Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 412 - The Battle of Iwo Jima: Part 1

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys PREORDER JOE'S BOOK https://www.amazon.com/Highlands-Burn-Foundling-Brigade-Saga-ebook/dp/B0GSG5CNXX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QWHSPAADI07D&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.uLEY0I7D6t0IC9GWsF7SH1FKEgKqsqTLmV4PQ_lLi-wVUCYgTqIv0BWd9_-x3VzP.xn7v2CqU5MjngXmmSbYvVGsY_fxkvgsz-LA2tkhHHTs&dib_tag=se&keywords=joseph+kassabian&qid=1774247705&s=digital-text&sprefix=%2Cdigital-text%2C176&sr=1-1 SEE US LIVE MAY 29TH IN LONDON: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-29th-may-tickets-1985443952308 CANT MAKE THE SHOW? WE'RE STREAMING IT! GET YOUR LIVESTREAM TICKETS HERE: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-london-29th-may-2026-tickets-1985444086710 GET SECOND HOME'S DEBUT ALBUM https://secondhomes.bandcamp.com/album/find-a-way-to-hate-it A tiny speck of inhospitable black sand turns into hell on earth as tens of thousands of men slaughter one another over caves, bunkers, and mountains. Armed with explosives, flame throwers, napalm, and more naval gunfire than the Japanese had ever seen, US Marines struggle through one of the most horrific battles of the Pacific Campaign of WWII. Part 1/3 SOURCES: Toll, Ian W. Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944–1945 Allen, Robert E. The First Battalion of the 28th Marines on Iwo Jima: A Day-by-Day History from Personal Accounts and Official Reports, with Complete Muster Rolls. Burrell, Robert S. "Breaking the Cycle of Iwo Jima Mythology: A Strategic Study of Operation Detachment" Toland, John. The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945 Leckie, Robert. The Battle for Iwo Jima Kakehashi, Kumiko. So Sad to Fall in Battle: An Account of War Based on General Tadamichi Kuribayashi's Letters from Iwo Jima Wheeler, Richard. Iwo Jima. Tatum, Chuck. Red Blood, Black Sand: With John Basilone on Iwo Jima

Hey everyone, Joe here. Me, Tom, and Nate are all going to be live May 29th in London at the Rich Mix. So get your tickets and come down and see us. It's going to be a great show. We're going to have some new merch, some shirts, some pins, maybe some book stuff because it coincides the launch of my book, The Highlands Burn. And if you can't make it, that's okay. We're going to be live streaming it. Check out our show notes. Make sure you click on the right link for live show and live stream tickets, whichever one you need, and get your tickets now. The Highlands Burn. My debut fantasy novel releases May 29th and is now available for digital pre-order. You can find the link in the show notes wherever it is you're listening to this. Just like this show, this book is a

completely independent production. To the crack of rifles and the acrid stench of sports, sorcery, a sudden invasion sweeps through the highlands of the Confederation, and Syatt's peaceful village life breaks with the dawn. A sole survivor amid the smoking ruins of all that he held dear, Siyah must make a choice. Is pursuing revenge against the mercenaries that took everything from him worth becoming one himself? As escape pushes him to the gruff embrace of the foundling brigade, he must learn to tread a path between his need to understand why his people were targeted for destruction and the new responsibilities of his soldiers life. Even as each new encounter with the horrors of battle force him to confront the terrible

cost of his oath. Before long, the shifting fog of war casts old certainties into a haze of doubt, while the stuff of legend seems as clear as day, and Syatt finds himself drawn into a much larger conflict that he could possibly imagine. Hello and welcome to the Lions Ed by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Nate fellas. How are you doing? I am living the life of a French peasant from the 1700s in that I did a 14 hour workday yesterday and came home and ate 3,000 calories of patte and bread.

I forgot to drink water all day and when I woke up this morning and took a piss, my piss could have cut a car in half. I said this to you online, but I'm sure the concept of fair to goop maxing existed in, you know, 15th century. 16th century France. The orthographic changes they've recently had make it look less fucked up the way they'd be spelled. But like, they absolutely could be on the brainwave you're on. If they had access to patte and freshly baked bread at any given moment, that's all they'd be eating. Getting frame-mogged by your neighbor, Francois, is just him building a bigger house. How many cigarettes did you smoke during this time period? Oh, fuck me. I think I's, uh, maybe like 20 over the the whole entire day. Because, uh, as people know at this age, I'm

building my own studio and I have like had to go into work at like 7 a.m. every day for different deliveries and saw a delivery from Wix that was an acoustic plasterboard and the man and the woman delivering it looked like asterix and obelisk except the woman was like huge and saw her pick up a 30 kilo sheet of plasterboard which is like two and a half meters long and about like four and a half to five feet wide and just like lifted up like an Atlas stone and I was like what the fuck. Okay. She's training. Yeah, so I am I am living the life of an

Irish builder who lives in Cricklewood in the 90s. I'm in my bed sit, I'm drinking large bottles of cider and pissing like Amber. Yeah, and you're like, all right, once I'm done filling up the spare change jar, I'll use it as a deposit on an entire row house. The only difference is like the Met police aren't showing up to randomly beat you.

Yeah, I have been enjoying, though. the code switching that I have to do when dealing with trades people so I don't feel like a you know an effete social media person it's like yeah I have a fake job no I know which end of a hammer you have to use to take nails out of a wall that makes one of us fellas I've gathered here because I have to ask you a very important question have you heard of a little thing called the Battle of Iwojima yeah that's what I figured the IJJ

in the episode link for recording stood for, but I was like, that's maybe too obvious. But then again, I was like, we haven't covered that yet. That's right. Ever. So, so fair to goop-backing is actually going to be a huge thing here in terms of the human goop made of the mud and slop of just layer upon layer of dead bodies. Like, it's a meal foy cake. We're actually doing a four-part series on the life of Nelson Mandela, and it stands for

In Johannesburg. Oh, I'm going to say, I feel comfortable proclaiming this, possibly the most goop. series we've ever done. All right. Tom, you presage this without knowing it by eating your bread and patte, you know, your goop,

your enormous wet bread you made for yourself. I feel like I need to buy a jar of premium wetness to wetten this bread with. You actually were predicting the next four episodes or three Joe. This is going to be three episodes. Three. Okay. A jar of wet does sound like something I could buy

at a British supermarket. I mean, like you're one to fucking judge living in the Netherlands for crying out loud. everything's a wet meal. I realize you're not Dutch, but like you are... Don't you insult me that way? Square like ground zero of wet meal. Like, you are in the smoldering wreck of wet

meal 9-11 living in the greater Benelux area. No, nay, a jar of wet is just a regional meal you get in Newcastle. Yeah, I was going to see. Exactly. You go to a ship shop and there's like, yeah, that's 6,000 calories and it'll feed an entire family. Get me a jar wet, he is fucking loose like.

Yeah, it sounds like a jar of wet is something to get along with my smack bar. smock barb jar of wet or somebody really really really like just didn't read the brief when they were doing counterfeit pressings of Allison chain CDs jar of wet I mean that's also Seattle fair enough

I'm the jar of wet spreading patch hay on bread won't you come and feel me. All right. I won't do this again, but I have to, I know this is going to be depressing.

Don't make promises you can't keep. Now, fellas, if there was one picture that jumped into the American mind regarding our collective military history, it's probably the flag

raising on Mount Sirabachi by U.S. Marines during the Battle of Uijima in February of 1945. And while the story behind that picture is interesting and horrible in its own right, and we will get to that. The Battle of Iwo Jima as a whole operation tends to be distilled down to that picture alone.

When you do that, you lose all of those strands that weave together to create a horrible human tapestry of tragedy on a very small isolated volcanic island that measures only 8.5 square miles, but would be the place where tens of thousands of people would die. in a grinding bloody fight that would be the only one during the entire Pacific campaign where American casualties would outweigh

Japanese casualties. And if you want to see a tapestry of human tragedy, why not come and see us live at Rich Mix on May 29th in London? Tickets available in the bio see three middle-aged men talk about military history. That's a good ad plug.

I like that. I'm a professional. Yeah. Well, you know, that's the thing. Volcanic islands tend to have grasslands that can get really dry at times when you start launching artillery at it. You may find yourself in a situation where the highlands burn, which is Joe's book that is launching on May 29th while we're as a live book event in addition to the live podcast performance. Man, you guys are just absolutely straining under carrying me through this intro. Well, we heard that people skip the plugs at the beginnings. Like, guess what, motherfuckers? It's a minefield now.

It's a plug minefield. Joe and I are really familiar with those. We only feel at home and we're walking through them. From now on, the first 90 seconds of every episode is just going to be Slob by My Knob by JuCJ. So then you skip forward and then get to the ad read. Oh yeah, by the way. Yes. Yes. Sorry. All right. All right. Guess what episode time.

That's what's finally going to bring us down as a copyright strike by JuCJ. For the next three weeks, we're going to be talking about the Battle of Iwo Jima. Otherwise known as the very confusingly named Operation Detachment, otherwise known as my father's favorite tactical maneuver. You know I had to do at least one. Your dad was the familial Houdini. He did get punched a lot.

