Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 413 - The Battle of Iwo Jima: Part 2

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: http://www.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 The episode with the flag raising in it.

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, Sia 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. Hey everyone and welcome back to the Lions led by donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast in the entire known world. I'm Joe. With me is Tom and Nate. Bellas, thank you for joining me in this cave that I have dug in the nearby mountain. How are you doing? I'm very much enjoying being trapped on Fart Island. I refuse to accept the water is bad for you and I'm going to

keep on drinking it. Eventually I'll get there. It's like the spirit of taking Ivermectin is eternal and it occurs throughout human history. I'm just its current, man. manifestation. What they needed to do is do what this guy I used to follow on TikTok who did Olympic weightlifting. And he blew up because someone asked him was like, I got watch your diet regimen. And he didn't mention that he drinks water. And someone was like, do you not drink any water? He's like, no, I just drink white monster and milk. That's the extra white monster. That's like, you know, and his explanation was so funny because he was like, well, like, Milk is like 90% water and so was monster. So why do I need to drink water? It's like I need

energy and I need calories and I'm like, bro. Get that cow energy. I mean, it might help you to lift powerfully a couple of times, maybe a couple of months, years even. But at some point, you will experience what my soldiers experience in an environment not too dissimilar from Fart Island, known as a hot desert plateau of Afghanistan, maybe less humid, I don't know, in which you get the world's biggest kidney stone. You get the hope diamond of kidney stones when you do that. I'm just saying. Let me tell you.

As someone who got a kidney stone at 21, because all I drank was alcohol, they're not fun. Going back to an episode that Nate, I did a few weeks back, got to do something with all this milk. Yeah, it's got to go somewhere. The milk is the preparatory agent before one applies the actual medicine, which is tobacco smoke, shotgun hits up your butthole. If you want to know more about that, to our episode about the 30

years war, the Battle of Rockwaugh, but we're not talking about Rockwa today. We're talking about what happens when a high desert plateau with grass on it catches on fire. The Highlands Burned Joe's book, which is coming out on May 29th. You're a natural pitch man. I love it.

And if you want to see a group of men who've drank nothing but milk and monster for three days, come to our live show on May 29 in Rich Mix in London. Tickets available in the link below. If we sell out, I will drink a milk monster on stage. That is my promise to you. To be fair, someone after the Glasgow show last year came up to me and was like,

man, did you like do something before the show? And I was like, no, I've just had three cans of monster today and like no water. That's why I'm like vibrating on stage and extremely red. Small warning though, uh, normally we do a meet and greet after the show. If I drink the milk monster, I might be a little late for that. I am lactose intolerant. There's this phenomenon called the chunderstorm.

You're about to learn all about it. And I would say, too, that if you come to the live show, but you're feeling bad because you want to like it. And yet, for some reason, you always find a way to hate it. Well, that's the name of my band's album coming out on May 5th. Damn. Damn, that's smooth. Speaking of smooth, like the inside of a soldier being splashed across the rocks of Iwo Jima, we are at part two on our series of the Battle of Iwojima.

and you guys are definitely better at those segways than I am. And when we left you last time on the first part of our series, the Americans had finally settled on the invasion of the island in order to open and secure their route to the Japanese home islands. Meanwhile, the Japanese garrison on the tiny volcanic hellhole of Iwo Jima were forced to toil and dig in some of the worst conditions we've really ever talked about on the show. Tired, thirsty, sweating in geothermal caves

had been filled with diarrhea and disease to the point that being liquefied by an American naval bombardment probably wasn't sounding like such a bad fate. And listen, that's enough about the average Russian sassana experience. Nobody's whipping anybody with pine reeds. Birch reads. I think it might be birch. Birch branches. It's birch branches. Yeah. So there's no need for medicine. You just go in the sauna and get your bare ass whipped with birch branches and it will heal all illnesses. A dude who's really into king just really misunderstanding the John Birch Society. As Robert Mavis. Matthews.

They get so hardcore in anti-communism, they become anti-Russian. And it's like, and yet you have so much in common. You also love getting whipped in the ass with branches, flails. I feel like in one of these steamy caves, someone's definitely getting hit with a kendo stick. So that's almost the same thing. I don't know. I guess to me it's like you have sulfur island. Everything smells horrible.

It smells like farts. It smells like rotten eggs. It's hot. Water's terrible. You've dug basically like the New York City subway system into voles. volcanic island. So you can get deeper into the source of the fart smell. I feel as though, like... I hate being deployed in the garrison led by Fart Slave 74. I feel as though at this point, you are just, you're like, you know what? Our goal is to kill as many of Americans as possible,

and I kind of wish they just fucking get on with it, because otherwise, like, we're basically doing the, like, tunneling for diamonds, but there's no diamonds. There's just a stronger fart smell. Like, I don't sympathize with the Japanese Imperial Army's ethos, but I do kind of feel bad for these these views because it's like, I would definitely want to die as quickly as possible. And the good news for the Japanese soldiers was that was coming. As soon as the fleet, Task Force 58 appeared off the coast of Iwojima, and observing Japanese soldiers said it looked like a mountain had risen out of the sea. The task force was massive.

One of the largest fleets ever assembled. 17 aircraft carriers, 6 battleships, 58 destroyers, 13 cruisers, over 1,000 aircraft all under the command of Admiral Mark, Mitcher, and charged with the Air and Navy support for the coming mission. And this is only part of the Greater Fifth Fleet under Admiral Spruance. The Navy at this point is legitimately terrified. It could never be equaled in size. It just wouldn't make sense in the modern context. The bombardments and bombings that had hit Iwojima so far were a little more than a light dusting for what was about to rain down from the sky.

According to Japanese soldier Takahashi Tashiharu, quote, On the island there was a huge earthquake. There were pillars of fire that looked as if they would touch the sky. Black smoke covered the island and shrapnel was flying all over the place with a shrieking sound. The few trees with trunks one meter across were blown out of the ground. The sound was deafening. as terrible as a couple of a hundred thunderclaps all coming down on my head at once

even in a cave 30 meters underground my body was jerked up off the ground it was hell on earth so kind of like how we joked about in our last episode they're having their skeleton shaken until they've accidentally invented hobber that is confirmed do you want to feel like the ice cubes in a shake or one of martini's being made

Jesus Christ so many shells and bombs slammed into the island that sailors on the ships out at sea felt a concussive blast of their impact, which is nuts. The island vanished in a growing cloud of fire and smoke. Under this cover, the minesweepers moved in, picking their way towards the beach, clearing the way for the landing troops of the 4th and 5th Marine divisions that made up Task Force 53 that were going to be arriving in a few hours. The task force brought with them 111,000 men, and though they did make up every branch of the

military that was there, virtually all of the landing force would be made up of U.S. Marines. With them came over 100,000 tons of supplies, hundreds of Amtraks, hundreds of supply trucks, all of which had been preloaded with landing supplies before being put on the ships. And that was just for the initial landing. That's not counting for the entire campaign. And it's also not counting for the hundreds of thousands of tons of supplies that the fleet itself would need, like ammo, food, and water, and fuel. necessary things.

I mean, unless you're a Japanese soldier sipping devil juice out of a puddle. No, we need to tell someone about a, you know,

the devil juice water from Iwojima actually has like healing properties and we can convince a dude on Instagram reels to go and drink it. I'm 100% convinced

that's why the Japanese government doesn't allow you to just go to the island. Like, you have to go in tour groups specifically connected to like the historical battlefield because they don't

want like wellness influencers, killing themselves there. It's like the gum gum fruit from one piece. Yeah, except it just makes you shit yourself. You're growing a third arm out of your ass. I was thinking more on the lines of the guy who was like, it's woke and soy to stay on the marked path at,

was it Yellowstone National Park. This geyser will absolutely not dissolve me and then just got fully fucking dissolved by it. Yep. At the end of the day, there's enough on Iwo Jima that you don't want to go, you know, off-piece spalunking, I suppose. Because, yeah, the environment is there to,

make bad things happen to you. I don't think you can spalunk Iwojima more than it's already been spulunked. Yeah, it's been pretty thoroughly spulunked. Aggressively spulunked, perhaps. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. You can say it's been comprehensively splunked. Yeah, yeah.

