American History Hit - Battle of Iwo Jima

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

80 years ago, the battle of Iwo Jima came to an end on 26 March 1945. After 36 days of fighting, nearly 7,000 US Marines had been killed and another 20,000 injured.Don is joined by historian Timothy Heck, naval historian, artillery officer and author of two books on amphibious warfare. They discuss the tactical importance of Iwo Jima, the battle itself and its outcomes, including that famous image of the marines raising the US flag.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's February 23, 1945. Associated press photographer Joe Rosenthal hikes to the peak of Mount Surabachi on Iwojima.

At 554 feet, it is the highest point on this island, 750 watery miles from the shores of mainland Japan. Slogging through deep volcanic ash, Rosenthal hears the occasional distant crack of rifle fire from enemy troops. He is on high alert for landmines as he passes by defeated gunnery positions along the way. He is following a small group of U.S. Marines ahead of him. Though Rosenthal may not realize it now, this is a once-in-a-lifetime photographic opportunity. The soldiers are carrying an American flag to the heights of Surabachi, and Rosenthal intends to capture it all on film. At the top, the photographer composes his frame.

Six men throw their combined weight into lifting the... flagpole upright upon the jagged ground. None of the soldiers' faces are visible, but that doesn't matter. Indeed, it's the point. The shot symbolizes the selfless spirit required for victory in battle. Later, the same men will restage the scene for another show, this time using a larger flag. It is a watershed moment, iconic history through the lens of a camera. But at the time, there are still 30 days left of this dangerous assault on Iwo Jima. By the end of it all, three of the photographed men will be dead. Hello there, great to have you listening.

This is American History Hit, and I'm your host, Don Wildman. 80 years ago, in February 1945, one of the most torturous battles of the war in the Pacific was undertaken. U.S. forces landed on the shores of a small, volcanically formed island, more than 6,000 miles from the United States. but only 760 miles from Japan. Iwo Jima would be one of the final stepping stones in the island hopping strategy the American Command had laid out two years prior. By leapfrogging Japanese occupied islands which had been heavily fortified and instead concentrating on capturing more lightly at defended ones,

the U.S. could advance more steadily across the Pacific, avoiding and isolating Japanese strongholds and then starving them of supplies. Eventually, so went the strategy, the Americans would occupy islands close enough to Japan to support a full-scale invasion, which until mid-1945 was still assumed to be inevitable, the only means to achieve complete victory. But some considered Iwo Jima a target without enough strategic value to justify the tremendous cost of American lives. The Japanese were dug in, American forces would be attacking soldiers fighting from tunnels and bunkers. In so many ways, Iwojima would be a preview of the horrors to come on Okinawa, later.

that spring. Here to explain the rationale behind Iwo Jima and how the battle unfolded is naval historian Timothy Heck. Timothy is an artillery officer in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and an accomplished writer who has produced two books on amphibious warfare. Greetings. Timothy Heck. Boy, Iwo Jima is in your wheelhouse. It is. I want to make a quick statement. Thank you for the very kind introduction. It's always fun to listen to those and realize other people think much more highly of you than you might. I'm here in a totally unofficial capacity. I don't represent the official views of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, any of those organizations. This is all my personal opinion and not the effectual reviews.

You are officially disclaimed here. Okay. The Battle of Iwo Jima comes just four months before VE Day. I just want to place this in context for the audience. We're at the end of the European War. I mean, VE Day is May 8, 1945. Here in the Pacific, it seems the end is in sight as well. the U.S. has won back the Philippines, Palau, the Marshall Island. They kind of, we own the South Pacific at this point. And it's really an impossible situation for Japan. Why are they holding out this long and what is their strategy? Holding out this long is a huge question. It involves morale. It involves grand strategy. It involves political will, none of which I'm really competent or capable of talking about in any meaningful way. But you have, I would think, you've got a nation that is fighting for its existence, right? It's

offering from the bombing raids, the 20th Air Force is launching. You know, the cities are on fire or are about to be on fire. Yeah. But there is this will to keep going. The Japanese army is massive. It's occupying incredible amounts of territory in China. Yep. It's got the homeland. It's got the Korean Peninsula. It's got a bunch of islands still. It is not to be discounted as a fighting force. That is so important to point out of this point because really the impression is, certainly from the movies that these are just a bunch of soldiers on a bunch of islands and we're just marching onward towards Japan. But in fact, Japan had been doing this for decades. They were a very, very well-built, huge military machine. And much of that was still in the home islands.

