Storm Landings

by Joseph H. Alexander

  Marine planners looked beyond the beach, noting the heights on either flank, sensing how Mount Suribachi and the Rock Quarry would afford the enemy deadly fields of fire. Said Maj. Gen. Clifton B. Cates, commanding the 4th Marine Division and a veteran of Belleau Wood, Guadalcanal, and Tinian: “I didn’t like the idea of landing in a bight, where you were flanked on both sides.”

  Iwo Jima would be the fourth assault landing in thirteen months for the 4th Marine Division. The 3d Division, scheduled initially in a reserve role, had defeated the Japanese at Bougainville and Guam. The 5th Division was brand new, but former Raiders and paratroopers with combat experience in the Solomons led most of its rifle companies. Moreover, the training focus for each division was right on target for Iwo: small-unit tactics, assaults on fortified positions, coordinated use of combined arms. Collectively, this was a tough, combat-savvy landing force, as lethal an amphibious spearhead as the Marine Corps ever fielded.

  Embarking the huge landing force uncovered frustrating problems. The newly modified M4A3 Sherman tanks were now too heavy to be safely transported in standard LCM-3 tank lighters and had to be loaded, five at a time, on medium landing ships (LSMs), which in turn skewed landing plans at the last minute. Commanders and cannoneers worried about their 105-mm howitzers preloaded in DUKWs. Iwo was known to have rough seas. The weight of the field piece equaled the DUKW’s maximum payload; there would be precious little freeboard. Amphibious rehearsals reflected the recurring problem of geographic separation of key task groups. Most amphibian tractor (LVT) units did not get the chance to rehearse with the LSTs, many of them new to the ship-to-shore business.

  Mary Craddock Hoffman

  Although the Japanese knew of their approach, the Fifth Fleet quickly established near-total dominance over the air, sea, and underwater approaches to the island. The most spectacular exchange of heavy gunfire at Iwo Jima occurred on the morning of 17 February, D-minus-2, during the conduct of the beach reconnaissance by Navy and Marine swimmers. These were men of the Navy Combat Demolitions Unit, augmented by reconnaissance Marines, collectively called “frogmen” (also, “half fish, half crazy”). Many were veterans of stealthy reconnaissance missions in the Marshalls, Marianas, and Palaus, but there would be nothing covert about this operation: a direct approach into “the bight” in broad daylight. This was a mission of tremendous risk, reflecting the critical shortage of information on the landing beaches.

  A dozen LCI-G gunboats comprised the first line of fire support for the frogmen, closely followed by several destroyers. The sight of this miniarmada approaching the most obvious beach made General Kuribayashi believe the main landing was at hand, and he authorized his local commanders to open fire from their concealed coast-defense batteries along the eastern slopes of Suribachi and the Rock Quarry. The tiny LCI-Gs were shot to pieces: one sank, all others badly damaged, two hundred casualties.

  To the rescue came a dozen destroyers and cruisers, moving close ashore to engage the enemy batteries one-on-one, both sides catching hell and delivering same. Incredibly, the swimmers accomplished their mission despite the cannonade, even braving Japanese rifle fire to gather samples of beach sand.* They found only one mine, no obstacles, no natural barriers to the approach—then retracted, bearing their precious vials of sand, with the loss of a single man.

  The swimmer mission, accomplished at great risk and acceptable cost, thus served the more valuable function as an inadvertent amphibious feint, causing the enemy to play his hand prematurely. Kuribayashi, facing his first amphibious landing, had even radioed Tokyo that his forces had repulsed a major landing. But Blandy’s gun crews had a field day the next thirty-six hours, systematically taking out the big guns overlooking the beaches that the Japanese had unwisely revealed. This factor, a tactical disaster for the Japanese—and Kuribayashi’s only major mistake of the battle—surely saved a thousand American lives on D-Day morning.

  Kelly Turner hoped for three days of good weather in which to conduct the landing. He got less than one. D-Day morning was nigh perfect. At 0645 Turner signaled “land the landing force.” The now-familiar choreography began, the process that proved so difficult at Tulagi or Tarawa now ticking like a Swiss clock. To some observers the ship-to-shore assault against Iwo Jima’s southeast coast resembled the third day at Gettysburg: hundreds of thousands of men of both sides watching the panorama of ten thousand shock troops in disciplined alignment charging the center. “The landing was a magnificent sight to see,” said Marine lieutenant colonel Robert H. Williams. “So the real landing has come at last!” recorded Lieutenant Sugihara, as he cleansed himself for death in combat.