Who, who? I hate when my island is comprehensively spalonged. Once again, this podcast creates sentences that have never been said before. Also, the devil juice energy drink would be the thing that we would pitch if we were ever given a marketing deal, which is why it would never happen. I'm just thinking Dark Souls fought comprehensively swallowed. That's a T-shirt. Oh, fuck, sake.

Put that one in the bank for later. Just a Japanese soldier in a loincloth? You know those videos where it's like, oh, this guy got stuck in a cave Spolunky for 20 hours and got pulled in half when he escaped? I was just like upside down and the guy is the same color as Saddam Hussein in his hiding place. I don't want to mention Fart Island on a T-shirt because that feels like it's designed either for like a nine-year-old sense of humor or like a Gen Xer's sense of

humor. But I definitely think comprehensively spuluck is very, very funny. Sorry. I didn't intend it to be, but like I just said some dumb bullshit. But you guys laughed. That's my only barometer of if anything I'm saying is funny. That's how our company meetings tend to go and we're like, what shirt should we bring to the live show that something called comprehensively belug tickers.

Now, Holland Smith, the commander of the Marine Landing Force, requested 10 days of pre-landing bombardment, but he wouldn't get it. It was pointed out that if the U.S. Navy opened up fully for 10 days on Iwojiba, they would burn through all of their ammunition that was meant to last through the entire campaign. Instead, they would be slotted three days of pre-landing bombardment, with each ship allotted six hours to fire, stop, check everything to make sure nothing had broken, fix what had, reload, and begin firing again. because for our non-gun

heads out there, obviously myself included, which I wouldn't know this if I hadn't used some of them, firing guns a whole lot tends to break them. And that gets magnified a million times

when it's a naval canad. You can't just fire things unendingly without maintaining them. And also something too is that like all rifle barrels, smooth gun barrels, whatever it is, will eventually sustain heat damage

if you use some continuously. And you can imagine that like it's a pretty big muscle movement to change out, for example, the barrels in a 50 caliber machine gun, something Joe and I have had to do in training. I don't know if you ever had to do it downrange. If your first lieutenant is changing the 50 cal barrel in combat, something has gone really fucking terribly wrong. Yeah, like catastrophically wrong. You have been catastrophically spunked. I have been catastrophically spunked. But you know, like exactly. Yeah, you're trying to take my headspace and timing gauge while I'm getting catastrophic. trophically spalunked. I would say, I don't even know if you can change the barrel on a naval gun.

I presume you could, but it's going to involve a fucking crane. So like, yeah, it requires a shipyard. Yeah, it's a problem. So yeah, obviously. And then you think about like all of the action on those things, the pistons, whatever the mechanical parts for moving it, they're just going to be the gigantic. Yeah. Like, it's not a thing you can take it down to the arms room and be like, hey, yo, can you fix my navel guns? Like, bringing it down, holding it like a baby. Hey, bro, could you just like fix this real quick. That's an infrastructure project. Your assigned weapon being a naval gun is like, that's like the meanest

specialist's best idea for hazing the dumbest private. It won't actually work. I'm going to make you do ready of trodles with a naval gun. And it's like, yeah, let me know how that works. Though there's wrinkles to this thing, right? Nothing works perfectly. No plans ever go great, especially if we're talking about them on this show. Whether it was cloudy and rainy, which in turn impacted the accuracy and scouting of the

bombardments, or, Sometimes they couldn't fire at all. Marine commander Harry Schmidt said, only partially joking, that out of the 36 hours that they were given for pre-landing bombardment, the Navy was only able to fire during 13 of them. Holland Smith, the Marine Commander we talked about previously on our episode about the Battle of Saipan, blamed the Navy for not giving them enough support, saying that he had to haggle with the Navy like he was, quote,

a horse traitor for bombardments. These words have managed to survive for way too long, in my opinion. Holland Smith has kind of a known track record for being an asshole, and he obviously had no understanding of the fleet's needs. For example, the Navy had never done a bombardment for as long as the one he was requesting. And the ships that were out there still had to worry about a possible counterattack. Remember the size of that fleet that I just talked about. They're sitting there static out in the middle of the ocean. They would be sitting ducks for any aerial or naval attack and had to retain

ammo and the off chance they would have to defend themselves. There's also another wrinkle here. Smith is 62 years old and is being forced not to command from the front anymore. And he is very, very unhappy with that. And he was going to be

a catty bitch the whole time. Yes, we love an old queen making it everyone else's problem. Smith is kind of a dickhead that's gone down in history for being a dickhead. And he's not the worst dickhead we're going to talk about here. That's definitely Admiral Kelly Turner. Now, the reason why Smith wasn't stuck behind a desk or forced retired due to his age at this

point was because Kelly Turner personally liked him. Turner was commander of Task Force 50 and considered the father of what would become known as underwater demolitions teams, or as we know them today as seals. Yep. So, yeah, thanks, asshole. He was also probably one of the best known assholes in the U.S. Navy or possibly even the U.S. military, maybe ever? I think it's an insane thing to be known as the biggest con going when you're in the same army as Douglas MacArthur. At the same time, even. I will say also, though, I was speaking from a little bit of personal experience here just from having done combined joint stuff. The Navy officer culture is really weird and petty and really like in their own world completely separate.

Like, they make it a big deal of, like, officers, do officer things completely separate from enlisted men. And that was only worse back then. That definitely is a tendency that existed throughout the U.S. military more so back then than it does now in general, certainly for like things like the Army and Marine Corps. But in the Navy, it's still very, very, like, upper deck, lower decks. It's weird. And like the level of just being a petty weirdo and being kind of insane. For lack of a better word, I've seen some shit with Navy officers in my life. from like, do you live on another planet?

Not only can I not believe you're in the military, I can't believe you're alive. For more on that, listen to our episode on the USS Somers. So all I'm going to say is, is that thinking now go back 80 odd years, you can only imagine the level of just weird personal idiosyncrasy, but everyone has to, basically, this guy thinks the right way to walk is to walk backwards or everyone's just fucking walking backwards. Yeah. That is the US Navy. And to further underline how much of an hour.

outlier Kelly Turner is here. He was a hardcore alcoholic, and you know it was bad when it's noted as he was drinking too much in the Navy in the 1940s. Yeah, yeah, 100%. He was, quote, often inoperative at night and fully operative in the morning. What a great way to fucking phrase it, inoperative. He always looked haggard as shit, too. I want to say a friend of mine shared a thing that he saw.

This is from Vietnam. His dad's ration card in the Navy in Vietnam for like alcohol and tobacco. And it was something like the equivalent of like two fifths of liquor a week was on your ration card. Yeah, that's some hard drink in there. For one person. I'm sorry. I have drank quite a bit in my lifetime at times I don't really drink anymore. Going through two full bottle, like a liter and a half of hard liquor in a week.

Yeah. As one person. assuming everyone else in the party also gets that. So it's not like you're just doing it solo. That's so much. And that's 30 years after this. I can only imagine what it would take to get noticed for being an alcoholic back then. Like I was a lower enlisted dude in the U.S. Army.

So like I, it goes without saying that I have put some drinking behind me. But I with full confidence, say, I would be put under the table by any single person in the U.S. Navy in the 40s. I'm pretty sure if I tried to drink with Kelly, he'd kill me. This is why I'm so excited to go to Vietnam on. Sunday because I'm going to go buy a jacket that someone's granddaddy fit two big bottles of vodka a week in Vietnam before he got blown to bits. Yeah, right. Tom, you're going to go there and you're going to have an ice coffee so good is going to change your life. And you're like,

you're going to finish building the studio and then sell up and go to Vietnam. Just watch. Kelly Turner was known for being such a caustic piece of shit that he in his position, as director of war plans in the office of the chief of naval operations, had created such a toxic, horrible, distrustful work environment due to how he treated people, mixed with his constant drinking, that it led to the intelligence failures that caused the attack on Pearl Harbor. Listen, I have made some mistakes and fucked up some things because of my drinking earlier in my life, but I've never caused Pearl Harbor to be attacked.

