Iwo Jima: Flags Of Our Fathers (Part 2)

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I was on the island a total of six days, and it seemed like 6,000 years.

Anonymous U.S.

Marine commenting on the fighting at Iwo Jima.

My senses had been put to the test on that island by the stench of the honorable dead, the lingering, penetrating odor of earth-shattering shells, the weird whistling of ricochet, the piercing shrill of buzz bombs, the horrible, agonizing cry of a wounded Marine calling for a medical copsman, the stirring sight of those determined men who fell to a permanent position of death in the last step toward the enemy, the cruddy feel of the island's filthy black ash that clung to my skin.

It's Lieutenant Patrick Caruso of the 3rd 9th Marine's 3rd Marine Division.

You did not smell the dead, you tasted them, far up the nose and back in the throat.

John Lane of the 4th Marine Division.

If hell looked like anything, it must look like Iwo Jima.

Anonymous Marine.

Welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk USA.

With me, Al Murray, John McManus, and James Holland for the second part of our Iwo Jima Hell on Earth series.

I think it's notable that there are no Japanese witnesses.

Well, maybe we'll come to that at the end of the episode.

Constitute something of a spoiler.

So, we set the scene in the last episode with Marines beginning to scramble down the nets from the sides of the...

Start of Operation Detachment.

Operation Detachment, which is a peculiar name, isn't it?

Not the sort of gung-ho American operational name we like, really.

That's positively British, as Operation names go.

Yeah, it should be called Operation Firestorm or something.

Or something.

Yeah, exactly.

Operation Detachment.

Yeah, much more.

British Army style.

Anyway, at 08.59 on the 19th of February, 4th and 5th Marines land on the island.

As they head in, the terraced beaches loom in front of them and there are pieces of rectal aircraft which are marking out the southern end of airfield number one.

And the Japanese start ranging their mortars on the landing craft as they come in.

Huge spumes of water flying up.

Aircraft fly overhead.

Yeah, there is the most amazing photograph taken from the air of the invasion force coming in.

And it's just these little white streaks going across the sea.

And the whole of the island is just, you know, covered in swirling smoke.

But you can still see Mount Suribachi at the the end of the island sort of poking up.

It's the most amazing photograph.

We'll try and dig it out.

This is a full effort here.

As you said in the last episode, John, it's two divisions.

This is Omaha Beach, isn't it?

Essentially, in terms of the kind of effort that's going in.

And the first men come ashore.

They're having to deal with this beach that's sand that isn't sand, a beach that isn't a beach, which is the volcanic ash.

One Marine says it was like trying to run in loose coffee grounds.

So that right from the off, the terrain is working against the attackers.

Which is the idea.

It's a place where where it's easy to get pinned down so the the first few moments of iwo jima are kind of surreal because there's not as much resistance as maybe they expected because kurabayasha is given orders to his guys to wait for the americans to move into the worst kill zones and then really open up because remember they're conserving their ammo remember his uh his whatever we're calling them six prescriptions or whatever you know the orders are that every bullet has to land every shell has to wound or kill or something and so they want to uh inflict the maximum damage by getting as many people into that kill zone as possible.

And they know the Marines are going to advance inland.

That's exactly what you're going to do.

And so really it's within, oh, after that first half an hour, 45 minutes, hour or so, that now things just become horrible.

But even so, I mean, the din is just incredible.

You know, the offshore naval guns booming, fighter planes coming in.

There's two squadrons of corsairs fly over, strafing the pillboxes at the edge of the airfields.

One corsair takes a direct hit, bursts into flames, and crashes into the sea.

Everyone can see it.

You know, no one quite knows what to expect.

They're hitting this incredibly soft cinder, you know, where sand should be.

It's this different kind of beach.

There's mortars coming in on them.

There's machine guns.

You're right, of course.

You know, it's not that heavy to start off with, but there's certainly a sense of, in pretty quick order, that this is going to be one hell of a fight.

There's smoke swirling around.

The acrid stench of cordite is very much in abundance at this moment.

And the assault on the senses for anyone doing this attacking.

And not everyone's been in battle before.

There's a huge number of first-timers on this battle.

And not least Dick Jesser, of course, who we mentioned in the last episode.

So, you know, I always think these amphibious assaults, it doesn't matter what reception you get, they must be absolutely terrifying.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, you go from the security of a ship, don't you?

And

the relative calm and from the chow line and all that to everything being kinetic and

everything being a matter of life and death.

Yeah, exactly that.

We should just say that, you know, we were moaning about this in the Battle of the Bulge series about

the American propensity for numbers as units.

But the 5th Marine Division is the 26th, 27th, and 28th Marines.

And John, you were...

Those are regiments that make it.

Yeah, so those are regiments.

So when you're talking about the 28th Marines, you're talking about the 28th Marine Regiments.

Correct.

4th Marine Division, it's the 23rd, 24th, and 25th Marines, or Marine Regiments.

And the 5th Marine Division is on green and red beaches, which is to the southeast.

You know, that's on the left of the landing assault.

And the 4th Marine Division are on yellow and blue beaches, which is on the kind of center and right-hand side of the assault.

Yeah, so within that first hour or so, now you're in a kill zone.

As the better part of those two Marine Divisions come ashore, you know, very, very quickly.

I mean, they're very well trained in getting

kind of 300 yards straight in, don't they?

In very, very quick order.

Yeah.

In the first 90 minutes, eight battalions are put ashore, which tells you that this isn't being hugely contested, that they are managing to sort of get their Amtrak and their Higgins boats on onto the shoreline and sort of scrabble ashore.

And of those eight battalions, that also includes two tank battalions and elements of two artillery battalions as well.

But there is resistance almost from the outset, isn't there, on the northern part of the invasion beaches above Blue 2, which is the kind of extreme right.

And this is the area the Marines call Rock Quarry.

And pretty much from the moment they land there, not elsewhere, but this is the hottest spot of the invasion force.

And this is where the 3rd Battalion of the 25th Marines get absolutely hammered by machine guns and mortars.

And there's this amazing line by Lieutenant Colonel Justice M.

Chambers, who's the third battalion commander.

And he says, you could have held a cigarette and lit it off the stuff going by.

Well, and he ends up with the casualties to prove it.

They suffer 83% casualties.

By like the next day, only 150 are left out of 900.

They're not all dead, obviously.

Yeah, but you know, in really, really quick order, you've got vehicles burning.

You've got beaches strewn with dead and stricken men.

You've got vehicles struggling to get off the beaches.

