by Daniel Wrinn
Amphibian tractors could cross the soft beach without help. They resupplied and conducted medevac missions directly along the front lines. These vehicles suffered from inexperienced crews in the LSTs who wouldn’t lower their bow ramps enough to accommodate the amphibious trucks and tractors approaching after dark. Many times, vehicles loaded with wounded Marines got lost in the dark or ran out of gas and sank. The amphibian tractor battalions lost over 147 LVTs at Iwo Jima. Unlike Tarawa, where enemy gunfire and mines accounted for less than twenty percent of this total. Thirty-four LVTs perished from Iwo’s crushing surf, and eighty-eight sank in the deep water.
Once ashore and clear of the loose sand along the beaches, half-tracks, tanks, and armored bulldozers collided with the strongest minefield defenses yet encountered in the Pacific. Under Kuribayashi’s direction, enemy engineers had planted irregular rows of antitank and horned anti-boat mines along the exits from both beaches.
The enemy accompanied these weapons by rigging massive makeshift explosives from 500-pound aerial bombs, torpedo heads, and depth charges triggered by a pressure mine. The loose soil on Iwo had enough metallic characteristics to render standard mine detectors inaccurate. Marines and engineers were on their hands and knees in front of tanks, probing for mines with bayonets and wooden sticks.
While the 28th Marines battled to encircle Suribachi, the shore party and beachmasters struggled to clear the wreckage from the beaches. In the 5th Marine Division zone, the relatively fresh troops of the 1/26 and 3/27 Marines got bloodied. They forced their way across the western runways and took heavy casualties from time-fused airbursts and enemy dual-purpose antiaircraft guns. In the 4th Division zone, the 23rd Marines captured and secured the airstrip—advancing 800 yards with massive casualties.
Some of the most savage fighting was along the high ground above the Rock Quarry on the right flank. Here, the 25th Marines were engaged in the fight of their lives. Rifleman Richard Wheeler found the landscape, and the embedded enemy surreal: “there was no cover from enemy fire. Japs were in reinforced concrete pillboxes and laid down interlocking bands of fire that cut entire companies to pieces. Camouflage hid all their positions. The high ground on either side was honeycombed with layer after layer of Jap emplacements. They had a perfect observation of us. Whenever a Marine made a move, those damn Japs smothered the area with a murderous blanket of fire.”
The second day of battle proved unacceptable on every front for the Marines. When the 1/24 Marines finally broke through along the cliffs late in the day, they were rewarded with back-to-back cases of friendly fire. A naval airstrike caused eleven casualties. Misguided salvos from an unidentified gunfire support ship took down another ninety troops. Nothing was going right.
The morning of D +2 promised more frustration. Marines shuddered in the chilly rain and wind. Admiral Hill twice closed the beach because of dangerous undertows and wicked surf. But during one of the grace periods, the 3/21 Marines came ashore, glad to be free of the heaving small boats.
The 20th Marines continued their attack on Suribachi’s base. It was a slow, grinding, and bloody fight—boulder by boulder. On the western coast, the 1/28 Marines made the most of naval and field artillery gunfire support and reached the mountain’s shoulder. Everywhere else, murderous enemy fire restricted any progress to a matter of yards. Enemy mortar fire from all over the volcano rained down on the 2/28 Marines, clawing their way along the eastern shore. Rifleman Richard Wheeler recalled: “it was terrible. Worst I can remember us ever taking. Jap mortar men played checkers with us as the squares.”
The Marines used Weasels, handy tracked vehicles that made their first field appearance in this battle to hustle forward flamethrower canisters and evacuate the wounded. That night the amphibious task force experienced the only significant air attack of the battle. Forty-nine kamikaze pilots from the 22d Mitate Special Attack Unit smashed into ships on the outer ring of Iwo Jima. In a desperate action, serving as a prelude to Okinawa’s fiery hell, kamikaze pilots sank the escort carrier Bismarck Sea with heavy loss of life. They damaged several ships and knocked the veteran Saratoga out of the war. All forty-nine Japanese planes were destroyed.
On D +3, it rained even harder. Marines darted forward under fire, hitting the deck to return fire. They discovered that the loose volcanic sand, combined with rain, jammed their weapons. The 21st Marines at the vanguard ran headfirst into a series of enemy emplacements at the southeastern end of the Japanese defenses. Marines battled all day to scratch and claw and advance 200 yards. Casualties were disproportionate and horrific.