He died from one swift punch to the head. That's true. Technically. He's punched in the head by a small packet of iron pellet fists. Yeah, we call that the Remington Ropa Dope. This is a secret. final level of punch out. But first, we have

to talk about a fuckload of contacts. There's no cute way for me to talk about this. The battle of Iwo Jima almost never took place at all. And to understand why that was the case, we have to jump back to June of 1944. American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in

the middle of his re-election campaign for his fourth term as president and touring the country, as well as managing the war, with a stopover in Hawaii to meet a collection of a Pacific Theater Commanders. This is despite the fact that FDR was already very, very sick to the point that they restricted the amount of press that were allowed around him because they were worried that

they might report that he kind of looked like a corpse. Like FDR himself said he felt, quote, rotten on the inside. And someone said that he looked a sickly shade of blue. FDR was experiencing a bodily composition only comparable to cops when they're exposed to a single gram of fiend. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I will say that they did a very good job because if you were to look at the press photos and all the coverage of him, he basically looked like he was jaunting off to

sort of swingers club at all times. He always looked like he usually a very, very fine form. And then you read any historical documents about it. You're like, oh, he was, he was basically like, like Kennedy was absolutely like the picture of perfect health compared to FDR towards the end, at least. And that man was ripped to the gills on fucking painkillers. He had the drugs that would get you so high you would marry the radiator. Absolutely. The first culturally Midwestern president? But it is important to remember here.

At this point of the war, the U.S. and its allies fully believed Japan was effectively already defeated. Guam, Saipan, the Tinian islands were either already taken or in the middle of being taken. The Japanese Imperial Navy had been smashed at the Battle of the Philippines. see so badly they lost three aircraft carriers at a single battle, hundreds of planes and thousands of men, none of which could or would be replaced. Well, the human bodies could certainly be replaced, and they would be. But the quality of men in training and the quality of material,

the generational loss of knowledge and ability that the Imperial Japanese military hemorrhaged at this point was completely irreversible. Japan was in the old tactical death spiral. Everybody knew this shit, even parts of the Japanese military. Some of them were beginning to bring up the fact that, hey, maybe we're losing. And this caused some serious political friction within the flailing Japanese cabinet, though it showed itself in interesting ways. There was only really one man, the minister of the Navy, Mitsumasha Yonai, who kind of voiced the opinion that we need to accept defeat and signed treaties as someone who lost the war. This was very controversial at the time.

Didn't go great for him. Everyone else either accepted that the war was lost, but they had no choice but the fight on anyway, or were sure at some point they'd figure something out and it would turn in their favor. Completely unconvinced that Japan could truly be defeated. The Japanese showing a dedication to this war only rivaled by my dedication to a four-day bender when I was 21. I got two more days than me. It is an interesting sort of counterfactual to imagine if Japan would be like, yeah, fuck it, we lost in 1944. It would be interesting.

When you look at some of these campaigns that we'll be talking about like this one in Okinawa, you're sort of like, yeah, let alone the atomic bombings. It's like, probably would have been better. Yeah, maybe it would have been time to hit the old dusty trail, boys, save a couple hundred thousand lives. Yeah, I feel like when I'm out, it's like, hey, sick, I had three aircraft carriers sunk in a single battle. It's sort of like, this is good. The Imperial Japanese Navy only sinks three aircraft carriers when it's under extreme duress. Yeah, it's auto-saving my last 10 turns, right? They can go back.

The Japanese government trying to save Scum the war? The aid to the emperor, like, guys, I have an idea. Who has the last save state? We're emulating Pearl Harbor. A lot of people don't know that was the basis for Final Fantasy tactics. It's certainly the basis when I play Final Fantasy tactics. Well, yeah, you can absolutely envision the Japanese High Command all. changing their jobs to Squire and just casting yell at each other nonstop so they can get

infinity turns. I heard this works. I heard this works. Gotta throw rocks at the conscripts until I level up. Now, this means allied planning began to shift to answering a not so simple question. How in the fuck do we prove to the Japanese that they are defeated? How many battles do they have to lose to accept our terms, which were unconditional surrender? American military planning had one of two plans in The invasion of Luzon in the Philippines, or, most psychotically, the invasion of Taiwan, or as it was known back then, Formosa. And with that started an argument. What was more important to meet the goals of ending the war? The Central Pacific campaign aimed towards Formosa, or the South Pacific campaign, otherwise known as Douglas MacArthur's revenge side quest.

To make a very long story short here and to cut out a lot of what really boils down, to MacArthur being very mad at people who are not listening to him. Virtually all of the military's planners believe that the central Pacific offensive towards Taiwan was the way to go. At first, I should say here, this changes quite rapidly. Japan was weak and the offensive was a shorter route towards the home islands, while the southern campaign would just keep spreading the war across the Pacific until MacArthur finally killed enough people to repair his broken ego.

There were other arguments as well, and I'm and I should lay those out, otherwise people will be mad at me. The Southern Offensive was a good idea, at least for a little while. In the beginning of the war, as we've talked about on a lot of episodes at this point, the United States was not exactly ready for a war in the Pacific. It took time to build up strength, capabilities, and slowly chip away at the Japanese. But those years were over, and the U.S. forces in the Pacific were more than capable and strong enough, and the Japanese weak enough.

That stabs that previously thought of as unconquerable islands were more than possible. At the heart and solved the central offensive at this point was the invasion of Taiwan. However, the commanders in the Pacific weren't feeling too great about that. For people who are unaware, as far as islands go, Taiwan is pretty goddamn big. It's roughly the size of the country of the Netherlands, which I know is small in the context of Europe. But in the scope of the island hopping campaign of the Pacific, it might as well be the size of the Soviet Union. For example, Okinawa, the largest single island that the U.S. would invade during the campaign, we'll talk about that some series in the future. There's only about 450 square miles.

Taiwan is 13,000. Fuck. Yeah. Problem. You could see how some commanders were like, uh, fuck. I don't know if we could do that, guys. Just being hit up at, I got the facilities for that big man. Any invasion of Taiwan would be at the scale of or greater than the Normandy landings.

And just to be safe, if they were going to pull it off, this would be the largest logistical operation the Pacific campaign would ever see. So in order to facilitate it, they would have to take Luzon anyway. From this developed competing plans for the coming invasion. Well, maybe we only need to invade southern Taiwan, or maybe just that part, or this part. it was from the top down, like the biggest idea from the guy will get to, but like, he's like, no, we need to invade Taiwan. And all the sub commanders were like, okay, but what if we only took part of it? That seems doable.

What if we didn't do this at all? Yeah. Well, as we know, that's eventually what they would settle on. But at this point, like, the naval commanders in the Pacific are really trying to get their boss to scale back his idea. The commander for what would have been known as Operation Clearance would have been as Operation Clearance would have been as. Admiral Raymond Spruent. And when he was asked directly if he could pull off an invasion of Taiwan, the most optimistic answer he gave anybody was pretty much,

uh, yeah, probably, maybe? Admiral Chester Nimitz and virtually everyone else was really not keen on the idea of a Taiwan invasion. Spruent says, quote, I don't like the Formosa idea, which is about as objectionable as an admiral can get. Yeah, it needs to work in more, you know, 2020's H.R. language into, I think we need to, you know, pivot on this idea of invading Formosa. Let's retriangulate and circle back to this, you know, maybe in a week. I'm really looking into disrupting the volcano infrastructure. I'm going to disrupt this island

with a massive artillery barrage. As per my previous email, which read, fuck no. We got to put FDR at the group chat and just start sending him memes about Taiwan. Maybe he'll understand. I don't know. Put FDR. in the group chat, but now he keeps mixing it up with his other group chats. He keeps sharing his pro infidelity means. That's the same group chat. This is a group of naval officers after all. RIPFDR, you would have loved to be in our group chat where I send in like clips of Balefunk and Polish robots chasing pigs in a car park. So instead of Taiwan, Spruance pitched a new idea, an invasion of Iwo Jima, then followed by an invasion of Okinawa,

because it would follow the same goal. The only man solidly in the pro-invade Taiwan side of things was Admiral Ernest King, who had quite frankly a scary amount of power within the U.S. Navy during World War II. What a fucking name. Ernest King, what an Ernest King. You tell him any plan, he's up for it.

Dude, there's quite a few name alerts of this one. Yeah, I figured there was the era for that kind of a thing. I have to say, while researching this series, I found what has to be the most interesting grip of dudes. I think we were ever going to talk about a single series. I'm really confident my ability to promise that. I do enjoy, you know, moving through the various different eras of particularly U.S. military history and the, you can really tell the delineation of time by like whether guys are being called like Ignatius or Leonidas. And then now we're like dealing with guys called Horatio Crumcake.

