It was the second, famous flag which was seen by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal as he stepped on the warm soil of Iwo Jima, just as it was caught and flung by the strong north wind whipping Suribachi’s crest. Forrestal had followed the battle aboard the command ship Eldorado. Now he was standing on the battleground, with Lieutenant General Smith beside him. He saw the flag unfurling and he turned to Smith.
“Holland,” he said, “the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”
To the Marines slowly slugging into the First Belt in the north, the news came over the loudspeaker used by the beachmaster to direct unloading operations. The speaker blared:
“Mount Suribachi is ours. The American flag has been raised over it by the Fifth Marine Division. Fine work, men.”
Those who could, turned dust-rimmed staring eyes to their rear. They squinted and saw the flag. They looked to the north once more, the loudspeaker blared again:
“We have only a few miles to go to secure the island.”
The young-old eyes blinked.
“Only,” one Marine repeated. “Only…”
5
All but three of the 26 Medals of Honor awarded to Marines and their Navy corpsmen on Iwo Jima were won in that nightmarish up-island battle which began the day the Twenty-eighth Marines swept south to Suribachi and the rest of the assault troops slugged north into General Kuribayashi’s First Belt.
That was on February 20 and on that day young Jacklyn Lucas saw his first and last combat. He moved with three other men in the Fifth Division’s strike up the western coast. They came to a ravine and were ambushed. The air was filled with enemy hand grenades. One landed among the four Marines. Lucas dove over his comrades to smother it with his body. Just as another grenade landed…
He pulled this one to him and he had begun to think, “Luke, you’re gonna die,” when the bombs exploded and his own hoarse trailing scream rose above the roar. The three other Marines attacked and forced the enemy position. Lucas was left for dead behind them, but seven months later he was well enough to receive his Medal of Honor.
On that same day Captain Robert Dunlap was leading his company against a steep, cave-pocked cliff commanding the western beaches. The Japanese pinned them down. Dunlap crawled forward for 200 yards while the bullets sang above him. He spotted the enemy guns, crawled back, relayed the information to naval gunfire and artillery observers, crawled up again and spent two days and nights among the enemy’s rocks —calling down the fire which did most to knock out the guns and secure the western beaches. He, too, won a Medal of Honor.
On the right flank the Fourth Division fought a fierce battle to overrun Airfield Number One as well as to push deeper into the cliffs north of the landing beaches. The airfield fell by nightfall of the first day, but the high ground along the east coast was not so swiftly seized. Here it was flesh and blood and will opposing steel and concrete; here captains commanded battalions, lieutenants and sergeants led companies, corporals and privates rallied platoons. Here there were also Medals of Honor won—by Jumpin’ Joe Chambers, who was wounded leading his last attack; by Captain Joe McCarthy, who gathered a picked band of Marines to take a vital ridge in a hand-grenade charge; by little Sergeant Ross Gray, taking six pillboxes and 25 Japanese soldiers before he fell fatally wounded. Hundreds of other Marines received their mortal wounds in this bitter three-day advance through the eastern anchor of General Kuribayashi’s First Belt.
But on the fourth day, February 23, the very day on which the flag flew over Suribachi and the loudspeaker voice prattled of “only” a few more miles to go, the Fourth Division made its biggest gains. The Marines broke into the ridges at the point where the pork chop bellies out. They seemed to have pierced Kuribayashi’s inner line, but they had actually reached The Meatgrinder.
By February 23 the Marines began to suspect that they had made no beachhead on Iwo Jima because Iwo was all beachhead. The familiar rhythm of break-in, break-out, breakthrough would not be repeated here. Lieutenant General Smith had said: “We will be ready for an early counterattack in one of three places. We welcome a counterattack. That is generally when we break their backs.”
But there had been no counterattacks and it was the Americans whose backs were breaking on the rock of the Japanese center.
