D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

At the same time, the conservative press was excoriating Nimitz for his costly Storm Landings, demanding that the President turn over the Pacific war to MacArthur, whose forces were taking big swathes of enemy territory with proportionally fewer casualties than Nimitz’s Marines. Americans were impatient; they were exhausted; and they could not see the end to this war with an enemy that seemed to have a collective death wish. “The Pacific war is gradually getting condensed, and consequently tougher and tougher,” wrote Ernie Pyle. “The closer we go to Japan itself, the harder it will be…. To me it looks like soul-trying days for us in the years ahead.”36 As Americans read this on February 24, 1944, their spirits must have dropped. Ernie Pyle, the man they trusted to tell the truth, had actually said “in the years ahead.”

  The next day, Americans at home opened their Sunday morning newspapers and there, spread out before them on the top of front page was Rosenthal’s photograph of six American warriors putting up that wonderfully big victory flag. Maybe Ernie Pyle was wrong. Suddenly, the end of the war seemed in sight. The message of the photograph also matched the wartime mood. Here were “six Americans, all for one, working together in victory and valor, and above them, Old Glory,” as the writer Hal Buell has observed. “Finally, for the first time, a clear, simple statement from the Pacific gripped the United States.”37

  No major paper carried Lowery’s photograph or mentioned the first flag raising. There was only one flag raising, the one captured for all time by Joe Rosenthal. Second only to the one that flew over Fort McHenry on the night Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner,” this became the most famous American flag that ever flew. To the men on Iwo Jima it was the flag that didn’t count. But to Americans back home that replacement flag was the only flag they wanted to hear about. They weren’t looking for truth, after all; they were praying for encouragement.

  The morning that the first flag went up there were still thirty days of combat ahead. The 28th Marines had paid a stiff price for Suribachi, and now the regiment moved north, with almost every assault unit on the island, into the teeth of Kuribayashi’s defenses. One of the first Marines to be wounded in the drive north was Charles Lindberg. After he was evacuated from the island and read the reports in the papers about the flag raising he found it difficult to suppress his anger. “It just didn’t make sense to me that something like that could happen. We went up the mountain and we raised the flag. We took the enemy off the top of the mountain. Somebody comes up four hours later and puts up another flag and they’re national heroes.”

  A CHAPLAIN FROM THE 5TH MARINE DIVISION CELEBRATES MASS ON MOUNT SURIBACHI (NA).

  By the morning of the fifth day, over 5,000 Marines had fallen—three for every two minutes of action on Iwo Jima. And now the Americans faced an obstacle greater than Suribachi—the barren stone plateau to the north of the airfields, where Kuribayashi had constructed his most imposing defenses, including his own underground headquarters. On D-plus-six the Marines moved northward, three divisions strong (the “emergency” 3rd Division had been put ashore right after D-Day). They now had the enemy outnumbered by at least three to one, but by going underground the Japanese nullified the Americans’ prodigious firepower. “For all our technical skill, we had on Iwo no method and no weapon to counteract the enemy’s underground defense,” wrote Sherrod. “The Japs made us fight on their own terms.”38

  A team of Marine Corps correspondents described the attempt to smash through these defenses at a place called “The Wilderness”:

  WHEN THE 24TH REGIMENT’S 2ND BATTALION reached … “The Wilderness” … they spent four days on the line, with no respite from the song of death sung by mortars among those desolate and gouged shell holes. The Wilderness covered about a square mile inland from Blue Beach 2, on the approaches to Airfield No. 2, and there was no cover. Here stood a blasted dwarf tree; there a stubby rock ledge in a maze of volcanic crevices.

  The 2nd Battalion attacked with flame throwers, demolition charges, 37-millimeter guns, riflemen. A tank advancing in support was knocked out by a mortar shell. After every Japanese volley, Corsair fighter planes streamed down on the mortar positions, ripping their charges of bombs into the Wilderness. But after every dive was ended, the mortars started their ghastly song again.

