Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  The Vow may have sounded like the same old Bushido, but there was a new and coldly logical mind behind the defense plan which Kuribayashi drew up.

  Like any good plan, it took utmost advantage of Iwo Jima’s unusual terrain. Unlike many plans, it had the genius of placing the right number of men at the right points. Lieutenant General Kuribayashi had hit on the great secret of proportion. Luck had given him the 21,000 men which was all that he needed and had also spared him the confusion of a crowd. With this force, with his engineers, with all the guns and ammunition he needed, with a sufficiency of stored water and the materials of fortification, he was going to make Iwo Jima into a fixed position at least unsurpassed in modern military history.

  At the southwest end of this southwest-northeast-slanted island—at the very tail of the pork chop—stood Mount Suribachi, a dead volcano humping 550 feet above the sea. Here General Kuribayashi stationed from 1,500 to 2,000 men in a semi-independent position. Between Suribachi and the point north where the chop bellies out to Iwo’s extreme width of 2½ miles was a flatland of volcanic ash about 1½ miles wide and two miles long. Here was the island’s finest airfield, Airfield Number One. Here General Kuribayashi put only light infantry defenses, for here, either to west or to east, were Iwo’s only landing beaches. Here the enemy would have to come, and once the enemy was ashore, with his vehicles and ammunition and stores piling up behind him, with his boats coming ashore by the literal thousands, here would fall all the fire of Kuribayashi’s guns sited on Suribachi to the south and the high Motoyama Plateau to the north.

  How many guns?

  12 320-mm. spigot mortars

  22 150-mm. trench mortars

  4 15-cm. coast defense guns

  4 14-cm. coast defense guns

  9 12-cm. coast defense guns

  12 12-cm. short coast defense guns

  30 12-cm. dual-purpose guns

  6 10-cm. dual-purpose guns

  5 8-cm. dual-purpose guns

  18 7.5-cm. dual-purpose guns

  1 150-mm. howitzer

  4 120-mm. howitzers

  6 10-cm. howitzers

  4 90-mm. howitzers

  5 75-mm. pack howitzers

  17 75-mm. field guns

  24 70-mm. battalion guns

  70 90-mm. or 81-mm. mortars

  380 50-mm. heavy grenade discharhers (knee mortars)

  54 47-mm. antitank guns

  15 37-mm. antitank guns

  4 40-mm. antiaircraft machine guns

  213 25-mm. machine guns

  9 23-mm. antiaircraft machine guns

  4 20-mm. machine guns

  168 13-mm. machine guns

  30 tanks dug in as pillboxes

  61 flame-throwers

  350 heavy machine guns

  480 light machine guns

  200 rocket launchers

  10,000 rifles

  Though the 320-millimeter spigot mortar was bizarre—its 675-pound shell bigger than the firing cylinder and fitting over and round it, its life no more than half a dozen rounds, its erratic projectile feared as much by its crew as by its intended victims—it could nevertheless make a monster bang. And when 60,000 Marines became packed onto tiny Iwo Jima, it would be difficult for it to be harmless. The rockets, varying in size from 550 to 200 pounds, were likewise more noisy than nasty. But the rest of that fearful armament could have ferocious effect, and Kuribayashi had emplaced these guns in an elaborate system of caves and concrete blockhouses.

  Where Peleliu had 500 caves, Iwo Jima had 1,500—most of them on the Motoyama Plateau rising north of Airfield Number One. Where Tarawa had blockhouses and pillboxes of ferro-concrete, Iwo Jima also had them—five-foot walls, ten-foot ceilings, sandbagged, humped around with 50 feet of sand and piggy-backed with machine-gun turrets—but Iwo Jima also had them invisible. Tarawa’s had been above ground, for the water level was only four feet. Iwo had no bottom, and up in the north it had a tunnel system surpassing the Umurbrogal’s. Kuribayashi had already set his men to work digging the first links of an underground network to total some 30 miles. Construction was around the clock. Every man worked three hours on, five off, or as long as was necessary to dig a minimum three feet. They worked wearing gas masks to filter out the fumes from Iwo’s numerous sulphur wells. Some places were so hot with sulphur that the men could cook a pan of rice over them in twenty minutes. But Kuribayashi got only about four miles of this master tunnel system finished before the Marines came, although he still had many miles of completed tunnels and interconnected caves below the ridges and among the rocky gorges of the two cross-island defense systems he had completed in the northeast.

