Jocko Podcast - 497: Lessons About Human Will and Those Who Don't Break. "Combat Leadership at Iwo".

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

>Join Jocko Underground<The brutal legacy of the Battle of Iwo Jima—America’s bloodiest Marine Corps battle. Drawing from Marine Colonel Joseph H. Alexander’s powerful article Combat Leadership at Iwo Jima, they unpack the sheer scale, strategy, and human cost of the fight. Jocko highlights the critical role of combat experience, disciplined training, and small-unit leadership in surviving such savage conditions. The conversation also explores modern SEAL training, live fire exercises, and how simulated chaos prepares warriors for real-world battlefield mistakes—especially the deadly consequences of “blue-on-blue.” This is a sobering reflection on war, preparation, and the will to lead when it matters most.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 497 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Ako. Good evening. The Battle of Iwo Jima occupies a meaningful niche in the heritage of our nation and our core. Marines have subsequent generations accustomed to limited wars and restrictive rules of engagement may find it hard to imagine the battle's sheer size and fury. The raw dimensions are staggering. Three Marine divisions assaulting a densely fortified island from the sea.

36 days of savage point-blank firing that won a great victory but cost the five amphibious corps nearly 28,000 casualties. The bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history. In the last and final analysis, it is the guy with the rifle and machine gun who wins and pays the penalty to preserve. our liberty my hat is off to the Marines I think my feelings about them is best expressed by Major General Julian Smith in a letter to his wife after Tarawa he said I never again can see United States Marine without experiencing a feeling of

reverence and that right there is the opening of an article that was written by Marine Corps Colonel Joseph H Alexander who was a company commander in Vietnam. And after he retired from the Marine Corps, he became a historian, an author, a script writer. And probably his most famous book is a book called Utmost Savagery. He also wrote Sea Soldiers in the Cold War and also a fellowship of valor, the history of the United States Marine Corps.

Very prolific guy. But this short article was taken from. from the Marine Corps Institute, or from a Marine Corps Institute document, which is called Leadership Credo. And the article itself inside Leadership Credo is called Combat Leadership at Iwojima. And I think there's some lessons in the article

for all of us about will, human will, the breaking point, and people that don't break. but people that instead lead. So I'm going to get into this article. Here we go. Iwo Jima proved so costly to the Marines because the Japanese devised a disciplined defensive plan

that maximized the island's formidable terrain and soft interior rock. Seizing sulfur island would demand every bit of experience gained by American amphibious forces in the 30 months since the initial landings at Guadalcanal. While the colorful Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith is widely known for his role as the senior Marine at Ewo. The real workhorse was the commander of the five amphibious corps major general Harry Schmidt.

Schmidt had commanded that corps effectively in the seizure of Tinian the previous summer. At Iwo Jima, Schmidt would have the honor of commanding the largest landing force of Marines ever committed to a single battle. Schmidt was fortunate to have three veterans of the heaviest fighting of World War I commanding his divisions. Major General Graves B. Erskine, Commanding General, Third Division, Silver Star, two Purple Hearts with the Six Marines. Major General Clifton B. Cates, commanding General Fourth Marine Division, Navy Cross,

two silver stars, two purple hearts with the six Marines, and Major General Keller E. Rocky, commanding general fifth Marine division, Navy Cross with the Fifth Marines. Their collective experience would prove invaluable during the prolonged battle of attrition at Ewo Jima, which often resembled the bloodbaths of the earlier war. Ewa would see the kind of fighting characterized by one Marine officer as throwing human flesh against reinforced concrete. Yeah. So you're starting off, you're going in the combat experience,

having those guys that I just rattled off as these commanders of these various units, guys that are Navy Cross and Silver Star and Purple Heart recipients from the First World War. And we've covered some First World War battles, and we've covered the war broadly on this podcast before. And it was just a whole other level of brutality and savages. that you wouldn't imagine, wouldn't imagine. And so these guys, having lived through that, they're mentally somewhat, it would seem prepared

for the brutality and savagery that they're gonna face at EW. Continuing on, to the extent humanly possible, the men in the ranks of the assault divisions assault divisions had the right mix of training and experience to undertake this daunting task. The third and fourth Marine divisions were recent veterans of the Marianas campaign in which they virtually annihilated the Japanese 31st Army. The newly organized 5th Marine Division would be facing combat for the first time, but a good third of its members were veterans, including many former raiders and paramarines.

Now, this is interesting because the bringing that experience in and having that experience is so helpful but most of the people that went into D-Day on Normandy did not have combat experience so these guys rolling in they already know what they're getting into they have experience and there is like a a huge there's a huge gap between you been to combat and you ain't been to combat there's like a huge gap and I've talked to some of my buddies, some of the missions that we did in the global war on terror, you could pick just a random mission on a random night, going to hit a target building, whatever. If that would have happened in the 90s when no one in a platoon, zero people in a platoon

may have had any combat experience whatsoever, we would have been so much worse, you know, and primarily we would have been worse just because of the mentality of getting used to it. You know, it's, it's not quite the same as jiu-jitsu, because jih Tzu, it's so technical, and you can, you can become so good with your techniques. But if you just take street fighting, like straight up street fighting, you know, did you know guys when you're growing up, they would get in one fight a week, out in the bars or whatever, out in the clubs, out in the streets? that having those couple street fights under your belt

makes you so much better. Right. It's different. And so I feel like this is a big beneficiary to these guys because they know what they're getting into. Now I've heard people say about Normandy that they actually just wanted guys that hadn't been so that they were, didn't have,

they kind of had the fantasy of battle. Like we're going to be heroic. Of course, you know, we're going to charge in and it's going to be kind of glorious, right? They didn't want those guys to have the, oh, wait a second, you want us to go on this heavily defended beach with freaking bunkered in elevated machine guns? Because if you tell an experienced combat guy, hey, here's the deal. You're going to go into an open beach with bunkered in machine guns with intersecting fields of fire. This doesn't seem like a great plan.

So these guys have experience, which is going to be better. It's going to be better in the long run. Absolutely. Carrying on. General Schmidt's divisions emphasized small unit action during workup trainings for Iwo Jima, a good investment in view of the localized fighting to follow. Captain Fred E. Haynes, assistant operations officer for the 28th Marines, believed his regiment's pre-assault training paid off in spades. Quote, first we ran all 81 rifle squads through a live fire assault course twice. Then, knowing we had to cut Iwo in two on D-Day, on the left flank, we found a volcanic terrain on Hawaii similar to Mount Surabachi and practiced moving from the beach to our assigned positions.

We even marked out control lines with white tennis court tape. Every man knew what to do, end quote. So he got 81 rifle squads just out there doing live fire assault courses. You got it. It used to be a big deal back in the day for us in the SEAL teams because we did a lot of live fire. We did live fire everything. Live fire immediate action drills out in the desert. Live fire, CQC, close quarters combat going through the houses.

A lot of live fire. And the pressure in live fire is obviously very high because if you make a mistake, you're going to, you can get killed or you can kill your friend. So the pressure is very high. And you have to get used to it. And these guys, especially back in the day, they're just getting used to shooting and maneuvering. Because it is, you're shooting close to your people. And your people are shooting close to you. So it takes some getting used to and you have to understand the precision that you need to operate within.

