Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  In Japanese eyes the Sulfur Island was infinitely more precious than Tarawa, Guam, Tinian, Saipan, and the others. To the Japanese, Iwo Jima represented something more elemental: It was Japanese homeland. Sacred ground. In Shinto tradition, the island was part of the creation that burst forth from Mount Fuji at the dawn of history. Modern-day governance honored that tradition: Iwo was part of the Tokyo prefecture. It was only 650 miles from the capital city. The mayor of Tokyo was also the island’s mayor. Thus the island was part of a seamless sacred realm that had not been desecrated by an invader’s foot for four thousand years.

  Easy Company and the other Marines would be attempting nothing less than the invasion of Japan.

  Emperor Hirohito was personally alarmed by the prospect of foreign defilement of his realm at Iwo Jima. In May of 1944 he handpicked a trusted commander to defend Japanese honor there, the head of his personal palace guard, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi.

  Kuribayashi’s ancestors were samurai and had served six emperors over five generations. Hirohito was confident this was the man to save Japan from disgrace.

  Kuribayashi was tall for a Japanese, five feet nine inches, husky, and with a small potbelly. He had had a varied career, from Japanese military schools to service in embassies in Canada and Washington to command of combat troops in China and Manchuria.

  He was familiar with America and spoke excellent English. As a thirty-seven-year-old captain and deputy military attaché at the embassy in Washington in 1928, he had crisscrossed the United States and studied its people and ways. He knew and respected his enemy.

  The night before he flew to Iwo Jima in the second week of June 1944, he had a private meeting with Emperor Hirohito, an almost unheard-of honor for a commoner. It was critical that the barbarians not take Iwo Jima.

  The highest personage in his land also handpicked the commander of the Marines. Because of his age, sixty-two, and serious diabetes, it took the personal intervention of President Roosevelt to get the old warrior Howlin’ Mad Smith out to battle.

  By now, as he sailed to Iwo Jima with the armada, Smith was the “Patton of the Pacific.” He was irascible, often profane, and constantly ruffled the smooth feathers of the hidebound Navy, but like Patton, he was a winner. And by early 1945 he had put together an unbroken string of victories over thousands of miles that even Patton would envy.

  Unlike all the other combatants in World War II, including the U.S. Army, Smith and his Marines never lost a battle. Wherever a Marine boot stepped ashore in the Pacific, Americans were there to stay.

  So Iwo Jima would be the battlefield of the personal representatives of the Emperor and the President. Smith would try to kick in the front door to Japan; Kuribayashi would try to sweep Smith from the sacred doorstep. Kuribayashi respected the Marines’ proud record in the Pacific. But he was determined to bury that record in the black sands of Iwo Jima.

  By February 11 the 5th Division armada had rendezvoused with the 3rd and 4th Divisions at Saipan. Filling the horizon were over eight hundred ships, pausing one last time before sailing the final seven hundred miles to Iwo Jima.

  Just eight months before, Marines had wrested Saipan away from the Japanese. Now long, gleaming white airstrips had replaced the rotting corpses among the cane fields.

  The boys of Easy Company watched the gigantic American B-29 Superfort bombers lumber down the three-mile-long airstrips and lift slowly into the air on their way to bomb the Japanese mainland. They didn’t know it, but some of those planes would not return because of a certain Sulfur Island. And it was for this reason that the battle of Iwo Jima had been ordered.

  In the fall of 1944 the Joint Chiefs of Staff had rejected General MacArthur’s plan to attack Japan via Taiwan and China. Instead, they endorsed Admiral Nimitz’s plan of a frontal attack against the Japanese mainland. Preliminary saturation bombing of Japanese military plants and cities was part of the plan.

  The biggest obstacle a B-29 pilot faced on his bombing run from Tinian and Saipan to Japan was the lethal triple whammy of danger presented by Iwo Jima. Athwart the direct path to Japan, the island was almost exactly halfway between the Marianas and Japan and boasted two airstrips and a radar station.

  As the Superforts approached Iwo on their way to Japan, the radar station would give mainland defenders a two-hour early warning. The gigantic B-29’s, lumbering north on their 2,500-mile round trip flight to attack Japan, made easy targets for the small, quick fighter planes based on Iwo.