  The first of these two barriers was the main one. It began on the Motoyama Plateau about a mile northeast of Airfield Number One and the narrow ashen neck on which Kuribayashi hoped to annihilate the Americans. Both of its flanks were on the sea and its center was anchored on Airfield Number Two, located at almost the exact middle of the island. This line was actually a belt of mutually supporting positions about 1,000 yards in depth, southwest-to-northeast. The second line, not as deep or as formidable, began a mile or so northeast of the first. The second line’s flanks were also on the sea, while uncompleted Airfield Number Three, a mile directly northeast of Airfield Number Two, represented its center. Behind the second line, in the last mile or so of northeastern Iwo, were more defenses—all made menacing by fantastic terrain. Such terrain could conceal the communications center located just south of Kita. It was a fortress with five-foot walls and ten-foot roof, a single room 150 feet long and 70 feet wide, housing 20 radios, reached only by a 500-foot tunnel about 75 feet underground—the tunnel’s entrance cleverly hidden between two small hills.

  Nor would the gunners popping out of this monster Chinese-box of a defense be the usual bad shots the Marines had encountered across the Pacific. Kuribayashi made sure of this in training characterized by this order:

  “It is necessary to eliminate completely the idea that firing results are satisfactory if shells merely fall in the enemy area. We must without fail score direct hits on the targets.”

  The general was also that rare thing among Japanese officers he was security-conscious. He set up eight different defense sectors, each with a plan of its own, none aware of the others’. If the Bushido code made it impossible for Kuribayashi to instruct his men on what to say when captured, he could at least guard against the inevitable by giving them nothing to talk about. There were also plans for defense against possible airborne attack, for the destruction of roads, for the digging of numerous ditches to guard against the American tanks Kuribayashi feared so much, and, finally, for encouraging the troops to disregard the devastating aerial and surface bombardment which preceded the American attacks.

  “We must strive to disperse, conceal, and camouflage personnel, weapons and materiel, and make use of installations to reduce damage during enemy bombing and shelling. In addition we will enhance the concealment of various positions by the construction of dummy positions to absorb the enemy shelling and bombing.”

  All this was done. Even the firing ports of the pillboxes were made small and angled so that nothing could enter them but a grenade thrown from a few feet away or a hand-gun fired point-blank. If this cut down the field of fire, it made little difference—there were so many pillboxes supporting each other.

  When the Seventh Air Force launched its seventy-two day pounding of Iwo Jima, Kuribayashi’s men stayed out of sight and dug their ditches all the deeper.

  When the long thick shapes of the American bombardment ships slid out of the darkness on the morning of February 16, the Japanese refused to be goaded into firing back and giving away the position of the coastal guns. Even though they had smokeless powder, they refused. Only when the swimmers of the Underwater Demolition Teams came into the eastern beaches on February 17 did they open up. They thought the invasion had begun, and big guns on the cliffs to the north began shooting at the covering gunboats. It was their only mistake and they p
aid for it dearly. Those vital guns were knocked out and left dangling down the cliff faces.

  Otherwise, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi calmly observed the destruction of pillboxes on the eastern beaches and heard reports of the gradual loss of much of his communications. He had expected the last, and had prepared for the first. The Americans would come ashore thinking his armor knocked out. Their planes would fly away. Their naval gunfire would lift. They would see only the terraces of volcanic ash which sea and wind had piled a few dozen yards inland at heights up to 15 feet. They would struggle beyond these. Then they would see the flatland with its hummocks of sand.

  But the hummocks would turn out to be hidden guns and the armor supposedly knocked out would begin the slaughter already celebrated in the Iwo Jima Garrison Song.

  Where dark tides billow in the ocean

  A wink-shaped isle of mighty fame

  Guards the gateway to our empire:

  Iwo Jima is its name.

  We brave men who have been chosen

  To defend this island strand

  Filled with faith in certain triumph

  Yearn to strike for Fatherland.

