The Battle of Iwo Jima is known as one of the most costly battles of World War II because of the loss of human lives on both the American and Japanese sides. The American forces sustained a number of casualties, but ultimately quelled the attack. The Battle of … Battles raged on in the northern part of Iwo Jima for four weeks, with Kuribayashi essentially setting up a garrison in the mountains in that part of the island. Iwo Jima is a tiny volcanic island approximately 650 nautical miles (1,200 km) south of Tokyo. Operation Detachment was the codename for the Iwo Jima attack. For Japanese, the final year of World War II in Asia was a blur of wholesale death overseas and on the home front as well, with U.S. air raids eventually targeting 65 cities. The battle had a major influence on the United States’ decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We know now, for example, that while Japanese fighting men did frequently charge into hopeless battles screaming the name of the emperor, more often their final thoughts and words evoked their families back home—particularly, with young men, their mothers. And it was Kuribayashi, the general who showed rare consideration for inferiors, who informed his men that they were expected to kill 10 Americans before dying themselves. 8. Taking the small island, encompassing only about eight square miles, required the commitment of 70,000 American fighting men and 26,000 casualties, over 6,800 of them killed. As it happens, this was powerfully addressed in text and film by the Japanese themselves many decades ago. Lead by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, over one ...read more, Nearly 22,000 Japanese perished during the brutal Battle of Iwo Jima, which began when U.S. forces invaded the Pacific island on February 19, 1945. The largely barren soil is mostly volcanic ash, and digging a warren of tunnels and ventilation shafts exposed Kuribayashi's men to dangerous sulfur fumes. Editor's Note: See the introductory note by Robert Brent Toplin, the series editor. Actor/director Clint Eastwood in 2006 made two movies about the events on Iwo Jima called, respectively, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Both films are provocative and eminently serious, and their challenge doubles when they are viewed side-by-side. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), the finest participant novel to come out of the Pacific theater on the U.S. side, includes such a scene and this is recreated in the gritty but now all-but-forgotten 1958 feature film based on this book. And why in that godforsaken place? Although the US had more soldiers wounded on Iwo Jima than the Japanese, the Japanese had many more deaths. Rather, it is simply alien to the "Greatest Generation" mystique that has dominated media representations of the war in the United States since the 1990s. #9 It is the only battle by U.S. Marine Corps in which U.S. casualties exceeded Japanese The Battle of Iwo Jima resulted in the death of 18,844 out of 22,060 Japanese soldiers on the island. In a traditional jisei or death poem written before the American attack, Kuribayashi departed a bit from tradition. When his personal stewards demurred, declaring that regulations required that the commanding officer be served a fixed number of dishes, he simply told them to set out the dishes and leave them empty. Iwo Jima is small and resembled hell even before the Americans invaded. The American dies in one of the caves holding a letter from his mother; a Japanese officer translates this aloud for the beleaguered soldiers clustered around, who have previously expressed hatred and contempt for the alien foe; and, however fleetingly, a spark of common identity is established. Yet one photo gave, and continues to give, Americans hope. Allied aircraft, battleships and cruisers had spent the previous two and a half months ...read more, The instability created in Europe by the First World War (1914-18) set the stage for another international conflict—World War II—which broke out two decades later and would prove even more devastating. But with the Manhattan Project still a closely guarded secret, to most people … Although Allied forces led by the Americans bombarded Iwo Jima with bombs dropped from the sky and heavy gunfire from ships positioned off the coast of the island, the strategy developed by Japanese General Tadamichi Kuribayashi meant that the forces controlling it suffered little damage and were thus ready to repel the initial attack by the U.S. Marines, under the command of Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith. There is no drinkable ground water. In his sequel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood took on the remarkable challenge of seeing the same battle through imagined Japanese eyes. The few civilian residents were evacuated before the battle, and U.S. aerial bombardment actually began in the summer of 1944 and was conducted on a regular basis from December. Why die? His assignment to Iwo Jima came in late May 1944, almost nine months before the attack, and from the outset his duty was clear in his own eyes. Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. “Fact Sheet: the Battle for Iwo Jima.” NationalWW2Museum.org. — John Dower is the Ford International Professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The Battle for Iwo Jima.” History.Navy.mil. In a letter dated September 12, 1944, he wrote his wife that "When I imagine what Tokyo would look like if it were bombed—I see a burned-out desert with dead bodies lying everywhere—I'm desperate to stop them carrying out air raids." National World War II Museum. Unlike some of his men, Kuribayashi never questioned the necessity of dying on Iwo Jima. (As commander, he was able to evade the censorship routinely imposed on personal communications from the front.) Naval History and Heritage Command. Extermination of the garrison on Iwo Jima was easily obscured in the shadow of this grander catastrophe. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Originally, American forces set their sites on the island of the Republic of Formosa (now Taiwan), but … 6. According to postwar analyses, the Imperial Japanese Navy had been so crippled by earlier World War II clashes in the Pacific that it was already unable to defend the empire’s island holdings, including the Marshall archipelago. American intelligence expected the island to fall in five days. The first depicts the battle from the American perspective, while the latter shows it from the Japanese perspective. Rising to power in an economically and politically unstable Germany, Adolf ...read more, On August 14, 1945, it was announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, effectively ending World War II. 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