252. Iwo Jima: Eight Square Miles of Hell
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Hello and welcome to Battleground 45 with me, Saul David. On the 19th of February 1945, just over 80 years ago, US Marines landed on the Japanese Pacific island of Iwo Jima, 750 miles south of Tokyo as part of Operation Detachment. Their intention? To capture the island and its two airfields and thus deprive the Japanese of a base from which their fighters could intercept long-range B-29 Superfortress bombers flying to strike targets in Japan.

Possession of these AFVLs would at the same time allow American P-51 Mustang fighters to escort and protect bombers en route to Japan. There were, in fact, other factors, and we'll get on to that. Now, planners assumed the island would fall within a week. In fact, it took five weeks.

and some of the toughest and bloodiest fighting of the Pacific War to subdue the 21,000 strong Japanese garrison, only 216 of whom were taken alive. Total American casualties, killed, wounded and sick,

were around 28,000, including almost 7,000 killed. The only time in the Pacific, as far as I'm aware, and John will correct me on this, that they exceeded Japanese losses, albeit not in comparison to the fatalities. The battle is probably best known for the iconic photograph of Marines raising the stars and stripes on Mount Suribachi, though ironically that was taken just four days into the battle and a long time before it was over.

Now, joining me to discuss the operation is American historian Jonathan Parshall, adjunct lecturer for the U.S. Naval War College and co-author of Shattered Sword, The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, numerous articles on the Pacific War, and a forthcoming new history of 1942. That, John, you can tell me the working title of. Yeah, the book's title is 1942 Crux of War.

Should be out from Oxford, hopefully in early 2026. Thanks for asking. Great stuff, John. I'll look forward to that. As you know, I've got a forthcoming book on Tunisia, Tunisgrad, coming up. So that's right in my wheelhouse, 1942. But let's go back to the main event, Iwo Jima. I mean, it's a kind of classic moment in American military history, isn't it? If you stopped a man in the street in the States,

man or a woman in the streets of a certain age, I suspect they'd have heard of the battle. Before we talk about it, because it's quite a controversial story, isn't it? Maybe you can give us a brief resume of where we got to in the Pacific War by February 1945 and why ultimately the decision was taken to catch it, Iwo Jima, rather than bypass it.

Absolutely. No, I think you alluded to some of the main reasons right off the bat in that we have four massive bomber bases at this point established in the Marianas Islands, Guam, Saipan and Tinian, and are cranking up our strategic bombing campaign against Japan. And that's about a 1300 mile flight from the Marianas up to, say, Tokyo.

And Iwo Jima sits smack in the middle of that flight plan, meaning that if there are Japanese fighters there, they can harass our bombers. And in some cases, the Japanese were even flying commandos down there.

from Iwo Jima to attack the air bases down in the Marianas. And so as this campaign goes on, the Americans are more and more convinced that we got to get rid of that nuisance factor. And as you say, too, if we could base our P-51s there, they could then escort those B-29s all the way up to Japan. Sort of bigger picture at this point, what's going on in the war, the Japanese Navy is for all intents and purposes been destroyed.

The Americans are ashore in the Philippines as well and have invaded the main island of Luzon beginning in January of 1945. So there are no more raw materials getting back to Japan at this point, and their economy is starting to do a real, you know, nosedive into a, you know, what is eventually going to be a collapse.

But the Japanese high command is looking down the road and are convinced that they are going to be invaded by the Americans eventually. And so the game plan for any Japanese garrison that is outside of the home islands at this point is play for time.

Because the more time you can buy the main islands back in Japan to build up those defenses, the better our odds of being able to fend off that forthcoming American invasion. Which means that when we get to Iwo Jima, we're going to see a complete change in Japanese tactics for how they're actually going to defend that island.

I mean, in some ways, John, the tactics they use on Iwo Jima have already been tried out, haven't they, in Peleliu? I mean, in my book, Devil Dogs, and also in the preamble to Crucible of War, I look quite closely at the 1st Marine Division's action on Peleliu. And unlike some of the earlier fighting where they heavily contest the beaches, there were a lot of

aggressive tactics used by the Japanese. This was very much a defensive struggle, a war of attrition, really. This is going to come to its kind of apogee, I suppose, its kind of worst moment, at least as far as the Americans are concerned, on Okinawa. But I think it's also fair to say, isn't it, that Iwo Jima is another example of this development of these defensive tactics, which

which were really the centerpiece of all of this is building these incredibly sophisticated defenses, these interlocking defenses using the terrain, in fact, tunneling into the terrain so that you, of course, had defenses against the

overwhelming firepower that the Americans possessed against them, both aerial and sea, and allowed you to take a heavy toll of the enemy. And I think it's quite clear that by the time we get to Okinawa, of course, the Japanese are thinking, well, we can't win the war, but we might not lose it if we can bloody the American nose as much as possible. And that does seem to have been the case

on Iwo Jima. So tell us a little bit about the defences there. Well, tell us a little bit about the island, actually, its size and the sort of defences that the Japanese constructed.

Yeah. So having been to a number of places in the Pacific, I will tell you that there are garden spots and then there are non-garden spots. So like Palau is lovely. Tinian, I think, is actually very pretty, too. You know, palm trees and white sands and all that good stuff. Iwo Jima is the exact opposite. Iwo Jima is god-awful.