I was going to say, Bush did do 9-11, but he didn't do it because he had relapsed. I understand it he was sober. so this guy got so drunk he caused for a harbor. But this is why, you know, it's incredible that like Pete Hegseth is going to bring about 9-112 because of his drinking because he's got to fuck something up so bad and Iran's going to drop a nuke on New York. Someday we will start doing Pete Hegseth bits. I one time saw somebody who's like, oh, we have a camouflage like secret flasks in the

shape of 30 round magazines. It was like, if those had existed when Pete Hegsets was in the army, he wouldn't be a problem for us anymore. Yeah. Hey, look, the only thing I'll say is I hope. hope one day he conquers his drinking problem in the same way that my father did. Kelly was also in command during the Battle of Savo Island, where the U.S. Navy suffered easily their biggest defeat of the war, not known as Pearl Harbor. And despite all of this,

Turner was not only not fired, but he was found to be good at something very specific and something that would become very important. Commanding amphibious landings. He had been at the helm during Guadacanal, Tinian, Macon, Guam, Saipan, and others, if there was a place where a Marine went to shore in the Pacific and you have heard of it, he was almost certainly in command of its attack force. If the war had continued and the U.S. invade the Japanese home islands during Operation Downfall, he would have been in command of it. So he was good at something and that was mostly filling marine caskets, but also taking land while doing it. I also have to say this too that when somebody is that much of an alcoholic

like they become completely incoherent really quickly and it's like I'm just thinking of the high stakes fast-based environment of being in combat and he have a guy who basically it's like four o'clock and he's talking like Woody Harrelson playing Larry Flint after he's been shot and that's like a day ending in why and nobody likes

this dude not at a personal level not at a professional level nobody gets along with him other than Holland Smith because Holland Smith is the same kind of tankerous old dickhead who was also a drunk. So despite Smith officially being too old to command from the front, he keeps his job,

but only to sit on Turner's ship and be his liaison to the Marine Corps because he was the only man who could stand to be in the same room as him. Meanwhile, Harry Schmidt would actually be in command of the Marines on the ground. So they had to invent a job for Smith of being the asshole's baby sitter or something. Sorry, we fell into a bit of a Turner, hole there, though that has also been splunked. Yeah, put a rubber stamp on it.

Turner, comprehensively spulct. Comprehensively spulooked to a permanent head. That's what the kidney stones are doing to his insides. The plans for the landing at EO were simple. We talked about this somewhat during our last episode, but

there are two marine divisions, the fourth and the fifth. They were to land on Iwo's southeast beaches and gun inland for airfields one and two. The fifth division would then turn south and march for Mount Sirabachi. Once Sura Bachi was secured, the two divisions would link back up and kind of march in a line for the north at the Japanese citadel at Motoyama Plateau. Another division, the third, would remain on transports as reserves to be thrown into the meat grinder, not if, but when they were needed, because planners all knew they'd be needed at some point. It's important to remember

they planned for a blood bath. They didn't plan for the one that they got, but they planned for the worst casualties they had yet suffered. So they knew the reserves were going to be used at some point. Normally when we talk about these landings, we always end up saying the same thing. The Marines took

horrific amounts of casualties to the shock of many. And while that is true, in the case of Iwo, like I said, the planners went into this expecting a bloodbath. They thought at best case scenario, 15,000 casuals. Like I already spoiled here, they undershot that by quite a bit.

Yeah. Four tank landing ships had been converted to be floating triage centers, two hospital ships were on standby, and logistics pipeline of healthcare was provided to funnel the worst off through all of those to hospitals in Guam and Saipan, where thousands of open beds and surgery teams were waiting. But just because the American fleet was one of the largest ever assembled in human history and was plastering Iwo Jima with an apocalyptic level of explosives. It didn't mean that the Japanese weren't already fighting back.

But also remember from our last episode, these are all the forward Navy positions who wanted to fight them immediately. They couldn't reach out and hit the fleet anywhere. Their guns weren't big enough. They didn't have planes. They had no Navy to speak of. But occasionally when a ship got too close to shore, like when they're ordered to cover the minesweepers,

Japanese guns would shoot at them. USS Pensacola got rocked with seven shells in quick succession and was forced to retreat after 17 sailors died and hundreds were wounded. Small demolition team sent ashore to clear any shore obstacles were blown to pieces and the rescue ships sent to go get them were hit as well, killing several more sailors. As the Marines began to climb down the netting into the landing crafts, the ocean exploded around them as Japanese shore batteries flung shells in their direction. And despite when all of this began, sea conditions were about as good as you could hope for for a sea landing. They were still sitting out in the open Pacific and the Amtraks were getting rock to shit.

And then as the loading is happening, the weather turns on them and the sea starts getting rough as hell. One dude falls off the rope that they're climbing on. So in case people have never seen it, how you got on these landing craft was climbing down like big rope nets down the side of ships onto them. from the top of these big Navy ships. So it's a hell of a fall from the top to the bottom. And more than one dude takes a straight header directly down into the landing craft, injuring or killing them. But there's no way to like take them back up on the ship.

Oh God. So they just have to stay there and die on the bottom of the landing craft. There's just a guy like squeegee and Gary off the deck. Yeah. Oh, it happened again. Remember if you're falling, aim for Steve. Nobody likes him. And while all of this is happening, the Navy is still firing their guns off right over these guys' head.

Just adding to a wonderful tossed salad in ways of how to get a concussive brain injury. By 8.40 a.m., the signal was given and the Amtrak started making their way to the shore. They're getting so battered by waves that men start to get seasick, getting all thrown around the interior, which is now very slick with vomit. and some of the Amtraks get so swamped with waves that people on the ships they just left from couldn't even see them anymore. And also they're being shot at. The naval machine guns and mortars and artillery begin to open fire as they get closer. And then because sometimes real life is actually a Michael Bay film,

an American plane pulling up over the ocean after completing their strafing run on the beach is shot down, catches on fire and crashes into the sea right in front of an Amherstaff. Amtrak. So they accidentally almost kamikazi themselves. Nearly two meter tall waves picked up the Amtraks and slammed them down as they got closer to the shore. And the Navy men piloting them had a really hard time getting them into position so the men could actually get out.

And some occasions like the waves were so bad. And the beach immediately climbs up into an incline. So if those two things like combined, some of the Amtraks are trying to drop men off while the front of them was like straight up in the air so nobody could get out. So they finally do. The ramps drop, Marines storm ashore under a withering gunfire and find that

the black sand isn't actually sand at all. Remember, most of these Marines have landed at least what other beach at this point. So they're kind of expecting sand to be something that they knew and were comfortable with. Instead, they sink up to the top of their boots with one Marine saying

it wasn't sand. It was like running through coffee grounds. Okay. And remember, they're going up an immediate incline and a steep one. So, like, they're like slipping and sliding and stuff. Wet coffee grounds or dry coffee grounds, I wonder? I realize you may not know the answer. Let's go dry for now.

Maybe a combination of the two. Dry would be falling, slipping. It'd be difficult. No purchase. Wet would be, that would be uncomfortable. Well, don't worry. The rain is coming to Iwojima. So at first, let's go dry because they're talking about slipping and falling back down

the incline. and they're just sinking in it. When vehicles try to advance, they sink up to their hubs, and like the track vehicles begin to suck this up into its sprockets in the back, which I can tell you from firsthand experience of being a tank crewman, is a perfect recipe of how you destroy your track and what is known as the final drive, which is the big sprocket in the back. That just shreds it.

Despite all of this, the landings did seem to be going well. Yeah, they were taking fire, but it isn't nearly as much as anyone imagined it would be. And of course, that's because what we know and the Marines do not, is that they're only fighting those forward naval positions from the Imperial Japanese Navy that they insisted on having. At Green Beach in the south, Marines faced almost no incoming fire at all and just pretty much calmly walked a few hundred meters off the beach into the island.

In the northern beach, called Red 2, nicknamed the Rock Quarry due to the fact that it was just, terraced rock faces and gorges. The Marines landed directly into a horrible, horrible amount of gunfire, the amount that everybody had imagined that they would be facing everywhere. The Japanese Navy had turned the rock quarry into funnels of death. To assault through this, I mean, the whole area is just a series of natural barriers. And there's only so many ways that they could go.

And the Navy, of course, knew this. The Japanese had planned this quite well. So all of these gorges kind of created natural trails that the Marines would follow, and they made sure all of them were covered by machine guns. It was here in the rock quarry where gunnery sergeant John Bass alone landed. Now, John Basselon is something of a hero in the United States Marine Corps. He's a guy who earned a Medal of honor already during the Battle of Guadacanal, where he alone picked up a crew-served machine gun and fired it while cradling it in his arms. So they're deploying the World War II Primark. Yeah, yeah.