A regiment of the Third Division had been committed there on February 21. The Twenty-first Marines, veterans of the big banzai on Guam, dashed again and again at the center just below the southwestern tip of Airfield Number Two. Small breakthroughs often became disasters. Penetrating Marines were raked from the flanks, chewed up—sometimes wiped out. Tanks that butted through were knocked out by guns blasting from interlocking pillboxes, or were hoisted on the spouting fire-balls of exploding land mines. Engineers crept forward on their knees, probing the black sand for the kettle-shaped killers which the Japanese had buried so abundantly, but they couldn’t find them all. Nor could Marines with flame-throwers and dynamite knock out all the pillboxes. Corporal Hershel Williams won a Medal of Honor by blasting or burning out position after position, but there were 800 pillboxes in this sector 1,000 yards wide and 200 yards deep.
Yet, the center had to move. It was holding up the Fifth Division on the left and the Fourth on the right. When Major General Erskine came ashore with Major General Schmidt on February 23 he ordered the Twenty-first Marines forward the next day “at all costs.”
Lieutenant Colonel Wendell Duplantis had commanded the Third Battalion during that wild night on Guam when Major Yukioka’s suicide troops had shot the gap and surrounded his command post. Now, on Iwo Jima, Duplantis was awaiting the tanks which would lead his battalion forward at nine o’clock.
But the tanks didn’t show.
“Attack must proceed without the tanks,” he signaled his company commanders.
Captain Clayton Rockmore led out I Company and fell dead with a bullet through the throat. Captain Dan Marshall took over.
Captain Rodney Heinze led out K Company and fell wounded. Lieutenant Raoul Archambault took over.
Archambault urged K Company’s Marines forward, into the first line of pillboxes, the wind-blown sand pelting their faces like buckshot. Hurling grenades, they sped through it. They found the Japanese in their trenches and jumped in among them. They jabbed them with bayonets, chased them down those corridors, jumped out again and swept on.
The charge changed to a rush. Far ahead of I Company, the men of K Company were running past mounds of pillboxes and up the slope leading to Airfield Number Two. Marine tanks had entered the fight behind them and were pouring into the hole—mopping up.
Now the riflemen in their baggy green dungarees were flowing across the airfield with a yell. They crossed it raked and struck by bullets. Marines fell, but the others went over the airfield and up to the crest of a 50-foot ridge just on its northern side.
And then, by one of those errors common to war, Marine artillery fire began to fall on them.
Lieutenant Archambault took K Company back down the hill. The shelling stopped. Archambault took them back up. The Japanese drove them off again.
Now I Company was driving through the hole, coming up to the northern edge of the airfield, but now both companies were being struck on their exposed flanks. Still, Archambault led his Marines forward once more. They started up the ridge and a wave of Japanese infantry rose from a gully on its reverse slope to come pouring over the crest and down among them.
The Marines stood back-to-back in ankle-deep sand, fighting with knives, bayonets, clubbed rifles, shovels and fists. In a few minutes the banging and screaming had subsided and there were 50 dead Japanese at the foot of the ridge.
I Company came up and both outfits began digging in. They had come through Kuribayashi’s rugged center “at all costs,” and now their orders were: “Hold at all costs.”
They did. Next day the Third Division’s entire attack flowed through the hole these companies had punched. The Ninth Mar
ines went into battle. They slugged slowly up to vital Hill 199 overlooking the airfield, making the kind of fight immortalized in Admiral Nimitz’ remark that on Iwo Jima, “uncommon valor was a common virtue.”
To win a Medal of Honor in this advance a man’s daring and shrewdness must surely be blessed by the fortunes of war. Only this or the direct intervention of the Almighty could have kept Private Wilson Watson alive as he stood in plain view on top of a ridge line to hold off an entire Japanese company with his BAR. Watson got up there by knocking out a pillbox alone. He came down after he shot 60 Japanese and his ammunition ran out. That was on February 27—the day that the up-island advance at last encompassed Hill 199 and the very heart of Kuribayashi’s First Belt had been pierced. Airfield Number Two had been conquered except for a few yards on its extreme northeastern tip. Southern Iwo Jima was now American and the growl of the bulldozer was already audible on Airfield Number One.
