D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  By the second morning, there were 2,400 casualties among the landing force, and most of them had “died with the greatest possible violence. Nowhere in the Pacific war have I seen such badly mangled bodies,” wrote Sherrod. “Many were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay fifty feet away from any body.”20 The velocity and intensity of the mortar and artillery fire on the compacted battleground was the reason nearly 8 percent of the Americans wounded on Iwo Jima would die of injuries, as against the overall World War II number of 3 percent.

  A MARINE HANDS A CIGARETTE TO A WOUNDED JAPANESE SOLDIER HALF BURIED IN A SHELL HOLE, AFTER KNOCKING AWAY A GRENADE THAT WAS NEAR HIS HAND. THE EMBITTERED LOCAL CONSCRIPT GAVE THE MARINES INFORMATION ABOUT JAPANESE DEFENSES ON MOUNT SURIBACHI (LOU LOWERY/USMC).

  On that rainy second day, with the wind off the ocean blowing the volcanic dust in their faces, the Marines got a close look at the piece of bleak Pacific cinder they had been sent to take. The pre-invasion bombardment had annihilated the island’s vegetation. Between Sunbachi on their left and the sloping wasteland of black crevices and cliffs on their right, there was nothing but a flat field of volcanic ash. Flies and mosquitoes were so thick in places men dared not open their mouths, and orders went out not to drink the sulfur-contaminated water. Big “slit-faced” hats soared out of smoking caves on shell-scarred Suribachi and clouds of black sulfur gas flared up through piles of steaming rocks, giving off the smell of rotten eggs. Iwo Jima means “Sulfur Island” in Japanese, and it was the sulfur deposits that had originally drawn prospectors. On at least one occasion, Marines could feel the whole island shaking. “It was as if the very earth itself was alive,” recalls William Clark. “At first we were deathly afraid that the entire beach was mined and it would soon erupt. However, successive tremors made us realize that volcanic action was still taking place.”

  But it was the barren and blasted landscape that provoked the greatest concern. “There was no cover and concealment as we had practiced in our training exercises,” says Captain Lawrence Snowden. “There wasn’t anything to hide you.”21 When men walked in soft ash up to their knees, and pulled one leg out, it left no imprint. The only marks in the tundra of sand and ash were huge craters created by the naval shelling. Hundreds of them gave the place a lunar appearance. And like walking on the moon, it was as if no one had been there before. There were Marines who fought on Iwo Jima for the entire six-week campaign who never saw a living enemy soldier. “It was an eerie landscape,” says Marine Fred Hayner. “While you couldn’t see them, you had a feeling that the Japanese had you always in their sights.”22

  IWO JIMA’S MOONSCAPE (USMC).

  As at Peleliu, the battle was fought in two dimensions: the Marines were on Iwo Jima, the Japanese were in it. Robert Sherrod had not been to Peleliu, so he had no idea what the Marines were in for. After the third day, he filed a cautiously optimistic report. “It seems certain that we will take Iwo Jima at a smaller cost in casualties than Saipan’s 16,000. Probably no large percentage of the Jap defenders have yet been killed, but henceforth the Japs will kill fewer Marines and the Marines will kill more Japs.”23 As Sherrod admitted later, “I did not then know the real underground strength of Iwo, nor the capabilities of its defenders.”24

  Iwo Jima had been turned into the world’s greatest underground citadel. “[When the invasion comes] every man will resist to the end, making his position his tomb,” announced the man who masterminded its defenses, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi.25 Iwo Jima was of more than strategic value to Japan. It was home territory, administered as part of the Tokyo Prefecture; the mayor of Tokyo was the mayor of Iwo Jima. Anticipating an American invasion before one was planned in detail, the Japanese had begun bolstering the island’s defenses after the Americans landed on Saipan. The assault on Peleliu gave them an additional six months to turn Sulfur Island into a subterranean death trap, defended by veterans of the Kwantung Army. Emperor Hirohito, the Son of Heaven, had taken a personal interest in preparing the island’s defenses, sending Kuribayashi, the commander of his Palace Guards, to defend it. Kuribayashi was iron-spirited and aggressive, the most formidable adversary the Marines would face in the Pacific war. He was from a distinguished samurai family and fought like a true professional warrior.

