D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  On February 16, three days before D-Day, Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, commander of what was the largest Navy-Marine landing operation up to that time, held an emotional press conference on his flagship, USS Eldorado. Granite-featured Harry Schmidt, commander of the three Marine divisions that would make the assault, predicted the island would be taken in ten days. It would be a small campaign between two large ones—Euzon and Okinawa. “But everyone [knew] we would lose a lot of men,” recalled Robert Sherrod, who was there that day. “We knew the under ground defenses of this little island were as nearly impregnable as man could devise, and that seventy-four straight days of bombing had not knocked them out.”

  “Iwo Jima is as well defended as any fixed position that exists in the world today,” Admiral Turner informed the reporters assembled in his palpably tense briefing room. Then Colonel Thomas Yancey, the chief intelligence officer, spoke. “Iwo is 625 miles north of Saipan and 660 miles south of the Japanese empire. It is of the greatest importance to the enemy. It is small: five miles long and two and one-half miles wide at its widest point. Mount Suribachi on the southern tip is a volcano, 554 feet high. About one third of the island is airfields and revetments, one-third cane fields and scrub growth, one third is barren. The beaches we will land on are volcanic ash, the northern two thirds of the island is a plateau whose height goes up to about 350 feet.” The invasion beaches were between the plateau and the volcano, at the southern end of the island’s eastern side.7

  A crusty Marine described the island with greater economy. “Think of a [large] bad-smelling pork chop burned black…. That was Iwo Jima.”8

  When Yancey completed his briefing, a member of General Schmidt’s staff outlined the plan of attack. This had already been given to all officers in the amphibious force, and William Clark described it accurately in the memory book he kept during the battle. “The 5th Division was to land near the base of Mount Suribachi. Its mission was to secure the volcano, thus denying the Japs perfect positions from which to subject our landing beaches to severe enfilade fire. When this was accomplished, it was to turn north and drive up the west side of the island. The 4th Division [to which Clark was attached as a radio operator] was to land near the center of the island. [Our] mission was to cut directly across the island, capturing Motoyama Airfield No. 1. This was the primary enemy airstrip. This accomplished, the division was to make a right, pivot and drive up the east side of the island. The 3rd Division was to be a floating reserve to be used only in case of emergency.”

  With the Japanese dug-in, it would be a “frontal assault,” the reporters were informed, a slugging match, yard by yard, with no room for maneuver or strategy. At least one of the generals was “misty-eyed,” and the reporters filed out of the briefing room with what Sherrod describes as “the sort of the pit-of-the-stomach emotion one feels when he knows that many men who love life are about to die.”9

  At night, in the rank-smelling holds of the rusted troopships, with all doors and hatches sealed tight, the Marines “spoke more flatly, and with less whimsical wood-rapping, of the expectation of death than any assault troops I had ever been with before,” reported New Yorker correspondent John Lardner. “I did not see a man … who expected anything but a bloody and disagreeable time of it.” They had been told that it would by tough, that the island was “too small to provide room for maneuver.” As one Marine major kept telling his men over and over again, “‘You can’t run the ends up there…. Every play is between the tackles.’”

  Thousands of these men were veterans of other hotly contested island assaults, and these earlier campaigns had had taken a toll on them, on their bodies as well as their minds. “In the Army,” Lardner explained, “shock troops are a small minority supported by a vast group of artisans, laborers, clerks, and organizers. In the Marines there are practically nothing but shock troops. For such troops, in time, no matter how well trained and competent, a saturation point is bound to come.”10 Men bound for the battle openly wondered whether Iwo would be it for them, not the place where they “bought it”—death was always expected—but where they broke down and could fight no more, letting down themselves and their brother Marines.