Put a pin in that one Fuck you, no I got a name that's close I promise Nate is nodding his head silently FDR made King Commander of the US fleet

and chief of naval operations making only one man in the entire Navy the fleet Admiral William Leahy because he was FDR's chief of staff to be the man that can outrank him not counting FDR himself This guy could make plans and approve his own plans

if he wanted to which isn't a great idea, but he did a fine job as far as a military commander being given that much power. Despite virtually every other Pacific commander being against the invasion of Taiwan, King was still very much in favor of the invasion of Taiwan, and it probably would have happened if it wasn't for FDR, who was surprisingly good at his job as commander-in-chief as far as those things tend to go. He also was somewhat of an interesting figure in the way that he organized, and ran things, you know, from the beginning, that he was pretty hands-on. He was not really a

delegator. And he loved kind of like pitting his staffs against each other. Yeah. He was good. I mean, he wasn't like a full-on burnout, you know, psychosis thing. Like, he was actually quite good at it. But like, his style was definitely not one of like the experts have given me their expert opinion. So I'm going to sign it. Like he did. It was like putting bees in a jar and shaking it to make it fight brackets positive. Yeah. Exactly. It's quite striking when you read about this stuff. Yeah. Especially as a guy like as infirm. as he was. Especially at this time.

Yeah, yeah, for real. When FDR arrived in Hawaii for his meeting, he purposely did not invite Admiral King to it. Rather, he and his chief of staff, Leahy, met with other Pacific commanders without him, worried that King's influence in the room would stop any dissenting opinions. And interestingly, this was only a worry that FDR had,

not his officers. Say whatever you will about King, and I'm not here to say I'm a huge fan of him or whatever. But when he did have meetings, he always made sure that dissenting opinions were heard and recorded in the meetings minutes, not saying that he would always listen to them, but he would also never just shut them down. But FDR also knew he had his mind solidly set on Taiwan. So he's like, ah, why don't you stay at home, big shot? I won't interrupt in the song, but I immediately thought of George Harrison's, I got my mindset on you. But it's, I'm going to take Formosa, the great big aisle of Formosa.

You could actually have some fun with it. way. Yeah, he had his mindset on it. It's George Harris and sung set to the tune of screaming artillery barrages. Yeah, it's basically breakcore. As for what was exactly said in the meeting, we don't know. No minutes were kept. And the only real firsthand accounts we have are of Douglas MacArthur,

who, as always, really likes to make himself the protagonist any story he tells. But the general feeling was that FDR went into the meeting not really wanting to invade Luzon. MacArthur chalked that up to FDR fearing that the American people would be a bit shy of losing a large number of soldiers. History has shown that to be very much not true. Nobody else agrees with MacArthur's appraisal of this meeting. And by all accounts, MacArthur being who he was, just kind of dominated the meeting. Going so far as to question FDR's ability to get reelected if he didn't invade Luzon. And he did this to FDR's face, which was considered a bit of a party foul, something.

MacArthur is famous for when it comes to his boss. Yeah, I mean, MacArthur famously didn't salute the fucking president. Yeah. When it was Truman. So, yeah, like he's old Douglas M. Famous for being a dumb piece of shit. Yeah, he sucks. Whatever happened in this meeting, FDR was obviously very unhappy with MacArthur saying

afterwards, quote, give me an aspirin. In fact, give me another aspirin to take after that one. In all of my life, nobody's ever talked to me the way that MacArthur did. He was like one. volume level down on the knob from yelling at the president. And FDR was the kind of guy that would let people yell at him and then would just ignore them anyway. He wasn't exactly a boisterous dude, especially when he's half dead in his wheelchair. You know?

Meanwhile, the planning stages for the invasion of Taiwan continued with each man involved actually planning the thing hating the idea. This got to the point that Admiral Forrest Sherman, Nimitz's deputy chief of staff, the guy being in charge of working on Nimitz's plans, stating that when he did write up an operational plan, he did so, so badly, on purpose, that people would have no choice but to reject it. Goddamn admirals and they're quiet quitting.

But by August, Nimitz was saying that the operation would require over a half a million ground troops, while Spruance was actively campaigning against the operation, trying instead to sell people on his combined Iwo Jima Okinawa idea. Spruance became so convinced. convinced that planning for an invasion of Taiwan was pointless that when the wonderfully named Army General Simon Bolivar Buckner was in the meeting of a briefing about his preparations because he was going to be the ground commander for a Taiwan operation. Spruent simply stood up,

interrupted him, and began explaining his plans to invade Iwo Jima completely unprompted. This is such a great error for names because you'll have like, you know, Admiral Mercutio Vanderbilt. And then like his chief petty officer is a guy. named Al Fuck. And it's just like that just reflects the strata of American society they came from. Most importantly, he did all this with the idea in mind that MacArthur was going to get his way about Luzon, which, as we all know, he would. And he put a timetable for any invasion of Iwo and Okinawa to come after the completion of

the Philippines campaign. Like, he knew that MacArthur was going to get his way. So he's like, I'm not going to fight this motherfucker. It's pointless. Hey, it's hard to argue when Aguilla will hit the president with. clothes, whack me. I'm fresh as fuck. I mean,

MacArthur is worse than Patton at being up his own ass, which really takes some work. Yeah. So, confirmed or not, did MacArthur fuck his own cousin? Unconfirmed. Unconfirmed. Yeah. No, FDR, on the other hand.

And he was a Roosevelt after all. Well, exactly. He's like, being a Roosevelt was interesting because like one cousin is the president and the other cousin is your wife. Like, I do love the idea that in any planning room, it's the U.S. military in this war, there's always someone in there who's clapping cheek with their cousin. Always at least one.

Horrible. People who don't realize Teddy Roosevelt is obviously Franklin Delano Roosevelt's cousin, but distant cousin. And Eleanor Roosevelt, uh, her last name was Roosevelt before they got married because she was, I think, also similar to like fifth or six cousin. Yeah. I think she was Teddy Roosevelt's niece. Something like that.

Yeah. They were related. That's why JFK was so great because he was the first American president to not fuck his cousins. Yeah. He just fucked everybody else's cousin. That's why he married into the Bouviers, because they were all cousin fuckers. He brought equilibrium back to the White House.

Yeah, and now he is actually canonically related to Homer Simpson's wife, March. Yep. Spruance and MacArthur would both eventually win out, and Admiral King gave up on Taiwan, agreeing to an invasion of Luzon, followed by an invasion of Iwo and then Okinawa. As the war ground on, as you can tell by the dates, the invasion of Iwojima is still a long way. off. But as the Americans got closer to the island, for example, the invasion of Saipan, it was not long before planes began bombing Iwo Jima. The first of these flights was conducted by Task Force 38.1, because we've officially got a Navy that's so big, the task forces have

decibel points in them. All right. This is under the command of easily one of the coolest dudes have ever stumbled across. Jocko Clark. Yes. Great name alert. Jocko is not his original name, it was a nickname that he insisted he'd go by. But Clark is an interesting guy who does a really good job showing how close some events are in American history to others in ways you probably never previously understood. He was born in the Cherokee Nation in 1893. And I don't mean on a reservation. I mean, he was born on Cherokee land and not a citizen of the United States. Oh, yes, yes, this guy gets so much cooler by the minute. I should point out here that he wouldn't be born a citizen regardless if he was on a reservation or not, because that bill was not signed

until the 1920s. But yeah, he was not born in the United States legally. But he was the first Native American to ever be admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy, the first Native American to ever be commissioned a naval officer. He's the first Native American everything within the U.S. Navy, the first to command a ship, the first to become an admiral, first to do it all, right? On top of a dude who solidly rocks. He was also married to an absolute weirdo. His wife Olga, no known real last name. Before...

Okay. Before her surname was Clark, she had like three different ones, both married names and just invented ones. So it's kind of hard to tell which one was real. She was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, and was first married to an officer of the white Russian army. she insisted was related to Jenghis Khan, which in turn made her a princess.

Her evidence of this is that he told her that. I know we haven't brought it up in a long time, but Nate, these two people are the most MGS3 people we've heard of in a long fucking time. The man of no nation who was born on Cherokee lands who rose through the ranks and was a fucking badass and his Georgian wife who has no last name. Yeah, exactly, because they couldn't figure out. out how to do the U.S. citizenship form for someone whose name was sniper wolf. So they just called her Olga. They're like, whatever. That's good enough. I promise you, it gets weirder. So the man who

insisted that he was related to Jenghis Khan dies, but she keeps calling herself a princess. She then married a chess grand champion. He dies. Then she marries an Olympic gold medalist Rower, who also dies. And she meets and marries Jaco Clark of the 1960s. At their wedding, she insisted that she insisted that she was referred to as her royal highness of House Khan? In the 1960s. But that is not the

only royal house that she claimed to be a part of. Yeah, in the 1960s. This isn't happen until after World War II, but I could not leave this out. It's really unrelated to anything. I just really had to tell the story about the fake Princess Bride who may or may not have killed several of

her husbands. Oh, Oticon. Give me a run down of the wolf and the white princess. So correct me for a moment, but you said their wedding in the 1960s. Like, wasn't, wouldn't he, would have been really, really old.

He was pretty old, yeah. So, he was only alive for a couple of years afterwards. Damn, I guess she's fucking, she got her job done. He's like, all right. Great job. Agent Khan. Now head for the next exit.

We found Mongolia and Anna Nicole Smith. Oh, that's sad. That's sad because Anna Nicole Smith never heard anybody. This moment was constantly accused of being a black. black widow. Fair. True. So technically, the first Native American admiral is, if you believe her, a royal related to

Jenghis Khan through marriage. So he basically, not only is he a member of the Cherokee Nation and the first Native American to be admitted to the Naval Academy and commissioned as a naval officer, he's also, he married into the Golden Horde. Yes. Correct. And I'm choosing to believe it. Why not?

