U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE U.S. MARINES ON IWO JIMA

Captain Raymond Henri, 3rd Marine Division

1st Lieut. Jim G. Lucas, 4th Marine Division

Tech. Sgt. David K. Dempsey, 4th Marine Division

Tech. Sgt. W. Keyes Beech, 5th Marine Division

Tech. Sgt. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., 3rd Marine Division

The U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima was originally published in 1945 by Dial Press, Inc., New York.  This ebook edition includes the complete contents of the original book published in 1945, including a lengthy list of U.S. Marines killed on Iwo Jima. Also included are numerous maps and photographs from the original book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

Prefatory Note 5

Foreword 6

ONE — Inevitable Island 7

TWO — Seventy-two Days 14

THREE — Uncommon Valor 17

FOUR — Hot Cargo 34

FIVE — Suribachi 39

SIX — As Long As You’re Not There... 47

SEVEN — Fire and Brimstone 58

EIGHT — The Meat Grinder 73

NINE — Western Front 87

TEN — Every Rat Hole 94

ELEVEN — Jungle of Stone 100

TWELVE — In A Voice Like Thunder 108

THIRTEEN — Breakthrough to the Sea 117

FOURTEEN — Out of the Valley of Death 129

APPENDIX — THE DEAD AND MISSING MARINES  OF IWO JIMA 136

Maps 151

Photographs 151

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 151

Prefatory Note

THIS book was written by three Marine Corps Combat Correspondents and two Marine Public Relations Officers who were with units that fought on Iwo Jima. Combat Correspondents are trained like other Marines and live and fight with the outfits to which they are attached. They write articles for newspapers and magazines about the men in their units and, during combat, assist the civilian correspondents in covering the action. It was inevitable in battle that each Combat Correspondent could see only what happened in his own unit’s limited sphere of action. In compiling this book, therefore, the authors drew upon their own experiences plus hundreds of stories written by other Combat Correspondents and Public Relations Officers on Iwo.

The photographs are the work of Marine Combat Photographers who, like the writers, are trained Marines attached to individual units which they accompany into combat.

There were three Combat Correspondents and three Combat Photographers killed during the battle of Iwo Jima. In addition, two Marine Public Relations Officers, three Combat Correspondents and eleven Combat Photographers were wounded in the fighting. The authors of this book, whose names follow, represent the more than 100 Marine writers and photographers who served on Iwo:

Captain Raymond Henri, Public Relations Officer, 3rd Marine Division.

First Lieutenant Jim G. Lucas, Assistant Public Relations Officer, 4th Marine Division.

Technical Sergeant W. Keyes Beech, Combat Correspondent, 5th Marine Division.

Technical Sergeant David K. Dempsey, Combat Correspondent, 4th Marine Division.

Technical Sergeant Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Combat Correspondent, 3rd Marine Division.

Foreword

OUR seizure of Iwo Jima was, as Secretary of the Navy Forrestal has pointed out, a step in the sequence of doom for Japan. Victory on Iwo Jima carried us inside the enemy’s inner defense line and, by forcing open the aerial front door to his homeland, enabled us to visit on him the devastating air offensive we have since witnessed.

The Japanese had every reason to believe that sooner or later we would attempt to capture Iwo Jima, since it was a keystone in their final island defense arc. And, because of the nature of the island, they knew precisely the only points at which a landing could be made. They were determined to make every square foot of the island untenable. Iwo Jima, when we got to it, was the most heavily fortified island in the world. And even after we had fought our way ashore the enemy garrison continued building fortifications.

The teamwork of all services and the grit, devotion and skill of the Marines who refused to be stopped reduced those defenses, won the island, and gave convincing proof to the Japanese that the best they had to offer was not good enough.

The operation at Iwo Jima was a strategic success, a completed phase toward the fulfillment of the overall Pacific-Asiatic offensive of the High Command. And it was more—much more—than that. It was a saga of American heroism destined to endure undimmed as an inspiration for all true Americans for generations to come.

—Lieutenant-General Holland M. Smith, USMC, Commanding General, Fleet Marine Force, Pacific.

ONE — Inevitable Island

THE story behind Iwo Jima, the reason why 60,000 Marines landed on a barren volcanic island five and a half miles long and two and a half wide and why more than 20,000 of them were killed or wounded—was simply this: we had to take that island to speed the end of the war against Japan.