On the right flank, Colonel Chambers rallied the 3/25 Marines through the rough and rugged terrain above the Rock Quarry. While Chambers directed the advance of his decimated companies, an enemy sniper shot him in the chest. Chambers went down hard, thinking it was all over: “I faded in and out. I don’t remember too much about it except a frothy blood gushing from my mouth. Then someone started kicking the hell out of my feet. It was Captain Headley yelling, ‘get up, you were hurt worse on Tulagi.’”
Captain Headley knew Chamber’s sucking chest wound was life-threatening. He tried to reduce his commander’s shock until he could get him out of the line of fire. Lieutenant Mike Keller, the battalion surgeon, crawled forward with one of his corpsmen. They lifted Chambers onto a stretcher and through enemy fire, carried him down the cliffs to the aid station, and eventually onboard an amphibious truck to make the evening’s last run out to the hospital ship. All three battalion commanders on the 25th Marines were now casualties. Chambers survived and received the Medal of Honor. Captain Headley took command of the shot-up 3/25 Marines for the rest of the fight.
The 20th Marines on D +3 made progress against Suribachi. They reached the shoulder on all points late in the day. Combat patrols from the 28th Marines linked up at Tobiishi Point: the southern tip of the island. Reconnaissance patrols reported they found few signs of life along the mountain’s upper slopes and on the north side.
Admiral Spruance authorized Task Force 58 to strike Okinawa and Honshu at sundown. After that, they would go to Ulithi and prepare for the Ryukyuan campaign. All eight Marine Corps fighter squadrons left Iwo Jima for good. Navy pilots flying from the ten remaining escort carriers picked up the slack. While there was no question of the courage and skill of these pilots, the quality of close air support for the troops fighting ashore plummeted after the Marine fighter squadrons departed.
The escort carriers had too many other missions: combat air patrols, anti-submarine sweeps, downed pilot searches, and harassing strikes against neighboring Chichi Jima. Marines reported a slow response time for air support requests, light payloads, and high delivery altitudes. The navy pilots delivered several napalm bombs, but many failed to detonate. This wasn’t the pilots’ fault. The early napalm bombs were old wing-tanks filled with the mixture and activated by unreliable detonators. Marines on the ground were concerned about these notoriously inaccurate weapons being dropped from high altitudes.
On February 23, D +4, the 28th Marines were poised to capture Suribachi. This honor was given to Lieutenant Harry Schrier and Company E, 3rd Platoon. They were ordered to summit, secure the crater, and raise a 54” x 28” American flag for everyone to see. At 0800, Schrier led his forty-man patrol forward. The regiment had already blasted dozens of pillboxes with demolitions and flame. They’d rooted out snipers and knocked out the mass batteries. The combined arms hammering by planes, naval guns, and field pieces had finally taken their toll on the enemy. Any Japanese soldier who popped out of a cave to resist was cut to shreds. Marines carefully walked up the steep northern slope, sometimes resorting to crawling on hands and knees.
The Suribachi flag-raising drama has endured for so long because so many people observed it. All over the island, Marines tracked the progress of the tiny column of troops during their ascent. Hundreds of binoculars from offshore ships watched Schrier’s Marines climb. When they finally reached the top, they disappeared. Those closest to the volc
ano heard gunfire. Then at 1020, there was movement on the summit—the Stars & Stripes fluttered bravely in the breeze.
Cheers roared from the southern end of the island. Ships sounded sirens and whistles. Wounded men propped up on their litters to get a glimpse. Marines wept. Navy Secretary Forrestal was thrilled. He turned to General Holland Smith: “raising that flag means a Marine Corps for another five hundred years.”
Three hours later, an even larger flag went up. Few knew that Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal had just captured the American war-fighting spirit on film. Leatherneck magazine Staff Sergeant Lou Lowery had taken a picture of the first flag raising and immediately got into a firefight with a handful of enraged enemy defenders. His photograph would become a valuable collector’s item—but it was Rosenthal’s that would enchant the free world.
