Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Iwo Jima: WWII in the Pacific About this episode 80 years ago, on the rocky volcanic island of Iwo Jima, the vicious battle for the Pacific reached ever bloodier crescendos. As Allied forces crossed the Rhine in Europe, American Marines won a costly victory on Iwo Jima in their island-hopping campaign towards the Japanese mainland.
For the latest instalment of our 'D-Day to Berlin' series, we're joined by Timothy Heck, an artillery officer in the US Marine Corps Reserve and a supervisory historian with Naval History and Heritage Command. Tim explains why the battle happened, and how the Americans overcame the tenacious Japanese defenders.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Matthew Peaty.
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1:24 Dan Snow? On the night of the 18th of February 1944, 80 years ago, the US Fifth Fleet arrived. One of the greatest assemblages of naval might in the history of our species. Battleships accompanied by the mighty carrier task force alongside ships carrying the fifth amphibious corps. Imagine that. One minute, empty sea. Hours later, a floating city has just appeared as if from nowhere, with airfields, warehouses, hospitals, men and morgues. Over 100,000 troops in over 500 ships.
2:06 Dan Snow? More aircraft than in most modern air forces. That is what control of the oceans allows you to do. They'd arrived off a tiny speck of land called Iwo Jima, a place that had really never troubled the history books until now. Because now it found itself directly in the path of an American thrust towards the Japanese home islands. One of the chain of islands that was being seized by the Americans allowed them to push military assets closer and closer to Japan itself. American bombers, for example, would be able to use the airfield on this little volcanic extrusion from the ocean. But before any American planes could take off or land, it had to be clear that it's Japanese defenders,
2:51 Dan Snow? just over 20,000 men. But they were well led and they'd had a lot of time to prepare. You're listening to Dan Snow's History, and this is the story of the Battle for Iwo Jima, a battle that began hours after the arrival of that fleet, with a speed that must have shocked the Japanese defenders. American troops headed for shore on the morning of the 19th of February. It was bright, clear blue skies. As the men took to the landing craft, big gun battleships let rip on the beaches. Surely, the infantrymen must have thought, nothing could survive that weight of steel and fire that was being rained down on the island.
3:36 Dan Snow? But they were wrong. The planners had said the landings would be easy, but they were wrong too. When they did land, the Marines discovered the whole island was covered in a kind of loose volcanic debris which left them trudging as if through snow. The exit points off the beach were far steeper than expected.
3:56 Dan Snow? And then, the Japanese defenders opened up. This is the story of what happened next. Eighty years on, we're going to tell you about one of the toughest battles of the Second World War, from the extraordinary defensive measures taken by the Japanese, the tenacity of the Americans, to the taking of one of history's most iconic, and yes, I mean iconic, photographs. Join me on the podcast is Timothy Heck. He's actually an officer in the US Marine Corps Reserves. He's a supervisory historian with the Naval History and Heritage Command. He's speaking to me now as a private citizen, not as a representative of either of those two august institutions. He's the author of Uncontested Shores: The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare.
4:40 Dan Snow? The perfect man to take us through Iwo Jima.
4:55 Dan Snow? Tim, thanks very much for coming on the podcast.
4:57 Speaker 02 Thanks for having me.
4:58 Dan Snow? Let's get the geography sorted. Tell me about Iwo Jima, this little speck of, well, land, I guess, that no one in the history of the human race has hardly ever heard of before it became the centre of global attention in 1945. Where are we talking?
5:11 Speaker 02 So, we're talking about an island that's not far off the Japanese mainland comparatively, right? The Pacific is vast, it's massive, and you have an island that is within striking distance of Japan, right? It's a staging. It's not as close as Okinawa, which is the next major American amphibious operation, but it's closer. So, we've moved north out of the Marianas, we've advanced across the Pacific from east to west, within striking distance of Japan. And that's part of the reason that, from the Japanese perspective, the island is so important is it's close. The Americans care about it for a few reasons, and there's now historiographical debate and significance discussions, and we can get to those later. The Americans like it because it's a good stopping off point for either bombers getting
5:56 Speaker 02 damaged coming out of Japan, or bombers having trouble going into Japan, because the American air offensive, supplemented by British bombers as well, the American air offensive has kicked off against the Japanese homeland.
6:07 Dan Snow? Why stop at Iwo Jima? Why not keep going and, as you say, go to Okinawa? Like, skip Iwo Jima? Is there a powerful Japanese strike group based there? Were they worried about them leaving it undaunted as they advance further towards Japan? Why go to all this trouble?