  The general brought hard discipline to Iwo Jima, abolishing the consumption of alcohol and evacuating all civilians, including his officers’ “comfort girls,” young women forcibly recruited from Korea and Manchuria. He then brought in Korean slave laborers, military engineers, and demolition experts, and supervised the construction of a phantasmagoric warren of interwoven caves and gun galleries inside Suribachi and under the rock-strewn badlands at the northern end of the island. His cave defenses were stocked with weapons, fuel, and rations, and all had myriad secret entrances and exits. They were mutually supporting, and if one position was threatened, his men could easily sneak through tunnels to the next—above, below, or behind the original position, surprising the Marines with exterminating counterfire. Over the entrances to these tunnels and caves Kuribayashi built double-layered concrete block-houses and pillboxes, which were concealed by volcanic ash. Only the gun muzzles were exposed. Suribachi itself had seven levels of tunnels, connecting almost 1,000 gun galleries.

  A MARINE SNIPER ON THE SLOPES OF SURIBACHI (USMC).

  Kuribayashi respected his enemy. Serving in the Japanese embassy in Washington before the war, he had traveled around the United States and was impressed by its industrial prowess. “The United States is the last country in the world that Japan should fight,” he had written his wife.26 Preparing for the American assault, he told his men what to expect and how to die. A list of “courageous battle vows” was posted in every underground position: “Each man will make it his duty to kill ten of the enemy before dying; until we are destroyed to the last man we shall harass the enemy with guerrilla tactics.”27

  He would fight as Colonel Kunio Nakagawa’s forces had at Peleliu. American intelligence had a name for it, “the cornered rat defense.” The Japanese would hole up and wait for the Americans to come to them, bleeding them in a battle of attrition. A dying officer who was found on the ground at Iwo Jima was heard to say over and over, “wait for them, wait for them, make them come to you.”28 But while Kuribayashi learned the lesson of Peleliu, American commanders ignored it, paying scant attention to their own intelligence reports. That is why they had been surprised on the beaches, first by no resistance, then by the nature of the resistance—flaming metal rather than fighting men.

  On D-plus-two, the 28th Marines of the 5th Division began the assault on Mount Suribachi. From this combination fortress and watchtower the enemy was pouring down fire on the beaches, and artillery spotters were siting targets for guns all over the island. It had to be taken out, and quickly. And the key weapons for taking it were Sherman medium tanks armed with Mark I flamethrowers capable of spewing burning napalm 150 yards.

  Sergeant Bill Reed, a correspondent for Yank, recounts the opening of the battle for “Hot Rocks,” as the Marines called Suribachi:

  FOR TWO DAYS THE MEN WHO landed [at the foot of the mountain] were pinned to the ground. Murderous machinegun, sniper, and mortar fire came from a line of pillboxes 300 yards away in the scrubby shrubbery at the foot of the volcano…. Men lay on their sides to drink from canteens or to urinate. An errand between foxholes became a life-or-death mission….

  Towering over them was Mount Suribachi, a gray unlovely hulk with enemy pillbox[es] … in its sides. Marines … grew to hate the mountain almost as much as they hated the Japs who were on it. Reaching the summit was almost as much of a challenge as destroying the men who defended it.

  The supporting air and naval fire did much…. But when it came to the specific four-foot-square machinegun emplacements and the still smaller snipers’ pillboxes there was little the offshore and air bombardment could do except silence them for a few minutes. Everyone knew that in the end the troops would have to dig them out.

  The
foot troops made their drive on the third day. They were aided by a naval and air bombardment so terrific that the Tokyo radio announced that the mountain itself was erupting. They were also aided by their own artillery and rocket guns, landed with superhuman effort the previous day in spite of a choppy ocean and the enemy’s guns.

  But the foot troops were aided most by the tanks that advanced with them and lobbed shells into the stone-and-concrete revetments that blocked the way of the foot troops. The Japs were afraid of our tanks—so afraid that they ducked low in their shelters and silenced their guns when they saw them….

