Twilight of the Gods
Page 65
Schmidt called in the rest of his floating reserve: the 3rd Marine Division (less one regiment), commanded by Major General Graves B. Erskine. This veteran outfit was inserted into the center of the line, with the 5th Division on its left and the 4th on its right—and assigned the tough task of driving directly north through the remains of Motoyama Village and the unfinished Airfield No. 3, up into the tableland at the center of the Motoyama Plateau. Schmidt ordered that 50 percent of VAC artillery fire be directed into this area, with the remaining 50 percent to be divided equally between the flanks facing the 4th and 5th Divisions. With three divisions abreast, the renewed northward offensive was commenced on D plus 5, one day after the flag-raising on Suribachi.
The Americans possessed a three-to-one advantage in troop strength over the defenders, a ten-to-one advantage in artillery firepower (if the naval guns were counted), and total control of the air. But Kuribayashi’s ingenious subterranean defenses effectively vitiated those advantages. Often the tanks had to be left behind, at least in the first stages of an attack, because all routes up to higher terraces had been heavily mined or blocked by tank traps. The infantry led the way, attacking with small arms, flamethrowers, and demolitions. In the center of the line, the 3rd Division took heavy casualties as it drove into some of the most heavily fortified ground anywhere in the Pacific.
For men on the line, the din of battle was inescapable. The rattle of machine gun fire and the ululating roar of artillery and mortars never paused. They kept their heads down, knowing that Japanese snipers posted in higher ground were constantly watching through their rifle scopes. The Japanese even sniped with their larger weapons, particularly their 47mm antitank guns, which could be aimed accurately enough to hit a single man at several hundred feet range. With so many heavy weapons firing, men became fatalistic about mere rifle shots, and even demonstrated their indifference when the bullets snapped through the air nearby. Captain William Ketcham of I Company, 24th Marines, was hit in one arm and one leg, but after having the limbs bandaged, he remained on the line with his company. He scoffed: “Shot at me twelve times and barely broke the skin with two bullets.”57
The infantrymen learned to hate the island almost as much as they hated the enemy. Iwo Jima was “ghastly,” recalled Ted Allenby of the 4th Marine Division: “It was almost like a piece of the moon that had dropped down to earth.”58 Digging into the ground for protection against the relentless enemy fire, the marines released vents of foul sulfurous steam. The sulfur merged sickeningly with the odor of burning and rotting flesh, a stench that could not be escaped anywhere on the island. Land crabs emerged from the cinders at the bottom of their foxholes and scuttled across their bodies as they tried to sleep. Fine volcanic dust, stirred up by wind and explosions, got into men’s eyes, ears, noses, and mouths. The ground was warm to the touch, and it grew warmer the deeper they dug. Elton Shrode buried his canned rations in the ground at the bottom of his foxhole. Half an hour later, he dug up the can and “would have a steaming hot C-ration to consume. This was the only advantage that I could come up with for this miserable rock.”59
With about 80,000 troops concentrated into less than eight square miles, Iwo Jima was one of the most densely populated battlefields in history. Given the amount of firepower on both sides, the carnage was hideous. The worst of it was on the front lines, but there was really no such thing as a rear area on Iwo Jima. Each combatant had the power to direct heavy artillery and mortar fire to any location on the island; consequently, everywhere on the island was in one sense the front line. Rolling barrages raked the beaches, the foxholes, and the command posts. Letups were brief. The marines grudgingly praised their enemy’s diabolical skill. “The Japanese were superb artillerymen,” said Colonel Stewart: “Somebody was getting hit every time they fired.” There was no safe ground, no rear area, and—for the Americans—little natural cover. General Schmidt’s VAC headquarters, a short distance north of Mt. Suribachi, was a cluster of tents surrounded by sandbags. According to Colonel Edward Craig, Schmidt’s operations officer, the post came under intermittent heavy shelling throughout the battle. The sandbag embankments grew steadily higher, but the concussions were still a terror. Whenever it started up, Craig recalled, “we were three-deep on the floor of a small C.P. tent, and there we remained until it stopped.”60 Half a mile north, at the 4th Marine Division command post, the huge 320mm spigot mortars crashed down on every side, the sky glowed an unearthly red, and a fine mist of ash particles hung in the air. The marine howitzers and the warships offshore answered with counter-barrages, but the Japanese seemed unfazed, and their heavy weapons kept at it with undiminished ferocity.