  Mitscher’s Task Force 58 returned from raiding Honshū in time to add to the fireworks. Among other assets, this provided the landing force with the temporary support of eight carrier-based Marine fighter squadrons, each well trained in close air support. The troops cheered as the Corsairs with USMC markings roared down the beaches ahead of the landing.

  The ship-to-shore movement at Tarawa fifteen months earlier had featured a convoluted ten-mile trek that took hours and left the LVTs dangerously low on fuel. Worse, the only senior control officer in the lagoon was the skipper of the minesweeper marking the line of departure, a brave man but inexperienced in amphibious execution and unassisted by any Marines. At Iwo Jima, the LVTs had an easy thirty-minute run to the beach, and the assistant commanders of the assault divisions, both brigadier generals, took station on the control vessels marking each end of the line of departure.

  Nor were there any deadly lapses in naval gunfire support as the assault waves of LVTs approached the beach. Navy and Marine fighters made one final screeching sweep along the coastline, then the ships commenced a carefully regulated “rolling barrage” to provide a moving curtain of heavy explosives just ahead of the disembarking troops. This complex procedure worked to perfection, reflecting the cumulative experience and painstaking planning of the amphibious task force. The torrent of explosives vaporized the worrisome line of fuel drums and demolished many of the Imperial Navy’s vaunted gun positions. A Japanese naval officer observing all this from a cave on Mount Suribachi could hardly believe his eyes: “At nine o’clock in the morning several hundred landing craft with amphibious tanks in the lead rushed ashore like an enormous tidal wave.”

  This was the ultimate storm landing of the Pacific War. Okinawa would be bigger but unopposed. At Iwo Jima eight thousand Marines raced ashore in the first few minutes. Within ninety minutes some of these men cut the lower part of the island in two. By dusk, when Lieutenant Sugihara guessed that “enemy strength [ashore] is approximately two thousand men and eighty tanks,” General Schmidt had actually landed thirty thousand men, the better part of two divisions, each with their own tank battalions and most of their organic field artillery. There would still be hell to pay, but the V Amphibious Corps had stormed ashore in great strength and good order. Kuribayashi was already in grave danger—abruptly he was outnumbered.

  The first enemy encountered by the landing force on Iwo Jima was the island’s damnable hydrography. Even in mild weather the steep beach featured a constantly plunging surf and a vicious undertow. Time and again the surf would first broach, then shatter the Higgins boats, reducing them to shards and splinters, further fouling a beach that soon resembled a demolition yard. For those vehicles that made it ashore, trafficability proved worse than expected. “Squeaky” Anderson’s experimental Marston matting worked well at first but soon became chewed to pieces by hundreds of tracked vehicles desperately trying to negotiate the steep terraces under fire. And while the Japanese had not mined the precipitous offshore approaches, they had spared no effort in mining beach exits. Many Sherman tanks and LVTs came to grief in a deadly field of horned antitank mines, inverted depth charges, and naval torpedoes buried vertically beneath pressure detonators.

  Like Colonel Nakagawa at Peleliu, Kuribayashi decided to expend one infantry battalion in the vicinity of the beaches to disrupt the landings. The Americans�
� “rolling barrage” made mincemeat out of most of these men, but those who survived maintained a hot fire. “Crossing that second terrace the fire from automatic weapons was coming from all over,” said one Marine battalion commander. “You could’ve held up a cigarette and lit it on the stuff going by.” This was simply the beginning.

  While the assault forces maneuvered in the soft sand to overcome the local defenders they failed to notice an almost imperceptible stirring among the rocks and crevices of the interior highlands. With grim anticipation, Kuribayashi’s gunners began unmasking their big weapons—the heavy artillery, giant mortars, and naval rockets held under tight discipline for this precise moment. Kuribayashi had patiently waited until the beaches and terraces were clogged with troops and material. His gun crews knew the range and deflection to each preregistered target. At Kuribayashi’s signal, these hundreds of weapons opened fire. It was shortly after 1015.

