Flags of Our Fathers

by James Bradley

  And how were the Japanese soldiers trained to recognize Doc Bradley as a medic? By their Unit 3’s.

  “Unit three! Unit three!” their instructors would shout, pointing to intelligence photos of young Navy corpsmen running through battle.

  Perhaps the biggest fear of the boys, now only days away from their target, was fear of the unknown. How many troops would be on Iwo Jima? Would air and naval bombardment eliminate most? How well dug in were the Japanese?

  American intelligence analysts had many aerial photographs of Iwo Jima, but they rarely revealed a Japanese soldier. Because of the island’s lack of potable water, they concluded only 13,000 troops could be there. They were off by forty percent. In reality there were 22,000 Japanese.

  By the summer of 1944 the Japanese high command concluded that, while they could not win the war outright, they could force America into a negotiated peace. They were confident the American public would not tolerate a long war with growing casualties in the Pacific. So they ordered attrition warfare: fighting that would slow the Americans down and inflict maximum casualties. These tactics would capitalize on two great strengths of the Japanese troops—their ability to dig in and their ability to endure the most god-awful shelling.

  In August of 1944 Imperial General Headquarters issued orders calling for “endurance engagement” through the use of “Fukkaku positions,” honeycombed underground defensive positions. No longer would the Japanese soldiers mount banzai charges; now they were ordered to fight from heavily fortified underground tunnels and caves.

  General Kuribayashi, waiting on the beaches of Iwo Jima for the U.S. armada, not only had absorbed the lessons of the Pacific, but had studied the mistakes Japan’s ally Germany had made in the amphibious invasion at Normandy seven months before.

  Normandy was a colossal military failure for Hitler, who had spent years building his “Atlantic Wall” as an impenetrable barrier to invasion from the sea. Thousands of troops spread over hundreds of miles were confident their cement bunkers, ocean defenses, barbed wire, and powerful guns would repulse any invader into the sea. Eisenhower’s forces leaped over this wall in twenty-four hours.

  At Iwo, by contrast, the defenders knew exactly where the invaders would arrive. Only two miles of beach on the entire perimeter was suitable for an assault. All the Marines would have to go through this narrow funnel, all under the deadly gaze of Mount Suribachi.

  Kuribayashi had absorbed the central lesson of Normandy: No matter how strong your defense, you cannot stop an American invasion on the beach indefinitely. So over the objections of his subordinates he dismantled the old beach defenses and pulled his guns back. He would not invest in a defense that could be breached in a day. General Kuribayashi was determined to cause as many casualties as possible over the longest possible time.

  Kuribayashi concluded attrition was the best he could expect. He would fortify the interior of the island and make it a killing field, hoping the exorbitant casualties would make the Marines falter and perhaps cause the civilians in America to pause in their desire to invade the Japanese mainland. To these ends he ordered that his forces cede the beach to the invaders, and that they move their fortifications underground.

  Kuribayashi had sifted the coarse volcanic beach sand through his fingers and figured the men and their machines would bog down there. So he would wait until the beach was crowded with bodies. Then his troops would open fire on the Marines huddled there. Crisscrossing, withering fire would rain down upon a beach so jammed with boys that hardly a bullet could miss.

  And anyone who made it off the beach would enter a frightening no-man’s-land with the enemy underground, unseen. Bullets would fly from hidden crevices, mortars would arc from holes deep below the surface. Kuribayashi’s defenses were designed to make every advancing step hell for the Marines.

  He set about building the most ingenious fortress in the history of warfare. By the time he was finished, Iwo Jima would become the most heavily fortified island of World War II. Kuribayashi transformed Iwo Jima into the equivalent of one huge blockhouse.

  Soon the best fortifications specialists in the Japanese army arrived on Iwo: quarry experts, mining engineers, labor battalions, and fortress units. They drew up specifications for the backbone of Iwo Jima’s defense—a subterranean cave system connected by tunnels.