I mean, they were ready to defend this place before and during this war. I mean, it was a big part of their strategy. But for the U.S., why Iwo Jima? What was important about this particular place? By the time, you know, so the planning for Iwo Jima really starts in the fall of 44. You know, the Marianas have been controlled or about to be controlled, the Carolines. And as you described, right, the Japanese empire is shrinking. American naval vessels and with our partners and allies, right, the British, the Dutch and, you know, the Canadians, we're compressing the Japanese. We're rolling them back, right? There's the, there's a submarine warfare that is strangling the Japanese economy and strangling its ability to feed itself. Iwo Jima is closer to Japan. And I think

that's probably the best way to describe it, right? You've got this vast amount of territory in the Pacific that's just water. And I can't put things, I mean, I can put a carrier on water. I can put a battleship. I can put a submarine under it. But to launch heavy bombing raids, right? The 20th Air Force's rule, I need land. And so these islands that are getting closer and closer to Japan allow me to increase the pressure on the homeland and increase the pressure on the main Japanese islands. And that's kind of how Yuijima becomes so important in the strategy planning. Additionally, the Japanese have airfields on that island. Okay. So they already, they've already done the groundwork, so to speak. Let's talk about the pork chop shape of this island is basically, it's got a huge

volcano, as all those islands do out there. That's how they're created. And then there's a lot of flatness beyond that, and that's really useful for the, for the purpose of landing big planes on it. I mean, this is generally speaking, just compressing the distance from the islands of the home islands all the way across. But it's also kind of strategic about how they measure from each other. Okinawa is not too far away, and that's going to be the next one. So they keep setting up these bases. But I guess that was the, I mentioned in the opening the questions, you know, the doubts about this strategy, because Okinawa is going to be the takeoff place for so much that happens in the home islands. I guess there were those who were just saying, let's just go for Okinawa and ignore

Iwojima, right? There were. And you'll see a farmer chief and naval operations, that summer writes, you know, Iwo Jima doesn't have a useful harbor. It's not that close. It doesn't have the staging areas you would need to put multiple divisions on or, you know, cores of soldiers to get ready and Marines to get ready for the landing of the invasion. And he questions the value of it. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, Iwo Jima, obviously as a Marine is steeped in myth. It's steeped in lore, the Marine Corps War Memorial here in Washington, D.C. or just outside of Washington, D.C., you write, the iconic image of those Marines from 28th Marine Regiment raising the flag is steeped in

identity. And so those questions of why or was it worth it get kind of shunted off to the side historiographically and even at the time. And it's been interesting to be doing the studies in preparation for a project I'm working on, but looking at some of those arguments that were both contemporary and retrospective about why Iwo Jima. Because there isn't that port, right? General Phil Shutler, who, you know, is a World War II Korea, Vietnam Marine. He retires as the Joint Staff J-3 sometime in the 1980s. He's a brilliant thinker and selfishly wrote the forward to the second amphib volume I did. He talks about maneuver warfare as a concept of shields and swords,

and you're just advancing shields up so you can use your swords to attack. And that's kind of the island hopping campaign in its essence, right? I seize a piece of territory so I can put bombers on it. Why don't I put bombers and fighters on it? Well, so that I can protect the fleet that goes to hit the next one. And I'm just advancing using these moving shields. Yeah. Iwojima is kind of the farthest north outpost of those shields until we hit Okinawa.

You think about it from a conceptual campaign planning model. That's it. I'm advancing my shields so I can advance the sword so I can advance the shield so I can advance the sword and moving in that kind of climbing up the ladder pattern. Well, you know, one, here's these, this name, the island hopping strategy. casually in this history, but I just revisited it reading all about this for this preparation. And it was a pretty ingenious plan. You know, it was a very, very smart idea to skip the big islands that were really defended well. It starts with the New Guinea and Papua New Guinea and all that down there and becomes this really very smart way of moving across the Pacific.

We should mention also that part of the strategy is also to protect the flank of all this attack that will go on because they do have these airfields so they can launch off things to go after our planes and so forth in this attack. The whole thing's called Operation Detachment, the capturing of Iwo Jima, and as you say, eventually three main air airfields there. This would then allow for the invasion of the Japanese islands, which incidentally, we mentioned in a previous episode that I really encourage people to listen to about the Doolittle invasion, which is a really fascinating early event. I mean, years before what we're talking about today, but it's really all part of the same thinking. But it's also really interesting what happens between Nimitz and MacArthur. You know,

this whole idea of the two-pronged approach that now is being unified, Iwo Jima kind of marks that, doesn't it? You've got, and I think I want to go back to something you said in the intro, because we've kind of glossed over it, but when we talk about Nimitz and MacArthur, it's very easy to think about the Pacific in a vacuum. Yeah. But the reality is, is Europe still happening, right? A month before, Iwo Jima kicks off, we've got the bulge, you've got massive Soviet operations in Eastern Europe, the Germans are still fighting, so you've got this conflicting resource requirement. I only have so many battleships, I only have so many transports, which are even more valuable than battleships. And I, not him heck I, but, you know, the grand

strategic planers right of the Joint Chiefs back in the United States and cooperating with the British, largely, but also the French and the Dutch, and the Aussies and the Kiwis have to figure out where we're going to allocate resources, specifically transports and battleships. MacArthur needs them in the Central Pacific, right? He needs them in the Philippines because he's still fighting through the islands of Luzon and the outlying islands in the Philippines. Europe still needs supplies. Europe needs fire support.

