by Daniel Wrinn
Defiant to the End
General Erskine caught pneumonia but refused to evacuate. His Chief of Staff, Colonel Robert Hogaboom, kept the war moving behind the scenes. The division continued its advance, and when Erskine recovered—Hogaboom adjusted accordingly. The two were an effective team.
Erskine had long wanted to conduct a battalion-size night operation. It bothered him that throughout the war, the Allies had yielded the night to the Japanese. When Hill 362-C continued to thwart his advance, Erskine ordered a predawn assault without the trappings of preparatory fire, which always identified the time and place of attack.
The honor of leading this unusual attack was put to Colonel “Bing” Boehm, CO, 3/9 Marines. But this battalion was new to the sector and received their attack order too late to reconnoiter effectively. Absent of advance orientation, the battalion crossed the line of departure silently at 0500 and advanced toward Hill 362-C. The unit achieved total surprise. Before the sleepy Japanese knew it, the Marines swept across 500 yards of broken ground and roasted enemy outposts and strong points with flamethrowers.
When daylight revealed that Boehm’s battalion had captured the wrong hill (Hill 362-C was still 250 yards distant), his battalion was surrounded by a sea of furious and wide-awake and counterattacking enemy infantry. Boehm redeployed his battalion and attacked toward the original hill. This was rough going and took most of the day, but before dark, the 3/9 Marines secured Hill 362-C—a main Japanese defensive anchor.
The Allied positions grew stronger after General Senda’s counterattack against the 4th Marine Division. On D +18, a patrol from the 3rd Marine Division reached the northeast coast. The squad leader filled his canteen with saltwater and sent it to General Schmidt marked: “For Inspection, Not Consumption.”
Schmidt welcomed the symbolism. The next day, the 4th Marine Division finally secured Turkey Knob and advanced toward The Amphitheater on the east coast. While the end was in sight, the intensity of the Japanese resistance did not fade. In the 5th Division’s western zone, the 2/26 reported a casualty rate of seventy percent. General Keller Rockey reported his Marines were: “in a state of extreme fatigue and exhaustion.”
Division commanders looked to relieve their shot-up men. General Cates formed a provisional battalion in the 4th Marine Division under Colonel Melvin Krulewitch. He was ordered to attack bypassed enemy positions. While the term “mopping up” was used, it was considered inaccurate by many Allied troops. Countless pockets of Japanese held out—defiant and well-armed to the end. Rooting them out was never easy. Marines used pioneers, motor transport units, and amtracs, as light infantry units to strengthen frontline battalions and conduct combat patrols.
In the extreme rear on Iwo Jima, the men had become overconfident. Movies were shown every night and ice cream could be found on the beach. Men swam in the surf and slept in tents in a deadly and false sense of security.
To the north, Colonel Cushman’s 2/9 Marines were engaged in broken terrain east of the airfield. Marines ultimately encircled the enemy’s position, but the battle of “Cushman’s Pocket,” raged on. Cushman’s battalion commander reported the action: “The Jap position is a maze of pillboxes, caves, emplaced tanks, stonewalls, and trenches. We beat against them for eight continuous days using every support weapon. Our core objective in the sector still remains. Our battalion is exhausted, and most of our leaders are gone. Our battalion now numbers 387 with 350 replacements.”
Cushman’s 2/9 was ultimately relieved by elements of the 9th and 21st Marines (equally exhausted) and had just as difficult of a time. General Erskine had no reserves. He ordered Cushman back into the pocket, and by March 16 (D +25), enemy resistance in the thicket of jumbled rocks ended.
The 4th Marine Division poured over the hills in the east and secured the coastal road by blasting the last Japanese strong points from the rear. Ninety percent of Iwo Jima was in Allied hands. Radio Tokyo announced the fall of Iwo Jima as: “the most unfortunate thing in the whole war situation.”
General Holland Smith took the opportunity to declare victory and conduct a flag-raising ceremony. Following that, the old warhorse departed along with Admiral Kelly Turner. Now, General Schmidt and Admiral Hill finally had the campaign to themselves. Survivors of the 4th Marine Division began backloading on board ship—their battle finally over.