And, you know, it's an absolute nightmare.

And there's this account even further down where the 5th Marine Division is landing towards Suribachi.

James Vedder is a Marine surgeon.

And literally, he's barely got ashore.

And one of the first things he does, literally, kind of within a minute of landing, he's having to try and remove a large fragment of jawbone wedged at the back of a Marine's throat just so that the guy can start breathing again.

And he looks at him and just thinks, oh my God, you know, how's this guy ever gonna get his face back to pieces again you know because half his jawbone's gone i mean it's just it's just absolutely horrific but the uh it's 11 o'clock isn't it that two hours after after landing really that the japanese mortar and artillery barrage suddenly intensifies and this is as you were saying john this is you know because they've moved inland they're now absolutely in the kill zone there because obviously there's no point in shooting at them when they're below the below the shore you know we can't see the shore from inland because of this little kind of mini cinder cliff.

And so get them up above that, get them into this kill zone, and then you start hammering them.

And boy, do they hammer them.

I mean, it's just an absolute slaughter, isn't it?

And they can't dig in because the soil is like, you know, like I said, coffee grounds.

It's sort of sifting.

It's really hard to take any shelter from that.

And of course, again, that's all by design.

I mean, you're really in the worst of those fields of fire, the kill zone, for all those weapons that they've spent months positioning.

Here you are.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you're going to have your mortars and your guns pre-registered, aren't you?

I mean, it's a fixed position first rule of defense, defense, isn't it?

You have your kill zones worked out, and a minute the enemy step into them, you're going to pace them.

So by nightfall, there are 30,000 Marines ashore, which is incredible.

There's already more Marines ashore than there are Japanese on the island by the end of the day.

But they're caught in these kill zones because they've got to come up off the beach and they're up on into areas the Japanese have ready.

And by the end of the day,

they've got 361 artillery pieces reigned against them.

Yeah.

You know, including this incredible Spigot mortar.

I mean, you know, we're big fans of the Spigot mortar on

the 10-day bombardment.

This looks good now.

It's not about now, guys.

I don't know about you.

But a 320-millimetre spigot mortar, that's quite a, you know, a 675-pound shell is quite that it can lob.

Yeah.

Nicknamed the flying ash can.

Yeah.

And they, so they suffer about, what, 2,300 casualties in the first 24 hours.

I mean, God.

Wow.

Yeah.

2,300 casualties.

566 dead or dying at the the

end of day one.

It is a lot of people.

It shows you just how accurate the fire had to have been.

Yeah.

Because

you'd have, you know, probably more wounded, you know, people who have been lately hit or whatever.

And when you got hit, you're going to get hit.

And as you were saying, up at Rock Quarry, 83% casualties in the 3rd Battalion of the 25th Marines.

So, you know, that's 150 men still standing out of 900 that have landed that morning.

I mean, that's the battalion gone, isn't it?

That's just

combat ineffective.

But they hold a perimeter of 4,400 yards wide and about 1,100 yards deep.

Everyone is sort of striving to scrape a hole because they suddenly realize they're on this exposed ground.

You know, there's Japanese on Surabachi could look down on them and fire from there.

It rises up again in these sort of staggered kind of terraces of rock towards the northern half who could also look down on them.

And they're caught in the kind of, you know, the plateau saddle, the low ground above the beaches out in the open.

And, you know, in one shell hole, PFC PFC Arthur Rodriguez is asked by a do you say corp corps or corpseman corpsman so he's he's asked by a corpsman to hold a man's protruding intestines while he while the corpsman applies sulfur powder

and then he watches them as the corpsman pushes the guts back into the wounded man's abdomen then just moments later there's a nearby explosion causes body parts to rain down on them Rodriguez then sees his squad leader a man named Privet standing with his left arm dangling by a thread and watches him as he grabs at it with his right pulls it off and throws it away.

You know, so the trauma of that and the violence of it, this suddenly you're out there and you're seeing these just terrible, terrible things.

You know, PFC Arthur Rod Regress, I mean, this is his first time in combat.

Hell of a thing to witness.

You know, all your kind of worst fears about how awful this is going to be are suddenly kind of writ large there in front of you.

You know, it's amazing.

Another Corman is seen rushing to the aid of a blinded Marine who's stumbling around on Red Beach with, he's blinded and both his hands have been blown off and the corpsman runs through you know pretty withering machine gun fire and mortars exploding left right and center grabs the man and guides him back to to the aid station and it's absolutely no surprise that the corpsman who seemed to have this incredible dedication and and kind of fearlessness i mean their casualties are running at 38 percent just on kind of day one yeah because they're out there running around trying to help people and they're often in the most vulnerable areas yeah this is so the the way this was structured uh the marine Corps did not really have its own intrinsic organic medics, the way you say the Army does.

So they tended to rely on the Navy for most all their medical support.

So what that meant in terms of like the Marine Rifle Companies and other Marine combat units, you would have attached Navy, what were called pharmacist mates, usually.

They were corpsmen.

These are basically like EMTs.

You know, they're the combat medics who are there attached to them.

And famously, of course, you know, most Marines detest the Navy and look down on the Navy or whatever.

But when it comes to corpsmen, you know, those are some swabies who are okay in their view.

And so they really become kind of honorary Marines because they're living with the Marines and fighting alongside them.

And, you know, like you said, Jim, 38% casualties tells the tale, doesn't it?

It certainly does.

It's incredibly courageous.

And that night, they're stuck out there on this, you know, trying to do these fog souls, knowing that they're out in the kill zone.

And so they're sending up these sort of illumination.

flares and illumination sort of star shells left, right, and center because they're all worried that the Japanese are going going to do what they're notorious for doing, which is a sort of banzai charge out of them out of the night, you know, swords wielding and all the rest of it.

But of course, they don't.

But they don't.

It is remarkable, really, that, as we said in the last episode, by this point, they're sort of still expecting that to happen.

It is.

You know, the penny hasn't dropped that the Japanese have had a rethink.

Because they do at Tarawa, but that's because Tarawa is basically one strand, isn't it?

There isn't an inland to go to, right?

Whereas here,

you do have an interior.

Well, and the the last hurrah for that was on Guam, and that turned out to be a complete disaster for the Japanese in late July 1944.

And so the most thoughtful Japanese commanders had learned from that.

And, you know, like we said, Nakagawa, Pelelu, so on and so forth.

So it's almost as if the Americans are kind of hoping the Bonsai charge will come, even though they're dreading and embracing for it.