Europe needs to do that sort of thing. Italy, all of these things are still happening. And so you wind up having to make strategic decisions at a high level about resource allocation. And that then, you know, kind of the nice part, and I use nice, probably the wrong word. It's absolutely the wrong word. As we get closer to the home island, resources can start to be shared, but they still, there's still vast amounts of ocean between the Philippines and Iwo Jima. And so you have to make, leaders have to make decisions about who gets what when. And you'll see that in the lead up in the planning for detachment, specifically with regards

to fire support. The eventual victory belies all the struggle internally that was happening, you know, among the command, especially famously between MacArthur and Nimitz, who was Navy versus Army. In there you have the Marines, of course, who are going to be the ones landing on those shores. They're not even consulted in this situation, are they? They are, but kind of as a, well, you're the landing force. So we're going to come up with this grand strategy, right? And Harry Schmidt, who commands Fifth Amphibious Corps that does the land.

And he's involved in the planning, right? I mean, his staff is figuring out where the divisions go and all of this. And they're advocating for fire support. And I'm going to keep coming back to fire support. And maybe it's the artillery officer in me. But the need, right? So the initial plan that the Marine Corps put forward for Iwo, we want 10 days. I need 10 days of fire support before I land.

And the Marine Corps had learned that lesson the hard way, right? starting in about 1943 when they start landing against opposed beaches. The first Marine Division tragically learns a lot of it at Pellowloor. Second Marine Division learns it at Tarlow.

And so Schmidt and his planners, they say we want 10 days. And the Navy says, I can give you four. Oh, my goodness. And then the Marine Corps goes, good, you can give us nine. And the Navy goes,

nah, I can give you four. And they have this back and forth. And eventually, because I have a limited carrier, I have limited battleship support, so the actual ships that are going to do the shelling, largely battleships, but also LCIMs, landing craft with rockets or LCIRs, with rockets on them, and gunboats and destroyers and all of these things, cruisers, I have a Japanese naval threat.

They're concerned, rightfully so, that the Japanese submarine threat still exist. And so the longer they sit off of Iwo Jima, the more vulnerable they are. And oh, by the way, we're only about 700 miles from the Japanese islands. there's now a kamikaze threat that has been introduced, which really comes out in Okinawa. And Guy Nizuti, who works for Naval History and Heritage Command, published an awesome book on the kamikaze threat and reactions to it off of Okinawa for readers' interest. It's called On the Verge of Completely Breaking Down or on... Those words are in the title, but it's a fantastic book to understand the kamikaze's threat.

So all of these factors are going in to Schmidt and the Navy advocating for Iwo Jima for both their parts, right? Schmidt needs to keep, wants to keep his Marines alive and wants as much fire support as he can and the Navy needs to keep its ships alive so that it can keep fighting the next battle. Schmidt wants to fight the next battle, right? So how do you balance is a cruiser worth a battalion of Marines? And that's a huge human decision that all of these leaders are undergoing. And we as historians can kind of look back and there's dispassion, but the weight on their shoulders must have been immense.

Now anybody emerged from this with any nights of sleep amazes me. There is going to be 70,000 Marines landed on the shores of Iwo Jima, 70,000 on this tiny island. How many Japanese are they going to be fighting against? Do they know when they're coming? They've got a pretty good idea, right? The intelligence is pretty good. And kind of the breakdown, right? Everybody talks about enigma in the Atlantic and with the Germans.

I don't know how much of it comes from signals intelligence. I don't know how much of it comes from submarines popping up off the shore with their periscope. They send UDT teams onto the island to get sensitive. They're flying sorties over. Oh, by the way, speaking of flying, one of the compromises that comes out of this 10 days versus four days thing is the Air Force is going to bomb the island for 72 days from above. Well, these islands have incredible weather patterns. And so what winds up happening is the Air Force winds up missing because they're bombing through cloud. A lot of the strikes wind up missing. And one of the Japanese survivors that they capture, and they only capture very few comparatively, said we were very thankful for the Air Force. paraphrasing here, but we were very thankful for the Air Force bombing because it killed the fish, which then washed up on shore that we could go out and get to supplement our rations. It's interesting. But they know that they're facing about 21,000 Japanese soldiers, and that's what they face on the island.

But planners are vastly more optimistic about the battle than what winds up coming to fruition, right? They think, oh, we're going to have all of this bombardment ahead of time, all this fire support, shades of World War I are Marines are going to be advancing under a curtain. of steel and it's going to take us five days. Yeah. And it takes 36. If you'd ask the division commanders, and I'm working on a project on Kelaraki who commands the fifth Marine division, if you ask them, they knew it was going to not take five days.

Yeah. That it was going to be a bloody, hard fight. I don't know if they had expected to be that bloody. So February 16th, 17th, 1945, that's when the firing support starts. That's when these battleships line up and start going for it. How many days do they eventually do that? They do that for two. Two days after they wind up getting two, right?

We won in 10. Yeah. We got 72 days of misplaced bombs and two days of fire spleen. Yeah. It's the U.S. 5th fleet that comes down. It's a really fascinating episode people don't know much about. The first thing that happens really in the battle for Iwo Jima is actually an attack on the Japanese home islands and on Tokyo, right? There is a part of the fleet or a fleet is up there and they actually launched the first attack on Tokyo itself.

