Major Horie brokered a compromise. Half of the materials sent to the island by the navy would be employed in building its desired pillboxes above the beaches. The rest would be allocated to Kuribayashi’s fortifications on higher ground. Reasoning that half of something was better than all of nothing, General Kuribayashi agreed.
Kuribayashi brought in a team of military and mining engineers to oversee his excavations. Much of Iwo Jima’s terrain consisted of “tuff,” a porous rock formed by compacted volcanic ash, which was susceptible to picks and shovels. Digging parties worked seven days a week in round-the-clock shifts. They set a pace of three feet per day; if they had dynamite, they could achieve twice that pace. Excavated dirt and debris was hauled up to the surface in rucksacks. It was a labor of the damned. As the workers tunneled deeper into the island, they were tormented by geothermal heat and sulfur fumes. Wearing nothing but loincloths and tabi rubber-soled shoes, they could dig for no more than ten minutes in a shift, before being forced to retreat to the surface for fresh air and a rest. “Our hands were covered in blisters, our shoulders got stiff, and we gasped and panted in the geothermal heat,” recalled an army private. “Our throats would smart, but there was no drinking water to be had.”6
In the fall of 1944, as the great effort progressed, an intricate honeycomb of tunnels, stairways, and bunkers was bored into the rock. Natural caverns could accommodate as many as five hundred men at once. Electrical lighting and ventilation systems improved habitability. Bare rock walls were plastered over. Command posts were interconnected by radio links or underground telephone lines. Eventually, some 1,500 subterranean bunkers were connected by 16 miles of corridors, with widely scattered entrances and exits to the open ground above. In this sunless subterranean city, one found hospitals, bunkrooms, mess halls, and communications centers filled with state-of-the-art technology. The island’s main naval command post, called the Nanpo Shoto bunker, was ninety feet beneath the surface. On the surface, the navy’s labor teams built hundreds of dome-shaped concrete blockhouses around the perimeter of the airfields. Sand was piled around them, both to conceal them from view and to protect them against naval bombardment. Small slit firing ports provided overlapping fields of fire on the landing beaches. Antitank ditches doubled as infantry trenches. The naval engineers also cannibalized aircraft wreckage for improvised fortifications along the runways. Wings, bomb bays, and tail sections were salvaged for use as construction materials. Wrecked fuselages were buried halfway into the ground, and then covered with stones and sandbags to serve as makeshift pillboxes. One officer, inspecting the work, gave his approval: “Good job. These aircraft are serving the country twice.”7
In order to reduce the number of mouths to be fed, General Kuribayashi ordered the entire civilian population of Iwo Jima evacuated to Japan. Between July 3 and July 14, a thousand civilians living on the island were repatriated to the mainland. All men between the ages of sixteen and forty without dependents were conscripted into the army. When Kuribayashi learned that senior officers were lingering at headquarters, with pretended bureaucratic and administrative tasks, he ordered them to “get out on site as much as possible and devote themselves to leading from the front.” Some resented the endless labor, and criticized the general behind his back: “We came here to make war, not to dig holes.”8 Kuribayashi, who had a ruthless streak, purged the dissidents and malcontents. He dismissed several senior officers from their posts, including his own chief of staff, a brigade commander, and two battalion commanders. He promoted younger officers into their jobs, or brought in replacements from the mainland.