The headquarters remained in touch with the division commands and the front lines by radio or message runners. Insights offered by regimental and company commanders influenced the tactical decisions of General Schmidt and his staff. Many officers and NCOs in the VAC and division CPs were detached for combat duty and sent forward to replace those killed or wounded in action. The wounded were transported south in jeep “ambulances” or by hand-carried stretchers. Trucks, tanks, and bulldozers headed north. Mines were buried all over the island, posing an omnipresent peril. Marines walking along tracks learned to take care to set their boots into the treads made by vehicles. Large antitank mines were buried deep, so that the minesweeping teams did not always find them. They were triggered when a tank or another heavy vehicle passed over. Shrode saw it happen to a heavy DS Cat bulldozer that was widening a road south of the No. 2 Airfield. “There was a terrible explosion and the DS disappeared right in front of my eyes, so I ran for cover. Pieces of that tractor rained down all over the area. Some of those parts weighed at least a thousand pounds. The driver, God rest his soul, landed about ten yards from me.”61
In the first five days of the battle, the marines suffered an average of more than 1,200 casualties per day. The beaches and the flat terrain around the airfields were strewn with dead. Shell craters left records of direct hits; some contained the mashed-up remains of ten or twelve marines. Exploring the terraces above Red Beach, Bob Sherrod observed: “Nowhere in the Pacific War had I seen such badly mangled bodies. Many were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay fifty feet away from any body. In one spot on the sand, far from the nearest cluster of dead, I saw a string of guts 15 feet long.”62 Losses were proportionally higher among officers and NCOs. Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone, a nationally famous marine who had received the Medal of Honor for his heroics on Guadalcanal, was killed on D-Day as he led his men onto Motoyama Airfield No. 1.
Armored bulldozers were digging long trenches to serve as mass graves. “We buried fifty at a time in bulldozed plots,” said Chaplain Gage Hotaling. “We didn’t know if they were Jewish, Catholic or whatever, so we said a general committal: ‘We commit you into the earth and the mercy of Almighty God.’ ”63
Warships patrolled off the coast, the destroyers and gunboats close inshore and the cruisers and battleships farther in the offing. Marine coordinators on the front lines could call down accurate naval gunfire on any target, via an open radio net linking them to gunnery officers on the ships. The ships often fired by radar direction alone, as the crews simply entered coordinates into the fire directors. The navy’s guns could not always be employed to good effect on Iwo Jima, because of the close proximity of friendly and enemy troops. Nevertheless, as Admiral Turner reported, there were an “unprecedented number” of naval call fire missions during the operation. High-explosive shells ranging in caliber from 16-inch to 5-inch rained down upon targets across the Motoyama tablelands. Small gunboats—modified landing craft armed with rockets, light mortars, and 20mm guns—patrolled close inshore around the northwestern part of the island, delivering harassing fire on enemy positions. They also deterred movements of Japanese troops along the shores, and intercepted boats attempting to land from Chichi Jima or other islands to the north.
