Who won the Battle of Iwo Jima?
The United States won the Battle of Iwo Jima, fought from 19 February to 26 March 1945, taking the tiny volcanic island after 36 days of some of the most brutal fighting of the Pacific war. The Japanese garrison of about 21,000, dug into tunnels and caves, fought almost to the last man, and only 216 were taken prisoner. Nearly 7,000 Americans were killed and more than 19,000 wounded, and the raising of the American flag over Mount Suribachi became one of the most famous images in history.1
In February and March 1945, US Marines fought one of the most brutal battles of the Pacific war for a tiny volcanic island called Iwo Jima. The Japanese garrison, dug deep into tunnels and caves, fought almost to the last man. The raising of the American flag over Mount Suribachi became one of the most famous images in history, but the island cost nearly 7,000 American lives, and almost the entire defending force died.2
Part of The greatest battles of the Pacific War · Before: Battle of Leyte Gulf · Next: The Battle of Okinawa · Key figures: John Basilone, Ira Hayes
Why Iwo Jima
By late 1944 American B-29 Superfortresses were bombing Japan from the Mariana Islands, and Iwo Jima lay almost exactly halfway along their route to Tokyo. A Japanese radar station on the island was believed to give the home islands early warning of every raid, and fighters based there harried the bombers, which had to fly longer, roundabout routes as a result. In American hands, its airfields could base escort fighters and give crippled bombers somewhere to land short of the sea.3
The plan, code-named Operation Detachment, took shape in the autumn of 1944, and in October the Joint Chiefs of Staff directed Admiral Chester Nimitz to seize the island. Iwo Jima was not some distant outpost: it was administered as part of Tokyo Prefecture and counted as Japanese home soil, which made it all the more certain to be fiercely held. D-day, first set for January, slipped to 19 February 1945 because the shipping was still tied up in the Philippines.4
The island itself was an ugly prize. About eight square miles of black volcanic sand and rock, shaped like a pork chop, it was dominated at its narrow southern tip by Mount Suribachi, a dormant volcano 556 feet high that overlooked the only usable landing beaches. Two airfields lay across the middle of the island, and a third was unfinished in the north, where the ground broke up into cliffs, gorges and caves.5
An island turned into a fortress
Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi took command of the island in mid-1944, knowing that little help would come from Japan's battered fleet or air force. He rejected the old doctrine of meeting the enemy at the water's edge, and he banned the suicidal banzai charges that had squandered garrisons from Tarawa to the Marianas. Instead his men would fight from cover, each one expected to kill ten Americans before he died, and make every yard as costly as possible.6
Half the garrison put down their rifles to dig. The soft volcanic rock was easy to tunnel, and the island's sand made good concrete, so by February the defenders lived and fought almost entirely underground: masked gun positions with interlocking fields of fire, miles of tunnels joining them, caves with several exits, and one installation inside Suribachi seven levels deep. American photo interpreters found nearly 700 targets but could not see the men, and estimated the garrison at 12,000 to 13,000 because they did not believe more could survive without fresh water. Kuribayashi in fact had about 21,000.7
The armies and their commanders
The landing force was Major General Harry Schmidt's V Amphibious Corps: the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions in the assault and the 3rd in reserve, the largest body of Marines ever committed to one battle. Above it stood the team that had won in the Gilberts, Marshalls and Marianas: Admiral Raymond Spruance's Fifth Fleet, Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner's amphibious force, and Lieutenant General Holland Smith in overall command of the troops. Counting support units, some 70,000 Marines took part.8
The Marines asked for ten days of naval bombardment before the landing. The Navy, short of time and ammunition with Okinawa already scheduled for 1 April, gave three, and bad weather cut even those short: by the Navy's own reckoning only about 13 hours of effective fire fell on the island. Kuribayashi's buried positions came through almost untouched.9
D-day on the black sand
At 9 a.m. on 19 February 1945 the first waves of the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions came ashore on the southeastern beaches, code-named Green, Red, Yellow and Blue. For about an hour the defenders held their fire. Then, once the beaches were crowded with men and vehicles, Japanese artillery and mortars zeroed in from Suribachi on the left and the quarry cliffs on the right. The beach rose in steep terraces of loose black ash that swallowed boots and stopped wheeled vehicles, and wrecked amphibious tractors, tanks and supplies piled up at the waterline under constant fire.10
Even so, the 28th Marines crossed the narrow neck of the island within about 90 minutes and cut Suribachi off from the rest of the garrison. By nightfall some 30,000 Marines were ashore, but they were still short of the day's objectives and losses were mounting fast. Among the dead was Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone, the Medal of Honor hero of Guadalcanal, killed on the first day while leading his machine gunners toward the first airfield; he was awarded the Navy Cross after his death.11
The flags on Suribachi
