World War II Pacific: Battles and Campaigns from Guadalcanal to Okinawa 1942-1945 (WW2 Pacific Military History Series)

by Daniel Wrinn

  Army units flew into Iwo on March 6 (D +15). The 15th Fighter Group arrived to escort B-29s over Tokyo. This group was a seasoned outfit that included the famous 47th Fighter Squadron and their P-51 Mustangs. While the army pilots had little to no experience in direct air support of ground troops, Colonel McGee was impressed with their “eager beaver attitude” and willingness to learn.

  McGee appreciated the fact the Mustangs could deliver thousand-pound bombs. He had the Army pilots trained on how to strike designated targets on nearby islands. In three days, they were ready for duty on Iwo. McGee instructed the Mustang pilots to arm their bombs with twelve-second delay fuses and attack parallel to the front lines approaching from a 45° angle.

  These tactics often produced stunning results—especially along the west coast—where the thousand-pound bombs blew sides of entire cliffs off into the ocean. This exposed enemy caves and tunnels to direct naval gunfire from the sea. According to McGee: “those Air Force boys did a lot of good.”

  The field medical support given to the assaulting Marines was a major contributor to victory on Iwo. Integrating chaplains, surgeons, and corpsmen within the FMF (Fleet Marine Force) paid valuable dividends. Most times, corpsmen were as tough and combat savvy as the Marines in that company. Wounded Marines knew their corpsman would move heaven and earth to reach them, bind their wounds, and start the long evacuation process.

  Marines on Iwo Jima echoed the views of Staff Sergeant Al Thomas: “we had outstanding corpsmen. They were our family.” The luxury of having first-rate medical help so close to the front took a terrible toll. Eight hundred twenty-seven corpsmen and twenty-three doctors were wounded or killed on Iwo Jima—a casualty rate twice as high as Saipan.

  Combat medical support was thoughtfully prepared and provided on Iwo. Past the crude aid stations and toward the rear, the Army and Navy field hospitals arose. Wounded Marines would receive treatment in a field hospital, then recuperate in a bunker before returning to the lines to often receive their second or third wound. The more seriously wounded were evacuated by air to Guam or to one of the several fully-staffed hospital ships operating around the clock. Within the first month of fighting on Iwo, 13,747 Marines and corpsmen casualties were evacuated by hospital ship and another 2,489 by airlift.

  When a Marine was wounded, the first few minutes were the most dangerous after going down. Enemy snipers had no hesitations about picking off corpsmen, litter crews, or even the wounded man himself as his buddies tried to slide him out of the fire.

  Corporal Ed Canter was a rocket truck crew chief in the 4th Marine Division. Rocket trucks always drew an angry barrage of counter-battery fire from the enemy. A Japanese sniper shot Canter through the stomach. Corporal Canter’s comrades knew they had to get him away from that launch site fast. As a nearby motion picture crew recorded the drama, four Marines carried Canter down a mud-covered hillside. They heard the scream of an incoming shell and dumped Canter while they took cover.

  The explosion killed the film crew and wounded each of the Marines, including Canter again. The film footage survived and appeared in US newsreels—before becoming a part of the movie Sands of Iwo Jima. Corporal Canter survived and was evacuated to a hospital ship and then to different hospitals in Guam and Hawaii before returning to the US. His war was over.

  The shore party personnel and beachmasters performed remarkable feats of logistics to keep the advancing divisions equipped and armed. The logistical management and sheer backbreaking work needed to maintain such a high volume of supplies and equipment moving over these dangerous beaches was hard to imagine. A single beach on the west coast became functional on D +11, but by that time, most of the landing force supplies were already ashore.

  The next day after the general unloading was completed, the vulnerable amphibious ships were released from their tether to the beachhead. Shortly after, well-aimed enemy fire detonated the 5th Marine Division’s entire ammo dump. Ammunition resupply became vital. Then, the ammunition ship Columbia Victory came under direct enemy fire as she approached the western beaches to unload. Waiting Marines held their breath as the Columbia Victory was nearly destroyed. She narrowly escaped, but the potential for disaster still loomed.

