Flags of Our Fathers (20 page)

Iwo Jima is an ugly, smelly place. Giant boulders, shifting sands, and stinking sulfur beds allow for little vegetation. Hardly a Pacific dream isle, it is covered by some twisted brush and has no fresh water. It is, as one Japanese soldier wrote, “A place where no sparrow sings.”

Maps are being unfurled on ships throughout the armada: large, rolled-up, heavily detailed maps, maps designed from aerial photographs of the island, table models made out of rubber, maps designed to be suspended from walls and spread across vast tables.

The maps show the military challenge. They give the combatants their first look at Iwo Jima: a small chunk of land in a triangular shape. Mike, Harlon, Franklin, Ira, Rene, and Doc no doubt pay close attention to the strange little fortified volcanic mountain down near the beach where they’ll rush ashore.

The boys, new to combat but seasoned by their year’s training, look on alertly, with professional savvy. Some of the veterans and older field officers, who can relate map symbols to direct personal experience, draw back in disbelief. One of them mutters, “It’s gonna be rough as a corncob.”

I can only imagine what the flagraisers thought as they bent over the Iwo Jima map on the
Missoula.
Stamped “
SECRET
” and dated November 12, 1944, it was based on “
PHOTOGRAPHY FROM NAVY SORTIES19. AUG. AND 1 SEPT. 1944
.” They must surely have focused on their landing beach, stamped “
GREEN BEACH
,” adjacent to Mount Suribachi. And they would have seen the designation the mapmakers had given Suribachi: “
HOT ROCKS
.”

Harry the Horse’s 28th Regiment, with Easy Company among it, would land closest to Hot Rocks, right under its threatening mass. They were part of the group that would string out in a ribbon of men across the narrow neck of the island, “cutting” Mount Suribachi off from the rest of the island. Then they’d pivot left to take the volcano.

The surface of Iwo was rendered white on the map. But the white was almost totally obscured by little black dots. These black dots represented the armaments that would fire at them as they struggled up Green Beach and raced inland in the shadow of Hot Rocks.

Just about every type of defense available in 1945 was represented by those black dots. All were identified by the key in the lower right-hand corner: Coastal Defense Guns, Dual-Mount Dual-Purpose Guns, Covered Artillery Emplacements, Rifle Pits, Foxholes, Antitank Guns, Machine Guns, Blockhouses, Pillboxes, and Earth-Covered Structures.

Hundreds of black dots, but no buildings. No structures to house the estimated 12,000 Japanese defenders.

Captain Dave Severance had first seen the maps a month before in the conference room at Camp Tarawa. He was astounded by its many overlapping swirls and heavy rectangles and triangles, each figure denoting a weapon emplacement or a fortified blockhouse. Severance’s thoughts reeled back through military history. “It scared the hell out of me,” he will always recall. “It conjured up images of Civil War battles, row after row of men going up and replacing those who had fallen. I knew we’d get to the top of that mountain, eventually—but how many men was it going to chew up?”

Each boy in the armada reacted differently to knowing the target. Some hoped it would be over quickly, others dreaded a long campaign. Others sharpened their bayonets for the umpteenth time, while a few checked their lucky charms once again.

For good luck Rene tucked a photograph of nineteen-year-old Pauline Harnois, his girlfriend from back in the mills, into the webbing of his helmet. The photo showed Pauline in an evening gown. Pauline, whom he had met working in the Chicopee spinning room. His mother disapproved of Pauline, thinking she was too aggressive, pushing her little boy. But it was Pauline’s picture that Rene depended on to protect him in the coming battle.

Mike Strank’s protection was his sense of humor. He put on a don’t-give-a-damn veneer, coated by his trademark grin and playful sense of humor. He wore his helmet cocked to one side of his head and told jokes in an Old Country dialect that broke up the farmboys and the office clerks.

Joe Rodriguez remembered the day that Mike overheard him sounding off about how poor his parents were during the Depression; how his mother had to make pillowcases out of used flour sacks.

“You guys must have been rich as hell,” Strank broke in. “I’ll tell you what my mother used to do. When I was a kid my mother made our shorts from flour sacks. You know, it took me almost six weeks after joining the Marines to figure out what that fly was for!”

Early in February the fleet crossed the 180th meridian, the International Dateline, and veterans like Mike initiated the men making their first crossing. They were now in the domain of the meridian’s ruler, the Golden Dragon. Mike threw himself into this comic ritual, where Marines were yanked out of their bunks, shaved bald, decked out in ridiculous garb, forced to ingest some unnamed “stinking” matter, and then doused with water hoses as they scampered up and down the decks. The victims were forced to kneel and kiss the bare feet of Neptune, the god of the sea.

Mike was at the center of it, laughing. “He dragged me out of bed while I was seasick,” John Fredatovich recalled, “but he let me go when he saw how sick I was. But I still had fun. Everybody was laughing. And Mike was the ringleader.”

The younger guys loved this, Rodriguez recalled. Those kids in uniform wanted to be just like him; kids who weren’t so sure of themselves couldn’t get enough of Sergeant Mike’s style.

It is a calculated performance. These admiring boys, many of them still innocent and unsuspecting, are his new younger brothers. They are transparent to him. The grueling training, the close quarters, the liberties, the poker games, the bull sessions about battle—all of that is over now. The cards are on the table. The cores of these kids’ beings are visible to Mike. They are ready to give their lives—especially for one another. But most of them don’t really know, yet, what that is going to mean. Mike is their shepherd. He has won their confidence. Now he is going to do his damnedest to get them home.