And then I would say, though, as we advanced, we started getting simulation and paintball and laser. We had an advanced laser tax system. That was better, but we never got rid of live fire. because you have to be comfortable freaking shooting lead bullets that can kill you or your friends. You just have to get used to it. What's the main difference? Is that just the psychology of it? Because the paintball or the laser tag system, for example, it still's loud, right?

Or is it like? It's not as loud. Oh, okay. No, actually, I take that back. They're not quite as loud, but they do have blanks. So you're shooting blanks. So it is loud. Oh, okay.

Not quite as loud, but it's loud. The main difference is not about what you feel. The main difference is what the enemy, the in quotes, air quotes, enemy is doing. Because with live fire, the enemy is just cardboard, pieces of cardboard silhouettes that are popping up. And we had a little like pneumatic targets that would pop the target up and you could shoot at it.

And when you hit it three times, it would go down. So you kind of knew that you were hitting it. But it wasn't maneuvering. It wasn't shooting back at you. We actually did have ones that had little, like, air cannons that would go, like, it would shoot at you, a little flash. So you could visually get used to it, but you weren't getting shot at. Right. And that's what I'm saying.

So, like, what? And it wasn't maneuvering. So what are the two things that your enemy is going to do to you that you most fear? Shoot. Yeah. Shoot and maneuver. So the two things that a cardboard silhouette cannot do is shoot and maneuver. So you've eliminated the enemy, the quote, air quotes, enemies, most powerful.

two things, which is shooting back at you and maneuvering. Right. So what is the value then? You subtract those things. What's the value of live fire? Just the psychology of it essentially. Yeah, the psychology of it. And you have to get comfortable shooting close to your friends and your friends are

shooting close to you. And you have to be like hyper safe. Right. Like just the idea. And hyper disciplined. The idea of like, hey, this gun shooting next to you is a real gun. That's a real. And if you do something stupid.

Right. you're going to get killed. And if you do something stupid, or if you do something stupid, you're going to kill one of your friends. So let me ask you this then. Is how often, just generally speaking,

like pretty often or not very often, you know, with the laser tag or the, um, the paint ball where it was obvious that that wasn't necessarily part of the things factoring in, into the guy's minds. You know,

like how, because just like, okay, we're going to inverse the, the, the, the, the,

We'll say so live fire. It's like oh everyone's hyper vigilant on where the you know their muzzle is and like all this stuff But on the other on the flip side when you shoot the the bad guy he's just sort of standing there, right? We'll say So it's kind of in but then if you have laser tag or paintball it's inverse So they can get the full the full benefit of the enemy maneuvering and doing all the shooting back of you all this stuff But on that initial side they're not as vigilant you would think in theory of the mother shooting the friends. So in a situation like that, how often do they shoot their friends?

Or how often does that show itself? So first of all, we would do live fire first, which might seem a little bit backwards because it seems like it's safer, right? Or it'd be more hazardous to do live fire first. You'd think you want to get the guys used to maneuvering. But no, you want to do the live fire first so their safety habits are just freaking instilled.

Their second nature. Now, listen, I'll tell you that probably once every five to seven years, someone gets shot live fire in the SEAL teams and sometimes killed. There has been people killed doing live fire training in the SEAL teams. So you have to be careful. And the other thing is you have to, it has to be at least a little bit constrained. You see what I'm saying? Like there's risks that you cannot take as a range safety officer or as a trainer to say,

oh, you know what? When you sold the target, you know, you can, if you find something to engage and it's behind the line, you can let him do it. No, no, you actually can't do that. Whereas in combat, you might have to do something. That's a little bit more, more, you might take more risk. So you got to put the constraints. There are safety constraints that you cannot let slide at all during live fire.

and when you get to sim munition or laser you can start to allow them to push the envelope. Now listen, the principles stay the same but there are things that are more dangerous to do live fire that you would only want to maybe do in combat

if you absolutely had to. And even more important it might be something that you don't want them to do in combat but they might do it by accident for instance, we would set up drills where it was going to be so chaotic that a blue-on-blue, if they weren't paying very close attention, they would have a blue-on-blue. In fact, when I ran training, every task unit or troop that we put through our land warfare training, all of them had blue-on-blues.

and that's because we ran freaking crazy scenarios. And it wasn't our intention that they would have a blue on blue because by the end they wouldn't have them anymore. But, you know, we do a bunch of field training exercises. And so they probably have one in the first two, the first two training events, the first two full mission profiles. They're about guaranteed to have a blue on blue.

And that was on purpose? It wasn't on purpose, but they hadn't learned the lessons yet. Yeah, but what I'm saying is as the trainer, you. So like, put it this way. It wasn't on purpose, but it was highly likely. Yeah, but was that factored into your training, like intention? Yes.

Yeah. It wasn't like I was trying to trap them with a blue on blue. You know, I wasn't like tricking them. Right, but it's part of the exercise. But part of the exercise was going to be like, oh, if they're not paying super close attention, they're going to have a blue and blue likely. And like I said, there would be one or two events. So they'd go out the first night. Maybe it wouldn't have one to go out the second night.

Maybe it wouldn't have one. On the third night, they'd have one. Or they'd have like one on one of those first few nights. And then by the time, the fourth and fifth. training events were coming along, they were super locked on, they understood the mistakes that could happen, and they would not have a blue on blue, which is what we aim for. And, you know, Jason Gardner tells stories because he went through, he went through that training before he came back and started teaching. But when he went through that training, he was all, like, all couldn't believe

that guys were having blue on blues. And then he, him and his troop had a blue on blue. And then when he got overseas, he tells, like, I think he's got two really solid stories of where he, he will say, if we hadn't done that training, we would have had a blue-on-blue. Because they weren't, they were so aware of blue-on-blue that, you know, it didn't happen. On, in the book, Extreme Ownership, the first chapter is about a blue-on-blue that I was in that I had for real on the battlefield. And luckily, or not luckily, we learned enough from that one. that we never had another blue and believe me there was a lot of blue on blues in romadi like it was crazy there's a lot of people running around the battlefield it was chaos and so there was

probably one reported blue on blue a week not necessarily that ended in a casualty right but you shot our tank you shot our humvee you shot at our position would happen um so what i wanted to do is make sure that these guys had these this high pressure in training so they have a blue-on-blue with paintball. Right. Which is beautiful. You have a blue-on-blue with paintball. You learn that lesson without costing a life.

And that's exactly what this individual was doing here, trying to push the envelope and train as hard as they could so that they could not have these bad things happen in combat. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's some good, smart training there because us who are not in the military and of course don't go to combat. We don't think about that part of it. Like blue on blue. We don't think about that part of it.

In fact, when you think blue and blue, you think like, I mean, all right, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense because all the video games I've ever played, you can't really do a blue on blue. Yeah, a lot of them, a lot of them don't allow, like it's not part of the game. The bullets just go right past or through the guy without hitting.

You can't, like, you ever play contra? No. You can't shoot the guy. Right, you're right behind him, shooting him through his back. It goes past them. You're saying. It's not part of my,

freaking psychology but in real life it's not like that so yeah I would have never thought hey you should train that dude I was a new guy and I was in my first platoon and we were down in Florida and we had laser

the old laser gear on but we were doing a danger crossing so we're going across the road and as we were crossing the road we had contact and as we had contact, like I returned fire a little bit into my field of fire,

but as I was shooting, like, let's say, to the right, there was, I wasn't shooting across the road, but what I didn't realize is I was shooting to the right, all of a sudden I saw my point man come running back across the road. And in my mind, I was like, I did not know he was there. Like it was just one of those things where we're walking. And, you know, it was in my mind,

I had like a mental. mental blue on blue. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Because I was like, dude, you did not know that guy was there. Yeah. And I realized how bad, bad these things could happen.