On the destroyer Howorth, the voice of a marine officer ashore was broadcast through the shi
p’s loudspeakers, so that every man aboard could follow the action. Because the island was often obscured by smoke and dust, the crew could rarely see their 5-inch salvos strike home. Yeoman James Orvill Raines felt proud when the voice on the radio link confirmed that the Howorth was hitting her assigned targets: “Look at those bastards run!” And later, “It might interest you to know your shooting is very good. The results are very gratifying.” Raines peered through binoculars, trying to make out what was happening ashore. When the smoke cleared, he caught a glimpse of a Sherman tank advancing into heavy machine gun fire, with an infantry squad crouching behind it. In a letter to his wife, Raines wrote that he was thrilled to know that the Howorth’s guns were hitting the enemy. “I’m glad, in spite of the sacrifice I feel that you and I are making, that I had something to do with killing some of them. I feel really grand about it. I get a special kick out of killing them. I only wish I were in close enough to see their bodies and parts of bodies go sky high when our shells hit.” On the other hand, Raines admitted that he preferred to watch the action from his relatively safe vantage point on the Howorth: “You couldn’t have dragged me on the beach with a winch.”64
The Japanese air response to the invasion of Iwo Jima was fairly weak, due to a combination of inclement weather and Task Force 58’s suppressing airstrikes on Tokyo airfields. Few Japanese warplanes appeared over the island, and when they did, most were quickly downed by the U.S. carrier fighters patrolling overhead. Only one massed kamikaze attack was attempted. At twilight on February 21 (D plus 2), about fifty twin-engine Mitsubishi G4Ms accompanied by Zeros attacked the fleet in the offing. The carrier Saratoga was hit by three planes, suffering casualties of 123 killed and 192 wounded, and was forced to return to Pearl Harbor for repairs. The escort carrier Bismarck Sea was hit aft by a suicide plane, causing fatal secondary explosions in her hangar. Her fires burned out of control, and she rolled over and sank, taking 218 officers and men down with her. A second CVE, the Lunga Point, was slightly damaged after fighting off four kamikazes. A cargo ship and an LST were also hit and badly damaged.
U.S. ground forces on the island never lacked for close air support. Bombing, reconnaissance, and strafing missions were flown by aircraft of three services—the navy, the marines, and the Army Air Forces. At times, American warplanes were so thick over Iwo Jima that collisions appeared inevitable. Hour after hour, formations of Grummans, Voughts, and Curtiss bombers winged in from the carriers, sun flashing off their wings. The dive-bombers plunged down at 70-degree angles and released their bombs on unseen targets behind enemy lines, causing spurts of flame to leap up from boiling masses of smoke and dust. Low-flying fighters walked .50-caliber tracers across Japanese gun emplacements, or fired 5-inch rockets from 2,000 feet altitude. The flyboys put on an impressive show, the marines agreed. But the effectiveness of strafing, bombing, and rocketry was limited by the same factors that dogged naval gunfire. Much of it had little effect on the island’s brawny caves and sunken casemates, and the pilots were wary of hitting friendly troops—as well they should have been, given the nearness of the opposing lines. The carrier planes provided other useful services, of course, such as aerial spotting for artillery, and deterring Japanese troops from moving over open ground. But the tactical situation on Iwo Jima called for unprecedented teamwork between ground forces and aircrews, a paradigm that took time and experience to refine.
Colonel Vernon E. Megee, the marine air coordinator, came ashore on February 24. He set up his communications tent in the VAC complex north of Suribachi. Eventually he would take over as air commander, Iwo Jima. Megee pioneered a system in which air liaison officers on the front lines could call down airstrikes on Japanese positions as close as 300 yards away. Marine tactical observers flew in the rear cockpits of TBM Avengers, with open radio links to artillery battalions on the ground. Japanese antiaircraft fire was generally moderate, but it burst forth at unexpected times and places. In the course of the month-long battle, it claimed twenty-six American planes destroyed and nine seriously damaged.