  Thoughts of duty ever with us,

  From dawn to dusk we train with zeal,

  Bound by Emperors commanding

  To bring the enemy to heel.

  Oh, for Emperor and homeland

  There’s no burden we won’t bear.

  Sickness, hardship, filthy water

  These are less to us than air.

  Officers and men together

  Work and struggle, strive and trust,

  Till the hated Anglo-Saxons

  Lie before us in the dust.

  3

  The hated Anglo-Saxons?

  Though there were indeed many men of that racial strain among the force forming to come against Iwo Jima, the Japanese who had mistakenly assumed at the war’s outset that their chief opponents were to be the British Army and Navy had again erred in identifying the foe.

  They were Americans. There were Anglo-Saxon names such as Erskine or Gray or Chamberlain. But there were others such as Schmidt or McCarthy or Stein or LaBelle or Basilone, and there was that commonalty of the Smiths which could be any or all of these.

  Chief of the Smiths was old Howlin’ Mad, now a gruff lieutenant general of sixty-three years. He was commander of the expeditionary troops mounting out for Iwo, a position which was purely titular. Kelly Turner commanded at sea and Major General Harry Schmidt would be in charge ashore once the Fifth Corps had landed. Smith sought to explain his presence with the quip: “I guess they brought me along in case something happens to Harry Schmidt.”

  Actually, he was along because the admirals wanted him to be. Smith and his staff were the most experienced amphibious commanders in the Pacific. Even so, the admirals’ admiration for Smith did not preclude a recurrence of the dispute over the volume of preinvasion bombardment to be delivered by the Navy.

  The Navy planned three days of preinvasion shelling timed to coincide with the Fast Carrier Forces’ first strikes on Tokyo. These raids would neutralize enemy homeland air strength. If they began, say, four days before the invasion, and were interrupted in two days or less by either bad weather or enemy resistance, then Japan would have enough time to recover from them and strike American shipping at Iwo. If they began only three days before the landings, as planned, and were interrupted in two days or less, then Japan would not have enough time to recover. The Navy’s other reason for restricting the preinvasion bombardment to three days was that this was sufficient and that anything beyond it would be subject to the law of diminishing returns.

  The Marines, still mindful of how little was knocked out at Tarawa and Peleliu, as well as how much was destroyed at Roi-Namur, made four separate requests for extended shelling, one of them asking for ten days of it.

  The Navy refused, for the reasons cited, the most telling of which was the one concerning the law of diminishing returns. Three days’ shelling did get the Marines safely ashore. After that they had to go against Kuribayashi’s masterly defenses the only way possible: on foot with a hand weapon. Events proved that nothing else but target pinpointing by troops ashore could have knocked out those positions. But at the time of the Marine requests no one suspected the extent of Iwo’s fortifications. Smith and Schmidt honestly believed that more bombardment would reduce casualties. That was why there were tears in Howlin’ Mad Smith’s eyes when he met the press off Saipan on February 16, told them there would probably be 15,000 casualties and said: “We have never failed, and I don’t believe we shall fail here.”

  Harry Schmidt also spoke, scowling heavily to conceal his inner tension. “The landing force is ready for combat,” he said. “We expect to get on their tails and keep on their tails until we chop them off.”

  It was Schmidt who had done most of the planning for the Iwo assault, but the man who had contrived the masterpiece at Tinian had found no lonely unguarded beaches on Iwo Jima. Here it was either east beaches or west beaches with only the forecasts of wind and tide to suggest which might be easier. Schmidt chose the east. The Fourth Division would go in on the right or north, the Fifth Division on the left.

  Commanding the fledgling Fifth was Major General Keller Rockey. He had been Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps before taking over his division a month after it was activated in January, 1944. Though big Keller Rockey’s outfit was new to battle, neither he nor many of his men were. Rockey had fought in World War One and could wear the French fourragere won in Belleau Wood. He was leading Marines such as Manila John Basilone, the man who had won his Medal of Honor holding off the Sendai on Guadalcanal.