It is one of the most volcanically active places on Earth. So it is being uplifted at a rate of between six and eight inches per year.

So it's essentially an active volcano. When you fly around it, there are these sulfur fumaroles at the northern part of the island. The island itself is only like about five miles long or thereabouts, shape of a pork chop. But yeah, if you fly around, you see the sulfur kind of, you know, seeping up through the fumaroles in the northern part of the island. It stinks of sulfur when you're on the ground. It is...

The most disgusting sort of dark mustard, yellow colored ground. And it looks like a moonscape because again, it's, it's volcanic rock. And so if you can imagine fighting a battle in the middle of an asphalt field, that's essentially what you got here. Very little vegetation. There's no fresh water. So the only drinking water comes from cisterns that are catching rainwater, which means the defenders, which are down in these caves, which are bloody hot.

are parched all the time. Yeah, no real vegetation. There's no real fauna, really. The only thing that I remember seeing there are these big-ass millipedes that are, you know, 10 centimeters long or something like that, crawling over the place. It's just, it's vile. It's just an absolutely horrible environment to make a war in. So the Japanese know it's going to be tough for the American invaders to fight over, right?

Tell us a little bit about the commanding general, the Japanese general, Kurubayashi, and what he intended to do. What was his plan of defense? Kurubayashi Tadamichi was the commanding general there, and he is a very bright cat. He has lived in the United States as a military attache. He came over in the...

Let me think. The late 1920s, I believe. 1928, 29. So he speaks English. He's traveled in the U.S. extensively and he understands the sort of gigantic industrialized power that we can bring to these sort of offensive operations. And he was an opponent of the war. He told his family that the U.S. was the last country on Earth that they should want to be fighting. So he understands what is going to be brought to bear against him. And as a result,

As you say, they are not going to be doing any sort of water's edge defense. He has learned from what happened to places like Saipan and Guam that if you try to position beach edge defenses, we will see them and we will just obliterate them with naval gunfire.

And so what happens in Iwo Jima is that, as you say, they dig into the island itself. They're almost entirely underground and they're taking any natural feature, a knob or a hill or a rock outcropping, what have you, boring into that, building caves inside, sometimes reinforcing them with concrete as well.

They built more than 18 kilometers worth of tunnels. So a lot of these strong points are interconnected, meaning that the Japanese can reinforce and lateral troops back and forth between these various strong points. And in many cases, too, the Americans would knock one of these positions out and bypass it, only to discover that night that the Japanese have then run more troops into it via tunnels. And now, lo and behold, you've got another unreduced enemy bastion in your rear.

So it's just a devilish place. And it was the sort of fighting that you had to knock out one position at a time, grinding out every meter worth of ground to get to the core of the Japanese defenses. It's just, it's really, really brutal.

And on the other hand, of course, we've got the U.S. Marines. They've been fighting against the Japanese and honing their tactics and getting better, frankly, at amphibious warfare. And they were probably the best in the world, certainly on the Western Allied side, even as early as 1942 in their first campaign in Guadalcanal. Three

US Marine divisions are assigned to this operation. It's extraordinary to think of that sort of number of men, really, isn't it, John? When you consider, as you already explained, the size of the island, about five miles long, we're talking about 30 miles square. I mean, this is a relatively small area and you're going to put

up to 70,000 U.S. Marine combat troops. Not all on the first day, of course, but they're going to feed them in there. Tell us a little bit about the U.S. Marine forces going in. Who were they and what was their intention? I mean, how were they going to develop their plan of attack? You're absolutely right that by this time, the war, the Marines are, I would say, the best in the world at executing landings against a defended enemy.

enemy beachhead. Although I will say that by this time too, the U.S. Army were no slouches either and they had had a lot of experience in the Pacific as well.

But the U.S. Marine Corps punches well above their weight in that respect. So we're going to be using specialized landing craft and amphibious tractors to not only be able to bring those Marines in from their assault transports, but actually get them on the beach and get them off the beach, you know, up over these bluffs and some ways inland before they're going to disgorge those troops.

A lot of those amphibious tractors have got not only machine guns, but in some cases cannon as well, so that they can bring direct fire to bear on enemy strong points that they run into. All of those forces, of course, are going to be backed up by very heavily armed warships that are now very well practiced in bringing naval gunfire down on any targets of opportunity.

I would say, too, that the Marines were pretty innovative in terms of their tactical structure. The Marines have implemented a 13-man squad system, which was sort of outsized. A lot of World War II squads are eight men, maybe nine men, something like that. The Marines have got 13 that are divided into three four-man teams, each of which has an automatic weapon, sometimes two,

And so if you look just in terms of raw firepower, your typical Marine battalion has three times as many machine guns as an Army battalion does. And even down at the squad level, these guys are rocking a lot of automatic weapons. And so...

They can bring a lot of firepower to bear against any of these positions that they need to. They've also got very good engineers. We use a lot of flamethrowers at this time. We've got a lot of tanks that have been equipped with flamethrowers as well. We got a lot of demo charges.

So when it comes to, you know, sort of the bloody business of reducing these pillboxes and other strong points, we definitely have got both the tactics and the equipment to do that. The unfortunate reality is, though, that all the equipment in the world isn't going to, you know, save you from suffering outsized casualties in the course of actually closing with these fortifications.