The killing continued in the north. The 5th Marine Division entered The Gorge, an 800-yard pocket of broken country the troops called “Death Valley.” General Kuribayashi would make his last stand here in a command center in a deep cave. Fighting through this horrid moonscape was a fitting end to the battle—nine days of cave-by-cave assaults with demolitions and flamethrowers. Marine combat engineers used 9,000 tons of explosives to detonate one massive fortification. Progress was bloody and slow. General Rockey’s depleted and drained regiments lost one man for every two yards gained. General Schmidt deployed the 3rd Division against Kitano Point in the 5th Division zone to ease the pressure.
Colonel Hartnoll Withers led the final assault with the 21st Marines against the extreme northern tip of the island. General Erskine’s pneumonia be damned. He came along to look over Withers’ shoulder. The 21st Marines felt the end was near. Their momentum was irresistible. In a few hours of sharp fighting, they cleared out the last of the resistance. Erskine signaled Schmidt: “Kitano Point Taken.”
Allied forces tried to persuade Kuribayashi to surrender during these last days. They broadcasted appeals in Japanese and sent him personal messages, praising his bravery, and urging his cooperation. General Kuribayashi was a samurai to the end. In his last message to Tokyo: “We have not eaten or drank for five days, but our fighting spirit is still running high. We will fight to the end for our Emperor.”
Imperial Headquarters tried to convey the good news that the emperor had approved his promotion to full general. There was no response from Iwo Jima. It would be a posthumous promotion. Controversial Japanese evidence revealed that he committed Seppuku on the night of March 25.
The 5th Marine Division clawed their way forward in The Gorge. The average battalion that landed with thirty-six officers and 885 men on D-Day now only had sixteen officers and 300 men. This included the hundreds of replacements funneled in through the battle. Remnants of the 1/26 and 1/28 Marines squeezed the enemy into a final pocket and destroyed them.
On the evening of March 25 (D +34), the battle for Iwo Jima was over. The island became eerily quiet. Far fewer illumination shells flickered a false light on the shadowy figures moving south toward the airfield. General Schmidt got the good news that the 5th Marine Division had snuffed out the last enemy cave. As the corps commander prepared to declare the end of organized resistance on Iwo Jima—a well-organized enemy force emerged from the northern caves and snuck down the length of the island.
This last spasm of Japanese resistance reflected the enemy’s tactical discipline. A 300-man Japanese force took all night to move into position around the island’s vulnerable rear area. Newly arrived army pilots from the VII Fighter Command were surprised in their tents. The enemy force attacked the sleeping pilots with grenades, swords, and automatic rifles. The fighting was as savage and bloody as any on Iwo Jima.
Men from the 5th Pioneer Battalion and surviving pilots formed a skirmish line and launched a counterattack. Seabees and redeploying 28th Marines joined the fight. There were few suicides among the Japanese. Most died in battle. Grateful to strike one final blow for their emperor. Sunrise uncovered the carnage—300 dead enemy and over a hundred slaughtered pilots, Seabees, and pioneers along with another 200 wounded. It was a grotesque closing chapter to five savage weeks of killing and carnage.
Legacy of Iwo Jima
In thirty-six days of combat, the V Amphibious Corps killed nearly 22,000 Japanese sailors and soldiers. This was achieved at a staggering cost. Marine assault units (along with organic Navy personnel) suffered 24,053 casualties—6,140 killed—the highest single action losses in Marine Corps history. Statistic
ally, for every three Marines who landed on Iwo Jima, one became a casualty.
According to military historian Norman Cooper: “Seven hundred Americans gave their lives for every square mile. For every plot of ground the size of a football field, an average of one American and five Japanese were killed, and five Americans wounded.”
Assault units bore the brunt of these casualties. Captain Bill Ketcham’s Company I, 3/24 Marines, landed on D-Day with 133 Marines and three rifle platoons. Only nine of these men remained when his company re-embarked on D +35.