Yeah, man. But luckily, you know, my field of fire was a radio man. So my field of fire was like off to the right. And so I was like looking off to the right. We started this danger crossing and I didn't see that my point man had gone across the road. Like, you know, you're doing a little setup. You're putting the machine gunners in place. There's this stuff going on.

And then all of a sudden, all of a sudden pick up, pop, pop. And I started shooting to my field of fire. And then a few seconds later, I see my point man running back across the road. I didn't know he was over there. I missed it, you know? And I was thinking of myself, I just had a mental blue on blue. I was hard on myself. But those things are, and, you know, who is it?

Stonewall Jackson went out on a recon and we got shot by his own men. And he died. You know, this is been, that's the Civil War. This stuff happens. So definitely need to train. hard and that's what these guys are doing um let's get back to it captain thomas m fields commanding company d second battalion 26 Marines d226 formed and equipped a 15 man assault squad of three teams quote the basic assault team had flame throwers bazookas and satchel charges said fields each man was a

rifleman with advanced specialty training most other Marines and the company knew the basics of these weapons. This practice was widespread and represented a significant change from the Tarawa assault where a handful of combat engineers had to provide all flamethrower and demo support and the infantry had no rocket launchers available. So they learned lessons, right? You can't just have one guy that knows how to operate the flamethrower or one guy that knows how to set up the satchel charge to blow up a bunker or something. You've got to get everyone learning all the jobs. Captain David E. Severance commanding company E-228 took pains to provide tank infantry orientation for his men. He commented, quote,

they not only learned how to talk over the bustle phone on the rear of the tank, they also took turns riding in the bow machine gunner's seat, using that weapon to mark targets for the main gun. Severance had his men dig foxholes then tested their nerve and validated their digging skills by driving tanks over obfries. Occupied holes the Marines also learned how to retrieve casualties in the hot zone by straddling a wounded man with a Sherman tank Pulling him into the tank through the bottom escape hatch Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Cushman Jr. commanding 2-9 also practiced this technique then used it successfully on Iwo Jima to rescue

One of his wounded company commanders So being familiar with your various things that you're going to be out in the battlefield and you know what's crazy when we first started working with tanks over, well, we first started working with them in training, and we'd go out to Fort Knox, and we, luckily, the army would come out and drive tanks around for us. Dude, like, you know how the pedestrians have the right of way?

Yeah. Like on the streets? Sure. Yeah, hell yeah. The pedestrian does not have the right of way with a tank at all. In a tank cannot see you, will not feel you, cannot hear you yell.

It is 100% the responsibility of the human, the soldier, the Marine to get the hell out of the way of that tank. That thing will just run you over. And you're, you, you, you, you kind of have a little bit of an instinct. Just a little bit of an instinct that a vehicle moving towards you will slow down. Right. You just have it, dude. Right. Right.

And the reason I know that is, I'd see like new guys, they would start walking as if this tank gave a shit. as if the tank could see them. You know, and we'd brief the hell out of them. Like, hey, this thing will absolutely run you over. You will die. This tank does not see you, can't hear you, it doesn't matter what you're doing, it's just going to run you over.

And that was good because when we got to Vermont, not only did you have American tanks, we had Iraqi tanks too. So the Iraqis, I mean, they definitely aren't as skilled. So it could get really chaotic. You got to get the hell away from those things, man. It's crazy too

If you know where they're going Then you can use them for cover right But if they're gonna start turning Get the hell out of the way So that's so smart for this guy Of like get familiar with the tanks And the other thing that's good about it is Well we we drove Humvees

And you know my guys were like a freaking NASCAR pit crew on the Humvees Flat tire Freaking had the little like Impact wrenches Guys pulling out this We'll zip tie that you know like everyone's good to go And we could rig for tow in 30 seconds, 20 seconds.

We had everything staged and ready. And, you know, it was all like zip tied in loosely, so it just break apart. But that's how you got to be. Got to be ready for that. Continuing. Many of the company commanders in the 5th Marine Division were former raiders or paramarines with combat experience in the Solomons in Bougainville. Fields and severance were in this category.

So was Captain Frank C. Caldwell, commanding company F226. All three applied their former paramarine experiences to small unit training. Our goal was for each Marine to be familiar with every type of weapon the company would use in combat, said Caldwell. Added severance. We wanted every man to be ready to assume a higher level of responsibility. Our PFCs were taught how to act as squad leaders. The veterans also taught basic battlefields survival skills to newcomers. Years later, some of Captain Fields surviving non-commissioned officers paid him a tribute saying,

you taught us everything we needed to know about hunting and killing Japanese. So that idea of making everybody really flexible, this is something that they picked up because they knew that they were going to lose people. Like, you are going to lose people. You're going to lose people that have expertise with. certain weapon systems and you're going to lose leaders. So everyone has to know how to little operate all these weapon systems and they have to be able to step up into the senior more senior leadership position.

And believe me, we did that all the time in trade at. We were killing dudes all the time. Kill that breacher. Kill that corpsman. Kill that chief. Kill that platoon commander. In fact, the better they were doing, they were getting killed. And when you say killed, you mean like you can't you for the scenario.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The breacher's dead. The assault. leader's dead the assault chief is dead like once that guy once you saw that the sole chief was good to go you're like yeah like i would just like come walking towards them they would have the look on their face

like no it's like uh the the the brad pit movie where he's death you know what i'm talking about yeah he plays the death meet joe black yeah meet joe black i was like joe black like i'd be i'd be looking at like a platoon chief just walking over and you see the look at his way it's like don't take me now I'm not ready to go you'd be like hey bro it's not about that so it's kind of ecological training essentially yeah there's some ecological activities going on yeah yeah the other funny thing is we would have like we would make sometimes the trade at guys would make little like shields with a piece of plastic or a piece of cardboard or you just cover up your face and you're nuts right oh so you don't when you get hit so when so when the paintball's about to

start flying you'd see like trade at guys would like cover their nuts or get behind one of these shields and so of course what that made us all do is we would because you're land grading like simultaneously so i'd like walk up to a hallway and then i just like cover up like the shooting was about the start you see all the guys get all tense but nothing was going to happen so eventually they got no indication of what was really going to happen which was the go continue on our commanders were new to war or sorry other commanders were new to war captain william ketchum jr took command of company one three two four in late nineteen forty four after serving as an instructor at the reserve officers course in quonico the fourth marine division by that time at connect

had commenced amphibious training in the waters off of maui ketchum was impressed with the expeditionary troops commander the legendary howlin mad smith spent so much time observing these procedures at the lowest levels he would come upon you and tell you if you screwed up or didn't know what you were doing and yell at you sorry and yell at you if you screwed up or didn't know what you were doing and um you know this is important because the leaders the individual leaders are responsible for training the people and there's no time where you're in charge of a team where you can say well headquarters didn't train us right or battalion didn't train us right or brigade didn't train us right or corporate didn't train us right you got to if you're in a leadership position