One of the controversial aspects, and there are quite a few to this campaign, John, as you know, is the story of the pre-bombardment, the naval bombardment. The Marines wanted a week. What they actually got was three days. And even those three days wasn't three days of solid bombardment. It was, you know, I think it was rounded up to just a number of hours in the end, comparatively speaking.

Was this a fact? I mean, is this a bit of a red herring, do you think, to the story of Iwo Jima? Would it have made much difference given the sophistication of the Japanese defenses? I think you're right on the money there that I do think it's a bit of a red herring in that

Naval gunfire was certainly useful for doing things like stripping vegetation off and exposing these positions. But in many cases, the positions being more inland as they were, were out of direct sight of the American warships, meaning that the only way you could get shellfire onto them was fire.

through indirect means, meaning you've got to have some sort of a forward gunnery observer who's right up close to that bunker and can say to Mr. Battleship, you know, here's the target. It should be at grid square XYZ, you know, fire for effect, and I'll see if I can walk your fire in. But that means that that preliminary bombardment, when the majority of those targets are still concealed, is

I don't think was going to do all that much, you know, three days, four days, seven days. At the end of the day, you are not going to get the sort of reduction of the defensive fortifications that you hoped for. It really is going to take close combat to do that. Okay, well, we'll go on to the landings now, John. The Marines first hit the beaches on the southeastern coast of the island just before nine o'clock on the 19th of February, 1945.

There's a sort of a lull, isn't there, at first? I mean, you've already mentioned the fact that the Japanese intention is not to fight on the beaches. So they begin to unload. There are guys milling around. And I suspect a lot of them are thinking, this is a little bit easier than we were expected. But, of course, that was what the Japanese were intending

for them to think. Very similar things happen in Okinawa, interestingly enough. So tell us what happens next and the effect this has really on the Americans who've already got ashore. Yeah. So the picture is actually somewhat mixed in that if you look at these landings, we're basically putting two divisions ashore abreast to start with. And

As I say, the island is shaped like a pork chop. And so we're going to cut across the narrow part of that pork chop. The very bottom of that is Mount Suribachi, which is this 555-foot-tall mountain that sits down at the extremity of the island. So we're going to isolate Suribachi. We're going to cut across the pork chop. And then we're going to array our divisions to drive north abreast. And we're eventually going to have three divisions ashore. Anyway.

The blandings come in. On the right flank, there's this feature called the quarry.

And the Marines that are right up against the quarry are taking fire right from the get-go from the Japanese. But for the majority of the battalions, as you say, nothing's really happening here. It's really kind of eerie. And so we get ashore. We're struggling to get off the beaches, which are this really awful black volcanic ash. I've got a jar of it here in my study. Yeah.

I thought that was your instant coffee there. John, you were about to make yourself like... Yeah, that's what it looks like, doesn't it? It's this vile, black volcanic sand, and it gave you no traction at all. And one of the Marines said that trying to dig a foxhole in this stuff is like trying to dig a foxhole in a bag of flour. It has no cohesion. And so...

We're really struggling to get men and machines up the incline off of the beaches and then a little bit inland. And Kobayashi is biding his time. What he wants to do here is lure the Americans in, get as many troops ashore onto that beach and concentrated in.

And so about half an hour, in some cases, you know, 40 minutes, it's quite a long wall. He waits until those beaches are packed and then he opens up and he has hundreds of artillery pieces that are all, of course, pre-registered on those beaches.

And he also has a number of these very large 320 millimeter spigot mortars, which fire this shell that the Marines said it looked like a trash can. And it has about all the aerodynamic properties of one, too. You know, so you got this dustbin coming over your head and kind of wobbling down, but it packs a hell of a big kaboom.

So the bottom line is that when Kuribayashi does open up on these beaches, it is just, it is hell to pay because the targets are densely concentrated. This artillery comes in and just blows those beaches to hell and gone. I believe that if you look at the casualty rosters for the battalions that landed that morning,

As opposed to the entirety of the campaign, the Marines suffer about half of their total KIA from this total battle are going to be suffered on day one.

Because of the concentration of targets on the beach when the Japanese artillery finally opens up. It's just it's absolutely awful. Yeah, I think listeners are getting the impression of what's coming next, which is five weeks of slow struggle as they try and claw their way across the island. You know, corkscrew and burn. I think that was a term.

At least I remember it was a turn that was used in Okinawa. I don't know if they were already using it at this point, but certainly those were the tactics they were needing to use, probably without the same kind of armoured support. I know some armour did get onto Iwo Jima, didn't it, John? Just as a quick sidebar, before we get on to the next stage of the story, Tsurubashi, tell me about this...

Wonderful character. Wonderful character, of course, in the HBO miniseries that some listeners will remember. And that's Sergeant John Bassalone. Now, he wins the Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal with the 1st Marine Division. And the 1st Marine Division isn't

fighting on Iwo Jima. It's already been slated to take part in the Okinawa operation. So how does Barcelona end up at Iwo Jima and what actually happens to him there? Barcelona, yeah, he's a hero. He's a legit hero at Guadalcanal. He wins the Medal of Honor. He goes back home. They pull him out and they're basically doing war bond drives with him. And so he's making a lot of money for the U.S. government and that's all well and good. But

He just cannot abide knowing that his comrades are still out in the Pacific suffering and he is at home, you know, getting wined and dined and doing what he's doing. And so finally he says, send me back to combat.