  And lastly, after enduring more antiaircraft fire and dogfights over Japan, the B-29’s, often damaged, would again be forced to face the Iwo-based fighters on their return trip. Too many pilots and crew were being lost to watery graves. General Curtis LeMay, commander of the Twentieth Air Force, warned that his pilots could not sustain these losses much longer.

  And it was not only the bombers in the air that were vulnerable. The Army Air Force concluded after the war that Iwo Jima–based planes destroyed more B-29’s on the ground, in raids on Tinian and Saipan, than were lost on all the bombing runs over Tokyo.

  But the conquest of Iwo Jima was not merely about cutting losses. In Allied hands, the island would take on an offensive value: The B-29’s could themselves land there to change crews, discharge wounded, take on fuel. And they could be escorted to their targets by squadrons of Army Air Corps P-51 long-range fighters.

  Given these powerful incentives, the island had to be taken at almost any cost.

  The Army Air Force was doing its part to soften up Iwo Jima for the Marines. Beginning December 8, B-29 Superforts and B-24 Liberators had been pummeling the island mercilessly. Iwo Jima would be bombed for seventy-two consecutive days, setting the record as the most heavily bombed target and the longest sustained bombardment in the Pacific War. One flyboy on Saipan confidently told Easy Company’s Chuck Lindberg, “All you guys will have to do is clean up. No one could survive what we’ve been dropping.”

  Some optimistically hoped the unprecedented bombing of the tiny island would make the conquest of Iwo Jima a two- to three-day job. But on the command ship USS Eldorado, Howlin’ Mad shared none of this optimism. The general was studying reconnaissance photographs that showed that every square inch of the island had been bombed. “The Seventh Air Force dropped 5,800 tons in 2,700 sorties. In one square mile of Iwo Jima, a photograph showed 5,000 bomb craters.” Admiral Nimitz thought he was dropping bombs “sufficient to pulverize everything on the island.” But incredibly, the enemy defenses were growing. There were 450 major defensive installations when the bombing began. Now there were over 750. Howlin’ Mad observed: “We thought it would blast any island off the military map, level every defense, no matter how strong, and wipe out the garrison. But nothing of the kind happened. Like the worm, which becomes stronger the more you cut it up, Iwo Jima thrived on our bombardment.”

  The photographs shocked Smith’s Chief of Staff. He would later write: “The prolonged aerial bombardment of Iwo Jima, which was a daily occurrence for over seventy days, had no appreciable effect in the reduction of the enemy’s well-prepared and heavily fortified defensive installations.”

  The air raids were called “softening up” activities. But in fact, Iwo Jima was becoming “harder.”

  Off Saipan, Doc now learned that whatever terrors the coming battle would hold for him, he would not have to climb down the rope nets he dreaded so much. The first ten waves of the assault force—the tip of Spearhead—were placed on board LST’s for the final trip to Iwo. Instead of ropes over the side as they had been trained, Easy Company would walk down to the dark holds of the LST’s and board amphibian tractors (LVT’s). These tractors would clank down a metal ramp into the sea and then to shore.

  A final invasion rehearsal was conducted, with Tinian as the objective. The LVT’s churned toward shore and swerved away at the last moment. The next time the boys would feel the earth under their feet, it would be on Iwo Jima.

  On February 15, the assault troops shoved off from S
aipan. It would be a seven-hundred-mile, four-day trip to D-Day, scheduled for February 19.

  The weather is balmy during the trip, and most of the men sleep atop the deck of the crowded LST. They are quieter now as battle approaches, more serious. They hone their knives and bayonets, clean and reclean their rifles. Religious services are well attended. At night men hang over the rails staring silently at the phosphorescence of the water as their LST slices through the Pacific.

  The armada’s momentum is inexorable now, fated, a force of history. Nothing will stop the surge. A man on one of the ships loses his balance, pitches over the side, and finds himself terribly alone in the Pacific Ocean. His craft does not stop. None of the ships stop. He waves his arms in panic. The ships churn past him. His horrified comrades look on as his figure recedes, then vanishes. The armada cannot stop for one man. The armada has an appointment, and means to be on time.

