At 7:00 on the morning of March 12, 1945, the largest force of Marines ever landed under a single tactical command halted its attack for two hours because a small gasoline engine would not start. The assault was scheduled for that morning against the last pocket of resistance in the Fourth Marine Division’s zone on Iwo Jima, a maze of sandstone ridges and deep ravines running toward the island’s eastern coast. A prisoner taken the previous evening had told Marine interrogators that roughly 300 men remained in the caves and tunnels around that pocket, armed with rifles, ammunition, grenades, demolition charges, and plenty of water, but very little food. A Japanese brigade was with them inside.
It was believed that General Senda, commander of the Second Mixed Brigade, was there as well. The attack was postponed for two hours to give intelligence personnel a chance to speak with him, and the prisoner volunteered to help. He led a group of Marines to a point on the front line near where he thought the brigade commander was hiding, and the equipment went in with them. A loudspeaker, an amplifier, and a gasoline engine to generate electricity.
For two hours, the operator worked on the engine, but it would not start. Someone brought a second engine, and it also failed. All the while, the group was under sniper fire, which damaged some of the equipment and caused one casualty. At nine o’clock, they gave up on the approach and the attack began.
The Twenty-Fifth Marines spent the next four days assaulting that pocket with bazookas, antitank grenades, 60-millimeter mortars, flame-throwing tanks, and demolition charges. Every time someone tried to persuade the defenders to surrender, the answer came back with rifle fire. On March 16, the regiment reported the pocket destroyed. About 1,500 Japanese soldiers and sailors had held it.
General Senda had committed suicide in his headquarters two days earlier. This is the part of the Iwo Jima story that gets summarized in a single sentence and then passed over. That sentence is usually some version of “they refused to surrender. ” That is true, but it is not an explanation.
The essential question here is a technical one. When a man is alive and wounded in a hole in the ground that no assault can enter, what did the Americans actually have to get him out alive, and how often did those means work? The answer to the first part is a short list, and it begins with the method the soldiers themselves gave a name. Marine engineers and infantry cleared caves during daylight hours with what the Pacific battles had taught them to use.
A method the troops called “flame thrower and bottle opener. ” Fire first, then explosives, then a bulldozer to seal what remained. Armored bulldozers paved roads forward so Sherman tanks could advance. The flame tanks did the job.
The Fifth Marine Division later described them as the only weapon that forced the Japanese to leave their caves and rock crevices and flee. Behind them came the engineers. They destroyed the damaged positions whether they could enter them or not. They sealed them completely.
This method predates the fighting in the north by a full month. On Mount Suribachi, once the summit was taken, the Twenty-Eighth Marines spent days combing the outer and inner slopes, killing snipers and blasting cave entrances. Most of those caves had more than one exit. The report of that phase records that the sealing left an uncounted number of Japanese inside, which is about as close as the official records come to a policy statement on the subject this account addresses.
There was also a nighttime version of this problem. During the middle weeks, engineers and infantry destroyed fortifications and caves by day. After dark, men who had been bypassed crawled out of other openings. They threw grenades into Marine positions and then went back underground.
The Marines on watch shot a great many of them before they could get back. The next morning, the same ground had to be worked over again. In the corridor at the northern end of the island, the operation took nine days. Progress was measured in yards because every cave had to be sealed before approaching the next one.
Near the eastern end of that corridor, the Marines encountered a concrete structure built into a hill, shaped like an igloo, surrounded by mutually supporting caves, and fortified against 75-millimeter tank fire and 40-pound demolition charges. Two days of assault silenced the surrounding positions. Then engineers bulldozed shut a door on the north side and destroyed the structure with five charges totaling 8,500 pounds of explosives. No one counted what was inside it, and no one counted what was inside most of the other caves either.
This point is worth noting because it puts a limit on everything that follows. Intelligence officers of the Fifth Marine Division described the nature of that fighting in terms no one has surpassed. There was no visible Japanese at all. Each one sat in a cave or crevice, positioned to provide what the report calls a comprehensive and interlocking ghost-like defense of every small chamber.