And so they put him into the cadre of one of these newer Marine divisions that they're putting together. And that's why he ends up in Iwo Jima and is leading a squad. He's just another squad leader at this point.

He will be killed, I believe it's on day, it's either day one or day two, leading his men across that narrow neck of the pork chop, comes up to the first airstrip and is killed there by a mortar shell that comes in and takes him and some of his men out.

Yeah, it's a very tragic story in a way, isn't it? Because as you say, he'd done his bit up to a point. I mean, admittedly, some guys fought in three campaigns in the Pacific. I think technically you were supposed to fight in a minimum of two, weren't you? But it also slightly depended on how long you'd been out there, how long you'd been on overseas. These point systems always tended to be adjusted consistently.

Compared to the circumstances. I know that, John. But in any case, Barcelona certainly could have, as you've already explained, chosen not to carry on in a combat role. And he did the opposite. And, you know, all the more extraordinary, really. But it's also a tragic story, really, isn't it? Of course, he won't come back from Iwo Jima.

It says something, too, about the unit cohesion within the Marine Corps. And that was one of the things that the Marines really prided themselves on is that we've got a very tight group of men here. They, you know, we look out for each other. We do not let any of our Marines go home without being recovered or that sort of thing. You know, we don't leave bodies behind that sort of ethos to their combat. And so, again,

So I think that says a lot about Barcelona as a person that, yeah, I just can't abide the cushy life here. I've only been in one battle. I'm going to go back and do my bit. But he ends up paying the ultimate price. Okay, we'll take a break there. Do join us in a moment when John will tell us all about that extraordinary, iconic moment when the Stars and Stripes are raised over Mount Suribachi. Yada, yada.

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Welcome back. Okay, let's move on to Mount Suribachi because it is one of the most iconic moments, as I say, or at least the raising of the stars and stripes. Now, this takes place just four days into the campaign, and we've already explained that we've got quite a long way to go. So tell us what happens at Mount Suribachi and also a little bit about the controversy of the raising of the flag, because the actual picture that was taken by a photographer called Joe Rosenthal wasn't of the actual guys who'd raised the initial flag, was it?

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Before we get to the flag raising, just just sort of a word about Suribachi. If you've been on the island, I've been there twice, and it's hard to describe just sort of the emotional impact of that. It's a hill, but it's it hunkers like an ogre over the entire southern portion of the island.

It absolutely dominates the terrain and it's completely honeycombed with defenses in many cases that have steel doors, you know, so the Japanese got big guns in this thing, you know, and they can they can open these steel doors, wheel the gun out, fire at the Americans, close the doors, you know, reload the piece. So it's a again, the sort of the epitome of the devilish defenses, if you will, on this island.

When you stand on the top of that hill and you look down at the invasion beaches, it's like you can reach down and touch everything that it's down there. The beaches are absolutely naked to the gunfire that is up here. And so it's almost impossible to describe that.

How did the Marines live under the guns of this thing for four days before they could finally get up to the top of it? So,

As you say, we eventually cut that mountain off by about day two and start making our way up the slopes, which is brutal work in and of itself, in that we can get armored to the base of Suribachi and knock out some of the bunkers that are at the base, but they can't get up any further on the slopes of the mountain, which are in many cases nearly vertical.

So now the Marines have got to crawl up, in some cases on their hands and knees, knocking out positions as they go. And finally, on the fourth morning, they find a path that's relatively lightly defended and they put a group of troops up on the top there and they've got a flag and they find a links of a drain pipe up on the top of the mountain and attach this small flag to the drain pipe and they raise it. And that is the first flag raising.

Well, they decide they need a bigger flag up there. And so they get a bigger flag and they take the first flag down and they put the second flag up. And that is the flag that gets captured in this iconic Rosenthal photo and is going to be all over the world within the next two or three days.

But the circumstances around the raising of that, and as you say, the identities of the gentlemen who actually do that flag raising were in doubt for years and years and years because you're in the middle of combat. Several of the gentlemen who do that flag raising do not survive the battle, and several others of them do.

are, I couldn't remember honestly if they had been there or not. And that's not a ding against them. I mean, when you hear often enough that, yeah, Charlie, you were there at the flag raising, I saw you. By the end of this five-week campaign, you probably can't even remember your own last name, let alone whether you were on the top of that stupid mountain. And in truth, I

To a certain degree, the first flag raising is really the more important of the two. And so why would you remember the second flag raising? It might not be important, but it just happens to be this perfect image of the Marine Corps and becomes the most famous image of the war in some senses. So...

Yeah, there was controversy over who the identities of some of these guys were that really was not figured out until six, seven years ago or thereabouts. And yeah, anyway, there's a whole big kerfuffle about that. But as you say, too, okay, great. We capture Suribachi after four days. And when I say capture, really what's happened is we've entombed the garrison there. I remember the first time I walked to the top of Suribachi, my wife was with me, actually.

And we're walking up the road that switches back and goes up to the top of this thing. There are a bunch of monuments up there. And I remember turning and telling Margaret, you are literally walking over the graves of hundreds of Japanese soldiers at this very moment because they're

Nobody surrendered. We just blasted them in and sealed up those caves. You can see the entrances to many of them as you're walking up this hill even now. So it is a really eerie piece of real estate to know that there are still hundreds of Japanese entombed in that hill. And in fact,

Iwo Jima as a whole, the garrison was, we don't really know, is somewhere between 21 and 23,000. There are still over 10,000 sets of Japanese remains on the island today that are buried in caves, blasted into bunkers, down so deep in some of these tunnels that are 150, 160 degrees Fahrenheit and full of sulfur gas that will kill you that no one can recover their remains.