  Cracks in the earth run along the open field to the left of the Wilderness, and hot smoke seeped up through the cracks. Gains were counted in terms of 100 or 200 yards for a day, in terms of three or four bunkers knocked out. Losses were counted in terms of three or four men suddenly turned to bloody rags after the howl of a mortar shell, in terms of a flame-thrower man hit by a grenade as he poured his flame into a bunker….

  The Japs were hard to kill. Cube-shaped concrete blockhouses had to be blasted again and again before the men inside were silenced. Often the stunned and wounded Japs continued to struggle among the ruins, still trying to fire back…. A Marine assaulting a pillbox found a seriously wounded Jap trying to get a heavy machine gun into action. He emptied his clip at him but the Jap kept reaching. Finally, out of ammunition, the Marine used his knife to kill him.

  Forty-eight hours after the attack began, one element of the Third Division moved into the line under orders to advance at all costs.

  Behind a rolling artillery barrage and with fixed bayonets, the unit leaped forward in an old-fashioned hell-bent-for-leather charge and advanced to the very mouths of the fixed Jap defenses. Before scores of pillboxes the men flung themselves at the tiny flaming holes, throwing grenades and jabbing with bayonets. Comrades went past, hurdled the defenses and rushed across Airfield No. 2. In three minutes one unit lost four officers. Men died at every step. That was how we broke their line.

  Across the field we attacked a ridge. The enemy rose up out of holes to hurl our assault back. The squads reformed and went up again. At the crest they plunged on the Japs with bayonets. One of our men, slashing his way from side to side, fell dead from a pistol shot. His comrades drove his bayonet into the Jap who had killed him. The Japs on the ridge were annihilated.

  And now behind those proud and weary men, our whole previously stalled attack poured through. Tanks, bazookas, and demolition men smashed and burned the by-passed fortifications. In an area 1,000 yards long and 200 deep, more than 800 enemy pillboxes were counted.

  The survivors of this bold charge covered 800 yards in an hour and a half. Brave men had done what naval shelling, aerial bombardment, artillery and tanks had not been able to do in two days of constant pounding. What was perhaps the most intensively fortified small area ever encountered in battle had been broken.39

  Iwo Jima would have been tougher to take without the help of the Navajo “code-talkers,” who had been serving in the Pacific since Guadalcanal. The Navajo language has no alphabet, and in 1941 was known to no more than forty non-Navajo in the world, none of them Japanese. The Marine Signal Corps recruited 420 of the 3,600 Navajo who served in all branches of the military. It trained them as radiomen and had them develop a highly secret metaphoric code, which included hundreds of words of their own invention for military terminology like machine gun and bazooka. The code was never written down—it had to be memorized—and it remains one of the few unbroken codes in military history. (The Army recruited Comanche Indians for the European theater and used them on the Normandy beaches and in the drive to the Rhine.) “We named the airplanes ‘dive bombers’ for ginitsoh (sparrow hawk),” says Cozy Stanley Brown of Chinle, Arizona, “because the sparrow hawk is like the airplane—it charges downward at a very fast pace…. We usually used the harmful animals’ names that were living in our country for the alphabet…. We were well taken care of. The generals would not allow other soldiers to come near us…. We were not supposed to take order[s] except from high [officers] we were assigned to.”40

  The code-talkers were generally split up into two-man teams, “one on either end of a field telephone or walkie-talkie so they could transmit coordinates for artillery or air strikes, relay information on enemy positions, and p
rovide other valuable intelligence without the Japanese being able to decipher the information.” explains one of their historians.41 On Iwo Jima’s impossible terrain, where secure communication between ground troops and supporting tanks, artillery, planes, and ships meant life or death, the code talkers relayed almost a thousand messages with out an error, including the one announcing the flag raising on Suribachi. “They told us that being a code-talker, we can’t make mistakes,” says Thomas Begay. “Has to be perfect. Because if we make a mistake, say the wrong word, could kill a lot of our men.”42 The code-talkers gave the Marines on Iwo Jima something the enemy did not have—a rapid, reliable, and absolutely secure system of communication. Most of the messages were sent in the fury of combat, and three code-talkers were killed.

