War Stories II (66 page)

On 14 February, U.S. ships were on their way to an undisclosed location. The Marines aboard had no idea where the battle would be fought, only that it was a top-secret location known as “Island X.”

Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance's 5th Fleet dominated the air and sea around Iwo Jima, softening up the island for the Marine invasion. The U.S. was sending 72,000 Marines of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions to “Island X”—more troops than were sent to any other Allied island assault. The convoy of 880 American ships—the largest naval armada in history at the time—took forty days to sail from Hawaii to Iwo Jima. Aboard the troop ships, the Marines received communion and prayed during brief services held by the chaplains. Others wrote letters home; some of these letters would contain the last words ever expressed to their loved ones back in America.

D-Day was approaching. This D-Day was not unlike its counterpart in Europe nine months earlier. The invasion of Normandy had been terrible, with appalling costs in dead and wounded troops. But the Normandy assault lasted just twenty-four hours, though to its participants it must have seemed much longer. Yet writer-historian James Bradley said, “Any time a bullet is near your head, that's a bad battle. Normandy was awful, but at the end of twenty-four hours you and your grandmother could have had a tea party on the beach at Normandy. Iwo Jima, a much smaller beach, had a
thirty-six-day battle on a four-mile-long island, and it was the most intense battle of World War II.”

The defending troops figured out that “Island X” was Iwo Jima even without coded messages and intelligence. They saw Admiral Spruance's ships on the horizon for two and a half months, with troop carriers edging ever closer to the small island.

The average age of a Japanese soldier in World War II was a battle-hardened twenty-four. Most of the Americans were teenagers; many of them at Iwo Jima were seeing combat for the first time. These young Marines had been told by naïve American war planners that the typical Japanese soldier was five feet, three inches tall, wore glasses, and weighed 117 pounds. They were painted as small, inept, and completely unskilled in jungle warfare.

That caricature did not even come close to the reality of the Japanese soldiers. In truth, they were fearless, some of the world's most effective fighting men, defending their emperor and their homeland.

But what did the Japanese know about the Americans, especially the Marines? Their superiors told them fearful myths: that for a young American to become a Marine he had to kill his parents; that Marines ate dead babies. Japanese leaders warned civilians that if the U.S. Marines ever invaded the homeland, the women would be raped and killed and their children slaughtered and eaten.

No doubt these grisly myths had inspired Japanese civilians on Peleliu to throw their children off cliffs and jump to the rocks below. But if these Japanese civilians had seen the Marines weep when they witnessed these terrible acts—including Japanese civilians being machine-gunned when they hesitated or didn't jump—perhaps there might have been a little less horror on Peleliu.

The responsibility for killing the Marines on Iwo Jima was given to General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, a sixth-generation samurai personally selected by Emperor Hirohito. Kuribayashi had been a victorious general in the Japanese campaigns in China and Manchuria, and before the war he had been a Japanese military attaché in the United States. He'd traveled throughout the U.S. and returned to Japan with intelligence about America's industrial
and economic might. He wisely told his superiors, “The last country that Japan should ever go to war with is the United States.” But the Japanese political and military leaders never really considered his advice.

But now, here he was, about to defend the island of Iwo Jima against that mighty sleeping giant. General Kuribayashi must have known in his heart that his 22,000 men would not be able to prevail against 72,000 Marines. Tokyo knew. It's not known if the general was told that this was a suicide mission, but Kuribayashi wrote to his wife that he did not expect to come home. Kuribayashi ordered his troops that they were to each kill ten Americans before they died.

The general inspired his men with talk of the samurai code, the honor of dying for the emperor, and the terrible dishonor of surrender. He told them that this would be a “heroic” battle for the defense of Japan herself. All they had to do was kill ten Americans before each of them died in battle.

Their cause may have been “heroic” in his eyes, but it was also hopeless. The only thing General Kuribayashi had going was that the Americans had underestimated his troop strength on Iwo Jima, which would turn out to be a significant flaw in their battle plan.

Leading the American troops was another hand-picked general, selected by FDR. He was nicknamed the “Patton of the Pacific”—his Marines had never lost a battle at any place they had stepped ashore. He'd directed assaults on Tarawa, Eniwetok, Tinian, Saipan, and Guam, often leading his troops ashore himself. Now he faced the assaults of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He was General Holland “Howlin' Mad” Smith, an Alabama lawyer who had received his commission forty years earlier and had even fought in WW I.

This down-to-earth commander of the Pacific Fleet Marine Forces knew more about amphibious assault landings than any other American officer. General Smith knew that he'd have to sacrifice some of his Marines but he also knew the consequences if he didn't. Without the use of Iwo Jima for air bases, it might take many more years to conquer Japan. Formosa and Thailand could be enslaved for decades. General Smith believed that most of Asia was already enslaved and he and his Marines had to do something about it.

Iwo Jima was a stinking hulk of volcanic rock located 650 miles south of Tokyo, between four and five miles long and two miles wide. A car traveling at sixty miles per hour could traverse its entire length in five minutes.