6:23 Speaker 02 They go to this trouble, one, because amphibious operations over long distances are very hard to pull off. And while the Japanese navy has been effectively defeated, right? It loses the last of its true remaining combat power in Leyte in late 44. You still have to stepping stone it. And in this part of the Pacific, unlike the Southern Pacific and the Central Pacific, where you have lots of little islands and, you know, MacArthur's famous island hopping campaign, where I can leave and bypass Japanese detachments and let them wither on the vine, that doesn't exist in the Northern Pacific in the same way. You want to kind of take incremental gains as best you can. American intelligence, we know in retrospect, right? The battle takes 36 days. The last Japanese
7:04 Speaker 02 troops actually surrender in 1949, but the battle really takes 36 days. American intelligence says it would take five. So Iwo Jima is supposed to be, according to the intelligence analysts and the folks predicting the operation, this is going to be quick. There's a strangled Japanese garrison that's there, right? Where they've been isolated. This will be quick. And it turns out to be the exact opposite.
7:29 Dan Snow? You're an officer in the US Marine Corps Reserve.
7:31 Speaker 02 Yes.
7:32 Dan Snow? But you're speaking to me as a private citizen with a particular interest and focus in this subject. With your experience as a practitioner, as somebody who studied amphibious warfare, when you're looking at Iwo Jima, what do you see? And does it look like a daunting target? Really, explain what you are seeing from the sea.
7:49 Speaker 02 Every amphibious operation is daunting. It's not easy, right? You're combining where water meets land meets air. It's ugly. They're all ugly. You know, and they look good on maps. They look good conceptually, but they're hard to pull off. I have the added advantage. I'm working on a biography of Kellaraki, who commands the 5th Marine Division at Iwo. They're the flag raising division. I have access to his personal papers and I'm seeing his thoughts as he's kind of preparing for and writing correspondence and running a division ahead of combat. I think that while folks thought it was going to be five days, anybody who had been in significant combat, which would be your three Marine Division commanders on that island, are thinking to themselves, we got told this before. It's
8:32 Speaker 02 never this easy. You know, you see in retrospective things from General Schmidt, who commands the 5th Amphibious Corps, which owns those three divisions, about the limits on pre-invasion bombardment. Chris Hemler just came out with a fantastic book called Delivering Destruction. He talks kind of about that evolution of fire support for amphibious operations with the Marines and the Navy in the Pacific. I think the best way to describe it is they were expecting 10 days worth of pre-invasion bombardment. They get maybe two.
9:00 Dan Snow? Tim, this means big gunned battleships firing those enormous guns. People will be familiar with them. Here in the UK, we have a couple of those guns outside the Imperial War Museum. And in the States, you're lucky enough to have so many battleships and battle wagons left over. So those huge big guns absolutely blasting the shore, taking the place of artillery on land, if you like, naval artillery blasting the shore. Okay, and they're hoping to have 10 days, and they got two.
9:24 Speaker 02 And airstrikes.
9:25 Dan Snow? And airstrikes. So this carrier-based aviation?
9:28 Speaker 02 Carrier-based and some land-based, very long-range land-based bombing out of the Marianas.
9:33 Dan Snow? And what were they trying to hit? What's on the land there?
9:36 Speaker 02 The objective is there are these two airfields and one that's under construction. It's a flat piece of land on a relatively flat island. What they're really trying to hit with this pre-invasion bombardment are the Japanese defensive works. Mount Suribachi, which anchors the southwestern part of the island where the flag raising happens, right? It's this visually distinct piece. It is honeycombed with Japanese caves and defensive positions. There are Japanese defensive positions all over that island. Reconnaissance aircraft, reconnaissance submarine missions have identified. So the Navy task force that goes in is looking to destroy or soften those up. It's pre-invasion bombardment. It's the same thing for your audiences that are more attuned to the European theater. It's the same thing that was supposed
10:20 Speaker 02 to happen at Normandy, right? We're going to silence these blockhouses. We're going to silence these oppositional positions. The landing troops are going to go ahead and just be able to march to victory. That's the intent. That's always the intent with pre-invasion fire support. Never plays out that way.
10:36 Dan Snow? It all sounds so straightforward in a planning room, right? It's nice and clear. You've got a great map there. You've got plenty weight of shells and it appears you've got a bit of time. What could possibly go wrong?
10:45 Speaker 02 Oh, I don't know. Let's see. Weather? And that's the big one, right? For the pre-invasion bombardment, this is 1945. And while there is radar, you don't have what we have today. Today, I have aircraft that can fly in all weather conditions. I have aircraft that can drop ordnance through cloud cover on pre-designated sighted positions or that can follow laser beams. Missiles I can launch from thousands of miles away, right? Tomahawks and things like that. I have all of these things that technology in the last 80 years have made all weather, all time of the day, right? You can no longer hide in the darkness. In 1945, that's not the case. I have to be able to see a target. Or think that I see a target, right?