Our Superfortresses had been bombing Japan from bases in the Marianas since November 24, 1944. They were having trouble—in four ways. Japanese planes, based on two airstrips on Iwo Jima—midway between the Marianas and Tokyo—had been raiding our bomber strips, damaging our big planes. Second, enemy fighters from Iwo were intercepting the B-29s on their long flight to Japan. Worse, our big bombers had to make the Tokyo missions—fifteen hundred miles each way—without fighter escort. Our fighters could not make that sixteen-hour round trip. This meant that over the target the big bombers had to stay up high—20,000 to 30,000 feet—beyond reach of the Japanese fighters. At 20,000 feet our bombing was not all it could have been. There was no secret about that. Let our bombers come down lower—to 5000 feet with fighter protection—and Japan would really feel the kind of bombing that had helped to knock out Germany.

Finally, between the time of taking off in the Marianas and the time of landing at the same place hours later, our planes had no place in which to come down in case of motor trouble, or damage caused by enemy action and sudden bad weather. The B-29s either had to get back to their base or fall into the sea with almost certain loss of plane and probable loss of crew.

So taking Iwo away from the Japanese and using it ourselves was a must. Actually, there were other islands between the Marianas and the Japanese mainland on which the Japanese either had or could have had airfields, notably Chichi Jima near Iwo. But Iwo was the most important of all the available spots; it was the most developed, and once we seized it we could neutralize all the others. The Japanese realized this also. On Iwo’s flat tableland, by the time we landed, the Japanese had almost finished a third airfield in a large clearing among the rocks of the northern part of the island. Though it was still rough, it was already in use and filled with Japanese planes.

Iwo was also another link in the iron chain we were planning to close around the Japanese mainland. It represented another forward push, another surge toward the heart of the enemy. The map on page 14 [see Maps] shows how our chain, begun at Guadalcanal in the Solomons and Funa Futi in the Ellice Islands, had been drawn steadily tighter across the Southern and Central Pacific. Somewhere in the Volcanos or Bonins was our next stop. Iwo was it.

Iwo Jima, unlike many other places we had previously taken, was not suitable as a base for our fleet. There was no harbor, no sheltered water. Iwo was simply an island surrounded by an ocean that was usually very rough. We did not look on Iwo as anything more than what it was—a spot of land needed to press our air attack against the Japanese homeland. That alone made it essential for us to take it.

Our high command had begun planning for the assault on Iwo long before we actually undertook it. Many months before our first Superfortress raided Tokyo, they foresaw the opposition Iwo would give us. And as that opposition began to develop and grow stronger, they realized still better the full tactical use to which the Japanese would be putting Iwo. Iwo was a powerful strongpoint in the inner defenses of Japan, and the Japanese were making it even stronger. And as they worked, Iwo became the inevitable island. We had to take it.

Our original maps told us little about Iwo except its general shape and appearance. The island resembled a leg of mutton. It was eight square miles in area. At the knob-like southern end was a volcano—Mt. Suribachi—a broad, dead cone 556 feet high with a deep, jagged crater. The base of Suribachi was surrounded by volcanic rocks and some gnarled, stunted banyan trees without much foliage. Its sides were steep, rough, and rocky. Just north of the volcano, where the island was narrowest—scarcely a mile across—Iwo was also lowest. This was the area of the beaches—one on each side of the island, stretching northward 3500 yards from the volcano. From each of the beaches, on the east and the west sides of the island, the ground sloped several hundred yards up and inland to a tableland on which the Japanese had made their first airfield. These slopes were not smooth inclines. Running lengthwise along the beaches were two rows of escarpments, or terraces, from five to twelve feet high. Although the handiwork of nature, they could not have better suited the island’s defenses if the enemy himself had built them. They were natural bunkers that could bar the way of our tanks and vehicles.

From Suribachi to the northern end of the second airfield the ground consisted of coarse, black, sliding volcanic sand which gave little traction for vehicles or men. The particles were about the size of buckshot but were light enough to be whipped up easily by the wind. Walking men might sink a foot or two into the sand with each step. These were terrain considerations which, when we studied our early maps, we had to think about seriously.

