Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [87]
D-Day would be February 19. Pretty soon now they would be sufficiently close to hear the sixteen-inch guns of the battleships, the heavy bunker-busting bombs of the big planes. The convoy plowed on through chill rain squalls and even sleet. This wasn’t the hot and steaming tropical South Pacific Basilone knew so well. Colonel Alexander continues to narrate the story of the Iwo Jima invasion from the point of view not of the infantry and the enlisted men, who would do the fighting, but of the staff and the flag officers, the Marine generals and Navy admirals who had worked up the plan and would now issue the commands.
Like all really good Marine officers, Joe Alexander was not only a student of tactics and the capacity of his own forces, the necessity for speed, but he also believed in “knowing your enemy.” He studied the most important subject, the opposing commander. He got to know and understand, and never to underestimate, the foe—in this case, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, a fifty-three-year-old very senior and high-ranking officer who had once actually lived in the United States, where he was assigned to the Japanese embassy in Washington. This was quite a highly ranked officer for a command so limited and a relatively small force of only 22,000 men. But General Kuribayashi had been handpicked for this job by the very highest authorities because he was a brilliant staff officer destined for great things, as well as a fifth-generation samurai, which in imperial Japan was sort of like being an original DAR, a Son or Daughter of the American Revolution. And this being Japan with its own very particular code of military honor, rather than fail at his mission a samurai was expected to be ready to kill himself by disemboweling in the ritual manner. The Japanese were indeed sui generis.
Kuribayashi was no mindless automaton, however, but a modern and intelligent man, also very much a realist who wrote to his wife six months before the battle, “The Americans surely will invade this Iwo Jima . . . do not look for my return.” Think about being a loving wife back home and receiving a cheering little missive like that! Later, during the battle, he would candidly inform his superiors in Tokyo without dramatics and flatly that he could hold the island only if they sent him naval and air reinforcement. Otherwise he could not, though he assured the brass he would die there. He had already demanded and received “the finest mining engineers and fortifications specialists in the Empire.”
Colonel Alexander details how these experts were used. “When American heavy bombers from the Seventh Air Force commenced a daily pounding of the island in early December of 1944, Kuribayashi simply moved everything—weapons, command posts, barracks, aid stations—underground. These engineering achievements were remarkable. Masked gun positions provided interlocking fields of fire, miles of tunnels linked key defensive positions, every cave featured ventilation tubes and multiple outlets. As an American joker following the battle remarked, ‘everything was buried but the airstrips. ’ One installation inside Mount Suribachi ran seven stories deep. The Americans would rarely see a live Japanese on Iwo Jima until the bitter end.” Maybe it was just as well, in the spirit of positive thinking, that the first assault waves to hit the beach weren’t too assiduously briefed on the sophistication of the enemy defense system.
Alexander also assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the three assaulting Marine divisions. Of Basilone’s 5th, the newest of all,