11:28 Speaker 02 Because the Japanese are in these caves and fortified positions inside the mountain and on the beach, you know, just off the beaches. I'm on a rocking ship, a moving shooting platform, and I'm hoping that I'm going to hit a target. And so while there's this massive saturation that does happen in those two days, you're kind of doing a spray and pray in some ways. I'm going to shoot a lot of ammunition and a lot of targets. And statistically, based on all of the analysis that's been done back at testing ranges and testing facilities and with my operational research associate, you know, groups, they're going to tell me I have destroyed the target because statistically I should have. But that's not quite how it plays out.
12:11 Dan Snow? Not quite lab conditions here?
12:13 Speaker 02 No, I mean, as an artilleryman, there are, oh goodness, I have to pull the memory banks real fast, 16 non-standard conditions to shoot artillery from a stationary position against another stationary position, now at a ship.
12:26 Speaker 02 Oh, and by the way, that round goes straight, the artillery round arcs. I mean, there's all of these complications that go into it. So the predictions that you can have in the States at planning conferences where you can sleep in your own bed at night, you can have three square meals a day, it goes a lot smoother than it ever does in practice.
12:48 Dan Snow? So tell me about those Marines. They are packed in there on transport ships. What are conditions like? And is it like D-Day? Is there a delay of 24 hours and people are throwing up their guts and, you know, being sick? Or is it running smoothly and they've got everything they need to hit those beaches in pretty good physical condition? Good night's sleep and holding some food down?
13:08 Speaker 02 Having talked to Marines that landed on that island, nobody got a good night's sleep beforehand. So you've got three Marine divisions, the third, the fourth, and the fifth. From south to north, the fifth Marine Division hits the southern Moche beaches. To their right is the 4th Marine Division and held in reserve is the 3rd Marine Division. The 3rd and the 4th had seen combat before. They have seen extensive combat throughout the war. The 5th Marine Division as a whole is untested. So Kellaraki takes them over in 1944. He's got them in California. He takes them to Hawaii. They have the benefit of an influx of veterans. Either coming out of units that have been disbanded or that have volunteered. And John Basilone, you know, the Medal of Honor recipient from Guadalcanal, one of the main
13:53 Speaker 02 characters in the HBO series, The Pacific, John Basilone, volunteers to go back to combat and comes to the 5th Marine Division. So while it's untested, its leaders know their jobs and a lot of their NCOs know their jobs.
14:05 Dan Snow? But a lot of those Marines, this is welcome to World War II. This is the first shot they're gonna hear fired in anger is on a beach near Iwo Jima.
14:11 Speaker 02 Yeah. Your 18, 19-year-old kids that were in high school six months ago are now being put on transport ships to sail across the Pacific.
14:19 Dan Snow? Wow.
14:19 Speaker 02 In talking with these veterans, in talking with these Marines, you know, they talk about the training that happened on the ships as best they could because they're crammed in there, right? This isn't, I can't practice patrolling, I can't practice land navigation or any of these other vital skills, but I can go out to the fantail and I can shoot my rifle a few times at the can that's been thrown over the side or we can, you know, the sergeants can talk to us, the lieutenants can show us the maps. You know, certainly in the 5th Marine Division, they're trained, they're highly trained in the States before they get on those ships. They have the transit across the Pacific. By 1945, the American industrial base and the American food industrial base, agricultural base, they're eating as well as they can. But that night before the invasion, you know, there's a pre-invasion meal that's traditionally served.
15:03 Speaker 02 I don't know how many of those Marines either ate it or retained it on their way into the beach. The landings were supposed to hit the beaches on Iwo Jima at 09:00 in the morning. They landed at 8:59. So they're a minute ahead of schedule or on path. What they land to is very different than what they were expecting.
15:22 Dan Snow? Let's talk about those few strange minutes after landing. What were they expecting and what happened?
15:29 Speaker 02 So Japanese defensive doctrine, right? And the Japanese commander Kurabayashi intentionally broke from Japanese doctrine. The defensive doctrine for the Japanese that the Americans and our allies, right? The Brits and the Dutch and the Aussies and Kiwis have seen at other islands throughout the Pacific is they're going to be met at the shoreline, right? When the water hits the beach, that's where the Japanese are going to fight. And Kurabayashi says, no, we're not doing that. That's foolish. We're going to build our defenses in. We're going to do a defense in depth. That's some moral courage on his part to counter man doctrine, to say to Japanese superiors, no. What were they going to do to him? You know, shave his head and send him to Iwo Jima? But he changes the script.