North of the second airfield the ground changed somewhat but, from our point of view, it was just as bad if not worse. Instead of open tableland and slopes there was a series of wild, rocky ridges that twisted across Iwo from one shore to the other. Except for Suribachi these ridges were higher than the rest of the island and gave fine observation of the beaches and the airfields. The highest of these ridges was 382 feet above the sea. Several of the others were over 360 feet high.

Among the ridges lay the island’s principal town of Motoyama where before the war some 1100 civilians lived (they were taken off the island several months before we landed), and the sulphur mine and sugar refinery where these people worked. There were some open clearings among the rocky hills—barren badlands that smoked from the sulphur in the ground. It was one of these clearings which was being converted into the island’s third airfield. As on the other two fields, the ground here was nothing more than hard-packed volcanic sand. This whole area was strong ground for defense; it was a mass of crags, gullies, chasms and hills that came one after the other until they tumbled as cliffs down to the water along the northern semicircle of the coastline.

By the time we were ready to tackle Iwo, our reconnaissance also showed us something of the way the Japanese had made use of this island—how they had fitted its natural topography into a general scheme of defense. The maps our troops went over again and again were covered with the red and black symbols that stood for enemy gun positions. Weeks of almost daily aerial photographic reconnaissance by the Army and Navy had uncovered hundreds of such spots: pillboxes, blockhouses, antiaircraft guns, trenches, artillery emplacements, machine-gun nests, antitank ditches and probable mine fields.

In photographs of the waters guarding the beaches, we could see strings of drums. We thought these were filled with oil which could be ignited by remote control from the shore as a fiery barrier to our first landing waves. On the beaches, on the slopes and terraces, and on the edges of the airfield were pillboxes, blockhouses and antitank ditches. Hummocks in the sand looked too much like further camouflaged positions. There was also the possibility that thousands of mines were buried everywhere in the sand.

If we got ashore and climbed to the first airfield, the Japanese would have other things ready for us. They would have us caught between the high ground of the north and Suribachi on the south. They could then plaster us from both flanks with mortars, artillery and rocket launchers hidden in caves and pillboxes in the volcano and the northern ridges. They might even be able to keep us from reinforcing our first waves and then annihilate our forces already ashore.

For the Japanese it was essentially a task of defense, and all their equipment, all their men were geared for that kind of battle. They had a preponderance of antitank and mortar battalions on the island. Even their tanks, we later found, were generally dug in as fixed, armored artillery pieces. And there were, so many fixed positions—thousands of them—so well emplaced and hidden, that even the loss of many of them would not seriously hinder the total island defense. Alternate positions would take their places from which the Japanese could cover areas previously guarded by the lost positions.

Every square yard on Iwo could be covered by at least one heavy Japanese weapon, some by dozens of them. And hundreds of the Japanese fortifications were mutually supporting. Whole strings of caves and pillboxes protected each other. From, one end to the other Iwo was a solid fort.

Although the Japanese had held Iwo for more than fifty years, it was not until the capture of Saipan in June, 1944 that they began to make the island as strong as we were to find it. Lieutenant-General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, fifty-four years old, commanding general of the Japanese 109th Army Division and the Bonins-Volcanos Defense Sector, was the man responsible for Iwo’s fortifications. Radio Tokyo described him as a short, squat, brown man, paunchy, but with the heart of a tiger. Although he was an old-time cavalry officer, he had a well-rounded knowledge of every branch of Japan’s armed forces. He commanded a cavalry regiment in the battle of Lake Nomanhan during the undeclared Russo-Japanese war of 1938-39 along the Manchurian border. The Japanese took a licking there, but Kuribayashi’s prestige remained unimpaired, for upon his return to Japan in 1940 he was promoted from colonel to major general and given command of a brigade.

In 1943, as a lieutenant general, Kuribayashi was sent to Tokyo and given the job of commanding the 1st Imperial Guards Division, a picked group of men charged with guarding the Imperial Palace. When we invaded Saipan an uneasy Tokyo ordered Kuribayashi to the homeland’s outer ring of defense. Part of that defense was Iwo, in Tokyo’s own prefecture. And from the moment he took command Kuribayashi set out to make Iwo impregnable.

The aerial photographs showed uninterrupted construction on Iwo from June, 1944 up until the time we landed eight months later. A study of enemy defenses after we had the island confirmed the belief that most of the enemy’s big guns were installed during that period.

