grenades and dying to save their friends.
Hill 362 fell on March 1, after holding out to the last man. The final defender killed himself. He came out of a cave and tapped his grenade on his helmet to arm it. The Marines who saw him ducked back, thinking he meant to throw it. There was a silence and the Marines raised their heads above the rocks again.
The Japanese soldier was crouched with the grenade to his ear, as though listening. It had not exploded.
He tapped it again and listened. No sound.
He tapped it a third time and listened. It went off.
None of the Marines thought it grimly comic. None thought it sad. They merely turned to glance at those western beaches which the fall of Hill 362 now made secure and wondered if the skipper would be able to get hot chow up to them.
7
It was March 4 and General Kuribayashi was signaling Tokyo for help. He had already told Imperial Headquarters: “I am not afraid of the fighting power of only three American Marine divisions, if there are no bombardments from aircraft and warships.” Now he was calling for his own aircraft, his own warships. “Send me these things, and I will hold this island,” he said. “Without them I cannot hold.”
He would not get them, although Japan had tried. On February 21 the kamikazes had made a major attack on the American warships surrounding the island. Suicide planes came in at dusk and sank the escort carrier Bismarck
None of the planes of this Second Mitate Special Attack Force ever returned to base.
That was all the help that Kuribayashi got from a homeland beginning to reel beneath the intensified raids of the American B-29’s. The night before Kuribayashi’s last appeal Japan had been raided again, and on that very morning of March 4 one of the returning Superforts was frantically trying to contact Iwo Jima. At last Sergeant James Cox heard a voice crackling over his radio.
Sergeant Cox switched off his radio. He watched the tiny cinder draw closer to the big bomber’s nose. He looked over the side as Lieutenant Raymond Malo circled the smoking, flashing little island in two wide circles—the narrow runway sliding out of his field of vision each time. The third time Lieutenant Malo hit the runway squarely. The big silvery bomber rolled 3,000 feet before it came to a halt.
Lieutenant Malo and Sergeant Cox grinned to hear the cheering of the Marines outside the plane.
The first B-29 had landed on Iwo Jima. It was the forerunner of 2,251 Superforts, which, with 24,761 crewmen, would make safe landings on Iwo before the war ended. Already, with the battle for Iwo not yet over, the value of Iwo had been made evident.
8
Even though Major General Erskine’s Third Division had overrun Airfield Number Three more than two-thirds of the way up the island, they had not been able to knock out a pocket of savage resistance holed up in blockhouses about 200 yards below the field at Motoyama Village.
It was decided to flank it, to strike at Hill 362-C, which stood above and behind it, for the Third Division was trying desperately to break through Kuribayashi’s Secondary Line to the northeastern beaches. This was to be done while the Fourth Division continued to clean out all resistance in the eastern bulge of the pork chop. The Third was to drive to the sea above the Fourth, then face north and press up the island’s right flank while the Fifth marched up the left. Below them, in the bulge, the Fourth would be whittling away at the enemy.
The decision to make the flanking movement on Hill 362-C a night attack was made by General Erskine. He had come to realize how skillfully the Japanese had adapted themselves to American attacks. When Marine artillery and naval guns began the fire preceding each morning’s attack, the Japanese scampered down to their deepest caves to wait it out. When it ceased, they ran back up to their guns to receive the Marines, inflicting heavy casualties—killing men such as the brave Sergeant Reid Chamberlain. The Japanese had done this so often they had it mastered to the point of split-second timing, and they had practially nullified the effect of preparatory shelling.
On the morning of March 7, an hour and a half before daylight, the Ninth Marines attacked without artillery. Three battalions faced almost directly east. The left or northernmost battalion was to take Hill 362-C, the others were to slip into the heart of the Japanese defenses and strike them at daylight.
At five in the morning, with a whistling wind hurling cold rain in their faces, they slipped out. There was not a shot fired. There was not a hand raised against them. The battalions on the lower or right flank reported moving 200 yards without detection. They were ordered to take another hundred.
The left-flank battalion came upon the enemy asleep in their emplacements, and wiped them out. Jubilantly, the Marines reported they had taken Hill 362-C. But they had not. In the darkness they had mistaken Hill 331 for their objective, and now it was daylight and those two battalions in the center and right had been spotted and pinned down.
They fought back throughout that day. The men in the center were hit so savagely that companies were reduced to barely more than squad strength. By nightfall Lieutenant Wilcie O’Bannon commanded less than 10 men—all that was left of F Company. He held them together on a mound 300 yards within the Japanese strong- point, while directing mortar fire by radio. But the Japanese opened with countermortars and O’Bannon’s radio fell silent. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cushman ordered tanks to the rescue. Thirty-six hours after the dawn attack began, the tanks ground over the rubble to the mound where O’Bannon and four other men lay fighting. They straddled them to drag them inside the escape hatches. And Company E under Captain Maynard Schmidt fared just slightly better in the same sector. They had seven men left.
On the right, there were also companies cut off among the jumble of rocks and crags, out in front of pillboxes passed during the darkness. Here Lieutenant John Leims risked death three times to save his men—once crawling 400 yards through enemy fire to lay communications wire from his cut-off company to the battalion command post, and then, after skillfully pulling his company back out of the trap, twice more crawling up to the abandoned ridge to rescue wounded Marines—and for this he received the Medal of Honor.
Such desperate heroics throughout that tragic March 7 made it appear that the night attack had ended in disaster.
But it had not. Other companies had been fed into the fighting on the center and the right, and here it was found that the Marines had penetrated the outer works of a formidable bastion which would be known as Cushman’s Pocket and would fall only after eight evil days of fighting. On the north, the men who had taken Hill 331 fought doggedly on to take their original objective—Hill 362-C—which rose directly in front of them. They took it, but only because their surprise assault had taken Hill 331. It was there that the Japanese had concentrated their fortifications.
By nightfall, all the highest ground on the Motoyama Plateau was in Marine hands—and from it the end was in sight.
There were other proofs that the Japanese had begun to crack: They had begun to commit suicide. Over on the left flank a hundred enemy soldiers holed up inside a ridge blew themselves up—as well as a company of