This is the fire bombing that happens off the aircraft carriers. Tell me about that episode. How long does that last? And why is it happening? Well, it's happening partially to keep the Japanese's head down, right? The concern that the Marines have is the Japanese are going to find a way to interfere with the fleet. Right. Again, Nimitz wants, needs to keep his ships afloat.

It's not easy to get them back to the West Coast to get them to Ulythi, to get them to Pearl to repair them. Yeah. So if he can keep the Japanese Navy specifically and its Air Force, pending the home islands, it gives more freedom of maneuver from a fire support and for assembling the amphibious landing force as well to get the Marines onto the beach.

Because the goal is to get them onto the beach, to support them, and to get the ships out of there as quickly as possible because of the threat, the ongoing threat. And you wind up seeing the ongoing threat, I mean, it materializes off of Okinawa in the form of Kaupacazis. The submarine threat is tragically brought to light in the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in August.

But the Japanese Navy and the Japanese Air Force aren't done. Yeah. There's still a viable enemy, even if the writing is on the wall, that eventually they will be defeated. But they're still potent. They're still lethal. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. The Americans destroy a lot of Japanese airplanes on the ground in Tokyo.

I mean, that was the real threat that they could actually attack from Japan. We're close enough now, 760 miles. They can actually take off and bomb the islands and the ships from there. So they have to take out all those, as much of that force as they can before they steer south and join the rest of the fleet down there to take part in this firing campaign. First wave of attack, February 19, 1945, they land on the southwestern coast. Tell me what that was alike for them when they caught on shore. The general idea I've learned from the movies,

thank you, Clint Eastwood, the Japanese were hunkering down. They were taking, they sort of moved themselves to Mount Surabachi and they were going to hunker down until the right moment came. So the Japanese commanders, as a general name, Krabayashi, he has learned from the previous landing that the Americans have conducted, right? Other Japanese commanders on islands met the Americans at the beachhead and suffered because of it. The Americans are able, you know, it's costly for the landing force. that the Americans are able to punch through using fire support and using all of this.

His argument is why don't we just get them and pin them in and kind of wait. And you talk to Marines who were on the landings and, you know, they were kind of expecting a little bit more of a Tarla experience, right? Where they're going to get hit the second the boats are within rain. Yeah. And that doesn't happen. There's some shelling, right? There's a little bit of shelling, but it's not the, you know, kind of the wall of Japanese lead coming at them. They get onto the beach and it's quiet.

And it's quiet for about two hours. And then Karabayashi effectively just flips a switch. And the Japanese guns, who, in spite of two days and 72 days and all of this pre-invasion bombardment, are in caves and are protected, right? They wheel out, they shoot, they get pulled right back in so they can't take counter battery. And with the volcanic sand, and the beach on Iwo Jima today is about 40 yards wider than it was at the time. So you don't quite get the same sense if you go when you, you know, if you can. go and visit it. There's a lot more gradual terrain.

No, the beach at the time, and I'm making hand signals here for the audience, was a lot steeper. You can't get your vehicles over it. You can't get your Amtrak, you can't get your tanks very effectively until you can smooth out paths to get up off of the beach head.

And so you have this concentration of two divisions of Marines, of support troops, on the landing beach when the fire opens up. Yeah. And the Japanese at this point have had control of OUijima for years, and they've basically got about every square inch of that island zeroed in. Yeah. And kilometers of tunnels, right?

Kilometers of tunnels that the Marines, I mean, never full, well, they fully eventually succeed in sealing them off. But it takes blow torches and demolition charges and very brave young men to run up to seal these these holes off. And then as the fighting progresses through the island, you know, they seal off one, but don't realize they didn't seal off the back entrance or they didn't seal it off properly, and all of a sudden, the Japanese are in their rears. They're moving north through the island. Sure. I did a show in years ago in Okinawa, a history show, and it was extraordinary, how deep those tunnels are, how solid in rock they are. They had a long time to prepare this whole

infrastructure for themselves, and they did a great job at it. Therefore, you know, They weren't easily affected by firepower, as you say. Just a last note on the beaches, the volcanic sand is different than sand we know, you know, usually, the silicate sand. The black volcanic sand doesn't behave the same way, so they get bogged down. Yeah, it's a lot. And I'm holding up my vial of Iwo Jima sand. Oh, I see it right there. It is a lot.

It's like little pebbles almost. I mean, like really small pebbles, right? This isn't the kind of pebbles you see at a kid's playground, but you can't get traction. You can't run at an individual level. And you're just, you know, this is like running in the worst sand dunes you can think of in the United States and just hoping to make traction, hoping to make forward progress. Oh, by the way, weighed down by 30 to 40 pounds a gear, a weapon, somebody shooting at me, chaos noise, the smell, the heat crumbing off of the island, but also it's February in the northern Pacific, so it's cold. There's rain that comes in in a few days. I mean,

And it's, it is a terrible place to be a foot soldier. Tell me about the Marine commander, Howland Mad Smith. I mean, howling man Smith at this point, I mean, colloquially, this isn't his first rodeo, right? He's come up through the Marine Corps. And like a lot of the general officers you see on Iwo Jima and on the other battles, they'd all known each other for years because the Marine Corps was so small. The Marine Corps, even today in the officer community, it's kind of jokingly called a small southern town where everybody knows everybody or at least is two steps away from the next person.