Both, you know, horseback riding people, you know, both. very good at archery. I love the idea that she was so obviously lying, uh, by proxy of her first husband lying about his broil background that he's just like, yeah, fuck it. It's house con. That's what he called himself. Like, that's not what that. Khan was not Jengis's surname. Truly a golden era of American liars. Yeah. It's so good. There's like a 60 year period from like 1880 up until like the end of the war where you can just say it's like, I'm the guy who invented the cardboard box and people will believe you. Anyway, Jocko began setting planes to bomb Iwo, targeting it as it made a pretty good relay station for Japanese planes heading towards Saipan.

The air raids turned to something of a game for his men. And this is from the book Twilight of the Gods for our full source list, of course. And there's way too many to name this time. Check out our show notes. Quote, Clark later said that he regarded those islands his special property. and his aviators nicknamed them the Jokogima. This is not part of the quote, but because Iwo Jima is part of one of many islands with the second word Jima. Upon returning to Enatawak the previous month, they had drawn up stock certificates

in an imaginary real estate investment company, the Jokogima Development Corporation, which was advertised as a business as the acquisition and development of exclusive sites in the Bonin Islands. Designated shareholders were presented. with colorfully illustrated stock certificates which entitled the owner to a share of quote choice locations on all types in Iwo Chi Chi ha ha ha and Muko Jima only 500 miles from downtown Tokyo

as president of the make-believe firm Clark side each certificate with his own hand the certificate soon became prized collector's items and were traded in some cases for real money throughout the Pacific and all the way to Washington DC This dude fucking rocks so

much. There's definitely like an insane Japanese collector whose house is like, or well, I suppose apartment is like 100 square feet and there's just like five square feet in the middle that he has to sleep standing up in and just has all of these stocks. You know what's interesting is just I realize that like, yeah, there's a much bigger picture we have to get to. But looking at some of the volcano islands, what you're describing, there's a part of me that's like I know that there was, I think aerial bombardments like there was a there wasn't a huge battle at Ha hajima, but To me, it's just sort of like, you're an American center broad to do your government's bidding me. And just like, sweet.

Can't wait to get my face blown off on Ha, ha, Jima. That sounds like to start of like the World War II version of the Joker. Like, and you might remember that the name Chi Chi Jima as sounding familiar. We've done an episode on Chi Chi Jima on this show. It's probably best known as the island where George H.W. Bush was nearly cannibalized on. Right. Right. Oh, if only.

He was part of a flight of bombers that were shot down. They were captured by the Japanese garrison on Chichijima, and only George H.W. Bush was not murdered and cannibalized. He managed to escape. These bombing runs continued until after the fall of Saipan as the island was built up with men and planes, with many of the pilots flooding in being relatively new and without really any experience. So it was determined that this new batch of dudes would bomb Iwo Jima and other places as a way to get real world training. These bombings would eventually become so routine that the pilots in them milk runs. And what is interesting about this phase of the wars, yes, the Japanese imperial military is still fighting, but it was pretty much dead on its feet, especially regarding the ability of its army air service and its naval air wings. This is during the peak of the deployment of kamikazis, and this is not the only time we're going to talk about them in the series,

who fell under both the army and navy because even when it came to killing yourself, the Japanese military argues, over who got what? The kamikazis were absolutely terrifying. Even if they were not exactly super effective, they were a brilliant terror weapon. They scared their shit out of the U.S. Navy. The collapse of the Imperial Navy left the U.S. of the Pacific in a very weird spot. They were so geared towards countering the Imperial Navy, which by now barely existed at all, but they weren't prepared to defend against kamikazis who were largely coming from land bases. They had a desperate shortage of fighter pilots to counter them because they've been deploying so many torpedo bombers and bombers to counter the fleet. So the new fighter planes like the F6F-HELCAT because we used to name

things cool back then got rushed to the Pacific. It was decided to plug the gap in the needed fighter pilots by simply having naval bomber pilots with no previous fighter training to just jump in those planes because it was thought that like the Japanese Air Corps from either services is such a small threat that these bomber pilots in a fighter plane for the first time would probably be fine against what Japan could throw in the sky at that point.

The last thing a Japanese kamikaze pilot will see is just a plane being piloted by a guy from Iowa careening towards them with Betty Boop with massive knockers on the side. It's called like Booper 6. Yeah. They thought that the only thing

they would have to do to get these bomber pilots ready to be fighter pilots. was a two hour long check flight, which was mostly doing, can you take off and land the fighter plane? Okay, you'll figure out the rest.

It's like when you'd get a job and they make you do a manual handling course and it's just a video from like 2006 of a skeleton lifting a box. It's almost every on the job training that I've ever had. Also, the Hellcat could carry a bomb.

So it was a bit of a twofer. Like the bomber pilots could still drop bombs if they needed to. That's my emotional support bomb. That's like, you know, it needs to be in. the plane for me to feel comfortable flying it. I need to be surrounded by at least a 500 pound bomb at all times.

Just don't tell my landlord. These pilots then got more training during these milk runs, as they're sometimes called breakout flights, bombing Iwo Jima and the other islands. And bombing Iwo is a good way to degrade the dwindling ability of the Japanese air service, as it was being used as a base to deploy fighter interceptors against American bombers on their way to plaster the home islands.

However, what the Americans didn't know was, On Iwo Jima, the rapidly dying Japanese air capability stationed there, were being drawn away towards the home islands, or at minimum, simply not being replaced. Japan had two main worries, and neither of them was Iwo. One was the possible invasion of Taiwan, which, as we know, would never happen, and the other was preparing to defend the home islands. So, they didn't think Iwo was that important. That being said, Japan was losing so much so fast that it didn't really matter.

Even if Japan wasn't currently having its industrial base blown to pieces by American bombing rains. And to be clear here, they absolutely were. Even if that wasn't happening, they didn't have the industrial ability to replace their losses from the last two years. We'll eventually talk about the Battle of the Philippine Sea at length, but just for the context here, Japan lost 600 planes. And in the Solomon Islands, they lost another several hundred, and that's just two battles. Even if somehow they didn't lose thousands of pilots over the same time frame, they were never going to replace these losses, even if their industry was still working. This circles back around to the planning table of the Americans and why they ended up zeroing in on Iwo Jima.

For starters, the island was pretty worthless for the Navy. There's no harbor there to speak of. Anything that would be used for that would need to be built. But it was thought of as another step towards the home islands. Remember at this stage of the war, pretty much everybody assumes that's how it's going to end. Americans fighting in the streets of Tokyo. But they still needed a reason, a tactical reason for the invasion. So U.S. planners fell on the same idea that the Japanese were using it for, an aircraft relay station.

The bombing campaign over Japan would continue and everybody knew that. And flying long-range bombers over Japan meant that fighter escorts could not travel with them. They were flying way too far. And that meant all those bombing raids were completely unprotected outside of the guns that the bombers could carry. If Iwo was captured, hypothetically, it could act as a staging point for fighter escorts and cut down on flight times. This is not what it would be used for. At all? Literally never.

We'll talk more about the aftermath of Battle Iwo Jima at par three, obviously, but that is the main argument going forward. As far as the American plan went, it was cut and dry. At this point of the war, the Minnan Command Spruent's operational commander known as Task Force 50, and under him, Task Force 51, making up the joint expeditionary force, under the command of Admiral's Richmond Turner and Henry Hill were veterans of the island hopping campaign. All of them held commands over previous landings. There wasn't going to be anything revolutionary here.

At this stage, we've talked about other landings, most of them, honestly, like Tarawa, uh, Pelilu, things like that, every time they'd learn something new and implement it in the future. Iwo Jima was to be seaboard landing perfected. at least to the mid in command. We know this is not what would happen, but in their minds, they didn't have anything new to add to the mix.

The recipe was perfect. For people who don't have a map in front of you, and why would you? If you're driving, in fact, make sure you pick up your phone and look up a map of Iwo Jima right now. Iwojima tapers down to a point with Mount Surabachi at the south end of it.

In the middle, there's two airfields. The Japanese were constructing a third, but they never finished it. So the US plan boiled down to hitting the islands with enough explosives to make God wins and then landing Marines in either side of it and then cut through the middle, splitting the island in half. Then with the Japanese forces broken up, they would advance south, take Mount Surabachi, meet in the middle again, and then advance north.

We'll talk more about the finer details later, but just know that for now. Just as a point, what does the topography and kind of environment look like on Iwo Jima? is like there are lots of trees, lots of jungles. Oh boy, we'll get there. It's bad. Okay. The landings would be timed with the tides to allow the first wave to hit the beaches inside LVTs or more commonly known as Amtraks. They suck.

