At Turkey Knob a 75-millimeter howitzer was dragged over rock and rubble to deliver point-blank fire at a blockhouse that was the center of the height’s defenses. Under covering rifle fire, demolition men crawled up to the blockhouse walls. They planted their charges to tear gaping holes in the walls. Then tankdozers cut a path through the rubble for a flamethrowing tank. Rumbling forward with its flame thrower hissing, the tank poured streams of flame through the holes. Still the blockhouse held out. So did Turkey Knob, so did the Amphitheater, so did Hill 382.
On Friday, March 2, after six days of assault on the Meatgrinder, the 4th Marine Division hit this wicked trio with all its strength. Turkey Knob and the Amphitheater were each attacked by a regiment. The objective was to prevent these strongpoints from firing on the force attacking Hill 382. In this, the Marines were successful.
Company E, under Major Rolo and Carey, and Company F, under Captain Walter Ridlon, prepared to move out against Hill 382. Before they did, heavy artillery laid down a barrage. Supporting fire from tanks and whooshing flights of missiles launched by rocket trucks also helped. Major Carey’s men attacked on the left, Captain Ridlon’s on the right. By mid-morning one of Carey’s platoons was just under the smashed radar antenna, which was situated atop the hill.
Then Carey was cut down by machine-gun fire. Captain Pat Donlan took over E Company. A few hours later Donlan was hit by shrapnel. First Lieutenant Stanley Osborne replaced him, only to be killed by a shellburst, which tore off Donlan’s right leg at the same time while killing one more officer and wounding another. Now Second Lieutenant Richard Reich was the only officer left in this riddled company.
Meanwhile, Captain Ridlon’s F Company was advancing. Running into far less fire, the Marines here on the right worked quickly up beneath the crest of the hill. Then they took it with a rush, and at mid-afternoon, Captain Ridlon radioed headquarters that he was on top of Hill 382. That night Major Garretson wrote in his diary: “Day’s progress, a little over two touchdowns.” Although the Marines held the top of the hill, they had not yet conquered it. And on the following day E Company passed through another ordeal.
First Lieutenant William Crecink had replaced Lieutenant Reich as its commander, but he was quickly wounded and Reich took over again. Then Captain Charles Ireland relieved him, only to be wounded. For a third time, Reich led E Company. For a third time he was relieved, by Captain Robert O’Mealia. But Captain O’Mealia was killed by a shellburst. For Lieutenant Reich, however, there was no fourth term at command of E Company. That was because there was no longer any E Company.
What remained of it was joined with Captain Ridlon’s riddled F Company. With this patched-up force, Ridlon cleaned out Hill 382’s last defenders. Turkey Knob and the Amphitheater still sputtered in defiance, but only weakly. On the following day they were safely by-passed to be reduced at leisure later. The dreadful Meatgrinder had been shattered and Kuribayashi’s first line of defense penetrated.
Again the cost had been high. The 4th Division had suffered 2,880 casualties during the week-long battle at the Meatgrinder. Now its total losses on Iwo were 6,600 men killed and wounded.
In the center, meanwhile, the 3rd Division was also piercing Kuribayashi’s first line of defense, punching through in a series of slanting attacks and overrunning the half-completed Airfield Number Three.
On the left, however, the 5th Division was passing through an ordeal only a little less fierce than the 4th’s.
The 5th Division’s up-island drive had freed the western beaches, where, despite a high and treacherous surf, a second supply line to the fighting front was being built. General Harry Schmidt had located his Fifth Corps headquarters there, and on March 1 he was joined by “Howlin’ Mad” Smith. As the two men talked outside Schmidt’s tent, they noticed that the ammunition ship Columbia Victory had moved inshore to unload shells.
Suddenly Japanese artillery began shelling her! Shell after shell came screaming down from enemy-held high ground. The two Marine generals exchanged glances of consternation. They both knew that a direct hit on the Columbia Victory would detonate her thousands of tons of ammunition, which would probably wreck lower Iwo Jima with all its men and supplies.