And the Marine Corps, even though it's massively larger in the Second World War, at the top, they all know each other. They all went to school together. Most of them are with each other in France or they did campaigning in the 20s and 30s. So Smith has been around. Smith has done multiple invasions and as the task force commander, you know, he's called Howlin Mad for a reason. He's got a little bit of a reputation for being an aggressive personality, we would say. say today, and he's driving his subordinates because he knows it's got to happen, right? Yeah. And the main subordinate that he's running is, his fifth amphibious course, Harry Schmidt.

And Schmidt, again, like the rest of them, had grown up in World War I, had grown up campaigning, knew his subordinate commanders, right? They'd served on staffs together. They'd gone to war together. And so they are old-breed Marines. And it's, you know, they're all, I mean, Helen Mads, the oldest of them, but they're all 50, 60 years old at the generals. And they're commanding these 17, 18, 19 year old kids who go and make the battle happen. Like I said, I'm doing a lot on Keller Rocky, who commands the 5th Marine Division.

And you see intense care that these generals have for their Marines. They're miserly in wanting to spend lives, right? They want to send bullets where they, instead of sending a man, which is something the former commandant, General Jim Jones, said to me, when talking about Vietnam, and never send a man to do what a bullet could do. That's their attitude, right? They want these 10 days of fire support, so that they can protect their Marines. It's a really interesting dilemma, isn't it? Because you have this command structure that really is, as you say, born out of World War I. And that was the age of artillery. That become this whole strategy of how to fight a war and how to move across a battlefield from the trenches in those days,

was created by the advent of artillery warfare. You know, send up a sheet of fire and then the men follow and then do the same. And you sort of move across that way. Add to this, A, it's in the middle of the ocean. So you have to move your artillery on a battleship. And you have this whole other dynamic, not to mention command structure, as we already mentioned. It's a whole different kind of conversation as to how this is going to happen. It's a really interesting subplot of those we don't have time for, but it was the,

It was the subplot of the entire Pacific War that people don't really consider too much about. Iwo Jima defended by 21,000 Japanese soldiers. Had they been there the whole time? Like, I've always wondered about these island fortresses. Were these Japanese soldiers just brought in for this battle, or had they been there for months and years before? There had been shifts and waves and, you know, Japanese manpower. You know, I mean, I don't think anybody was there on December 7, 1941, the Americans' perspective of when World War II. starts to 19 February when the landing happens. But the Japanese are plusing up the island. They're

improving the fortifications. One of the fascinating things that, you know, when you think about it from the fire support, back to the bottom, those 72 days of bombing. On the day of the landing, there were something like 730 significant defensive positions on the island. When they started the bombing, there were something like 400. So in that intervening time, the Japanese know the Americans are coming. They can read a map just as well as we can and go, well, you can go here, you could go there, and we're going to defend here. They're improving their defense. And the idea is defense in depth, right?

So Kiribayashi wants to get the Americans onto the beach and then just wants to at them. He knows he can't win. He knows that, you know, the bravado of the commander at Taro is it would take, you know, 100,000 men, 100,000 years or something like that to take the island and the Marines take it in three days. that bravado isn't there. And you see it in his communications to his troops.

And it's basically, look, you're going to die here. Right. But your objective is to slow them down. Your objective is to make it as painful as possible. Because every day you spend fighting and staying alive and killing Americans, he's one more day the homeland stays safe. He's one more day your family stays safe. And that's kind of the message that Karabayashi is giving to his troops.

In Ian Toll's book, Twyta of the Gods, he mentions actually a mimeographed sheet passed around to Japanese soldiers that had a sort of oath. And I just want to read, there's six commands that they are talking about. One, we shall defend this place with all our strength to the end. Two, we shall fling ourselves against the enemy tanks, clutching explosives to destroy them. 3. We shall slaughter the enemy dashing in among them to kill them. Four, every one of our shots shall be on target and kill the enemy. Five, we shall not die until we have killed 10 of the enemy. Six, we shall continue to harass the enemy with guerrilla tactics even if only one of us remains alive.

So this was a sheet of paper printed and passed out. They had to memorize this. this was sort of baked into their entire behavior before this battle begins. You know, the official, one of the officials, because the Marine Corps has done multiple official ones, histories of the U.A.GMA landing is called amphibious epic. And Whitman Bartley, Lieutenant Colonel, writes it in 1954, right? So he's got access to the participants, you know. Yeah.

And the files are still available. You know, they haven't been put in different archives and microfilm and you can't find them anymore. And he quotes something that. that the fourth Marine division's D2, the interpreters captured it. And Krabayashi himself expressed his feelings in these words. I'll shout bonsai for the empire. I have utmost confidence that you will all do your best. I pray for a heroic fight.