Often the field of fire covered an arc of ten degrees or less, which also meant anything outside that arc could not be hit. When the attacking forces swept over his position, he simply withdrew deeper into the rock, waited, then came out again, unless someone blew up the cave immediately. That last paragraph sums up the entire policy in eleven words. Unless the cave was blown up immediately.
What the Americans had on the other side of the equation was sound. Some leaflets were dropped from aircraft and fired in artillery shells, but the most used method was direct talk. Language officers, Nisei soldiers, and volunteer Japanese prisoners stood at cave entrances and spoke. The main intelligence section later examined 65 prisoners who had been exposed to American propaganda in any form and asked each one about its effect.
Fifty-three said it was the direct reason for their surrender. The other twelve said two things held them back. Fear of their officers and fear that the Americans were lying. In any case, those twelve were captured by other means.
Fifty-three men. Out of a garrison of nearly 21,000, the total number of prisoners taken during the 36-day battle was only 216. Some were captured only because they had lost consciousness or were too badly wounded to resist. So talk was the reason a quarter of the survivors came out alive.
The most elaborate thing the Marines tried was not a loudspeaker at all. General Erskine, commander of the Third Division, reasoned that Kuribayashi might see himself as personally unable to surrender, and decided to direct the appeal to someone of lower rank. Colonel Ikeda of the Forty-Fifth Infantry Regiment, whose men were known to control the Kitano sector. The message went out with two Japanese prisoners, former soldiers of Ikeda’s own regiment, who confirmed they knew the location of his command post.
They carried cigarettes, rations, a portable SCR-536 radio, and a call sign to work with, since the Third Division’s language section was broadcasting under the name “Smith-Choi. ” Then they set off across no man’s land. They contacted several groups of Japanese soldiers along the way and did not abandon their mission. After a few broadcasts during the morning, they stopped using the radio, reasoning that it might get them killed rather than help them.
One of the two was wounded in the leg and stopped to rest it. The other continued alone, and after six hours from his start, he reached Ikeda’s cave and delivered General Erskine’s message to one of the headquarters guards. Half an hour later, the guard came out again. He said he had given the message to the regimental commander, and the colonel had muttered something about consulting with the general.
At the mention of the word general, the prisoner left quickly and went back to get his companion. The two radio breakers broke radio silence for the first time since morning to say they were coming, then crossed back to the American lines at 6:30 in the evening in the Fifth Division’s sector instead of the Third’s. They had no trouble at all surrendering. Explaining why two Japanese soldiers were carrying an American frontline radio took much longer.
One man took the radio from them immediately, and the Third Division recovered it later. Whether the message actually reached Ikeda cannot be verified. The interrogation report says the guard claimed to have delivered it, and that is the end of the chain of evidence. No Japanese account of what happened on the other side of that cave mouth survived.
What the two men brought back with them was worth more than the message. They reported that Kuribayashi and his staff had joined Ikeda in that cave on March 16, and that the enemy still had effective radio communication with Chichi Jima. They also said the troops they had spoken with were aware the situation was hopeless, and that morale was excellent, which they attributed to the presence of senior officers in the area. The radio link they described was real.
On Chichi Jima, Major Hori tried on the 17th to inform Kuribayashi that Imperial Headquarters had promoted him to full general. There was no reply. On the 21st, a message came from the other end saying the garrison had not eaten or drunk for five days and intended to fight to the end. After nearly three days of silence, the set spoke again to say goodbye to all the officers and men of Chichi Jima.
After that, nothing. At about 5:15 in the morning of March 26, between 200 and 300 Japanese came down from the western side of the island and attacked the infantry and army camps near the western beaches. It was not a suicide attack but an organized one. They carried Japanese and American weapons, and 40 of them wore swords, which later confirmed to the Americans that a high proportion were officers or senior NCOs.
