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By Root 463 0

Iwo. The Marines still took security seriously, and it was standard operating procedure in amphibious warfare not to tell the men where they were headed until they were at sea, unable to blab. Now, on the second day the Hansford was out of port, Lieutenant Colonel John Butler got on the horn over the ship’s PA system. You know, the old “Now hear this, now hear this” announcement. Said the colonel, “Our destination is Iwo Jima, an objective closer to the Empire of Japan than any other to date.” I suspect the saltier of the Marines on board took this as a good news/bad news item of information. Good in that it took us a step closer to winning the Pacific war; bad in that the closer Americans got to the Japanese mainland, the harder and more desperately the enemy would fight and the more Marines would die.

Maybe the best place to start telling about Iwo is with Marine historian Joe Alexander. In his monograph Closing In: Marines in the Seizure of Iwo Jima, Alexander begins with a dramatic little vignette, not at the start of the fight but two weeks into the battle, on Sunday March 4.

There was a hot war going on and gunfire everywhere, when a desperately wounded B-29 bomber called Dinah Might, crippled during a bombing raid on Tokyo, piloted by Lieutenant Fred Malo and carrying a ten-man crew, came in on an emergency landing. It was crash-land at sea or risk this heavily shot-over landing strip, and Malo piloted her in safe if not precisely secure, everyone glad to be alive but anxious to be swiftly away. The Air Corps was paying its boys to fly, not to get shot at on the ground like ordinary infantry grunts. Dinah Might underwent half an hour of very hurried makeshift repairs, took off safely again (every Japanese gunner within range firing at the damned thing), and got back to its base without further distraction. It would be only the first of hundreds of such B-29 emergency landings on Iwo and the first ten of what would be thousands of air crewmen saved, and it proved to at least some of the Marines then fighting there that the place might turn out to have been worth taking.

Colonel Alexander sets the scene, writing that by this date, “The assault elements of the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions were exhausted, their combat efficiency reduced to dangerously low levels, the thrilling sight of [the] American flag raised by the 28th Marines on Mount Suribachi had occurred ten days earlier, a lifetime on Sulphur Island. The landing forces of the V Amphibious Corps (VAC) had already sustained 13,000 casualties, including three thousand dead. The ‘front lines’ were a jagged serration across Iwo’s fat northern half, still in the middle of the main Japanese defenses. Ahead, the going seemed all uphill against a well-disciplined, rarely visible enemy.”

But to the machine gunners at sea in January aboard the USS Hansford, all this was well into the future. And, as Alexander remarked, ten days could be a lifetime on Iwo. Bruce Doorly’s monograph about Basilone takes us on board with Manila John and his gunners: “The convoy of U.S. ships was still three weeks and 5,000 miles from arriving at Iwo Jima. They took time to prepare. The men kept in shape by doing exercises. Due to the limited room on the ship each group would have to wait for the limited open space used for calisthenics. John worked his men hard to ensure that they would be ready. By this time their hair started to grow in again [remember those shaved heads that relieved the boredom at Camp Tarawa?]. To keep themselves busy, the ‘soldiers’ [Doorly uses the word interchangeably with ‘Marines’] played cards and read. Books were passed around and traded. A small pocket copy of The New Testament became popular as they neared Iwo Jima. Letters home were written.” Knowing Basilone’s tastes, you suspect he played more cards, read fewer Bible passages, and wrote fewer letters than most.

Now that the men were safely unable to pass on the information about their location (there was no way letters could be mailed until after the invasion), officers provided them with more detailed