Iwo Jima
The Iwo Jima Memorial
On the morning of February 19 the Marines in amtracs and landing boats moved toward the forbidding shore not knowing that preliminary bombing and shelling had knocked out only 17 of the more than 730 major defense installations on the island. The Japanese held their fire until the Marines began to crowd into the beaches. Then all hell broke loose. There was no place to go on the beaches tangled with men equipment, tanks and the mangled bodies of Marines blown into fragments by the withering Japanese fire. The surviving Marines dug in where they were, and the next morning began moving yard by yard into the interior. Four days of death were required before Mount Suribachi had been assulted and the defenders wiped out. On February 23 patrols of the 28th Marine Regiment made it to the top of Mount Suribachi and raised a small American flag in victory. Soon thereafter another patrol reached the summit of Suribachi; its Marines had with them a larger flag taken from LST. This second flag-raising, dramatically captured for all time by an Associated Press photographer, became an overnight inspiration to the Corps and to the American nation and lives today as themost famous symbol of the Marines and their victories in the Pacific.
For two more weeks the Marines clawed their way up the face of Motoyama Plateau. Flame throwers, grenades, TNT, and air strikes were their constant companions as they blasted the Japanese defenders from their caves and blockhouses one by one. Before the main enemy lines had been penetrated and the high ground had been seized on March 10, almost 13,000 Marines had been killed or wounded. Yet the fighting and dying continued as the Marines worked their way north to clear the tiny island of its stubborn defenders. Almost all of the island's 21,000 Japanese troops died in the place as ordered.By the time the island was declared secure and the mangled remains of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions were pulled out on March 16, 6,000 Marines and Navy doctors had paid with their lives and another 20,000 had been wounded in taking the tiny volcanic island.