Well, let's not spoil this yet. Oh, fuck. So he's cradling this cruiser of machine gun in his hands while also barefoot. And the barrel of a cruiser of machine gun gets very hot. And he melts the skin on his arm while cradling this gun. And he almost single-handedly fights off a Japanese counterattack for hours. I promise as a brief explainer, does not do it justice.

The HBO show, The Pacific, does a really good job of covering John Basselone's life. Mm-hmm. But after this, John Bassloane, again,

he's awarded the Medal of Honor. He returns back to the United States. He's put on the war bond tour. He becomes a celebrity. He does things that a male celebrity tends to do. Oh, no. Not in that way. Okay.

At least not that we know of. And he hated every fucking second of it. Like, he's doing like ad reads effectively going to like red carpet premieres hanging out with supermodels he fucking hates this shit but imagine just being a japanese soldier and the last thing you see before you get turned to mulch is a dude with a machine gun and his dogs out yeah getting killed by the grip reaper getting fucking obliterated by the dude from toad the wet sprocket who always has to fucking be barefoot on stage he constantly requested to the

the Marines to send him back to the Pacific to go back to war. The Marines refused because they realized the bad PR that would come if their war hero got killed and instead offered to promote him to become an officer or take command of a training unit. He refused all of this. The thing that finally got the Marines to cave instead of back to war is that he was just going to get out of the Marines. His contract was up in six months.

And he's like, that's fine. I'll just become a civilian. Obviously, he's really good for PR and they want to make him happy. so like, okay, fine. They promoted him, and they sent him back to war, and here he is landing at the rock quarry. Bro. He hit Red 2 Beach and advanced forward, commanding a machine gun section.

They fought inland coming across a string of blockhouses and bunkers. What happened next, we know thanks to Baselone soldier Chuck Tatum, who, despite having quite possibly the most American name ever, goes on to have the most American job ever, and after leaving the Marine Corps becomes a race car driver. Because that's just something that used to happen. Yes. According to Tatum, Baseload was doing crazy shit,

like assaulting Japanese positions alone, throwing grenades through the windows of blockhouses, grabbing a machine gun again on his own and running around like it was Call of Duty. Though this time, he had a purpose-built handle that went around the barrel, so he didn't burn his arm off a second time. Baslon, by all accounts,

punched by himself, a big enough hole for the rest of them in the end. area to exploit and continue their advance. But being at the front of all of this is really, really bad. And Bazelot, seeing how bad it was getting, told Tatum to stay and hold where he was, he was going to run back and make sure reinforcements came up. As he was running, he paused to help a tank navigate a minefield because, of course he did, and then died.

He's either killed by shrapnel from a mortar burst or hit from bullets from a machine gun. There's some debate on which nobody can really agree on it. Some eyewitnesses say one thing, some say the other. This happened with an eye shot of Tatum and hundreds of other men. There was not a single man in the US Marine Corps who didn't know who John Basselone was. Again, he's a celebrity. And watching him die was a massive blow to their morale. I can't imagine watching like Brad Pitt get destroyed by an IED in Afghanistan, you know?

Oh, they're deploying the death watch. It was like, yeah, this dude is too insane to live in the real world. as Tatum put it, if John Basselone could get killed, we all wondered what was going to happen to the rest of us. Yeah. Yeah, there's that. This will never happen again in U.S. military history. There will not be a famous person who joins the military for PNPR is huge and then he gets killed. Well, in John Basselon's defense, he was just a normal, like, Italian American dude from Jersey when he enlisted. He wasn't famous beforehand. That's true. And also in John Basselon's case, he didn't get fucking killed by his own guys. That is true, at least as far as we know, yeah. For the minute, the rock quarry, that was a serious question.

As they advanced, word of Baselone's death within an hour of landing spread through the ranks while they were left scrambling up these terraced rock faces, fighting pillboxes, caves, and bunkers at close quarters. And that's something that I think that the Pacific does really well, the show on HBO, of showing just how fast John Bazelon gets killed. Like, it's often shown as like this heroic stand or whatever, because that's how everybody would like to imagine it. but he just dies within an hour, because that's how that tends to happen.

Since these were isolated positions for the Japanese, not connected to the greater network that had been built underground, each one of these positions fought to the death. One Marine lieutenant, Benjamin Roselle, had his personal hell documented in Derek Wright's book Iwojima, 1945. Quote, within a minute, a mortar shell exploded amongst the group. His left foot and ankle hung from his leg. held on by a ribbon of flesh.

Within minutes, a second round landed near him and fragments tore at his other leg. For nearly an hour, he wondered where the next shell would land. He was soon to find out as a shell burst almost on top of him, wounding him for a third time in the shoulder. Almost at once, another explosion bounced him several feet in the air and hot shards ripped into both thighs. As he lifted his arms to look at his watch, a mortar shell exploded only feet away, and blasted the watch from his wrist and tore a large jagged hole in his forearm. Lieutenant Roselle later said, quote, I was beginning to know what it must be like to be crucified.

This war fucking directed by Garth Ellison, who did the boys. Imagine looking down to try to find your watch and there's just nothing there anymore. Like, fuck, can the next one just kill me? Yeah, yeah. Aim better, you fuckers. I really don't like getting the military version of getting attacked by the clone stamp in Photoshop. It's just removing limbs. just like, wow, there wasn't just ground

there before. Why is that rock pattern just repeating over and over again? Where's my arm? Getting evacuated back to the hospital and getting your purple heart and the officer getting it just so confused over how many times you would just dumps a bucket of purple hearts on top of you? It's like, we're going to be honest

with you, Chief. We don't know. Here, just take as as many as you think is necessary. Ending up as the like the guy in the Metallica One video. Oh, around 900 Marines landed to take the quarry. By nightfall of the first day of the attack, only 150 of them were still able to fight. And one celebrity was killed. And then things got worse, I said the thing. The Japanese artillery

finally opened the hell up. Now the reason for this is despite the Navy's insistence, the army had pre-registered their guns to hit the beaches further inland than the shore. That way, they would wait until more landing craft showed up and more Marines gathered on the shore, grouped together and began to advance over open sand rather than try to hit ships in the water, which is way harder to do. So now, the Japanese army's guns opened fire. These guns were set back on both Sarabachi and Motoyama, and every single one of them had survived the bombardments. This also meant that despite what we talked about, like Bazelone hitting the beach and dying within an hour, that first wave had it easier than everybody else because of this. By 11 a.m., when more

waves were coming in, they got hit way harder. We're still when they ran ashore to join the others and everybody tried to dig in for some kind of protection from the incoming artillery. They found that the coffee ground fart hellscape just collapsed as soon as they dug in. This didn't stop

them from trying to dig with shovels and helmets and even their own hands, but none of it mattered. Then came the armored support in the form of Sherman tanks. You probably already know where this is going. Yes, the the big heavy tank operating on what is essentially soft silty ground.

Yep, they immediately get stuck. Others don't get stuck. It's the incline. Like the combination of the sand and the incline kills them. They become sitting ducks for Japanese gunners which target them immediately. Some tanks don't even make it that far.

Due to choppy waves, they get dropped out of their vehicles too soon and just get swamped in the surf. And remember, there's crews in these. I just imagine being the tank driver I'm like, huh, engine's not responding. It's getting awfully moisted here. And you don't know that you've surprised.

You're a submarine now. Whoops. The ones that were able to pull off the beach didn't get far, like I said, thanks to the incline. But some were able to get over that and then found all the landmines or fell into the tank traps. After a while, the tanks landing behind those ones had such a hard time navigating the beach that was so full of stuck and destroyed vehicles. not to mention the growing pile of dead bodies, which they just had to run over, that they also got trapped unable to move. They created a giant dead traffic jam.

This growing pile of wreckage and the slope coming off the beach were cleared by Navy Seabees or combat engineers, with bulldozers while under small arms and artillery fire. C-Bs were counted in horror that they had no choice but the bulldozed dead bodies, vehicles and sand into piles in order to create something like a smooth road to make offloading easier. So we got another corpse road. I was going to say a corpse road.

Corpse pier. A corpse pier. Corpse road. Corpse Burm also. Corpse Morbury Harbor. Yeah. Short crews attempted to set up a pontoon causeway to come off of the beach to make offloading easier. But the rough surf broke it free.