We've talked about Amtrak's at length in the past. They still suck. Now, we've talked an awful lot about the United States so far. So with that, let's talk about Japan and the preparations they were making for Iwojima. So as soon as the Americans hit Saipan, The Japanese become very aware that Iwo Jima would be their next target, which was a problem because they had done absolutely nothing to prepare it for an invasion. Enter General Tadamichi, Kuriabashi,

probably best known in the world now for being played by the absolutely wonderful Ken Watanabe in the 2006 film, Letters from Iwo Jima. I love that movie. It is the only good thing Klanese would have ever made, and I hate that he's involved with it, but I'll watch anything with Ken Wantanabe in it. He's a guy I find incredibly interesting. interesting? And by interesting, and I do not think Kyriabayashi is a good man. You can be

interesting and a piece of shit. We are talking about an officer in the Imperial Japanese military in World War II after all. Curia Bayashi was born into the samurai family of the Sanada clan in 1891. And while he was born with never-ending amount of social privilege, he and his family had pretty much squandered away their actual wealth during the Meiji period. At first, he had no intention of joining the military. Rather, he studied English, which he spoke fluently, and he wanted to become a journalist. Please help. My family is broke. My father has spent

all his money on all these French nudie mags that are now flooding the country. And my son wants to be a journalist. We're going to be poor forever. No, son, you're going to join the army. Actually, maybe this is why you like him, Joe. Actually, what is weird? He did not get pressured to join the military by his family. Other students said that he

was very much not the picture of a military officer. He had a tendency of bucking the Japanese norms for the day. He fought back against teachers that treated students badly. And at one point, organized a wildcat student strike against them, which, you know, in Japan during this era, normally gets your ass beat by the cops, which is exactly what happened to him. Though eventually, he was pressured by his own teachers to attend the military academy. All right.

I found the one man that has worse teachers than me. He became a cavalry officer and graduated 26th in his class. So not spectacular. But from there, he goes to command staff college and he graduates at the top. It's because that he is good at planning. He's not exactly a great commander. He's really good at planning. He does so well that he is given a sword personally by the emperor and allowed to study abroad,

which was considered a massive privilege at the time. the time. So, he chose to go to the United States. He gets to the U.S. in 1928 and moves in with a normal family in Buffalo, New York. Poor bastard had to watch really bad hockey. And according to the book, so sad to fall in battle, which I sourced heavily for anything to do with his personal life, he loves the United States. He was taught normal American shit by this upstate New York family. He was taught how to drive by a friend in the U.S. Army. He bought a race car. And then he went on road trips, taking courses at random colleges along the way. That rules.

This dude rocks at this point. I will clarify, at this point, he rocks. Yeah, yeah. He hasn't done anything personally terrible yet. Stops on his road trip included Boston and Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is fun. And while doing so, he starts staying on army bases because, you know, he's a military officer. He's kind of hanging out with army officers, learning shit from them, getting tours of the military, like the Navy, manufacturing places, stuff like that.

And then he becomes close personal friends with Army General George Van Horn Mosley. You might be wondering what the two men have in common. That is the love for drinking incredibly large quantities of whiskey, playing poker, and fascism. I was wondering if it was going to be

one of those types of Mosleys. Yeah, yeah, all Moseley's are bastards, it turns out. Yeah, this dude, like, just taking a break between like whipping shitties in his Ford Model T outside the general store to bond with the American Oswald Moseley over like hatred of minorities. It probably should come as no surprise here

that an officer in the Japanese Imperial Army from an old samurai family was a bit of a fascist and that distinct Japanese imperial flavor, but Moseley was such a fascist and anti-Semite that speeches given by him on college campuses were protested by students in 19-fucking 51. This guy was rough. Oh, God. Look, at least they, but even back then they were protecting free speech on college campuses.

Anyway, Curry Bayashi, while touring army bases in towns and seeing the U.S. wrote letters back to his wife. Almost all of these letters came in like one of three flavors. One, how much he missed her, two, the U.S. fucking rules we should move here. And the third, which is, Japan could never, ever, ever defeat the United States in a war. I hope we never do it. He eventually returns to Japan, gets promoted a few times. and was posted to Canada as Japan's military attache, took a slight break to become a singer-songwriter,

and by 1940, he was a general. Okay. By 1941, he was sent to the field for the very first time in China. We don't really need to talk about what the Imperial Army got up to in China. We did an entire series on that. Feel free to go listen to it. But Kuriibayashi was in the thick of unspeakable war crimes in Guangdong and the eventual invasion of Hong Kong

as chief of staff of the 23rd Army of the Imperial Japanese Army. In case you're wondering what exactly was going on there, just as a measure, the man that he was chief of staff for, General Takashi Sakai, the commander of the 23rd Army, was executed for war crimes.

So these are the things that he is involved in. That was a good chance that that also would have been how Kuri Bayashi's life ended if, you know, Iwo Jima doesn't happen. And while I should point out, that there is zero evidence that he ordered any atrocities personally to take place, but he wouldn't have. He's chief of staff.

But there is the concept of command responsibility, which we've also talked about on the show before it. And that's how Sakai was executed. There is no evidence that he ordered any war crimes, but tons of men under him did. Therefore, it is his responsibility. And due to his upbringing, he was part of the army faction of the imperial government. So it's fair to say that he was probably fine with everything that was happening. Men were executed for war crimes for far less than that.

I really did need to point this out because we're going to talk about him more as a commander on Iwo Jima, and doing so requires us to sound quite favorable to him. So I want to make sure that everybody knows that he's a real asshole and I hate him. Everybody happy now. Okay. Despite everything, Keri Baiashi's soldiers loved him. And this is the first Japanese officer I've ever said this about. This is such a rarity within the IJA.

I don't think I've ever heard it uttered before. He wasn't known to hit his soldiers. He refused to allow other officers to hit soldiers under him. And when they were sick or injured, he would visit them in the hospital. That all sounds like nothing. But this is considered beneath officers in Japan. He would also eat with his men. He would share their horrible rations rather than enjoying the privileges his ranks would give him, at least some of the time.

And I know this all sounds pretty basic. but the bar for an IJA officer is on the fucking ground here. They were known to be horrifically vicious disciplinarians, which is one of the reasons why they create that culture within the military, and he hated that. While his soldiers liked him, his fellow officers absolutely hated him, namely his boss, General Sakai. Like we've talked about before in regards to the IJA politically, there was a culture of officers doing whatever the fuck it was that they wanted to try and show up the.

their superiors for advancement. If they succeeded, all was great, and nobody cared that you ignored orders to do it. If you failed, then it was on you. This is a practice known as Gekujo, or the low overcomes the high. Most men in the army political faction love this shit. I not only put up with it from their officers, but it had almost certainly benefited from it early in their careers. Koryabayashi thought all this is dumb as hell, and was counterintuitive to having a well-functioning military. And he is correct. When several officers launched attacks without orders, he recommended them to be charged with insubordination.

Sakai never charged anyone and told Kuribayashi to shut the fuck up about it. At the same time, he planned the invasion of Hong Kong. Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor to his utter horror. Almost as soon as he heard about the attack, Kuryabayashi was telling anyone who would listen, and most of those people wouldn't actually listen, that Japan need to make peace immediately, to any terms that the U.S. would offer.

After this, in the previous attempt to charge men for disobeying orders, Sakai transferred Karebayashi to commit a training unit within the Japanese Imperial Guard back at home. And while doing so was a prestigious post on paper, it was considered something of a dead end. It was like being promoted out of the way. It was garrison training duty and then guard duty, far away from the battlefield. During his time kicking the tires on his career,

he never stopped telling people that Japan should take the first available exit and get out of the war or they would lose openly. It's kind of crazy that he was not arrested at some point. This all but ejected him from the army faction political group and made every single man with any amount of power within the Tojo administration, the peak of army faction political power, hate him and label him a defeatist, which I should remind you is actually a crime at the time. But he kind of gets away with it. And the only reason why he was never charged with anything was that Emperor Hirohito personally liked him and he kept getting personal audiences with the emperor. So he was pretty much bulletproof for many legal fallout.

But that would not save him for very long. Now, despite the kind of mythos that has formed around him and I'm admittedly adding to, nobody ever believed he was a good battlefield commander. He had never held a battlefield command. At any level, he was a chief of staff. he was a plans guy. So, he was given command of the 109th Division, the garrison of the Bonin Islands,

which includes Iwo Jima. I've seen some sources putting him at like the 100th best general in Japan at the time, or having maybe the most 100th most combat experience for such a posting. Personally, I just really like the idea of military leader saber metrics here, but like nobody thought that he was the best man for the job. Welcome to Watch Mojo's top 100 Japanese generals. No matter what way you spin it, nobody thought that he was a good commander and he would see Iwojima through the coming emergency.

Hell, even the invasion of Hong Kong that he planned kind of went to shit. Instead, several Japanese historians, including Kumiko Takahashi, the author of So Sad to Fall in Battle, said that he was given this assignment because everybody knew it was a suicide mission and they finally saw a way to get rid of him. That fucking sucks. The only Japanese Imperial Army General with a I was about to say any kind of sense of humanity,

but like this guy is a fascist at the end of the day. I suppose he's the most normal fascist general out of an entire army of fascist generals. Right. It's like when you talk about certain people like the quote unquote anti-Hitler Nazis that tried to kill him like von Stauffenberg. They were totally on board with like 90%.

of what was happening. Just like Keri Bayashi truly believed in the expansion of the Japanese Empire, as long as it didn't include fucking with America. Yes. I mean, he did love America, but like, he just thought that the Japan would get dusted at any war. Like, he was very practical about his objections. The first instance of woke fascism. I'm so sick of my woke imperial Japanese generals.