you got to make sure things are getting trained properly. It's a solemn duty of leaders. Iwo Jima would also be Lieutenant Colonel Don J. Robertson's first fight. He had spent much of the war serving, much of the war serving with a defense battalion in Samoa. Two weeks before embarking for Iwo, he took command of 3-27. Robertson immediately scheduled a four-day field of firing exercise. His men executed their landing plan, crossing an imaginary line of departures. archer and assigned boat teams while artillery fired overhead and close support aircraft made nearby strafing runs Robertson came away impressed with his unit's combat readiness most commanders believe they were ready for Iwo Jima we were well trained well equipped motivated outfit said Captain Caldwell of his company F said Colonel Robert E. Hageaboom chief of staff of the third marine division we were in good shape well trained and thoroughly supported our training was very

very realistic said Colonel Robert H. Williams, executive officer of the 28th Marines. And I think the entire 5th Marine Division was as ready as any division could possibly be. Major Frederick J. Karch, operations officer of the 14th Marines, believed that the 4th Marine Division had a continuity of veterans that was just unbeatable. Again, that's the idea that bringing people that had experience is the best way to go, which I agree with. Again, D-Day had less of that, but having those guys with experience, especially when now they're back in Maui and they're training people, getting them ready and telling them what it's

really like, you need that. The troops would find their hard training quickly validated at Iwo Jima. Three things happened on D-Day to knock a soul plans awry. First, the beach proved treacherous. The combination of high surf, steep slope, and poor trafficability in the volcanic sand created a bottleneck of stalled vehicles and smashed boats along the high watermark. So, bro, you know the deal. Like, the waves can cause issue.

Period. End of story. Now you're bringing in through big waves, steep beach, which means shore pound. And now you're bringing in vehicles. You're bringing in guys that might not be the best swimmers that, but even if there are good swimmers that are laden down with a bunch of gear. That's just part one, just nature, just the ocean. already took its toll second and despite these conditions general Schmidt continued to land his

reserves and artillery units seeking to build full combat power ashore before the anticipated night counterattack this created incredible congestion along the beaches and lower terraces so even those guys were getting hung up and slow general Smith was just like keep landing keep landing so now you got crowd now you got people bunched up huddled up vehicles huddled up that's a problem heard Japanese gunners opened a devastating fire throughout the crowded lowlands, enjoying open targets and fire superiority that they would never again experience in battle. So confused were conditions by late afternoon on D-Day that 1-28 reported 600 missing in action. Nearly all would resurface within the next 24 hours.

Here, but imagine you're sending up, like you're in charge of a battalion and you're missing 600 dudes. Like even if they're all going to turn up somewhere right now for the next two hours, three hours, four hours, you don't even know where they are. That's how freaking chaotic was that you lost 600 people. Here the small unit training paid valuable dividends.

Obviously, because even though if you don't know where your people are, how are you commanding them? No, you've got to actually have decentralized command we're going to make things happen on their own. When company B128 lost five of its officers, the staff NCOs and NCOs stepped up and kept their company moving. The 28th Marines cut the island in two in 90 minutes with such initiative. On the right flank, 325 lost 22 officers and 500 men in the first day.

Junior officers and NCOs maintained the frontal assault against the face of the rock quarry and prevailed. Imagine that. You lose 22 officers. You lose 500 men, but the junior officers and the junior NCOs step up and they keep pushing undenied that's Marine Corps activity right there among the ranks of the landing force on D-Day were two Medal of Honor Marines from Guadalcanal who had voluntarily returned to combat one died on the beachhead the legendary gunnery sergeant Manila John Bazelone the other survived Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Gaylor one of the first Marine fighter aces in the war as hectic as that first night ashore on Ewa was for Gaylor,

he could readily see the progress since the Guadalcanal years. Then it was, can we hold? Now it's how long before we're done here. So they had a little better attitude heading in. And we all know the legend of Manila John Basile, and Bazzi. Didn't want to be back here in the States going to Hollywood parties and living the good life.

He wanted to be back with his boys overseas, and there he was going into Iwo. As the battle swung north into the teeth of the Japanese defenses, the Marines on the ground were accompanied by an unprecedented wealth of fire support. Core artillery, two battalions of 155 millimeter howitzers, a fledging fire support coordination center, division artillery, 4.5 inch rocket trucks, close air support, including a few napal bombs and some of the best post-landing naval gunfire support of the war.

But the Japanese garrison somehow endured, hunkered down well-prepared bunkers and tunnels, waiting for the guns to lift and the attack to begin. Then it would be the turn of the Japanese gunners to take their toll, said Lieutenant Colonel William W. Buchanan, assistant operations officer of the fourth division. We still didn't have an effective way of either destroying or neutralizing the defenders in a very restrictive area. So it fell to the thin green line to get in there and dig them out in hand-to-hand combat. There must be a better way. And this is a very hard thing for people to understand is you watch like a position get bombed for days.

And yet at the end of those days of the most, Most intent bombing, you can imagine, out comes an enemy with a machine gun and starts shooting at you again. This is, you know, Matt Hasby, when Matt Hasby, when speaking of blue on blue, when Matt Hasby was the victim of a blue on blue. And American forces shot probably 150 rounds of 50 caliber machine gun into his position, which was also BTF, Tony was there. Like they got they got hammered by US forces grenades 40 millimeter grenades and Despite all that the only person that got wounded was Matt and it was we got like a A relatively minor wound could have been worse but he got a relatively minor wound he basically caught some frag in the face But when we would now you fast forward to trade at and

and some turret gunner in a in a hum v with a 50 cow would shoot you know 30 rounds of blanks at a building and and then they'd start getting shot at again by the trade at guys they'd be like oh this is bullshit this is not no no no dude none of your rounds even penetrated none of your rounds even got in there and look these are structures in iraq that are they build with concrete you know concrete and sand right they're concrete block so they are more durable than let's say an American structure which is made a freaking plywood and drywall but these Japanese are in legit actual bunkers so you know what has to happen the Marines have to go in there and freaking clear them that's what happens general Holland Smith in his task force 56 action report best summarized fighting on Ewo there was little possibility for tactical initiative. It was an operation of one phase and one tactic.

From the time the engagement was joined until the mission was completed, it was a matter of frontal assault maintained with relentless pressure. So, you know, what is he saying? He's saying, like, you got all your tricks, you want to flank people, you want to flank them and spank them, all these things that you want to do, guess what? You just have to do a frontal assault. That's what your choice is.

Captain Bill Ketchum found that all the school solutions from Kwanikos' Rolling Hills were inappropriate. Here was more important to tie in the flanks, hug your supporting fires, and keep grinding ahead. As Lieutenant Colonel Cushman recalled the fighting, it was discouraging. After every one of our terrific artillery barrages, you'd hear the damned enemy open up their machine guns. It was just painful slugging with tanks and high explosives and flame. And then the infantry with their flame throwers and grenades and pole charges digging them out. Casualties were terrific. You got to just have an, even he's saying the fling, like they had tanks that shot fire, right?

But even that's not good enough. You need a dude. Cushman also characterized the conflict as a battalion commander's battle. The fighting indeed took toll at that echelon and below. 12 infantry battalion commanders were wounded, five were killed, and three were relieved. Think about those numbers. 12 infantry battalions were wounded,

five were killed, and three were relieved. And by the way, imagine you're in the midst of an assault in the Pacific campaign, and you've got a bad thing happening, you still have to fire this leader right now. one of the few two emerged unscathed was lieutenant colonel don robertson of three two seven all three of his company commanders died in action two killed by the same shell cushman's two nine paid a stiff price quote by the time iwo jim was over i had gone through two complete sets of platoon commanders lieutenants we had such we had such things as an artillery forward observer commanding a company and sergeants commanding the platoons down to half strength or less. It's a bloodbath. Going through two complete sets of platoon commanders, Colonel Haga Boom released his staff secretary to take over a leaderless rifle company.