  “Why do you have to go?” Navajo mothers asked their sons who volunteered for the Marines. This is “the white man’s war.”43 Cozy Stanley Brown provided one answer. “My main reason for going to war was to protect my land and my people because the elderly people said that the earth was our mother,” and it was being dominated by foreign countries. “There are Anglos and different Indian tribes living on the earth who have pride in it…. I believe what we did was right, and it was worth it. We protected many American people, also the unborn children, which would be the generation to come….

  “I brought one of the enemy’s scalps home,” he declares with a warrior’s pride. “The Squaw Dance was performed on me for the enemy scalp that I brought home with me.”44

  When Motoyama Airfield No. 1 was secured and cleared of mines, transports flew in from Guam to evacuate the badly wounded and to bring in cases of whole blood. Twenty-three-year-old Norma Crotty from Cleveland, Ohio, was on one of the first R4D cargo planes to land on Two Jima.

  NAVAJO CODE-TALKERS OPERATE A RADIO SET IN A JUNGLE CLEARING (NA).

  TWELVE OF US NURSES HAD BEEN flown from Honolulu to Guam, where we lived in hospital tents. We were there only a few days when our chief nurse said we were going to fly to Iwo Jima to bring back patients to the hospital on Guam. We didn’t know much about the place, and we were astonished to hear that we would be flying into a combat area.

  We left Guam about four o’clock in the morning and tried to sleep a little bit on the plane. When we approached Iwo, the pilot woke us up, and we looked out and saw the whole fleet in the water around this tiny island, ships of all kinds firing away, and you could see the smoke coming up from the island. It was impressive. I felt like I was living in a newsreel.

  When we landed we ran to the aid station, which was nothing hut a big tent, a sandbag tent. Iwo was almost indescribable. There was tremendous noise and dirt and it was all gray sand, which I found out later was volcanic ash, nothing green, no vegetation whatsoever. It was cool and the island smelled, and there were smashed planes and equipment all over the place, and big bulldozers at work. It was so far removed from any experience I ever had.

  The patients were on the ground. With the help of the doctors we picked out the worst cases and took them to the plane. The worst things you would see were burns, and men who were torn up by shrapnel. We had some men who were flamethrowers and their tanks had blown up, and it was horrible—the pain, the terrible pain. On the four-to five-hour trip back, we worked with corpsmen—there were no doctors—to stabilize the men and monitor their condition, checking for bleeding, giving them plasma, and feeding them sliced peaches in little paper cups, which we would sit on their chests. It was like they were swallowing little goldfish.

  We gave them morphine occasionally, but we didn’t have oxygen, or water to wash our hands. We worried about that, going from patient to patient without being able to wash our hands. The men, about thirty of them, were on stretchers and they were stacked up three and four high on the plane, and it was cold and drafty. Generally there was only one nurse and one corpsman on every plane. We were on our own.

  The fellows were so much younger than us, seventeen or eighteen years old, and some of them looked younger than that. Like little boys. And they wanted their mothers, and we sort of became their mothers and comforted them. They were all very courteous and appreciative of anything we did. As much as we did for them medically, I think it was the comforting that was most important to them, and to us. Mostly, they wanted to talk to us, and they enjoyed watching us comb our hair and put on lipstick. They’d ask us to do that. The feeling of closeness to these boys I didn’t have again until I had children.

  What was touching to me was that so many of them were replacements, right out of high school. And now a lot of them were ruined for life.

  NAVY NURSE AIDS IN EVACUATING WOUNDED FROM IWO JIMA (NA).

  The thing that matters most to me now, fifty years later, are the friendships I made with the eleven other nurses I worked with on those trips between Guam and Iwo. We stayed very close through the years. You must remember that women and girls back in the 1940s hardly left their mothers. It was quite a thing to be away, without any family support, on your own. That meant a lot, because then you knew through the rest of your life you could do just about anything that you put your mind to, that nothing could stop you. You knew you were in control. That was the good thing we got out of our war experience.45

  Almost 2,500 wounded men were airlifted out of Two Jima. Not one patient was lost on the flights to Guam.

