The Lions of Iwo Jima: The Story of Combat Team 28 and the Bloodiest Battle in Marine Corps History - Softcover

INTRODUCTION Many military historians today regard the attack on the island fortress of Iwo Jima as the supreme test of the amphibious assault in the annals of war. Three reinforced divisions of Marines and their supporting forces, some 110,000 men in all, not counting the massive numbers of men manning the ships and planes surrounding the island, assaulted the Japanese on February 19, 1945. From its formal inception in October 1944, the operation to wrest Iwo Jima from its defenders was considered by American planners to be potentially the most difficult mission in the 170-year history of the Marine Corps. The campaign itself, fought between February 19 and March 26, 1945, proved the planners entirely correct. The battle, in the end, took thirty-six days of unceasingly ferocious combat. Most of the killing was at close range by infantrymen and demolitions men wielding rifles, flamethrowers, and explosive charges designed to blow up gun emplacements and the underground tunnels and caves that comprised the Japanese defensive system. One-third of the nineteen thousand Marines who were killed in World War II died on Iwo Jima. Operation Detachment, the official name of the operation, was the sole campaign in the Pacific in which total American casualties exceeded those of the Japanese. The fortifications on the island were the most elaborate encountered by Allied infantrymen in the Pacific. Because Iwo Jima was so small and the combatants so numerous, the battlefield was intensely cramped. During the first two weeks of the fight, there was no safe place, no “rear area” that could not be reached by Japanese guns. The Japanese fighting positions ranged from one-man spider holes to pillboxes, dug-in tanks, blockhouses, trenches, and interconnected cave openings. They were scattered throughout the island, but camouflage rendered the vast majority undetectable. The commander of the Japanese forces was a superb professional soldier. A lieutenant general, Tadamichi Kuribayashi was a fifth-generation samurai and a gifted defensive strategist. He had long admired the United States and believed the decision to initiate war against the Americans a grave mistake. Nonetheless, for eight months before the invasion, Kuribayashi drove his garrison at a furious pace. They prepared a lethal system of interlocking defenses across the entire island. More than nine hundred major gun emplacements and several thousand individual fighting positions were supplied by a network of underground barracks and storehouses, connected by eleven miles of tunnels. The Japanese garrison on Iwo waged one of the greatest campaigns of static defense in the history of war, exacting—and paying—an enormous price in blood. Avoiding the large-scale, costly banzai attacks that had featured prominently in earlier battles, the Japanese instead chose to adhere, as a V Amphibious Corps (V Corps or VAC, the senior military command echelon on the island) report put it, to a “well coordinated plan by a commander who has prepared his defensive positions and utilized the terrain to the best tactical advantage in order to conserve his force, inflict heavy casualties on the enemy, and delay the capture of this strategic island.. . . Each Jap defender was given the mission of killing 10 Americans before dying himself.”1 “The gravity of the coming battle filled me with apprehension,” wrote Lt. Gen. Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, who, in leading the Marines in their drive across the Pacific, had become a symbol of the Corps’ fighting spirit. 21 Smith had predicted at least fifteen thousand casualties among the landing force. Before the landing, the V Amphibious Corps believed the enemy bastion on Iwo to number about fourteen thousand men. In fact, there were close to twenty-two thousand defenders.The Americans suffered twenty-eight thousand casualties, while fewer than two thousand Japanese survived the battle. “I was not afraid of the outcome. I knew we would win,” wrote Smith. “We always had. But contemplation of the cost in lives caused me many sleepless nights. My only source of comfort was in reading the tribulations of leaders described in the Bible. Never before had I realized the spiritual uplift and solace a man on the eve of a great trial receives from the pages of that book.” 3 “Great trial” indeed. On Iwo Jima, there would be no flanking attacks or amphibious assaults behind enemy lines designed to crack the thick belt of defensive positions from the rear. There could be no end run around the enemy. The island was too thickly fortified to undertake such maneuvers, which have traditionally limited both casualties and the duration of large battles. For the assault troops, Iwo Jima was from beginning to end a matter of frontal assault against an enemy who resisted attacks almost to the last man. Beginning on December 8, 1944, and continuing for the next seventy-four consecutive days, the island was bombarded by B-24 Liberators of the 7th Army Air Force. The island received by far the heaviest preinvasion bombardment of the Pacific War, yet an official intelligence report issued two weeks before the battle confirmed that the daily bombings only served to slow down the furious pace with which Kuribayashi and his men were digging in and building new positions. Photographic evidence of the bombings between December 3 and January 24, an American intelligence report made clear, had “not prevented the enemy from improving his defensive position, and as of 24 January 1945, his installations of all categories of [fortifications] had notably increased in number. The island is now far more heavily defended by gun positions and field fortifications than it was on 15 October 1944, when initial heavy bombing strikes were initiated.” 4 It was Adm. Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, who proposed the strategic directive to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) that led to the island’s seizure. On October 2, 1944, he issued a directive indicating that the Navy lacked the resources to sustain the provisionally scheduled invasions of Formosa and China. The JCS had envisaged constructing air bases on both to conduct a massive strategic bombing campaign against Japan proper. King argued that the Navy did, however, have sufficient resources to take intermediate air bases on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and that their seizure would greatly enhance the strategic bombing of the Japanese home islands from bases already established in the Marianas. Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold, who led the Army Air Forces, ardently supported the directive. Iwo Jima, in particular, could be used as a base for long-range P-51 fighter escorts for the massive B-29 Superfortress raids designed to destroy Japan’s capacity to make war. The island was equidistant from Tokyo and the B-29 air bases on Guam, Tinian, and Saipan. It already had two airfields suitable for use by fighters. The capture of Iwo would eliminate the two-hour warning of impending attack from the island’s radio station. With fighter escort protection and without the fuel-wasting dogleg around the island, the B-29s could fly in low over their critical targets in Japan. On October 3, the JCS accepted King’s proposal. There was a secondary reason for taking the island: Japanese bombers flying from Iwo had already succeeded in destroying more than a dozen B-29s on American airfields in the Marianas. If the Japanese opted to replenish their air armada on Iwo