  An entire brigade of the 62nd Naval Construction Battalion (Seabees) extended and repaired the captured runways. Marines returning to the beaches from the northern highlands could scarcely recognize the place they’d first seen on D-Day. There were now over 80,000 Allied troops on the small island, and the Seabees had bulldozed a two-lane road to the top of Mount Suribachi.

  Communications had improved dramatically on Iwo compared to previous amphibious campaigns. Handsets and radios were now waterproof and had more frequencies. Forward observer teams used the backpack SCR-610, while companies and platoons preferred the walkie-talkie style SCR-300 or even lighter portables, the “Spam Can” SCR-536.

  Colonel Jim Berkeley, XO of the 27th Marines said: “On Iwo, we had near-perfect communications. It was all any commander could ask for.” Marines strung telephone lines between support units and four command posts as the battle raged, elevating the wire along upright posts to avoid damage by tracked vehicles.

  Enemy counterintelligence expected to have an easy day splicing into Allied phone lines, but Marines baffled them with Navajo code talkers. Each division employed twenty-four trained Navajos. The 5th Marine Division’s command post had six established Navajo networks on the island. No one throughout the war could ever crack the Navajo code.

  Black American troops played a major role in the capture of Iwo. Black troops drove army amphibious trucks and were active throughout the landing. Black Marines of the 8th Ammunition Company and the 36th Depot Company landed on D-Day and served as longshoremen on those chaotic, bloody beaches. The on-island Black Marines worked with the Shore Party and helped to sustain the momentum of the Allied northern drive. When the Japanese counterattacked penetrated these beach areas, Black Marines dropped their cargo, unslung their carbines, and engaged the enemy with well-disciplined fire.

  Colonel Leland Swindler commanded the V Amphibious Corps Shore Party: “the entire body of Black Marines under my command conducted themselves with marked coolness and courage and inflicted more casualties on the enemy than they sustained.”

  News coverage of the Iwo Jima battle was extensive. Dozens of combat correspondents were embedded with the landing force throughout the battle. Marine Sergeant “Dick” Dashiell was a writer for the Associated Press and assigned to the 3rd Marine Division. Although sometimes terrified and filled with horror, Dashiell endured and wrote eighty-one frontline stories and pounded out news releases on his portable typewriter at the edge of his foxhole. Dashiell’s eye for detail always caught the attention of the reader: “All is bitter. Frontal assault always uphill. A ceaseless wind filled the air with a fine volcanic grit.” He described how Marines had to stop and clean the grit from their weapons—and how naked that made most Marines feel.

  Occasionally, hot food was delivered to the exhausted Marines on the front lines. The deliveries of milk and fruit from nearby ships boosted morale. So did watching the crippled B-29s zoom in for an emergency landing. Sergeant “Doc” Lindsey was a squad leader in Company G, 2/25 Marines. He stated: “It was good to see them land. You knew they’d just come from hitting Tokyo.”

  Defiant to the End

  General Erskine caught pneumonia but refused to evacuate. His Chief of Staff, Colonel Robert Hogaboom, kept the war moving behind the scenes. The division continued its advance, and when Erskine recovered—Hogaboom adjusted accordingly. The two were an effective team.

  Erskine had long wanted to conduct a battalion-size night operation. It bothered him that throughout the war, the Allies had yielded the night to the Japanese. When Hill 362-C continued to thwart his advance, Erskine ordered a predawn assault without the trappings of preparatory fire, which always identified the time and place of attack.

  The honor of leading this unusual attack was put to Colonel
“Bing” Boehm, CO, 3/9 Marines. But this battalion was new to the sector and received their attack order too late to reconnoiter effectively. Absent of advance orientation, the battalion crossed the line of departure silently at 0500 and advanced toward Hill 362-C. The unit achieved total surprise. Before the sleepy Japanese knew it, the Marines swept across 500 yards of broken ground and roasted enemy outposts and strong points with flamethrowers.

  When daylight revealed that Boehm’s battalion had captured the wrong hill (Hill 362-C was still 250 yards distant), his battalion was surrounded by a sea of furious and wide-awake and counterattacking enemy infantry. Boehm redeployed his battalion and attacked toward the original hill. This was rough going and took most of the day, but before dark, the 3/9 Marines secured Hill 362-C—a main Japanese defensive anchor.

