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but on Iwo Jima the sight of so many men dying if they attempted to move created a popular bias in favour of hugging cover. This was natural, but militarily crippling. “The terrain was most favourable to the defense…The uncanny accuracy of enemy rifle fire caused many casualties,” wrote Lt. Col. Joseph Sayers. He thought Japanese artillery poorly directed, but noted that the defenders did not squander men in futile charges, as they had done in earlier Pacific battles. “The enemy is a much improved fighter.” Sayers delivered a bleak after-action verdict on a typical day for the 2/26th Marines on Iwo: “Low morale, fatigue500, an average strength of 70 men per company,” and next evening: “Morale was very low, and the strain of many days in the line was evident. It was noted that the men became more careless, and exposed themselves more to fire when fatigued.” He urged a halt to the practice of dispatching replacements to join units on the line, for there was no opportunity to instruct them in even the basic skills of survival. Ten out of seventeen replacement medical corpsmen sent to his battalion were killed or wounded within days simply because, in the view of their commander, they were ignorant of fieldcraft.

As an operations officer with the 24th Marines, Maj. Albert Arsenault was responsible for making a nightly situation report, characteristically exemplified as: “Progress a hundred yards501, casualties thirty-seven. Tied in for the night.” Regimental headquarters demanded: “How many Japanese did you kill?” “None that we could be sure of.” “None! Thirty-seven casualties and you haven’t killed any Japanese! You’ve got to do better than that.” Arsenault thereafter projected Japanese losses at least double those of his own unit: “One day was pretty much like another: small advances, heavy casualties.”

Warrant-Officer George Green, an artillery forward observer (FO) with 3/21st Marines on Airfield 2, kept seeing a bespectacled Japanese popping his head up. When he urged a nearby rifleman to shoot him, the man replied crossly: “He’s in I Company’s sector—let them get him.” A captain radioed Green, demanding to know why he was not firing. The FO answered that he could see no targets. “Pick some prominent landmark502 and fire anyway,” said the officer. Two grenades suddenly arched through the air, and fell nearby. Green shouted to a nearby BAR man, who rashly walked towards the bushes from which the bombs seemed to have come. There, he toppled dead. A fire team eventually silenced the Japanese with grenades. Amid endemic nervousness in the perimeter, a Navajo Native American “code-talker” who spoke poor English was mistaken for a Japanese by a group of Marines. The man sat paralysed with well-merited fright until he was identified by another Navajo.

The 3/9th Marines landed on 23 February in tearing high spirits, eager for battle. Languishing on the ships in reserve through the first days, they and the rest of 3rd Division were fearful of missing the action. The tinny, echoing ship’s PA system informed them that 4th and 5th Divisions had met only “light resistance.” Within minutes of reaching Airfield 1, however, they found themselves under shellfire. Oklahoman Lieutenant Clyde McGinnis, at thirty the oldest man in K Company, urged his nearest companions to follow him into a crater, where they found a freshly decapitated Marine, still holding a smouldering cigarette in his hand. McGinnis said: “Damn, this is a hot place,” and started singing “Take Me Back to Tulsa.” He called back to the men behind: “I’ll be all right here, but I do think those guys are trying to kill me.”

Firepower alone was incapable of destroying Japanese positions. “The most discouraging thing was, right in the middle of this tremendous barrage you’d hear the damned enemy open up their machine guns,” wrote Lt. Col. Robert Cushman, twenty-nine-year-old commander of the 2/9th Marines. “It wasn’t knocking out those bunkers. So it was just a painful, sluggish business with tanks, H. E. and flame-throwers. And then the infantry with their flame-throwers and