Captain Frank Caldwell reported a loss of 220 men from Company F, 1/26 Marines. By the end, a private first class commanded a platoon in Captain Caldwell’s merged 1st and 2nd Platoons.
Captain Tom Fields relinquished command of Company D on the eighth day to replace his battalion’s executive officer. When he rejoined his company at the end of the battle, Fields was sickened to find only seventeen of the original 250 Marines still alive.
Company B of the 1/28 Marines went through nine company commanders in the fight. Twelve different Marines served as platoon leaders of the 2nd Platoon—including two buck privates. Other divisions reported similar conditions.
The American public reacted with shock and sadness as they had fourteen months earlier on Tarawa. The debate about the high cost of forcibly seizing an enemy island raged in the press while the battle was being fought. The Marine Corps released only one statement on February 22 about detailed battle losses during the fighting. They reported casualties of nearly 5,000.
William Randolph Hearst was an early supporter of the MacArthur for President campaign. Hearst ran a front-page editorial in the San Francisco Examiner blaming the horrific Marine losses on poor tactics: “it’s the same thing that happened on Saipan and Tarawa.” The editorial urged for the elevation of General MacArthur to supreme commander of the Pacific, because: “HE SAVES THE LIVES OF HIS OWN MEN.”
One hundred off-duty Marines disagreed and stormed the offices of the examiner and demanded an apology. But the Hearst editorial had already received wide play. Many families of men fighting in the Pacific were forwarded the clippings. Marines received these in the mail while the fighting still raged on Iwo—an unwelcome blow for morale.
FDR, an expert in manipulating public opinion, kept a lid on the outcry by emphasizing the troops’ sacrifice as symbolized by Joe Rosenthal’s Suribachi flag-raising. While this photograph was already famous, Roosevelt made it the official logo of the Seventh War Bond Drive. He ordered the six flag raisers be reassigned home to boost morale, but three out of those six men had already been killed in the fighting on Iwo Jima.
The Joint Chiefs studied Iwo’s losses. No one questioned the objective: Iwo Jima was an island that had to be secured to launch an effective strategic bombing campaign. The island could not have been bypassed or leapfrogged. There was evidence the Joint Chiefs considered using poison gas during the planning phase. Neither the US nor Japan had signed the international cessation on poison gas, and there were no civilians on the island. The US had stockpiled mustard gas shells in the Pacific Theater. When FDR read the report, he shot down the idea. He publicly stated that the United States would never make first use of poison gas. This left the landing force with no other option but a frontal amphibious assault against the most heavily fortified island the United States had ever faced.
The capture of Iwo Jima provided other strategic and symbolic benefits. Marines raised the flag over Suribachi the same day MacArthur entered Manila. The parallel captures of the Philippines and Suribachi were followed immediately by the invasion of Okinawa—accelerating the pace of the war and bringing it at long last to Japan’s doorstep. These three campaigns proved to the Japanese command that the Allies had the capability and will to overwhelm even the most resolutely defended islands. Honshu and Kyushu would be next.
The capture of Iwo Jima delivered immediate benefits to the strategic bombing campaign. Marines fighting on the island were reminded of this mission repeatedly as crippled B-29s flew in from Honshu. Securing and rebuilding Iwo’s airfields increased the operating range payload and survival rate of the big bombers. The monthly tonnage of high explosives dropped on Japan by the B-29s based in the Marianas increased eleven-fold in March alone. On April 7, eighty P-51 Mustangs took off from Iwo, escorting the B-29s bombing the Nakajima aircraft engine plant in Tokyo.
The great value of Iwo’s airfields was that they could be used as emergency landing fields. By war’s end, 2,252 B-29s made forced landings on Iwo. These forced landings included 24,765 flight crewmen. Many of these men would have perished at sea without Iwo’s safe haven. According to one B-29 pilot: “whenever I landed on that island, I thanked God for the men who fought and died for it.”