  By the fall of 1944 a veritable city of 22,000 was functioning below the surface of Iwo Jima. Two additional levels of tunnels had been added, above and below the original tier. Tunnels large enough for troops to run through standing up. General Kuribayashi himself would direct the battle from his command center, a bombproof capsule that was seventy-five feet below the surface.

  As one officer, Baron Nishi, wrote in a letter to his wife: “When we complete our underground rooms we…won’t even have to worry about the enemy’s one-ton bombs.”

  On Iwo Jima, the defenders constructed fifteen hundred underground rooms. Many were electrified and ventilated. Most had plaster walls. Lighting ranged from electricity to fuel lamps and candles. They were thirty to fifty feet deep and had stairways and passageways. There was space for storing ammunition, food and water, and other supplies. The caverns had multiple entrances and exits to avoid entrapment.

  Underground billets, meeting rooms, communications centers, and even hospitals complete with surgical equipment and operating tables took shape. One hospital could treat 400 men on hospital beds carved into the rock walls.

  The blockhouses on the surface were built of thick concrete with steel reinforcing rods. The walls were three feet thick, the ceilings six feet thick.

  The Japanese camouflaged the blockhouses with sand. Thus, there were many more than General Smith and his aerial spotters could see from their photographs. The black dots that the boys had observed on their battle maps were only the surface openings of this elaborate system: the tip of the iceberg, the spout of the submerged whale.

  The blockhouses were mutually supporting, laid out so that every square inch of the island would be covered by cross fire.

  The blockhouses had tiny slits exposing only the muzzles of slender machine guns. Antiaircraft guns pointing at the beaches were hidden in rocky outcroppings. Tanks waited behind six-foot rock walls with only their turrets visible. Coastal defense guns jutted from concrete bunkers.

  Snipers were ready in cave entrances and tunnel openings, piles of hand grenades at the ready.

  Antipersonnel mines were stockpiled for shallow burial on the landing beaches. Heavier mines would wreak havoc with tanks making their way inland. Rocket launchers and mortar tubes hid under concrete covers with firing apertures. Antiaircraft guns were pointed not at the sky, but forward to meet the oncoming Americans.

  The maps on the U.S. ships didn’t tell the American boys—mostly teenagers—that they would have to run over ground that hid fifteen hundred underground rooms connected by sixteen miles of tunnels. Running over the heads of 22,000 well-fed troops with plentiful rations that could hold them over for five months. Unable to see an enemy who had a clear view of them.

  The Air Force pilot on Saipan was correct when he suggested the boys wouldn’t see anyone on the island. But not because of the aerial bombing. It was because the Japanese were not on Iwo Jima. They were in Iwo Jima.

  On February 17, D-Day minus two, ships’ doctors reported an outbreak of diarrhea. Young boys were getting anxious.

  But no matter what the Japanese had designed as a defense, the Marines figured they had an ace in the hole. Big Navy ships would deliver the real power punch before their arrival. The battleships the boys had seen anchored off Saipan that had preceded them by days to Iwo Jima reassured the Marines: enormous monsters capable of lobbing 2,600-pound shells the size and weight of large automobiles to smash the enemy’s blockhouses. Every one of these shells would save many American lives.

  The Marines could not know that this ace was about to be trumped—by their own command.

  The invasion of Iwo Jima was a Navy operation.
General Smith’s Marines, were, in effect, the Navy’s land troops. Smith and his staff were the world’s experts on amphibious assaults. They knew that ten days of Navy shelling by heavy ships was critical before their Marines rushed ashore. Smith requested that amount in an October 24 memo.

  The general was stunned at the Navy’s reply: Ten days was “impossible.” (“Impossible” was a concept that Howlin’ Mad was not familiar with.) The Navy would only provide three days’ bombardment. Their bureaucratic rationale dumbfounded the Marine general: “due to limitations on the availability of ships, difficulties of ammunition replacement, and the loss of surprise.”

  Smith knew that the Japanese couldn’t be surprised after seventy days of bombing by planes and the sure knowledge of an armada of 880 ships sailing toward them. He was convinced that replaceable ammunition could be found to save irreplaceable lives. But the key was the phrase “the availability of ships.”