Lieutenant Colonel Lowell E. English commanded 221 until the 12th day when a Japanese machine gunner blast let a blast go and I got one through the knee. His battalion suffered critical losses. I lost every company commander. I think I had one executive. officer left, it was pretty goddamn rough. Company B-128 went through nine company commanders in the battle. The billet of platoon commander, second platoon, company B changed hands a dozen times. Lieutenant Michael E. Kelleher, U.S. Navy, assistant regimental regimental surgeon in the 25th Marines became 325's surgeon when their doctor was killed on D-Day. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Justice M. Jump and Joe Chambers,

had already qualified for the Medal of Honor by D-plus-3 for leading the survivors of 325 over the rock quarry. Then a Japanese Nambu gunner put a bullet through his chest. Kelleherd got on him quickly, but the wound was critical, the position terribly exposed. Somehow they snaked Chambers. out of the beaten zone down to the beach back aboard the ship say back aboard a ship saving his life i shall always remember i shall always wonder why i'm alive keller wrote his wife from the battlefield

fighting conditions on iwa were gruesome the marines had never faced a leaf such a lethal combination of mines heavy artillery rocket guns and enormous spigot mortars the landscape was surreal almost lunar the japanese garrison fought with uncommon discipline for the most part eschewing their sacrificial bonsai attacks maintaining excellent camouflage and stoic patience most marines rarely saw alive japanese i saw maybe 20 said captain caldwell and most of those were at the bitter end of the fighting exhaustion prevailed we learned to sleep fitfully in short short snatches said Captain Ketcham, but I had to constantly yell at my men to stay alert, not to make careless mistakes because of their fatigue.

And with every man, fear was a constant factor. As Lieutenant Colonel Cushman admitted, I always had fear. I hated high explosives. Its effects are so terrible. E. Wo veteran T. Grady Gallant later wrote of his squad mates, they no longer expected to survive. Fear was not of death, but of mutilation. And there were no end to the mutilating wounds. Others simply expected the worst. I had no illusions, recalled Lieutenant Colonel Chambers after reviewing the Japanese defenses along the Rock Quarry and his assigned sector. To be honest,

I liquidated myself and my outfit in advance. So you're looking at what you're about to go up against and you just say, yep, we ain't going to make it. We're going to do our best. We're going to make progress, move the ball down the field, but we ain't coming out of this alive. Sometimes dealing with fear was a factor of one's preoccupation with responsibility. Much of the time, I was simply too busy to think about being afraid, said Captain Ketchum. The action for us was pretty much nonstop. Lieutenant Colonel James P. Berkeley, executive officer of the 27th Marines, shared that view. When you're responsible for something,

you don't have time to be scared, he said. Berkeley had been an observer at the Allied landings in Salerno in 1943. I was scared to death at Salerno with those damned 80s going around my head. But at EW, I was concerned with maintaining good communications. It's good to be busy.

It's not good to sit around and freaking think about what can possibly happen. Combat losses among the landing force grew steadily. As early as 23 February, which is D plus four, the day of the Surabachi flag raisings, the five amphibious corps had already lost 6,251 men. By three March, the date the first crippled B-29 landed on Iwo's airstrip, the count had reached 13,665. And by March 16th, when General Holland Smith dedicated the cemeteries, declared the campaign a success, and, and, and, and, the count, and departed the objective area,

the casualties toll stood at 19,928. 10 more days of savage fighting in the north would further spike the count. Each division landed with a sizable replacement with sizable replacement drafts in tow. In view of the stiff casualty losses, it is doubtful if the battle could have been won without these replacements,

but no one seemed too happy with the plan. And this is one of those things where they know, they've actually got a plan for replacements and this is something in the seals we just didn't we didn't even think about that stuff you know that's how naive we were you know when we were overseas in tasking a bruiser we didn't have replacements we didn't we didn't think about that and again that's just how naive we were and how um you know indestructible we were in our own And it was weird when I came home and I would talk not at the like platoon or troop level, but at the team level and at the group level of saying, hey, when when guys go on deployment,

you need extra people. And even again, these are a lot of these commanders at that time. They didn't have combat experience. And so for young freaking jocco to be sitting there saying like, hey, you need extra guys. What do you mean? any extra guys you need to plus up the platoons well why because when you lose a guy you need freaking guys yeah yeah that is great like what i mean did you guys not think about or did they not think about it or was it like it just wasn't a thing and and we had like we had um we had like

an immediate action drill for what to do if a guy gets wounded or killed hey you need to shut down the radios you need to initiate the um protocol for contacting the family you need to to get their personal items, you know, secured. Like, there's a bunch of things that we knew we had to do. Yeah. But what we didn't think about was like, oh, yeah, we got to go back on missions again in two days, three days, tomorrow. And we just, seals had not taken care.

I mean, Mark was the first seal killed, you know, in Iraq. And then what did you do? Do you fly, like, someone else in, or did you just go with one man? No. Well, a little bit of both. We had had new guys show up. which was kind of a new thing where they would just send once a guy graduated from SQT

and he got assigned to a team. If the team was on deployment, they started just sending new guys over on deployment. But it was really sketchy to try and say, like look at a new guy. Yeah. And say, yeah, just go ahead and pick up this Mark 48 and standby to get some.

No, that wasn't happening. We slowly got some of those guys in the field a little bit. But a lot of times what they did was they kind of picked up the slack in camp. you know and picked up some of the more easier jobs in camp or maybe they were going to be a turret gunner in a vehicle or something like that but it was and we also we we had some guys from from another team show up one of the east coast teams that they had sent to like a squad of guys so that was cool so we kind of gotten plused up there and they were great dudes so you know we had them as well so we kind of got plused up but it wasn't like part of the plan it was sort of a little bit more luck Yeah, it feels like, because, yeah, obviously I play sports growing up, you know, and you got your alternates and, you know, even like on a freaking track team where it's like an individual sport, there's an alternate. Like if that guy can't run, he's injured, you can't go for whatever reason or whatever. It's like there's an alternate.

Or there's this, you know, in teams, there's the second string guy and third string guy. It almost is kind of like, hey, shouldn't it kind of be like that? It should be. It should be. Yeah. And it's just one of those things. we hadn't been at war for so long. Yeah, that's the kind of just,

we kind of just didn't think about it. Yeah. And you know, the army, you heard me say this before. Like the army in the Marine Corps, they have doctrine. They have like written doctrine that says, when you do this kind of mission, when you do a massive airborne drop,

you're going to take 6% casual, I think it's actually 10%, 10% people are going to get hurt on a big airborne drop. So you got to plus up your people 10%. Like they've got all their figures and it's all doctrine a lot. We didn't have any freaking doctrine The single team it does now

But we didn't have any doctrine You couldn't just refer back to like hey think Better think about this And we had also gotten very into the in the 90s We were very into the idea of the big Mish Right Which is we're just going to do one mission And whatever happens on that mission

The mission is now over And we'll Start training again and train up some other people But it ain't like that in an actual war So those were where some hard lessons learned. Yeah, there's got to be a bunch of like stuff like that that you can't really, it's not very obvious at, actually, it's not obvious at all until you go through it a few times.

