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By Root 1005 0

vehicles, dead and stricken men, unwounded ones hugging the earth, created traffic chaos. Some braver souls pressed on inland, but as these were cut down, the assault’s momentum faltered. One of Vedder’s corpsmen had been tasked to carry his instruments ashore. In a moment of panic, the man simply ran forward, leaving the surgeon’s bag on their boat. Vedder found fragments of hot steel smouldering on his clothes, and brushed away a splinter that was stinging his backside. Within seconds of landing he was at work, removing a large fragment of jawbone wedged in the back of a Marine’s throat, to enable him to breathe freely again. He could do nothing, however, for the ruin of his face: “I wondered how our plastic surgeons494 would ever restore this man’s identity.”

The bombardment had destroyed Japanese defences close to the beaches. The Marines were quickly able to stake out positions three hundred yards inland. Yet the entire perimeter remained within easy range of the enemy. When armour began to land, tracks thrashing for a grip in the ash, most was swiftly knocked out by anti-tank guns. Some 361 Japanese artillery pieces, together with plentiful heavy mortars and machine guns, were dug into Iwo Jima’s defences. An ordeal began which persisted through the days and nights that followed. Shelling, mortar and small-arms fire inflicted casualties and relentless misery on every American unit from the shoreline to the foremost positions.

Lt.-Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the slender, elegant, fifty-three-year-old commander of Iwo Jima, had no illusions about the outcome of the struggle to which he was committed. He had served in Canada and the U.S. in the 1930s, and knew the relative weakness of his own nation. “This war will be decided495 by industrial might, don’t you agree?” he mused to a staff officer. Kuribayashi had opposed the conflict, because he did not think it winnable. Yet fatalism did not impair his meticulous preparations to defend Iwo Jima. He had no faith in the survivability of positions on the beaches or airfields, though he could not prevent the navy contingent, beyond his authority, from devoting heavy labour to such entrenchments. He concentrated upon defence in depth, exploiting rocky heights. In the months before the American landing, some fifteen hundred natural caves were sculpted and enlarged into an intricate system linked by sixteen miles of tunnels, centred upon Kuribayashi’s command bunker, seventy-five feet underground.

If such burrowing represented a primitive response to the technological might of the invaders, it was also a formidably effective one. Most Japanese positions were proof against shells and bombs. Guns were sited so that they could be rolled out from caves to fire, then withdrawn when the Marines responded. Much American historical hand-wringing has focused upon the restriction of the pre-landing naval bombardment to three days. Spruance chose to conduct carrier operations against Japan while Iwo Jima was assaulted, depriving the attackers of Fifth Fleet’s firepower. However, given the limited effectiveness of low-trajectory naval gunfire against fixed defences of such strength, it is hard to believe that further bombardment would have altered events. By far the most significant American mistake was to delay an assault on Iwo Jima for so long. If the Marines had landed in late 1944, they would have found Kuribayashi’s defences less formidable.

Iwo Jima, February–March 1945

As it was, even Japanese artillery sited in the midst of the island could fire on the beaches, while being too well camouflaged and protected to be easily suppressed. By nightfall on 19 February, 30,000 Marines were ashore—but 566 were already dead or dying. The invaders held a perimeter 4,400 yards wide and 1,100 yards at its deepest point, within which every man was striving to scrape a shallow hole, or merely nursing his fear. There was no respite from Japanese shelling.

In a shellhole, a corpsman asked Private First Class Arthur Rodriguez to hold a man’s protruding intestines while he applied sulphur