And now that is just being thrown all over the place around other landing vehicles and stuff. So it just more threats being added into the landing, but now one of them is just a flag piece of pontoon. Admiral Turner is fully aware of just how horrible all of this is going. But that left him with a very important question to answer that people often ask us whenever we talk about these episodes. Well, what do you do to fix this? The men on the shore, the ones who already landed, needed supply so they could keep fighting. They needed more men so they can keep pushing. But the landing is

turning into a shit show full of buried corpses and blown up tanks. However, you can't stop landing or you're doomed the men who already have to defeat. We're still, Turner knew that he had to do this fast because nightfall is coming. They need to push far enough inland to set stakes and prepare for a counterattack at night, something that the Japanese were known for doing. The Japanese Imperial military probably launched more night attacks than anyone else during World War II. So, he had no choice but to keep feeding men and machines into the meat grinder. On the beach, men were forced to answer the same question.

The landings were going terribly, whole units were scrambling in every direction, and men were trapped in, at best, platoon-sized elements of about 30 men? If they sat in the holes that they dug and then were collapsed into, the artillery would obliterate them. But if they advanced, the machine guns would tear them apart. Adding to this horror was the Japanese 320 mills. millimeter spigot mortar. Ooh.

Yeah. This thing fired in nearly 700 pound shell at such a low velocity that Marines could watch it fly through the sky and it looked like it was wobbling as it did so. What the fuck? Yeah. They nicknamed it several things. The flying ash can is a good one. The wobbling bobber is another, which sounds like something that,

that you'd call bucking in 1930. That sounds like a very British coded. I have to be honest with you. You want to wobble by bobbers. Yeah. Wobbling bobbler sounds similar to me to like, you know, reaper madness. All damn kids are getting out with this wobbling bomber.

Or my personal favorite nickname, the screaming Jesus. The new band name, new band name is the screaming Jesus. Yeah, the wobbling bobbers are opening up for screaming Jesus. And somehow David Yew is in both of them. Yeah, this is basically like fucking, it's like a Brit pop band in the early 90s very incongruously opening for grunge band in the early 90s. So it's, yeah, wobbling bobber opening up for screaming Jesus.

Navy corpsmen, otherwise known as the medics for the Marines, discovered something new and terrible. That was when a man was injured, obviously blood would start coming out, right? It would contaminate the loose black sand, which would then get into the wound and then turn into a wound. strange volcanic paste making treating almost any injury virtually impossible. Oh no, I got volcanoes in my wounds.

Because I presume you'd have to irrigate the wound a lot and it's not as if they had a lot of water to do that with. Not at this point, no. Like at this point since they're still coming to shore, they got canteens. That's it. Like I read accounts of Navy Corman just leaving that paste in the wound and then just bandaging

over it, hoping that the paste would keep the insides in. Oh my God. least happy that we've discovered a new goo on this show, you know. We're discovering new kinds of goo. Yeah, I mean, like, it's kind of, because if your only other option is like, you can't use all of your drinking water, that's not going to work. And seawater also is going to bring its own problems of serious contamination. Yeah, I mean, plus once you're inland, you can't exist.

It can be like, yo go get me some ocean water. So, yeah, it's that good. The only dude previous to this who, like, experienced this very specific type of ailment was the guy who was jerking a crazy style when Vesuvius erupted. Oh, God. Nobody wants to be the Marine Corpsman who has to improvise volcano medicine on the beach. Yeah. I mean, I think it's like it's so fucked up what you're describing with it. It's like, we can't really fault them for that decision because like there aren't really any other options. It's just like, I guess at the end of the day, it's, it's kind of a weird fucked up poultice. So there it is, you know. Guys, guys, I have an idea to shove more of the goo inside. The outside goo keeps the inside goo inside. Once again, this is why they won't let

new age hippie health people on Ewo Jima because it's like they're going to create the goo that cures everything. Yeah, they're going to have to cut them, do a little like preparatory wound so they can try out the Fart Island Quick Clot. Yeah, some Marine in 1945 was the first man to discover quick clot when his leg got blown off. And he just shoved it full of volcano goo. I'm technically speaking, the dude's getting triage and treated for lower,

like lower extremities injuries probably also did the first instance of Iwo Jima butthole sunning. Oh god Now the advance on the ground kept moving Despite all of this They eventually made it to the southern tip of airfield number one The capture of which was actually a day one objective But they would not achieve it

They only made it to the airfield They couldn't take it over But not every mission was a failure on the first day The left flank of the Marine advance Managed to cut across the island at its narrowest point Linking up with the Marines on the other side And isolating Mount Surabachi A lot of this is thanks to the unending stream of naval and air support being called in by forward observers.

Some that you may have heard of, the Navajo Code Talkers. Yes. Now, other native languages were used in code as well, but the Navajo was the most well-known code, thanks to how complex the Navajo language was and was completely unknown to outsiders. the man who first pitched this code to the U.S. military said it thought it'd be a good idea because according to him, at best, 30 people in the entire world outside the Navajo himself had any functional knowledge of the language at all. And none of them were Japanese or German. Exactly. Yeah, I remember hearing about this too. Yeah. So a code was developed using their language.

Sometimes it's thought that they simply spoke using their language over the radio and that is not true. It was a code using words from the language. And owing to American racism and white men at the time, not really being able to tell a difference between a Native American and a Japanese person, the code talkers were given a bodyguard to follow them around to make sure Americans and accidentally shoot them. If you want to experience what it would have been like trying to break this code, you should come to our live show on May 29th and try and have a conversation with me

after I've had four pints after I've gotten off stage. Yeah, he's going to become a, a county cork code talker. The Fienian wind talker is a whole new story. Now, it was never published policy, but one code talker, Bill Toledo,

I'm not making foot of his surname for the only time, said that the bodyguards were given orders to shoot them if they thought that they might fall in the Japanese hands because the Japanese were aware of the code talker program,

even if they had no understanding of it as a whole. Though, I should point out here, there's no evidence that this statement is true. Bill also said that this never actually happened. No bodyguard ever shot anybody. But this did make it into the terrible John Wu film,

Wind Talkers, that we did a bonus episode about many, many years ago. If you ever want to see US Marines literally doing karate for some reason with flamethrowers, it's a shit movie. It's so bad. But as far as we're aware, and as anybody's ever been able to prove,

there was no policy to kill the code talk. that was just kind of assumed. Like a lot of the code talkers believe that the bodyguard was there to kill them. Because you can assume that the bodyguards were pretty racist assholes. I mean, this is 1940s we're talking about here. But the code talkers made it rain constantly. And famously, they never made a mistake in passing their code back and forth. And their code remains the only unbroken spoken military code in history.

We'll eventually do a full episode on the Code Talkers. I just wanted to make sure that everybody knew that they were there in their role in this battle because they were incredibly important. And I know this isn't important and has nothing to do with anything, but it's strange just how many officers involved in this battle have something in common with one another. The commander of the unit that cut off Surabachi, Colonel Harry Liversedge, was also a former Olympian.

He competed in 1920 and 1924 in the shot put and won bronze in 1920. He also commended our favorite screwdriver wielding psychopaths, the Marine Raiders, and had a nickname Harry the Horse because he was fucking jacked. He was a shot putthrower. He was huge. Dude's got one massively developed side delt. You don't want to try and punch him from slightly too far to the side. Yeah.

The other possibility for his nickname is that his fellow Marines had to make sure to feed him with a flat hand, otherwise they'd lose a finger. I don't know. Hey, listen, you've got to be careful, Henry's nibbling again. Oh, Henry the nibbler. Anyway, by nightfall of day one, there were 40,000 Marines on Iwo Jima. All of them dug in the shitty soil and collapsing positions, waiting for the all but assured Japanese counterattack, but they never came.

The U.S. was pretty used to the Japanese nighttime tactics by this point. So instead of just sitting there and waiting, the Navy opened fire with a constant barrage of illumination rounds, turning pitch black into bright daylight. They fired over 1,000 of the things on night one. So it was never actually dark. Fuck. Now, this also meant that Marines did not sleep at all. But I think it's fair to assume they probably weren't going to anyway.

It's night one after a beach invasion. I think they're mostly just sitting there and be like, I guess it was like farts. I'm really scared. I'm afraid of fireworks now. American commanders were learning that they weren't dealing with a Japanese commander like they had in the past. They're expecting large-scale bonsai attacks immediately, counterattacks over open ground that allowed the Americans to obliterate them with superior firepower,

but that wasn't happening. The Japanese would remain in their positions and force the Americans to fight them tooth and nail over every single one. Whereas Holland Smith said, quote, I don't know who he is, but this Japanese general run in the show is one smart bastard, though I should point out, he did not say Japanese. I had to change that so I could speak. it. Use your imagination. You're creating racist mind libs.