Yeah. And then these little things emerge like, oh, wait, stuff you'd never think about. And the Army and the Marine Corps had the, have the size and the mass to do that. But dude, the seal teams after Vietnam, there's only two seal teams, seal teams. You know, there was just Seal Team one and Seal Team Two. They had like a hundred guys each and those guys got out moved on and they didn't they didn't have the They didn't have the systems in place to capture lessons learned and pass them on and we have all that stuff now Yeah, so things have changed, but that was definitely a growing phase for us. You know, we were like a startup

You know what I'm saying? And it's actually more like the the Vietnam seals were were obviously they were the ones that started it but they didn't after the Vietnam War was a over everything downsized you know and then you had to go another you know almost 30 or 30 years 30 years so there's a few like contractors or civilians working that were vietnam's vietnam legit seals but a lot of those guys were fully retired like not even around the community anymore so man we had some lessons to learn and then we you know and we started documenting those lessons and and capturing them but it's also it's not the thing that anybody wants to think about. You know what I mean? Yeah.

So, I mean, you remember when I had, you know, Elliot and Joe on, and my briefing to them was like, you guys will take casualties. And even with that, it's like nobody thinks about it, wants to think about it. It's freaking horrible. And these guys are taking massive casualties going back to this document. Each division landed with sizable replacement drafts in tow.

In view of the stiff casualty losses, it is doubtful if the battle could have been won without these replacements, but no one seemed happy with the plan. Okay, now back to it. Too often the replacements were fed into the front line units as groups of individuals rather than, say, trained squads. The new men were strangers to each other and their new outfits, disoriented and apprehensive. General Erskine complained that the replacement. joining his third Marine Division were poorly trained. His personnel officer commented that they get killed the day they go into battle. Lieutenant Cushman berated the inexperience of his replacements during the final days of the

fighting, reporting that almost all of the infantry were replacements. They lacked entirely the will to close with the enemy. Few other field commanders shared Cushman's harsh assessment. Most found no lack of fighting spirit among the replacements. The troop leaders were much more concerned. that the combination of inexperience and disorientation made the replacements such initial liabilities. And again, it's interesting that, you know,

they mentioned that they would come in as an individual instead of as a squad and so no one really knows them. And I can see advantages and disadvantage to that because if you have, you know, a squad of 10 guys or whatever and you lose a guy and you get a new guy, well, at least the squad is nine-tenths, experienced and used to working with each other as opposed to a brand new squad of 10 guys and you throw them into the mix well they haven't been in combat they haven't worked they haven't seen it yet and so they might be a little bit cohesive yeah they might not be very cohesive and also just like one individual is not cohesive with that squad yet the squad is now not very cohesive with the platoon or the company yet so I don't know which one of those would be worse I tend to think actually that it'd be better to take like a

I'd rather take one new guy and put him in rather than take a whole squad of new guys. And this is essentially, actually, this is essentially the debate, somewhat of a debate that I had with Seth and Leif, where we had some additional personnel when we were going through urban warfare training. And these additional personnel were seals, but they were from another unit. And some of them weren't seals. Some of them were other types of technicians. They're going through our training with us. And each platoon was responsible for like, I don't know, like six or seven of these guys. And I told the, I told Laf and Seth, and I was like, hey, take these seven or eight guys and just divide them up between your fire teams.

And it'll be a little bit bigger than a fire team. But actually I used the term that the Polish grom used, which was sections. So they called their fire team sections and they had like six guys. So I said, just break it into sections and distribute these guys. with your guys so they have they're instantly being mentored and not even just mentored but like directed by someone that knows what's going on and seth was like roger that but i told and tony and uh laf and tony were like now we're going to keep platoon integrity and we'll just put that that will be like a separate squad so we'll have three squads and seth's guys guys and seth's

like incorporated the new guys and were able to maneuver very quickly and Laif's Laif had basically a squad that was not functioning properly because they didn't know what they were doing as a whole and it was problematic so Laif came back he's like tell me about this section thing I was like yeah cool here's what you do so yeah I kind of prefer the idea of spreading them out but I wasn't there back to the document the fifth Marine Division reported a casualty rate of 55% of its replacements. Captain Caldwell ordered each member of company F, veteran or replacement, to fasten black tape around the base of their helmet. That way they at least knew who the hell

was in their own company. With the fourth Marine Division, Captain Ketchum tried to orient and integrate company F, company I's newcomers, but often we didn't have the time. Sometimes we could barely write down their names before the fight was on. Better hope those freaking guys got some good training. That's how confusing it is that you put freaking black tape around your helmets. You can tell Who's who? Most commanders who survived the battle condemn Holland Smith for stubbornly refusing Harry Schmidt's repeated request to release third Marines from expeditionary troop reserves. All three of the divisions would have welcomed reinforcements by one of the full-strength battalions of this veteran regimental combat team. Smith refused possibly from perspective of his other hat, commanding general.

Fleet Marine Force Pacific knowing how critically he would need at least one experienced intact Regiment upon which to rebuild his shattered forces for the forthcoming invasion of Kyushu. So again, there you have a little bit of a disconnect, like a strategic disconnect, right? Because who is a General Smith? General Smith is looking at the bigger picture, saying, if I, use up all these regiments right now, we got work to do. And

if I have one regiment that's good to go, I can at least backfill it with fresh people and we'd be ready for the next operation. But if I decimate all these regiments, I might be in a worse spot. So he's trying to play that strategic game. Now, of course, you could say, well, it's better to get him in there, get more experience.

There's a way to argue it. But I'm sure the, I'm sure Harry Schmidt's request would have been at least nice to acknowledge why we're doing this, right? Instead of just going, no, you can't have them. And I don't know if that's what happened, but I figured if Harry Schmidt gets told,

hey, I need to keep these other guys prepared for this next invasion, which is going down directly. Lacking this perspective, the commanders on Iwo could only curse Smith when the ships bearing the third Marines departed for Guam on 5 March. By that time,

each commander had a deal with filling leadership billets with his few surviving veterans. In most cases, combat savvy took precedence over normal rank or lineal list standings. This is awesome. This means like if you were freaking good to go in combat, we were going to get you promoted. And we didn't give a shit about this guy over here who's inexperienced or lame. In the 25th Marines, staff sergeant Alfred I. Thomas took command of the half-track platoon when his lieutenant fell wounded on day and stayed in command throughout the campaign earning a silver star and a battlefield commission in the process.

Hell yeah. In 325, Captain James G. Headley, the senior company commander and a veteran of three previous assault landings took over the battalion when Lieutenant Colonel Chambers went down and retained command for the remaining three weeks of combat. The only captain to command a infantry battalion in the battle. Headley earned the Navy Cross and battlefield promotion to major, which unfortunately did not stick. Already half-deaf before Iwo Jima, Headley lost almost all of his hearing in combat. Fatigue and illness took their tolls among higher echelon commanders.

Within the 3rd Marine Division, General Erskine developed pneumonia, but refused to be evacuated. His chief of staff, the competent Colonel Hogabom, quietly ran the show for several days, until Erskine could recover his strength. Similarly, Colonel Williams unobtrusively called the shots for the 28th Marines during the period when Lieutenant Colonel, or sorry, when Colonel Harry the horse, Liver's Edge became too sick to function. The temporary illness of Erskine and Liver's Sedge were far different than the totally debilitating effects of combat fatigue, which caused the evacuation of 2,648 Marines during the battle.

