Battle of Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima is a small volcanic island in the Volcano Islands of the western Pacific, on the bombing route between the Mariana Islands and Japan. Between 19 February and 26 March 1945, United States Marines fought there against a deeply entrenched Japanese garrison in a 36-day assault that cost more than 26,000 American casualties. It was the only major Marine battle in the Pacific in which total American casualties exceeded those of the Japanese, and a photograph of a flag raised on its summit became one of the best-known images of the war.

By late 1944 American B-29 bombers based in the Marianas were raiding Japan. Iwo Jima served as an early-warning station and as a base for fighters that intercepted the bombers. The United States wanted its airfields to remove that threat, to give escort fighters a base and to offer damaged bombers somewhere to land. American intelligence expected the island to fall within a week. The operation was codenamed Detachment.

Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who took command in June 1944, knew he could not win. Instead he aimed to make the Americans pay so heavily that they might think again about invading Japan. Breaking with usual Japanese practice, he did not try to stop the landing on the beaches but built a defence in depth: bunkers, hidden artillery and some 18 kilometres of tunnels connecting positions across the island. His roughly 21,000 men were ordered to avoid wasteful mass charges. Months of American air raids and a three-day naval bombardment before the landing had only a limited effect on these underground works.

The first Marines came ashore on the south-east beaches at 08:59 on 19 February 1945. Loose volcanic ash bogged down men and vehicles, and after letting the beaches fill up for about an hour the Japanese opened fire with machine guns, mortars and artillery. Over the following days the Marines isolated Mount Suribachi, the 169-metre volcano at the southern tip. On 23 February a patrol reached the summit and raised a small flag. Later that day a larger flag replaced it, and the Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the moment. His picture won the Pulitzer Prize and later inspired the Marine Corps War Memorial near Arlington.

The hardest fighting came in the rocky north, where Japanese troops emerged from tunnels to reoccupy positions the Marines thought they had cleared. Fighting around the airfields and strongpoints such as Hill 382 bogged down, and American casualties mounted rapidly. A kamikaze attack on 21 February sank the escort carrier Bismarck Sea. The island was declared secure on 16 March, but fighting continued until a final Japanese attack on the night of 25 March. Two Japanese holdouts surrendered only in January 1949.

Figures for the main battle list 6,821 Americans dead and about 19,200 wounded. Of the roughly 21,000 Japanese defenders, most were killed; only 216 were taken prisoner during the main fighting, with several hundred more captured afterwards. The value of the island was disputed even at the time: a retired US chief of naval operations publicly questioned the price paid. Its airfields did host escort fighters and emergency landings by B-29s.

Lessons from Iwo Jima shaped American preparations for the Battle of Okinawa weeks later and for the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands, which in the end never took place.

Our 1938 map shows the Pacific islands of the Empire of Japan, and our 1945 map shows the region at the end of World War II.