The Battle of Iwo Jima: Landing, Casualties and Legacy

The Battle of Iwo Jima ran from 19 February to 26 March 1945 and cost the US Marine Corps more casualties than any other single battle in its history. Three Marine divisions, close to 70,000 men in total, landed on a five-mile volcanic island roughly 1,200 km (750 miles) south of Tokyo, against a Japanese garrison of about 21,000 that had been ordered to defend it from underground rather than on the beaches. The 36 days of fighting that followed produced one of the war's most reproduced photographs, its highest concentration of Medals of Honor of any operation in the war, and a strategic argument that historians still have not settled. Administratively, Iwo Jima belonged to Tokyo Prefecture rather than to a captured colony or mandate, making it the first piece of the Japanese home islands the United States tried to take by force, a fact that shaped how fiercely it was defended as much as any tactical calculation did.

Codenamed Operation Detachment, the invasion put Lieutenant General Holland M. "Howlin' Mad" Smith's V Amphibious Corps ashore under the overall command of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance's Fifth Fleet. Getting there took a long, contested air campaign; holding the ground, once the Marines were on it, took longer still. It followed close on the heels of the island-hopping advance through the Solomons and the carrier battles of 1942, and it would not be the last time that campaign's casualty arithmetic came under argument.

Why the United States wanted Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima sits in the Volcano Islands, about a hundred nautical miles southwest of the midpoint between Saipan and Tokyo and roughly 700 nautical miles from Kyushu, Shikoku and the southern half of Honshu. From Iwo Jima, P-51 Mustang fighters and B-24 Liberator bombers could reach targets across a large part of Japan, and it was the only island in the region flat enough for the airfields such a force required. In Japanese hands the island also carried early-warning radar that could alert the home islands to incoming B-29 Superfortresses flying the direct route from the Marianas, and fighters based there sometimes attacked the bombers directly, which were especially vulnerable on the outbound leg while still heavily loaded with fuel and bombs; the threat forced many missions onto a longer and more dangerous path around the island, and Iwo Jima additionally supported counter-raids against the American airfields on Saipan and Tinian. General Henry H. Arnold, commanding the US Army Air Forces, pushed early for its capture, and by October 1944 it had been marked for invasion in the new year.

Iwo Jima's name means "Sulfur Island" in Japanese, an accurate description of ground that was still geologically active in 1945. The island runs barely five nautical miles on its long axis and, in its northern half, about two and a half nautical miles across, for a total area of roughly eight square miles. It is dominated at its southern tip by the extinct volcanic cone of Mount Suribachi, labeled "Hot Rocks" in the American operation plan, rising some 550 feet (168 meters) above the sea; at Suribachi's base the island narrows to about 800 yards across. Away from Suribachi's base the terrain flattens into loose volcanic ash too soft for secure footing, while the north is rocky and broken, cut by ravines that favored whoever held the high ground. The rock itself, soft enough to cut with hand tools yet strong enough to hold a tunnel once faced with concrete, was exactly the material a commander bent on digging in would want.

After the American seizure of the Marshall Islands and the devastating carrier raids against Truk in February 1944, Japanese military leadership concluded an American drive toward the Marianas and Carolines was coming and organized an inner defensive line running from the Carolines through the Marianas to the Ogasawara Islands, of which Iwo Jima was part. The Thirty-First Army, activated in March 1944 under General Hideyoshi Obata, was given responsibility for garrisoning that whole line, spread thin across island after island. Losing the Marianas that same summer had already sharpened Japanese fears for the Ogasawaras specifically: their fall, planners knew, would open the home islands to sustained American air raids capable of disrupting war production and damaging civilian morale directly, which is exactly what losing Iwo Jima went on to do. By late 1944 the Japanese had finished two airfields on Iwo Jima itself and started a third. After the American seizure of Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshalls in February 1944, both the Japanese Army and Navy reinforced the garrison: 500 men arrived from the naval base at Yokosuka and another 500 from Chichi Jima that spring, and by the time the Marianas fell that summer the Army garrison alone had grown past 5,000, equipped with artillery, heavy machine guns and coastal defense guns. Reinforcements kept arriving through the autumn despite mounting losses to American submarines, and by early 1945 the garrison had reached roughly 21,000, some estimates put it as high as 23,000, under a commander who had already decided that meeting the invasion on the beaches was the wrong plan. Air support was a different matter: by 1944 the Imperial Japanese Navy had already lost most of its carrier strength, and Japanese aircraft production losses were severe enough that combined air strength was not expected to reach 3,000 planes again until the spring of 1945. Even those aircraft could not have reached Iwo Jima from bases in the home islands, since their range fell short of 900 km (559 miles), so whatever air defense the island got had to be based there itself, or not come at all.