  The Joint Chiefs had made the capture of Iwo Jima the main Allied objective in the Pacific. But the Navy was eager to grab headlines and show that they too, and not only the Army Air Force, could shell mainland Japan. And so ships were diverted to the high-profile but strategically dubious mission of bombing the enemy’s homeland.

  Smith seethed and fulminated, and made increasingly desperate pleas for more bombardment. Nine days, seven, until he was down to four, just one more day than the Navy had arbitrarily assigned. All his requests were rebuffed. Smith knew three days’ shelling would spell death for many of his Marines. But the Navy would have their headlines.

  Then at the last moment the Navy added a final insult: There would be even fewer ships available for the shelling of Iwo Jima than agreed upon. Additional ships were “needed” for the shelling of Japan. This further diminished the impact of the bombardment. When his own Navy associates expressed disagreement with this siphoning-off of ships, Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance weakly wrote Smith: “I regret this confusion caused in your carefully laid plans, but I know you and your people will get away with it.”

  “Get away with it.” The flip phrase betrayed the harsh reality. But Smith’s Chief of Staff needed no hints. “The cost in Marines killed will be far greater,” he wrote, “because naval support has been so weakened as to jeopardize the success of the operation…”

  And it got worse.

  The Navy shelling was scheduled for three days: February 16, 17, and 18. But only February 17 saw a complete day of bombardment.

  The problem was the rules the Navy imposed upon the bombardment. Targets were to be shelled only when they were visible and if the results were observable by spotter airplanes.

  Ten minutes into day one of the bombardment, clouds rolled in. The shelling was stopped and the Marianas-based bombers returned to their bases without releasing a single payload. Rain squalls on February 18 similarly halted the action.

  Marine officers pleaded for just one extra day of shelling. It was about the lives of young Marines, they argued. But Vice Admiral Blandy, in charge of the bombardment, refused and sent this message to his superiors: “Though weather has not permitted complete expenditure of entire ammunition allowance, and more installations can be found and destroyed with one more day of bombardment, I believe landing can be accomplished tomorrow as scheduled.”

  Smith would always remember that the ammunition lockers in Blandy’s battleships still contained hundreds of shells that hadn’t been fired because of Navy rules. “If the Marines had received better cooperation from the Navy,” he wrote bitterly, after the war, “our casualties would have been lower.”

  Months before, a Marine officer had summed up the Navy’s attitude when he pointed a finger at his Navy counterparts and asserted, “Even though you Navy officers do come in to about one thousand yards, I remind you that you have a little more armor. I want you to know that Marines are crossing the beach with bayonets, and the only armor they’ll have is a khaki shirt.”

  As Easy Company with their khaki shirts neared their destiny, seventy civilian correspondents gathered in the steaming wardroom of the command ship Eldorado anchored off Iwo, for a final briefing.

  Admiral Kelly Turner told the newsmen that the battle would be rough—“the defenses are thick”—and that Iwo Jima was “as well defended a fixed position…as exists in the world today.”

  Perhaps hopefully, he then added, “We are taking steps, as far as our knowledge and skill and intent are concerned, to reduce these losses as far as we can, to as low a figure as we can.”

  General Smith nodded as Turner, his superior, took his seat beside him. It was all Howlin’ Mad could do to control his disgust. He knew very well the steps the Navy had failed to take.

  Now Smith took the podium. He somberly predicted large casualties, a hard fight. As his words sank in among the correspondents he said proudly and quietly: “It’s a tough proposition. That’s why my Marines are here.”

  As the Old Warrior sat down his eyes were misty. Iwo Jima would be his last battle, the last time he would command “my Marines.”

  Then a special guest rose to speak. He was dressed in Marine fatigues with no insignia of rank. He was the big boss, Navy Secretary James Forrestal, out to witness the Navy’s largest operation in its history. And he made clear that he knew who would bear the brunt of this campaign:

  In the last and final analysis it is the guy with the rifle and machine gun who wins the war and pays the penalty to preserve our liberty. My hat is off to the Marines. I think my feelings about them are best expressed by Major General Julian Smith. In a letter to his wife after Tarawa he said, “I never again can see a United States Marine without experiencing a feeling of reverence.”