Sometimes like, you know, I do my best, like, in some episodes when somebody uses something of an outdated term, like Indian instead of Native American, I will say it because like that's at least not a slur. It's just, it's just old timey and wrong. This is not one of those cases, guys. He used the N-word.

And I don't mean the one for black people. I mean the one for Japanese people. You know what it is. I don't have to say it. Anyway. The second day, Leverages Marines would be given orders to continue their state admission of securing Mount Surabachi. Or as the Marines had nicknamed it, the hot rocks.

Due to, well, yeah, they're really hot and they're rocks. The constant fart clouds of hot sulfur that kept venting themselves from the ground. This feels like the closest you can get to actually being in hell. We have to tactically invade hell Like the biblical version of hell Like beaches covered in black sand sulfur There's definitely a dude who's just like

Completely red Running around There's a lot of really red guys Not for long The devil and his minions I suppose And just so you can picture this in your head Surabachi in the general area around it Look like the surface of the moon

And you can look up pictures of it today It still looks virtually the same though with significantly fewer dead bodies these days. It's barren, there's no trees or plants, nothing. It's the same black volcanic soils, everything else, with the occasional rocky ridge breaking everything up. There's no cover. At the base of the mountain where a collection of 70 reinforced concrete bunkers

all dug into the mountain itself with all of the accompanying tunnels and whatnot. These were also camouflaged with the same black sand or failing that painted black. And because of how Sarabachi is, there's no way to flank the mountain, go up a different way, nothing like that. You would have to assault through these bunkers with a frontal attack. And again, Marines assaulting Japanese positions at this point was a known tactic. Marines trained for this before they were sent to the Pacific.

First, naval bombardment, air bombardment with explosives followed by napalm. That would lift. Infantry and tanks would advance. The tanks would fire smoke grounds directly at the bunkers, so Japanese machine gunners could still, you know, they'd still be able to fire, but they couldn't aim. Then the infantry would under a wall of tank fire advanced close enough to throw satchel charges into the firing ports, while other teams tried to find like side or back doors into the bunker to rush in and kill anybody who survived. We've talked about this another island hopping episodes. Not this time. Nope. Remember all the added difficulty here, the sand, the incline, the mountain, the low.

rocks. Tank support was not able to move around freely, so Marines had to drag 37-millimeter guns up like they became horses so they could fire on the bunkers. Sometimes these are able to blast the bunkers apart right then and there, but oftentimes it wouldn't be enough. And since these are dug into the mountain itself, there's no like side door. There's nothing to assault except the firing ports themselves. So they would hit them with explosives, either from the tanks, their toad guns, or the satchel charges, these would blow chunks off of the bunker so the Marines could kind of get in. And then they would get in like hand-to-hand combat constantly

while trying to clear these bunkers at the base of Suribachi. Though the Marines advance without bayonets attached, not because they didn't have them, but because climbing up Surabachi was a real pain in the fucking ass. They're like, they're slipping and falling in the sand and adding weight to the front of your rifle doesn't necessarily make things easier for you. So as this gap is closed, Marines and Japanese soldiers get into every kind of fight you can imagine all to the death. Swords, knives, bayonets, rifles, helmets, rocks, teeth, fists, and other times order to get around the world's worst mosh pit,

armored bulldozers were brought up and simply buried the bunkers with sand with everybody still inside. Just deploying a tactical Italian American from New Jersey called Jimmy the Tooth. He's just taking a massive chump out of a bunker. The Japanese didn't pay their sanitation bill on time, bringing the bulldozer. Still other times, flamethrower tanks, nicknamed Zippo tanks, were brought up. Or, more often than not, Marines carrying flamethrowers on their back. They would spray the gun ports or cave openings they found with napalm, killing everybody inside in just about the worst way imaginable. And the Japanese were more afraid of the,

the flamethrowers or anything else. And I'd say a pretty good fucking reason. So they were targeted immediately. Honestly, yeah, because you're in an enclosed bunker on a fucking volcanic island and some like corn fed redneck with a flame throwers pointed out your face. Yes, I would feel like I've just met the great Western Satan. Yeah. They were targeted immediately by snipers, riflemen.

As soon as anybody saw one of these dudes ambling up the cliff, everybody shot at them. It's basically the human version of the big red barrels in Golden I-O-7. Quite literally, because they explode. They explode. Exactly. Like, if the tanks got hit in such a way, the flamethrower man themselves would go up like a torch. They only have a range of about 40 meters. So they have to get pretty up close and personal. The M2 flame thrower, the one that they carried, also weighed over 70 pounds.

Yeah. So they weren't exactly moving very quickly, only made worse by the fact that they're going up the world's worst slip and slide. For a reference for people who aren't nearly 40 years old, it was like the mission in Call of Duty World at War where you are in the Pacific campaign on a flamethrower and there's like dudes in the tree shooting at you. Yeah, the second you appear, everybody's trying to kill you.

Like, that's one thing that the surviving dudes who carry these things, spoiler alert here, there's not many survivors, all said like this second that I appeared in the open. It was like the world exploded around me because everybody's trying to kill me. All of these factors combined meant that carrying a flamethrower at Iwojima was statistically almost a certain death sentence. The average casualty rate for them across the board was 92%, which is the highest in the entire military.

Jesus Christ. A lot of people don't know the briefing for, I think it's the 2007 Capcom showcase of Dynasty Warriors was actually based on training for Japanese soldiers at Iwojima. like aim at red mark for massive damage. Fuck up. One million troops. I mean, in a way, you can kind of understand

then why Japanese video games made in the 80s and 90s featured the big red glowing thing that you shoot at. Yeah, because that used to just be some guy named Carl. I was going to say it was the epigenetic memory of encountering Americans. Yeah, you know, Sergeant Al-Fuck,

who's climbing up the hill with the 70 pound of flame thrower. Just like moving, really slowly making Dark Souls pain noises the entire time he's going up the hill. It's because the Japanese imagination, they metastasize, you know, the trauma of the dropping of the nuclear bomb into Godzilla and they, you know, metastasized the trauma of being faced with a guy from Iowa with literally a handheld dragging, spitting fire at you, but with a giant crab with a glowing red spot on its chest. And like, if you look at pictures of these

flamethrower guys actually in the field, you notice that they're always standing by themselves. Yeah, obviously, because no one wants to fucking be around the car. Even the Marines knew that like, yeah, that guy's going to fucking explode. Yeah, guy writing letter homes. You know, from private, you know, Clem Grumpton, first Marine division, flame thrower company. He's just like, no one wants to be friends with me. He wants to be friends with Johnny Boom, boom.

This happened all along the base of the mountain and the fighting went on for two days before the Japanese line around Surabachi was broken. Though unlike before, the Japanese. fought day and night, though still without the infamous bonsai charge. Instead, in small teams, they would try to attack individual foxholes and then run back into their caves. Then if that wasn't mind-fuck enough for Marines in the middle of the night, after attacks on these marine positions, other teams of Japanese soldiers who had learned a few words of English would sit back and scream out, Corman! Corman! Which was the universal marine word for calling a medic.

for help. So the medics would run out looking for wounded right into an ambush. Tactics like this as well as just the general hell of the battle at large would lead to Navy corpsmen having the highest casualty rate after Flamethrower guys, with some units losing 85% of their corpsmen, leaving a lot of units with no medics whatsoever as the battle went on, so casualty rates increased. Once the lines were broken, the Japanese commander at Sarabachi,

recognize his position was doomed and ordered the only mass counterattack during this episode of the battle. This was not a suicide charge, though. There's no bonsai-related shenanigans. It's important to remember the difference here. Like, a bonsai charge has no meaningful tactical purpose. Like, they're literally just running directly at a machine gun to die, right? Bonsai-related shenanigans is such a great phrase. Do you reckon that the soldiers before the bonsai charge would like play pranks on his? other like tie their shoelaces together

and the guy just wants for it. Straight down. Oh, you got me again, you fucker. Oh, you prick. I'll get you next time. Well, actually, I suppose I won't. Given the fact of what we're about to do. God damn you, Fukushi, not again.