In the weeks before the landing, Marianas-based bombers hit Iwo Jima and the Japanese mainland daily under a campaign the Americans called Operation Scavenger, and Japanese fighters and kamikaze aircraft based on the island answered in kind. Every Japanese soldier on Iwo Jima was told his position was also his grave: the plan assumed each man would die where he stood, after killing roughly ten American soldiers first.

Kuribayashi's underground defense

Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi took command of Iwo Jima in June 1944 and broke almost immediately with the standard Japanese doctrine of stopping a landing at the water's edge. Having watched what American naval and air power had done to beach fortifications on Saipan, he chose instead to let the Marines come ashore largely unopposed and built a defense in depth behind them: reinforced-concrete pillboxes and blockhouses, artillery dug into the high ground, and a tunnel network eventually intended to run some 27 km (17 miles) through the island's soft volcanic rock, of which roughly 18 km (11 miles) was finished by the time the Marines landed. He also banned the mass banzai charges that had characterized earlier Japanese defenses, ordering his men instead to hold small, mutually supporting positions until each was physically destroyed. Each defender, the plan assumed, would die in place, and each was expected to take several Americans with him.

The full account of the tunnels, the gun positions, the artillery Kuribayashi assembled and the order of battle behind them is covered separately in the Japanese defense of Iwo Jima. The short version is that American aircraft had already bombed the island almost daily since December 1944, adding up to some 72 days of aerial attack by the time the Marines landed, one of the longest preliminary air campaigns of the Pacific War, and it still was not enough. Commanders asked separately for ten days of naval gunfire against the island before the landing, a request scaled back to nine and then approved for only three; against a defense built to be invisible from the sea and the air alike, three extra days of shelling barely mattered. Of roughly 750 identified Japanese fortifications, fewer than 200 had been silenced by the time the first Marines hit the beach.

Operation Detachment: the landing, 19 February 1945

At 02:00 on 19 February, battleship guns opened the day's bombardment; roughly a hundred carrier and land-based bombers struck the island soon after, followed by another round of naval gunfire, including salvos from the battleship USS Nevada. The first Marines went ashore at 08:30, aiming for Mount Suribachi at the island's southern tip. The beach itself fought the landing before the Japanese did: plunging surf broached landing craft at the waterline, and beyond it the volcanic ash rose in terraces up to 15 feet (4.6 m) high, soft enough that amphibious tractors lost traction and stalled outright, forcing crews to dismount and continue on foot while trucks and jeeps bogged down behind them. The ash gave neither secure footing nor any purchase for digging a foxhole, and the Marines advancing off the beach came under heavy fire from positions on Suribachi almost immediately, with little cover to answer it from. By nightfall the mountain had been cut off from the rest of the island and some 30,000 Marines had landed; roughly 40,000 more would follow over the following weeks, and including the Navy crews who put them ashore and kept them supplied, American personnel committed to the whole operation numbered around 110,000. By the end of the first day, the 28th Marines had secured the southern end of the island and a third of it, along with Motoyama Airfield No. 1, was in Marine hands.

Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone, who had already earned the Medal of Honor for holding a machine-gun position on Guadalcanal in 1942, was killed by mortar fire on Iwo Jima's first day after helping destroy a Japanese blockhouse with the 5th Marine Division, and was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for it. The next day, Private First Class Jack Lucas, seventeen years old, smothered two Japanese grenades with his body and his rifle to save the men in his fire team, survived his wounds, and became the youngest Marine to receive the Medal of Honor in the war. The naval side of the landing, including the task-force organization and the ships that kept the Marines supplied and supported from offshore, is covered in a separate account of the naval operations at Iwo Jima.

Mount Suribachi and the two flag raisings

The climb up Suribachi was fought yard by yard, up steep, ash-covered switchback trails with no real cover; rifle fire did little against the mountain's concealed defenses, but flamethrowers and grenades gradually cleared the bunkers one at a time. At 08:00 on 23 February, four days into the battle, a 40-man patrol from 3rd Platoon, E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, led by First Lieutenant Harold G. Schrier, assembled at the base of Suribachi with orders to take the crater at the summit and raise the flag there. The patrol worked its way up the steep trails, met no enemy fire on the way, and took up positions around the crater rim watching for pockets of resistance while other Marines searched for something to serve as a flagpole. At around 10:30 a.m. they raised a small American flag on a length of Japanese water pipe. Marine photographer Sergeant Louis Lowery captured that first raising on film; moments later a Japanese grenade forced him to dive over the crater's edge, and he tumbled some 50 feet down the slope. His camera lens shattered in the fall, but he and his film were unharmed.

