Strong Men Armed

with which Tadamichi Kuribayashi and 21,000 Japanese warriors had defended the Emperor’s front gate. In all, 5,885 United States Marines were killed on Iwo, or in the air above or sea around it. There were also 17,272 Marines wounded, 46 Marines missing and surely dead, 2,648 Marines felled by combat fatigue —as well as 738 dead and wounded Navy doctors and corpsmen.

The Fifth Division had more Medal of Honor men to bury. Platoon Sergeant Joseph Julian lost his life charging pillboxes, Pfc. James LaBelle and Private George Phillips had thrown themselves on grenades to save their comrades, Lieutenant Jack Lummus had died leading his men, Corpsmen Jack Williams and John Willis had perished protecting wounded Marines. They were all buried in the shadow of the volcano their division had captured. In the hospitals far from Iwo Jima Private Franklin Sigler and Corpsman George Wahlen recuperated from wounds suffered while helping stricken comrades. They too would receive Medals of Honor. So the fledgling Fifth was blooded now with 8,563 casualties in its first and only fight—and the Fifth buried its dead at the base of Mount Suribachi while taps blew sad and solitary over the drifted ash dunes.

Higher up the island the Third and Fourth Divisions buried their dead in adjoining cemeteries. Already the men had carved memorials out of Iwo’s sandstone and decorated the graves of their friends with carved crosses and Marine emblems. Some had made inscriptions:

REACH DOWN, DEAR LORD, FOR THIS MARINE WHO GAVE HIS ALL THAT WE MIGHT LIVE.

MONTY A GOOD MARINE WHO DIED IN DEED BUT NOT IN VAIN.

And then this single stark cry of anguish:

BUT GOD—FIFTEEN YEARS IS NOT ENOUGH!

Marines came to the cemeteries from their bivouacs to stand or kneel in prayerful farewell before they took ship to sail away from this dark ugly curse of an island. Major General Erskine spoke to them, commemorating all the fallen.

“Only the accumulated praise of time will pay proper tribute to our valiant dead. Long after those who lament their immediate loss are themselves dead, these men will be mourned by the Nation.

“They are the Nation’s loss!

“There is talk of great history, of the greatest fight in our history, of unheard-of sacrifice and unheard-of courage. These phrases are correct, but they are prematurely employed.

“Victory was never in doubt. Its cost was.

“The enemy could have displaced every cubic inch of volcanic ash on this fortress with concrete pillboxes and blockhouses, which he nearly did, and still victory would not have been in doubt.

“What was in doubt, in all our minds, was whether there would be any of us left to dedicate our cemetery at the end, or whether the last Marine would die knocking out the last Japanese gun and gunner.

“Let the world count our crosses!

“Let them count them over and over. Then when they understand the significance of the fighting for Iwo Jima, let them wonder how few there are. We understand and we wonder—we who are separated from our dead by a few feet of earth; from death by inches and fractions of an inch.

“The cost to us in quality, one who did not fight side by side with those who fell can never understand.”

There would be more crosses for the world to count, more stars, more plain headboards for those nonbelievers who also fell—and the cost to the nation in quality would increase.

On March 26, the day the fighting at Iwo Jima was declared ended, an Army division landed at a place called Kerama Retto.

Okinawa, the last battle, had begun.

9

No one expected Okinawa to be the last battle.

To both sides the inevitable fight for this chief and largest island of the Ryukyu chain was to be but prelude to the titanic struggle on Japan itself. To America it meant seizure of the last steppingstone to Nippon. To Japan it was to be the anvil on which the hammer blows of a Divine Wind would destroy the American fleet.

This was still the chief object of Japanese military policy-this destruction of American sea power. It was sea power which had brought the Americans through the island barriers, had landed them at Iwo within the very Prefecture of Tokyo, was now bringing them to within less than 400 miles of Kyushu in southern Japan. Only sea power could bring about the invasion of Japan, something which had not happened in the three thousand years of Nippon’s recorded history, something which had been attempted only once before.

In 1570 a Mongol emperor massed a great amphibious force on the Chinese coast. Japan was ill prepared to repel the invaders, but a kamikaze, a Divine Wind, sprang up in the shape of a typhoon and it scattered and sank the Mongol fleet.

In early 1945, nearly four centuries later, a whole host of Divine Winds was blowing out of Nippon. They were the suicide bombers of the Special Attack Forces, the new kamikazes who had been so named because it was seriously expected that they too would destroy an invasion fleet.

They had been brought into being by Vice Admiral Takejiro Onishi. He had led a carrier group during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. After that aerial disaster, he had gone to Fleet Admiral Toyoda with the idea of organizing a corps of flyers to crash-dive loaded bombers into the decks of American ships. Toyoda agreed. He sent Onishi to the Philippines. There, in August, 1944, Onishi began organizing kamikazes on a local and spontaneous basis. Then came the Palau and Philippines invasions. On October 15, Rear Admiral Masafumi Arima tried to crash-dive the American carrier Franklin. He was shot down by Navy fighters, but the Japanese High Command told the nation he had succeeded in hitting the carrier, and had thus “lit the fuse of the ardent wishes of his men.” The first organized attack of the kamikaze came on October 25 at the start of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Suicide bombers struck blows savage enough to startle the Americans and make them aware of a new weapon in the field against them, but not enough to stun them. Too many kamikaze missed their targets and were lost, too many were shot down. Of 650 kamikaze sent out in the Philippines, about a quarter of them scored hits—but mainly on small ships. The High Command, still writing reports in rose-colored ink, still keeping the national mind carefully empty of news of failure, announced hits of almost 100 per cent. The High Command did not believe this, of course. The High Command guessed privately at hits ranging from 12 to 50 per cent, but the High Command also assumed that nothing but battleships and carriers had been hit.

So the kamikaze was born in a storm of enthusiasm and anticipated glory. A huge kamikaze corps was organized in the homeland under Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki. By January of 1945 they were a part of Japanese aerial strategy, if not the dominant part. So many suiciders would be ordered out for an operation, to be joined by so many fighters and bombers. Often the duty of the fighters would only be to protect these six-plane units of suiciders; the duty of the bombers would be to guide them to the targets.

They needed to be guided because they were often a combination of old, stripped-down aircraft and young, hopped-up flyers. Admiral Ugaki did not use his best planes or his best pilots, as Admiral Onishi had in the Philippines. Ugaki considered this wasteful. He considered that the spiritual power of “the glorious, incomparable young eagles” would compensate for their own lack of flying skill as well as the missing material power of obsolete aircraft from which even the instruments had been removed. To this end, as well as to inspire the nation, the kamikaze were hailed as saviors. They were wined, dined, photographed and fondled. Many of them attended their own funerals before taking off, or climbed into the cockpit with legs made wobbly by the exuberance of farewell feasts. It did not seem to occur to the Japanese that the saki drunk at such inspiring leave-takings might influence the purpose, as well as the aim, of the kamikaze. It did not, because the kamikaze had so thoroughly captivated them. It was this very deep, this very real faith in the kamikaze’s second coming which dictated how the battle on Okinawa would be fought.