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It was six weeks before American troops addressed themselves systematically to clearing the caves in which such survivors as Harunori Ohkoshi clung on. First, they tried teargas. Then they sent captured Japanese to broadcast by loudspeaker, who sometimes called on men by name to come out. One POW approached Ohkoshi’s tunnel entrance, bearing water and chocolate, only to be shot by the occupants. “We were doing him a favour,” claimed Ohkoshi laconically. “His honour was lost.” On 7 May, in bright sunshine, men of the army’s 147th Infantry poured a hideous cocktail. They pumped 700 gallons of salt water into one of the biggest tunnel complex entrances, then added 110 gallons of gasoline and 55 of oil. The deadly flow, ignited by flamethrower, raced through the underground passages, starting a string of ammunition fires, incinerating many Japanese and causing others to kill themselves amid the choking, clogging smoke. Some men embraced each other, then pulled pins on grenades held between their bodies. Ohkoshi finished off several dying men with his pistol. Yet after three months of subterranean animal existence, he decided that he himself would rather die in the sun. The Americans had sealed the tunnel entrances, but by frenzied labour some Japanese clawed passages to the surface. Ohkoshi was the first to burst forth, like a shaggy, blackened mole. He was at once seen and shot by an American, and fell writhing with two bullets in the leg. His surviving companions were more fortunate—or not, as the case might be—and were captured uninjured. Nursing shame and exhaustion, they were taken away into captivity. When Ohkoshi saw his own features in a mirror on Guam, he did not recognise the skeletal ruin of a human being which he represented. A U.S. officer’s report on the episode concluded dryly: “Fifty-four were eventually taken into custody with some difficulty. Two of these subsequently committed suicide.”

Captain Kouichi Ito, an army officer521 who remained a lifelong student of Japan’s wartime campaigns, believed that Iwo Jima was the best-conducted defensive operation of the Japanese war, much more impressive militarily than the defence of Guadalcanal, or the subsequent action in which he himself participated on Okinawa. Yet it would be mistaken to suppose that most Japanese defenders of the island found their experience, or their sacrifice, acceptable. A survivor from the 26th Tank Regiment, Lieutenant Yamasaki, wrote afterwards to the widow of his commanding officer, in a letter which reflected a sense of the futility of what he and his comrades had endured: “In ancient times522 our ancestors said: ‘Bushido, the way of the warrior, is to die.’ This may have sounded wonderful to knights of old, but represents too easy a path. For both the living and the dead Iwo Jima was, I think, the worst of battlefields. Casual words about ‘bushido’ did not apply, for modern war does not make matters so easy. Unfeeling metal is mightier than warriors’ flesh. Where, when, how, who died nobody knew. They just fell by the wayside.”

When Marine veterans got back to Hawaii, one group marched triumphantly down the street waving a Japanese skull and taunting local Japanese-Americans: “There’s your uncle523 on the pole!” The experience of Iwo Jima had drained some survivors of all human sensitivity. Was the island worth the American blood sacrifice? Some historians highlight a simple statistic: more American aircrew landed safely on its airstrips in damaged or fuelless B-29s than Marines died in seizing it. This calculation of profit and loss, first offered after the battle to assuage public anger about the cost of taking Iwo Jima, ignores the obvious fact that, if the strips had not been there, fuel margins would have been increased, some aircraft would have reached the Marianas, some crews could have been rescued from the sea. Even if Iwo Jima had remained in Japanese hands, it could have contributed little further service to the homeland’s air defence. The Americans made no important use of