  The Allied positions grew stronger after General Senda’s counterattack against the 4th Marine Division. On D +18, a patrol from the 3rd Marine Division reached the northeast coast. The squad leader filled his canteen with saltwater and sent it to General Schmidt marked: “For Inspection, Not Consumption.”

  Schmidt welcomed the symbolism. The next day, the 4th Marine Division finally secured Turkey Knob and advanced toward The Amphitheater on the east coast. While the end was in sight, the intensity of the Japanese resistance did not fade. In the 5th Division’s western zone, the 2/26 reported a casualty rate of seventy percent. General Keller Rockey reported his Marines were: “in a state of extreme fatigue and exhaustion.”

  Division commanders looked to relieve their shot-up men. General Cates formed a provisional battalion in the 4th Marine Division under Colonel Melvin Krulewitch. He was ordered to attack bypassed enemy positions. While the term “mopping up” was used, it was considered inaccurate by many Allied troops. Countless pockets of Japanese held out—defiant and well-armed to the end. Rooting them out was never easy. Marines used pioneers, motor transport units, and amtracs, as light infantry units to strengthen frontline battalions and conduct combat patrols.

  In the extreme rear on Iwo Jima, the men had become overconfident. Movies were shown every night and ice cream could be found on the beach. Men swam in the surf and slept in tents in a deadly and false sense of security.

  To the north, Colonel Cushman’s 2/9 Marines were engaged in broken terrain east of the airfield. Marines ultimately encircled the enemy’s position, but the battle of “Cushman’s Pocket,” raged on. Cushman’s battalion commander reported the action: “The Jap position is a maze of pillboxes, caves, emplaced tanks, stonewalls, and trenches. We beat against them for eight continuous days using every support weapon. Our core objective in the sector still remains. Our battalion is exhausted, and most of our leaders are gone. Our battalion now numbers 387 with 350 replacements.”

  Cushman’s 2/9 was ultimately relieved by elements of the 9th and 21st Marines (equally exhausted) and had just as difficult of a time. General Erskine had no reserves. He ordered Cushman back into the pocket, and by March 16 (D +25), enemy resistance in the thicket of jumbled rocks ended.

  The 4th Marine Division poured over the hills in the east and secured the coastal road by blasting the last Japanese strong points from the rear. Ninety percent of Iwo Jima was in Allied hands. Radio Tokyo announced the fall of Iwo Jima as: “the most unfortunate thing in the whole war situation.”

  General Holland Smith took the opportunity to declare victory and conduct a flag-raising ceremony. Following that, the old warhorse departed along with Admiral Kelly Turner. Now, General Schmidt and Admiral Hill finally had the campaign to themselves. Survivors of the 4th Marine Division began backloading on board ship—their battle finally over.

  The killing continued in the north. The 5th Marine Division entered The Gorge, an 800-yard pocket of broken country the troops called “Death Valley.” General Kuribayashi would make his last stand here in a command center in a deep cave. Fighting through this horrid moonscape was a fitting end to the battle—nine days of cave-by-cave assaults with demolitions and flamethrowers. Marine combat engineers used 9,000 tons of explosives to detonate one massive fortification. Progress was bloody and slow. General Rockey’s depleted and drained regiments lost one man for every two yards gained. General Schmidt deployed the 3rd Division against Kitano Point in the 5th Division zone to ease the pressure.

  Colonel Hartnoll Withers led the final assault with the 21st Marines against the extreme northern tip of the island. General Erskine’s pneumonia be damned. He came along to look over Withers’ shoulder. The 21st Marines felt the end was near. Their momentum was irresistible. In a few hours of sharp fighting, they cleared out the last of the resistance. Erskine signaled Schmidt: “Kitano Point Taken.”

  Allied forces tried to persuade Kuribayashi to surrender during these last days. They broadcasted appeals in Japanese and sent him personal messages, praising his bravery, and urging his cooperation. General Kuribayashi was a samurai to the end. In his last message to Tokyo: “We have not eaten or drank for five days, but our fighting spirit is still running high. We will fight to the end for our Emperor.”