16:12 Speaker 02 And so the first hour, the Marines land on this beach and it is a volcanic sandy beach. There's no roads off of it. You can't dig in. You can't do any of these things you're expecting to do and that the Marines have done on other beaches in the Pacific. He waits an hour and then opens up and that beach is crowded with waves and waves of Marines. And you read the memoirs, you read the letters home, you talk to these Marines. And that first 24 hours on the beach after that initial call, there wasn't a single shell hole or position on that beach that didn't have a dead Marine. The Japanese fire is so effective because they can look down from Suribachi and see everything and oh, by the way, they've had possession of this island for decades and
16:56 Speaker 02 know where every single point is on it.
16:59 Dan Snow? So you can have an artillery spotter on the high ground and he can call in fire precisely from artillery barrels where they've practiced. They know exactly what they've got to do, what heat, temperature, wind conditions. They can drop a shell on exactly that spot of ground. They've practiced it dozens of times and they can call in that fire at will.
17:17 Speaker 02 Yes. And oh, by the way, I can open the enclosure, stick the barrel of the gun out, fire, pull it back in, close the enclosure, reload, rearm, reset, and American counter battery fire, he can't get me.
17:30 Dan Snow? You're in a cave or you're in a really strong sangre or something that people can't get.
17:36 Dan Snow? That first few minutes, though, when it was completely silent, they must have, what did they think? Oh, my God, this is so different to what's gone before. Those veterans must have told everyone that you're going to be fighting in the shallows. And here they are going ashore. They must have thought, what was going on?
17:50 Speaker 02 Yes. And, you know, in talking to some of these Marines and certainly kind of projecting my own sense on to this a little bit, the mind can go one of two ways. Oh, intel got it right. This could be a cakewalk. Or, oh, God, something's coming. When is the other shoe going to drop? And, you know, as we know, in retrospect, an hour later, when the Japanese opened up, the other shoe did drop.
18:13 Dan Snow? So the naval bombardment was not as effective as they'd hoped. I feel like I've said that on this podcast before, sadly. The aerial bombardment had not, so, you know, rather than just occupying smashed Japanese positions manned by corpses, they are fighting a very, very alive and prepared and motivated enemy, I guess, right? The Japanese, even by this point of the war, we've people will have heard of this kind of, you know, suicidal valor that Japanese display. I mean, what is motivating these men? Are they fighting as fanatically as perhaps movies and TV shows have us believe?
18:45 Speaker 02 Hollywood versus history. I think they are fighting to that level, right? So there's 21,000 roughly Japanese on the island. In the end, ultimately, only about 1,000 of them are captured. The rest all die. So they are fighting to the end. They are fighting differently. Kurabayashi, again, one, the tactics are different. He's fighting a defense in depth. He knows he cannot stop the Americans. He's been given the strategic task of delaying. All he has to do is hold up the Americans as long as he can because the Japanese know that the next stop is the start of the home islands, which is Okinawa, but it's the mainland
19:24 Speaker 02 Japan as well. So every day he buys and every Marine he kills on Iwo Jima is one more day for prep on the islands and one fewer Marines in Tokyo and Kobe, wherever. We are fighting for our homeland. We are fighting to defend our homes so that our mothers, our sisters, our brothers, our parents, whatever, our children, don't have to or have to face a weaker enemy. But Iwo Jima is a strategic defense in depth position for the Japanese as well.
19:55 Dan Snow? After the Japanese open up, you have vehicles being knocked out, you have infantry being torn down, no cover. How did the Americans get off the beach?
20:04 Speaker 02 Ones and twos, under small leadership, small unit leadership. And I think, you know, one of the legacies of the battle is that is the iconic image that Joe Rosenthal takes on D plus four on February 23rd of the flag raising. It's a small unit that has stayed together under the leadership of young lieutenants, sergeants, corporals, and in some cases, you know, the senior private who is in the unit three days before the other two guys that are with him. And that's how they get off the beach. Somebody saying, if we stay here, we're going to die. We might as well at least die going forward. And that's a quote or a paraphrase from another battle, but that really is the mentality that gets
20:46 Speaker 02 the Marines off that beach. Yes, they're being pushed by generals and by battalion commanders and all of that, but they know their objectives and they know that if they stay, nothing good is going to happen.
20:56 Dan Snow? There's no Manstein or Napoleon or Julius Caesar making flanking movements and big top-down pronouncements. This is just a grinding, attritional battle. They're crowdsourcing the problem. Small groups finding little cracks, tiny little dents in the Japanese defenses and then pushing into them and expanding those little toe holes.