  The ensuing bombardment was as deadly and terrifying as any of the Marines had ever experienced. There seemed to be no cover at all. Explosions blanketed every corner of the three-thousand-yard beachfront. Large-caliber coast-defense guns and antiaircraft guns firing horizontally added their deadly scissors of direct fire from high ground on both flanks. Landing force casualties mounted appallingly. As the Japanese fire reached a crescendo, the four assault regiments radioed dire reports to the flagship:

  1036: (From 25th Marines): “Catching all hell from the quarry. Heavy mortar fire.”

  1039: (From 23d Marines): “Taking heavy casualties and can’t move. Mortars killing us.”

  1042: (From 27th Marines): “All units pinned down by artillery and mortars. Casualties heavy.”

  1046: (From 28th Marines): “Taking heavy fire, forward movement stopped. Machine gun and artillery fire heaviest ever seen.”

  Veteran combat correspondent Robert Sherrod spent D-Day morning with General Cates on the troop transport Bayfield, flagship for the 4th Marine Division. Cates watched the fighting ashore through binoculars and agonized over the pounding of his troops. “Look at that goddamned murderous fire on our Yellow beaches,” he exclaimed to Sherrod, adding, “There goes another hit square on a tank—burned him up!”

  The landing force suffered and bled but did not panic. The profusion of combat veterans in the ranks helped steady the rookies. Communications remained effective. Keen-eyed aerial observers spotted some of the now-exposed Japanese gun positions and directed naval gunfire effectively. Carrier planes swooped in low to drop napalm canisters. The heavy Japanese fire would continue to take an awful toll throughout the first day and night, but it would never again be so murderous as that first unholy hour.

  Robert Sherrod went ashore in the late afternoon, but even his previous experiences during D-Day landings with the Marines at Tarawa and Saipan had not prepared him for the carnage he encountered. “Whether the dead were Japs or Americans, they had one thing in common,” he reported, “they had died with the greatest possible violence. Nowhere in the Pacific War had I seen such badly mangled bodies. Many were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay fifty feet from the nearest cluster of dead.”

  By day’s end General Schmidt counted twenty-four hundred casualties among the landing force, a stiff price for the beachhead—comparable to losses of the U.S. V Corps at Normandy’s Omaha Beach on D-Day—but still proportionally better than the first night at either Tarawa or Saipan. Schmidt began to sense he was facing a formidable opponent, although it would be days before his staff could confirm that Kuribayashi had in fact been present on Iwo Jima from the start.

  Bad weather the next day severely hampered unloading operations. Even the larger landing ships, LSTs and LSMs, had difficulty maintaining position when beached. Stern anchors rarely held. Forward cables to “deadmen” (usually wrecked tanks or LVTs on the beach) snapped under the strain. Smaller craft played hell getting ashore. One artillery battalion commander, Lt. Col. Carl A. Youngdale, watched in helpless horror as twelve of his fourteen 105-mm guns went down in deep water, one by one, when their DUKWs swamped in the choppy seas.

  Schmidt’s desire to land a regimental combat team from the 3d Marine Division, the corps reserve, on D+1 could not be met. The troops debarked in a series of hair-raising net-to-boat episodes, then circled for hours, desperately seasick, waiting for the pounding surf to abate on the beach. It never did. The troops had to struggle back on board their transports and wait another day. Hill’s efforts to land heavy equipment by pontoon causeway sections also proved disastrous.

  At this point, the inexperience of some of the LST crews and the absence of any opportunity to rehearse with LVT and DUKW units proved costly. Because of the high surf, wounded Marines could only be evacuated from the island during the first several days by these amphibian vehicles, often just at dusk to avoid enemy fire. All too frequently, however, the green LSTs refused to accommodate any unfamiliar craft appearing close aboard out of the darkness. When pleas and curses failed to work, the small vehicles could only move further out to sea in hopes of finding a more receptive ship. Too often this resulted in LVTs and DUKWs foundering in high seas at night, usually with a dozen wounded men on board. The landing force lost eighty-eight LVTs to noncombat sinkings during the campaign, most of them under such circumstances during the confusion of the first several nights.