  First to hit the beaches were the frogmen. Navy underwater demolition teams swam into the landing areas two days before D-Day, covered by the fire of a dozen gunships, backed up by destroyers and cruisers. In an interview given long after the war, frogman Andy Anderson describes the work of the men who were known as “half-fish and half-nuts”:

  I’LL NEVER FORGET WHEN WE FIRST arrived in the waters off Iwo on D-minus-three and stood on the deck and looked at that island. It was the most godforsaken place I’d ever seen, with the rising smoke and haze and that frightening-looking volcano. It flashed through my mind that this would be a great place to film a Dracula movie. We all thought, “Why do we want that miserable piece of real estate?”

  Our job was to swim in to the invasion beaches, locate mines and detonate them, identify other beach obstacles, and bring back samples of the sand to see if our landing vehicles could operate on that brown volcanic ash. The operation had to be done in daylight to be sure we got all the mines. At a thousand yards, the gunboats—converted LCI [Landing Craft Infantry] ships—fired their rockets and we raced by them in speedboats and were dropped into the water 700 yards off the beach. Five pairs of swimmers went in at 100 yards apart.

  Our first shock was the temperature of the water. When you hit that water at fifty-eight degrees it was a real character builder. We had no rubber suits or scuba tanks. They weren’t used until the Korean War. We were the naked warriors; that’s what they called us. We went in with swim trunks, a pair of fins, a mask, a knife, a slate and pencil, and blasting caps for detonating mines, which we kept in condoms to keep the powder dry. We strapped the condoms to our belts. In fact, we used so many condoms in training back in Florida that the Navy sent down a morals officer to look into the situation.

  We painted our bodies with grease that was mixed with silver paint, to give us camouflage. When we got close to the beach, an awful lot of enemy fire was coming at us. I rolled over in the water and looked back and all those gunboats that were supposed to be giving us cover had been either sunk or disabled. When the Japanese mortar shells came down they actually popped us up, almost out of the water. And we could look down in the water and see the shells that missed us, spiraling to the bottom. But bobbing out there, with silver paint on, we were hard targets to hit.

  NAVY FROGMEN (USN).

  When we almost reached the beach we saw an abandoned boat with a sniper in it. He kept popping up and shooting at us. My swim partner was a young Irish kid with a hot temper and he stood up, shook his fist, and shouted, “Why don’t you come down here and fight like a man.” I screamed at him, “Matt, get your tail down or it’s going to get blown off.” On the beach, all I remember is looking up and seeing this sixteen-inch stuff exploding out of these cliffs and the tremendous return fire of our ships. It was terrifying, and the noise was deafening.

  After we got our sand samples and other information we swam back to the rendezvous point with the speedboat. Going back you didn’t know whether to zig or zag as the shells came in on the left and then the right, one after the other, till they pulled us out of the sea.

  Part of our mission that day was to get the Japanese to fire on us, so we could locate their big beach guns, which were hidden in cliffs and hills. We fooled them. They thought we were the first wave of the invasion force. That night Tokyo Rose went on the radio and congratulated the valiant defenders of Iwo Jima for repulsing the American invasion. But all we did was force them to make a mistake by firing on us. The next day the Navy pulverized those beach guns, saving lives on D-Day.

  Our operation was successful in other ways. We didn’t find any mines or obstacles and there were no sandbars. It was well graded for bringing up LSTs. We didn’t have to do any demolition and only two swimmers were killed in the whole operation, one after he got back on the boat.
[Two hundred sailors, however, were killed or wounded on the disabled gunboats.]

  As soon as we were pulled out of the water, we were debriefed. Then a chart of the beach was made and sent to the Marines.11

  That night, after singing religious hymns on the deck to settle himself, William Clark “slept better than I had slept before many a college exam.” Morning broke bright and clear; high clouds, calm seas—a perfect invasion day. After watching the third and final day of the greatest naval bombardment of the Pacific war, Clark boarded a boat to guide in the first waves of assault vehicles. After this he became a kind of water cop, keeping boats moving to and from the thickly congested beach. “This gave me an opportunity to view the whole attack.”

  Out at sea, John Lardner transferred to a ship closer to shore to watch Clark and the first wave head in. His first trial was the wet, loose web of rope that hung from the side of the troop carrier. “Even young Marines have been killed on these descents when the sea has been rough,” he wrote, “and for those over thirty-five the endless sequence of nets, Jacob’s ladders, bouncing gangways, and lurching boats is a hazard and nightmare.”