Captain Tom Fields of Company D’s 1/26 Marines heard his men yell: “Look up there!” and he turned in time to watch the first flag go up. His first thoughts were on the battle still at hand, and he remembered in the moment saying: “Thank God the Japs won’t be shooting us down from behind anymore.”
The 28th Marines captured and secured Mount Suribachi in three days at the cost of 900 casualties. Colonel Liversedge reoriented his regiment for operations to the north. Unknown to all, the battle of Iwo Jima still had another bloody thirty days before it would be over.
The Meatgrinder
It wasn’t until the ninth day of battle that intelligence officers realized General Kuribayashi led the Japanese forces on Iwo Jima.
The unexpected early loss of the Suribachi garrison was a setback for Kuribayashi, but he still held a strong position. He had eight infantry battalions, two artillery and three heavy mortar battalions, and a tank regiment. Admiral Ichimaru had 5,000 naval infantry and gunners under his command, but unlike other besieged garrisons in the Central Pacific—these two Japanese leaders worked well together.
Kuribayashi was pleased with the quality of his artillery and engineering troops. His chief of artillery, Colonel Kaido, commanded from an impregnable concrete blockhouse in the east-central sector of the Motoyama Plateau. A lethal landmark the Marines called “Turkey Knob.”
General Senda was an artillery officer with combat experience in Manchuria. He commanded the 2d Independent Mixed Brigade, whose central units would be locked into a 25-day death struggle against the 4th Marine Division. The 204th Naval Construction Battalion had built some of the most formidable defense systems on the island in his sector. One cave had an 800-foot-long tunnel with fourteen separate exits. It was only one of the hundreds defended to the bitter end.
Well-armed and confident enemy troops waited for the advance of the V Amphibious Corps. Kuribayashi ordered occasional company-sized attacks to recapture lost terrain or disrupt enemy assault preparations—but these were not sacrificial or suicidal. These mainly were preceded by stinging mortar and artillery fires and aimed at gaining limited objectives. General Kuribayashi’s iron will kept his troops from large-scale, futile banzai attacks until the last few days.
An exception was on the evening of March 8. General Senda, frustrated at the noose the 4th Division were applying, ordered 800 of his surviving troops into a ferocious counterattack. Finally, the Marines had targets out in the open. The suicidal Japanese attackers were cut to pieces with machine-gun and small arms fire.
For the first week of the drive north, the Japanese on Iwo had the assaulting Marines outgunned. The enemy’s 120mm mortars and 150mm howitzers were superior to most of the weapons of the landing force. Marines found the enemy’s direct fire weapons deadly. Especially the dual-purpose antiaircraft guns and the 47mm tank guns, buried up to their turrets. Retired General Donn Robertson said: “the Japs could snipe with those big guns. They also had the advantage of knowing the ground.”
Most of the casualties in the first three weeks of battle were from high explosives: rocket bombs, grenades, mines, artillery, and hellacious mortars. Robert Sherrod (Time correspondent) wrote that the dead on Iwo Jima, both Japanese and Marine, had one thing in common: “they all died with the greatest possible violence. Nowhere in the Pacific War had I seen such badly mangled bodies. Many men were cut squarely in half.”
The close combat was savage. Another constant stress for Marines was no secure rear area to put wounded troops. Kuribayashi’s gunners hammered the beaches and airfields. Massive spigot mortar shells and rocket bombs tumbled from the sky. Japanese defenders were drawn to softer targets in the rear. Anti-personnel mines and booby-traps were everywhere and on a large scale for the first time in the Pacific.
Exhausted Marines stumbled out of the front line, seeking nothing more than a helmet full of water to bathe in and a deep hole to sleep in. Instead, Marines spent their rare rest repairing weapons, dodging incoming rounds, humping ammo, or having to repel another nighttime enemy probe.
General Schmidt planned to assault the northern Japanese positions with three divisions abreast. The 5th on the left, the 3rd in the center, and the 4th on the right. This northern drive would jump off on D +5: the day after securing Mount Suribachi. Preparatory fires along the high ground north of the second airfield would last for an hour. Then three regimental combat teams would advance abreast: 26th Marines on the left, 24th on the right, and the 21st in the center. For this assault, Schmidt merged all three divisions’ Sherman tanks into one armor task force—commanded by Colonel “Rip” Collins. This would be the largest concentration of Marine tanks in the Pacific War: an armored regiment.