So that gives you sort of an emotional sense for, yeah, the Americans and the Marine Corps in general look at Iwo Jima as our Mecca. But the Japanese look at this island as their Masada, that half of our garrison never came back from this place. And it is a deeply somber sort of island for us.

for the Japanese. Yeah, it's fascinating stuff. And it's worth reminding listeners, actually, that this was the first bit of Japan proper. I mean, you talked about the home islands, but this is actually part of the sort of government of Japan, isn't it? The prefectures of Japan. So this is the first time we've got to, the allies, the Western allies, the Americans, of course, have got to

a piece of Japan proper. So this really mattered, the defense of this island. We're going to see what's going to happen next, of course, with Okinawa. And all of this plays into, ultimately, the assumption of the terrible casualties that American generals and politicians assume they're going to incur, and not just Americans, of course, Western allies more generally, when they get to the Japanese home islands, which is going to play into the

debate about whether or not to use atomic weapons. That's for another episode, so to speak, John. But let's carry on with the story. So they've now captured the southern part of the island in just a few days. It's a relatively small bit. The main defenses are further north. The Kuribashi is further north. So tell us a little bit about what happens next in the next few weeks of fighting, what they're really trying to do. Because you talked about the plan, which is to get

three divisions on the island. You've now got them side by side driving north. What kind of opposition do they come up against? So, as you say, we've got three divisions abreast at this point, although the 3rd Marine Division only landed two of its three regiments. So, let's call it three divisions. It's fair enough. We're really at a point here where there's no operational level of warfare left. I mean, when we think of

say, on the Eastern Front where you have these big encirclements by the Germans and you can actually maneuver, there's none of that on Iwo Jima. It is...

Yard by yard, meter by meter, the bunker that is 40 meters that way, that's my problem this morning. And there's no way to maneuver around that sucker. I've just got to figure out some way to get my squad close enough to that thing that I can suppress its occupants' firepower long enough

To somehow get a dude up to the slit of that thing and shove a demo charge in through it or get my flamethrower operator close enough that he can blast it. And that's how we're going to go about reducing this island. It's one bunker at a time, one fortification at a time.

But of course, this is incredibly difficult because Mr. Bunker probably has five or six other bunkers that are overlooking it from positions further in the rear with interlocking fields of fire. Meaning anytime I try to move a group of men forward to get closer to that bunker, they come under fire from those supporting positions. And so now it's like, OK,

Maybe what I need to do then is bring a tank up or get a gunfire observer to take out some of those supporting positions in the rear. I got to unlock the key to this forward bunker by suppressing the firepower of the positions in the rear. So it becomes a very slow, methodical grinding mode of combat to try to reduce these positions one by one. And,

In many cases, you try a gambit. You're like, okay, Charlie, you take your three guys. I think there's a lane that you can probably sneak over to the left here. You try it, and they all die. They all get killed. And this happens over and over and over, which means that the frontline infantry battalions are just being worn down to a nub, and we're having to feed new reinforcements into these units as they're being bled white. It's just extremely bloody, awful work.

Yeah, it's an absolute meat grinder, isn't it? And it does remind me of some of the baffles on Okinawa, which obviously is a much bigger area. But when you got into that really tight-knit central defensive position in the centre of Okinawa, very, very similar descriptions, you'd bypass or you'd think you'd captured a feature. But of course, as you've already explained, John, the Japanese are burrowed beneath it. They can fire forward, backwards and to the side. And

And so often, you know, a squad of Marines advancing would actually be shot in the back or shot from the flank. I mean, it must have been an absolutely horrific experience for them. And it always begs the question to me, how on earth do you keep going in those circumstances? You know, this kind of close-knit unit, this kind of sense that you've got to fight for the guys on either side of you, if they're all being killed or wounded, it's really...

extraordinary to think that they do keep going. And it does say a lot, frankly, for the esprit de corps and the sheer determination and bloody-mindedness of the U.S. Marine Corps that they are actually able to finish this campaign, doesn't it? Yeah, you're absolutely right. And

You read some of the Marine accounts, particularly towards the end of the battle. These units are no longer the same people that came ashore. You would have situations where in a company of 240 guys, by the time you get towards the end of this campaign in the mid to end of March.

you might have four dudes out of those 240 that had actually been on the beaches, you know, when they first came ashore. The rest have all been killed and wounded. So the attrition is just horrific, and the turnover is tremendous. And the Marine accounts tell you, too, that the guys that showed up towards the very end didn't necessarily have the same gumption to close with the enemy that the first cats did. And so...

And kind of understandably so, because they've sort of they know and they have seen what has happened to their predecessors here. So it is a really interesting thing to contemplate. Yeah, the mental state of a lot of these people. How do you keep going in this sort of thing? And I think the answer to that is, yes, I am fighting for the guys that I came ashore with.

And I'm fighting because I know that the only way off of this island is either to be wounded and taken off or to just get this bloody thing over with and let's get her done. You know, so that is what is driving these people forward really is just I just want this to end. This is hell on earth. I just want it to be over with. Let's just kill these guys and get her done.