There was also evidence that many thousands of the caves which honeycombed the island were dug during this time.

This does not mean, however, that the enemy had made no preparations in earlier years for the defense of Iwo. Signs were found—printed in Japanese and English (because the latter language is generally understood throughout the Orient warning that the taking of pictures or sketching of maps was prohibited by the Military Secrets Act. These signs were dated August, 1937.

Since the early phases of the war, the Japanese have tacitly conceded our superiority in firepower and matériel, but the Japanese soldier has always been told that he could overcome this disadvantage through a superior spiritual strength or individual bravery. Here is where Kuribayashi differed. This Japanese general believed less in spiritual strength than he did in material objects like ships, guns and troops in numbers.

Send me these things, he wirelessed Tokyo during the fighting on Iwo, and I will hold this island. Without them I cannot hold.

Tokyo’s reply is not on record, but Kuribayashi did not get what he wanted.

While he believed in firepower over spiritual strength, and went so far as to recommend to Tokyo that the Japanese Army adopt our Browning automatic rifle and M-1 (Garand) semi-automatic, Kuribayashi did not underestimate the importance of individual bravery.

Long before the battle began, he had had his men swear to defend the island to the death. In almost every cave and pillbox were posted mimeographed or printed copies of this set of Courageous Battle Vows:

"(1) Above all, we shall dedicate ourselves and our entire strength to the defense of this island.

"(2) We shall grasp bombs, charge enemy tanks and destroy them.

"(3) We shall infiltrate into the midst of the enemy and annihilate them.

"(4) With every salvo, we will without fail kill the enemy.

"(5) Each man will make it his duty to kill ten of the enemy before dying.

(6) Until we are destroyed to the last man, we shall harass the enemy with guerrilla tactics.

To increase the spirit of his men, Kuribayashi in the fall of 1944 introduced the Kamikaze suicide doctrine to Iwo. Men took oaths to undertake suicide missions if it became necessary during the island’s defense. Scarves with the Kamikaze (which means Divine Wind) symbol printed on them were distributed to the men adopting this spirit. They wore the scarves around their heads in pirate fashion. A whole unit of navy men charged with defending a boat basin on the northern end of the east beach vowed to a man to wear the Kamikaze scarf. So did many of the army infantrymen who were to stay hidden in underground shelters until emergency demanded that they come into the open and hurl back the Americans in direct assault.

From this, however, it is not to be assumed that Kuribayashi believed in the so-called Banzai charge. He viewed such last-gasp tactics as a waste of men. He knew that he could (kill more Marines if he waited for them to come at his defenses. He had learned this lesson from studying the previous campaigns when the Japanese had thrown away their strength in futile mass-suicide assaults. But he did plan to use his infantry as support for the artillery.

However, in the artillery and in the emplacements for it lay the secret of his plans for Iwo’s defense. He had a variety of mortars ranging from 90 to 320 millimeters. It was to be the first time we would meet the 320 mm. weapon. Also new to us would be his 8-inch rocket—the buzz bomb—which his men launched by the simple expedient of placing it in a crude wooden trough, pointing it in our direction and lighting a fuze. A 1905 model 120 mm. howitzer was new to the Marines too. And Kuribayashi also had a number of other if weapons including many 47 mm. antitank guns and, big guns for such a small island, 15 cm. rifles. All of these weapons were set up in defenses that he had planned with a mathematical precision that left no spot on the island vulnerable to attack.

His man-made caves and underground tunnels and caverns followed a definite pattern to give flexibility to his defense. The Japanese could move around with ease below ground. In some places they could go half a mile through tunnels connecting different positions. In general, the larger caverns were used for storage and as quarters. Some caves housed entire field hospitals complete with surgical instruments and operating tables. Live steam, electricity and running water were piped in. Minimum specifications for the caves called for 35 feet of overhead cover, more than enough to resist any shell or bomb. The caves were at least five feet wide, 33 feet long and five feet high. Some were built on three levels and all had multiple entrances. The larger caves, some of them built over sulphur beds, had air shafts 30 or 40 feet deep to allow foul air to escape. As a protection against flamethrowers, artillery and other weapons, all of the caves were built with frequent turns of as much as 90 degrees.

