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By Root 1157 0

to hunting rifles and pistols. Along with 7,500 other naval personnel, the teenager was trained to address tanks by thrusting pole charges into their tracks. Ohkoshi’s group dug bunkers deep, deep into the hills and rock of Tanana Mountain, at the centre of the island. He covered his own hole with the wing of a wrecked Zero, overlaid with timber and camouflage. On 16 February 1945, as the final American bombardment began, Ohkoshi was sent with a patrol to view the coast. He returned awed, saying: “You can hardly see sea491 for ships.” Then he and his squad took up positions which they scarcely left through the next seventeen days.

Watching from offshore the devastation wrought by the bombardment, Marine lieutenant Patrick Caruso felt a stab of pity for defenders like Ohkoshi: “I…thought of the helpless feeling492 those poor Japanese must have had on that island.” Another lieutenant bet Caruso, whose unit was in reserve, a bottle of brandy that they would not need to land. William Allen of the 23rd Marines “couldn’t understand why we needed three divisions to take this piddling island.” Private First Class Arthur Rodriguez, a BAR man, offered a tortured figure of speech: “My first impression of Iwo Jima was that it looked like a termite nest in the shape of a turkey drumstick with Suribachi as its kneecap.” What followed became the most famous, or notorious, battle of the Pacific war.

Some of the men who began to land along the south-east coast on the morning of 19 February had been six weeks at sea, on passage to an objective initially identified to them only as “Island X.” Others had embarked at Saipan a few days earlier. When word came to “saddle up,” the Marines of 4th and 5th Divisions found it hard to climb the ships’ ladders, each of them being weighed down with at least fifty pounds, sometimes a hundred pounds, of weapons, kit and ammunition. The clumsy clamber down scrambling nets from a ship’s side to an assault craft pitching on the swell was an alarming experience even for veterans. One man itemised his own load: clothing and helmet493, backpack and entrenching tool, poncho, three light and three heavy rations, two packs of cigarettes in a waxed paper sack, leather case of weapon-cleaning kit, extra socks, gas mask, cartridge belt, pistol and two clips, sterile canned compress, two water canteens, one GI knife, two fragmentation grenades, binoculars—and a Browning Automatic Rifle weighing thirty-six pounds. Men bent under such burdens made hard landings in the boats. James Shriver crushed his fingers in a hatch, and was nursing the pain as he looked towards Suribachi and thought miserably: “They expect me to get up that fucking mountain!” Shriver was an eighteen-year-old assistant BAR man from Escondido, California. His original gunner was removed by military police just before embarkation, having been discovered to be only fourteen. Now, with a substitute, Shriver prepared to land with the 28th Marines.

As amtracs splashed forth from the hulls of their parent transports, correspondent John Marquand likened the spectacle to “all the cats in the world having kittens.” The first wave of sixty-nine hit the beach at 0902. From his landing craft, James Vedder glimpsed wrecked planes on the airstrip, terracing inland, and further south the sheer rock walls of Suribachi. Under the thunder of the bombardment, debris flew skywards, great clouds of smoke drifted across the shore. Vedder, a surgeon with the 3/27th Marines, watched as two Zeroes struggled off the ground, only to collide with the bombardment and plunge into the sea. As he touched the shore and stumbled through the clogging black ash underfoot, the first human he saw was a dead Japanese, obviously burnt by a flamethrower. The doctor noted curiously that half the corpse’s moustache was scorched away.

As soon as the invaders began to scramble up the steep terrace behind the beach, shells and mortar bombs fell in dense succession, maiming and killing with almost every round among the crowds of heavily laden Marines. Pillars of ash erupted into the air. Burning