They thought it was all over on the 16th of March when the island was first declared secure. This also is a trend that happens on many of these islands. Of course, it wasn't. It takes another 10 days. Tell us about those last few days, because Kurebashi's plan was not to send his troops forward in these kind of

helter-skelter, all-out attack, so-called Banzai attacks. And yet there were a couple of them, weren't there, towards the end of the campaign, presumably because the Japanese troops knew that, you know, it was almost all over and they had nothing left to lose at that stage. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, word is due here for the defenders as well, in that we tend to look at this, of course, from our Western standpoint, our American standpoint, and

The conditions for the Japanese defenders were in some ways even worse than for the attackers. They're living in these bunkers and fortifications. It's hellishly hot. They have only maybe one bottle of water a day, so they are...

parched. They are hungry. Kurabayashi himself describes the physical conditions on the island as the most hellish. He had never experienced anything remotely like it in his life, and he was living as the average Japanese trooper was. We have a tendency to look at the Japanese soldier and say, well, they were fanatics and they were blah, blah, blah. They were human beings, though, too, and all of them knew that

that I am fighting in this bunker and this is where I am going to die. I am not coming out of this battle alive. And there's obviously a terrible psychological toll that gets inflicted as a result of that realization. It meant, among other things, that the Japanese were a terribly cruel army. Any American prisoners that fell into their hands were tortured and mutilated because they

You know, the Japanese army had always been a terrible army just to begin with. But in straits like this, where you know that the jig is up and you are going to perish, where are the rules? You know, you have no motivation to be compassionate to any enemy soldier that falls into your hands. And so.

The few remaining accounts that we have from these Japanese soldiers are absolutely harrowing because the physical conditions that they're operating under are just increasingly horrific. They will come out at night to try to get some water and in many cases to scrounge amongst the American corpses to try to find food because they're starving. In fact, in some of the few American...

American night attacks that get driven in during this portion of the battle are actually relatively successful because we catch the Japanese outside of the bunkers. They're all trying to get some sleep out there because at least it's somewhat cool and you're not trapped in this in this hell pit that you've been fighting in all day long. So anyway, yeah, that's that's kind of where we find ourselves in the middle of March.

The island is declared secure on March 16th. And I think some of the ugliest words that any infantryman can hear are, oh, it's just mopping up from now. You know, mopping up, man, you can get killed just as easily while you're mopping up as during the main affair. And Kuribayashi is still holed up in a series of gorges in the very northern part of the island. He's not going to be killed until the 22nd or thereabouts. So there's still some very hard combat.

It seems from the sort of what ends up happening is, yes, there are a couple of localized attacks, and it may well be that Kurabayashi led one of them himself in that there was a last minute incursion, not a bonsai attack. Somebody led a fairly large group of Japanese infiltrators that actually made it all the way to one of the airfields and break into one of the tent encampments.

So you had a group of, I forget, logistics troops and anti-aircraft gunners. There were a number of African-American troops in this mix as well. These are rear echelon people. And all of a sudden, you've got a couple hundred Japanese coming into these tents with swords and putting the occupants to the sword. And it's clear from the number of swords that were collected that there was an unusually high concentration of Japanese officers in this final attack. So-

So Kurabayashi's body is never positively identified. It's possible that he may have died in that final attack, but it does take until about the 22nd or 23rd before Death Valley or the Death Gorge, as they call it up in the north, is finally reduced and this island is now mostly under our control.

The weird thing is, though, that there are still more than a thousand Japanese left alive from the garrison, even at the technical end of the battle. As you said, we only captured about 200 during the battle itself, but...

But there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Japanese that were still left alive in these bunkers that were scrounging around for food at night and not necessarily wanting to engage in combat, but they're still out there. So it's kind of a weird situation. And Peleliu, I seem to recall, John, there were some holdouts, some guys who were hiding, who eventually surrendered two or three years later. So are there some examples of that from Iwo Jima?

Absolutely. Yeah. Some of these guys don't come out of their caves for a couple of years. The majority of them are rounded up. Some of them commit suicide. Some of them are too badly wounded to have survived in any case. But yeah, we end up capturing more than a thousand by the end of the operation as a whole. And in some cases are taking actual organized units. We stumble across people.

a field hospital, a complete field hospital that was buried in one of these caves. And we had just kind of bypassed it. Didn't really, you know, the entrance looked like nothing special. And when we finally got wind of the fact that, you know, there are a lot of Japanese in this cave, we came in and used an interpreter and,

coaxed the majority of them out, captured I believe 50 or 60 of them and only two or three committed suicide. But yeah, there are definitely pockets of Japanese still left alive on this island after the operation is concluded. So the operation is now over. The casualties as we've already mentioned on the American side are pretty horrific. Roughly at

A third of all those who take part in the operation, certainly who actually land on the island, are killed, wounded and missing. And these numbers are going up, aren't they, compared to some of the previous campaigns. And the same thing's going to happen on Okinawa. I mentioned the fact

that both Iwo Jima and Okinawa were referenced at that famous meeting between Truman, the new US president, and his chiefs of staff and senior political advisors on the 18th of June towards the end of the Okinawan campaign, where they're really talking about what happens next. And they are clearly discussing the casualties at Iwo Jima. And it does play a factor. It does play a part in the mentality of if this is...

how the Japanese are going to fight. Now we've got to the first bit of Japan proper, and it's not even the home islands. What's it going to be like when we get to the home islands themselves, the operation that was scheduled for late 1945 and another one in early 1946? So the consequences are,

are clear. And as I said before, that's for another day, John. But the question to ask you in the light of the famous quote from the retired chief of naval operations, William V. Pratt, is was it all worth it? And I'll just give that quote here quickly. And he wrote or noted the expenditure of manpower to acquire, as he put it, a small godforsaken island useless to the army as a staging base and useless to the Navy.