But still, they're like, okay, we hope they'll come because we'll slaughter these guys in droves.

Well, in a sense, that's like, you know, in Northwest Europe where you rely on the Germans to counter-attack and you use their counter-attack to destroy them.

You know, after you've put an attack in, they're not going to be able to help themselves.

They're completely wedded to their doctrine.

They will counter-attack.

So you can destroy them in the open as they form up with your artillery.

And the Japanese are not obliging.

They have actually adapted.

Which is, again, an interesting thing, given that the received opinion is the Germans tactically learn and are adept and are more cunning.

Whereas in fact, actually, it's the Japanese here who've done the thinking.

But however, there's no alternative.

You've got to do frontal attacks.

If you're going to winkle the Japanese, there is no alternative now.

They aren't going to ban Xai Charge.

They aren't going to offer themselves up to be destroyed.

So you're going to have to, they're going to have to break out of this pocket, this 4,400 yard wide, 1,100 yard deep pocket.

They're going to have to break out.

So here we go.

If you're a Marine right now, oh, well, lads, they're not coming for us.

So we're going to have to go get them.

And what motivates you maybe is the fact that if you stay still and you hunker down, you're just as vulnerable.

You're getting slaughtered there.

So you might as well go forward and try and take them out.

And maybe that'll lead to a diminution of the fire, I guess.

I don't know.

But also, too, these are exceptionally well-trained troops who are trained as assault troops and understand a lot about how to attack fixed positions, how to deal with pillboxes and bunkers.

Of course, they know that.

And they've been equipped for it here, you know, with satchel charges and flamethrowers and grenades and whatever else.

But submachine guns, obviously, there's a lot of that too.

But man, these are tough positions.

The Navy pillboxes we've discussed, the tunnels.

It's just a warren of death that's out there for you.

But one of the first sort of significant moments in the battle is the capture of Mount Suribachi at the southeasterly end, the knuckle of the turkey leg.

And it's the 28th Marines, and they begin their attack on D plus 1, so 20th of February.

The volcano is, of course, absolutely pulverized by naval gunfire and by artillery.

And then the marines jump off at 8 30 a.m you know they're advancing and sort of running running crouch going from sort of crag to crag and trying to kind of push their their way up the second battalion of the 28th marines is on the left the third battalion is on the right one of the medals of honor is is won in this action by private donald j rule of company e and he jumps onto a grenade to protect his buddies kills himself but gets the medal of honor posthumously and really the attack on surabachi sort of is the pattern for the rest of you know the approach for attacking the rest of of the island.

So, you know, heavy naval gunfire, napard bombs dropped from carrier aircraft, tanks, and 75-millimeter half-tracks advancing to effectively point-blank rage where these pillboxes are and cave entrances and so on.

Smoke grenades to blind the enemy.

And then the Marines themselves coming in with phosphorus grenades, flamethrowers, demolition chargers.

They're fired into the embouchures and openings and so on.

And then it's kind of charged to the last bit, firing your automatic weapons, hand-to-hand fighting, bayonets, knives, you know, and occasions even fists.

You know, and it's a bloody, close-quarter, brutal, extremely violent kind of form of warfare.

But I mean, those six points in a peculiar way reflect the six points that the Japanese yeah, don't they?

They sort of mirror them.

They mirror each other.

The consequence of those, how we're going to fight to the last round, one of us must take 10 of them with us.

So in order to deal with that, you've got to do this.

Then they're using a lot of napalm here.

And of course, in people's imaginations, napalm is associated with the Vietnam War, but there's plenty of it here, right, john absolutely yeah i mean and it had been in play since the previous year in 1944 uh and used pretty heavily in the pacific war and it's it's a little pattern you're seeing as the war migrates north um there's less and less fighting in jungles and more in cave terrain and by this stage of the war um the u.s is really using a very elemental weapon to subdue the japanese and it's fire and and of course napalm is an example of that we've got a lot of flamethrower teams um you know individually carried carried flamethrowers with tanks on their back, the M2 flamethrower on Iwo Jima.

And of course, at the much higher level, as of March 1945,

incendiary raids against Japan itself fire bombing their cities.

So fire has like become the lead weapon in a way, in addition also to flame tanks on Iwo Jima, I should mention too.

Yeah.

Which is a mark of bullets won't cut it because people aren't going to let you shoot at them, are they?

This is what it comes down to.

They're tucked away where you can't get at them.

Yeah.

And it's the only way to get them out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's horrific.

Oh, it's terrific.

It's It's terrific.

Absolutely horrific.

Anyway, um, in the battle for Suribachi, you know, incrementally they kind of start inching around and taking these positions one by one.

And by the third day of the battle for Suribachi, it's a gray and windy morning.

There's a bit of drizzle and scattered rain around.

And this halts the U.S.

tanks.

But 2nd Battalion has suddenly also finds itself having lots of trouble with snipers.

And the problem is they can't ever spot them.

You know, the Japanese has this kind of the powder they use is kind of non-flash powder.

So it's really, really hard to find spot where the fire is being directed from.

This is a problem that continues right through the whole of the of the battle for the island.

But by the night, nightfall on the 22nd of February, Suribachi is surrounded.

And what they've discovered is that the fighting intensity has tailed off a little bit once the enemy lines at the base of Surabachi have been cleared.

And Lieutenant Colonel Robert H.

Williams, who is the XO, the executive officer of the 28th Marines, says, we figure we've killed about 800 jabs down there, but we've had a hard time finding 100.

We must have blown up 50 50 caves.

And this is a point.

This is very much in keeping with the anonymous enemy, the enemy that you just don't see.

You know, the one that's sort of, you know, somehow kind of operating from below.

You know, it's a very deeply unsettling, asymmetric kind of fighting, which even after Pelelu, these guys are just not used to.

And they're having to acclimatize this very, very quickly.

On the top of Suribachi, Colonel Atsuchi, who's the commander of the forces up there, he attempts a breakout to sort of dash down to the northern lines.

Only 25 of the men that kind of do this breakout manage to make it, and most of them are just sort of cut down.

Kuribayashi is pretty disappointed that Suribachi doesn't hold out any longer.

Anyway, bottom line is on the morning of the 23rd of February, the summit of Suribachi is taken by the Marines.

It's another grey morning, which is one of the reasons why the famous flag picture is kind of absolutely no sun in there whatsoever.

But as it turns out, that's a good thing because it makes the picture so much better.

But anyway, it's in the gray morning drizzle.