  As soon as the tanks had passed or had been blown up by mines, the Japs came out of their holes and attacked our men from behind with machineguns and mortars…. The enemy had hundreds of pillboxes and emplacements connected by a network of tunnels. When the Japs were driven from one pillbox, they would disappear until the Marines advanced to another, and moments later they would appear at their old emplacements, lobbing grenades at our men who had just passed.

  By early afternoon of D-plus-two the Japs at the foot of Suribachi had been silenced. However, everyone knew there were Japs still around … [in] their shelters….

  There were also many Japs who were dead. They were dead in every conceivable contortion of men who met death violently. Their arms and legs were wrenched about their bodies and their fists were elenched and frozen. Those who had been killed by flamethrowers were burned to a black darker than the ashes of Suribachi or scorched to a brilliant yellow. Their clothes had been burned off, and the heat vulcanized their buttocks together with ugly black strips. It was good to see these sights after having been pinned down to [the beach] for two terrible days.

  There were dead Marines too. Some platoons had been entirely stripped of their officers and noncorns. Some had lost more than three-fourths of their men since morning…. But the worst of the battle for Suribachi was over. Our men had fought their way in under the guns higher up on the mountain.29

  That night, half of the small enemy force of 300 that was still inside the mountain made a breakout, trying to reach their comrades on the northern side of the airfield. Not more than twenty made it. The following morning, February 23, a patrol led by Lieutenant Harold G. Schrier began the ascent of the still dangerous mountain. Its job was to secure the summit. “Just before we set out, Colonel Chandler Johnson, our battalion commander, handed Harold Schrier a small American flag,” says Charles W. Lindberg, one of the two flamethrower men in the platoon, a Marine respected for his almost inhuman composure under fire. “He said, ‘If you get to the top. raise it.’ I remember he used that word, if.

  “Staff Sergeant Lou Lowery, a photographer for Leatherneck magazine, went with us.”30

  That morning the fleet had been notified of the mission and told to withhold all fire on Suribachi. Sailors stood by their silenced guns, watching the ascent through binoculars. The volcanic ash and broken rock on the steep path made it tough going, and the men slipped and slid. “We all expected trouble, but not a shot was fired at us,” says Lindberg. When they reached the crater’s rim, two of the Marines claimed the mountain for their country in their own way: by urinating on it. Then some of the men found a fragment of old pipe, shot a hole through it, and tied the flag to it. “Towards ten thirty, we found the highest point, we could and we raised it.” As the men gathered around the flag, Lou Lowery recorded the event with his camera. “Then things broke loose down below,” says Lindberg. “Our troops started to cheer and our ships whistled and blew their horns. I was so proud. It’s a feeling I’ll never forget.”

  The cheering grew louder when the beachmaster turned up the volume of his public address system and announced that the flag was flying on Suribachi. That entire area of the island erupted with noise, the cheers and whistles of the Marines accompanied by the sirens and bells of the fleet. “Talk about patriotism!” says Coast Guardsman Chet Hack. “The uproar almost shook the sky.”31

  The men on the summit didn’t have time to celebrate. “Just after we had the flag up, all of a sudden from our right side some shots were fired,” Lindberg recalls. “Some Japs were running out of caves, one of them swinging a broken saber, and we drove them back into their hiding places…. Then we went around the crater and burnt out some other holes and threw some explosives into whatever caves we could. By about one thirty, we had the mountain secured….

  MOUNT SURIBACHI. THE FIRST FLAG GOES DOWN AS THE SECOND FLAG GOES UP (LOU LOWERY/USMC).

  “I found out later that they had changed the flag. I didn’t pay any attention to it.”