As a fleet base, one wonders if the same sort of air base could not have been reached by acquiring other strategic localities at a lower cost. So my question to you, John, is was he right? Were the benefits outweighed by the costs of this operation? That's a great question. And actually, I do want to, before I go there, let us talk a little bit about the casualties because you're absolutely right.

I just actually got sent some information on this very topic by my good friend, Rich Frank. And he ground some numbers on casualties amongst the battalion commanders, which I thought were absolutely fascinating. And I, you know, being a spreadsheet junkie, I just went ahead and did that last night. If you look at some of the earlier campaigns at places like Guadalcanal or even Tarawa,

The percentage casualties amongst your battalion commanders were, you know, maybe 20%, 30%, and most of those guys were wounded in action. It was very comparatively rare to see commanders actually killed.

Saipan and Iwo Jima and Okinawa all have percentage casualties that are above 60% for those battalion commanders. And understand these are dudes that are relatively usually far back from the actual firing, but that gives you a sense for just how lethal they are.

Japanese artillery was in a lot of these locales and until you could reduce their artillery park they were reaching out and touching people that were in battalion command posts and that sort of thing

So, yes, these were extremely bloody operations. And you alluded to this in the introduction that Iwo Jima is the first instance we have where if you look at casualties in terms of wounded in action, missing in action, and killed in action, in aggregate, the Japanese inflicted more casualties on the Americans than they themselves suffered. It was about 0.8 to 1.

And that is not the ratio you want to see as an American planner. We had typically been killing Japanese at a rate of four, five, seven, 10 to one. We're not doing that here on Okinawa or on Iwo Jima. And it's just as bad on Okinawa as well. And so,

Yes, that has a tremendous impact on war planning for late war operations as we're facing up to the arithmetic of what is it going to be like to now go into a place like Kyushu that has, you know, five million civilians and a Japanese garrison of nearly a million guys and go up against them in combat. Holy God.

So the question of whether or not Iwo itself was worth it, I think it was. There's some fairly facile math that gets run around here that, you know, X number of B-29s landed on this island and you multiply that number of B-29s by 10 crewmen a pop and that's 30,000 guys and therefore it was worth expending money.

Nearly 7,000 American lives. Well, not all of those planes would have had to have landed on Iwo Jima. Not all of those guys, even if they had gone down in that plane, our search and rescue services were very good at this point in the war, too. So.

The numbers there, I think, are squishy. I do think that having a fighter base on Iwo was extremely useful to us in terms of projecting air power over Japan and being able not only to escort our bomber forces, but even using those P-51s as tactical assets to be doing strafing and bombing missions that happened all the time.

The other sort of conjectural what if, and this is another favorite of Rich Frank, is to note that if the Americans had decided that the invasion of southern Kyushu was going to be too problematic and too potentially bloody, they might have decided, you know what, we're just going to pull a switcheroo and go straight for Tokyo right now.

And in that instance, having an air base that was capable of projecting air power over the landing beaches around the Kanto plane near Tokyo would have been absolutely invaluable so that we could project air power with Iwo Jima and also aircraft carriers, get our troops ashore, set up air bases on the landing beaches, and then move our air power up. So,

I don't think that you can necessarily measure the strategic worth of this island strictly in terms of lives expended or potential lives saved. It played a part in a larger strategic calculus. There was a big puzzle here that had to be put together, and Iwo Jima could potentially have been a very important part of that puzzle later in the war had the bombs not been effective. And

And finally, John, slightly pointless parlor game, but we'll play it anyway. Was this the toughest single nut to crack that American forces faced during the whole of the Second World War? Given the numbers, given the scale of opposition, would you say? Man, that's a toughie. That is a real toughie. Because I've been to Peleliu, I've been to Iwo and I've been to Okinawa and all of them in their own uniquely horrible ways have

are uniquely horrible. I have to give Okinawa the nod on that one, I think, just because of the sheer size of the battlefield. And the other component that gets dragged in here is the awful, heart-rending

casualties that are inflicted to the Japanese civilian population. It's just, it's so god-awful. We kill between a third and a half of the civilians that live on that island. And, you know, on the one hand,

The Japanese kind of had this coming to them. We cannot overlook the tremendous amounts of death and destruction. They're still going on in places like China and northern Vietnam. You know, there are two massive famines going on in Vietnam and Java at this time. And so,

I do think that the Japanese civilian population was now reaping the whirlwind that their national government had brought upon them. And so we need to keep in mind that allied civilians are still dying at a rate of four or five to one in comparison with Japanese civilians, even at the end of the war, even in the midst of this firebombing campaign that we're doing. However, that said, having been to Okinawa and,