But he's not, in so right, so we have this image of the Japanese bonsai charge, right? Saipan is a prime example. Go kill seven Americans for every one of you and all. And they don't work. They are incredibly costly in lives. Yes, there's a psychological toll they take on the American. Americans and they do kill some, but you wind up, the Japanese wind up losing many more soldiers and do less damage than they intend to at these bonsai charges. So Kuribayashi is using

bonsai as a concept as opposed to as a tactic here. And he doesn't have his troops go out and do these bonsai charges because they're ineffective. And he knows he's not getting anymore. So he is also attempting to be miserly cautious with the lives. He's not throwing away his soldiers' lives on, you know, showmanship or these grand gestures. So as a commander, and again, Bartley in Amphibius Epic calls him an astute commander. And I think that's, I mean, that's high praise for an enemy, right? He's an astute and savvy commander. So, Tim, tell me how this campaign unfolds over a month long period of time, because they basically have to extract these guys from the tunnels, you know, and go in and get them and use flamethrowers on the tanks and so forth.

Tell me about the general strategy to find these guys and kill them. Well, I mean, the basic strategy is on D-Day, two divisions are going to hit these beaches on the southeast corner of the island, right? Fifth Marine division on the left, fourth Marine division on the right. Fifth Marine division is going to do two things. It's going to shoot straight across the narrow point of the island to isolate Surabachi in the south, right? Surabachi, the flag is raised four days later, five days later, on the 23rd. The battle goes on for another month. So we have this incredible iconic image. There's a month of fighting left. Wow.

Right. So the 5th Marine Division sends RCT 28 to the south, regimental combat team 28 to the south, to deal with the Japanese in and around Surabachi. It takes its other RCTs and pushes them along the west coast of the island, moving north. The fourth Marine Division turns north and is shooting for the airfield, which are objectives on like D plus 1 and D-Day itself. Very early on, the Americans think they're going to have the airfields. And they get to them, but they can't control and they can't get the Japanese out of them because the Japanese, like you said, have gone to ground. And so it winds up becoming, while you have divisions and, you know,

the third Marine Division is supposed to be the Corps Reserve. Elements of it, 21st Marine Regiment, get committed on the 21st. I mean, they were supposed to not even come off the ships, and they are there almost immediately. because casualties are so high and the going is so slow. But the war while we look at it and you can look at, I mean, Iwo Jima is not a big island. Right. And so when you look at maps, it's easy to go, oh, well, you just move here and there. The micro terrain, the caves, the tunnels, it quickly devolves into a war of squads.

Yeah. And it goes back to that, you know, 19-year-old corporal or that 22-year-old lieutenant going follow me. Yeah. Or put fire down there. The 5th Marine Division is blessed in the sense that they had received a lot of Marines who had been in other units. They could disband it, right? The paratroopers, right. Ira Hayes, one of the flag raisers, had been with the Marine Parachute Regiment.

John Bazelone, who received the Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal comes back and joins the 5th Marine Division and is a platoon sergeant. So you have experienced troops in the ranks that are, you know, leavening, for lack of a better term, the inexperienced troops because the 5th Marine Division is just, getting basically kids straight out of boot camp. Sure. The fourth Marine Division at this point has made multiple landings. So their command team is wired together. They have experienced NCOs who have led the troops that they are leading. They still get all these new Marines out of boot camp.

But they have had recent combat experience. The 5th Marine Division hasn't, though its leadership has, with the exception of a lot of those lieutenants. Wow, interesting. But the war just devolve is the wrong word because it sounds like the command and control didn't exist, and it absolutely did. But the war becomes a fight of squads against individual Japanese positions that are interlocked

with other Japanese positions. And so they wind up having to use the flamethrower tanks. The flamethrower, the Marines carrying flamethrowers, right? Woody Williams, the last living World War II Medal of Honor recipient who just passed away the last couple of years, he's a flamethrower man. And they are running up with cans of gasoline on their back, shooting fire into Japanese tunnels. That's the news real footage that we see from those last.

islands that were taken. I mean, they had to adapt tactics to those incredible infrastructures that had been built. Talk about the Navajo Code Talkers. Was this the first time that they were used on Iwojima? No, this isn't the first time the Navajo Code Talkers have been used. They've been used on other islands successfully. The language is known only by a small group of people. It's been adapted for the modern battlefield, right? There's no word for battleship or submarine in Navajo traditionally, but it's been adapted and it's successfully used. on the island to keep communication secure, right? There's no encryption software like we think of today in our radios. I mean, these are bulky transistor, or not even transistor, these are bulky

vacuum tube radios. And what was the system that they were talking? What was the use of the language? It's, you know, it's using words like egg for bombs. It's kind of substituting Navajo words, but speaking in a language that they had all grown up speaking mostly on the reservation. So each squad would have their own, okay. How did it work? No, it wouldn't go down that far and how far down it went. I mean, you've got a very low-density, you know, modern language, you've got a low-density, high-demand asset in these code talkers.