You go to pull out your sword and someone took the blade off. So it's just like the handle. It's just killed. The emperor gave me this. Rather, this was a breakout attempt. Like they were trying to get out of Sarabachi and make it all the way back to Motoyama Plateau in the northern tip of the island. There's a tactical idea in mind for this.

This is not a suicide charge. But as you can imagine, trying to break out from a network of bombed out and half-burned bunkers through miles of open ground across the island was probably not going to work out well for them. And it didn't. They were obliterated in short order. Though somehow apparently, according to letters at Motoyama, 25 of the 1,000 or so of the mountain garrison did manage to turn up at the plateau, and nobody's entirely sure how, just running across the whole island, like,

oh, maybe they just think I'm a civilian, this is crazy. This was the first real hint to Kuriayashi that things were going much, much worse than he thought they would. Writing in his diary, he is not shocked that Suribachi fell. Remember, the whole point of this battle from day one is he knows he's going to lose. But he thought it would take 10 days of fighting to take Suribachi. Instead, it took three. He was like, oh, we're going to die a lot faster than I thought we were going to, boys. Yeah, Jesus.

So in case you were listening to this series to learn about the flag raising at Mount Surabachi, we're finally there because, who boy is this whole saga confusing? And also, most of what you know about it is probably not right. So after the breakout attempt, resistance on Mount Surabachi was done. Organized resistance, I should say. The Marines are not charging up a mountain to plant a flag under fire. Instead, a small patrol of 40 Marines marched up the mountain towards the summit after bombardment on the fourth day of the battle, February 23rd.

There were still small groups of Japanese soldiers that opened fire on them as they advanced, but there was nothing coordinated. They were easily dealt with, including a lone Japanese officer who popped out of a hole in the ground, armed only with a sword and tried to kill a journalist. He got shot. Many Japanese soldiers, most of them were too wounded. or too sick to take part in the breakout attempt, killed themselves with grenades.

Marines heard them constantly exploding under their feet as they advanced up the summit, which must have just been a strange experience. They said they were like hearing popping noises, and they weren't entirely sure what it was until they realized they were just standing on top of an ant hill of tunnels. The patrol walked up the mountain,

collapsing cave entrances with explosive charges or blasting them with flamethrowers. According to the men, the whole place was just about the word, smelling battlefield they've ever been to, rotting corpses by the hundreds mixed with the ever-present fart smell of sulfur. On top of the mountain,

Marines from E Company's 2nd Battalion rigged up a flagpole out of some iron pipes they found that the Japanese have been using as part of a water collection system and ran a small American flag up to its top and marine photographer Lewis Lowry snapped a picture of this flag. This is the first picture on Mount Surabachi.

This was spotted by just about everybody I remember Iwojima's not a very big island Mount Sarbachi is the biggest part of it and it's overlooking the beach so everybody's like hey look it's a flag sick one of these men happened to be the secretary of the Navy Jim Forrestal

who decided it would be a good time to come ashore to Iwojima personally while the battle was still going on sometimes it's framed that Forrestall was shot at or came under artillery fire that's not true we know this because Forrestall himself said it ever happened. This seemed to be something

the press just kind of made up. Because we'll talk about this later, but there are still routinely artillery shells coming down on the beach. Like, no part of Iwo Jima is ever safe from artillery due to the size of itself and the guns at play. So, you were never too far away to get hit. What is generally

not known is that pretty much only seconds after the first flag was raised, the men at the top were ambushed by a group of surviving Japanese soldiers. Lowry, the man who took the picture was nearly killed when a grenade blew. him off of a ridge line instead of his camera flying. Holy fuck.

We almost lost the first picture altogether. Uh-huh. Then, about three hours later, a group of Marines went up to the mountain with a much larger flag to replace a smaller one so it could be seen better. This patrol went up with a journalist Joe Rosenthal. Some people tend to think that this whole thing was done for Joe Rosenthal and that picture, which would become easily the most well-known photo in American military history. But if that was the case, nobody told Rosenthal.

He thought so little of the situation he didn't even raise the viewfinder on his camera to his eye before taking the picture and he nearly missed the raising altogether though next to him was a Marine cameraman who recorded the whole thing in color. Obviously, all these things survived today. There is further confusion on this as well.

Rosenthal was asked by his editor if he staged the photo because it does kind of look too perfect. It is a great picture. It is, as a picture, it is perfectly composed. It's perfectly exposed as well, which is so rare,

consider it's on a battlefield, on a fucking volcanic island. On a somewhat overcast day. And then the film had to be transported all the way back to Guam to be developed. Rosenthal thought he meant a different picture, a clearly staged photo of a group of Marines sitting next to the flag,

which has been since nicknamed the gung-ho picture. This is just a normal group photo of the guys who had done the flag raising. So Rosenthal said, yeah, his editor then published the photo, mentioning that it was staged when it was not. He had just gotten very, very lucky and Rosenthal spent the rest of his life trying to correct the fact that the photo was not staged. And this is actually like a big rarity in very famous war photography. Like the very famous picture from the Valley of Death is staged. It's one of the very first war, like famous war photograph.

they like move the cannonballs and like dragged corpses around and like it's completely staged and it is one of the most famous war photographs and a lot of them since then are including there's quite a few during the American Civil War that were were set up there is um the god I can't remember his name now he came to shore during D-Day Robert Kappa yeah Robert Kappa was found staging photos earlier and later and later in his career as well. Also other stuff that like details not necessarily lining up with his D-Day photos either. It's, it's pretty common, but there is no evidence to suggest that this was, that this was set up. And I know a little bit about Bob Kappa and yeah, like he, there were some

things where it's like, you're correct. And there's some photos where it absolutely is not staged. And it's just like, I think the culture of it was different back then. I would say in Bob Kappa's case, he wasn't really able to correct the record because he, if I remember correctly, stepped on a landmine in Vietnam in when it was still the French war in Vietnam and died. Yeah, it's kind of why a lot of Lee Miller's photographs at the end of the war going through Europe are like so striking because she was doing like fashion photography and then and kind of art photography then was taking photos in London and in Britain during the Blitz. And like so much of her stuff on the continent is like very, very natural and diagetic. like the only kind of state I saw an exhibition of her stuff

and there's a huge section of her of her work from the end of World War II and there's a photo of her photography partner at the time taking photos in Hitler's bath and it's the most striking shit ever and it's like all the photos of like you know the prison guards

in the concentration camps that had been gotten the shit kicked out of them by allied soldiers and stuff like it's so natural and like a lot of people think that stage, but there is a huge history of war photography being very, very, very, very staged. Like I said, Rosenthal's film was sent to Guam to be developed and then was published. FDR saw the picture and said, hell yeah, this slaps, we should use this. And then he orders the men to return to the United States, the men that were in the photo,

for a press tour after the Battle of Iwo Jima's over. This is where the confusion begins. This causes a slight problem. Nobody knows who the fuck these Marines are because Rosenthal nor anybody else ever bothered to note who was in the picture because they didn't think it was a big deal. Making things even more confusing

was that a Coast Guard photographer who was there, who might have remembered, was killed at Iwojima. As was the guy running that video camera who was there with Rosenthal. So any other like people there taking pictures and possibly taking notes was dead. One man,

Renee Gagnon, was mentioned by his commander as definitely being in the photo. And if you haven't seen the photo, which would be surprising to me, but look it up, nobody's face is really clearly visible. Gagnon then was told to name the men who were with him. So he tried to remember who was there, and he gave the names Henry Hanson, Franklin Sousley, John Bradley, and Michael Strank. Southley Strank and Hansen had all been killed later on during the same battle in Iwojima.

the last man that he knew was probably the most famous Ira Hayes but he refused to name Hayes to his commander because Hayes knew he was in the photo, knew they were looking for him, and threatened to beat Gagnon's ass because he didn't

want to become famous. Oh my God. Then Gagnon caved when the Marines threatened to punish him for withholding Ira Hayes' name. However, Gagnon wasn't right. He fucked up. Maybe his memory was wrong. He had forgotten or he was simply pressured to try and remember this five-second event in the middle of, you know, the Battle of Ewojima.

Ira Hayes upon returning to the United States, contended that Gagnon had gotten some of the names wrong. He instead said that a man named Harlan Block was in the photo, not Hanson, going so far as to hitchhike all the way to Block's family home and tell them that their kid was in the picture because Block had also died at Iwo Jima. Though at this point, Hayes was pretty troubled guy. He was pretty shattered from PTSD and from not only Iwo Jima, but the war in general. And he crawled hard into a bottle. He became such an issue personality-wise that the army kicked him off the press tour because he kept causing. He kept getting very, very drunk and starting problems. There's also a tinge of racism to it because Ira Hayes is a Native American.

