by Toland, John
At Livadia, Harriman showed Roosevelt the draft of Stalin’s proposal together with the amendments he himself had brought up. Assured he was acting in the best interests of America, the President approved the amendments, and asked the ambassador to resubmit them to Molotov.
The warm relationship between Stalin and Roosevelt, begun at Teheran, continued at Yalta until that afternoon when Churchill announced he had been “practically instructed” by his government not to mention figures in the matter of reparations, and Roosevelt said he too was afraid the mention of a specific amount (Stalin had brought up the figure of $20,000,000,000, with half going to Russia) would make many Americans think of reparations solely in terms of dollars and cents.
It seemed to Stalin that Roosevelt was ganging up with Churchill against him, and he became visibly angry. Though the matter was hastily smoothed over, Stalin was apparently so concerned by his own flare of hostility that he took Harriman aside as soon as they recessed for tea to tell him that he was prepared to meet the President halfway on the agreement to join the war against Japan. “I’m entirely willing to have Dairen a free port under international control,” he said. “But Port Arthur is different. It’s to be a Russian naval base and therefore Russia requires a lease.”
“Why don’t you discuss this matter at once with the President?” Harriman suggested, and before long Stalin and Roosevelt were huddled together conferring in hushed voices, their brief rift healed. They reached complete agreement. The only question now was how and when to tell Chiang of the accord. The President wondered if Stalin wished to take up these matters with T. V. Soong in Moscow or if he would rather that he, Roosevelt, take them up directly with the Generalissimo.
I am an interested party, said Stalin. It would be better if the President did it. When should the subject be discussed with the Generalissimo? asked Roosevelt, sensitive to the problem of secrecy. I’ll let you know when I’m prepared to have this done, said Stalin, who wanted to have twenty-five more divisions in the Far East before informing Chiang Kai-shek. At that point Churchill joined them and they did not continue the discussion.
The Prime Minister did not learn of the agreement until the next morning. He was about to sign it when Eden, who was appalled by what he had just read, stopped him. In the presence of Stalin and Roosevelt the Foreign Secretary branded the agreement “a discreditable byproduct of the conference.” Churchill rebuffed him; British prestige in the Orient would suffer if he followed Eden’s advice. He defiantly added his signature to the accord.
A few hours later the Yalta Conference ended. At the final luncheon there was a general feeling of relief that everything had gone so well. Roosevelt was in high spirits. His cherished Declaration on Liberated Europe, the promise of self-determination for these nations, was accepted, and Stalin had agreed in writing to enter the war against Japan two or three months after the fall of Germany.ǁ
There was an aura of quiet satisfaction among the Americans. To Ambassador Harriman it was a solid diplomatic success. Stalin had agreed to support Chiang Kai-shek and recognize the sovereignty of the Chinese Nationalist government over Manchuria. Harry Hopkins was sure that this was the dawn of a new day for everyone. The first victory of the peace had been won with the Russians proving they could be reasonable and far-seeing.
Some of the British, however, had serious reservations, particularly about the fate of Poland; Roosevelt’s health had been an adverse factor of the meetings and had led him into serious errors. But it was he alone who had promoted—in the face of a reluctant Stalin and a dubious Churchill—the most lasting achievement of the conference, formation of the United Nations Organization.
The conditions of Stalin’s agreement to fight Japan were known only to a few. If they had been circulated there would undoubtedly have been objections over Roosevelt and Churchill’s promise that the Soviet claims for territory in the Far East “shall be unquestionably fulfilled after Japan has been defeated.” Russia had, in effect, been bribed to do something she wanted very much to do. She would run no risk at all and suffer little cost in blood and matériel in attacking a beleaguered Japan once Germany was crushed. Moreover, the spoils of war—in particular the occupation of Manchuria—were a far greater inducement to join the assault than the secret pledges won from the West.
* A mispronunciation of chinthe, Burmese for “lion.”
† It was found in Stilwell’s file clipped to a radio message dated May 14, 1944.
