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By Root 404 0

here is Colonel Alexander’s reading, including a personal note about Manila John: “The unit’s newness would prove misleading. Well above half of the officers and men were veterans, including a number of former Marine parachutists and a few Raiders who had first fought in the Solomons.” Agreed a recently arrived battalion commander after observing a live-fire exercise back in Hawaii, “These were professionals.” Alexander noted that “among the veterans preparing for Iwo Jima were two Medal of Honor recipients from the Guadalcanal campaign. Gunnery sergeant John ‘Manila John’ Basilone and Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Galer. Headquarters Marine Corps preferred to keep such distinguished veterans in the States for morale purposes, but both men wangled their way back overseas—Basilone leading a machine gun platoon, Galer delivering a new radar unit for employment with the Landing Force Air Support Control Unit. The Guadalcanal veterans could only shake their heads at the abundance of amphibious shipping available. . . . Admiral Turner would command 495 ships of which 140 were amphibiously configured, the whole array ten times the size of Guadalcanal’s task force.” Before it was over, they would need the lot.

24

Before the Navy and the Marine Corps even reached Iwo, they were already feuding, the dispute ignited by an Army Air Corps-Navy rivalry. With a bloody fight like Iwo coming up, you marvel that senior professional officers, the best products of West Point and Annapolis, would permit themselves the luxury of jealous, pride-driven college-boy spats. But they did.

The Air Corps Superfortresses had recently flown a big mission over Japan that failed to destroy the targeted aircraft factories, and Naval Air was out to prove it could do the job. Task Force 58, assigned to batter the island of Iwo Jima with big guns and fleet aviation just prior to the Marine landings, sort of a knockout blow, was instead being lured by a new target of opportunity, within easy reach on Honshu, those Japanese factories the B-29s missed. Ambitious naval leadership allowed itself to be distracted and sent the huge task force steaming away from Iwo toward the Japanese mainland, creating for the Marines two problems. This sudden, last-minute change of plans meant that the Navy was taking away not only its big new battleships and their sixteen-inch guns so effective in shore bombardment, but also the fleet’s eight Marine squadrons of specially trained, close air support fighter-bombers, experienced in working with ground air control officers to fly shotgun for the infantrymen hitting the beaches and then heading inland against formidable enemy defenses. In the end, Task Force 58 did its thing on Honshu and then belatedly returned to Iwo in time, if only briefly, to support the landings. It then hurried somewhere else again on yet another mission, not to return to Sulfur Island.

As D-Day (February 19) came closer, the commanders of both sides met with their staffs. Tadamichi Kuribayashi declared that despite all of the bombing and shelling, the bulk of his defenses were intact and functioning, and kept his message to the staff simple: “I pray for an heroic fight.”

On board Admiral Richmond Kelly “Terrible” Turner’s flag-ship, Joe Alexander reports, “The press briefing held the night before D-Day was uncommonly somber. General Holland Smith predicted heavy casualties, possibly as many as 15,000, which shocked all hands. A man clad in khakis without rank insignia then stood up to address the room. It was James V. Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy. ‘Iwo Jima, like Tarawa, leaves very little choice,’ he said quietly. ‘Except to take it by force of arms, by character and courage.’” That reference to Tarawa was sufficient to shake any Marine in the room, since it was well-known that Tarawa was a bloody foul-up and losses there, for a three-day fight on such a small island, had been ghastly. Colonel Alexander now takes us to D-Day itself, the nineteenth (as for the brilliant Forrestal, he so exhausted and drained himself, so suffered over the casualty