21:16 Speaker 02 The generals and the staff officers, they plan this battle and then the Marines and the soldiers and the sailors go out and execute it.
21:23 Dan Snow? Yeah.
21:24 Speaker 02 But they go out and execute it with that sense of why they're going where they're going. And then, oh, hey, you follow me. And that's how they actually get off the beach. It's not until eventually the Navy construction battalions, the C B's, are able to bulldoze exits off the beach that you can get jeeps, you can get tanks, which wind up playing a major role in the battle, or an outsized role, I should say, in terms of personnel versus impact, off the beach and into the inland. But on that first day...
21:57 Speaker 02 And in those first hours, it's those young leaders, right, whether they're lieutenants or whether they're staff and CEOs or non-commissioned officers, picking up Marines and saying, follow me.
22:07 Dan Snow? Do we have casualty figures for that first day, do we think?
22:10 Speaker 02 Those numbers are out there. The Marine Corps has done a really good job of indexing its casualties, you know, both wounded, non-battle and all of this. But maybe instead of the first day, let me give you one regiment in Fifth Marine Division's casualties for the first four days between landing and the flag raising. And this, by the way, is the regiment that raises the flag. This is 28th Marines. In the four-day period from D plus one to D plus four, they lose 510 Marines. What's a regiment? About 3,000, maybe? A little more, probably with reinforcements, but they're losing significant numbers, but comparatively, right? In the span of the entire battle, Marines, sailors, airmen, soldiers, 6,800 American dead.
22:54 Speaker 02 In contrast, to put it in today's terms, 20-plus years of the global war on terror and we're looking at about 6,000. So in 36 days, as many casualties as in 20 years of combat operations in this century.
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25:48 Dan Snow? Tell me, when they do manage to go off the beaches, as you say, they get some armor forward, they bulldoze some roots off the beach. Is it digging in? Is it like the first... This volcanic rock, it must have been very difficult indeed to construct any kind of shelter. How does the battle unfold once they get off that beach?
26:07 Speaker 02 So the first day... Largely, they don't hit their objectives, right? The objectives are to capture the southern airfield. The objections are to isolate Mount Suribachi on the southern part of the island. They do that. Twenty eighth Marines, under Harry the Horse Livershead, who is this kind of outsized figure in Marine Corps history for good reason, he gets the regiment across the island, right? It's 800 meters wide at its narrowest point. He seals off Suribachi and it takes them another four days, or three days, rather, to get that patrol up to the top of the mountain to raise the flags. But they're still fighting. The Japanese are dug into Suribachi in caves, in tunnels that have been constructed. The sand, and I can show you this on the podcast and we'll have to describe it to folks, that's sand from Iwo Jima.
26:52 Dan Snow? This is Tim holding up a vial of black coarse, big, big grained sand.
26:58 Speaker 02 Yes, yeah. Because this is an island that is just a rock that has been worn down by the sea, and it's sulfur, it's right, it's horrible smelling, it's hot, because it is a volcano. Digging in is very difficult. As you look at pictures as the battle advances and the battle continues, right? So they kind of hit the far shore, the western shore, and both divisions turn right and thus to the north. So there's a kind of a turning movement with the Fifth Marine Division on the west coast, the left side of the island, the Fourth Marine Division on the right side along the east coast, and they're pushing north. Well, a regiment of the Fifth Marine Division is still reducing the Japanese holdings on Suribachi, which has the commanding view of the entire island.
27:41 Speaker 02 It was already a slog, but as you look at the advancing days, right? Some days you make it 200 yards, some days you make it 20. And the Japanese defensive network, right? Again, Kurabashi had done a brilliant job of digging in. It's not World War I trench lines, but it's a series of interconnected tunnels, interconnected pillboxes, and so you could clear one out. And the Marines did this, they found this out the hard way. They would clear one out and advance, and they hadn't sealed it off. So Japanese soldiers would pop up in their rear and either take out the following waves or shoot them in the back because of the interconnected tunnels.
28:21 Speaker 02 Kurabashi had a plan to dig something like 27 kilometers of tunnels under the island. By the time the Marines land, he's only, I say this very, very air quotes, only has 17 kilometers of them dug or so, but it's enough to make. Every yard gained, not actually gained, until you can seal off what's behind you, whether that's using bulldozers, or satchel charges, or flamethrowers and dogs. And it's ugly. And as they advance north, the terrain starts to become a little bit more compartmentalized, is the military term for it, right? So you've got draws and valleys, but not valleys like you would think of like, oh lovely, I can go hiking here.