  And theirs will be no surprise attack. The day the invaders sail from Saipan, General Kuribayashi orders his men to take their battle stations, and he moves to his command post. “I pray for a heroic fight,” he writes.

  To the general a “heroic fight” meant one in which all his men would die. There were no medals for survivors in the Japanese army, only for the heroic dead.

  More was expected of the Japanese soldier than any soldier in World War II. They were to fight valiantly with no hope for survival. Every man on Iwo Jima knew the island would be his grave.

  Kuribayashi had no expectation that he could win the battle. He knew the Americans would throw overwhelming arms and numbers of men at him. And by now he realized the depleted Japanese navy would not sail to his rescue.

  His goal was a foreshadowing of the enemy’s strategy in Vietnam: to make the battle so costly to the Americans in terms of lives that the civilian leaders in Washington would blanch at the prospect of a later invasion of the Japanese mainland. He had instructed his men that their duty was to “kill ten Americans before you die.”

  His issen gorin had long ago written the final letters that would be delivered to their folks on farms in Kyushu. To his wife, Kuribayashi had written, “Do not expect my return.”

  The troops had even pooled their money and shipped it to the treasury in Tokyo. Their lives were only worth the cost of a postcard to their military masters—“one yen, five rin”—but perhaps Tokyo had use for their money. They knew they would have no need for it anymore.

  All they had to look forward to was the death of as many Marines as possible before they offered their lives for the Emperor.

  The Japanese troops on Iwo Jima were hardened veterans. To ensure a solid defense, the army had shipped from Manchuria the veteran 145th Infantry Regiment, crack troops from Kagoshima, for the battle.

  All their young lives their heads had been filled by military propaganda, in grade school, high school, and now in the army. Since their youth they had been told how true Japanese heroes always “died with the Emperor’s name on their lips.” Death on the battlefield was glorified for the home front, but the veterans knew the last word of a boy dying in battle was someone else’s name, not the Emperor’s. It was the same name all troops throughout history had cried out with their last breath. It was rendered in different tongues, but the meaning was universal. His last word was invariably “Okasan!” The German would cry “Mutter!” The English and Americans, “Mother!” “Mom!” or “Mommy!”

  No matter the similarity in death, in life the Americans and Japanese fought very differently. The Japanese army fought using the most ruthless tactics of any combatant in World War II. Their practice of “no surrender” meant they were unpredictable, as they fought far beyond the limits of a Westerner. On Tarawa only seventeen Japanese soldiers had surrendered. And most of those were captured unconscious, stunned, or weakened by battle. Five thousand Japanese soldiers fought to extinction. Ira, echoing the feelings of many Marines, had recently written his parents, “I would rather fight a Nazi than a Japanese.”

  The Japanese soldier turned all Western logic on its head. If surrounded, a German would surrender; a Japanese would fight on. If wounded and disabled, an Englishman would allow himself to be taken prisoner; a Japanese would wait and blow himself and his captor up. The Marines could not treat the Japanese soldier as they would hope to be treated. Their only choice was to exterminate him.

  Japanese treatment of defenseless prisoners of war alarmed the American fighting man. All armies commit atrocities against their opponents, but these are usually isolated incidents not condoned by higher officials. But Japanese authorities in Tokyo, including the Emperor, condoned a different set of rules to fight their war. Rules that permitted, among other startling actions, slavery, systematic torture, barbaric medical experiments, even cannibalism.

  Japanese “hell ships” with their Allied chattel stuffed in dark, stinking holds delivered survivors to China, Korea, and Japan, where they were forced to work as slaves in mines, factories, and farms. Allied slave labor built the “Railroad of Death” over the Kwai River at a brutal cost of three hundred lives per mile.

  The Japanese had their counterpart to the Nazi Gestapo: skilled torturers, the Kempei Tai. One of their favorite tricks was to force fistfuls of rice down a POW’s throat, insert a water hose down his throat until his belly swelled, and then mercilessly jump on him.