This was still a relatively new phenomenon for the Marine Corps, which categorized these cases as sick and therefore not on, not did not list them on as battle casualties. Yet they were very much casualties of protracted fighting. Few if any ever recovered in the rear field hospitals in sufficient condition to return to the front line. So this is where you get the real the real battle fatigue, right? 2,648 Marines that are, they can't, they get evacuated and they can't come back. Dr. Kelleher, 325's surgeon during the initial phase of fighting, recalled that battle fatigue occurred in two different categories. The first was more akin to shell shock, noting that the landing force sustained 99 cases of battle fatigue on D-Day alone.

Kelleher said, this was attributable to the shelling we took. on the beaches the noise, shock, blast, and sense of helplessness. So that's the first one. The first one is just like acute, you're getting, you're just getting traumatically blown up, explosions going off, and complete fear, complete helplessness. And first day, they get 99 cases, first day. The second form occurred as the battle progressed and seemed more a function of sleep deprivation and bone weariness, weariness.

Kelloggher continued, we all had battle fatigue to a degree. We were numb, fatalistic, exhausted, but some men simply crossed the line could no longer function in a combat zone. Some would even hallucinate at night, open fire on imaginary enemy troops, exposing our lines and endangering our own men. We had to get them out of there. Yeah, this is something that's portrayed in the Pacific. You know, guys freaking out in the middle of the night.

They're having bad dreams. Captain Fred Hayes recalled examples of both kinds of battle fatigue. One staff officer became so terrorized by the Japanese artillery barrage on the beach on D-Day that he would not leave the shelter of the first shell crater he found even hours after the barrage stopped. We had to evacuate him. Much later in the campaign, the 28th Marines had to relieve a highly competent. battalion commander engaged in the thick of fighting he had lost all capacity to lead he was slumped over and crying haynes said liver's edge quietly replaced the stricken officer with his executive officer so you have like a guy that's fully competent fully capable and he just breaks and this is something

hack worth talking about in about face like fill up that water that water starts to overflow everyone's got a different size glass and when it happens not it's not it's not it's It's almost also, I think, very important. And you can see that they've got it here. And they do it in a band of brothers as well. One of the guys gets combat fatigue. And they just like, it's okay. You're like, hey, we're gonna get him off the front line.

It's almost, you know, like you can't be mad at a guy for getting wounded or whatever. They're not, they're not like, calling him a coward. Like, you know, you get the famous patent thing where he slaps the guy around or a couple guys around that were in the back for, or in the rear, in the hospital. for combat fatigue,

but in that, they kind of go, okay, it's okay, dude, like get you to the rear. Kind of like a NASCAR, right? You got a pit stop. Yeah, I need a pit stop. Although these guys sound like

they're like out of the game. This isn't a pit stop. They need to get them out earlier and there's an actual example at right here. The company commanders had little experience dealing with combat fatigue. There was a natural tendency at first to suspect

malingering. Captain Ketcham resorted to slapping one of his officers to break him out of his sudden stupor. It didn't work. Captain Caldwell was able to save one man at the breaking point by reassigning him 20 yards to the rear with the 60 millimeter mortar crews. Just getting him off the front line seemed to help and he didn't snap. So that's something that you've heard me say many times, right? Just get him out of there. Get him out of that stress environment. Don't blow the engine. Right, right. And it's funny, 20 yards to the rear, bro. Yeah.

And by the way, 60 millimeter mortar, that was sledge. That was sledge's job. You know what I mean? It's not like these guys weren't freaking totally stressed out. But you're 20 yards back. That's enough. Yeah. Captain Severance recalled having two brothers in his company.

One died of wounds early on. The other lasted about two weeks, then got the classic symptoms. The wide-eyed stare, the shakes, uncontrolled. crying he had to go. Unlike wounded in action cases, the company commanders rarely saw their battle fatigue cases again, rarely learned whether they ever recovered. Yeah, some of that's got to be a little bit of the, like the wounded guy, maybe they're, hey, is he okay?

But the guy that was battle fatigue, they figure he's like, whatever, he'll be okay eventually. The impact of the marine casualties at Iwo Jima is perhaps the, measured, best measured in the ranks of the rifle companies. One more time. The impact of the marine casualties at Iwo Jima is perhaps best measured in the ranks of the rifle company. So let's just look at the rifle companies. What do we got?

Captain Fields commanded company D-226 for the first eight days, then served as battalion executive officer. The final news from Company D broke his heart. Every officer and platoon sergeant went down, so did the first sergeant. At one point, Sergeant Hubert J. Fulton, a former raider, commanded the company for six days. In the end, only 17 Marines who landed with Captain Fields on D-Day remained. Captain Severance of company E-228 lost 71 killed, 167 wounded, 21 sick and evacuated.

He lost all five platoon commanders. A replacement lieutenant lasted 15 minutes. Quote, in the end, I had my first sergeant and my company gunnery sergeant. My three platoons had been consolidated into two, one led by a corporal, the other by a PFC, end quote. of the six men from company E who raised the flag on Surabachi on D plus four, three died and one was wounded in subsequent fighting in the north. Captain Bill Ketchum, his company, I-324, landed on D-Day with 133 Marines in its three rifle platoons. Only nine of these men were still standing when the fourth division backloaded their ships 26 days later. Captain Frank Caldwell's company F-226 lost all its platoon commanders and 221 men.

Caldwell's worst day came on 3 March. We had seized Hill 362B and were holding on for dear life. I lost 20 and 25 wounded and two cases of combat fatigue. I lost my platoon commander and my first sergeant killed while standing in his foxhole taking casualty reports seizing iwo jima enhanced the strategic bombing campaign against japan and saved thousands of lives among b29 crews struggling back from their raids over h hugh was it worth the cost of so many marines in corpsmen so many proud infantry battalions military military historian and marine officer ronald h specter analyzed the casualties of iwo jima from a different

perspective had the war gone as expected with the invasion of japan necessary in early nineteen forty six he wrote in eagle against the sun the wholesale sacrifice of three well-trained and expert assault divisions simply to secure emergency landing fields might have loomed as a gross strategic error So as this dude's looking at it, hindsight's 2020. Look, you got an emergency landing field for the B-29s, but what did it cost us to get those things? But then there's another side of that. Going back to the article from Joseph Alexander,

Colonel Joseph Alexander, yet the psychological factor of the American victory at Iwo Jima cannot be ignored. After Iwo Jima, both sides could clearly see the inevitable outcome of the final battles to come. The Americans had demonstrated a mastery of forcible assault from the sea, the concentration of overwhelming combat power, the ability to sustain offensive momentum, and the will to see it through. The years of issue in doubt were gone forever. So that psychological victory over the Japanese that they knew that no matter what they did, they could not. They could not stop the United States Marine Corps and the United States Army and our will for victory. And this document closes out with this statement.

Captain Ketchum recalled that his survivors felt heart sick at their appalling losses, but upbeat about their victory. Morale was surprisingly good. We had destroyed a very good enemy force defending a real fortress. We had the sense that nothing could stop us. So there you go. This is the heroics of the United States Marine Corps, and their docks, the Navy Corpsmen.

Don't forget about those docks. The Marine Corps love their docks. And important, first of all, Fourth of July coming up, important to remember incredible sacrifices that have been made for our freedom. And I will never go through material like this and not be reminded of the will and the strength of human beings that are determined to do something. To get up day after day after day.