A 40-man patrol led by by Lieutenant Harold Schreier takes a summit at about 10 o'clock.

So scattered resistance, few men emerging from tunnels, including a sword-wielding officer.

They're all killed.

Many take their own lives.

They hear these sort of dull explosions of grenades going off in the caves below.

And they find another cave with sort of, you know, mass of dismembered Japanese all over the place and the sort of terrible stench of death.

I mean, it's absolutely appalling.

But it's a big moment, isn't it?

But it's a kind of a false dawn in a way.

Yeah, it is.

And when the flag goes up, of course, Marines all over the island see it.

And many of them have the mistaken notion that this means the island is secure and it's over.

And so famously, of course, this big cheer goes up and bells ring from the ships.

And it's just this incredible crining moment.

But I think partly that's based on the sort of mistaken belief that the battle's about to be over.

It was kind of just beginning on some level.

But this was important to take the highest ground.

There's no question about it.

And like you said, Jim, Kiribayashi was a little bit disappointed that Suribachi didn't hold out longer.

I don't think he would have favored

that group trying to break out and run away and

hook up with the Japanese elsewhere.

That really, the better concept is to hunker down and sell your lives as dearly as you can.

So you have two flag raisings.

The first one, which was the product, that initial patrol and all this, and this is where Forrestal comes ashore and sees that flag raising in the distance.

And he thinks like a military administrator.

He says, this means a Marine Corps for the next thousand years.

And he's with

Holland Smith, of course, and Holland Smith is delighted to hear that and agrees.

And it's emotional for Holland Smith, as you might imagine, a man who's devoted his whole life to the Marine Corps.

But there's then this whole, you know, without getting too deep into the rabbit hole, there's this whole internecine thing about who gets the flag and a forestall being Floristahl wants the flag that's been raised over Surabayachi and the bottom line, all of this, you end up with a second flag raising, which is actually the more famous one because that's where the photo comes from.

I also went Joe Rosenthal's there

as they put it up.

And it's also, it's also, there's movie footage of it as well.

Yeah, that's taken by Sergeant Bill Janost, and he's fascinating, I think.

This is a guy who joined the Marine Corps at age 36 to be a combat photographer.

And so I'm sure we've all seen, you know, documentary footage, most of it in color, of the fighting on Iwo Jima, some of it quite intense and quite dramatic and really quite horrifying.

A lot of that, if not most all of it, is taken by Janas.

And he takes, he's right there for the flag raising.

And so if you've ever seen the actual motion picture footage of the flag raising, he took that.

This was so meaningful in the United States that once TV comes into play after the war, that footage, a lot of times for TV stations, that's how they would sign off late at night.

And that's how they would sign on early in the morning, showing that footage that Bill Janas had taken.

Wow.

That's amazing.

And John, I hadn't heard

this latest research that it wasn't John Bradley and Renee Gagnon that were the flag raisers.

It was actually Harold Schultz and Harold Keller because both Bradley and Gagnon said they were.

Well, Bradley, it's interesting.

I don't know if Bradley ever really admitted it.

And I think that's one of the reasons why he never wanted to talk about it.

Now I'm only speculating.

But famously, I'm sure you've read in James Bradley's book and seen in the movie that when media would call around the anniversary each year,

John Bradley would leave instructions to his kids to say he was off fishing or just not available.

He never really wanted to talk about it.

And in retrospect, I wonder if that's because as a pretty honorable man, he didn't want to take credit for something he hadn't done.

Now, it's a different circumstance in 1945 when you've got authorities coming to you saying, we think you're one of the flag raisers.

You're going to go home on this war bond rally and all that.

I mean, you kind of have to follow orders.

And of course, there was a lot of even discussion then as who were the guys raising the flag and all that.

In Gagnon's situation, he seemed a little eager to be associated with that and perhaps to capitalize from it so maybe he's a little bit different dynamic but yeah there's been so this research has been in the last uh five six seven years something like that as i understand it at least i'm not an expert but as i understand it conclusively proven to bradley and gagne were not flag raisers that but has james bradley spoken out about this he has and i think and i don't know him so i'm just speaking he's a really nice guy i haven't spoken to him for 20 years but i i did know him yeah then you maybe know better than i but he does know about it and i think you know certainly this was a kind of a devastating thing but you know obviously he faces historical facts squarely as well, just like we all do.

And that's the way it is.

It is really, in my opinion, I don't think it really matters that much just from my detached opinion that, I mean, John Bradley is

a fine, courageous man.

Imagine how many Navy Corps and imagine how many lives he must have saved and how incredible he was a good father and all of the great life he had.

I mean, I don't think it takes anything.

away from him or Ganyon or anybody else.

Those guys were all there.

They were part of this horrendous battle.

In a way, the point of the photo, in my opinion, is they're supposed to be anonymous.

Who cares who's in it?

It's really the symbolism of the fighting guys at Iwo Jima.

And I don't really think it matters if it's Harlan Block or Mike Strank, you know, Renee Gagnon or, you know, Harold Schultz or whoever.

It's, you know,

it's all of us, right?

Or even that it's the second time the flag's raised, you know, you know, because symbolism is the point.

I mean, it's like the flag on the Rice tag, isn't it?

Yep.

You know, it's a similar thing, you know, and and obviously in that photo, they airbrush out the extra watches he's wearing.

Yeah, let's not, let's not leave on that.

Let's not get hung up on that either.

I mean, the point is the symbolism.

The point is the symbolism of the struggle, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

And this was such a powerful symbol.

Already they saw it at the time, of course.

And, you know, as we know, I mean, the flags of our fathers does this very well in showing the war bonds drives that were based on the symbolism of Rosenthal's picture.

Obviously, that has a meaningful impact then.

But after the war, it's on a postage stamp.

And of course, famously, there's the memorial in the Washington, D.C.

area that's dedicated in 1956.

You know, I think it remains with us today as probably the most famous image from all of American military history.

And,

you know, to me, that's all to the good in that sense that it keeps that front and center in our minds.

And again, I don't think, I don't really think it takes away at all from the people who supposedly were in the image, but weren't.

I'm glad the scholarship was done, but I don't think it casts any aspersions on the people who

were thought to be in the image but aren't, is my point, I guess.

Right, we need to take a quick break.

We'll return with the battle continuing because Surabachi may have fallen, but there's plenty to come.

The flag's been raised and it looks like the battle's over, but it ain't.

We'll be back in a second.

We are now encountering increasing numbers of dead Japanese and swarms of great green flies.