And so they're going to live at higher levels in the chain of command to provide secure communications, whether that's between the regiments and division or whether that's across the divisions. I'm not 100% sure, but they don't have enough to go down to the squad level. Okay. And the idea, of course, was that the Japanese were listening and they would be able to hear these commands in English and know what they were talking about. But this Navajo was completely unknown anywhere in the world because it was such an isolated language form. Fascinating. And it was very effective. I imagine very effective.

Yeah. And there are, it was very effective. But those, I mean, you got to end it to those Navajo Marines. And there's a few of them that are left, mostly out in the American Southwest. They were incredibly high value assets and very rare. And, oh, by the way, they don't look like your average Anglo-Marine from, you know, Philadelphia, where you're from. Yeah. And so there are incidents of, you know, suspicion of who they are if they're isolated. Are you Japanese in an American uniform? Because that was a trick that the Japanese had used elsewhere. So, again, nothing but admiration and respect for the Marines of those Navajo Code Talking Units.

I'll be back with more American Hill. history after this short break. So the strategy that the Japanese commander comes up with, this attrition strategy, results in battle sites like the meat grinder and bloody gorge and places all over this island. But really what that speaks to is, as you mentioned, the breaking down into the forces into smaller teams and the squads. And so that is part of his strategy. He saw it all the way there? Or was that just what came of the results of things? I think it was planned. I mean, right, Karabayashi has plenty of time to look at the map of his island and go,

if I'm attacking, what do I do? Right. Yeah, right. Assault doctrine for motorized, mechanized, modern infantry is going to look roughly equivalent from the Japanese perspective and the American perspective, right? We might have more tanks. We might have more of this. They might have more of that.

But if I'm going to flip the map, which is a commander, if I'm going to defend terrain, I'm going to look at how I think I'm going to be attacked. And that's exactly what I'm going to. what Kurabayashi did. And he's had time to walk the island, right? It's not his first, he's not building the defense the night before the Americans and he's building it over the course of months and years. And he's inheriting defenses that are there as well.

But that's what makes this a particularly terrible situation is they had time to prepare for this. The strategy was very effective in breaking down this massive force that comes along into smaller squads and so forth. And that results in a terrible loss of life. not nearly the loss that the Japanese suffer because they lose almost everyone. 18 to 20,000, 21,000 are gone at that point. Only 216 Japanese are captured.

A lot of Japanese died. It's an insane battle that just takes a lot longer than anyone thought it would take. What are the advantages that we now have, having won the battle? We take this island officially on March 26, 1945. It is declared secure. Let me just go over some numbers. 6,821 U.S. soldiers are dead, 19,217 wounded. That's a rough one.

But as I say, compared to the 21,000 of Japanese, wiped out, essentially. We have clearly attained a victory that we sought. It is now an emergency landing site for the Betone bombers that will take on the home islands. Remember at this point, everybody must recall. And I say this as the son of a man who was on a ship in the Philippines, waiting to attack the home islands. I mean, my dad was there. And we have talked many times about the PTSD that my father and others had, you know,

suffered in their lives, knowing that they were going to die in that attack. I mean, that was just a foregone conclusion. So at this point, the entire plan is to take these islands following with Okinawa, of course, as these landing sites for the B-29s that are going to proceed to be that firepower going to the islands for probably months, I would imagine, right? We talked about it earlier, right? So what does Iwo Jima represent? I think there is debate, right? You've got the former chief of naval operations in the summer of 45 already saying, what was the point? There's no harbor. And that's a Navy man talking Navy things, but I think it's a valid point. You know, I, if I'm the commander, if I'm Nimitz or if I'm,

you know, the commander of task force, whatever in the U.S. Navy, and I have to go all the way back to the marshals, then Iwojima didn't do me a ton of good. Yeah. There is a lot of, is a Marine author whose name is alluding me, but in the early to mid-2000s, he writes a reappraisal of Iwo Jima from a strategic perspective, specifically talking about the B-29 bomber. Because the B-29's,

the justification for the B-29 bombers, or for the island, and the casualties the Marines suffer there, is that that many B-29 crewmen survived because they had a place to put their bomber. Well, this article breaks it down

and says, yeah, the surface, that might be true. But when you start breaking down survival rates of B-29s that had ditched off of Japan, when you start looking at the actual reasons bombers are landing there, the battle damage suffered, you know, we have this vision of nothing but B-29's limping in on one engine. And that's not what actually lands on the island. And there's a funny story from one of the Marine lieutenants on the island, who was from New Jersey. And his buddy from high school was one of the B-29 pilots who just landed there to check in on him one day. You have pros and cons. I'm not to this is not to in any way diminish the sacrifice or the loss, but there have to be questions

in retrospect of wasn't worth it. Yeah. You know, if we're going to play one life is one life, was it worth it? And I think that author makes a compelling argument that it might not have been. But let's zoom back out and let's think about Joe Rosenthal's photo. Yeah. It becomes the motto for the seventh war drive bond, right? all together now, which in a war-weary country is a bit of the boost in the arm, right? We have the euphoria of 1944. We've done D-Day. We've done Dragoon in the south of France.

