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By Root 825 0

powder, then pushed them back into his abdomen. A nearby explosion caused body parts to rain down upon them. The young BAR man tried to focus his mind on his sweetheart, Sally, back home rather than upon the ghastly spectacle before him. Soon afterwards, “I saw my group leader496 Privett sitting there with his left arm dangling by the skin. He just grabbed it with his right arm and pulled it off and threw it away.” Rodriguez and his squad blazed away at rocks and small bushes till someone demanded in puzzlement: “What are we shooting at?” Like so many men in their predicament, they were wasting ammunition simply to vent frustration, to convince themselves they were not mere targets. Corporal Jerry Copeland spent his first night ashore in a hole with two American corpses and four dead Japanese, praying incessantly: “‘God, if you save my life I’ll go to church every Sunday497 of my life—never miss’…It was my first time with God.”

In the days which followed, the sole tactical option available to the Marines was frontal attack. They were obliged to advance across Iwo Jima yard by yard, bunker by bunker, corpse by corpse. This is what they did, at a cost of much blood and grief, through the next five weeks of February and March 1945. Almost all the ground traversed by the invaders was overlooked by the Japanese. Battalion after battalion, the Marines launched open-order assaults. Most petered out after one or two hundred yards, because so many participants fell. True, the application of technology helped. Armoured bulldozers hacked routes uphill for tanks. Flame-throwers proved invaluable, lancing cave mouths to make way for explosive charges. Warship and artillery fire did something to suppress Japanese fire. But to occupy Iwo Jima, to stop the mortar bombs and shells scouring every American position back to the beaches, the Americans could discover no effective substitute for sending men forward again and again, to prise each cluster of rocks piecemeal from shockingly dogged defenders.

The more exposed Japanese positions around the airfields were overrun in the first days, as Kuribayashi had anticipated, but their navy occupants accounted for significant numbers of Americans before perishing. Mount Suribachi fell on the fifth day, 23 February, after a savage struggle with its 1,500 defenders. Lt. Harold Schrier led forty men of the 5th Division onto the summit. When crews on the ships offshore witnessed the Stars and Stripes rising on the volcano’s summit, many raised a spontaneous cheer, as did the American people when they saw the legendary photograph of a second flag raising. Yet American triumph in the south left most of the 22,000-strong Japanese garrison still entrenched in the north, with an overwhelming advantage. Since they were neither willing nor able to leave Iwo Jima alive, their immobility conferred priceless invisibility. The defenders were told: “Each man should think of his foxhole as his own grave, fighting to the last to inflict maximum damage upon the enemy.” The Japanese held a small area in which even infantry bunkers were impervious to anything less than a direct hit, and in which there was no scope for outflanking manoeuvres. The onus was entirely upon the Americans to move, and thus to expose themselves.

“We had a gross misconception498 of the enemy before we encountered them,” wrote Patrick Caruso. “They were not jokes; they were not inept. We hated them enough to kill them, but we did respect their ability. I often thought that if we had to go to war again, I would want them on our side.” The Marines were surprised to find that many Japanese corpses were those of large men, for they had always thought of the enemy as pygmies. They were bemused to see some sprouting heavy black beards, such as never featured in American propaganda images.

After several days of combat, wrote Arthur Rodriguez, “we had not seen any of the enemy499 to shoot at. It made us feel frustrated and angry, because we had almost nothing to show for all our casualties.” The U.S. Marine Corps was a formidable fighting force,