Iwo Jima had just a few notable characteristics: Mount Suribachi, a small extinct volcano about as high as the Washington Monument, on the south tip of the island, and two crucial airfields, with another under construction. These airfields were needed as landing fields for U.S. aircraft returning from bombing runs, especially planes damaged from AA gunfire or encounters with Japanese fighters, and planes that were running out of fuel. As it was, too many American pilots were becoming casualties. Having no place between Japan and the American-controlled islands to land safely, a number of them could only ditch. Some were picked up but most simply went to a watery grave.

Key to the invasion were the seventy-two consecutive days of bombing by American B-29 Superfortresses and B-24 Liberators. They dropped more than 5,800 tons of bombs on Iwo Jima in a little more than two months. In fact, Iwo Jima would set the record for the most sustained and heavy bombardment in all of the Pacific war.

At dawn on D-4, the gunnery ships, along with escort carriers commanded by Rear Admiral William Blandy, had already arrived on the scene and began to blast the small island in preparation for the invasion.

Nearly 500 Navy ships laid down more shelling of the island from before dawn until just before 0800. Aircraft from Task Force 58, just off the coast
of Iwo Jima, sent in their dive-bombers and fighters to bomb and strafe the small island.

Offshore to the southeast, there was a mix of fresh-faced, newly arrived Marines and battle-hardened Leathernecks who'd already experienced combat on other islands in the Pacific. They were waiting for the word to go in. For the Marine combat veterans, this was their fourth assault in thirteen months, and they were ready to take and hold the beachhead's right flank.

But the Japanese had terraced the beach, and after the Navy guns and bombers had rearranged the coarse, coal-black volcanic sand, it was almost impossible to dig in. When the typical Marine, wearing a seventy-five-pound pack on his back, tried to dig a foxhole for cover it was like digging a hole in a barrel of ball bearings. The best he could hope for was to burrow into the sand like a beetle and hope it was deep enough. As it turned out, the only real practical but grim protection from Japanese bullets was often the lifeless body of a fallen comrade.

The troops from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions began reaching the Red, Green, Yellow, and Blue beach landing zones. The 4th Division would take the quarry south of Airfield 2. The 5th Marine Division would surround and capture Mount Suribachi. The 3rd Marine Division consisted mostly of reserves, but some scouts and headquarters personnel went ashore.

The first troop-carrying Amtracs rode the low waves onto the black sands of Iwo Jima by 0905 on 19 February 1945. For the next hour or so it was a flawless landing. But then all hell broke loose. Marines from the second waves of Amtracs waded ashore amidst unbelievable chaos. There was broken debris from blasted equipment—landing craft, armored vehicles, and supplies—scattered across the beach and washing up on shore.

Scores of dead Marines were also bobbing in the waves and washing onto the black sands. Body parts were almost as commonplace as the chunks of volcanic rock. The scene was one of absolute pandemonium and mayhem. As one eyewitness Marine said, “I can't describe it to you. All I could think was, this is not the movies.”

General Kuribayashi had waited until several waves of Americans were ashore before letting the Marines know that they had company on the
island. Then Kuribayashi's guns triangulated on the Marines on the beach, mowing them down like a buzz saw. Rockets, anti-aircraft fire, and anti-tank guns were also trained on the landing beaches. The Japanese opened fire from almost everywhere on the island.

Marines everywhere on the island were pinned down or cut down. Casualties began to mount, and it was an impossible mission for the Marines during those first few hours of combat. In fact, in the first seventy-two hours of combat, there was one Marine casualty every forty-five seconds.

U.S. intelligence had pegged the Japanese troop size on Iwo Jima in late 1944 to be somewhere between 4,000 and 11,000. That's why FDR and the Joint Chiefs were optimistic that the Marines could master the island in short time. No one knew it, but the enemy troop strength was in fact at least twice the highest number given by military intelligence.

General Kuribayashi had constructed his command center with five-feet-thick walls and a ten-feet-thick roof, seventy-five feet underground.

The Americans were not prepared for the horrendous numbers of killed and wounded Marines. Nor had they been prepared for the barbarous ferocity of the Japanese counter-attacks. To General Kuribayashi, this would truly be a “heroic” battle. By that he meant that he expected every one of his soldiers to die, but not before killing 220,000 Marines first—ten for every Japanese soldier, as he had inspired them to do. Kuribayashi would have been even more encouraged if he'd known that the Americans were sending “only” 100,000 Marines ashore—his troops could turn the tide by just killing five Americans apiece.

At the end of the day, the Marines had progressed only a few feet—at a tremendous cost of 10 percent of their forces. Of the first 30,000 men who landed on Iwo Jima that day, 3,000 were already casualties. About 40,000 Marines followed, and were met with the same percentage of casualties. Every one of the nearly 100,000 combatants on Iwo Jima would be caught up in the viciousness of the fighting.

Twenty-four-year-old Marine Captain Fred Haynes was the operations officer for the 28th Marine Regiment as the showdown on Iwo Jima's beaches drew near.