We figured the Japs were no longer able to reclaim their dead.

From the scattered memorabilia that festooned the battlefield dead, we concluded that these were veterans with service in China and Southeast Asia.

Japanese dead were a problem for us.

Booby trapping was endemic and some of the dead were feigning.

It became necessary to shoot their dead to be sure they were.

I found this coup de grace repulsive.

P.S.C.

Robert Leader, E-Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines.

Welcome back to We Have Ways to Make You Talk, USA, with the Battle of Iwo Jima entering its...

I mean, that in itself, that's horrendous testimony, isn't it?

Yep.

Yes.

What these men who survive

have witnessed this and are carrying these memories are just appalling, aren't they?

It's truly shocking.

Yep, it really is.

In part one, we raised the flag over Mount Suribachi, but there's more to come, right?

Yep, absolutely.

I mean, most of the kind of exposed Japanese positions are overrun in the first few days.

I mean, obviously, there's a reason why the airfields are where they are, because it's on the kind of flat low line bits.

The first airfield number one is overrun in reasonably quick order.

Most of airfield number two is in U.S.

hands by the 24th of February.

So that's kind of, you know, over a week after the invasion.

But, you know, the front line at this point on the 24th of February looks like a sort of giant M.

So it's got these two kind of sort of bulges and then a kind of indentation.

basically where the kind of northern part of airfield number two is.

But of course, the biggest part, it looks like they've got kind of half the island already in their hands, but in terms of land mass, they absolutely haven't because the biggest part of the pork chop or the turkey leg drumstick or whatever you want to call it is in the northern part.

And that's the bit that where most of the tunnels are, that's where most of the Japanese garrison are.

And that's where the biggest problem is.

And they just can't see where they're firing from half the time.

And progress is

countered in feet and yards rather than tens or hundreds of yards.

And it's really interesting because when you look at the map of the 27th of February, it hasn't moved a huge amount.

I mean, you know, the very top northern part of the airfield number two is still not in American hands.

And, you know, this is incremental stuff.

This is a few yards every single day.

It's push forward from your foxhole, charge a position.

It's the same thing.

Get the bombs coming in.

Get the guys coming over the napalm.

Chuck some smoke grenades.

Get out of your foxholes.

Charge.

Hope that the smoke's going to hide you and that you don't bump into a passing Japanese bullet or mortar shell as it's coming in blind.

And then reach the edge of an opening, shove in the flamethrower, shove in the demolitions, move on to the next one.

And it's really, really painstaking, awful, terrible stuff.

I mean, by this stage, the 3rd Marine Division is in as well.

And they've got the center part of

the line.

And it's just horrendous.

And it's also horrendous, incidentally, for the Imperial Japanese Navy and Imperial Japanese Army garrison that are dug into this ant nest.

And the Japanese troops are told each man should think of his foxhole as his grave, fighting to the last to inflict maximum damage upon the enemy.

I mean, just imagine receiving that order.

Goodness gracious.

Yeah.

When you've already had kind of months of digging holes in sulfur-infested, lice-infested, cockroach-infested tunnels.

I mean, maybe by that point, you'd almost find it liberating.

Yeah, well, maybe, maybe.

The agony's about to end.

Yeah, yeah, you're freed from the agonies of life.

Your fate has been decided for you.

So, you know, you can submit to it, I suppose.

I mean, I don't know.

These are all situations wildly unimaginable to me.

Yep, and to me.

It's attritional warfare, and it's just a bloodbath every day going forward to capture, secure some reasonably small objective.

Usually caves.

Sometimes knolls.

But I think we should say that, you know, by the 1st of March, the Marines are into the kind of final third of the length of Iwo Jima.

All of airfield number two is now in their hands.

5th Marines Division on the left, on the northeast side, 3rd Marine Division in the middle, 4th Marine Division on the southern side.

By the 6th of March, the United States Army Air Force's 15th Fighter Group flies into airfield number one, flying P-51s and P-61 Black Widows.

So the key objectives included the free airfields, but also lots of hills, such as Hill 362A, there's Hill 362B, and there's Hill 326C.

And these dominate other parts of the island.

There's limited kamikaze attacks, isn't there, which sinks the escort carrier USS Bismarck C and damages

the USS Saratoga.

About 300 sailors killed in this time.

But actually,

a lot of sailors start feeling quite guilty because, you know, they're eating their ice cream and having coffee and, you know, having their steak and chips every night, steak and fries every night.

And, you know, they're looking out and knowing what the Marines are having to do on this island.

And there is quite a lot of observer's guilt, isn't there?

Yeah, because they're seeing some of the casualties come aboard some of their ships.

And, you know, it's just, I mean, devastating how many of these guys are coming back, what kind of treatment they're having, because of course the medical apparatus is overstrained to treat all these guys.

I mean, I don't know how those combat units sustained any kind of momentum of advance with the kind of casualties they were taking because they really weren't getting a lot of replacements either.

Some people were being lightly wounded and going back, obviously, but still, it's amazing they they were able to continue the advance at all one of the reasons they can is the flame tanks that are going to be in play and uh that was a really good standoff weapon especially against a lot of the the caves

sergeant janas took a lot of that really good footage of these these flame tanks that are going to be coming into play there that really does give you some maneuver space, I guess maybe is the best way to think of it.

And that, obviously, that weapon is going to be used at a higher level on Okinawa with many, many more tanks.

But on Iwo, you're already seeing that.

And I think it's one of the reasons why they could advance at all.

Yeah.

But I mean, you know, but even with that sort of comparatively new weaponry, this is still very, very, this is snail-paced stuff.

And, you know, there's an after-action report from the 3rd Battalion of the 28th Marines.

It says, you know, the fighting in the northern end was very discouraging.

Troops were so close to the enemy positions that supporting weapons, even 60 millimeter mortars, could not be used with safety.

Yet the enemy was so well concealed that he could not be seen.

Over and over and over again, you see this in the eyewitness testimonies in the after action reports that the Marines doing the attacking are they can hear, see, and feel the bullets and mortar shells which are raining in around them, but they can't actually see the enemy.

They can't find the enemy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Plus, there's the back clearing.

that they think they've advanced and they've gained some ground and it's secure.

That's a Suribachi, isn't it?

Yeah.

So, and of course, there's tunnels that they haven't taken.

And so the Japanese pop up behind them or on positions we think we've taken.

Imagine that too, how demoralizing that would be and how vulnerable you're going to be.

So I mean, so is the battle climax.