‡ The U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey later concluded that attacks launched by the B-29’s based in China “did not warrant diversion of the effort entailed and that the aviation gas and supplies used by B-29’s might have been more profitably allocated to expansion of tactical and shipping operations of the 14th Air Force.” The 800 tons of bombs they dropped were of “insufficient weight and accuracy to produce significant results.”
§ On March 23, 1955, MacArthur charged that his views had not been sought at the Yalta Conference, and that if they had he “would most emphatically have recommended against bringing the Soviet into the Pacific war at that late date.” In February 1945 he gave three listeners the opposite impression. After his conversation with MacArthur, Brigadier General George Lincoln reported: “Concerning over-all plan, General MacArthur considers it essential that maximum number of Jap divisions be engaged and pinned down on Asiatic mainland before United States forces strike Japan proper.” Colonel Paul L. Freeman, Jr., recorded: “He emphatically stated that we must not invade Japan proper unless the Russian Army is previously committed to action in Manchuria.” And the new Secretary of the Navy, James V. Forrestal, wrote in his diary: “He said he felt that our strength should be reserved for use in the Japanese mainland, on the plain of Tokyo, and that this could not be done without the assurance that the Japanese would be heavily engaged by the Russians in Manchuria.”
ǁ Several weeks after the conference, Roosevelt summoned the American journalist and author Edgar Snow to the White House. “I got along absolutely splendidly with Stalin this time,” said the President. “I feel I finally got to know the man and like him.” He waved aside Snow’s reservations “with airy optimism,” while admitting that the Russians obviously were “going to do things in their own way in areas they occupy.” Roosevelt seemed confident that future problems could be settled by mutual compromise. “I got the impression,” he said, “that the Russians are now fully satisfied and that we can work out everything together. I am convinced we are going to get along.”
26
“Like Hell with the Fire Out”
1.
Several weeks before the landings at Leyte, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were persuaded—at the urgent request of Raymond Spruance and three Army generals—to proceed to Japan by way of Iwo Jima rather than Formosa. The immediate beneficiary was the Air Force. Iwo Jima was 625 miles north of Saipan and 660 miles south of Tokyo: a perfect halfway house for the VLR (Very Long Range) bombing project. Crippled Superfortresses could use it in emergencies, and from there the shorter-range P-51 Mustangs could escort the B-29’s all the way to Japan.
Japanese resistance on Leyte forced a postponement of the Iwo Jima invasion, first to February 3 and then to February 19. The soft-spoken Spruance, veteran of Midway and the Marianas, was named overall commander, while Richmond Kelly Turner, who had learned so much at Guadalcanal, was made Joint Expeditionary Force commander. It was to be an all-Marine operation with “Howlin’ Mad” Smith as commander of Expeditionary Troops. He in turn selected Major General Harry Schmidt to command the Landing Force, three divisions. The two assigned to hit the beaches on D-day, the 4th and 5th, began arduous amphibious exercises in Hawaii, while the 3rd, the reserve, trained on Guam.
From the sea Iwo Jima (Sulphur Island) resembled a half-submerged whale but from the air it looked like a fat porkchop. Its most distinctive feature was an extinct volcano at the narrow (southern) end. Only 556 feet in height, it seemed more imposing, jutting as it did straight up from the sea. This was
Mount Suribachi, Japanese for “cone-shaped bowl.”
The island was nearly five miles long and two and a half miles wide—a third the area of Manhattan. Though its volcano was inactive, the entire island seemed to be alive with jets of steam and boiling sulphur pits. The combination of coastal cliffs and rugged Suribachi gave the appearance of another Rock of Gibraltar. Yet habitants had the queasy feeling that the island might disappear any minute into the ocean.
The fat northern part of the triangular island was a plateau some 350 feet high with inaccessible rocky shores, but at the narrow end toward Suribachi there were wide stretches suitable for amphibious landings. The beach to the east was the one selected for the Marines to assault, but what looked like black sand was volcanic ash and cinders, so light that a heavy man could sink to his knees. While the sterile soil provided little natural cover on the windswept beaches and plateau, the little hills and valleys surrounding the tableland were dense with jungle growth.