29:03 Speaker 02 But you've got terrain that if you're kind of using your finger as a terrain model, right? In between each finger, you've got these ridges, you've got folds where your knuckles are, you've got all of this. And that's what they're fighting in as they go north along the island.
29:16 Dan Snow? You mention flamethrowers, satchel charges. So you're reducing these little strong points. But then presumably, once you've cleared out the Japanese defenders, there's guys who have to go in there and are entering the warren of tunnels. So you're fighting, it's horrific above the ground, but I imagine it was pretty bad below the ground, too. You get a strong nerve to go down there.
29:38 Speaker 02 You have some that do that, yes. But by and large, the Marines' tactic was just to seal the caves off, to seal the tunnels off.
29:45 Dan Snow? Oh, interesting. Okay, so it's cauterize them on the surface.
29:48 Speaker 02 Right, so I either bulldoze materials in to block the opening, I satchel charge it, I try to collapse the caves or the tunnels using explosives, you know, never send a man to do what a bullet could do, or a block of TNT. And that's what the Japanese face, that, you know, the Marines are just blowtorch and corkscrew tactics, right? The corkscrew being those explosives and the blowtorch being either man-packed flamethrowers or Zippo's or Ronson's, which are Sherman tanks with flamethrower attachments on them.
30:21 Dan Snow? Let's just do the Mount Suribachi moment. You've already talked about it, but this group of Marines goes up and raises the US flag on top of that mountain. That's a great moment. Well, a brief respite, a brief moment of celebration. Is that mountain then neutralized in terms of high ground? Or are there still caverns and warrens in there which people are able to call down fire on American positions?
30:45 Speaker 02 They're still able to call down fire, right? The Japanese wind up.
30:50 Speaker 02 Behind, underneath, in front of, to the side of American positions. And while there's the flag on top of Suribachi and the cheer goes out across the island and talking to Marines, they remember either their buddy bumping him going, hey, look, or hearing it, and then the cheer goes up across the island. But at that point, there's still another month plus of fighting. And it's because the Japanese are everywhere.
31:14 Dan Snow? Is the Japanese general, obviously, he's built this extraordinary defensive network, he's set out the doctrine. Once Suribachi, the summit falls, and is he still able to exercise any control over the course of this battle? Or is it just, this is a, now the Japanese really have broken out and it's just small unit subalterns just saying, we're going to fight and die here, lads?
31:37 Speaker 02 No, the Japanese still have command and control. You know, Suribachi is the bottom corner of the island. And certainly as the Americans advance, command and control nodes, telephone lines start going down. The Japanese ability to control at the general officer level down starts to degrade. He's very definitely still in control, though in many ways, the mechanics of the battle had already been set. And to your Napoleon comment earlier, right? He can't do that kind of sweeping gesture, and now we will attack with this regiment here on the left-hand side. Like, that's just not a possibility for the Japanese. And that's not what they were intending to do anyway. So I never like to use the word inevitable,
32:20 Speaker 02 but there is this overwhelming tide of American power that just continues to compress and compress and compress the Japanese. Without taking away from the valor of the American soldier, or the American Marine, or the Japanese soldier on that island. There's a lot of hard individual decisions when every instinct, every survival mechanism in your body is saying, don't do this. Somebody else is saying, follow me, and off they go.
32:48 Dan Snow? To that point, are there particular challenges of motivating the men in that situation when everyone on both sides kind of knows the outcome and yet to get to that point, you have to endure the unimaginable?
33:00 Speaker 02 They're similar to any other act of war. Inherently, you are motivating someone to do what is not necessarily in their best interest. The human condition of war, how do you, as a leader, whether that's the senior private in a group of three or a group of two, whether that's the sergeant, that's the lieutenant, that's the commanding general, how do you motivate and instill that sense of mission accomplishment, that sense of fortitude and resilience, to use modern language, to make this sort of happen? I don't think the Battle of Iwo Jima is any different than what is being seen in Ukraine
33:42 Speaker 02 right now, than what would have been seen in the English Civil War, any of the battles of the ancient Romans, right? It's small groups of men and women fighting for something that they believe in, whether that's a higher ideological cause, whether that's their body, whether that's their reputation, whatever it is, it's combat remains combat. And motivating folks is the hardest part of all of this.
34:08 Dan Snow? Here's the downside of history. We're talking Iwo Jima more often this.
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36:06 Dan Snow? Pretty successful, you could say, kamikaze attacks, so suicide aircraft attacks on the 21st, 22nd February. One carrier lost, one carrier had to return to port for extensive refit.