The flag was judged too small to be seen easily from the beach, and a larger replacement was sent up the mountain a few hours later. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal photographed this second raising, around midday, in the image that went on to win the 1945 Pulitzer Prize and became the basis for the Marine Corps War Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery, sculpted by Felix de Weldon and dedicated on 19 November 1954. At the dedication, then-Vice President Richard Nixon called the statue a symbol of "the hopes and dreams of America, and the real purpose of our foreign policy."

The six men in Rosenthal's photograph were identified in 1945 as Michael Strank, Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley, Ira Hayes, John Bradley and Rene Gagnon; Strank, Block and Sousley were killed later in the battle. That identification stood for decades and was the basis for the 2000 book Flags of Our Fathers, written by John Bradley's son James together with Ron Powers and later adapted into a 2006 film, both built around the account of Bradley as one of the flag raisers. Two of the six identifications turned out to be wrong. Marine Corps investigations corrected the record in 2016 and 2019: Corporal Harold Schultz, not Navy corpsman John Bradley, was the fifth man in the photograph, and Corporal Harold Keller, not Rene Gagnon, was the sixth. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz's assessment of the men who fought on the island, inscribed on the memorial, still stands as the battle's best-known epitaph:

Among the men who fought on Iwo Jima, uncommon valor was a common virtue.

The advance north: the "Meat Grinder"

The 3rd Marine Division entered the line on the battle's fifth day and pushed toward the island's center while the 4th and 5th Divisions worked the eastern and western coasts, each fighting hard against a defender who had no intention of giving ground even where the position was already lost. With Suribachi gone, Kuribayashi still commanded roughly the equivalent of eight infantry battalions, a tank regiment, two artillery battalions and three heavy mortar battalions in the north, along with some 5,000 naval gunners and infantry, dug into terrain even more favorable to defense than the volcano had been. His strongest positions covered three linked features the Marines named the "Meat Grinder", on the advance's right flank: Hill 382, the highest point on the island after Suribachi and the site of a radio and weather station along with an artillery command post; the fortified position known as Turkey Knob, home to a large enemy communications center; and the Amphitheater beyond it. On the left flank the fighting was no easier: Marines spent days clearing the equally stubborn Hill 362 while the Meat Grinder fight ground on beside them, both aimed at the same objective of securing Airfield No. 2 in the island's center. A Marine account of the fighting there put it bluntly: every "penetration seemed to become a disaster" as units were raked from the flanks and Sherman tanks were destroyed by interlocking fire or hoisted into the air on the fireballs of buried mines, so that American forces "could take these heights at will, and then regret it" once a cleared position came back to life from tunnels the Marines had already walked past. Flamethrower-equipped Shermans the Marines nicknamed "Zippo tanks" did more against the pillboxes than rifles or grenades alone, working with engineers who sealed cave mouths with satchel charges once the defenders inside had been killed or driven back underground.

On 21 February, kamikaze aircraft from the Japanese home islands struck the fleet offshore, sinking the escort carrier USS Bismarck Sea and badly damaging the fleet carrier USS Saratoga, the last US aircraft carrier lost to enemy action in the war; the same attack lightly damaged the escort carrier USS Lunga Point, a tank landing ship and a transport. Ashore, Marines learned to expect Japanese gunners to hide in the caves during bombardments and reappear only once the advance resumed; before dawn on 7 March, Major General Erskine responded by ordering the 9th Marines to attack under cover of darkness with no preliminary artillery barrage at all, catching many Japanese defenders asleep and proving decisive in taking Hill 362. The following night a roughly 1,000-man Japanese counterattack, led by Captain Samaji Inouye against Kuribayashi's own standing orders against banzai charges, struck with the stated aim of retaking Mount Suribachi, a goal well behind the front line by that point in the battle and unrealistic on its face. It failed, inflicting 347 American casualties, 90 of them fatal, at a cost of 784 Japanese dead.

By 9 March the 3rd Marine Division had cut the island's defenses in two, reaching the northeastern beach, while the 4th Division fought off a smaller "mini banzai" attack from the last of the Japanese Navy personnel on the island that killed nearly 700 of the attackers. On 4 March, in a moment that would matter more to postwar argument than to the fighting itself, the damaged B-29 Dinah Might made the first emergency landing on the island's captured airfield, was serviced and refuelled, and flew on to complete its mission. The island's last organized Japanese position, a fortified gorge at the northwestern tip held by Kuribayashi himself, was destroyed with explosives on 21 March, and on the night of 25–26 March a final Japanese force, estimated at around 300 men, struck near Airfield No. 2 in fighting that cost First Lieutenant Harry Martin his life and earned him the last Medal of Honor of the battle; two Marines from an African-American depot company received the Bronze Star for the same action. Whether Kuribayashi personally led that last attack, in a silent charge unlike the shouted banzai charges of earlier battles, remains disputed among historians relying on conflicting Japanese accounts; if true, he would have been the highest-ranking Japanese officer to lead an attack in person during the war, and the only senior commander in the Pacific to die that way rather than by his own hand behind the lines.