General Kuribayashi proved to be one of the most competent field commanders the Marines had ever faced. His expert understanding of simplicity and economy of force made maximum use of Iwo’s formidable terrain. He deployed his mortars and artillery with great skill and commanded his troops with an iron will—to the end. He was a realist. With no hope of naval or air superiority, he knew he was doomed from the start. Allied forces took five weeks to breach every strong point and exterminate his forces on the island.
Iwo Jima was the pinnacle of Allied amphibious capabilities in the Pacific. The sheer magnitude of planning the assault and sustaining the landing forces made Operation Detachment an enduring model of detailed planning and violent execution. The element of surprise was not available. But the speed of the landing force and the toughness with which assault units withstood the withering barrages amazed the enemy defenders.
Colonel Wornham of the 27th Marines said: “The Iwo landing was the epitome of everything we’d learned over the years about amphibious assaults. Bad as the enemy fire was on D-Day, there were no reports of ‘Issue in doubt.’”
Colonel Galer compared his Guadalcanal experience to the battle on Iwo: “then, it was can we hold? On Iwo, the question was simply, when can we get this over?”
While the ship-to-shore assaults were impressive, the actual degree of amphibious effectiveness was seen in the massive, sustained logistical support which flowed over the treacherous beaches. Marines had all the ammunition and flamethrower refills they needed around the clock. They also had many less obvious necessities that marked this battle differently than its predecessors. Marines on Iwo had enough quantities of whole blood, most donated two weeks in advance, flown in, refrigerated, and always available.
Marines had mail call, clean water, radio batteries, fresh-baked bread, and prefabricated burial markers. The Iwo Jima operation was a model of interservice cooperation. Marine and Navy teams functioned efficiently together. The Navy earned the respect of the Marines on D -2 when a flotilla of tiny LCI gunboats fearlessly attacked the coastal defense guns to protect the Navy and Marine frogmen. Marines appreciated the contributions of the Coast Guard, Army, Red Cross, and embedded combat correspondents; all shared in the misery and glory of this battle.
The US Military occupied Iwo Jima until 1968, when jurisdiction was transferred back to Japan. Seventy-seven years later, the island remains a military-only island. It is no longer a baren moonscape, but covered in rich greenery, yet two aspects of this battle are still controversial: inadequate preliminary bombardment and the decision to use piecemeal replacements instead of organized units to strengthen the assault forces. Both decisions were made in the context of several competing factors and were made by experienced commanders in good faith. Iwo Jima’s highest cost was the loss of so many combat veterans while taking the island. While this battle created a new generation of veteran heroes among the survivors, many proud regiments suffered devastating losses.
Those veteran regiments had already been designated as crucial landing force components in the Japanese home islands assault—these losses had severe potential implications. It may have been these factors that influenced Holland Smith’s unpopular decision to withhold the 3rd Marines from the battle.
According to Holland Smith: “We had no hope of surprise, either tactical or strategic. There was little possibility for tactical initiative. The entire operation was fought on virtually the enemy’s terms. The strength, conduct, and disposition of the enemy’s defense required a major penetration of his prepared positions in the center of the Motoyama Plateau and a subsequent reduction of his positions in rugged terrain sloping to the shore on the flanks.
“The terrain and size of the island precluded any Force Beachhead Line. It was a one-phase and one-tactic operation. From the time the engagement was joined until the mission was completed, it was a frontal assault maintained with relentless pressure by a superior force in supporting arms against a position fortified to the maximum practical intent.
“We Americans of a subsequent generation in the profession of arms find it difficult to imagine a sustained amphibious assault under these conditions. In some respects, the fighting on Iwo Jima took the features of the Marines fighting in France in 1918. We sensed the drama repeated every morning on Iwo Jima after the prep fires lifted, when the rifleman, engineers, corpsman, flame tank crews, and armored bulldozers somehow found the fortitude to move out again into The Meatgrinder or Death Valley. Few of us today can study the defenses, analyze the after-action reports, or walk that broken ground without experiencing a sense of reverence for the men who fought and won that epic battle.”