So the flame tanks I was talking about, they're using about 5,000 to 10,000 gallons of napalm per day.

Just imagine that.

Wow.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just absolutely incredible, isn't it?

And Schmidt's only forecast a 10-day battle.

So it's now gone on for more than 10 days, substantially so.

And they're running low on ammunition.

So on the 7th of March, he has to order his artillery battalions to conserve ammo.

Well, that's not the kind of news you want getting around.

Definitely not.

That would not be welcome news.

No, and I think it's also really worth pointing out that the terrain at that northern end of the island is incredibly different.

I mean, it's, you know, volcanic eruptions have kind of spewed chunks of rock far and wide, and they're still scattered around that northern end, creating sort of outcrops as well as loose rocks.

I mean, Marines quite often find they can only obtain cover by defylade or or by piling loose rocks on the surface to form a kind of sanger, I suppose, for want of a better phrase.

And there's also up at that northern end, there's these irregularly eroded crisscross gorges, which are very sort of precipitous size.

They have to be kind of traversed and overcome.

And at the bases of these gorges, you've got yet more tunnels running off.

And that means it's very, very close quarter.

And often, you know, your field of fire is limited to, you know, a matter of yards.

And

you've got all the sulfuric vapors coming up from from any openings uh so that's almost like these heat plumes coming up so by the testimony of the marines

of steam and stuff yeah they they said that uh they had to put down planks or cardboard if they were going to sit down otherwise they'd burn their bums you know i mean so god that only adds to this right it's like you know you you can't even sit down without this island harassing you in some fashion and yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well there's this great line from the from one of the marine fifth fifth Marine Division intelligence reports, which says, you know, it's always difficult and often impossible to locate where defensive fires originated.

The field of fire of the individual Japanese defender in his cave was often limited to an arc of 10 degrees or less.

Conversely, he was protected from fire except that coming back on his arc.

The Japanese smokeless, flashless powder for small arms was of particular use here.

And that's the point.

They can't spot where the bullets are coming from, where the snipers are firing from.

It's just...

Just look at how horrifying that would have been.

It's devastating fire.

It's sweeping through your your ranks.

You're looking around to see where it's coming from, to figure out how you're going to fire back, what you're going to do.

Very helpless feeling.

Well, I think we should have another little bit of, you know, we should talk a little bit more about the nature of fighting.

And you obviously know a huge amount about this, John.

So we should talk a bit more about that.

We've talked about flamethrowing tanks and everything, but the Americans are adapting as they're going along, aren't they?

Yeah.

So I think the stars of the show, as we go forward now, especially in the March, are the guys carrying the M2 flamethrowers,

basically the flamethrower guys guys with tanks on their back so imagine what it took to to do this job basically you're you're running around with this heavy ungainly uh two tank setup uh of napalm on your back and uh you've got your nozzle and maybe you've got some fire support uh a squad that's supporting you or whatever and it's really your job to get close enough to the cave or whatever we're assaulting to go in and basically flame these guys to death.

I think that would motivate the Japanese to fight pretty hard and to probably shoot at the flamethrower guys.

So they suffered 92% casualty rate.

Yeah.

I mean, that's just amazing.

That meant the tanks got hit, and you can then imagine the rest that perhaps it brews up and you've got the tank on your back.

Not that that happened all the time, but it was enough that would have been pretty distressing to think about that possibility.

The guy who's best known for this, of course, is Woody Williams, who's a corporal by the time of the Battle of Iwo Jima and just has this kind of individual effort in which he just flames out pillbox after pillbox after pillbox over the course of four plus hours um he's sort he is supported by by riflemen but still really it's it's woody williams doing much of his own thing and uh i met him actually did you

yeah fascinating guy yeah it was a hell of a nice guy he was really really nice and he looked amazing for his age i mean you know whatever and i met him he was 98 or something

but he didn't look anything like it this is i mean this is a man portable weapon weapon that weighs 30 kilos when it's full And the range is what, 20, 20, 30 meters?

If you're lucky.

You got to get damn close.

You do.

It's a close-fire weapon.

Yeah.

And so Williams gets the Medal of Honor, of course, for this.

And so a big part of what he's doing, the tanks drain quickly.

It takes, you know, not that long.

I mean, 20, 30, 50 seconds, whatever.

And then you got to go back and fill them up again.

You got to come back.

I mean, think of how enervating this is.

Maybe in the heat or whatever.

So one of the reasons why Williams gets the Medal of Honor is just how relentless he was.

And yeah, he died in 2022.

He was the last surviving World War II Medal of Honor recipient.

Really an amazing individual, had a very long and fulfilling life, unlike a lot of the others, of course, who never got off that island.

But he's one of 27 Medal of Honor recipients from the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Just turn that over to your mind for a second.

27.

Yeah, that's incredible, isn't it?

That is absolutely goodness.

And of course, this is where John Basilone gets killed.

For those of you who've watched the Pacific, you'll remember him.

He gets his Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal on Bloody Ridge, and he volunteers to go back.

He doesn't have to, but he's needed in the 5th Marine Division.

They said there's a big role for him, and he feels it's his duty.

He goes in and gets killed, isn't he?

Yeah.

So he had been on war bonds drives as a Medal of Honor recipient, like a war hero kind of thing.

And he had spent a long time crisscrossing the country,

getting those accolades, and was quite uncomfortable with it.

He

felt that he wanted to be where combat Marines were, and he wanted to be leading Marines.

He wanted to be doing his part.

And he had to be told while he was on those war bonds drives, hey, you're helping the cause in a very important way now.

But he just wasn't willing to do that long term.

And so he volunteered to go back into combat.

He helps train a lot of these guys because remember, among the three Marine divisions that go in at Iwo Jima, the fifth was new to combat.

The other two had seen pretty extensive combat, the third and the fourth.

Fifth was new.

So he's got new guys.

He's leading.

He's killed on the day of the invasion, February 19th, as he led a machine gun section of the 5th Marine Division.

He was a machine gun expert, by the way,

because that's why he gets the Medal of Honor at Guadalcanal, because of how devastating his machine gun was to break up a Japanese attack.

So, Basilone, I mean, here's a Medal of Honor recipient who volunteers to go back into combat and dies leading the way on the first day of this invasion.

It's quite poignant, I think.

Yeah.

The key thing here, though, is that the tactics are evolving even as the battle's

going forward, isn't it?

They had to, yeah.

Because you've got no option.

And I think the really striking thing about this is that the U.S.

Marines are not trained in night fighting at all.