The island was declared secure on 26 March 1945, though isolated defenders held out in the caves for weeks afterward, far more than the handful American commanders initially estimated, and small groups kept surfacing for years; the last two Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima did not surrender until January 1949. The US Army's 147th Infantry Regiment took over ground control of the island on 4 April 1945, relieving the Marine divisions that had done the fighting and freeing them to refit for the next campaign.

Casualties and honors

Twenty-seven Medals of Honor were awarded for actions on Iwo Jima, 22 to Marines and 5 to Navy hospital corpsmen, more than for any other single operation of the war and more than a quarter of all Medals of Honor given to Marines in the whole of World War II, fourteen of them posthumous. Jack Lucas, whose actions on the battle's second day are described above, was among the youngest of the 22 Marine recipients, part of a list that also includes dozens of names that never made it into a photograph or a memorial statue. Historians have described the fighting as American forces "throwing human flesh against reinforced concrete"; the island fell in the end to a combination of Marine persistence and the naval and air support that kept them supplied, but the underground defenses Kuribayashi had built meant that almost every position had to be taken by hand, at close range, more than once.

Iwo Jima since 1945

The United States administered Iwo Jima until 26 June 1968, when it was returned to Japan. In 2007 Japan's geographical survey authority formally restored the island's original Japanese reading, Iō Tō, reversing a wartime mistranscription that had produced the name most of the world still uses. No civilians live there today; the Japan Self-Defense Forces maintain an air base and a garrison of a few hundred troops, and US Navy aircraft still use the runway Kuribayashi's garrison once tried to keep out of American hands for carrier-landing practice. American and Japanese veterans and their descendants have periodically returned together for joint memorial ceremonies on the island, including a 70th-anniversary gathering in March 2015.

Did Iwo Jima justify the cost?

The scale of the casualties raised questions about the island's value even before the battle ended. Writing in Newsweek in April 1945, retired Chief of Naval Operations William V. Pratt asked publicly about the

expenditure of manpower to acquire a small, God-forsaken island, useless to the Army as a staging base and useless to the Navy as a fleet base ... [one] wonders if the same sort of airbase could not have been reached by acquiring other strategic localities at lower cost.

The case made after the fact rested heavily on emergency landings by damaged B-29 Superfortresses: contemporary tallies put the total recorded landings on Iwo Jima anywhere from 2,251 to 2,400 by war's end, carrying an estimated 27,000 crewmen between them, and the figure circulated widely after the war as proof the island had saved thousands of bomber crews. Historian Robert S. Burrell, then a history instructor at the US Naval Academy, argued in a widely cited study of the battle that only a small fraction of those landings were genuine emergencies, most being routine technical stops, training flights or refuelling, and that the justification became prominent only after the Marines had already seized the island and paid for it in casualties, pressuring veterans, journalists and commanders to fix on the most visible rationalization available. As Burrell put it, tying the two myths of the battle together directly:

As the myths about the flag raisings on Mount Suribachi reached legendary proportions, so did the emergency landing theory, in order to justify the need to raise that flag.

The invasion's actual original justification, Burrell noted, had rested on fighter escort for the B-29s, and in the event only about ten such long-range escort missions were ever flown from the island, since the range problems they were meant to solve turned out smaller than expected; historian J. Robert Moskin's tally credits Iwo Jima-based fighters with a separate 3,081 strike sorties against targets in Japan in the war's final months, a real contribution, just not the one the invasion plan had been built around. The capture of Iwo Jima did not even disrupt the Japanese early-warning radar system that spotted incoming B-29s, since it continued receiving data from the nearby island of Rota, which was never attacked. Burrell's critics counter that genuine emergency landings undoubtedly did happen and that the island's air-sea rescue base saved real crews regardless of how the paperwork read; his own publishers argued separately that the losses, whatever their strategic worth, cemented a reverence for the Marine Corps that outlasted the argument over the island itself. Neither side disputes the casualty figures, only what they bought. The much larger invasion of Okinawa, launched barely a week after Iwo Jima was declared secure, would raise the same argument again at an even higher price, on the way to the Japanese surrender recorded in Japan capitulates.