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Bloody Miniature: Iwo Jima

PLACE-NAMES which pass into history often identify locations so unrewarding that only war could have rendered them memorable: Dunkirk and Alamein, Corregidor and Imphal, Anzio and Bastogne. Yet even in such company, Iwo Jima was striking in its wretchedness. The tiny island lay 3,000 miles west of Pearl Harbor and less than seven hundred south of Japan. It was five miles long, two and a half wide. Dominated at the southern tip by the extinct volcano of Mount Suribachi, five hundred feet high, in the north it rose to a plateau, thick with jungle growth. Iwo had been claimed by Japan in 1861, and desultorily employed for growing sugarcane. A Japanese garrison officer described it sourly as “a waterless island of sulphur springs489, where neither swallows nor sparrows flew.”

The perceived importance of this pimple derived, as usual, from airfields. During the last months of 1944 and the early weeks of 1945, American aircraft pounded Iwo Jima on seventy-two days. As fast as Japanese squadrons reached the island, their planes were destroyed in the air or on the ground. The usefulness of the base to Tokyo thus shrank to the vanishing point. Yet, in the boundless ocean, the U.S. Navy coveted Iwo as one of the few firm footholds on the central axis of approach to Japan. In the autumn of 1944 the joint chiefs mandated the island’s seizure. After various American hesitations and delays, which served the defenders’ interests much better than those of the invaders, an armada was massed. Even as MacArthur’s soldiers battered their way across the Philippines, three Marine divisions were embarked.

One of the island’s garrison, Lt.-Col. Kaneji Nakane, wrote to his wife a few weeks before the U.S. landing, with the banality common to so many warriors’ letters: “We are now getting enemy490 air raids at least ten times a day, and enemy task forces have struck the island twice. We suffered no damage. Everybody is in good shape, so you don’t have to worry about me. The beans brought from our house were planted and are now flowering. Harvest time is approaching, and the squashes and eggplants look very good. Yesterday we had a bathe, and everybody was in high spirits. We get some fish, because every time the enemy bombs us a lot of dead ones are washed ashore…We have strong positions and God’s soldiers, and await the enemy with full hearts.”

Another Japanese on Iwo Jima was a teenager named Harunori Ohkoshi. The youngest of five children of a Tokyo roofing contractor, he had cherished illusions about the glories of service life. In 1942, at the age of fourteen, he applied to the navy to become a boy sailor, forging a letter of parental consent, for which he sneaked access to the family seal. When all was revealed, his mother was distraught, his father supportive. Less than two years later, at sixteen, he was serving as flight engineer on a navy transport plane, carrying engine parts from Kyushu to Saipan, when it was bounced by Hellcats. Easy meat, the transport ditched in the sea. Four men died, but Ohkoshi and two others were retrieved by a passing fishing boat, and eventually deposited on Iwo Jima. When the local command found that the survivor was a qualified engineer, he was posted to a maintenance unit.

Ohkoshi and his comrades grew accustomed to being strafed by American P-38s, which approached too low and fast to offer warning. They were also bombed from high altitude by B-24s, and shelled by warships. Comrades taught the teenager to lie across the line of attack when he prostrated himself before machine-gunning fighters claiming that he thus presented a smaller target. By February 1945, because length of service counted for more than age, at seventeen he found himself a technical sergeant—and no longer an aircraft mechanic. Every man on Iwo Jima was pressed into combat infantry service. Ohkoshi was given command of a fourteen-man group. They were issued with helmets and equipment, together with a makeshift assortment of weapons ranging from machine guns