The 28th Marines spent three days fighting up the slopes of Suribachi with flamethrowers and demolition charges. On the morning of 23 February a patrol from Company E, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, under First Lieutenant Harold Schrier, climbed to the crater rim and raised a small American flag on a length of pipe. Cheers rang out across the southern end of the island, and the ships offshore sounded their whistles.12
The first flag was thought too small to be seen across the island, so a larger one was carried up and raised a few hours later. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal caught that second raising on film, and his picture won the Pulitzer Prize, became the emblem of the Seventh War Loan drive, and is one of the most reproduced images ever taken. The Marine Corps itself has twice corrected who they were: in 2016 it found that Harold Schultz, not the Navy corpsman John Bradley, was in the photograph, and in 2019 that Harold Keller had been mistaken for Rene Gagnon.13 › Ira Hayes
The meat grinder in the north
The flag marked the end of the beginning, not the end. The main Japanese defenses lay across the broad northern plateau, and the three Marine divisions now ground into them side by side. The second airfield fell after heavy fighting by the end of February, and on 27 February a coordinated push broke through the center of the Japanese line. On the right flank, the 4th Marine Division ran into a complex of strongpoints around Hill 382, the Amphitheater and Turkey Knob that the Marines called the Meat Grinder; Hill 382 fell on 2 March, and the rest was not cleared until 10 March.14
Progress was measured in yards. After nine days the drive north had covered about 4,000 yards at a cost of some 7,000 casualties, and many rifle companies were down to half their strength. Teams of Marines with flamethrowers, satchel charges and grenades, backed by flame tanks, burned and blasted the defenders out cave by cave, because bombs and shells could not reach them. On 4 March a damaged B-29 made the first emergency landing on the island, a sign of what the battle was for, while the fighting went on around it.15
The last pockets held out in the broken ground of the north, in what the Marines called Cushman's Pocket and in a gorge on the northwest coast where Kuribayashi made his final headquarters. The Americans declared the island secure on 16 March, but the fighting went on.16
The bitter end
Before dawn on 26 March, about 300 Japanese soldiers who had crept south through the American lines fell on the tents of Army Air Forces pilots and Seabees near the first airfield. More than 100 Americans died in the fighting that followed, and the attackers were wiped out. It was the last organized action of the battle, and the operation was officially declared over the same day. Kuribayashi died in those final days, by his own hand by most accounts. Japanese accounts are fragmentary, and the official US Navy history dates his suicide to 23 March, while the Marine Corps history places it in the night of 25 to 26 March.17
Even then the island was not quiet. The Navy's history estimates that some 3,000 Japanese soldiers were still hiding in the caves when the Marines left. Army troops of the 147th Infantry spent months hunting them down, and one group did not lay down its arms until 1949.18
The cost
Iwo Jima was the bloodiest battle in the history of the US Marine Corps. American losses were about 26,000, between 6,800 and 6,900 of them killed and 19,217 wounded; the National WWII Museum gives 6,821 dead and the Navy 6,871. Counting the wounded, American casualties outnumbered the entire Japanese garrison. Of a garrison of about 21,000, only 216 were taken prisoner, and estimates of the Japanese dead range from about 18,500 to 22,000.19 › Battle of Tarawa, 1943
Twenty-seven Medals of Honor were awarded for the battle, to 22 Marines and five sailors, and half of the awards to men of the landing force were made after their deaths. Admiral Nimitz summed up the battle in a single phrase: “uncommon valor was a common virtue.”20
Was it worth it?
The question was asked while the battle was still raging, as the casualty lists reached American newspapers. The case for Iwo Jima rests above all on the airfields. By the end of the war 2,251 B-29s had landed there, carrying some 24,761 crewmen, and many of them would otherwise have ditched at sea; from 7 April P-51 Mustangs flew from the island to escort the bombers over Japan.21
Later historians have been more skeptical. The Marine officer and historian Robert Burrell found that only about ten fighter escort missions were ever flown from the island, and that most of the B-29 landings were not true emergencies. The Navy's own history notes that the Japanese radar on Iwo Jima turned out not to provide useful early warning, that flying escorts from it was hard on pilots facing a 1,500 nautical mile round trip, and that whether the operation justified its human cost is still debated.22 › Battle of Okinawa, 1945
Legacy and memory
Rosenthal's photograph outgrew the battle. The sculptor Felix de Weldon modeled the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, on it, with bronze figures 32 feet tall raising a 60 foot flagpole, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower dedicated it on 10 November 1954, the Marine Corps' 179th birthday. It honors every Marine who has died for the country since 1775.23 › Battle of Peleliu, 1944
The island itself, known in Japan today as Iō-tō, is no longer a place most people can visit, so for Americans and Japanese alike the battle lives on above all through the story of the flag and the monuments built around it.24
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