Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502220040
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
It was, first and foremost, a forbidding, otherworldly place to fight - eight square miles of lava, ash and cinders belched up by the still-roiling volcanic violence of the west Pacific Ocean floor. It exuded, one correspondent wrote, ``a sullen sense of evil.''
It was honeycombed with caves and tunnels, walled by scarred stone cliffs and slashed by boulder-strewn ravines. The enemy was usually invisible underground.
Wrapped in the rain and fog that marked some of the invasion's earliest days, the island steamed eerily in places; and if the nights were chilly above ground, digging in could yield a nightmare oven of a foxhole that stank of sulfur and sweat even without the scent of fear.
Every battleground of the Pacific war was its own particular hell: The rain-washed mountains of New Guinea; the rotting, Stygian jungle of Guadalcanal; the naked corpse-cluttered reef at Tarawa; the malaria-ridden thickets of Bataan.
But Iwo Jima, where U.S. Marines landed 50 years ago today, remains the iconic battleground of World War II, its image burned on the American soul by the famous, flag-waving photograph and the horror in the eyes of the men who fought there.
When the Marines invaded the pork-chop-shaped island, the airfields constituted one of the last great barriers to the U.S. aerial advance against the Japanese mainland.
From Guam and neighboring Saipan and Tinian, Army Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay was flying B-29 Stratofortress bombing raids on Tokyo, but they were scoring little success. The island's radar provided two-hour warnings, so swarms of Japanese Zero fighters on Iwo Jima, halfway to the capital, regularly intercepted the tight U.S. formations.
Without taking Iwo Jima, LeMay said a month before the battle began, he couldn't bomb Japan effectively,
``Victory was never in doubt. Its cost was,'' said Maj. Gen. Graves B. Erskine in dedicating the Marine Corps Cemetery on the island in 1945. ``What was in doubt, in all our minds, was whether there would be any of us left ... at the end, or whether the last Marine would die knocking out the last Japanese gun and gunner.''
Iwo Jima remains the Marine Corps' costliest battle (one-third of all Marines killed in World War II died there), and one of the costliest for American servicemen since Gettysburg. More troops died assaulting it than died on the beaches of Normandy; and if the 6,821 total dead paled beside such carnage as the 60,000 British killed in a single day on the Somme in World War I, Americans were nonetheless stunned by the toll.
With the wounded, there were more than 28,000 U.S. casualties; and though all but about 1,000 of the 22,000 Japanese defenders died in the battle, it was the first and last time American casualties exceeded Japanese deaths in the Pacific offensive.
Reinforced by even greater casualties in the Army-dominated battle for Okinawa the following month, the Iwo Jima toll would figure heavily in the decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan.
``Please, for God's sake,'' one mourning mother protested to the White House, ``stop sending our finest youth to be murdered on places like Iwo Jima.''
Today at 11 a.m, President Clinton will lay a wreath at the Iwo Jima Monument in Arlington, Va., to commemorate those long-ago dead. He'll be joined by 4,000 people, including about 1,800 veterans from among the 75,000 who landed on the island in 1945.
They've been here all week attending reunions and seminars, memorial services and banquets. There is no getting away from what Iwo Jima means to them. It is not glory, for as they tell you, in some detail after half a century, there is precious little glory in seeing your best friend decapitated or disemboweled by an artillery shell, or witnessing floating corpses revolving in the propeller of a landing craft, or shivering all night listening to the screaming of a gut-shot 19-year-old taking a long time to die.
More than 2,600 men went insane, most of them permanently, experiencing the particular horror of Iwo Jima. Those who survived the battle mentally intact tend to view their lives since with a kind of wonder, and with a profound sense of obligation to those who died there so that they could live.
Wildly optimistic U.S. predictions that Iwo Jima would fall in three or four days dissolved almost as soon as the first amphibious-tracked vehicles churned toward the two narrow beaches in the shadow of Suribachi, near the island's southwest tip. Unable to gain traction in the fine, black grit, the advance stalled. The Japanese then opened fire, pouring down a withering barrage on the 9,000 Marines who hit the beaches in the first wave.
Weighted down by their equipment, unable to surmount the steep shoreline, many were sucked back into the surf; others found it impossible to dig foxholes and desperately pressed their bodies against the beach, praying that somehow they would be invisible.
The casualties were horrendous.
At sunrise on Feb. 23, Marines began the push up Suribachi. Led by Lt. Harold G. Schirer, a 40-man patrol with fixed bayonets and hand grenades slashed their way to the lip of the steaming, sulfurous crater at 10:30 a.m.
There, six men raised a length of pipe to which they tied a small American flag. The fluttering Stars and Stripes, suddenly visible to the men fighting below, sent morale soaring. Watching through binoculars from the flagship El Dorado, politically astute Navy Secretary James Forrestal remarked, ``The raising of the flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.''
A short while later, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the second flag-raising - this time with a much larger red, white and blue banner - to produce perhaps the most famous picture of World War II.
The Marines inched their way over the island amid showers of artillery and mortar shells, throwing grenades at machine-gun nests and dynamiting pillboxes. The Japanese would retreat underground, then pop up from a tunnel somewhere else, or suddenly reappear behind American lines in a bunker long thought neutralized to machine-gun rear-echelon troops.
The Marines shot streams of flaming napalm into their tunnels or buried them alive by exploding their caves. Or heard them blow themselves to pieces with grenades for the emperor rather than surrender. Many Marines began thinking of themselves as exterminators of underground vermin, divorcing themselves even further mentally from an enemy whose apparent hunger for death seemed not so much brave as inhuman.
``I remember we had one Japanese officer run out of a cave by himself and charge a flamethrowing tank with his samurai sword,'' remembers retired Col. Fred Caldwell. ``All by himself. Against a tank. I don't know what the hell he thought he was doing, but the tank just moved that stream right up his body and burned him to a crisp.
``Another time we were advancing past this rock pile with a hole in the top, and we dropped a phosphorus grenade in the hole just to be sure. And in a minute the rocks came all apart and out came this Japanese soldier with a hand grenade, smoking from the phosphorous burns, right at us. We all turned and shot him - just another `dirty Jap,' you know. Except his helmet came off ... and there in the top inside was a picture of him and his family. He had six kids. There he was with his wife and kids, all dressed up, looking proud. Like one of us. I still remember that.''
Some material in this report came from Knight-Ridder Newspapers.
by CNB