Some called Kuribayashi a tyrant, but the general showed genuine concern for the welfare of his subordinates. When visitors from the mainland brought gifts of food or vegetables, he ordered them distributed among his men. He was a family man who doted on his wife and each of his four children. Kuribayashi wrote them each separately, often dwelling on small details of their domestic life, and reminding the children of their particular duties around the house. He prophetically warned of the devastation to come in the bombing raids on Japan. To his wife, Yoshii, in a letter of September 12, 1944, he wrote: “When I imagine what Tokyo would look like if it were bombed—I see a burned-out desert with dead bodies lying everywhere—I’m desperate to stop them carrying out air raids on Tokyo.” Two months later, when the Superfortresses began operating from bases in the Marianas, Kuribayashi and his troops could see the big silver bombers soaring high overhead on their way to Japan. But the garrison could do nothing to stop them, because they were well out of range of the antiaircraft guns. “In this war, there’s nothing we can do about soldiers like me out here on the front line dying,” he wrote Yoshii on December 8. “But I can’t stand the idea that even you, women and children on the mainland, have to feel that your lives are in danger. No matter what, take refuge in the country and stay alive.”9
In January 1945, Kuribayashi and his officers concluded that an invasion was imminent. They had weeks left to prepare, perhaps less. Plans had envisioned linking the Motoyama Plateau to Mt. Suribachi by a long tunnel running deep under the airfields, but there was not enough time or manpower to dig it. The shipping lanes to Japan were no longer safe, and it was even becoming dangerous to navigate small craft between Iwo and Chichi Jima. Renouncing his earlier bargain with the navy, Kuribayashi ordered a halt to pillbox construction around the airfields, and reassigned all laborers and materials to completing defensive fortifications on the Motoyama Plateau. He wanted more effort to camouflage the entrances of both underground bunkers and firing embrasures for guns. Kuribayashi also stepped up the training regimen, with exercises devoted to refining techniques for sniping, night infiltration attacks, and antitank tactics.10
In his radiograms to Tokyo, Kuribayashi lobbied for more arms, ammunition, and supplies, asking that they be flown into the island by air freight. He wanted small craft and even fishing boats to be pressed into service to carry freshwater and provisions from Chichi Jima. But in February, as the island garrison surpassed 22,000 men, working and living conditions degenerated. Underground bunkers were hot, overcrowded, and filthy. Ventilation shafts were added, but subterranean temperatures often surpassed 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and sulfurous vapors made it extremely difficult to breathe. There were not enough latrines on the island, and men with uncontrollable diarrhea had to relieve themselves on the spot. Clouds of blowflies rose from open cesspools near the tunnel entrances. To protect the garrison’s supplies against relentless American air raids, everything had to be moved down into the tunnels and bunkers. Corridors were lined with 55-gallon drums containing freshwater, fuel oil, kerosene, or diesel fuel. Men laid thin mattresses or blankets across the tops of the drums and used them as beds. Infestations of flies, ants, lice, and cockroaches drove men to the ends of their wits. Body odors permeated the airless underground cavities. A soldier wrote in his diary, “In the air raid shelter it is just like staying in the hold of a ship. It is so stuffy from cooking etc. and the temperature rises so, one cannot remain inside for a long period of time without getting a headache.”11
During those same weeks, U.S. intelligence analysts in Guam and Pearl Harbor marveled at the Japanese garrison’s apparent disappearing act. Iwo Jima had been bombed, strafed, and blasted for eight months; it had been shelled from offshore, bombed by B-24s and B-29s based in the nearby Marianas, and visited a dozen times by carrier task forces. Craters upon craters had been punched into the island’s soft volcanic ash. The B-24s alone had hit the island for the past seventy consecutive days, dropping thousands of tons of bombs. But during this same period, Iwo Jima’s underground fortifications and artillery encasements had only grown stronger and more extensive. The bombing and bombardment had made little impression on the island’s defenses; nor had it interrupted the pace of the garrison’s work. Every square yard of Iwo Jima had been photographed by U.S. planes and submarines, producing thousands of high-resolution images from every possible angle. The photos revealed that t
he Japanese had vacated their exposed barracks and bivouac areas and moved underground. Daily reconnaissance overflights confirmed that virtually no buildings or tentage remained on the island, and scarcely any troops could be seen from the air. Captain Thomas Fields of the 26th Marines put it succinctly: “The Japanese weren’t on Iwo Jima. They were in Iwo Jima.”12
On the eve of the invasion, Iwo Jima was well prepared to receive the enemy. Suribachi and the Motoyama Plateau had been converted into natural fortresses. Implanted in the rocks were a variety of weapons, from big coastal defense guns in sunken casements, to mortars, light artillery, antitank guns, and machine guns. Mortar tubes and rocket launchers were concealed under steel or concrete covers that could be retracted and closed quickly. The best marksmen in the garrison were armed with sniper rifles and positioned in cave entrances with the best sightlines onto the beaches and airfields. Baskets of hand grenades were stashed near bunker entrances. The lanes leading up from the beaches to the terraces and airfields were sown with anti-personnel mines, and the roads and flats were riddled with heavy antivehicular mines that could destroy or disable tanks, bulldozers, and trucks. Food was stockpiled to feed the garrison for two months. Although General Kuribayashi had encountered stubborn resistance in his ranks, he had finally imposed his will on the garrison, and indoctrinated all of his subordinate commanders into his plan. There would be no massed counterattacks over open ground. Banzai charges were strictly forbidden. The Japanese would blanket the landing beaches with artillery and mortar fire when the attackers were most vulnerable, but they would not stage an all-out fight to hold the airfields.