  After maneuvering down the ropes, Lardner boarded a small boat with Colonel Thomas Wornham, a regimental commander of the 5th Marine Division, and headed through the choppy seas to Wornham’s control ship. It was anchored at the line where the first wave of assault troops “formed up in their amtracks and began their long, slow, bobbing run for the beach.” The men in the boats were “a fierce and stirring sight as they passed us to disappear in the valleys of the water between us and the beach. I stood watching them as well as I could from the rail of the control ship beside a regimental messenger, a Navajo Indian named Galeagon, and we spoke of how most of the shock troops we could see, their hands and faces greased dead white for protection against possible flame barriers, sat up very straight and looked intently ahead.”12

  The first assault waves came ashore at nine o’clock, right on schedule. It was a surprisingly easy landing. The toughest part was scaling the steep terraces of soft volcanic ash that rose up in front of the men as they walked out of the surf, each Marine carrying sixty or more pounds of equipment. Reaching the top of the dunes on their bellies and scanning the horizon, the Marines found what looked to be an abandoned island. “Where’s the reception committee?” asked Private Louie Adrian.13 Three hours later, with the beach jammed with men and equipment, Adrian got his answer.

  The Japanese used monstrously large mortar shells, “flying ashcans” the Marines called them, which blew parts of men and machines as high as a hundred feet in the air. Landing that afternoon, Private First Class Thomas H. Begay, a full blooded Navajo, said the beach was the “scariest damn thing” he had ever seen. “I got numb … all over my body. No feeling, I was scared as hell, I mean scared. Even though I’m walking, I feel like I’m standing in one place. And that place was like wrecking yard. They had things blown to pieces, it’s like traffic jam…. There was piles of bodies, and wounded ones…. I grow up that day. I age about two years right on that beach, got my Ph.D. about war.”14

  MARINES ON A THIRTY-MINUTE RUN TO THE BEACHES OF IWO JIMA AT THE FOOT OF MOUNT SURIBACHI (USMC).

  The enemy zeroed in from Mount Suribachi and from the cliffs and hills north of the beachhead, and nearly everywhere they put a shell it hit a man or a machine. “No man who survived that beach knew how he did it,” said Joe Rosenthal, the Associated Press photographer who would take the most famous picture of the war on Iwo Jima. “It was like walking through rain and not getting wet.”15

  That evening, Captain Clark, working close to the beach, watched the Marine tractors, the only vehicles capable of negotiating the soft ash with little trouble, scurrying “back and forth like a bunch of ants. Some of our fellows carried badly needed supplies right to where the fighting was in progress. These cumbersome vehicles were choice targets for Jap gunners and mortarmen.” It was a job, in the pitch black of night, requiring “daring and cool courage,” the tractors’ only guide being a blinking flashlight held by a Marine officer who directed the unloading of ammunition and other supplies. Much of this work was being done by African-American Marines with the ammunition and depot companies, eleven of whom were wounded, two fatally.

  D-PLUS-ONE ON IWO JIMA (USMC).

  John Lardner had landed later in the day with the fourteenth wave and experienced some of the worst of the mortar assault. “At Iwo, as at Anzio, there quickly developed two fronts—the battle front forward and the shelling front on the beaches, where our supply and reinforcement lines were wholly dependent on boats and amphibious vehicles that were being stalled and pounded by surf and wind. And in the case of Iwo, the Marines depended also on motor or human convoys, which were slowed by drifting volcanic sand.” The Japanese had high ground over the supply beaches and pounded them mercilessly. “The mortar shell … travels in a high, lobbing trajectory and throws its fragments over a wide radius when it explodes. It makes for tearing, disfiguring wounds and disfigured dead.” Everywhere Lardner looked, he saw “slashed and mangled bodies.”