We bogged down. Market Garden doesn't go well. The Philippines, okay, we got Manila, but we're still there. You've got a lot of successes in 1944, but the fight's still going, right? Germany's still fighting. You've got German allies that are still fighting. The Japanese are still fighting. and all of a sudden here's this iconic image.

Oh, the bulge happens, right? The Germans who were supposedly knocked out of the war and it'll be over soon and suddenly are threatening Paris, threatening Brussels. Ooh, something's a miss, right? And so Rosenthal's photo takes on a legacy for the American war effort. And not just for Easy Company 228

or the 5th Marine Division or even the amphibious corps that's on the island under Harry Schmidt or the Marine Corps. it becomes this image of nationally unity. Yeah, right. So much of what happened in the Pacific is about unconditional surrender. The command structure wants that, the president wants that. The American people are so tired at this point that it's within the reason to say,

oh, okay, well, we'll settle at this point, you know, because what are we going to gain out of it? Well, little do we know what's going to come. You know, with the communist everything, there's a gigantic other strategy that's post-World War II that all these leaders are thinking about. The shot of the Marines on top of Surabachi, that iconic figure, is really the image of unconditional surrender, isn't it? Yeah, and Nimitz in his communicated to the Pacific Fleet talks about uncommon value being a common virtue, or uncommon valor being a common virtue, which is on the war memorial

here carved in. And, you know, Secretary of the Navy Forestall is on the island that day. when the flag is raised. Hmm, wow. You have a cabinet member at the base of combat. It's a fascinating thought to have today, right? And when we think of designated survivor and all of this sort of concepts.

But, like, there's a cabinet member on the island. And the island is still being contested. But he remarks that the raising of the flag on Surabachi guarantees a Marine Corps for the next 500 years. Culturally, it becomes impressed upon both the Marine Corps, but also the American people concurrent. And then it has been used for a series of images since then. Brian Robertson at the time wrote a book with Marine Corps University Press called Investigating

Iwo that talks about all the efforts to figure out who the flag raisers actually are. And one of the chapters in there is about the enduring impact of Rosenthal's image on American culture and global culture. And I visited that statue as a little kid. I mean, these things really matter in terms of building an idea of history. It is wrong from our modern perspective to assume that the Japanese were that much on their heels at this point. They were still a very well-equipped and mechanized army, weren't they? Yeah.

I mean, I think can they match the industrial might of the United States? No. And some of their leaders, right, Yamamoto famously or allegedly says, you know, we've got about six months to win. And if we don't win in that six months, we're doomed. And you look at, you know, American industrial might, you look at our agricultural might, you look at just a manpower pool that we have to, draw on both men and women to serve the nation. History is not inevitable. War is not inevitable. I don't want any way to say that, but the odds were decidedly stacked in the Americans' favor. But the Japanese are still very effective. They're still learning. They're still adapting.

They're just constrained or restrained by a bunch of limitation, right? They don't have steel. They don't have oil. They don't have a lot of these things. And as a result, the American industrial might and the American methods of warfare, have isolated pockets of Japanese on these islands. But they have radar, right? They've got a radar station in the Marianas that we never take out that are seeing American bombers taking off from the Marianas to strike the homeland and radioing back to Japan. So the Japanese know they're coming. They're building jet engines at the end of the war and in flying jet aircraft.

I mean, they're not, while they are on their heels, they are not an ineffective fighting force. But the hand that has been dealt them or that they have dealt themselves was a weaker one. than the Americans had by 1945. And until August 6th, they are still playing that card of conditional surrender. We can still hold out. And they are really until the Soviets crossed the border in Manchuria on the 11th, right? There's this hope. They can pull it off.

They can pull it off. And when the Soviets enter, it's all done. The two atomic bombs were the opening and the Soviets just sealed the fate. Let's just cap this. 27 medals of honor are given out after the fact. It's more than any other battle in U.S. That speaks volumes right there. On the other side of it is up until 1949, they are still finding Japanese soldiers in those tunnels years afterwards, still fulfilling their oath of no surrender.

It's interesting and speculative to compare, but, you know, World War II battles and what happened on those battlefields, compared to today, you know, and the way mechanized warfare has evolved, it's apples and oranges in so many ways, isn't it? It is and it isn't, right? The nature of war hasn't changed, right? It's impugn't, you know, to, and I'm not a on-war-thumping Klausowiczian, but it's about imposing political will at the highest level, at the lowest level, it is that 19-year-old kid, man, woman, doesn't matter who leads other men and women to accomplish something, to impose that, you know, to make that possible. You look at the fighting that's happened, whether it was a global war on terror, whether it was Ukraine,

whether it's in any of these spots, and it's kids. It boils down to kids. Timothy Heck is an accomplished naval historian, also an artillery officer in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. He has produced several books about amphibious warfare. Tim, thanks a lot. Thank you so much, Don. Have a good day. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit.

You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow,

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