  The room was still as Forrestal sat down. Howlin’ Mad’s face beamed with a proud smile.

  Admiral Turner broke the silence. “Are there any questions?”

  From the back row a correspondent asked, “When’s the next boat to Pearl Harbor?”

  The Japanese on Iwo certainly did not share Forrestal’s opinion of the Marines. These troops had never fought Americans and by their standards the Marines were cowardly, known to refuse the honorable choice of death and choose surrender. The Marines fought for publicity and had materialistic desires, their government pamphlets assured them. And worst of all, they didn’t fight with spiritual incentive like the Japanese fighting man, but instead depended upon their material superiority.

  Veteran combat correspondent Robert Sherrod, who had landed on Tarawa and who would also land on Iwo, felt differently. He wrote that it was easy to say that American industrial power was winning the war. “But no man who saw Tarawa, Saipan…would agree that all the American steel was in the guns and bombs. There was a lot, also, in the hearts of the men who stormed the beaches.”

  For the boys of Easy Company, their year of special training at Camp Pendleton and Camp Tarawa had prepared them to pay any price for one another, as a team, as a band of brothers. They would fight for their company, their platoon, their squads and fire teams. And it would be the ties at this level that would determine the outcome of the battle. Ira had written home: “There is real friendship between all us boys; and I don’t think any of us would take $1000 to separate from the others. We trust and depend on one another and that’s how it will be in combat. These boys are all good men.”

  The Japanese enemy would fight to the death for the Emperor. That motive made them formidable. But these boys would fight to the death for one another. And that motive made them invincible.

  As Robert Leader would write as a full professor of fine arts at Notre Dame in 1979:

  It was like being on a winning athletic team and everyone was playing over his head. Can you possibly imagine the unspoken affection we felt for each other? An affection that allowed men to offer their lives daily for each other without hesitation and, I suppose, without understanding. And yet, to place oneself between danger and one’s people is the ultimate act of love.

  Mike, Harlon, Franklin, Ira, Rene, and Doc were about t
o enter a battle against an underground enemy that had endured the Pacific’s most intense bombing of World War II and had not been disturbed. The only way the cave kamikaze could be overcome was by direct frontal assault, young American boys walking straight into Japanese fields of fire.

  It would be a battle pitting American flesh against Japanese concrete. The boys would have only their buddies to depend upon, buddies who were willing to die for one another. As soon they would.

  The evening of D-Day minus one, February 18, a date that nine years later would become my birthday, my father and the assault troops still could not see their objective. Everything was timed down to the minute. Their churning craft would approach Iwo Jima on schedule, only just before it was time to assault the beaches.

  Each boy was quiet now, lost in his private thoughts. Their confidence must have been shaken when, that night, Tokyo Rose named many of their ships and a number of the Marine units. She assured the Americans that while huge ships were needed to transport them to Iwo Jima, the survivors could later fit in a phone booth.

  The opposing commanders tried to get some sleep before battle. Howlin’ Mad comforted himself with his Bible in his cabin on the Eldorado.

  Kuribayashi was also in his personal quarters—a system of caves and tunnels seventy-five feet below the surface of Iwo Jima. Lying in his small concrete cubicle. The dim candlelight illuminated the “Courageous Battle Vow” posted on the wall, as he had ordered it posted on the walls of all the bunkers, caves, and blockhouses on the island. It read:

  We are here to defend this island to the limit of our strength. We must devote ourselves to that task entirely. Each of your shots must kill many Americans. We cannot allow ourselves to be captured by the enemy. If our positions are overrun, we will take bombs and grenades and throw ourselves under the tanks to destroy them. We will infiltrate the enemy’s lines to exterminate him. No man must die until he has killed at least ten Americans. We will harass the enemy with guerrilla actions until the last of us has perished. Long live the Emperor!