  By 1945 the Marines were aware of a number of Japanese atrocities. There was a certain photograph, copies of which were passed among Allied troops in the Pacific. It showed an Australian POW—a pilot, on his knees, blindfolded, with his arms tied behind his back. A Japanese officer towered over him with a raised samurai sword, about to chop the Australian’s head off. In the background, smiling Japanese soldiers looked on.

  The statistics at the end of the war spoke to the brutal Japanese treatment of anyone within their grasp. Allied POW’s captured by the Germans in the European Theater died at a rate of 1.1 percent. But POW’s held by the Japanese died at a rate of 37 percent.

  Because the Japanese fought by different rules, the Marines changed some of theirs also. I think of Doc, my twenty-one-year-old father-to-be, on that LST sailing to Iwo Jima. He’s “Doc” to everyone, a Navy corpsman. But his counterpart in Europe would not recognize him as a fellow medic.

  Doc is dressed like any other Marine. But if he had been a medic in the European Theater, he would have worn a red cross on his helmet and expected the Germans to spare him as a noncombatant. Since the Japanese refused to make this distinction, Doc bore no special markings. In Europe the medics were unarmed, according to the Geneva Convention; the Germans usually would not stoop to shooting a corpsman. But Doc and the other medics in the Pacific had been issued .45-caliber pistols to protect themselves. The Japanese targeted corpsmen to prevent them from helping wounded Americans.

  Despite his youth, Doc was the senior corpsman for Easy Company. In that capacity he occasionally called the other corpsmen together for a briefing, to relay news, to go over procedures. But briefings got old; there wasn’t much news, and by now the other corpsmen knew their procedures.

  And so Doc calmed his mind by arranging and rearranging the contents of his “Unit 3,” again and again. And again.

  A Unit 3 was a corpsman’s pouch—a large cloth pouch that the medic would sling across his chest, much like the newspaper bags my father used on his paper route back in Appleton. But this pouch was not meant to bring in dollar bills for young Jack Bradley to put on his parents’ mantel. This pouch was meant to save human life. It contained medical supplies. Bandages, adhesives, safety pins, tweezers, and sulfa powder for disinfectant—penicillin, still new and costly, was available only in limited supply then. And like the newspaper boy he had once been, sitting and folding the papers on the curb, Doc would spend hours hunched down someplace on deck, organizing and reorganizing his Unit 3. He memorized the exact place where every item would be; memorized it by touch, so that he could reach for it in the chaos of battle and find it unerringly.

  The morphin
e Syrettes—small tubes with a needle on one end and a dispenser on the other—contained a quarter grain of morphine to be injected into a grievously injured Marine to dull unbearable pain. To calm him so that Doc could work on him. Or just to ease his passage to death.

  The thick white swatches of woven cloth for tourniquets. In battle, these would be stained red from blood spurting from severed arteries as the corpsman wrestled one over the stump of a man’s missing arm or leg.

  The large gauze dressings with their long tie-strings. These were for the hideously but accurately named “sucking chest wounds,” wounds that tore open the chest and punctured the lungs. The sucking sound came as the injured man gasped for breath and his chest cavity lost pressure. Doc would have to restrain the victim, applying the dressing over the hole, and hope it was enough until the kid could be evacuated to an aid station.

  The hemostats, clamps with flat ends to stick into a gaping wound and tie off a broken artery.

  I can imagine my father, Doc Bradley, finally packing up his Unit 3 at the end of the day. Perhaps he hoped it would bring him luck, protect him, that he would be as safe with it slung across his body as he had been with a newspaper sack back in Appleton.

  But no matter how he would have tried to imagine that the Marine riflemen would do most of the dying, there was the fact that 414 corpsmen had been casualties of the fighting on Saipan, eight times as many as on Tarawa. At Iwo Jima the figure would double.

  Whatever his thoughts as he lay down to sleep on his LST, he didn’t know that on Iwo Jima the Japanese soldiers had special rules regarding the treatment of Navy corpsmen like him. They were being trained how to recognize him and make him a priority target. The idea was that if they could kill a corpsman, more Marines would die unattended, bleeding into the sand.

  Even better, they were instructed, was to wound a corpsman. Since the Marines valued their corpsmen and felt protective of them, often three or four would rush out to help them, making inviting targets.