  Sergeant Basilone could have spent the rest of the war making War Bond tours in the States. “But it was like being a museum piece,” he explained, when his astonished new buddies in the Fifth asked what had possessed him to come back to the islands. “I kept thinking of how awful it would be if some Marines made a landing on Dewey Boulevard on the Manila waterfront and Manila John Basilone wasn’t among them.”

  So Sergeant Basilone and other veterans such as Corporal Johnny Geddings—the parachutist whom Brute Krulak had called “The Pineapple Kid” on Choiseul—were back leading untried youths like Pfc. Jacklyn Lucas or Corporal Tony Stein.

  Stein was a youth of unusual good looks, and he was tough and bold as well. He had passed the time in Hawaii learning to use a special weapon he had devised. It was an air-cooled machine gun stripped from a wrecked Navy fighter. It was called a stinger. Stein had it with him as he left Camp Tarawa with the Twenty-eighth Marines and the regiment began boarding its ships.

  Stowed away aboard another ship was young Jacklyn Lucas. He was not yet seventeen. He had enlisted at fourteen, lying about his age. It was easy to believe he was older, for he was a young bull at five feet eight inches and 200 pounds. Jacklyn Lucas had been in the brig twice already. The first time for fighting; the second for being absent without leave, for being in possession of a case of beer which was not his, for beating up the MP who sought to shut off his frolic. Two sentences of thirty days’ bread-and-water were enough to convince Lucas that he was stuck in a “chicken outfit.” He went down to the docks where his cousin was boarding ship with the First Battalion, Twenty-sixth Marines. He went aboard with them. On January 10, 1945, his own outfit—the Sixth Base Depot in Hawaii—declared him a deserter. But Jacklyn Lucas couldn’t care less. He was off to Iwo to fight with the Fifth Marine Division.

  The Fourth Marine Division was also mounting out of Hawaii to fight at Iwo Jima. It had been only a year since the Fourth sailed straight to Roi-Namur from the West Coast, but the division was already as salty as outfits that had “been out” three times that long. It still had its old salts, men as radically different as Jumpin’ Joe Chambers, the hell-for-leather leader of Third Battalion, Twenty-fifth; as tight-lipped, taciturn Captain Joe McCarthy, still commanding Company G of the Twenty-fourth Marines with a Silver Star from Saipan and two
battle stars to his credit; and as little Sergeant Ross Gray, still moving quietly along with Company A of the First Battalion, Twenty-fifth. They called him Preacher Gray. He had studied for the ministry. He read his Bible constantly. He had held church services before the guns of Roi-Namur had ceased and been a carpenter on Saipan until his buddy was killed. Then he changed. He volunteered to fire a BAR on Tinian and now the Preacher was going to lead a platoon on Iwo.

  Commanding such men was the oldest salt of them all. Major General Clifton Cates had been in Belleau Wood and had come out of France loaded with American and French decorations. He commanded the First Marines the night the Ichikis shuffled off to annihilation at the Tenaru; he had commanded the Fourth Division when it was the spearhead at Tinian. He was a leader of invincible aplomb. His division had drawn the toughest assignment of landing on the right beneath the guns of the northeastern cliffs.

  “You know,” Clifton Cates said slowly to a war correspondent, “if I knew the name of the man on the extreme right of the right-hand squad of the right-hand company of the right-hand battalion, I’d recommend him for a medal before we go in.”

  As the Fourth was making the 3,800-mile voyage to Iwo, the men of the Third Marine Division on Guam prepared to follow in floating reserve—under the new commanding general they called “The Big E.”

  Graves Erskine had been Lieutenant General Smith’s chief of staff. Now, at forty-six, already wearing two stars, he led a division. His men had named him well, not so much for his physique, which was strong, but for the strength of his will, for the disciplined intelligence evident on his handsome face. In France during World War One, Erskine had taken a patrol of 38 men into no man’s land and had come back with four. His commanding officer said: “Go back out there and throw a rock at that machine gun so it will shoot at you and then we can knock it out.” Erskine went back and threw the rock. He was soft-voiced and his smile could be gentle, but his eyes were green and cold. He was stern. On Guam, he had courtmartialed artillerymen for firing short rounds that killed Marine riflemen. But he had the respect of his men—of men such as Sergeant Reid Carlos Chamberlain.