  Imperial Headquarters tried to convey the good news that the emperor had approved his promotion to full general. There was no response from Iwo Jima. It would be a posthumous promotion. Controversial Japanese evidence revealed that he committed Seppuku on the night of March 25.

  The 5th Marine Division clawed their way forward in The Gorge. The average battalion that landed with thirty-six officers and 885 men on D-Day now only had sixteen officers and 300 men. This included the hundreds of replacements funneled in through the battle. Remnants of the 1/26 and 1/28 Marines squeezed the enemy into a final pocket and destroyed them.

  On the evening of March 25 (D +34), the battle for Iwo Jima was over. The island became eerily quiet. Far fewer illumination shells flickered a false light on the shadowy figures moving south toward the airfield. General Schmidt got the good news that the 5th Marine Division had snuffed out the last enemy cave. As the corps commander prepared to declare the end of organized resistance on Iwo Jima—a well-organized enemy force emerged from the northern caves and snuck down the length of the island.

  This last spasm of Japanese resistance reflected the enemy’s tactical discipline. A 300-man Japanese force took all night to move into position around the island’s vulnerable rear area. Newly arrived army pilots from the VII Fighter Command were surprised in their tents. The enemy force attacked the sleeping pilots with grenades, swords, and automatic rifles. The fighting was as savage and bloody as any on Iwo Jima.

  Men from the 5th Pioneer Battalion and surviving pilots formed a skirmish line and launched a counterattack. Seabees and redeploying 28th Marines joined the fight. There were few suicides among the Japanese. Most died in battle. Grateful to strike one final blow for their emperor. Sunrise uncovered the carnage—300 dead enemy and over a hundred slaughtered pilots, Seabees, and pioneers along with another 200 wounded. It was a grotesque closing chapter to five savage weeks of killing and carnage.

  Legacy of Iwo Jima

  In thirty-six days of combat, the V Amphibious Corps killed nearly 22,000 Japanese sailors and soldiers. This was achieved at a staggering cost. Marine assault units (along with organic Navy personnel) suffered 24,053 casualties—6,140 killed—the highest single action losses in Marine Corps history. Statistically, for every three Marines who landed on Iwo Jima, one became a casualty.

  According to military historian Norman Cooper: “Seven hundred Americans gave their lives for every square mile. For every plot of ground the size of a football field, an average of one American and five Japanese were killed, and five Americans wounded.”

  Assault units bore the brunt of these casualties. Captain Bill Ketcham’s Company I, 3/24 Marines, landed on D-Day with 133 Marines and three rifle platoons. Only nine of these men remained when his company re-embarked on D +35.

  Captain Frank Caldwell reported a loss of 220 men from Company F, 1/26 Marines. By the end, a private first class commanded a platoon in Captain
Caldwell’s merged 1st and 2nd Platoons.

  Captain Tom Fields relinquished command of Company D on the eighth day to replace his battalion’s executive officer. When he rejoined his company at the end of the battle, Fields was sickened to find only seventeen of the original 250 Marines still alive.

  Company B of the 1/28 Marines went through nine company commanders in the fight. Twelve different Marines served as platoon leaders of the 2nd Platoon—including two buck privates. Other divisions reported similar conditions.

  The American public reacted with shock and sadness as they had fourteen months earlier on Tarawa. The debate about the high cost of forcibly seizing an enemy island raged in the press while the battle was being fought. The Marine Corps released only one statement on February 22 about detailed battle losses during the fighting. They reported casualties of nearly 5,000.

  William Randolph Hearst was an early supporter of the MacArthur for President campaign. Hearst ran a front-page editorial in the San Francisco Examiner blaming the horrific Marine losses on poor tactics: “it’s the same thing that happened on Saipan and Tarawa.” The editorial urged for the elevation of General MacArthur to supreme commander of the Pacific, because: “HE SAVES THE LIVES OF HIS OWN MEN.”

  One hundred off-duty Marines disagreed and stormed the offices of the examiner and demanded an apology. But the Hearst editorial had already received wide play. Many families of men fighting in the Pacific were forwarded the clippings. Marines received these in the mail while the fighting still raged on Iwo—an unwelcome blow for morale.