As they watched, the first two salvos fell astern of Columbia Victory. The ammunition ship turned and ran for the open sea. Then a third salvo fell ahead of the vessel. The generals tensed. So did everyone on the beach. “The next one’s going to hit her square,” said Smith.
But the fourth salvo missed, dropping in the water astern. Before more artillery could fire, Columbia Victory was safely out of range. She would not return until the Marines battling westward across the ridges could silence the enemy’s guns.
Hill 362A fell on the same day. But the gallant corporal Tony Stein lost his life while helping to reduce that strongpoint. His captain had asked for volunteers for patrol, and Tough Tony Stein had volunteered. He did not return. Three of the men who helped to raise flags over Suribachi also died during the 5th’s conquest of Hill 362A. So did Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson, the battalion commander who had ordered the Stars and Stripes unfurled atop the volcano. And Gunnery Sergeant William Walsh won the Medal of Honor on Hill 362A, when he gallantly smothered an enemy explosive with his body to save his men.
Hill 362A, just 20 feet lower than Hill 382 on the east coast, had been almost as fiercely defended. Sometimes the Marines burned the Japanese out of their caves by rolling gasoline drums inside and shooting them alight. At other times they hung from the cliff ledges to lower explosives into the caves on ropes.
True to their word, the brave Japanese defending the hill had fought to the last man. True to the strange Japanese tradition of suicide, the lone survivor killed himself. Marines watched cautiously as he crept out of a cave with a grenade in his hand. They ducked behind a rock when he tapped it on his helmet to arm it. But it did not go off, and when the Marines lifted their heads again they saw that the Japanese had the grenade held to his ear as though listening to it. He tapped it again, and listened. No explosion. A third time…. It went off.
The fall of Hill 362A did not halt the 5th’s advance. The division continued to sweep forward, driving toward the northern coast. On March 3, the 5th was staggered by its losses of 518 killed and wounded, its second worst casualty day during the entire campaign. But on that day five of the Division’s men won Medals of Honor, an amazing record in American military history.
Corporal Charles Berry and Private First Class William Caddy won their Medals by laying down their lives for their comrades. Both of them leaped on sputtering enemy grenades.
Medical corpsman George Wahlen lived to receive his Medal, although he was wounded three times in six days. His last wound was very serious, but Wahlen insisted on accompanying the Marines to treat the wounded. At last, however, he collapsed and had to be evacuated.
Sergeant William Harrell was on sentry duty early that morning when an enemy grenade sailed in on him. It exploded, breaking his thigh bone and tearing off his left hand. Then a Japanese attacked, brandishing a saber. Drawing his pistol with his right hand, Harrell shot him dead. More Japanese attacked. Harrell fought them off until he sank to the ground from loss of blood. A Japanese then ran up and put a grenade under his head. Harrell killed him and pushed the grenade as far from himself as he could. When it exploded, it killed another Japanese and tore off Harrell’s right hand. With that the Marine sergeant lost consciousness. He was found at dawn lying senseless among a dozen dead Japanese. He had held his position, and he would live to receive his nation’s highest award.
Corpsman Jack Williams won the fifth Medal of Honor that day. During a grenade battle he ran out in the middle ground to treat a wounded Marine. As he knelt over the stricken man, a sniper shot him three times. Still, Williams worked on. Only after he had finished treating the Marine did he turn to bind up his own perforated belly. Next he gave first aid to a second Marine. But then an enemy bullet cut him down for good.
With suc
h men General Keller Rockey’s battling 5th at last punched though the western anchor of Kuribayashi’s strongest line. The 5th’s advance, combined with the conquest of the Meatgrinder in the east and the 3rd Division’s penetration in the center, meant that defeat was overtaking the enemy.
By March 3, thirteen days after D day, General Kuribayashi had lost most of his artillery and his tanks, along with 65 per cent of his officers. He had only 3,500 front-line troops able to fight. His communications had been shattered. This meant that he could not contact his subordinate commanders in charge of the different sectors of defense. As a result, the Japanese force defending Iwo was like a body fighting without its head.
Still General Kuribayashi was determined to fight on. He radioed Tokyo: “I am not afraid of the fighting power of only three American Marine divisions, if there are no bombardments from aircraft and warships.”