It's not part of their doctrine to do it.

But here they have to evolve it as a tactic, don't they?

They do, because that's the only way to move sometimes, unfettered.

But also the Japanese are fighting at night, sometimes in small groups, infiltrators, this thing that they had done through the whole war, of course.

Infiltrators, small groups that are launching little local counter-attacks, terror, you know, whatever.

And so, yes, the Marines have to kind of learn as they go.

I tend to think, and I've been sort of beating this drum a long time now, so I apologize for those who have heard this, but it bears repeating.

I tend to think the U.S.

Armed Forces had an enormous blind spot in relation to night fighting

from World War II all the way really through the night vision until the night vision era begins.

Because the idea is we'll fight a nine-to-five war and we'll cede the night to our enemies.

We see this in Vietnam.

We see elements of it in Korea.

We certainly see it a lot in World War II.

Not entirely.

I mean, Terry Allen is very big on night attacks for the big red one and the 104th Division.

You're going to have some commanders who dissent and who prepare their people accordingly.

And obviously the airborne dropping at night or whatever.

So I'm not saying it's uniform, but I am saying it's a tendency.

And even here at Iwo Jima, three of the finest divisions in the entire U.S.

Armed Forces are not really prepared for night combat the way maybe they should have been.

But they had to.

Because, like we said, that's your route of movement at night.

In the daylight, it's just a death zone.

You're not going to be able to gain that much ground.

So you do see some of this, like you said, Al,

you have to adapt to the tactics and the situation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, it's Major General Erskine of the 3rd Marine Division who says to Schmidt, you know, how about this?

You know, can I try a night attack?

You know, something different, you know, because then the Japanese can't see us coming.

And Schmidt says, Yeah, okay, give it a go.

And

the whole point is to try and attack the feature called Hill 362C.

We mentioned a little bit earlier on, and we were talking about Hill 362A.

So, before dawn on the 8th of March, you know, three flamethrowing demolition squads move off first and they managed to get, come, some 500 yards behind enemy lines without the Japanese knowing.

And they gained total tactical surprise.

I mean, they seal off pillboxes and cave entrance and everything seems to be going absolutely fine and tickety-boo.

And then suddenly dawn comes up and the smoke eventually clears.

They realize that they've taken Hill 331 and that Hill 362C lies a further 250 yards to the north.

I mean, can you imagine how pissed off you're going to be when you realize that?

And in between are kind of very, very long yards of exposed ground.

But, you know, they're there now.

They've kind of got momentum behind them.

So Colonel Bohm of the 3rd Battalion, the 9th Marines Regiment, does push on his men.

And by the afternoon, they have taken 362C as well.

And it's worth pointing out, I think, that by this point,

on the 8th of March, this is the final...

froze of the Japanese defenses.

You know, there's not very many Japanese left at this point.

They're starved.

They're short of water.

I mean, physically, they're in appalling shape.

You know, for the moment, the Americans turn up on the 16th.

Forget it.

You know, so whatever stockpiles you've got, that's it.

And particularly, this is a problem for water.

So the first is a massive issue for the Japanese.

And this is why by this stage...

whether it's a night attack or a day attack, they're starting to make pretty quick ground compared with the pace that they've had, you know, the last week of February, for example.

Yeah, it's the climax of this thing.

And by the 9th of March, you know, Erskine's 3rd Marine Division holds 800 yards of the northeast coastline.

So they're, you know, it's now a kind of just a tiny little bit of land which hasn't been cleared.

And, you know, there's perhaps of the 22,000, 24,000 Japanese that are on the islands, only probably 3,000 left.

You know, so the net is very much closing in.

But from an American point of view, they're still taking, you know, a thousand casualties a day.

I mean, a thousand in one day.

It's horrible.

And they're not taking any prisoners, any prisoners of war, are they?

Very, very, very, very very few i think they take what 200 some odd or something like that during this you know operational phase until the island is declared secured by the americans on march 26 whatever that means they declare the island secure um and they start loading out on the 14th of march they declare the island secure on the 16th but they're still fighting yeah i mean the reason they can do the loading out on the 14th is because there's a very small space now in which fighting can take place you know those who are needed you might as well get them out of there as quickly as possible give them a shaven um a shave and some water and some ice cream.

I mean, PDQ, really.

But Kuriobashi writes to Tokyo, signals Tokyo on the 16th, the gallant fighting of the men under my command has been such that even the gods would weep.

My forces have been utterly empty-handed and ill-equipped against a land, sea, and air attack of a material superiority such as surpasses the imagination.

Yeah, amazing, isn't it?

Incredible.

And he's right.

I mean, the gods would weep.

And he kills himself, does the right thing as he sees it.

It's not confirmed.

I mean, he might have been.

We don't know for sure, but probably.

Yeah, most likely.

Yeah.

There's certainly no witness that's any witnesses don't survive and his body's never identified.

And the last message coming from his command post is on the 23rd of March, which is sent to the garrison on Chichijima.

And it says, all officers and men of Chichijima, goodbye.

I mean, crikey.

It's gun-wrenching.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so you've got the U.S.

Army's 147th Infantry Regiment that's in play now in so-called mop-up role.

There's that loathsome term again.

Really, what it means is we're in combat every day in small unit actions, and there's people who are going to kill us.

And so they kill 1,600 Japanese, they say, in small unit actions.

They lose 15 killed, dozens, of course, wounded.

The aviation, like you said, Jim,

the P-51s, the P-61 Black Widows are going to be based on that airfield.

It's hardly secure.

The CBs had really improved the airfields quite a bit.

But of course, in some cases, the aviators are enmeshed in the ground fighting against Japanese stalwarts, too.

I I mean, so

I mean, wow, nowhere's safe.

It's it's you know, it's it's like sort of walking around an island that hasn't been cleared of mines.

I mean, you never know where you're going to stand, you never know when the sniper's bullet's going to hit you, when someone's suddenly going to let rip or whatever.

I mean, it's it's just horrendous.

I mean, it really is a kind of sort of ordeal by fire, isn't it?

It's um appalling conditions, terrible place in which I mean, this is just not really meant for human

habitation at all, least of all in the middle of a high-intensity, ultra-violent,

highly materialistic war.

But the casualties are just truly horrific.

Only 216 POWs out of somewhere between 22,000 and 24,000 men.

Although the 147th did capture several hundred more after the supposed end of hostilities,

and that's a little harder to quantify.

So I guess a few hundred more Japanese did survive.

Whether they were combat troops is another thing altogether.