So there's a lot going on there, though Hayes was. dealing with a lot of fucking demons. That part is undeniable. Here's the thing, though. There's a very good reason as to why Hayes and Gagnon had two very different memories regarding the photo.

Gagnon wasn't in the photo at all. I was waiting to get there. No. Gagnon carried the second flag up the mountain, but was not in the photo. As for, did Gagnon lie or get caught up in the whole, well, everything behind it being

misidentified himself, then suddenly finding himself talking to the fucking president? Well, we'll never know, ever. He wasn't concretely proven to not being in the photo until long after his death in 1979, and he never changed his story. Muddying everything further, another man who was not in the picture,

but was named being there by Gagnon, John Bradley, agreed that Gagnon had gotten the names correct. And then if that wasn't weird enough, Ira Hayes, a man who was definitely there, insisted that Gagnon had been there with him, but he was right about all of the other names other than Hansen. So there's so many layers of this thing.

So like Gagnon wasn't there. Hayes insisted he was, but then Gagnon got all the names right anyway other than Hanson. It's so confusing. Everybody looks the same when you're covered in volcanic suit. It wasn't until 2019 that the full story and the real identification

of all of the men involved was finally probably figured out. Hayes was right. Harlan Block was in the photo, as was Harold Keller previously believed to be Gagnon. Sousley was accurate, as was strength, but Bradley was wrong. Instead, it was a guy named Harold Schultz.

And what is interesting here is that both Schultz and Keller survive the war, fully knowing that it was them in the picture. Weirdly, they never tried to make it a thing. It does seem that Keller tried to correct his account in 1945, but was told that he must be wrong. It's important to remember here

that he was a private, and he was speaking to a Marine General. Nobody believes a private when they say anything. And I'm not saying that you're wrong not to believe them. I was a private once, and I lied to many people like Nate, trying to get out of work. Fair enough.

He mentioned it again in a letter to his wife, Ruby, which was posted from Iwojima in the immediate after, But after that, nothing. Schultz never told a soul other than in a single conversation with his stepdaughter over dinner, decades later, and then never brought it up again. Hayes contends that he did try to correct the whole block for Hansen thing to a colonel immediately afterwards, but was told to shut the fuck up. The colonel contends this never happened, and I'm not one to side with a colonel on anything.

But Hayes was also pretty troubled at this point of his life. He's not a very reliable narrator and he's hardly ever sober. That aside, I would not be surprised if what he said was true. Again, think of the context. He's a lower enlisted guy trying to correct a PR blitz while not only being kind of sauced most of the time, but also a Native American. Nobody is going to listen to him. Yeah. But even if Hayes was right about that, and he was, that doesn't explain anything else that happened along the way.

So why did Gagnon lie? why did Hayes agree with him? It's important to remember here as well Hayes went to his grave insisting Gagnon was there when he wasn't. Why did Bradley lie? We legitimately have no idea because they all died before the truth came out.

Just for the funsies. I don't think it has anybody any favors that come up with reasons why or think that there's some kind of vast government cover-up because of this photo. There's no evidence that there is and there's evidence that there ever was. The thing to remember is that like these guys have just, you know, stormed an island and literally landed on hell and are making some gains is like, I think their minds are kind of preoccupied with other shit than like remembering who they raised the flag with that they're, you know, their commanding officer says go run up that hill and raise that flag again.

Yeah, there's a lot going on. I'd also say too, yeah, that like there's some certain things when I look back on it, like details about stuff that I experienced in when I was. deployed, which was by, you know, tiny hundreds fractions, you know, as intense as what these guys were experiencing in this campaign. There are some things around like, you put me on the stand. I'll tell you exactly as I remember it. But that might also be wrong. I might genuinely just not remember correctly because it was a long time ago and like stuff gets mixed up in your head. You know what I mean? So it's like, that's a natural thing. And then I guess none of these guys had any idea. This was going to be this symbol that, like you said, Joe, probably the most

famous U.S. military photo ever. I can't think of any other one that's been, I mean, the Marine Corps Memorial has this photo, you know, made into a statue. Right. It's, this is it. This is the most, the most famous photo from World War II, I think, from the U.S. military, certainly the Pacific, but probably the most famous. Like, going off of what Nate said, like, it's really easy to fall into this thing like,

oh, these guys must have been lying. And like, look, I'm not going to debate the fact that Gagnon was certainly. lying. He had to have known he was not in that picture. Why he did it, no idea. But as far as everyone else, specifically Ira Hayes, like, I've been in firefights before. Obviously, not comparing that to Iwo Jima, but my account of that firefight is much different than a guy that was five meters away from me. Like, nobody remembers the same thing. And especially going through traumatic experiences, your brain delete something. Sometimes it invents others that never happened or maybe seemed a lot worse to you than someone else. Like, it's not.

surprising that Hayes didn't necessarily know that Gagnon wasn't there. Maybe he remembered he was there because Gagnon was on top of Mount Surabachi, for example. Like, so your brain gets kind of put in a blender and not to mention this whole thing only takes a couple minutes. And also think about how much intense like sleep deprivation, starvation, pain, heat, everything, like water deprivation, all this stuff that's going on. Like, it's completely natural. I mean, the closest I ever got to like flat out getting killed was a friendly fire thing. A ANCOP shot at us and like a bullet hit close enough that like it hit a concrete wall. And I don't recall that I felt the chunks of it hitting me, but I definitely like I heard the rocks, the bullets, everything coming really close to me.

I think like he scratches from it. That's the closest. But like in my mind, I have no idea. I couldn't tell you flat out like how far away I was at this point. I remember it happening in my head. Remember where I was. I remember seeing the gun, hearing the shot, hearing the impact, like it was one blur. But it was it was it a meter? Was it two meters? I don't know. I have no idea. I just know was very close to me. Your brain doesn't have the ability to tell you those things any real accuracy. Yeah, and the picture is so fucking hazy. Even though I can remember exactly what it looked like, it's still so fucking hazy that I

really couldn't tell you. You know? And I was not sleep deprived that day. Yeah. And there's like, there's questions within questions, you know? There's two dudes who are definitely lying. And they knew they were lying. Why didn't they say anything?

Would you? Who knows? Yeah. I'm not here to judge them for it. Like, they're just trying to get along with their lives through the worst stretch imaginable. These are dudes who are teens or in their early 20s when it happens. They are dealing with wildly untreated post-traumatic stress disorder.

You're not going to get a straight story out of any of them. In an era where like talking about it like all the ways in which we've learned about processing trauma, like that wasn't really, there were some people who were kind of like trailblazing on it. But in general, it wasn't a thing that was done. It certainly wasn't a thing that was like accepted amongst the general like veteran populace at all. Yeah. The idea of treating it was like, have you tried to hitting your soul? and calling him a pussy.

Yeah. And the idea of, you know, treating it in yourself after the war was forget about it and never talk about it. And it's like, hmm. Or drink. Or drink. Which is what they all did. And that's what eventually killed Ira Hayes.

He had a very rough life. And it was done no favors and was treated terribly by the military and the government. It's just all of this is just one of those things that we'll never know for sure. We know, according to the Marine Corps office of the historian, that these names are accurate for now. they could also still be wrong. We don't know. It's just another one of those things

about the Battle of Iwojima that we'll just never know for sure. And we're gonna have some more of those on part three when we pick up next time on the conclusion to our series on the Battle of Iwojima. So yeah, we got to the Mount Surabachi part. I hope everybody's happy.

I know that's what everybody was listening for. Flag, flag mentioned. Flag mentioned. Tap, tab on the thing. Weird Spotify auto-generated subtitles that we can't fucking change. says flag, I'm going there, want to hear about the flag. Flag content only.

They better not, they'll miss all the spulunking parts. I know, exactly. Comprehensive spulunking. Catastrophic spuloking. Welcome to the end of part two of the battle of Emo Gima where we say the lyrics.

And tonight will be the night I'll raise the flag for you. Over again. You guys are fucking killing me, man. You're fucking killing me. But speaking of, being catastrophically splung to a permanent end. You could come see us live May 29th in London.

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