However, the American bombardments were continuous. But in spite of them, the Japanese commander had managed to inflict the worst casualties of the war on the attacking Marines. During two terrible weeks the Americans had lost 3,000 killed and 13,000 wounded. They did not know yet that they had cracked through the enemy’s strongest defenses. All that they could see was that nearly half the island was still in Japanese hands.
CHAPTER 7
BREAKTHROUGH
Now that the Americans had taken more than half of Iwo Jima they discovered that “Sulphur Island” was indeed as strange as it was ugly.
At the southern end of the island and around the airfields, Marines still shivered in their foxholes at night. But farther north they had come to the Japanese sulphur wells. Here, General Smith said, “it looked like something left over when they finished building Hell.”
The air was foul with the smell of sulphur. Sulphur mists rising to the surface had stained the earth dead white and pale yellow. Marines could scarcely dig a foxhole without starting a sulphur bath. They could cook a can of C rations by burying it in the earth for a quarter-hour. When they wanted to make coffee, they took their canteens to the sulphur wells. Sometimes the temperature of the water rising to the surface was 160 or 170 degrees.
As usual, the Marines took oddities like these in their stride. They had fought and won campaigns in the malarial swamps and jungles of the Solomons, and on the blistering-hot coral atolls of the Gilberts and Marshalls and Carolines. They knew that they would do the same on this peculiar, cold-hot hump of sand and rock. On March 4, it appeared that General Kuribayashi was inclined to agree with them. On that day he radioed Tokyo asking for aircraft and warships to come to his aid. “Send me these things,” he said, “and I will hold this island. Without them I cannot hold.”
As the Japanese commander might have suspected, he was not to get either planes or ships, However, on that very same day, his enemy received a wonderful boost for their morale.
During the afternoon of March 4, Radioman William Welsh was monitoring the air-sea rescue frequency aboard the command ship Auburn. He had just finished a crossword puzzle when the loudspeaker overhead suddenly came to life:
“Hello Gatepost, this is Nine Bakecable. We are lost. Give us a bearing.”
“Hello Nine Bakecable, this is Gatepost,” Welsh replied. “Who are you?”
“We are a monster short on fuel. Give us instructions please.”
An officer checked a list of code names and discovered that a “monster” was a B-29. The Superforts had raided Japan only that morning. Obviously, one of the giant bombers was asking for permission to make an emergency landing on Iwo Jima! Excitement ran like an electric shock through the Auburn. At once, aerial transports from the Marianas were warned to keep away from Iwo. Ashore, the emergency field was cleared for the landing of a “big one.”
No more than two weeks after the Marines had first landed on Iwo, the island was beginning to serve its purpose—even with a savage struggle for the island still going on. As the word spread across Iwo, Marines, soldiers and Seabees came running toward the airfield.
Out over the ocean, the B-29 Dinah Might flew through the rain and mist with open bomb-bay doors. That was Dinah Might’s trouble. The doors would not close, and the wind whistling through the opening had slowed the plane and forced it to consume most of its fuel. When Lieutenant Fred Malo, the pilot, tried to tap the spare tanks he found that the valve would not open. For Dinah Might it was Iwo or the Ocean.
Now Sergeant James Cox, Dinah Might’s radioman, was getting a bearing from Auburn. “Course 167 for 28 miles,” Welsh instructed him. “Do you prefer to ditch offshore or try to land on the strip?”
“We prefer to land.”
“Roger. We will have the field cleared for you.”
Soon Lieutenant Malo sighted Iwo Jima. It was a tiny speck in the sea, growing to cinder size, then larger… larger…. Twice Malo circled the island. Each time the narrow runway slid out of sight. On the third pass he hit the runway squarely. The 60-ton aircraft whacked the matting with a whhhumphf! like an exploding shell. Then it was whizzing between lanes of wildly cheering Americans, its left wing cutting down a telephone pole like a sickle slicing straw, its roaring motors whipping up a huge cloud of dust. When the dust settled, Dinah Might stood safely at the end of the runway. Lieutenant Malo and his men were the first of many B-29 crews to land on Iwo. A total of 2,251 Superforts, carrying 24,61 Americans, were saved by emergency landings on this tiny island.