When Keri Baiashi finally gets to Iwo Jima, he's faced with a monumental task. He knew he and his men were sent to die. Make no mistake about that. He told his wife as much. When he left Japan, it was goodbye, goodbye. He knew he was not coming back. But he also knew that he needed to kill as many Americans as possible while doing so. But he wasn't given much to make that achievable.

Iwo Jima hadn't been reinforced or built up in any way and had about 6,000 men stationed on it, which is nothing. Life on Iwo is absolutely miserable, even compared to the standard level of misery. that was expected in Japanese island garrisons. Iwo is a volcanic island that is still actively venting heat and sulfur through the black cinder, which kind of looks like sand on its surface. In short, the island was hot in the way that standing on a blacktop parking lot is in the middle of summer, like it's amplified artificially. And of course, the whole place smelled like nasty farts thanks to the sulfur.

The volcanic sand also made digging anything virtually impossible. As soon as you dug it, it would collapse. So previous commanders, simply hadn't done it. Curry Bayashi tours the island, and he sees that the topography of the island is nothing but black sand and cliffs. So it begins to draw up his plan. According to his letters back home,

this took only two hours. The reason for this quick thinking isn't that he's some kind of genius. It's that 50% of battlefield planning is just kind of taken out of his hands. He knew that Americans had unparalleled naval and air supremacy. He was not going to compete with it, so he just won.

50% of planning done, right? So he chucked any plan of beating the invasion on the beach straight out the window, as any positions built there would be sitting ducks to get bombed by the air and the sea. Ewa also offers no natural cover other than cliffs. Any positions outside of those cliffs would be in the open. And there's no way you can sit out out in the open and face bombardments and bombings. So, he came to the only practical conclusion. We'll have to go under the island.

What? Tunnel mode. Rat mode. Tactical rat mode. Yet again. This is the most anybody's ever Molmax in the history of this podcast. See, we had Nazi diglet. Now we have IJA or fascist diglet.

Yeah. And I will say that this particular diglet is the champion of diglitz. Because when the battle of Iwo Jima begins, and we'll get there, obviously, the imperial Japanese military, the vast majority of them in the caves and tunnels, which we'll talk about, never see the light of day again. Like they literally live underground and fight underground until they die. He occasionally would come out of his cave to like get a few minutes of sunlight and mostly fresh air. Again, we'll talk about that in a second. But once they went in into Iwo Jima, they never came out. We're fighting chilled warfare. He would array his forces in the island instead of a

complex system of caves, tunnels, and bunkers, and they had only come to the surface and heavily reinforced blockhouses that could withstand punishment. The majority of his forces would need to be positioned between the two airfields, knowing that any invasion would be gunning for them. Then, obviously, Mount Surabachi would be reinforced, but the true gem of his defenses was the Motoyama Plateau, which is the north part of the island. He would create an impassable citadel there. dug into the rocks. And just the terrain there is terrible. It is sheer cliff faces and valleys.

There's no good way up that plateau, even if there wasn't 22,000 Japanese soldiers inside of it. And remember, all of this is happening while the island is being bombed at will. There are several Japanese pilots on the ground at Iwo who were stationed there, but they had no plagues left to fly anymore. So they just got their shit rocked around the clock like everybody else. There was also the gauntlet that the supplies and reinforcements ordered Ewo had to run through in order to get to the garrison there at all.

Not only did Kuriayashi have all of that to deal with, he also did deal with the realities of the Japanese military, namely entrenched branch-based political factionalism between the Army and Navy. Talked about this exhaustively before. It's something I'm truly obsessed with. But this routinely exploded into violence and coups over the years. Army and Navy officers and their sailors and soldiers on Iwo Jima when he arrived, slept separately, ate separately, and constantly argued over who got what supplies, leading to all of them stealing

from one another. And I should be clear here, there wasn't shit to steal in the first place. Yeah, you're fighting on Far Island over dirt. There's an underground battle going on between the Iwo and the Morlocks? For starters, most importantly, to the deprivation that the Japanese would be going through here, there's no natural source of drinking water on Iwojima. It was a

volcanic island. So digging wells was pointless. Yeah. And any water that came from the ground was contaminated with sulfur and would at best make you violently ill if you drank it or kill you. Your skin would be fucking great though, I'm sure. When you vomit

the sulfur on yourself, it's very purified. just constantly steamed like a dumpling. Starving to death, dying of thirst, but you have absolute flawless skin care. Little did I know

that the my thing at the start of this episode about my piss being able to cut a car and half was going to be strangely prescient to a imperial

Japanese soldier stuck on Iwojima. Yeah, because I mean there are places in Micronesia and you know, in the Central Pacific where like,

yeah, there's enough of the weather paders created enough rainfall. Freshwater collects, but like that's not every island. Some islands.

It's just not really any water. It sucks. The water that came out of the ground, the Japanese nicknamed it the devil's water or my personal favorite devil juice. Yeah. Because they never had enough water. So like even when they were getting supplies and again, we'll get to that in a second, there was always this water that would come up and, you know, they're literally dying of thirst

even before the battle begins. Like they do not have enough water. So it requires the most amount of like self-control to not be like, well, maybe I'm different, maybe I can drink the devil juice. And a lot of people take a chance on it. And they shit and vomit the brains out. The garrison was shipped water from nearby islands, but it never arrived unbombed enough to fully supply them for what they needed.

And again, this is before the invasion starts. Most of the water they got came from collected rainwater. But as more and more reinforcements showed up, remember they started with 6,000. Now there's over 20,000 Japanese soldiers on the island within a very short amount of time. time. So it was never enough rainwater either. It didn't take long for men to get desperate and begin drinking out of puddles. And so you know what happens next.

Everybody gets dysentery and typhoid. You know, everybody to include Kurebayashi. A different kind of goop maxing, I guess. Everybody's goopy, man. This isn't the last time we're going to talk about goop, I should point out. There's a lot of goop going on here. I would have been able to drink the puddles. I recently got vaccinated against typhoid.

Stick me in a Thai machine. Send me back. I'll defeat the Americans at Ewojima. the man in the high castle being made real. I love the idea that you almost said toy foy like you were Ernie Burrell, like fucking getting paid in Williams. Carrie Bayashi tried to set an example for his men, showing them that like how they could ration water.

He lived on less than a coffee cup full of water per day where he would brush his teeth, shave and drink from it. See, when you said like less of a cup of coffee of water, I thought he was Affleck maxing and he's like, got to have his duncan, even if he would, Gima. You know what I say something wrong? It's going to be cut out. But I guess to me, I'm amazed. So the water was so horrific that you couldn't even use it for washing. You couldn't use it for personal hygiene. Or was it just it wasn't abundant enough in the sense like there were so little to begin with it. The rainwater, there wasn't enough to go around. And as for the water that came from the ground, I suppose they could wash their clothes in it. I mean, probably like the minerality of the water that they're getting from the ground. If you, if you shave. And like you cut yourself. If that gets into your bloodstream, that will probably make you sick as well.

And I'm pretty sure the contaminated water will fuck your skin up too. You're not availing of proto-Korean skin care on Iwo Jima. It'll definitely cure your acne, but it might rip your face off too. Yeah, because it's like a lot of sulfur. It's not like a little amount. Like it doesn't kind of smell like varts, you know? It's mostly sulfur. The American soldiers coming face to face with the Japanese army and they all look like

members of BTS, like perfect skin, perfect hair because they've been drinking the devil's juice. Like you said, I mean, the fact that like it doesn't have any naval value, there's not really a harbor to speak of. It's not, it is like, you know, closer to the home islands, but not exactly massively close. And it is sort of like, oh, by the way, it smells like shit all the time. It's really, really hot. It's basically like you've made a toilet in a solar oven and now you need to go fight there for months and die. My favorite, and we'll talk about what happens when the Americans come to shore and how they discover how bad they. island is. But one of my favorite things was, is Americans would dig in and discover how hot

it gets hotter as they go deeper. So they learned a trick of just like shoving the rations into the sand to heat them up. I mean, they're like, ha ha, life hack. I'm also boiling. So I'm suveting myself with my rations. There was definitely some American soldier who like got conscripted, ended up on this island and like lived long enough to be posting on forums under the name Fart Slave 74 who loved being on being on a Yuba. It crossed some wires in his mind for sure. I'm just wondering like obviously there's like a

Japanese military infrastructure on Iwo Jima still and like they have like memorials there. They do ceremonies there. Like does it smell like farts everywhere? Like when you go The whole island's got a smell. So you get there. You like time to do the solemn ceremony. It's like it smells like someone's been ripping ass the entire time. On the bright side, it's the only place outside

of like say like a nightclub where you could just fart constantly and no one will ever know is you. The admiral's gathering around the table planning the invasion of Ichima and one general just bravely speaks up and says, gentlemen, do it stank though. It smell crazy in here.