The Fifth Pioneer Battalion formed a defensive line and stopped the attack, inflicting 196 casualties on the attackers. The pioneers lost nine dead and 31 wounded, while the seven fighter command units caught in the open lost 44 dead and 88 wounded. Iwo Jima had been declared secured ten days before all of this. Then the Marines sailed away.
General Schmidt closed his command post and left by air on March 26, and the last elements of the Marine division departed on April 12. Responsibility for the ground passed to the 147th Infantry Regiment, an Ohio National Guard unit of 2,952 men that had landed on March 21 and assumed full responsibility on April 4. The Fifth Amphibious Corps commander estimated the number of Japanese remaining on the island at between 100 and 300, while the real number was nearly 3,000 spread across 13 miles of connected caves containing more than 1,500 rooms. A 500-pound bomb dropped into a cave mouth near Kitano Point during the battle had caused smoke to rise from a cliff face more than 400 yards away.
The 147th divided the island into three sectors, assigned one battalion to each, and settled into a routine of ambush patrols, combat patrols, and what the men called cave exploring. James McGuire, a veteran of the company, later wrote that his unit formed teams carrying nothing but courage, hand flashlights, and pistols, and the men called themselves cave men. A platoon leader in another company learned how dangerous this work was while trying to seal a cave, because the Japanese had placed sentries at the entrances for the sole purpose of shooting anyone who tried to enter. On March 30, a patrol killed two sentries at a cave mouth, entered, and found a vegetable garden, chickens, two cows, weapons, ammunition, and American medical supplies.
Then in April, a platoon of Nisei volunteers joined the regiment and the calculations changed. Captain James Kolp of Company A was setting up an ambush on the eastern side of the island when two Japanese soldiers came out of a nearby hole. His men fired, killing one and wounding the other, and the survivor went back underground. Kolp called for his Nisei interpreter, Sergeant Ritsuofo Tanaka, who went to the hole and began to talk.
The officer who answered was Major Masaru Inaoka, a senior medical officer, and what was below with him was the field hospital of the Second Mixed Brigade, about 100 feet beneath the surface. Tanaka told him the choice was surrender or shooting followed by burial. Inaoka then did something almost no Japanese commander did in that war. He put the question to his men for a vote.
The result was 69 votes to 3 in favor of coming out. Corporal Kiyotaro Kojima, one of the three dissenters, committed suicide on the spot. Everyone was helped to the surface and then into captivity, and this remains the largest group captured on Iwo Jima at any stage of the campaign. Accounts of that morning conflict, with some saying the unit was 69 men total rather than 69 votes out of 72, and no Japanese-language records have settled it.
Technical Sergeant Terry Takeshi Doi worked the same job around the island, often assisted by Japanese prisoners. He went into the caves. Once he walked toward a fortress with his shirt off so the men inside could see he was carrying nothing, and spoke to them in their own language. He received the Silver Star for that.
In April alone, the regiment recorded 963 Japanese killed and 664 captured. The two sides of that ledger belong to the same month and the same method, and the ratio is the honest answer to the question the account raises. By June, there was almost no one left to find, with monthly reports showing 17 killed and six captured. One cave explosion that month was magnified by ammunition the garrison had stored inside, and 54 men came out alive after the blast and surrendered.
The regiment ended its operations on July 26. Its operations report covers the entire period from March 21 and records 1,062 Japanese killed against 867 captured, at a cost of 15 dead and 144 wounded on their side. Neither column counts the men who died in sealed ground and were never found. Army forces in the Pacific Area summed up the work as consistent courage and combat skill, a fair description of the ambush patrols and a simple one for the rest of it.
Adding the Marines’ 216 to the Army’s 867, the number of that garrison who came out of Iwo Jima alive was 1,083 out of a force of 20,933 on the morning the Americans landed. More than 10,000 of the others remain under the island. Two Imperial Navy machine gunners stayed there with them and did not come out until January 6, 1949, three years and four months after the war ended.
They wrote a book about it in 1968 under their own full names, and that is the only reason anyone knows for certain who they were.