LAST WEEKEND, Japan celebrated the 80th anniversary of the Pacific War’s iconic Battle of Iwo Jima; an island with no official residents, today it is a place of pilgrimage for the relatives of the 18,375 Japanese and 6,821 American marines who died in one of the bloodiest engagements of World War II. In addition to the deaths, 19,217 Americans were wounded, while only 216 Japanese were taken prisoner. To commemorate the event, President Trump released a statement:
‘In spite of a brutal war, the United States-Japan alliance represents the cornerstone of peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific. Nevertheless, our victory stands as a legendary display of American might and an eternal testament to the unending love, nobility, and fortitude of America’s Greatest Generation.’
Iwo Jima is a battle that earned its iconic status not just because of its high casualty rate, but because of the Pacific War’s most famous photograph, taken by Associated Press’s Joe Rosenthal: the raising of America’s Stars and Stripes flag at the summit of Mount Suribachi. Observing the flag-raising from the bridge of USS Rock Mount, Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal observed, ‘the raising of the flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.’ Writing to his wife on board his flagship USS Indianapolis, fleet admiral Raymond A. Spruance enclosed a copy of the Rosenthal’s picture, describing it as the, ‘Finest photograph this war has given us to date. When we settle down, I want to have this picture framed. Some first-class sculptor should do this in bronze, it is so perfect.’
Felix de Weldon’s 32-foot-tall bronze statue representation of the photograph now stands at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.
Hollywood has further embellished the legend of Iwo Jima. Sands of Iwo Jima, filmed in 1949, featured John Wayne playing the lead role and earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Other Iwo Jima films followed, including a pair of films directed and produced by Clint Eastwood in 2006: Flags of our Fathers was a story built around the flag raising on Suribachi, whilst Letters from Iwo Jima, a joint American and Japanese production, explored the Battle of Iwo Jima from the standpoint of the Japanese. At the Oscars, the latter was nominated for Best Picture.
On a map, Iwo Jima is a five-mile-long jagged shark’s tooth, with Mount Suribachi at the sharp end. Because of its smell, it was named Sulphur Island by Virginia-born Captain John Gore, who took command of HMS Discovery after the death of Captain Cook in Hawaii. On an otherwise largely flat island, Suribachi looks like a misshapen knob of mouldy putty plonked down by God as an afterthought. It has otherwise been described as ‘like a sea monster with the little dead volcano for the head’. John Lardner, a war correspondent for The New Yorker, described Iwo Jima as,
‘a miserable piece of real estate… no water, no bird, no butterfly, no discernible animal life, nothing but sands and clay, hump-backed hills, stunted trees, knife-edge kunai grass in which mites who carry scrub typhus live, and a steady, dry dusty wind.’
After a three-day naval barrage from Admiral Spruance’s 500-ship fleet, including 16 aircraft carriers and 1,200 planes, US marines of the 3rd, 4th and 5th Divisions launched themselves on the steep, volcanic ash beeches of Iwo Jima on March 20, 1945. Why was this pin prick of an island, half the size of Manhattan, so important that it needed to be invaded?
Originally, Iwo Jima was not on the menu for the American forces’ Pacific Ocean advance on Japan. On his island-hopping route, America’s naval commander-in-chief, Admiral Chester Nimitz, had, wherever possible, bypassed heavily defended islands. So why make Iwo Jima an exception? Nimitz had planned to go directly to Formosa (now Taiwan) as his advance base for an assault on Japan. Against this plan, General Douglas MacArthur determined that Luzon, the Philippine’s northernmost island, would be a better staging post.
However, neither Formosa nor Luzon were better launchpads for the bombing of Japan than the Mariana Archipelago which included the major bases of Guam, Saipan and Tinian. These islands, taken in fierce battles in the summer and autumn of 1944, provided the bases for General Curtis LeMay’s Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress bombers.
He argued, ‘Without Iwo Jima, I couldn’t bomb Japan effectively.’ He wanted Iwo Jima as a base for fighter escorts and his bombers, as well as an emergency base for B-29s that were struggling to make the 1,500-mile trip back to the Marianas. In the event, Curtis LeMay’s switch to night bombing using napalm obviated the need for fighter escorts.
