Iwo Jima, Battle of

Iwo Jima, Battle of (1945).Located 670 miles southeast of Tokyo and vital to Japan's defense, Iwo Jima became strategically important in the latter stages of the Pacific phase of World War II. Dominated by Mount Suribachi, Iwo was defended by Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi's 21,000 men and a thousand heavy guns. Foresaking Japan's usual tactics of defending at the water's edge, Kuribayashi decided instead to defend from an elaborate system of tunnels and caves dug into Iwo itself.

Assigned to capture Iwo was Marine Major General Harry Schmidt's Fifth Amphibious Corps (Third, Fourth, and Fifth Marine Divisions), comprising more than 80,000 men. At 9:30 A.M on 19 February 1945, after ten weeks of continuous bombing, the first wave of armored amphibian tractors touched down on the island's black volcanic sand beaches. The capture of Suribachi on 23 February was immortalized by the Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the flag‐raising on its heights.

Fierce and bloody fighting continued until 26 March, during which 5,931 Marines and navy hospital corpsmen were killed in action, and 17,372 wounded. For their heroism, twenty‐two Marines, four navy corpsman, and one navy landing‐craft commander were awarded the Medal of Honor, half of them posthumously. Japanese losses have never been determined exactly, but only 216 prisoners were taken, most of them Korean conscript laborers. The terrible cost to Americans was somewhat balanced by another statistic: By the war's end, 2,251 B‐29 superfortresses, with crews totaling 24,761 airmen, had made emergency landings on Iwo. The horrific death toll on both sides led Americans to conclude that a land invasion of Japan itself, to end the war, would be long and very costly. Re‐created in John Wayne's The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), this battle looms large in the lore of World War II.

Bibliography

Joseph H. Alexander , Closing In: Marines in the Seizure of Iwo Jima, 1995.
George C. Garand and and Truman R. Strobridge , Western Pacific Operations, vol. 4 of History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, 1971.

Benis M. Frank