On March 6, the USAAF’s Fifteenth Fighter Group—including a contingent of P-51s (Mustangs) and P-61s (Black Widows)—flew into Airfield No. 1. The army airmen had not been trained for close support of ground combat operations, but they were crackerjack pilots with an “eager-beaver attitude,” and they were willing to try whatever Megee asked them to do. The P-51s had the horsepower to carry and deliver 1,000-pound bombs, which had much greater effect than 500-pounders against the sandstone pumice of Iwo’s rocky northern heights. Approaching their targets in a 45-degree glide, the Mustangs flew parallel to the front lines, in order to reduce the risk of misses that would endanger the marines. Half-ton bombs with delayed-action fuses, when dropped into enclosed canyons or recesses in the rocky terrain, exploded with amplified destructive force. In a few memorable instances, said Megee, a bomb dropped by a P-51 “blew the sides of entire cliffs into the ocean, exposing enemy caves and tunnels to direct fire from the sea.”65
When talking to battalion and regimental commanders, Megee stressed that the 1,000-pounders posed a serious hazard to their troops, especially in case of a wide miss in the direction of U.S. lines. As a rule of thumb, he proposed that target distances should be one yard for every pound of bomb, meaning that the 1,000-pounders should be aimed at targets no less than 1,000 yards from the marines: “A 1000-pound bomb going off two or three hundred yards in front of you is no toy.” But the 4th Marine Division, engaged in a bitter, bloody struggle against cave fortifications on the northeast coast of the island, wanted the Mustangs to hit enemy positions directly opposite their lines. One battalion commander told Megee, “Well, you can’t hurt us any worse than we’re being hurt.” With a radio link directly to the cockpits, the marines would take cover just before the bombs were released. “So I went up there and ran all these strikes,” Megee said, “and we jarred the back teeth of a lot of people, including mine, but we didn’t hurt anybody but Japs.”66
GENERAL SCHMIDT’S TEN-DAY VICTORY FORECAST had been far too optimistic. On Sunday, March 4—the two-week mark—major combat remained as intense as it had been at any point in the campaign. The marines held about two-thirds of Iwo Jima, including all three airfields, and had smashed through Kuribayashi’s outer line of defenses on the Motoyama Plateau. V Amphibious Corps had taken 13,000 casualties, including 3,000 dead. The worst-hit units had lost their commanders, their officers, and their NCOs, and then adjusted to the arrival of new commanders, officers, and NCOs, and then lost the replacements. On the eastern anchor of the lines, the 4th Marine Division finally overran the craggy coastal inlet they called the “Amphitheater.” The 5th Marine Division on the west was driving toward Nichi Ridge and Hill 362-B, and running into tough resistance in the rocky cliffs along the coast. In the center, the 3rd Marine Division had fought a punishing offensive into high, broken terrain, advancing by 3,000 yards in nine heartbreaking days. The dark, menacing shape of the “Motoyama honeycomb” loomed directly ahead. This zone of action was only about one square mile in area, but it included a thousand different cave or tunnel entrances to the sophisticated labyrinth that lay beneath.
To the south, in the plains around the airfields, rear-echelon troops were building an advanced operating base. Beach unloading was now progressing with little interference, except an occasional long-range mortar or artillery shell. A cemetery, marked by lengthening rows of white crosses, had been established in the shadow of the pockmarked slopes of Mt. Suribachi. The Seabees of the 133rd Naval Construction Battalion had erected six water distillation units. The energy-hungry machines converted saltwater into potable processed water, which was trucked to the front lines in five-gallon cans. By March 6, the distillers were producing enough drinking water to fill three canteens per marine on the island each day. Meanwhile, in the Japanese caves and bunkers, water stockpiles were rapidly diminishing and men were beginning to succumb to the ravages of thirst.
On March 4, the Superfortress Dinah Might (1st Squa
dron, 9th Bombardment Group) made an emergency landing at Motoyama No. 1, which the Americans had named South Field. Heavily damaged in a bombing mission over Japan, the aircraft would have been forced to ditch at sea if not for the runway on Iwo Jima. As it taxied to a stop and shut down its four engines, a crowd of perhaps two hundred marines and Seabees gathered around it. Photographers and a motion picture crew recorded the historic scene. The arrival of the big silver bomber was an unforgettable milestone in the campaign, and a timely boost to morale. It dramatized the larger purpose of the bloody island fight—to secure an airbase within easy striking range of Tokyo. A month later, P-51 Mustangs of VII Fighter Command would begin joining up with northbound formations of B-29s, providing fighter escort during their bombing missions. A squadron of navy B-24 (PB4Ys) patrol bombers would begin operating from Iwo Jima on March 16. While fighting still raged a mile and a half north, South Field was beginning to assume the appearance of a major working airbase.