  Kelly Turner’s naval officers at Iwo Jima included an unusually high percentage of newcomers to combat. While in due time they would become seasoned, valuable veterans, their first days were filled with a mixture of awe and distress. Future Hollywood producer David H. Susskind recorded his emotions on D-Day at Iwo Jima as a fresh-caught lieutenant on board the troop transport Mellette: “Iwo Jima was not all flaming spectacle and harrowing death. For this ship and this crew—for me—it was the end of one world and the beginning of the other. . . . We were ‘young-in-war’ and everything ahead would be the first for most of us.”

  Fully effective naval support for the Marines ashore remained hostage to the treacherous surf and the looming presence of Japanese-held Mount Suribachi. The 556-foot volcanic cone—honeycombed with its Fukkaku caves and firing ports—became the objective of the 28th Marines. Kuribayashi knew his southern sector could not hold Suribachiyama indefinitely, but he expected them to resist for two weeks. He was stunned when the Marine regiment took the pinnacle in four days. “Hot damn!” exclaimed Navy pilot David Conroy over the air control net as he flew past the summit and saw the first flag go up. “All hands look at Suribachi!” bellowed “Squeaky” Anderson over his beachmaster’s bullhorn. “There goes our flag!”

  The Suribachi flag-raisings have taken on a life of their own in the ensuing half century—to the point that many modern readers express surprise that the events occurred on the battle’s fourth day, not the thirty-sixth. Seizing Suribachi was essential to prosecuting the rest of the battle and enabling the logisticians to get on with the mammoth buildup ashore, but the spectacular flag-raisings signaled “the end of the beginning”—hardly the end of the battle. Ahead lay a full month of combat as savage and relentless as the Marines would ever face.

  Kuribayashi rued the precipitate loss of the highest peak on the island, but he knew the Americans had yet to encounter his real defensive masterpiece in the central highlands. That battle commenced directly with three Marine divisions attacking abreast. Each would pay dearly for every yard, every redoubt. Throughout this period the Marines rarely saw a live Japanese soldier in the daytime. Nights were marked by desperate struggles between small groups of shadowy men slashing and stabbing with knives and bayonets. The VAC would average a thousand casualties a day during the first three weeks of the assault.

  Nowhere was the Navy’s role in the Iwo Jima battle more crucial than in sustained medical support. Surgical teams operated around the clock in field hospitals barely two miles behind the lines. A dozen women, Navy flight nurses, served aboard DC-3s making daily runs from Guam to Iwo and back during the fighting to help evacuate nearly twenty-five hundred critica
lly wounded men. Former flight nurse Norma Crotty recalls holding many a desperate hand on the return flights to Guam, murmuring, “Hold on, son, just hold on.” The DC-3s inbound to Iwo also delivered priceless cases of whole blood to battlefield surgeons. And every boat or LVT or DUKW that delivered supplies ashore returned to hospital ships at sea with another load of wounded Marines.

  This was an extremely costly battle for the surgeons and corpsmen who accompanied Marine units. Exactly 850 of these men were killed or wounded at Iwo Jima, twice the rate for bloody Saipan. The bond between Marines and their corpsmen was never more profound than during the protracted, point-blank combat on Iwo. The pressures on these young medical technicians were enormous. Corpsman Stanley Dabrowski recalls “being up to my elbows in grime, dirt, and blood, and you’re constantly asking yourself, ‘Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing enough?’“ Four of the seven Congressional Medals of Honor awarded to Navy corpsmen during World War II originated at Iwo Jima.*

  Kuribayashi’s field medical service suffered by comparison. Often the only “cure” for a wounded Japanese was for his companions to leave him a hand grenade with which to end it all. The subterranean caverns soon filled with dead and dying men. And despite their “Courageous Battle Vows,” the Imperial troops failed to exact the ten-to-one kill ratio sought by their commander. They died by the thousands, many sealed up in caves and tunnels by armored bulldozers, or burned alive by flame-throwing tanks.* They had not anticipated the Americans’ proficiency in combined arms, small-unit leadership, field expedience—nor their undeniable individual courage. And nothing in the combat experience of Kuribayashi or his other veterans had prepared them for the intensity of American firepower, delivered day after day from ships, planes, artillery pieces, and rocket trucks. “We need to reconsider the power of bombardment from ships,” he telegraphed the chief of the general staff. “The violence of the enemy’s bombardments are far beyond description. . . . The power of the American warships and aircraft makes every landing operation possible to whatever beachhead they like.”