General Kuribayashi did not hold out hope that his men could win the battle for Iwo Jima. They were to fight a delaying action, to inflict maximum casualties on the Americans, and (eventually) to die to the last man. In the final days before the invasion, from his subterranean command bunker near the rocky northwest shore, Kuribayashi wrote out a list of six “courageous battle vows.” These were mimeographed and distributed to every unit on the island, and every soldier was compelled to memorize and recite them. The vows were posted on the walls of bunkers, pasted to the barrels of weapons, neatly copied into notebooks, and kept on folded pages in soldiers’ pockets:
1. We shall defend this place with all our strength to the end.
2. We shall fling ourselves against the enemy tanks clutching explosives to destroy them.
3. We shall slaughter the enemy, dashing in among them to kill them.
4. Every one of our shots shall be on target and kill the enemy.
5. We shall not die until we have killed ten of the enemy.
6. We shall continue to harass the enemy with guerilla tactics even if only one of us remains alive.13
On February 16, 1945, as the American invasion fleet gathered offshore, radioman Tsuruji Akikuisa was in an observation bunker near the lower airfield. Peering through a 3-foot-long firing slit, he saw concentric rings of warships surrounding the island, stretching to the horizon and beyond: “It looked like a mountain range had risen up out of the sea.”14 When the distant battleships opened fire, he saw the flash before he heard the report. A whoosh of warm air came through the slot and blew in his face, and the acrid scent of cordite stung his nostrils. As the first shells struck home, they ejected great mounds of earth and rock. The ground trembled, and the walls of the bunker quivered as if made of marmalade. Corporal Toshiharu Takahashi of the First Mixed Brigade of Engineers was awestricken: “On the island there was a huge earthquake. There were pillars of fire that looked as if they would touch the sky. Black smoke covered the island, and shrapnel was flying all over the place with a shrieking sound. Trees with trunks one meter across were blown out of the ground, roots uppermost. The sound was deafening, as terrible as a couple of hundred thunderclaps coming down at once. Even in a cave thirty meters underground, my body was jerked up off the ground. It was hell on earth.”15
WHEN TASK FORCE 58 LEFT ULITHI on February 10, 1945, about half its pilots were rookies, recently deployed to the fleet. Many of the veteran aviators who had fought through the Philippines campaign had been rotated out of service for a badly needed rest. The newcomers were superbly trained, with an average of six hundred hours of “stick time” in their flight logs, but they had yet to test their skills in air combat.
As the fleet steamed north through gentle seas and mild breezes, rumors abounded. All could guess that another big invasion was in the cards; that much was clear by the multitude of troop transports and amphibious vessels they had seen anchored in Ulithi lagoon. On February 15, the electrifying news was announced on every ship: Task Force 58 was headed for Tokyo, where it would raid airbases and aircraft manufacturing plants before turning south to support an amphibious landing on Iwo Jima. No U.S. carrier task force had attempted to hit Japan since the Doolittle Raid, nearly three years earlier. Attacking the enemy’s capital would be like kicking over a hornet’s nest: hundreds of Japanese fighters would likely challenge them, and antiaircraft fire would be heavy. One young Hellcat pilot began applauding, then stopped, turned to his squadron mates, and asked, “My god, why am I clapping?”16
As the force pushed north into higher latitudes, the weather turned wet, cold, and blustery. Bucketing rainsqualls washed across the decks and splattered against the Plexiglas windows of the bridges and pilot houses. Ships reared and plunged, heaving and shuddering as they smashed through the gray winter seas. Admiral Spruance called it the “damnedest, rottenest weather that I could think of.”17 Heavy wool watch coats, caps, and gloves were distributed to all crewmen with duty topside. But the inclement weather offered a compensating benefit: the task force managed to sneak into Japanese coastal waters without raising an alarm. The enemy’s patrol planes were grounded, or if they were airborne, they could not see the approaching fleet through the overcast. Radar operators kept their eyes fixed on their scopes, but no enemy planes approached. NHK Radio and Radio Tokyo, whose frequencies were monitored continuously in the American radio shacks, continued to broadcast their normally scheduled programs.