Oh, oh, Nate, don't worry. It's about to get far, far worse. Yeah, DJ fart in the club originally wanted to call themselves DJ fart on Iwo Jima, but everybody thought it was disrespectful. This is where things get very, very weird as well,

but also just very imperial Japanese military. Bayashi was in command of the island garrison, which technically included the Imperial Japanese Navy. But the Navy refused to listen to him and his defensive plans. The Navy wanted to defend the island at its shore and contest the Americans as soon as they landed. When Kuri Bayashi said, no, we're not doing that, which again is his role and ability to do. The Navy just said, okay, well, if you don't do our plan, we'll tell the Navy to stop sending supplies to Iwo Jima. Motherfucker, you're on.

Yuijima. Yeah, no kidding. The Navy was more comfortable shooting themselves at the chest to spite throat ahead. You know what I mean? We're all trying to find the guy who did this. And obviously, Kurebayashi couldn't have that happened. He needs literally tons of concrete, steel, machine guns, ammo, all the things that make defense possible. So this led Major Yoshitaka Hori, a member of the army staff and liaison to the Navy to strike a compromise. Hey, how about you allow the Navy to bring us supplies, we'll give you some to do at the shore whatever the fuck it is you want,

and we'll take the rest. The Navy agreed, so building supplies and military engineers were soon on their way. Thankfully, for the men on the island, or unfortunately, depending on what way you look at it, the surface rocks on Iwo are actually quite light and porous,

meaning they can be easily dug out with picks and shovels rather than heavy equipment. So soon, teams of men stripped down to their army-issued loin cloths, decidedly not underwear, and rubber-sold sandals to keep the heat off of their feet,

were digging down into the island, and with every single inch, they got deeper, it only got hotter, thanks to geothermal activity. And remember, all of this is with barely any water at all. We must build and defend Fort Ass.

This is from Twilight of the Gods. Quote, in the fall of 1944, as the great effort progressed, the intricate honeycomb of tunnels, stairways, and bunkers was bored into the rock. Natural caverns could accommodate as many as 500 men at once. Electrical lighting and ventilation systems improved habitability. Bare rock walls were plastered over so men wouldn't think that they were inside of a mountain. Command posts were interconnected by radio links or underground telephone lines. Eventually, some 1,500 subterranean bunkers were connected by 16,000.

miles of corridor with widely scattered entrances and exudits open to the ground above. This shit's getting deep. And then there's the artillery positions because obviously Iwojima is going to be plastered with piles, like literally tons of explosives, right?

But the artillery positions that the Japanese had were also dug into the mountains and cliffs and knowing they were going to be targeted by sea and air. They were set in very, very deep with steel reinforced doors that would slam closed in between firing for protection. They also, some but not all, were on big old tracks. So they would be

like shoved out of the cave to fire and be able to be pulled back into the cave for covering concealment. So basically the Japanese were put on Fart Island and they decided to create what amounts to outer heaven. Yes. But this explains so much about a, I suppose, the thematic through line of Clint Eastwood's like directorial filmography is his biggest fear is tunnels full of Asians. Tunnels in general. Oh, well, no, sorry. I was adding in Sylvester Stallone there because of the newest rainbow film. Yeah, right, right, right, right.

My bad. I have a theory, really, really quick thing because you brought up Clean Eastwood and letters to Iwo Jima that if you actually analyze that Clint Eastwood makes what you can only describe as American fascist realism. It's like socialist realism, but it's fascist realism. It basically is because like the hero has to just, uh, has to do his heroic mission and strive towards making America great, but is held back by woke lives from the government. Even if, like, in the case of Sully, he has to invent shit in the thing that was literally

televised the entire time to include the congressional hearings to be like, the woke lives at the, you know, National Board of Transportation Security or whatever the fuck it is, you know, trying to like send Captain Sully to jail for killing, you know, transgender geese for whatever the fuck they want to say. Like, Clint Eastwood makes fascist realism. That is my theory. I'm really happy that I never watched that movie. Yeah.

The only good movie I've ever watched that he made is, again, letters from Iwojima. It's very, very good. mostly because of Ken Watanabe absolutely kills his role. Unforgiven is a good movie. That's true. It is actually a good movie. I got to hand him that one. You don't always have to hand it to Clint Eastwood, but those are two that you have to hand him.

Completely insane in the 2000s, but. Yeah. And letters from Iwo Jima's early 2000s. So it's a little bit before he went full psycho mode. Yeah. Like the Obama years. I wasn't 9-11 that made him go crazy. It was Obama 100%.

That was what he interviewed the empty chair. That is actually what made America go crazy more than more than 9-11. Yeah. You can't have much to a clean tea store, especially not the hands of a clock anymore. I don't know if you've seen the thing where it was from like a, like a textbook thing, explaining for dementia symptoms of like whether people can communicate clearly or not, but is it like inappropriate response or just completely incomprehensible response? And, you know, asking like what, you know, what day is it?

And the inappropriate response from a dementia patient is it's February. And the incomprehensible response is just awaga. And all I can say is cleanies, what's been on some awaga shit for a while. now. Everything the soldiers needed, well, other than water, of course, would be moved into these burning hot underground cave systems. And I do mean burning hot.

The tunnels and bunkers, even with the ventilation system dug in and installed, would at best sit at about a hundred and 20 degrees Fahrenheit. That's very unpleasant. That is fucking insane. And that is like a humid 120 because they're

just surrounded by steam all day. They've created the first tactical combat sauna. Well, maybe not the first Finland exists, but like the first one you'd fight from. The Finnish definitely have military sonnas. That I know for a fact. Yeah, but they don't have machine gun slits.

No, no, no, no. Like, they don't combine defensive position and sauna at the same time. Maybe they should. Maybe they will, you know? Yeah. They're always improvising. That's true. But inside were hospitals, mess halls,

barracks, everything. Curry Bayashi built these with the intention that they would never have to leave because, like, they couldn't. They would just get murdered by airstress. and naval bombardments. Back then, there was a civilian population of Iwo Jima. Today, there is not. It is kept as a memorial island.

He ordered them all to be evacuated, unless, of course, you happen to be a man between 16 and 60, in which case, start digging. But that wasn't the only thing he did. He ordered his officers to start digging alongside the men. He himself dug right alongside them. And, like, his officers kept fighting ways to get out of work, which is the only thing I'll say I respect them for.

because that was just me E1, three, E everything. It's like, like, hate them because they're the fascist army of Japan, respect them because they are trying to sham out of mole-maxing. Exactly. I get it. And he would send people to go around and like round up his officers

and just like hand them a shovel and tell them like, it's your duty to dig. Otherwise, you are dishonoring me. And they'd be like, fuck, that's some like verbal judo shit. Now we have to dig. You are dishonoring the emperor. by not stripping down to your bare asshole and balls and picking up a pick. It's that meme of dig the fucking hole, but with like, you know, philosophy behind it.

Fulfilling the masculine urge of wanting to dig a hole on a beach. I just imagine them doing this as like the goblin army from the animated version of the Hobbit singing where there's a whip, there's a way, but in Japanese. It's like we often say at the show, island hopping in the Pacific sounds great if you don't know what any of those terms mean. sure does. And this is like digging a hole of the beach. It's awesome. Brackets. Not so much. He also had a policy of when officers got care packages from home with food inside, as was often the case. It had to be seized and redistributed amongst the men.

He also did this himself and this pissed off of his officers even more. It's important to remember here that officers in the Japanese Imperial Army were the unofficial samurai class of Imperial Japan. And therefore enlisted men were the commoners. the social discrepancies here are unavoidable. And he just would swoop in and be like, nah, nah, fuck that. You can't do that here. This guy's like light energy, Syed Kudab if he went to America,

just like turned him on to a galatarius. Whipping shitties, doing donuts on someone's lawn and fucking the grass up, going to the drive-in theater. Like, Siongut could have saw that he's like, this is moral degradation. We should absolutely kill all these people. Whereas this guy was just like, this is cool, actually. You know what? This is the two parts you can take.

either turn it to this guy or sidecob when you see a jazz musician on heroin in the 1920s. If someone could have convinced him that the president of the United States was actually the reincarnation of the Sun goddess, he would be much different guy. But instead, you know, he had to be fascist. I mean, listen, Pearl Harbor was kind of like 20th century 9-11 when you think about it. You look at this, you're like, okay, this does seem like it's better at maintaining morale, good order, etc. in the context of the Japanese Army of World War II, which is not a good thing, but like given the level of just like murder,

cannibal despotism you hear about elsewhere, this guy seems like he does kind of know what he's doing. And that's why he was ranked number 100th. This led several officers to begin to openly shit-talk him and plot, like rally junior officers to try to supersede him. So rather than put up with that as unofficial custom dictated within the Japanese army,

he relieved them of command and kicked them off the island and promoted younger officers to replace them. This fucked their careers up too. Like, wait, you got fired from suicide island and sent back to Tokyo? On one hand, you're not laboring in the sun on fire island, but on the other hand, your prospects after the war are fucked. Meanwhile, the Navy went to work building reinforced concrete bunkers with intersecting fields of fire, anti-tank ditches,

which would also double as infantry trenches, which sounds ominous and it will be, and they made sure to camouflage it all. Even all of the supplies they managed to get to Iwo were never enough for building either. So, like, the Davy was forced to repurposed, bombed out, like, wrecks of planes and turn them into bunkers,

which I assume they only put their least favorite dudes in there. Like, no, you don't get to be in the cave. You have to go be in the fucking car accident outside. We put a machine gun port in. It's weird because we keep making agricultural references to things here. And now it started to sound like the wreck of the Excell and Valdez and Waterworld. Like that's what they're fighting out. But it's an island version of that.