36:18 Speaker 02 Yes, so an escort carrier sinks, and then the Saratoga is damaged to the point that has to recover.
36:25 Dan Snow? Did that affect the course of the battle? Was there air component missed?
36:29 Speaker 02 The default answer, anytime you lose access to a carrier, the answer is, yes, I've suffered a huge loss, right? But American naval superiority and aerial superiority at this point is so vastly overwhelming that while there is logically a slight downturn, other existing assets can pick up some of that slack. Because you just have a... You never have a surplus of aircraft on station to deliver ordnance in your favor, but the Americans just have so much in the skies and at sea ahead off the coast. Really, the carrier threat or the kamikaze threat to the US Navy comes into its own and comes into its fruition at Okinawa in a few months after this.
37:09 Dan Snow? The Marines are pushing north.
37:11 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
37:12 Dan Snow? Does anything change? Is this just a day-in, day-out attritional slog like you've described to this point? Does the nature of the operations change at all?
37:20 Speaker 02 They change conceptually, and that's a... I'm not even sure I like that word as it comes out of my mouth. But three Marine divisions are aligned against this island.
37:31 Speaker 02 On D plus two, General Schmidt, the commander of the amphibious corps, has already committed the first part of his reserve at sea. You've inserted the third marine division onto the island and now you have more marines, but you don't necessarily have a reserve you can draw upon. The terrain changes as they start to move north, right? You get that more compartmentalized terrain. You're off the beach. Supplies start flowing into the battle. You start getting 155 millimeter artillery, for example, in place that can fire. I mean, they fire something like 43,000 rounds of artillery, 155 rounds on the island, which is a significant amount. They start to build some of the supporting establishments behind.
38:15 Speaker 02 And for wounded, there are field hospitals and things like that on the island. Mail comes in and it's hard to think of mail as what it meant to those young marines in 1945, right? In this era of text messages and email and all of this, I can get something immediately. By early March, mail is getting flown into the island, which is a huge morale boost to the troops. They can hear what's going on at home. They can find out that, hey, that picture of Suribachi, of the marines raising the flag on Suribachi, within 17 hours of it being taken by Joe Rosenthal, is on newspapers throughout the United States. So people know what's happening on the island to their loved ones, almost in real time, or as close to real time as you can have.
39:00 Speaker 02 But the fighting continues and casualties don't diminish. They stay high throughout the campaign. You know, the island is declared secure on the 16th, but really it's not until the 26th when almost all of the Japanese defenders are taken care of. I mean, then army regiment comes in, 147th, to do mop up operations. But as I said earlier, the last Japanese soldier surrenders in 1949.
39:24 Dan Snow? Well, let's break that one down. So by mid-March, the island is declared occupied, but the fighting goes on till late March. General Kurayashi commits suicide in his command post. Do we see a spate of suicides at the end here?
39:40 Speaker 02 You see... A watered-down version of that stereotypical banzai charge. And I say watered down not to say that they weren't successful, but you know, the Japanese defensive tactics throughout the rest of the Pacific War was to launch these kind of nighttime mass suicide raids and attacks. So that was the traditional Japanese model. I'm going to meet you on the beachhead. Kurobayashi doesn't do that. I'm going to fight you every inch of the way. And at night, I'm going to launch these kind of human wave banzai attacks with screaming and yelling and psychological things. And the Americans for the, by and large, just machine gun and use howitzers and use hand grenades. And it winds up in hand-to-hand fighting in many cases.
40:25 Speaker 02 But Kurobayashi said, that's a waste of manpower that doesn't accomplish our objective. Because if I kill a thousand men in a banzai charge that gets me ultimately nothing, I don't have a thousand men to fight tomorrow morning. I don't have a thousand men to fight the day after. And so the Japanese defensive tactics continue to rely on interlocking fields of fire from prepared positions across the island up until the very, very end. As opposed to these traditional banzai assaults, which would have happened on night three or night four, they wind up happening on night 26. They wind up happening much later in the battle and in much smaller numbers. Now, they do hit an airfield one night and they're successful. They destroy planes on the ground, they kill pilots, they kill ground crew, the Army Air Forces personnel on the ground, fight back, right?
41:10 Speaker 02 There's this battle on an airfield from a banzai attack at night. But for the most part, you don't see that kind of stereotypical wave of suicidal attacks and you don't necessarily have the suicidal cliffs that you have on some of these other islands in the Pacific.
41:26 Dan Snow? So different Okinawa, which will come a couple of months later on. So you mentioned that the people held out to 1949. So even when the island was secure, there were still a couple of thousand Japanese hiding in this warren of tunnels. And did they eventually just emerge and surrender through the course of 45? Or how did they Winkle them out of there?