Marines recognized they were trying to force a passage through Kuribayashi’s primary defensive belt. The assault deteriorated into multiple desperate small unit actions along the front. While the 26th Marines (with the help of tanks) gained the most yards, it was still relative. Airfield runways were lethal killing zones. Mines and high-velocity direct fire destroyed Sherman tanks all along the front. On the right flank, Colonel Alexander Vandegrift (son of Marine Commandant Alexander Vandegrift) was wounded.
During the fighting on D +5, General Schmidt moved his command post onshore from the amphibious force flagship Auburn. Schmidt now had eight entire infantry regiments committed to the battle. General Holland Smith still had the 3rd Marines and expeditionary troops in reserve. Schmidt made his first of multiple requests to Smith to release that seasoned outfit. The V Amphibious Corps had already taken 6,845 casualties.
On February 25, D +6, enemy resistance intensified. Small Marine units escorted by tanks made progress along the runway. Each Marine was under the impression he was alone in the middle of a giant bowling alley. Often, holding newly gained positions across the runway proved more deadly than capturing them. Resupplying the troops became virtually impossible. Precious Sherman tanks were getting destroyed at an alarming rate.
General Schmidt got two battalions of 105mm howitzers ashore under the command of Colonel John Letcher. Well-directed fire from these heavy field pieces eased some of the pressure on the assaulting Marines. While fire from destroyers and cruisers was marginally effective, air support was a total disappointment. The 3rd Marine Division later complained that the Navy’s assignment of eight fighters and eight bombers on station was utterly inadequate.
At noon, General Cates sent a message to Schmidt requesting the strategic Air Force in the Marianas immediately replace Navy air support. Colonel McGee, air commander on Iwo, took heat from the frustrated division commanders. He later wrote: “those little spit kit Navy fighters up there were trying to help but were never enough and were never where they needed to be.”
In fairness, it’s debatable if any service could have provided adequate air support within the opening days of the northern drive. The air liaison parties within each regiment played hell trying to identify and mark targets. The enemy kept a masterful camouflage. Japanese frontline units were often eyeball to eyeball with Marines, and the air support request net was often overloaded.
Navy squadrons flying from the decks of escort carriers eventually improved
by adding heavier bombs and improving their response times. A week later, General Cates rated his air support as satisfactory. But the battle of Iwo Jima would continue to frustrate Allied forces; the Japanese never assembled legitimate targets in the open. Captain Fields of the 26th Marines wrote after the war: “the Japs weren’t on Iwo Jima. They were in Iwo Jima.”
Richard Wheeler, who survived Iwo Jima with the 28th Marines, wrote two books about the battle. “This was one of the strangest battlefields in history. One side fought wholly above ground, and the other operated within it. During the battle, American aerial observers marveled that one side of the field had thousands of figures milling around or in foxholes while the other side was deserted. But the strangest of all was that the two contestants sometimes made troop movements simultaneously in the same territory with one maneuvering on the surface and the other using tunnels below.”
As the Marines fought like hell to capture the second airfield from the Japanese, the terrain features rising to the north caught their attention. While there were three hills named 362 on the island, Marines had different nicknames for them: “Amphitheater” and “Turkey Knob.” But the bristling complex of hills and terrain would be forever known as “The Meatgrinder.”
The 5th Marine Division earned their spurs and lost many of their precious veteran leaders fighting on “The Gorge” and attacking Nishi Ridge (Hills 362-A and B).
The 3rd Marine Division focused their assault north of the second airfield and then onto the heavily fortified Hill 362-C beyond the airstrip. Finally, they attacked the moonscape jungle of stone, soon to be known as “Cushman’s pocket.”
Colonel Robert Cushman commanded the 2/9 Marines on Iwo. Cushman and his Marines were veterans of heavy fighting on Guam but were stunned by their first sight of the battlefield. Burned out and smoldering Sherman tanks dotted airstrips. Casualties streamed to the rear. The terrific and horrific echo of machine-gun fire was everywhere. Cushman mounted his troops on the surviving tanks and rumbled across the field. They met the same reverse-slope defenses that dogged the 21st Marines. But after three days of savage fighting, Cushman’s Marines secured the two Hills north of the second airfield, Peter and 199-Oboe.