That's right. And well, the main difference is they don't have any oil. They don't have any water either. So yeah, the handshake meme with Kevin Costner's weird movie. Yeah. Maybe they'll try drinking their own pee. As fall turned into winter and then into 1945, Kuri Bayashi was sure the invasion was coming soon. almost a day didn't go by

when the island wasn't being bombed or he saw the flights of bombers passing overhead to go bomb bomb the home islands. And he was constantly in communication with Tokyo. Constantly complaining that his men needed more supplies, but hey, if you only can send one thing, I'll just send some water.

His supplier route to Chichi Jima Island is becoming more and more tenuous, thanks to the constant encroachment of the U.S. Navy, and the situation on the island, which started out as miserable, was quickly turning into just about the worst place of Japanese soldier could be stationed anywhere throughout the war. Dysentery became endemic to the garrison.

There wasn't a single person who didn't have it. And due to the whole, we are the Imperial Mole People now part of the situation. There wasn't enough latrines, Doug underground for 22,000 men, who now all have explosive diarrhea. So soon men sweating in their volcanic oven base are shitting just everywhere. They were shitting in any dark corner they could find to the point that Kari Bayashi complained about it in letters. These motherfuckers won't stop pooping.

I love that like in between writing poems to his wife, he's petting letters complaining about how much his dudes are shitting. To include himself, that's important to know too. He's constantly pooping everywhere too. Just adding to the general ambiance of the whole thing, you know? I can't imagine this is actually the case, but like part of me is wondering, like, did he, wasn't there like a tradition of composing death poems and stuff like that? Yeah, he wrote a death poem.

Did did Cory Bayiashi write a death poem? about like this side of I've been shitting out of my doo-do ass shit is falling out of my doo-do ass like the petals of the cherry blossom tree there's a perfect haiku about getting a hammeroid and just to add to the smells

here I already said that they pulled all of their supplies into the bunker that also meant just like giant barrels of gasoline that are off-gassing so everybody's getting nauseous and lightheaded from gasoline fumes and shooting everywhere. Everyone is huffing fumes.

Wow. I didn't realize that an island in the tropics or subtropics would be so spiritually Alaskan, but there you have it. The tunnels crawled with lice, cockroaches, and blow flies. Everything stink like shit, piss, gasoline, and body odor. And everything is just shaking from constant airstrikes. Some of them are 30 meters underground. And they equated to being caught in the middle of an earthquake,

every day all day. I'm pretty shaky on the timeline, like, explicitly, but I seem to recall, isn't the bombing starting like the summer of 1944? And it wasn't until was early spring or like very late winter, 1945, they actually do the landing. So it's just like, yeah.

So basically it's just months and months and months. Just like you said, basically they invented Hobber from first principles, but it's with tons of explosives falling. Shaking. The skeleton is doing it against their will. You ever get so fucked up on gas fumes and bombs from like, naval gunfire offshore that you basically just become spiritually Dutch.

It's the first time that a skeleton invented a dance move independent of the rest of the body because it's just jerking around that way. Yeah, there's actually like the origin story of the animated gift. They saw it on Owe Jeeva and the survivors like, yeah, we should document this. Skeletons can dance sometimes. The Americans who had been pounding the island almost unendingly at this point were getting confused because from where they were sitting, the Japanese garrison had simply vanished. they straight up ran out of targets to hit because they couldn't see anything.

And also the ash that is the sand and Iwo Jima is super soft. So every time they fire at it, it just rips cartoonishly huge craters into its surface. It took several passes of recon flights with the best cameras of the day to realize that, according to Captain Thomas Fields who overlooked these pictures, that the Japanese were not on Iwo Jima. They were in Iwojima. for lack of targets the you know

American artillery operators took the same you know position as Nelson months towards the whales yeah got to nuke something as curabayashi prepared for the coming invasion

he stocked ammo and grenades at every point though there still wasn't enough ammo to go around either according to what I could find most Japanese soldiers had about half of the ammo they would normally carry at best

he also strictly forbade bonsai charges or any other meaningless use of the men's lives. This started more complaints from some officers, but one officer, Colonel Taikichi Nishi, quickly took his commander's side and kind of silenced descent. And the reason that that was possible is Nishi was a celebrity. He was the bastard son of a baron who thanks to how the Japanese peerage system work at the time, he was still able to keep the title when his dad died. His father was super important within the imperial government,

and he was able to benefit from that. He rockets up the social ranks. He becomes a cavalry officer and wins an Olympic gold medal and equestrians show jumping at the 1932 LA Games. While he's in LA, he becomes a celebrity in the American press because he also bought a sports car, loved hauling ass and whipping shitties on the highway, and most importantly became

a drinking buddy of Charlie Chaplin. Of course, and all of the sports commentators like, look at that China man jump on that horse. I mean, if there's ever been a person who probably did Akira slide the horse, it's this guy. I believe in him. This guy just like drinking with Charlie Chaplin getting up to hijinks completely in silence. His horses name was Uranus, which is important. Because Americans know he's on the island right after the invasion begins.

And they start appealing to him to talk to his commander to surrender. And he just kind of jokes at he's like, they probably think Uranus is here too and they only care about the horse. But he had left him back on the home islands. Also unimportant, but Uranus died like a week after he did. I think from an airstrike. I don't remember. He probably was thinking it was going to be a broken heart. He's whipping shitties in heaven on his horse or hell or the netherworld.

Again, this has nothing to do with anything. But Nishi also competed in the 1936 Olympics, infamously held in Nazi Germany, where he's widely believed to have lost his jumping competition on the orders of his government so the Nazis could win gold. The Olympics have always been terrible. Nishi was, like all good cavalry commanders, made a tank commander at this point. He was in charge of Iwo Jima's tanks.

And there's a collection of early war Japanese tanks, later improved versions, both light and medium. And there's some disagreement over how many there was there, somewhere between 20 and 25. Though in reality, none of that would matter. Nishi, nor any other Japanese officer, had any faith in their armor against the Americans at this point. After the Nomohan incident, which we've talked about before, Japan tried to rethink their armor design and re-gear it to counter enemy armor rather than support infantry attacks. But the industrial demands of naval and aviation production far superseded tank development within the Japanese Empire. Not to mention the Pacific Theater with its small islands and all that shit wasn't exactly conducive to tank warfare. So even within existing doctrine, tanks in Japan simply became an afterthought.

Throughout the war, Japanese tanks were under-armored, underpowered, and under-armed. Nishi and Kuri-Bayashi knew Iwojima is not a place to suddenly try to launch a tank battle. Not only would the soft volcanic ash just swallow their tracks if they tried to maneuver, but putting them in open combat would result in them getting bombed to shit. So as was often the case for the Japanese, they buried them in the dirt and turned them into bunkers. Anyway, Kuriayashi knew that he and his men were not going to win this battle. That was never his intention. But he needed to rally his men to fight a suicidal defense that required them to hold for as long as possible.

And the worst conditions that a Japanese soldier had ever seen, at least outside of a jungle. So in the days before the invasion, he published a six-pointed letter that needed to be reproduced and spread to every position on the island, with men encouraged to take it to heart and memorize it. It read, one, we shall defend this place with all of our strength to the end. 2. 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. 4. Every one of our shots shall be on target and kill the enemy. 5. We shall not die until we have killed at least 10 of the enemy.

6. We shall continue to harass the enemy with guerrilla tactics, even if only one of us remains alive. On February 16th, 1945, the American invasion fleet finally appeared off the coast of Iwo Jima. And that is where we'll pick up on part two. And for people who are curious at home, that's where we're going to talk about Matsirabachi. So don't worry about it. It's Coven. I'm very excited to see the combat engagement between a army that has essentially endured conditions only comparable to like dark souls, like living in Lordran for like 18 months. And then the Americans who are essentially experiencing like the first level.

of Crash Bandicoot. Don't worry. Next episode's going to be all about some good old fashion American misery. But that is the Battle of Iwo Jima part one. Fellas, you host other things.

Plug those things. Fire them at the audience like they're a battleship shell. Yeah, so I am a co-host and producer of Trash Future. And I am the producer of Gil James Bond and No Gods No Mayors. and I am in a band called Second Homes. We have an album coming out on May 5th.

This might be out by then, I'm not sure. But regardless, it's available on Bandcamp. And we'll be available on streaming eventually, but should buy it on band camp, please. Beneath skin, show about the history of everything, told you the history of tattooing, and Blood Work a show about the economy of violence. Joe was recently on an episode that is on the free feed. You can check it out. I've already plugged my stuff by my book. Leave us reviews.

Tell your friends, because we are an independent podcast that does no marketing. So when you support us, it lets us stay that way. Leave us review on wherever it is you listen to podcasts. And until next time, find a cave, shit all over the walls. You can recreate the Yu-Ojima experience.