On the morning of 19 February 1945 the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions landed on the southeast coast of Iwo Jima, a small volcanic island on the bomber route between the Marianas and Japan. The first waves met only scattered fire, then sank into soft black ash while hidden Japanese guns opened up from the high ground on both flanks. By nightfall about 30,000 Marines were ashore and some 2,400 had been killed or wounded. It was the first day of a battle that lasted five weeks.
Why a speck of ash mattered
Iwo Jima lies between the Mariana Islands, where the American B-29 bombers were based, and the Japanese home islands. Its Japanese garrison could warn Tokyo of incoming raids, and its airfields could become an emergency stop for damaged bombers and a base for fighter escorts. The island measures barely ten square miles, with the dormant volcano Mount Suribachi at its narrow southern end overlooking the only beaches where a landing was possible, according to the Marine Corps commemorative history by Colonel Joseph H. Alexander.1
The Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, knew he could not stop a landing. Instead of defending the shoreline he moved his guns, command posts and men underground, into positions linked by miles of tunnels, and planned a long and costly battle of attrition.2
H-Hour, 09:00
The Marine Corps official history by Lieutenant Colonel Whitman S. Bartley describes more than 450 ships off the island at dawn and a final bombardment that began at 06:40, followed by carrier aircraft attacking the slopes of Suribachi and the beaches. The first wave of 68 armored amphibious tractors crossed the line of departure at 08:30, with troop-carrying amtracs close behind. The waves reached the beach almost exactly on time: Bartley puts the first armored amtracs ashore at 09:02 and the first troops at 09:05, and Alexander writes that they hit the beach within two minutes of H-Hour.3
The first enemy was the island itself. The beach rose in steep terraces of loose volcanic ash, in which the Marines sank to their ankles and trucks and jeeps bogged down as soon as they rolled off the ramps. A rifleman of the 4th Marine Division, quoted by Alexander, said it was like trying to run in loose coffee grounds. Wrecked and swamped landing craft soon piled up at the water’s edge.4
The guns open up
At first the fire was light, and some Marines began to hope that the bombardment had done its work. Then, as men and vehicles crowded onto the narrow beach, mortars, artillery and machine guns opened up from pillboxes, blockhouses and caves on Suribachi to the south and the high ground to the north. Among the dead was Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone, a Medal of Honor recipient from Guadalcanal, killed by a mortar shell while leading his machine gun platoon toward the airfield.5 › John Basilone
On the left, the 28th Marines struck straight across the narrow neck of the island. Bartley records men of the 1st Battalion reaching the western shore at 10:35, and Alexander writes that they got there within 90 minutes of landing, cutting Suribachi off from the rest of the island. By evening six infantry regiments and two tank battalions were ashore, although the advance had fallen well short of its objectives for the day. Alexander gives the assault divisions’ losses for the day as 2,420 men, including 501 killed, out of some 30,000 Marines who had landed; Bartley also counts about 30,000 troops ashore and a casualty rate of eight percent.6
Five more weeks
Marines reached the summit of Suribachi on 23 February and raised the flag there, and the island was declared secure on 26 March. The totals depend on the source. The National WWII Museum counts 6,821 Americans killed and 19,217 wounded, and says that of a Japanese garrison of about 20,000 only 216 were taken prisoner. Alexander counts 24,053 casualties among the Marine assault units, 6,140 of them dead, and about 22,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors killed.7
The whole battle is told in our article on the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Also on this day
- 1905: Battle of Mukden. Russian and Japanese armies clashed around Mukden, now Shenyang in China, in the last major land battle of the Russo-Japanese War.
