River 110 miles south of Berlin, famous for its art and its graceful and delicate architecture. In February 1945 the Russian front advanced to less than eighty miles to the east; refugees streamed west from that deadly harrowing and into the Saxon city. Lacking significant war industry, Dresden had not been a bombing target before and was essentially undefended. It counted in its suburbs 26,000 Allied prisoners of war.
Winston Churchill instigated the Dresden raid. The Secretary of State for Air responded to a phone call from the Prime Minister sometime in January with tactical proposals; the P.M. countered as testily as he had countered in the matter of Niels Bohr:
I did not ask you last night about plans for harrying the German retreat from Breslau. On the contrary, I asked whether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in East Germany should not now be considered especially attractive targets. I am glad that this is “under consideration.” Pray report to me tomorrow what is going to be done.
Dresden's number thus came up. On the cold night of February 13, 1,400 Bomber Command aircraft dropped high explosives and nearly 650,000 incendiaries on the city; six planes were lost. The firestorm that ensued was visible two hundred miles away. The next day, just after noon, 1,350 American heavy bombers flew over to attack the railroad marshaling yards with high explosives but found nine-tenths cover of cloud and smoke and bombed a far larger area, encountering no flak at all.
The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was a young prisoner of war in Dresden at the time of the attack. He described his experience to an interviewer long after the war:
The first fancy city I'd ever seen. A city full of statues and zoos, like Paris. We were living in a slaughterhouse, in a nice new cement-block hog barn. They put bunks and straw mattresses in the barn, and we went to work every morning as contract labor in a malt syrup factory. The syrup was for pregnant women. The damned sirens would go off and we'd hear some other city getting it —
Every day [afterward] we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who'd simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A fire storm is an amazing thing. It doesn't occur in nature. It's fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn't a damned thing to breathe. We brought the dead out. They were loaded onto wagons and taken to parks, large, open areas in the city which weren't filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. One hundred thirty thousand corpses were hidden underground.
Nearer at hand Curtis LeMay could see the intensity and ferocity of Japanese resistance increasing as American forces fought their way toward the home islands. The latest hellhole was Iwo Jima — Sulfur Island — a mass of volcanic ash and rock only seven square miles in area with a dormant volcano at one end, Mount Suribachi, that had risen from the sea within historic times. Miasmic with sulfur fumes, a steam of rotten eggs, Iwo lacked fresh water but supported two airfields from which Japanese fighter-bombers departed to attack LeMay's B-29's shining on their hard-stands on Guam, Saipan and Tinian. It was nine hundred miles closer to Tokyo than the Marianas and its radar outposts gave Honshu antiaircraft batteries and defensive fighter units ample warning when B-29's dispatched for strategic assault passed overhead.
The Japanese understood the island's strategic position and had prepared for months, often under bombardment from U.S. Navy and Air Force planes, to defend it. Fifteen thousand men turned Iwo Jima into a fortress of bunkers, ditches, trenches, 13,000 yards of tunnels, 5,000 pillboxes and fortified cave entrances, vast galleys and wards built into Suri-bachi, blockhouses with thick concrete walls. The emplacements were armed with the largest concentration of artillery the Japanese had assembled anywhere up to that day: coastal defense guns in concrete bunkers, fieldpieces of all calibers shielded in caves, rocket launchers, tanks buried in the sand up to their turrets, 675-pound spigot mortars, long-barreled anti-aircraft guns cranked down parallel to the ground. The Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, taught his men a new strategy: “We would all like to die quickly and easily, but that would not inflict heavy casualties. We must fight from cover as long as we possibly can.” His soldiers and marines, increased in strength now to more than 21,-000, would no longer throw away their lives in banzai charges. They would resist to the death. “I am sorry to end my life here, fighting the United States of America,” Kuribayashi wrote his wife. “But I want to defend this island as long as I can.” He expected no rescue. “They meant to make the conquest of Iwo so costly,” says William Manchester, who fought not this battle but the next one, Okinawa, “that the Americans would recoil from the thought of invading their homeland.”
Washington secretly considered sanitizing the island with artillery shells loaded with poison gas lobbed in by ships standing well offshore; the proposal reached the White House but Roosevelt curtly vetoed it. It might have saved thousands of lives and hastened the surrender — arguments used to justify most of the mass slaughters of the Second World War, and neither the United States nor Japan had signed the Geneva Convention prohibiting such use — but Roosevelt presumably remembered the world outcry that had followed German introduction of poison gas in the First World War and decided to leave the sanitizing of Iwo Jima to the U.S. Marines.
They began landing on Saturday, February 19, at 9 a.m., after weeks of naval barrage and bombing. A less well-defended foe would have been pulverized by that battering; the Japanese dug in on Iwo Jima were only groggy from the long disturbance of their sleep. The Navy ferried the marines to shore in amphtracs, gave them over to the deep and treacherous black pumice of the beaches and ran out to reload. The Japanese commanded Suribachi, the high ground; they had zeroed in on every point of consequence on the flat island and now stood back to fire. On the beaches, says Manchester, men were more often killed by artillery than by bullets:
The invaders were taking heavy mortar and artillery fire. Steel sleeted down on them like the lash of a desert storm. By dusk 2,420 of the 30,000 men on the beachhead were dead or wounded. The perimeter was only four thousand yards long, seven hundred yards deep in the north and a thousand yards in the south. It resembled Dor6's illustrations of the
After that first awful night, when the Japanese might have squandered themselves in counterattacks but chose instead to hold fast to their defensive redoubts, the leaders of the invasion understood that they would pay with American lives for every foot of the island they captured. Kuribayashi's final order to his men demanded of them the same sacrifice: “We shall infiltrate into the midst of the enemy and annihilate them,” he exhorted. “We shall grasp bombs, charge the enemy tanks and destroy them. With every salvo we will, without fail, kill the enemy. Each man will make it his duty to kill ten of the enemy before dying!” Slow, cruel fighting continued for most of a month. In the end, late in March, when shell and fire had changed the very landscape, victory had cost 6,821 marines killed and 21,-865 wounded of some 60,000 committed, a casualty ratio of 2 to 1, the highest in Marine Corps history. Of Japanese defenders, 20,000 died on Iwo Jima; only 1,083 allowed themselves to be captured.
That so many were dying to protect his B-29 crews when their results were inconsequential to the war