  On March 4, a Sunday, the Marines around the airfield got an unexpected visitor. The fuel-starved B-29 named Dinah Might, on its way back from Japan, skidded to a stop at the end of a runway less than half the size of the one it had taken off from in the Marianas. “As the silver craft came to a stop at the northern end, shellfire began hitting near it. The Japanese wanted that B-29 badly,” says Iwo veteran Richard Wheeler. “But Dinah Might swung around and taxied out of range toward Suribachi. Hundreds of Seabees and Marines cheered their throats dry as the sixty-five-ton plane stopped and cut its engines.” The hatch opened and four or five of the fliers “jumped down and fell to their hands and knees and kissed the runway.” another Marine recalls. “What a contrast! Here were men so glad to be on the island they were kissing it. A mile or two to the north were three Marine divisions who thought the ground … [was] not even good enough to spit on.”46

  The silver bomber had a faulty fuel valve, and thirty minutes later it was airborne again, soaring out to sea. “If anything was needed to tell the Marines why they were dying on this unholy island,” wrote correspondent Keith Wheeler, “the successful landing of Dinah Might furnished the demonstration.”47

  Then there were the dead. At this point in the battle, William Clark was still back at the beach, living in a foxhole, working with the supply companies. The fighting had ended in his sector but all around him was the smell and physical presence of death. “Directly offshore from our bivouac area lay a pontoon barge which held several rows of white-clad figures laid in stretchers. These were the mortal remains of men who had died aboard hospital ships and had been towed into shore awaiting burial. There was no time to tender them this decency. For days the barge rocked back and forth on the waves and one by one the bodies would slip overboard…. Some were washed ashore; others went to sea.”

  On the beach, burial detachments were at work. “Anyone who thinks that death on the field of battle is a hero’s end should be made to watch a burial party picking up the remains of some poor devil whose luck had run out,” says Clark. “We kid ourselves into calling this man a hero. Calling him a hero does not bring life into this limp mass of flesh. Such a man as this was sacrificed by the stupidity of mankind which made such an end possible.”

  By D-plus-fourteen, many of the Japanese cross-island defenses had been broken and Kuribayashi had only about 3,500 battle-ready troops left. On the high ground in the center of the island, Marines of the 3rd Division had driven a wedge into the northern third of Iwo Jima still held by the Japanese. This wedge was exploited in fighting that took the attackers through a “jungle of stone”—wild lava ledges, smoking sulfur pits, chasms, cliffs, caves, b
oulders. Four days later the breakthrough to the sea was accomplished and the Japanese force was split. Turning southward, Marines cleaned out the eastern pocket in cave warfare, and it was on the northernmost tip of the island, at Kitano Point, that Kuribayashi reputedly was killed leading his men in a final attack, although his body was never found.

  On March 14, General Schmidt declared the island officially occupied by the forces of the United States, and the Army was brought in to finish the job. But the battle really ended on March 25, D-plus-thirty-four, when the last enemy stronghold was taken in a place called Death Valley. A week before this, Admiral Nimitz had issued a statement that summed up the fight. “On Iwo island, uncommon valor was a common virtue.”48 That was nice to hear, but it was thin consolation for the battered and bleeding Marines, among them the company that had raised the flag on Iwo Jima. Easy Company had landed with about 235 men and received seventy replacements. By the battle’s end, it had suffered 240 casualties, more than 100 percent of its original number. Among the dead were three of the Marines who had raised the second flag on Suribachi: Mike Strank, Harlon Block, and Franklin Sousley, and one of the photographers who immortalized the act, Bill Genaust.

  On March 17, Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso, speaking by radio, called the fall of Iwo Jima “the most unfortunate thing in the whole war situation.” He was quick to add, however, that the nation would fight to the last man “to shatter the enemy’s ambitions.”49

  As if to bear out that threatening prophecy, a remnant of Kuribayashi’s men mounted one final attack in the early morning hours of March 26, the day after the Americans had declared the battle over. “About 300 of them took off straight down the center of the island,” recalls Fred Hayner. “They went right down the airfields and they caught a group of young pilots who had come in with P-51s to escort the B-29s over Tokyo and Yokohama. These fellows, along with some Seabees and Marine construction units, were sleeping in tents or on the ground and the Japanese killed about fifty of them.”50