Then to some of the museums there that illustrate the plight of the civilian population, it was uniquely horrific. And the fact that the civilians were being herded up by their own army and used as

human shields and impressing teenagers and girls as combat soldiers and nurses respectively and it's just it's a really really horrible place so yeah i guess for my money i i give i give the nod to okinawa but that said uh iwo jima yeah just the the terrain on iwo jima i think is

is some of the worst that we ever encounter. Yeah. And just a final comment from my behalf. I mean, famously, Eugene Sledge, author of one of the great memoirs, arguably the greatest memoir of the Pacific War, was asked,

He'd fought in two, Peleliu and Okinawa with the 1st Marine Division. Which was the worst of those two? And he was in no doubt, interesting enough, it was Peleliu. I mean, if you read his accounts of Okinawa, it's just heart-rending. Maybe as his first experience on Peleliu, the ferocity of the combat and the sheer...

sheer number of people he lost who he was close to by that point. I mean, what's interesting about Okinawa, particularly towards the end of the campaign, apropos your point about the replacements coming in on Iwo Jima, is that Eugene Sledge, Gene Sledge and many others who'd survived, and there weren't many of them left, certainly not many who'd fought on Peleliu as well, basically said we had nothing to do with the replacement. We didn't want to get close to them. We didn't want any kind of relationship. We were shot by that point.

in terms of our sort of emotional response to death and destruction. So probably that all played its part. But, you know, as I say, it is a bit of a pointless pile of game. They were all uniquely awful in their own way. I think that's clear, John. I wanted to ask you, have you been to Peleliu? I haven't, no. And in fact, I'm looking forward one day with a little bit of luck visiting some of these places with you.

John, I mean, I have, of course, been to Okinawa, but I don't think that really compares, does it, in terms of the kind of visual experience, sensory experience that you'll get on both Peleliu, Iwo Jima and some of the other islands? I would say that if you're looking for a battlefield in the Pacific that is still a time capsule, there is nothing like Peleliu.

It's amazing. There are still so many artifacts out in the jungle. You'll be walking in a path in front of the China Wall, which is in Wildcat Bowl in the heart of the Umber Brogal Mountains. And you're walking down this path and you're looking at your feet and it's like, oh, cartridge. Yeah. Unexploded grenade. Let's not touch that. There's tons of UXO there.

One of the things that blew me away this last time I was there, they had just dragged out of the jungle, had been sitting there for 80 years, was one of those little Japanese 70 millimeter battalion guns. And it's this little piece, it's got a gun shield on the front. It's almost like a mortar. I mean, the barrel is all of half a meter long or something like that. And there was a shell inside.

halfway in the breach of that gun. And so talk about a moment frozen in time. You know, the crew was loading that weapon and we killed them

And they died there, and the shell was half in and half out, and that gun has sat in the jungle for 80 years until they dragged it out last year to put by the trail that I happen to be walking by. So, yeah, for anybody who has an interest in actually getting a real sense for what the battlefield was like in terms of relics and whatnot, I can't recommend Peleliu highly enough. It's just really, really interesting.

And just to reiterate, John, I mean, it's not actually that easy to get to Peleliu, is it? I mean, you can't just hop on a commercial flight and fly in there. It is quite a logistical business, isn't it? Yeah, you got to go down to Palau and then you got to rent a boat. And it takes an hour and a half to go through this lagoon down from Palau south to Peleliu. It's a gorgeous lagoon, you know, coral outcroppings and beautiful blue waterfalls.

It's tremendous for scuba diving and whatnot. But yeah, you're absolutely right. It's not like it's easy to get to. Yeah, and one of the best places to get there, actually, an organization you have worked with very closely for a number of years, and I'm beginning to now, is the National World War II Museum in New Orleans that runs a number of very brilliantly organized and, of course, led by some excellent historians, yourself included, John. And they do do tours to Palo Alto.

Peleliu and Iwo Jima and elsewhere, don't they, in the Pacific. So certainly anyone who's interested in listening to this podcast, do have a look at the National World War II Museum's website and you'll get all the information you need on that. Yeah, come along. I've done about 12 of these tours with them at this point. Their travel staff is magnificent. These tours are incredibly well-organized.

We do four distinct ones. There's one big one that goes across the middle of the ocean to the Marianas. We sometimes go to Iwo Jima and then end up down in either Peleliu or in the Philippines. My compatriot, James Scott, will go to the Philippines.

I lead a tour every other year down to Guadalcanal. That is absolutely fascinating. And then on the opposing years, I go up to Japan and lead one that starts in Tokyo, goes to Hiroshima, then Kagoshima and the Kamikaze bases, and then finally down to Okinawa. So they ain't cheap, but they're extremely well run. And yeah, you get what you pay for, baby.

Great stuff, John. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat about Iwo Jima. It's a grim story, but it's also an extraordinary story, isn't it? If you want to know the nature of Pacific war combat, then that's the battle to have a look at that, Okinawa, Peleliu, and one or two others, as you mentioned, John. So thanks so much for taking the time to lead us through that. I really appreciate being here. Thanks so much for having me.

Well, that was fascinating, wasn't it? Grim, but certainly compelling too. It would be good to get John back on the podcast in the weeks and months to come. Okay, do join us again on Friday when we'll be hearing the latest from Ukraine and also following Wednesday when we'll have another episode of Battleground 45. Goodbye.

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