Iwo was one in a chain of islands hanging like a loose necklace from the entrance of Tokyo Bay to within three hundred miles of the Marianas: first the Izu Islands, then the Bonins, and finally the Volcanoes—three islets in a north–south line, with Iwo in the center.
The Bonins were first settled in 1830 when two New Englanders, a Genoese and twenty-five Hawaiians landed at Chichi Jima, not quite two hundred miles north of Iwo. Twenty-three years later Commodore Perry visited Chichi and took possession of it for the United States, with intent to make it a provisioning station for American naval ships and mail steamers. But President Franklin Pierce repudiated his action, and in 1861 Japan, claiming that the Prince of Ogasawara had discovered the Bonins in 1593, annexed them all.
An Englishman, Gore by name, came upon the Volcanoes in 1673 and gave Sulphur Island its name. Next a Russian explorer arrived, in 1805, but neither of these men thought the Volcanoes were worth colonizing, and it wasn’t until eight decades later that the first settlers—they were Japanese—landed on Iwo. Like all the other islands in the chain it was placed under the jurisdiction of the Tokyo Prefectural Government to be administered as a part of the homeland.
By the middle of the 1930’s there were almost eleven hundred colonists, living in flimsy, one-storied Japanese-style homes. The main village, Motoyama, was located a little north of the exact center of the island near the sulphur pits. Vegetables, bananas, pineapples, papayas, sugar cane and grain were grown for local consumption but the economy was based on a sugar mill and a sulphur refinery. The sugar mill did so badly that it was converted into processing medical herbs. There were two schools run by seven teachers, the Taihei-ken inn, and a bar serviced by three girls. Six times a year ships brought supplies, visitors, and news from Japan.
Of the entire chain, Iwo alone was suitable for airfields, but for years the Imperial Navy paid little attention to it except for installing radio and weather stations. In 1940 the Mabuchi Construction Company began an airfield with two strips almost a mile long near the foot of Mount Suribachi. The following spring a Navy lieutenant arrived with ninety-three men to start erecting gun positions. Two thousand civilian laborers poured onto the island.
It was not until early 1944 when the Marshalls were invaded that the island, along with Formosa, received the full attention of Imperial Headquarters. First Commander Tsunezo Wachi, the former assistant naval attaché (and secret agent) in Mexico, landed with a garrison of more than five thousand sailors. Then work commenced on a second airfield on the central plateau, and by the end of May the Army had a garrison of 5,170, thirteen artillery pieces and more than two hundred machine guns; the Navy had fourteen coast defense guns, a dozen heavy pieces and one hundred and fifty 25-mm. machine guns for antiaircraft defense. But there was a feeling of resentment between the services, and when Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi arrived in June to set up headquarters for the 109th Division and assume overall command, he found a divided community.
The Japanese had divined American intentions long before they were conceived. “The entire Army and the nation will depend on you for the defense of that key island,” Tojo had told the fifty-three-year-old Kuribayashi. Japanese estimates of American aims seemed to be confirmed a fortnight after Kuribayashi’s arrival. Fifty-one carrier planes—intent only on neutralizing the island’s air power—knocked down sixty-six interceptors and then bombed Iwo almost at will.
The raid was sobering to Kuribayashi. Nevertheless, he put on a show of confidence to his subordinates. “When the enemy comes here, we can contain him,” he told a newly arrived major, Yoshitaka Horie, over whiskey, “and then our Combined Fleet will come to slap his face. That is to say, our role here is a massive containing action.”
Horie knew more about the Navy than most Navy men; he had worked for a year to try to improve the convoy system. “General,” he said, “there is no longer any Combined Fleet. Some scattered naval forces remain, but they have no striking power. Haven’t you been informed of the results of A-Go?” He described the devastating defeat off the Marianas ten days earlier.
The general accused him of being intoxicated. “This island is under the jurisdiction of the city of Tokyo!”
“When I saw this island from the air today,” Horie replied, “I thought the best thing to do would be to sink it to the bottom of the sea.” It could be done with enough explosives.