That was the value of Iwo. And for the first time during the war, the value of an objective had been made evident even before it was taken.
The day after Dinah Might’s dramatic landing, the Marines on Iwo Jima rested. General Schmidt gave his tired men a “day off.” They read letters, ate hot “chow,” and where possible they scrubbed Iwo’s gritty gray grime off their bodies or treated themselves to the luxury of a shave. In the meantime, the divisions reorganized. Generals Schmidt and Smith had decided on a coordinated attack the next day by all three divisions. This, they hoped, would break through Kuribayashi’s last line and bring a quick victory.
The quest for quick victory had brought the Marines back to the assault again and again. The sooner the island was won the sooner the invasion fleet could be released for duty elsewhere. Victory would gain more airfields to provide fighter cover for the B-29s bombing Japan. It would provide flank cover for the invasion of Okinawa, thus speeding up the timetable of conquest.
In wartime the attempt to achieve a quick victory may seem a needless sacrifice of lives, but in the long run it saves lives. The rapid conquest of lower Iwo Jima with its big airfield had already begun to save American airmen and their valuable B-29s.
So on the morning of March 6 the heaviest bombardment of the campaign was begun. It was devastating. All the guns ashore and at sea blasted away. In 67 minutes the Marines fired 22,500 shells of all sizes at the enemy positions. A battleship and two cruisers added 50 rounds of huge 14-inchers and 400 rounds of 5-inch shells. Three destroyers and two landing ships also opened up, and from the carriers came aircraft dropping bombs and tanks of napalm. It did not seem that the enemy could survive such a rain from the sky.
But they did. When the Marines rose up to attack, they were met by a dreadful hail of enemy fire. Once again they were forced to close in and chase the enemy down his warrens of rock and concrete, along his underground burrows and right into his formidable blockhouses. The Japanese were simply not going to be blasted into defeat.
While the Marines were struggling to make some more headway, the Army Air Corps began to arrive on the island. Twenty-eight P-51 Mustang fighters and twelve P-61 Black Widow night fighters roared into Iwo. For the second time, the value of quick victory had been demonstrated.
That night, however, the advance was still being measured in bloody “touchdowns.”
The failure of the artillery barrage had convinced General Erskine of the 3rd Division that the enemy had to be surprised, not overwhelmed. Erskine realized that the Japanese had skillfully adapted themselves to American assault. Whe
n artillery began the onslaught preceding each day’s attack, the enemy soldiers merely ran down into their deepest underground positions to sit out the bombardment. When the fire lifted, they ran back up to their guns to greet the advancing Marines with shot and shell. They had done it so often that they could now do it with split-second timing. As a result, the barrages were next to worthless.
General Erskine’s solution was a surprise predawn attack without artillery. His division still held the center, and its mission was to crack straight through to the other end of the island. When that was accomplished, the Japanese would be split in two. Then the 4th Division on the right would clean out all resistance in its area, while the 3rd would join the 5th in mopping up the left.
Blocking the 3rd Division’s path to the sea was a height called 362C. This hill covered other Japanese positions on the right. (All of these enemy positions were located on the high ground of Motoyama Plateau.) So General Erskine ordered one battalion to take Hill 362C by surprise attack, while two other battalions slipped into position to attack the enemy emplacements on the right. (All of these enemy positions were located on the high ground of Motoyama Plateau.) So General Erskine ordered one battalion to take Hill 362C by surprise attack, while two other battalions slipped into position to attack the enemy emplacements on the right. Once Hill 362C was taken and its guns silenced, the two battalions on the right could begin to attack without fear of flanking fire.
At five o’clock in the morning, with a whistling wind hurling cold rain in their faces, the Marines moved out. Not a shot was fired. Not a hand was raised against them. The two battalions in the center and right reported having moved 200 yards. On the left at Hill 362C, the Marines came upon the Japanese asleep in their trenches and killed all of them. Jubilant, they reported that they had taken Hill 362C.