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Though most of the navy men died running forward towards the American positions, a few survivors remained in the open. Harunori Ohkoshi and his group crawled some three hundred yards, inch by inch, attempting to regain their tunnels under the American fire raking the battlefield. At intervals the seventeen-year-old called softly to those behind him, checking who was left. Each time, fewer voices answered, as machine guns silenced them one by one. Dawn found Ohkoshi pinned down with just three others, amid a jumble of Japanese bodies. They adopted desperate expedients, smearing handfuls of human debris onto themselves to simulate convincing corpses. “The blood and guts of the dead kept us alive,” said Ohkoshi. They lay in the open for forty-eight hours, in plain sight of the Americans. When their water was gone, they sucked blood. Days and nights were alike punctuated by the screams of dying Japanese, their cries of “Mummy, mummy!” or the names of loved ones. The noise of firing was deafening, scarcely ever stilled. At last, American activity in their vicinity seemed to slacken. The battle had moved on. The four Japanese crept back into the tunnel system.

Underground, they found a few medics and other survivors such as themselves, perhaps fifty men in all. Day after day they lay in stifling heat, and at night crawled out to search the battlefield around their positions for water bottles or food. A steady trickle of men failed to return from these scavenging missions, having been shot by the enemy, or fallen foul of booby-trap wires. A core of survivors like Ohkoshi lingered, however, long after the Americans declared victory, and most had left the island.

By the time K Company of the 3/9th Marines reached Iwo’s north beach, about 50 men remained of the 230 who had landed less than three weeks earlier. On the afternoon of 10 March, when some had thought their battle over, they were ordered to carry out a local reconnaissance. Sgt. Gordon Schisley said to Patrick Caruso: “You know, Lieutenant, the men who are here now have come all the way. Wouldn’t it be hell if someone were to get hurt on a little patrol like this?” Caruso nodded. His two platoons advanced perhaps a hundred cautious yards without glimpsing the enemy. Each cave mouth they passed received a flamethrower’s kiss. The sun shone brilliantly, and there was a welcome breeze off the ocean. Suddenly, they were under fire. Caruso’s men scrabbled for cover. The battalion commander called on the radio: “King 2, bring the men back.” But Caruso could not withdraw until he could pass word to his scattered Marines. Sergeant Schisley fell, hit in the neck. Sergeant Henry, a Nebraskan who saved every cent of pay for improvements to his farm, collapsed. Caruso was shocked by the anguished look of appeal on Henry’s face as he died. Everywhere men were being hit, and soon the lieutenant himself fell with a bullet in the leg. He crawled behind a rock, and was eventually evacuated with the other survivors. His combat career had lasted twelve days. The 3/9th Marines lost all twenty-two company officers who originally landed on Iwo Jima. Ten were killed, the rest wounded.

U.S. headquarters declared organised resistance on Iwo Jima ended on 14 March. Most surviving Japanese were thereafter fugitives like Harunori Ohkoshi rather than combatants, though they continued to harass American mopping-up operations with small arms and occasional wild, hopeless charges. In his underground headquarters, General Kuribayashi found time to send a signal to the general staff in Tokyo, offering advice gleaned from the Iwo Jima experience: “However strongly you build beach defences, they will be destroyed by battleship bombardment. It is better to erect dummy defences on the shoreline. It is essential to maintain eavesdropping watches, since the enemy communicates in plain language. The violence of enemy fire is beyond description. It can take more than ten hours for a junior officer