  As he slogged forward through the thick, shifting sand, his breathing “sharp and painful,” he heard the “whine and bang of mortar shells dropping and bursting” all around him. At one point, after stopping for forty minutes, his body pressed against the sand, he realized that “there is such a thing as wishful pinned-down thinking,” and that “it can become a more dangerous state of mind than any other in an area that is being shelled. A man tends to cling to his trench, even if it is in the center of a target, when the sensible thing is to [move forward].” It took Lardner almost twenty minutes more to adjust his nerves and move ahead, struggling all the while to fight “overpowering intimations of mortality.”16

  Around five o’clock that afternoon, Robert Sherrod was about to board a landing boat to head into the beaches when he ran into his friend Keith Wheeler of the Chicago Times. Wheeler was returning from the island to write his D-Day story. “There’s more hell in there than I’ve seen in the rest of this war put together,” he told Sherrod. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you, it’s plain foolishness. The Nips are going to open up with everything they’ve got tonight.” Sherrod shook his head and headed in. When his Higgins boat crunched ashore, he found it almost impossible to dig a foxhole in the loose volcanic ash. “It’s like diggin’ a hole in a barrel of wheat,” a Marine next to him shouted.

  By this time, the 5th Division had cut across the tail of the pork-chop-shaped island, isolating Suribachi from the rest of Iwo Jima, and General Schmidt had 30,000 Marines ashore, against about 21,000 Japanese defenders.

  Learning from the failures of Tarawa, the Navy had fired a rolling barrage in front of the advancing Marines, giving the Japanese no time to reoccupy emptied positions. And carrier planes flew in low, strafing and bombing. But aside from the beach and a small portion of Motoyama Airfield No. 1, the Japanese owned the rest of the real estate, and no place on it was beyond the range of their heavy guns. After the remainder of the assault force, over 40,000 men, landed over the course of the next week, Iwo Jima would be one of the most heavily populated eight square miles on earth.

  When Sherrod arrived on the beach, the mortar fire had quieted down and he was even able to catch a little sleep. But just after 4:00 A.M. the Japanese opened up with everything they had. “The first big mortar shell hit only a few yards from my foxhole, and it sounded like the break of doom…. All night the Japs rained heavy mortars and rockets and artillery on the entire area between the beach and the airfield. Twice they hit casualty stations on the beach…. The corpsmen were taking it as usual.”17

  Squad leader Albert J. Ouellette landed with two doctors and forty corpsmen. “Before the day was out, one doctor was killed when he lost both legs, and only two corpsmen were left,” he recalls. “All the rest were dead or wounded.”18

  Navy corpsman Stanley E. Dabrowski landed under heavy fire near Mount Suribachi. “I had a carbine and a .45. Unlike the Arm
y in Europe, we were armed. That was because of our experience on Guadalcanal. At that time corpsmen still wore Red Cross brassards on their arms and a red cross on their helmets. They were the first ones to be knocked off.” Even after that, the Japanese, spotting the medical kits that corpsmen carried on both shoulders, focused their fire on them.

  On landing, Dabrowski and his team of corpsmen picked the deepest shell hole they could find and set up an emergency aid station. “Evacuation of wounded was extremely hazardous. The stretcher-bearers were under constant fire…. When we started experiencing heavy casualties, it was almost impossible to comprehend. Be cause of the heavy artillery and mortar fire there were a lot of traumatic injuries, traumatic amputations…. No arms, or both legs. And then there were abdominal injuries, torn-out intestinal tracts. Often I was beside myself trying to decide what to do with these people….

  “Sometimes these young men would be covered by a poncho and lying on a stretcher. And I’d say, Hey, Mac, how are you doing? Pretty good, doc. What’s the problem? Oh, my left arm got it. So you’d lift the poncho and you’d see a stump.”19

  When the firing let up at daylight, Sherrod walked back to the beach. He saw only a dozen or so dead Japanese. “The Jap plan of defense was plain,” he wrote in his first story from Iwo Jima. “Only a few men would defend the beaches. The mortars and machine guns from the hillside caves … would stop the landing.”