Mike, the immigrant American, is representative of the best of the young leaders in the Pacific. A sergeant, he does not lord his rank over anyone. He embodies the Raider egalitarian ideal of no divisions between the men, no hierarchy.

He eats with his men instead of going to the sergeants’ mess. And a few weeks before leaving for Iwo Jima, Captain Dave Severance tries to recommend Mike for the rank of Platoon Sergeant. Mike turns the offer down on the spot, saying, “I promised my boys I’d be there for them.”

Despite the hilarity, one frightening aspect of the coming battle stuck in the back of the boys’ minds. There was reason to believe the battle for Iwo Jima would be even more ferocious than the others, reason to expect the Japanese defender would fight even more tenaciously.

In Japanese eyes the Sulfur Island was infinitely more precious than Tarawa, Guam, Tinian, Saipan, and the others. To the Japanese, Iwo Jima represented something more elemental: It was Japanese homeland. Sacred ground. In Shinto tradition, the island was part of the creation that burst forth from Mount Fuji at the dawn of history. Modern-day governance honored that tradition: Iwo was part of the Tokyo prefecture. It was only 650 miles from the capital city. The mayor of Tokyo was also the island’s mayor. Thus the island was part of a seamless sacred realm that had not been desecrated by an invader’s foot for four thousand years.

Easy Company and the other Marines would be attempting nothing less than the invasion of Japan.

Emperor Hirohito was personally alarmed by the prospect of foreign defilement of his realm at Iwo Jima. In May of 1944 he handpicked a trusted commander to defend Japanese honor there, the head of his personal palace guard, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi.

Kuribayashi’s ancestors were samurai and had served six emperors over five generations. Hirohito was confident this was the man to save Japan from disgrace.

Kuribayashi was tall for a Japanese, five feet nine inches, husky, and with a small potbelly. He had had a varied career, from Japanese military schools to service in embassies in Canada and Washington to command of combat troops in China and Manchuria.

He was familiar with America and spoke excellent English. As a thirty-seven-year-old captain and deputy military attaché at the embassy in Washington in 1928, he had crisscrossed the United States and studied its people and ways. He knew and respected his enemy.

The night before he flew to Iwo Jima in the second week of June 1944, he had a private meeting with Emperor Hirohito, an almost unheard-of honor for a commoner. It was critical that the barbarians not take Iwo Jima.

The highest personage in his land also handpicked the commander of the Marines. Because of his age, sixty-two, and serious diabetes, it took the personal intervention of President Roosevelt to get the old warrior Howlin’ Mad Smith out to battle.

By now, as he sailed to Iwo Jima with the armada, Smith was the “Patton of the Pacific.” He was irascible, often profane, and constantly ruffled the smooth feathers of the hidebound Navy, but like Patton, he was a winner. And by early 1945 he had put together an unbroken string of victories over thousands of miles that even Patton would envy.

Unlike all the other combatants in World War II, including the U.S. Army, Smith and his Marines never lost a battle. Wherever a Marine boot stepped ashore in the Pacific, Americans were there to stay.

So Iwo Jima would be the battlefield of the personal representatives of the Emperor and the President. Smith would try to kick in the front door to Japan; Kuribayashi would try to sweep Smith from the sacred doorstep. Kuribayashi respected the Marines’ proud record in the Pacific. But he was determined to bury that record in the black sands of Iwo Jima.

By February 11 the 5th Division armada had rendezvoused with the 3rd and 4th Divisions at Saipan. Filling the horizon were over eight hundred ships, pausing one last time before sailing the final seven hundred miles to Iwo Jima.

Just eight months before, Marines had wrested Saipan away from the Japanese. Now long, gleaming white airstrips had replaced the rotting corpses among the cane fields.

The boys of Easy Company watched the gigantic American B-29 Superfort bombers lumber down the three-mile-long airstrips and lift slowly into the air on their way to bomb the Japanese mainland. They didn’t know it, but some of those planes would not return because of a certain Sulfur Island. And it was for this reason that the battle of Iwo Jima had been ordered.

In the fall of 1944 the Joint Chiefs of Staff had rejected General MacArthur’s plan to attack Japan via Taiwan and China. Instead, they endorsed Admiral Nimitz’s plan of a frontal attack against the Japanese mainland. Preliminary saturation bombing of Japanese military plants and cities was part of the plan.

The biggest obstacle a B-29 pilot faced on his bombing run from Tinian and Saipan to Japan was the lethal triple whammy of danger presented by Iwo Jima. Athwart the direct path to Japan, the island was almost exactly halfway between the Marianas and Japan and boasted two airstrips and a radar station.

As the Superforts approached Iwo on their way to Japan, the radar station would give mainland defenders a two-hour early warning. The gigantic B-29’s, lumbering north on their 2,500-mile round trip flight to attack Japan, made easy targets for the small, quick fighter planes based on Iwo.

And lastly, after enduring more antiaircraft fire and dogfights over Japan, the B-29’s, often damaged, would again be forced to face the Iwo-based fighters on their return trip. Too many pilots and crew were being lost to watery graves. General Curtis LeMay, commander of the Twentieth Air Force, warned that his pilots could not sustain these losses much longer.

And it was not only the bombers in the air that were vulnerable. The Army Air Force concluded after the war that Iwo Jima–based planes destroyed more B-29’s on the ground, in raids on Tinian and Saipan, than were lost on all the bombing runs over Tokyo.