Kuribayashi’s pillboxes and blockhouses were of all sizes and shapes. Their walls and roofs were made of concrete two to five feet thick and reinforced with steel, rock and rope. Over the concrete might be five to 15 feet of volcanic rock. The whole thing, sunk flush with the level of the surrounding ground, would be covered with still more feet of sand. Many of his blockhouses were concrete cubes, five or six feet to a side, with walls and roofs one or two feet thick. Also sunk into the ground, these boxes would be covered with sand and camouflaged with stones. Mortar pits, with tiny holes through which to fire, were sunk into the ground like wells and covered with concrete lids. Works in different sectors would always be mutually supporting and interconnected, so that men could run either underground or through well-protected trenches from one firing position to another.

Nobody will ever know the full extent of the fortifications that Kuribayashi constructed to support and defend the artillery and mortars. During the battle thousands of entrances that undoubtedly led into such forts were blasted shut without exploration. But our men who fought on Iwo learned during the twenty-six days of battle that the maps they carried into action hardly began to indicate the masterful way in which the Japanese general had organized the defenses of the island.

And yet none of us went into the battle with the slightest bit of optimism. Incomplete as they were, our maps did indicate an impressively strong network of defenses covering the entire island. One Marine said the place looked like the Rock of Gibraltar. Another thought that Iwo looked like a little section of eight square miles plucked out of the center of the most strongly defended line anywhere in the world.

The minute we land, we’re going to be in the middle of it, he said. "And we’re never going to be out of it until the battle is all over. Wherever you look there are artillery, mortars, machine guns and everything else looking right down at you. There isn’t a safe spot on the island."

He was right.

Before the battle Lieutenant-General Holland M. (Howlin’ Mad) Smith, commander of all the Marines in the Pacific, said that the battle for Iwo would be as bitter as any that Marines had ever fought. And Vice-Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, in overall command of the landing forces, declared solemnly: Iwo Jima is the most heavily fortified and capably defended island in the world. It will be a tough fight.

In view of the fact that Iwo was a small island, where so much of the success of the operation depended on the landing or amphibious phase, Marines were chosen for the job. The three divisions of the V Marine Amphibious Corps, under command of Major-General Harry Schmidt—roughly 60,000 men—were given the assignment.

The assault landing was to be made by the 4th Marine Division, led by Major-General Clifton B. Cates, and the 5th Marine Division, commanded by Major-General Keller E. Rockey. General Graves B. Erskine’s 3rd Marine Division was to be held in floating reserve, to land if and when needed.

The 4th Division had been activated at Camp Joseph H. Pendleton, Oceanside, California, on August 16, 1943, then under the command of General Schmidt. It first saw action on January 31, 1944, when, in twenty-six hours, it captured Roi-Namur in the Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands. In the brief but nevertheless intense battle for this Central Pacific airbase, four members of the 4th Division won the Congressional Medal of Honor for outstanding heroism.

On June 15, 1944, with the 2nd Marine Division the 4th made the landing on Saipan in the Marianas, followed by the 27th Infantry Division of the Army on D plus 2. In the 26-day campaign that followed the 4th lost nearly 1500 men killed and some 7000 wounded. Then, two weeks later, it crossed the narrow channel to Tinian, four miles away, and with the 2nd Marine Division, captured that island in nine days. The 4th Division was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for its achievements in the Marianas.

General Rockey’s 5th Division had been formed at Camp Pendleton around a good-sized nucleus of former Paramarines and Marine Raiders, all veterans of fighting in the early days of the Pacific war. Forty per cent of this division had seen previous action. For the rest, Iwo would be their baptism of fire.

A good many men of the 3rd Division’s personnel had been overseas two years. Under command of Major-General Allen Hal Turnage, they first met the Japanese when they launched the invasion of Bougainville on November 1, 1943. It had been a bitter campaign, fought in the jungles and swamps of one of the worst rain forests in the South Pacific. Next, with the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade and the 77th Infantry Division of the Army, the 3rd Division liberated Guam, landing on that island on July 21, 1944. Major-General Erskine took command of the Division in October, 1944.

In addition to the three divisions, with their infantry, artillery, tanks, engineers, pioneers, service and medical units, the V Marine Amphibious Corps also landed its own units among which were artillery, service and amphibian tractor outfits. Also, certain Army and Navy units assisted the Marines on Iwo, landing either on