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23

Iwo Jima, Japanese for “Sulfur Island,” is a volcanic flyspeck in the Central Pacific situated roughly six hundred miles north-northwest of Saipan and Tinian in the Carolines and another six hundred or so miles from Tokyo, the capital and largest city of Japan. It was this equidistant geographical position that gave Iwo any importance whatsoever in the Pacific war. Japanese engineers had built three airstrips on the small island (only ten square miles of sand and rock) from where their Zeroes and other interceptors could attack United States B-29 Superfortresses based in the Carolines en route to Tokyo and other mainland Japanese targets. The same Japanese fighters taking off from Iwo could also ambush and shoot down B-29s on their return flights to Tinian and Saipan, especially Superforts damaged by Japanese antiaircraft fire or shot up by Zeroes over the mainland, now limping home, wounded, slowed, and vulnerable, the planes and their ten-man crews. If American forces could take Iwo, the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of U.S. flyers would be saved and our bombardment of the home islands stepped up in frequency and in bomb tonnage. It would also permit American fighter escorts, with their relatively short range, to accompany the B-29s to Tokyo and back, improving their effectiveness.

Invading and taking the rugged little island from its powerful garrison of good Japanese troops and dangerous aircraft would not be done on the cheap. Major General Harry Schmidt’s V Amphibious Corps would be ticketed for the task: three Marine divisions, the 3rd, the 4th (with George Basilone and commanded by Major General Clifton B. Cates), and the brand-new and untested as a unit 5th Marine Division, a blend of raw-to-combat young Marines freshly over from the States and salty and blooded veterans like gunnery sergeant John Basilone, a total of roughly 60,000 men, about half of them having already faced and fought the enemy. There would be casualties, and some senior Marine officers expected them to be heavy.

I have been to the island once, in November 1951, almost seven years after the battle, as a replacement platoon leader being flown out to the 1st Marine Division in North Korea. Our Navy transport plane landed at Iwo to refuel, and we forty or so young officers and senior NCOs had a few hours to stretch cramped legs and wander about and gawk, very much like tourists anywhere—except that, for Marines of any generation, Iwo Jima wasn’t a tourist attraction but a sacred shrine. My memory of the place is simple. Mount Suribachi was stark, bare, smaller than I anticipated; the air reeked of sulfur, the sand was black, and the wind moaned. Beyond that, nothing. Only the imagined echoes of muted battle long ago and the sense of other presences, the ghosts of the men of both sides who fought and died here. Those sensations I took with me, along with a sense of awe, long after the stench of sulfur faded. A Japanese source once described Iwo in these words: “no water, no sparrow, no swallow.” More prosaically, an American source described it as being shaped like “a porkchop.”

Everyone I’ve asked about the epic battle, from Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, who took the iconic photo of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi, to combat Marines and one Navy nurse who were there under fire in the famous fight, remembers the shifting sands, difficult if not impossible to dig foxholes in. That sand, the smell, and the wind.

As a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in 1951, I was hardly an expert on Iwo, but I probably knew more about the island than did Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone as he sailed from Hawaii in late January 1945, one small element of a convoy of 500 ships and perhaps 100,000 men, sailors and Marines both. As he and his machine gunners departed Pearl Harbor on January 26 aboard the USS Hansford, it is probable that none of them, Basilone included, had ever even heard the name of their targeted destination and had not yet been told about