“You’re drunk,” Kuribayashi reiterated, but with less conviction. In the morning he took Horie to the beach at the foot of Suribachi. He threw himself on the black sand as if he had just stormed ashore. “This beach is wide,” he said and pointed to the adjoining airstrip. “Yes, the enemy must land here. They have no alternative.” For the next two hours Kuribayashi compelled Horie, who had been wounded in China, to fling himself down all over the airfield, a target while the general “shot” him time and again with a walking stick. Horie thought he had the mind of a squad leader; it was easy to believe the derogatory stories of the general’s obsession with details.
But Kuribayashi must have been impressed with Horie—or at least with the information he seemed to possess. He insisted that the major come to dinner again. They resumed their drinking, and all of a sudden Horie found himself talking about the disaster at Midway, and the pitiful state of convoy escort operations. Kuribayashi, his mind in a turmoil, tried to disparage what Horie said, and called him “a walking encyclopedia.” But this resistance made Horie more persuasive. The general’s face grew pale as the major disclosed the Combined Fleet’s retreat from Truk to Palau, and then to the Philippines.
“The nineteenth of June [the Marianas Turkey Shoot] marked the death of Combined Fleet and Japan,” said the major, his eyes glistening with tears. He tried to clear his throat. “If we could each kill ten enemies before dying, the world would realize it was really we who won the war!”
“Ah,” sighed Kuribayashi, “I didn’t know any of this.”
“Personally I am reconciled to dying.” Horie drew out a packet of potassium cyanide. Sobered, the two men sat in silence.
Kuribayashi ordered the evacuation of civilians and accelerated the program to build underground defenses in the porous volcanic rocks. He had decided to defend the island in depth rather than concentrate his efforts on annihilating the enemy on the beaches, and by midsummer Iwo was undermined with tunnels and caves. Reinforcements swelled the Army complement to 7,350 men. The Navy grew to 2,300 and received a new commander, Rear Admiral Toshinosuke Ichimaru, an experienced pilot who still limped from the crash of an experimental plane in 1926. His new combat command had inspired him to poetry:
• • •
Let me fall like a flower petal.
May enemy bombs be directed at me, and enemy shells
Mark me as their target.
I go, never to return.
Turning my head, I see the majestic mountain [Fuji-san].
May His Majesty live as long.
On August 10 Major Horie, who was now stationed on Chichi Jima, returned to Iwo to establish an
emergency supply transportation system. He brought with him as gifts for 109th Division headquarters two bottles of water—there wasn’t a spring on the island—and some vegetables. Kuribayashi was sitting on his porch in a relaxed mood, even though twenty-eight tanks had recently been sunk in transit. Most of the 145th Infantry Regiment had arrived safely, and he was pleased to find them well trained. But at dinner, after several tumblers of whiskey, he complained that he couldn’t depend on his staff. There had been a growing resistance to his radical tactical plan of defense. “They react slowly to everything, and I can’t restrain my impatience.” What was the situation on Chichi Jima?
There were many overage officers there. One lieutenant colonel, past sixty, had asked Horie, “Why dig so many caves? We’re all going to die, anyway.”
“Japan has reached the end of the road,” Kuribayashi reflected and poured the major another glass of whiskey.
The general’s irritation with his staff embarrassed Horie the next day at the traditional morning ceremony in front of Division headquarters. After everyone had turned toward the Imperial Palace and bowed, the adjutant began reading communiqués. Kuribayashi interrupted the recital to criticize his chief of staff, Colonel Shizuichi Hori, for his bristling mustache. Later that morning Major Horie visited the headquarters of the largest unit in the 109th Division, the five-thousand-man 2nd Mixed Brigade, and was buttonholed by its commander, Major General Kotau Osuga, and the colonel with the offending mustache. For twenty minutes the two complained of Kuribayashi’s arbitrary insistence on leaving the beaches undefended. That meant giving up Airfield No. 1, the only airstrip long enough for bombers.
Major Horie realized that he was largely to blame for the difference of opinion. Ignorant of the great naval defeat on June 19, these officers were still confident that the Combined Fleet would steam to their aid once the battle was joined. But he said nothing. It was not safe to tell everyone the truth.