I mean, can you imagine if you're, if you're, if there's only nine guys left out of 250, That means you've watched hundreds, hundreds of your friends and comrades get wounded and killed and you are still fighting Not to mention the heat not to mention the bugs not to mention the Dehydration not to mention every other thing that would make this totally miserable Totally miserable and on top of all that the fear the anxiety The sadness the horror and you know what if these guys can get up up and do that and make that happen. I think we can get up in the morning and work out, right?

You know what I'm saying? I think we can face our fears. We can face our challenges. We can do our duties. And no matter what, carry on. Speaking and carrying on, we need that mental strength. You know, we're training. Look, the Marines were training.

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If you want this stuff in one of those facilities But just get yourself some good fuel, the best fuel, jaco fuel. Also, Origin USA. Look, we fought wars to maintain freedom. And then we sold it overseas. And now we got slaves in other countries making crappy products for us and we're sending them our money. Don't do that.

Instead, go to origin USA.com and get yourself some goods. jeans, boots, rash guards, geese, t-shirts, hoodies, whatever you need. We got you covered. Go to origin USA.com. Get your workout gear. Get your hunt gear. And you know what you'll get? Communist free gear.

There's a 100% guarantee for no communism in our gear. You don't like communism? I don't like communism. You don't like tyrannical leaders? I don't like tyrannical leaders. There is 100% tyrannical leadership free clothing, communist free clothing. Go get some. OriginUSA.com. Also, speaking of gear, got more gear, discipline equals freedom gear.

It's on jocco store.com. Also, you know, we all are familiar with the idea of good, you know. Every day is not going to be perfect. Even in everyday life. So I'm just saying you've got to take the good with the bad. So, yes, anyway, if you're familiar with that, you can represent with shirts you've got hats on there got hoodies on there got socks on there big hit by the way i wouldn't know we got some sorry about that we got some new stuff coming by the

what what oh you want some socks i've been asking for socks for months you know hey look you know how you said earlier it's good to be busy you know then you don't oh you're so busy so busy so busy so the busiest actually maybe ever nonetheless they're on the how about this i'll uh i'll look into it I'll say you some. Freaking, even like here, being recorded, you're noncommittal because you know that your word means nothing. Well, let's say not nothing, but, you know, nonetheless, you know, there's a very reliable place to get socks if in the event of you wanting socks. It's called chocolate store. We got.

We got. We got. You know what I realized? How long we've been in this outfit? Ten years. Yeah, ten years. Right? Discipline equals freedom.

There's the original shirt. This is the second shirt, the one you designed, by the way. Good job. Congratulations. Discipline equals freedom standard issue. That's the third one. And then there's discipline equals freedom zero zero four. There's four discipline equals freedom.

So it takes two years to come out with a new discipline equals freedom. So I kind of started to feel that heat a little bit. Sure. But new ones on the way. There's a new one on the way. It'll be good. and then hopefully I'll get more every 12 months or so we'll have a better one. Where's my Viking skull shirt?

Oh, they didn't come in. I sent you four of them. Oh, you did? Yeah. When did you send them? Like a month ago. No, like three weeks ago. Would you do me a huge favor and look into that?

Double two. Because I did not receive these things. And I need them like for right now. I got you. Okay, I'll look into that as well. I'm being serious, actually. But yes, what you're talking about, the Viking skull.

shirt is part of the shirt locker. That was the June, June. No, not June, sorry. Right before June, April. I wouldn't know. It was the May shirt for the shirt locker, which is, if you don't know, it's a subscription scenario,

new shirt, design every month, a little bit outside the box, but still representative of this path, discipline and freedom. See what I'm saying? Anyway, Jocco particularly liked or Jocco liked that particular one. Yes, I did. And hey, man, I'm in agreement. with you it came out good.

Check. Nonetheless. But yeah, so new discipline equals freedom shirt. Aside from the shirt locker, shirt lockers good, of course. New discipline equals freedom shirt, a new good shirt. Actually, no, that's going to be part of the shirt locker. Anyway, go to jocco store.com. If you want to get updated on like new stuff or whatever, bro, I don't spam nobody ever

under any circumstances, but you can sign up for the email thing on there and get notified. Anyway, yeah, jocco store. Right on. Maybe you could spam me with a new shirt. Also, check out primalbeef.com and Colorado CraftBeef.com. You need good steak. You need it. You need beef tallow, perhaps.

Yeah. Some people would be rubbing this on their face. I don't know anything about that. But I do know this. When you cook with it, it's hella good. Yes. You get that from Colorado Craftbeef.com. And then just awesome steaks.

Primal beef also making a jerky right now, which is tasty. I got some of my bag. That's my lunch today, so let's go. Who you've been hanging out with that you're saying, Hella good. I said that one time. Yeah.

But I'm a kid from the 80s, bro. Yeah, but isn't that in Northern California? Oh, I know. Because Hannah, she went up to. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, she went slow, right? Okay. Who went to Cal?

Who went to Berkeley? Frey. Yeah. You been hanging out with Freya or Hannah? I don't think Freya has ever said hella good. That's where it's going to. I think I brought it directly from the 80s. All right.

Well, it is hell of good. It is hell of good. So check out. Colorado Craftbeef.com, primalbeef.com. Also, subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to Jocco Underground. Check out our YouTube channels. And then, of course, got a bunch of books.

Need the lead by Dave Burke. Get that pre-order. Get that first a dish. First a dish. I've written a bunch of books, too, including a bunch of kids' books. So check those out if you got kids. And then we have Eshlam Front Leadership Consultancy.

We solve problems through leadership. We take the lessons that we learn on the battlefield and let you apply them to your business to your life. So if you want to come to our events, you go to ashtonfront.com. We got the, we just finished the council up in the mountains of Washington State, the middle of nowhere. What an incredible event.

It's like 20 to 25 people there. And two days of just total disconnect from two days, three nights, I think, something like that. But it's awesome. So come and check that out. Also, muster, December, Orlando, Florida, women's assembly, FTX, we call all kinds of stuff. Or we can actually be hired as a consultancy to go to your business, get embedded in your business, figure out what your problems are and solve those problems through leadership. That's what we do there.

And if you need training for your company, you can do online training. Go to extreme ownership.com. We can train your company. Or if you're just an individual human, you have a job. or you have a family or you have friends and you interact with other humans, then guess what? You need to know how to lead. Go to Extreme Ownership.com to learn how to lead.

And also if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families. You want to help Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Leach. She's got an incredible charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. Also, we got Heroes and Horses.org. And then finally, Jimmy May's organization,

Beyond the Brotherhood.org. All those rely on donations to function. So that's what we got going on. Also, if you want to connect with us, you can check out jocco.com and on social media, I'm at Jocko Willing. Echo is at Echo Charles. Just be careful because people want your brain.

They want to possess it. Like possessed. They want to own it. Don't let them own it. Don't let the algorithm own your brain. It'll get you. Also, thanks to our uniformed personnel around the world with a solemn semper-fi to the United States Marine Corps, specifically the old breed. Thank you for your sacrifice and your example.

We will never forget. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all other first responders. Thank you for your sacrifice here at home to keep. us safe and for everyone else out there there's a quote it's an unattributed quote from a Marine that fought on Iwo Jima and he said we were all afraid but we had a job to do and we did it that is a simple but powerful way to think we know what we have to do you know what you have to do at home at work for your team for yourself You know what you have to do.

You know what your mission is. You know that you have a job. So do your job. And that's all I've got for tonight. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.