41:47 Speaker 02 Some do. Like I said, you have this Army unit, right? The 147th Infantry Regiment, which is an Ohio National Guard unit that had fought in a series of campaigns in the war. They wind up providing security and hunting down these Japanese stragglers. You have these, you know, these intelligence reports and these after-action reports from these skirmishes, because there really are at this point skirmishes. You know, we heard Japanese voices, we went out and investigated, we came across two Japanese soldiers trying to steal food, get water, whatever it was, because that's ultimately one of the limiting factors the Japanese had. They have a lot of ammunition, they use a lot of ammunition, but they can't replenish their food and they can't replenish their water. And that's what winds up driving many of them out eventually, and you see this across
42:30 Speaker 02 the Pacific, that at some point, they get hungry. The Japanese holdouts that last into the 50s, last into the 70s in some cases, it's because they had agricultural resources to live off of. That doesn't exist on Iwo Jima. They are clearing out stragglers and pockets of Japanese throughout the end of the war and then on into the post-war period.
42:51 Dan Snow? That is crazy. Six, nearly 7,000 US personnel killed, 20,000 wounded. What do we think on Japanese casualties?
43:03 Speaker 02 So, the Japanese numbers, Robberell wrote a book in 2006 called Ghosts of Iwo Jima, he's questioned the numbers, right? The numbers were traditionally 20,000 Japanese dead, he thinks that number is closer to 18,000 cumulatively, but the numbers of American casualties on Iwo Jima are for the first time higher than the Japanese casualties. Now, the Japanese suffer more dead, right, so absolute casualties off the battlefield permanently, the Japanese, three times the American numbers, roughly, but the island is lost and every single one of those Japanese soldiers is off the battlefield permanently. From that perspective, from an attritional count, Iwo Jima's a success.
43:45 Dan Snow? What about strategically? What were the benefits of having taken the island?
43:51 Speaker 02 The traditional answer is, it's a staging base for bombers that have been shot up over Japan to come in and recover. 2,500 B-29s wind up landing on Iwo Jima. So, the math then has traditionally been, well, that's 25,000 bomber crew that would have died otherwise. Burrell and some others have gone through and said, well, all right, let's look at those statistics, right? Numbers, as Twain said, what lies, damn lies in statistics? What would the survival rate have been if they had ditched at sea? What would are these other things? There's a funny story that a lot of these bomber crews, they land on the island for refueling or minor engine repairs as opposed to battle damage. Very few land on the island because of battle damage. There's a story of one of the officers
44:35 Speaker 02 on the island, a marine lieutenant, and a guy he'd played baseball with in New Jersey in high school lands his B-29 on the island to see him. You know, just says, no, I'm gonna land and check on my buddy. So you have some strategic questions in retrospect. Was the cost of the island worth it? The Japanese still know bomber fleets are coming. There, for example, there's a radar station down near Saipan in Marianas on an island called Rota. So the Japanese can know and are radioing back, hey, the bombers are coming. The Americans never go and take that radar station out. Because we don't have to invade the homeland, the use of the island becomes more symbolic than it does strategic. And
45:17 Speaker 02 in fact, even before the war has ended, the former chief of naval operations, right, a former four-star admiral in the US Navy says, what's the point? We can't launch enough aircraft out of this. The army doesn't want it. You can't put a fleet in its harbor. What was the point of all of this sacrifice? So from a strategic perspective, there are questions. And I'm still wrestling with that from an intellectual level. But I think what it does, and certainly, you know, it's encapsulated in that image that Rosenthal takes. That becomes the central image of the Seventh War Bond Drive altogether now is the slogan underneath the painting of it. In 1954, when the Marine Corps War Memorial
45:58 Speaker 02 is open here in Northern Virginia, it is that image that is used as the sculpture. It is on so many of our plaques and this. And Iwo Jima obtains this mythical status because it was a mythical battle. But, you know, in terms of heroism and valor and all of these things. But from a strategic perspective, I'm still wrestling with it. And I think there, and there are other historians that are doing the same thing.
46:25 Dan Snow? Interesting. Thank you so much for coming on and telling us all about this astonishing battle. Tell us what your book is called.
46:32 Speaker 02 Ooh, you're asking for a title of a book. I'm leaning towards Spearhead, right? Hopefully, I'll have a draft to a publisher by the end of the year.
46:39 Dan Snow? Well, people look out for that. And in the meantime, because they'll want to see what you've been up to, they can read On Contested Shores: The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare, which is great stuff. Tim, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
46:51 Speaker 02 Dan, thanks for having me. My pleasure.
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