  After the first flag went up, Colonel Chandler Johnson sent a runner to the beach to get a larger flag. He was worried that Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who was with the invasion fleet, would want the flag on Suribachi for himself. “It was the first American flag to fly over Japanese home territory in World War II. Johnson wanted to preserve that flag [for the battalion],” says Lindberg. Johnson’s man got a larger flag, eight feet by four feet eight inches, from the communications officer of an LST, who had picked it up in a salvage depot at Pearl Harbor. Johnson handed the flag to nineteen-year-old Rene Gagnon and told him to get it to the top of the mountain as fast as he could. When Gagnon reached the summit, Sergeant Mike Strank, who had climbed Suribachi with him, took the flag from him, handed it to Schrier, and announced, “Colonel Johnson wants this big flag run up high, so every son a bitch on this whole cruddy island can see it.”32

  When Tarawa veteran Norman Hatch, the 5th Marine Division photo officer, had learned that a larger flag was going up he sent two of his men, Sergeant Bill Genaust, a movie cameraman, and Private Bob Campbell, a still photographer, to the top of Suribachi to cover it. The diminutive Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal joined them. As the three photographers ascended Suribachi they ran into Lou Lowery, who was on his way down, and apparently was not aware there was going to be a second flag raising. “You guys are a little late,” he said, “the flag is up, but it’s a helluva view up there.”

  When they reached the rim of the crater about noon, a couple of Marines were attaching a flag to a twenty-foot iron pipe they had found in a pile of rubble. Schrier ordered the replacement flag raised at precisely the moment the original flag was lowered. Six men raised the flag: Mike Strank, Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes, Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley, and Navy corpsman John Bradley. When the flag started to go up, Rosenthal was talking to Genaust, but then stopped and shouted, “There it goes!”

  “Out of the corner of my eye, as I had turned toward Genaust, I had seen the men start the flag up. I swung my camera, and shot the scene,” Rosenthal remembered Campbell got a different still shot, one of the first flag going down while the second one went up. And Genaust caught the replacement flag going up with his color movie camera.

  Rosenthal feared there might have been too much movement for him to have taken a good picture. A few minutes later, he took a second shot, a posed picture with a group of Marines crowded around the replacement flag cheering and raising rifles and helmets high.

  Colonel Johnson got the original flag and secured it in the battalion safe. The replacement flag flew on Suribachi for three weeks, before it was torn to shreds by the wind. And the country got one of the most famous photographs ever, and one of the finest. It became the most widely reproduced still shot of all time. An engraving of it appeared on a three-cent postage stamp, a painting of it was used in the most successful bond drive of the war, and after the war, the sculptor Felix de Weldon spent nine years on a 100-ton bronze statue based on it that commands the entrance to Arlington Cemetery.

  The story of Joe Rosenthal’s photograph has been mired in myth and misrepresentation. To this day, some people still believe, despite several excellent books on the flag raising, that Rosenthal staged his photograph. Rosenthal himself added to the confusion. Nine days after taking the picture, he walked into press headquarters on Guam and a correspondent walked up to him.

  “CONGRATULATIONS, JOE,” HE
SAID, “ON THAT flag raising shot on Iwo.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “It’s a great picture,” he said. “Did you pose it?”

  “Sure,” I said. I thought he meant the group shot I had arranged with the Marines waving and cheering, but then someone else came up with the [flag raising] picture and I saw it for the first time.

  “Gee,” I said. “That’s good, all right, but I didn’t pose it. I wish I could take credit for posing it, but I can’t.”

  One of the correspondents had overheard only the first part of the conversation and he wrote that Rosenthal had posed it, that it was a “phony.”

  “As I left for home,” says Rosenthal, “I had the fear that, through no fault of my own, I was in the doghouse. When I arrived in San Francisco, however, I found that I was now a celebrity.”33

  When Rosenthal’s packet of pictures had been sent by mail plane to Guam to be developed, the Associated Press photo editor picked up a glossy print of the flag raising, whistled, and said, “Here’s one for all time!”34 He radioed the image to AP headquarters in New York, and it made every front page in America.

  The picture arrived at exactly the right time and with just the right message. The war in Europe was almost over, but news from the Pacific was discouraging. Americans had already died in godforsaken places that people back home had difficulty finding on a map: Kwajalein, Saipan, Peleliu, Tarawa. And at Iwo Jima they were dying in horrifying numbers, and for what? Were these awful little islands worth it? (In 1944, the Navy had come up with a secret plan to shoot shells filled with poison gas onto Iwo Jima, taking it without losing a single American life, but Roosevelt had scotched that plan, insisting that poison gas only be used as a last-ditch retaliatory measure.)35