I don't know.

Right, right, right.

But at least 18,000 Japanese have been killed.

Yeah, exactly.

In this encounter, at least.

At least.

At least.

Probably more.

Probably more.

Well, we talked about sort of 20 to 22,000 on the island in the first place.

Exactly.

So they have fought to the last round.

They have gone out dying.

But what they haven't done is taken 10 each with them, which is one of the imprecations.

Thank God.

And I mean, although the America cost is incredibly high, 6,821 dead, 19,217 wounded in action, 2,648 with combat fatigue.

It's interesting to see that as a separate figure, actually.

So almost 26,700 casualties, mainly Marines.

It's a staggering amount, isn't it?

And on such a tiny, tiny island.

I mean,

in strictly speaking, American casualties are greater than Japanese because wounded people who survive rather than people who are wounded and die, which is the, they have no...

nothing in place to save their wounded, have they?

It's absolutely shocking, isn't it?

It is.

This, of course, is a taste of what may be to come the closer you get to the home islands.

Well, this is, you know, if it costs this to do a five by three, what's it going to take to take the whole of Japan?

You can start to, you know, when you look at Iwo Jima and you look at Pelelu and then latterly, you know, Okinawa as well, you start to understand

why everyone's getting so sweaty at the higher echelons of

ally command about having to do an invasion of Japan.

Yeah.

Because you can expect this kind of, you know, 100 times over.

And would we be willing to absorb that?

No.

Because remember, too, a lot of those casualties are going to have to come from people being redeployed from Europe who have survived that mess.

I think it's very questionable.

And yeah, so what's happened at Iwo Jima is just a preview for what's about to happen at Okinawa, which then is a preview of what's going to happen in Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan.

The Japanese strategy to make it as costly as possible for the Americans is working.

The thing they don't know is that the Americans have the atomic bomb.

Right.

Yep.

That is the variable that they couldn't have calculated.

They have not calculated for.

Yeah.

But as it stands, it's working, this process.

The worry it's causing in Washington, because certainly at this point, no one knows if the atomic bomb is going to work quite yet do they we're not yet into the spring where a test is is becoming imminent yeah yeah god man horrible so then you've got to ask the question was it worth it did the battle accomplish what it was supposed to i mean that's what we're still parsing over and turning over in our our minds and debates uh even 80 years later um i think it's fair to say for decades especially while the generation that fought Iwo Jima was

alive and well and thriving and telling the story and many of the Marines who had been there.

The standard interpretation was that Iwo was absolutely horrible, but it had to be done to prevent massive B-29 landings.

Because of these 202,251 emergency landings.

But as you were saying, you know, this is debatable.

It's more like 20% of those.

They're not all emergency landings.

Yeah, most were pretty mundane.

Planned refuels, planned

technical stuff, training, missions, all that.

So this is the standard thinking, I think, is a little questionable.

We also really don't yield a lot of benefits from fighter planes being based there in the strategic bombing campaign, you know, nor did four-engine bombers fly missions from Iwo.

And can't you just starve the island out anyway?

As you do in so many other places,

yeah.

I mean, I think it's at least worth raising the question.

Um, and I wish I could say definitively, like we do generally with Pelelu, probably shouldn't have been there at all.

I don't know if this is quite that definitive because it did accomplish something, but boy, for this level of cost, I don't know.

It's pretty pretty questionable.

It's a lot of lives cut short over a sulfurous, hellish place for not a huge amount of end, isn't it?

I mean, that's.

Well, and Japanese lives, too.

I mean, this is the other thing, is could you, as you say, starve that garrison out?

They'd have surrendered.

Or just died.

I mean, you know, or been repatriated.

If you can't supply them,

if nothing's getting through, then

what are you going to do?

What are you going to do?

I mean, and it's, it was hard to even discuss all this while there were still Marines alive who'd fought there.

And I guess there's still maybe a tiny tiny few.

But I'm saying, while there were so many, it almost seemed disrespectful at Iwo because it was so iconic.

And I think that's one of the reasons why it was this kind of accepted article of faith, almost as if no one really wanted to poke that bear, you know, of asking these uncomfortable questions, saying, should this have been done or not, that it was so horrible.

And the level of valor of the people who fought there so extraordinary that it seemed disrespectful to even ask the question at all.

I think maybe we're past that now, and maybe that's good in the sense that we can examine it.

But I think we also have to kind of still respect that, you know, that human cost of what went on there and what they did accomplish and not take that away from them.

I remember talking to Dick Jesser and he was reminding me of a story just when I saw him in November in Miami last year.

And

he was saying he remembered coming across this body of this Japanese guy and he saw the photos of the guy's family and the letters and he suddenly realized they were just like he was, just like his buddies.

And at that moment, he decided that if he survived this battle, he was never going to get involved in any other war or fighting or violence ever again.

I mean, it completely shaped his life, so much so that he went into becoming a leading professor at the University of Colorado in Human Sciences.

And, you know, he's just a phenomenal guy.

And he's still alive over 100.

You know, he's 100 now, must be one of the last survivors, I suppose.

But, you know, he's a fantastic fellow.

But his career and his later life completely shaped by those 36 days on Iwo Jima.

But I thought we should end with this quote by Corporal William W.

Bird of the 28th Marines.

And John, I think we should recruit you once again to

read us out.

I can do an American accent every now and again.

Let's see.

All right.

Let's see.

Martin Anderson from Salt Lake City and I walked up a hill and looked out across the vast Pacific Ocean.

We looked to the north in the direction of Japan and wondered what lay ahead.

We shook hands and he said, Man, you need a shave.

Lieutenant Armstrong sent word to the other two companies in the 2nd Battalion that he had gotten word from the command post of the 28th Regiment to have our troops move out in about an hour.

We were headed for the beach area near Mount Suribachi, four miles away.

Everyone got their gear together.

My rifle was just about all I had.

Lieutenant Armstrong looked around and was worried that some of the wearied, dirty, twice-wounded Marines might not be able to make the hike.

We formed two lines for our march back to the south end, where we first landed 36 days earlier.

As we walked down the single-lane road parallel to the beach, it seemed that everybody was looking down and not looking to the left at all the hellish places where where so many of our comrades had fallen.

Corporal William W.

Byrd, 28th Marines.

There you go.

Well, thanks for listening, everybody.

This has been We Have Ways of Making You Talk USA with Me Al Murray, James Holland, and John McManus.

And that was the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Thanks for listening.

Cheerio.

Cheerio.

See ya.