In case you're wondering what America can do if it actually seeks to win a war you might want to read Iwo by Richard Wheeler, a U.S. Marine veteran of the grueling battle (February and March 1945) to seize from the Japanese Army and Navy the island of Iwo Jima, 800 miles from Japan, 800 miles from Guam; thus, a strategically located airstrip for distressed B-29 heavy bombers returning from bombing Tokyo and other cities in the war's final year.
Except for a page where Wheeler (a member of U.S. Marines, 5th Division, 28th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, E "Easy" Company) relates how he received the wounds preventing him from joining his fellows in climbing Mount Suribachi to raise the American flag (as shown in Joe Rosenthal's famous photograph), the author keeps himself out of the book, though he does emphasize the actions of his Company throughout the battle. He knew these men. Three of the six in Rosenthal's photograph were killed during subsequent days and weeks. The flag went up only on February 23, 1945, just four days after D-Day, the commencement of the invasion on February 19. Not a sign of victory as such, but a morale booster, for the flag could be seen from all over the tiny island.
Like flags planted on the Moon, the Mount Suribachi flag overlooked a blasted dead landscape. Iwo Jima had, by February 1945, developed into a formidable defensive fortress with tunnels, bunkers, artillery emplacements, tanks buried with their gun turrets exposed, hiding spots, natural caves in volcanic rock.
The U.S. Navy bombarded the island regularly during the battle, airplanes from carriers strafed, bombed, and rocketed dug-in Japanese Navy and Army defenders. From the summer of 1944 onward some 15,000 men had labored to create a castle of death and resistance on the open sea, guarding the way to their homeland. Japanese troop movements during the battle happened simultaneously beneath aboveground American troop movements, a fantastic circumstance never known before or repeated in the history of warfare. Marines thus had the enemy on all sides, beneath them and above them, too. At night Japanese patrols would use their extensive tunnels to slip outside and attack Marines in their foxholes. These assaults, an ever present danger, caused significant disquiet among the Americans, leading to sleeplessness on top of their other difficulties.
"Battle fatigue," PTSD in today's lingo, afflicted 2,648 U.S. troops at Iwo Jima.
Five weeks passed before the island was considered to be in the control of American forces. The Marines left, replaced by an Army regiment that spent the next two months killing a further 1,600 Japanese who wouldn't surrender and taking prisoner 867. The Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, committed hara-kiri.
It was Kuribayashi who directed the building of the fortress Iwo Jima became.
Kuribayashi in the 1920s had spent time in the U.S. and Canada, a deputy attaché in Washington, D.C. He liked America, predicting that its people would demonstrate a strong fighting spirit if pushed to that. In a letter, he wrote, "The United States is the last country in the world that Japan should fight."
Head of the Imperial Guards when war between the two nations started, he accepted the command at Iwo Jima apparently knowing he wasn't going to survive it.
The reader, in the early chapters, gets a good glimpse of the views of a few Japanese officers, especially the commander. He wrote letters home to his wife and children, poignant words from a father and husband, sounding like a regular person, not some demonic enemy. He clearly loved his wife Yoshii dearly, as well as his kids. He wrote a letter to his daughter admonishing her about writing more grammatically. This little criticism of his child seems strange considering he was facing the might of the U.S. Navy and Marines, living in a bunker, but I think it also shows his will to keep the darkness away from his young daughter's thoughts, showing himself, even in the midst of eventual ruin, steady and patient, a firm father figure for her to look up to.
I would've liked to have read more accounts of the regular Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima but so many of them didn't survive it's understandable why there's probably less material along those lines for the author to work with.
The book, however, deals effectively with the Marines' hardihood, their fears and pain, their determination, their cohesiveness as a fighting unit derived from extensive and brutal training. 6,821 Americans died, 19,217 were wounded. Approximately 20,000 Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen died, with only 1,083 captured.
Since Wheeler was there, his account, even when writing about the many parts of the battle he didn't participate in, are vivid and told with a full understanding of the combat Marine's experience. The book's most astonishing story involves Colonel Chandler Johnson, an ill-tempered but much respected officer in the habit of standing in the midst of enemy fire, like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, heedless of bullets and mortar explosions. Walking inland a ways to meet with "Easy" Company he paused to look at two dead Japanese soldiers in a crater. A Marine calling to him was one of several who witnessed the Colonel receiving a direct hit from a mortar shell, blowing him to pieces. The Marine who'd called out spit out a piece of Chandler Johnson's flesh. The men found his rib cage and part of his forearm with attached hand. The Colonel's wristwatch was still ticking.
Any account of war will have such stories, only the technology changes. In a modern day war like in
Afghanistan, the weaponry is much the same as in the 1940s (bombs, bullets, missiles) but America's experience of World War Two was wrapped up in three years, eight months, ending in victory. Compared to our current obscenity of the War on Terror (in its twentieth year), the key difference is that back then, in the time of Iwo Jima, America tried to win, with clear objectives, rather than to serve a military industrial congressional complex existing mainly to perpetuate itself.
Wheeler's book, published in 1980, a concise work of 225 pages with black and white photo sections, remains an excellent account for the general reader of a horrifying, seemingly endless battle, written soberly by an objective military historian who also feels deep compassion for every man (on both sides)
who participated.
Wheeler and his fellow Marines' iron determination finally won out, the B-29s got their emergency landing base, Japan lost, and then in 1968 the U.S. handed the island to Japan's Defense Forces, prompting one Marine, an Iwo Jima veteran, to joke, "By hell, I'll run off to Canada before I help take it again!"
Vic Neptune