But on the left flank the Fifth Division had been brought up short in an evil pocket known as Hill 362, while on the right the Fourth had entered The Meatgrinder.
6
The Hill, the Amphitheater, and Turkey Knob were the three knives of The Meatgrinder.
The Hill, or Hill 382, was the highest ground on northern Iwo. It rose about a hundred yards east of the northern end of Airfield Number Two. About 600 yards beneath it was the Amphitheater. Just east of the Amphitheater was Turkey Knob. Within this complex was Iwo’s communications center and a maze of crags, rocks and outcroppings from which the Japanese had kept the Marines under observation since the landings.
Tanks buried to their turrets guarded all natural approaches. Antitank guns poked their snouts from scores of cavemouths. There were 75-millimeter antiaircraft guns and twin-mount artillery pieces with muzzles lowered to fire point-blank—and everywhere was a multiplicity of heavy and light machine guns. The Hill, the Amphitheater and Turkey Knob were also mutually supporting. Artillery and mortars could be brought down on all or any of them.
The Meatgrinder, hard shell of this iron nut of an island, could only be taken by storming all its points at once.
Up against The Hill went the Twenty-third Marines. The Twenty-fourth took on the Amphitheater. The Twenty-fifth moved on Turkey Knob.
At the Hill the Marines reached the summit with amazing ease. And then the Japanese struck them to the ground and kept them there with a murderous fire. It even came from the rear, for the Marines’ rush had carried them past a system of well-hidden pillboxes. The Marines came down from The Hill under cover of a smokescreen. The same thing happened the next day, even though Pfc. Douglas Jacobson attended to the pillbox system—knocking out 16 positions and a tank with his bazooka and killing 75 Japanese to win the Medal of Honor.
It happened also down at the Amphitheater and on Turkey Knob behind it. It seemed the Marines could take these heights almost at will, and then be sorry for taking them. The Japanese withdrew each time it became clear they could not hold. Then they called for their artillery and mortars. When the Marines were forced to withdraw at dusk, the Japanese returned.
For seven days—from February 25 to March 3—the Marines were torn on the knives of The Meatgrinder, taking casualties so great that on a single day the Fourth Division used 400 pints of whole blood. Casualties among the doctors and corpsmen were also fierce, and there were many feats of impromptu medical skill as well as of courage among them. Corpsman Cecil Bryan rushed to aid First Sergeant Fred Lunch when a shell fragment shattered Lunch’s windpipe. Bryan seized a section of yellow-rubber transfusion tubing from his pack. He cut off a six-inch length. He inserted it within Bunch’s torn throat and carried him to an aid station, saving both his life and his power of speech.
Gradually, the battering of the Marine attacks began to break Japanese resistance. Four days after the battle began, there was a shift of regiments. The Twenty-fourth relieved the Twenty-third in front of The Hill, while still-fresh units of the Twenty-third went down to the Amphitheater and Turkey Knob. One position after another on The Hill was hammered into powder. Caves were sealed, observation posts blown up. At Turkey Knob a 75-millimeter howitzer was hauled to the front to deliver point-blank fire into a blockhouse. Men with demolitions crawled up to it to blast holes in its walls. A flame-throwing tank rolled up a path cut by tank-dozers to pour hissing streams of flame through the holes. Turkey Knob fell. So, too, did the Amphitheater by the sixth day of fighting.
On the seventh, E Company of the Twenty-fourth Marines all but disappeared. But its remnants, having survived a half-dozen company commanders, joined the remnants of F Company and a platoon remaining from a company of another battalion and went up The Hill under Captain Walter Ridlon. They stayed there.