On the eve of the strike, Admiral Mitscher distributed a memorandum to all air groups. “The large majority of the VF [fighter] pilots in Task Force 58 will engage in air combat for the first time over Tokyo. This fact will not be too great a handicap if pilots will remember the fundamentals and keep calm. . . . Try not to get too excited. Remember that your plane is superior to the Jap’s in every way. He is probably more afraid of you than you are of him.” Mitscher stressed the importance of sticking together in section formations, and resisting the instinct to peel away to chase individual Japanese planes. That was particularly true at lower altitudes, where the margin for error was smaller and the Zeros could exploit the advantages of their tight turning radius. “When you sight your first Jap resist the impulse to follow your first individual reaction,” Mitscher wrote. “If you are a wingman follow your section leader and never leave him.”18
That night the aviators gathered in their ready rooms. Seated in comfortable reclining leather armchairs, they were briefed by their squadron leaders and air intelligence officers. The target selectors had identified two dozen airfields and aircraft plants in and around Tokyo, and assigned primary and secondary targets to each squadron. Among the top-priority targets were two important factories that the B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force had tried to destroy, without success, for the past ten weeks: a Tachikawa aircraft engine plant in Tama, west of the city, and a Nakajima airframe plant in Ota, southern Tokyo, near the bay.
During the final overnight run-in toward the Japanese coast, the weather remained abysmal, and speed was throttled back from 25 knots to 20 knots. Even so, it was a rough ride. The ships lurched sickeningly, and expansion joints creaked and groaned under the strain. Aboard the Randolph, the young ensigns of VF-12 lay awake in their bunks, staring at the overheads, trying in vain to get some sleep before the big day. A chain was banging against the Randolph’s hull and making an awful racket. One later recalle
d: “I must have finally dozed off for a while, being suddenly awakened to the blare of ‘General quarters. Man your battle stations.’ This is what we trained two years for.”19
At dawn on the sixteenth, the task force was 60 miles off the coast of Honshu and about 125 miles southwest of Tokyo. A freezing wind gusted out of the north at 30 knots. Hard rain lashed the carrier flight decks. In the bone-chilling cold, the precipitation included sleet and even snow. Visibility was “zero-zero.”20 The plane crews, bundled up in wool coats and hoods, wielding red and green flashlights, guided the pilots through the maze of parked planes. At the Fox signal, the starter cartridges fired and the engines spun to life; they coughed and backfired, and then settled into their familiar throaty roar. An officer watching from the bridge veranda of the Yorktown imagined the scene as “a cross-section of the bottommost level of hell—black, cold and roaring. The thunder of the engines shakes the ship. Pale blue flames flicker from their exhausts and are reflected from the wet deck, until the propellers blast the puddles dry.”21
Task Force 58 launched 1,100 warplanes from seventeen aircraft carriers. They climbed north through the damp gray gloom, each pilot attempting to keep his eyes fixed on the faint blue exhaust flames of the planes ahead. Lieutenant McWhorter of VF-12 recalled: “I had the canopy pulled shut against the icy wind, and I shivered instinctively as blowing rain and sleet splattered noisily against my airplane. The white-capped waves, only a few hundred feet below, had a steely gray, angry look to them—inhospitably cold.”22 At 14,000 feet, the forty-seven Randolph Hellcats suddenly popped out of the clouds into clear sky. Beneath them lay a gray, fleecy carpet stretching to the horizon in every direction. They could see nothing of Japan except the snowcapped circular caldera of Mt. Fuji, about 70 miles to port. It offered a useful point of reference for navigation.
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