Marines who had occupied the ridge.
The night of the next day came the battle’s only
The following day, March 9, a patrol of the Third Division reached the northern end of Iwo Jima. They clambered down the rocky cliffs to the sea. They filled a canteen with sea water and sent it back to Major General Schmidt, inscribed: “For inspection, not consumption.”
Iwo Jima had been traversed in eighteen days.
That night Tadamichi Kuribayashi sent his first melancholy message to Tokyo.
“All surviving fighting units have sustained heavy losses. I am very sorry that I have let the enemy occupy one part of Japanese territory, but I am taking comfort in giving him heavy damages.”
He was indeed doing that. Even though resistance was subsiding, there were still many Japanese holed up in individual pockets. In the eastern bulge, where the Fourth Division had been gathering momentum since the banzai, there were numerous hold-out pockets. One of them was believed to be the headquarters of Major General Sadasui Senda, commander of the 2nd Mixed Brigade which had opposed the Fourth. To him Major General Clifton Cates addressed a surrender appeal broadcast from loudspeakers. He said:
“You have fought a gallant and heroic fight, but you must realize the Island of Iwo Jima has been lost to you. You can gain nothing by further resistance, nor is there any reason to die when you can honorably surrender and live to render valuable service to your country in the future. I promise and guarantee you and the members of your staff the best of treatment. I respectfully request you accept my terms of honorable surrender. I again appeal to you in the name of humanity—surrender without delay.”
But Senda did not surrender. Nor was his body found when, by March 16, there was nothing but corpses opposing the Marines in the eastern bulge. The Fourth Marine Division had conquered again—but it had suffered casualties of 9,098 men, of whom 1,806 had been killed. That was half the division’s strength. In fourteen months’ time, this splendid division had fought three major battles and had suffered casualties almost equal to its strength —17,722 dead and wounded Marines. In three more days the battered Fourth would sail for Hawaii, never to enter battle again.
But the brother Third and Fifth Divisions still had fighting to do in the west sector commanded by Colonel Masuo Ikeda. On March 16 General Erskine made his own surrender appeal. It was addressed to Colonel Ikeda and typed in English on one side of a paper, written in Japanese on the other. It said:
Our forces now have complete control and freedom of movement on the island of Iwo Jima except in the small area now held by the valiant Japanese troops just south of Kitano Point. The fearlessness and indomitable fighting spirit which has been displayed by the Japanese troops on Iwo Jima warrants the admiration of all fighting men. You have handled your troops in a superb manner but we have no desire to completely annihilate brave troops who have been forced into a hopeless position. Accordingly, I suggest that you cease resistance at once and march, with your command, through my lines to a place of safety where you and all your officers and men will be humanely treated in accordance with the rules of war.
General Erskine entrusted the message to two captured enemy soldiers. He gave one of them a walkie-talkie radio and instructed him to tell his countrymen that he had taken it from enemy Marines after a harrowing fight. On the message, Smith said that the Japanese soldiers had been taken captive while lying unconscious in their foxholes. The two men set out to pass a day and a night divided between lying to their countrymen and dodging the shell-bursts of both armies. One of them actually reached the cave occupied by Colonel Ikeda and got a sergeant friend to take the note in to him. But then, the resourceful prisoner got cold feet. He slipped away. He rejoined his companion and spent the next day spotting targets for the Marine artillery.
The two Japanese returned to the Marine lines the night of March 17, but to those of the
“An American general gave it to me,” the boldest of them replied, adding stiffly: “I demand to be taken to my commanding officer.”
The interpreter grinned.
“Oh, yeah? Who’s he?”
The Japanese soldier stiffened and rapped it out rat-a-tat-tat.
“Major General Graves Erskine,” he said, and the interpreter was just startled enough to call the Third Division’s command post.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said after the grin had faded from his face. “Yes, sir! I’ll bring them right over!”
General Erskine’s attempt had also failed, and now it was up to the Fifth Division to clean out the rocky, Japanese-infested gorge lying south of Kitano Point. Here were the remnants of Colonel Ikeda’s 145th Infantry, here were blockhouses commanding all the entrances, and here was General Kuribayashi himself.
It was the most grinding work of the grimmest battle in Marine history. One blockhouse withstood endless shelling as well as demolition attempts with 40-pound shaped charges. The Marines cleaned out the surrounding positions and bypassed it, leaving it to the tank-dozers to seal off its air vents and cave it in with five 1,600-pound dynamite charges.
Then the tank-dozers caught up with the riflemen moving through the gorge. One of them began shoving out a path for the Sherman tanks to follow. Suddenly a single Japanese soldier scrambled out of a cave and ran at the tank-dozer with a satchel charge.
The driver swung his tank sharply to face the charging Japanese. He raised his blade high in the air. It paused there. Then it dropped to cut the assailant in two.
To the astonishment of the men in the waiting Sherman tanks, the tank-dozer’s turret came open. The driver popped out. He ran back to the tanks, while bullets whined and clanged off rock and steel. He hammered on the side of one of them, until someone answered him through a fire port.
“Did you see what that Nip bastard tried to do to me?” he called. “That does it, brother—I’ve had it!”
He turned and walked out of the gorge.
But the next day he was back again, sealing off caves, clearing roads for the killer-tanks as the attack in the gorge ground forward. That was on March 21. That night General Kuribayashi was still alive, for he got off a message to Major Horie on Chichi Jima.
“We have not eaten nor drunk for five days. But our fighting spirit is still running high. We are going to fight bravely to the last.”
Three days later, Major Horie’s radio crackled again.
“All officers and men of Chichi Jima—goodbye.”
Silence.
The following night on Iwo Jima some 300 figures arose from caves, from the ruins of pillboxes and blockhouses in that last northwest pocket. Many of them carried swords, for there were numerous officers among them. Most of them carried explosives. They slipped down to the western beaches and they fell on men of the Army Air Corps’ VII Fighter Command based there.
They had come upon those Americans least trained to fight on foot in the dark, and they took a fearful toll. Then they raced on to the bivouac of the Fifth Marine Pioneer Battalion, and here they were brought up short against a hastily organized defense line, and were struck to the ground by a counterattack led by Lieutenant Harry Martin. The counterstroke broke them, though Lieutenant Martin himself did not live to receive his Medal of Honor.
In the daylight of March 26 there were 223 Japanese bodies counted on the western beaches, 196 of them in the Fifth Pioneers’ area. The Marines looked eagerly for the body of Tadamichi Kuribayashi, for they had heard it was he who had led this last lash of the Japanese tail on Iwo Jima. Like Senda’s, it was never found.
But there were the bodies of more than 5,000 Marines to be buried in grim testimony to the skill and tenacity