The Meatgrinder was utterly broken on March 3, though it had cost the Fourth Marine Division thousands of casualties. The division’s losses were now 6,591 men killed and wounded, and its fighting capacity was down 30 per cent.
In the center, the Third Division slashed through the First Belt with a series of slanting attacks, finally breasting it, overrunning the half-completed Airfield Number Three and coming up short against Kuribayashi’s Secondary Line.
On the left, Hill 362 still resisted the Fifth Division. If this western height was only 20 feet lower than its bigger brother in The Meatgrinder, it was only that much less costly. Marines burned the Japanese out of their caves by rolling gasoline drums inside and shooting them aflame, by hanging over cliff ledges to lower explosives on ropes—which the Japanese often cut—and by bringing up rocket trucks to loose showers of missiles on the infested hillside.
Three of the men who helped raise flags over Suribachi died on Hill 362. Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson, the commander who had ordered Old Glory flung to the winds on the volcano’s summit, also was killed there.
The Pineapple Kid died, too. Corporal Geddings volunteered to help evacuate wounded. He gave his helmet to a stricken Marine. Ten minutes later a shell fragment struck him in his now-exposed neck and killed him. Four more Medals of Honor were won on Hill 362: by Sergeant William Harrell holding off a squad of Japanese infiltrators; by Gunnery Sergeant William Walsh, Corporal Charles Berry and Pfc. William Caddy throwing themselves on grenades and dying to save their friends.
Hill 362 fell on March 1, after holding out to the last man. The final defender killed himself. He came out of a cave and tapped his grenade on his helmet to arm it. The Marines who saw him ducked back, thinking he meant to throw it. There was a silence and the Marines raised their heads above the rocks again.
The Japanese soldier was crouched with the grenade to his ear, as though listening. It had not exploded.
He tapped it again and listened. No sound.
He tapped it a third time and listened. It went off.
None of the Marines thought it grimly comic. None thought it sad. They merely turned to glance at those western beaches which the fall of Hill 362 now made secure and wondered if the skipper would be able to get hot chow up to them.
7
It was March 4 and General Kuribayashi was signaling Tokyo for help. He had already told Imperial Headquarters: “I am not afraid of the fighting power of only three American Marine divisions, if there are no bombardments from aircraft and warships.” Now he was calling for his own aircraft, his own warships. “Send me these things, and I will hold this island,” he said. “Without them I cannot hold.”
He would not get them, although Japan had tried. On February 21 the kamikazes had made a major attack on the American warships surrounding the island. Suicide planes came in at dusk and sank the escort carrier Bismarck Sea, badly damaged big Saratoga and sent her limping home to Pearl Harbor, and damaged the escort carrier Lunga Point, plus a cargo ship and an LST.
None of the planes of this Second Mitate Special Attack Force ever returned to base.
That was all the help that Kuribayashi got from a homeland beginning to reel beneath the intensified raids of the American B-29’s. The night before Kuribayashi
’s last appeal Japan had been raided again, and on that very morning of March 4 one of the returning Superforts was frantically trying to contact Iwo Jima. At last Sergeant James Cox heard a voice crackling over his radio.
“This is Iwo. What is your trouble?”
“Iwo, this is Nine Baker Able. We are running low on gasoline. Can you give us a bearing to Iwo?”
“Course 167 for 28 miles. Do you prefer to ditch offshore or try to land on the strip?”
“We prefer to land.”
Sergeant Cox switched off his radio. He watched the tiny cinder draw closer to the big bomber’s nose. He looked over the side as Lieutenant Raymond Malo circled the smoking, flashing little island in two wide circles—the narrow runway sliding out of his field of vision each time. The third time Lieutenant Malo hit the runway squarely. The big silvery bomber rolled 3,000 feet before it came to a halt.
Lieutenant Malo and Sergeant Cox grinned to hear the cheering of the Marines outside the plane.
Strong Men Armed Page 47