaching. Six-foot waves lif
ted the boats and set them down hard, with a crunch of coarse sand under the hull. The ramps dropped with a bang and the marines trudged up the steep-sided beach. It was a hard climb. The “sand” under their boots was soft volcanic cinder, and their boots sunk to the laces. On the steeper sections, they found themselves slipping and sliding backward. A rifleman with the 4th Marine Division said it was like “trying to run in loose coffee grounds.”38
At first, the situation on the landing beaches seemed manageable. Unit commanders ashore radioed encouraging reports: “Light machine gun and mortar fire. . . . Light opposition on the beach. . . . Only sporadic bursts of mortar fire.”39 Colored flares went up, signaling a successful landing, and the second and third waves of boats followed quickly behind the first. On the Green and Red Beaches, at the southern end of the beachhead, the assault troops overran enemy blockhouses and pillboxes and advanced inland to a distance of 300 yards, taking only minimal losses. Some speculated that the naval barrage and air support had done the trick; Holland Smith guessed that the Japanese “lay stunned under the terrific explosive shock of our naval gunfire.”40 In the first ninety minutes of the battle for Iwo Jima, the marines put eight battalions ashore, including two tank battalions and elements of two artillery battalions.
The hardest fighting that morning was in the craggy terrain at the far northern flank, above Blue Beach 2, in an area the marines called the “Rock Quarry.” Here the gorges and rock faces were seemingly impervious even to direct hits by 1,000-pound bombs and large-caliber naval weapons. The terrain had been improved with prolific use of concrete and rebar, and all possible approach lanes were swept by machine guns. From the moment they landed, the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines were under punishing machine gun and mortar fire. As they advanced over the first terrace, they drew a crossfire from pillboxes inland and to the south. To Lieutenant Colonel Justice M. Chambers, the battalion commander, the Japanese seemed to be targeting them from every direction: “You could have held a cigarette and lit it on the stuff going by. I knew immediately we were in for one hell of a time.”41 The Rock Quarry was the hinge upon which the entire U.S. line would turn. The 25th Marines had a critical job to do, and they knew it. They could do nothing but take the casualties and keep fighting, so they did.
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