Two weeks before Iwo Jima, LeMay’s Great Tokyo Air Raid on March 10, 1945, killed more people than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. By this time, however, the wheels were already in motion for the attack on Iwo Jima. These devastating nighttime napalm bombing raids would burn down 40 per cent of Japan’s housing stock.
LeMay, supported by Admiral Spruance, won the argument, but it was a costly decision. Lt. General Holland Smith, a marine commander, bluntly told Spruance, ‘It will be the toughest place we have ever had to take. I don’t know what anyone wants it for, but I’ll take it.’ Even today, it is argued back and forth as to whether Iwo Jima could have been bypassed, with the US going directly to Japan’s southernmost island of Okinawa. With the benefit of hindsight, I would suggest that Iwo Jima was probably a mistake.
Even after the taking of Mount Suribachi, fighting went on for four weeks. Few Japanese soldiers surrendered; the last one to do so was a Japanese soldier who continued the struggle for four years after the war until he happened across a copy of the US Army’s Stars and Stripes newspaper.
The fighting was brutal. It was later said that the ‘bullets and artillery were so thick it was like trying to run through the rain without getting wet.’ There was no expansive battle. Engagements were fought over small parcels of ground with obtuse names; ‘Motoyama’s Plateau’, ‘Hill 382’, ‘Turkey Knob’, ‘Nishi Ridge’, ‘Baker’, ‘Quarry’, ‘Cushman’s Quarry’ and ‘The Amphitheatre’ took on the aspect of major battles.
These were micro-battles in which portable flamethrowers came into their element. Introduced shortly before Iwo Jima, the napalm-using M2-2 flamethrower became the weapon most feared by Japanese defenders. Japanese soldiers faced carbon dioxide levels that could reach as high as 20 per cent, with levels as little as 10 per cent causing rapid deoxygenation, hypoxia, loss of consciousness, convulsions and death. Flamethrowers were deadly for their users too. A special target for Japanese snipers, they suffered casualty rates of 92 per cent.
Iwo Jima produced many heroes but, surprisingly perhaps, the focal hero of the battle was not an American. It was the Japanese commander Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi; ‘The best damned general on this stinking island’ wrote one Marine rifleman. Kuribayashi, a cultured man who loved poetry and aspired to be a journalist, had studied at Harvard and became a deputy military attaché to Washington. He loved America. Presciently, he recalled,
‘I was taught to drive by some American officers, and I bought a car. I went around the States, and I knew the close connections between the military and industry. I saw the plant area of Detroit, too. By one button push, all the industries will be mobilized for military business.’
The brilliant young officer developed Iwo Jima into a killing machine of dystopian proportions. He believed that by killing enough American soldiers, at the expense of the life of his troops and himself, he might deter an attack on Japan’s mainland. He was astute enough to know that US public opinion might swing sentiment toward a negotiated peace. Kuribayashi is believed to have committed seppuku (ritual suicide), though his body was never found.
Today, Kuribayashi is a war hero commemorated in Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine along with Emperor Hirohito’s other wartime generals. For Japan, he is a tragic heroic figure to rank alongside King Leonidas at Thermopylae or William Travis and Davie Crockett at the Battle of the Alamo.
Ultimately, Kuribayashi’s sacrifice was in vain. He was not to know that the Manhattan Project was about to produce the atom bomb that would void the need to invade mainland Japan – plans that the US War Department estimated would cause between 1.7million and 4million American casualties. Japanese military and civilian deaths were estimated at 5million-10million. Perversely, it was the rising US casualty levels at Iwo Jima, and later Okinawa, that formed the basis of these calculations. It made President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki inevitable. No president, committed to Japan’s surrender and possessing such a weapon, could have made any other decision.
When he heard the news of the Hiroshima bomb, Paul Fussell, a 21-year-old American officer about to be deployed to Japan recalled, ‘We cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.’ Even Japan’s Navy Minister, Mitsumasa Yonai, later viewed the US atom bomb as a ‘gift from God’. It was. However appalling, the use of the atom bomb against Japan saved millions of lives on both sides.
