[Rhodes22-list] History: Sixty Years Ago Today

brad haslett flybrad at yahoo.com
Sat Feb 19 16:19:03 EST 2005


Note: If you get the chance to visit the WWII monument
in DC I highly recommend it.  I was there on a sunny
day and 80% of the visitors were there to fill a
square on their tourist list.  For those who study
that period of history or had parents who served, it
is a bit more of an emotional experience.  Brad

_____________________________________________________


Iwo Jima
The famous battle offers lessons for us 60 years
later.

BY ARTHUR HERMAN
Saturday, February 19, 2005 12:01 a.m.

Sixty years ago today, more than 110,000 Americans and
880 ships began their assault on a small volcanic
island in the Pacific, in the climactic battle of the
last year of World War II. For the next 36 days Iwo
Jima would become the most populous 7 1/2 square miles
on the planet, as U.S. Marines and Japanese soldiers
fought a battle that would test American resolve even
more than D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge had, and
that still symbolizes a free society's willingness to
make the sacrifice necessary to prevail over evil--a
sacrifice as relevant today as it was 60 years ago.
The attack on Iwo Jima capped a two-year
island-hopping campaign that was as controversial with
politicians and the press as any Rumsfeld strategy.
Each amphibious assault had been bloodier than the
last: at Tarawa, where 3,000 ill-prepared Marines fell
taking an island of just three square miles; at
Saipan, where Army troops performed so poorly two of
their generals had to be fired; and Peleliu, where it
took 10 weeks of fighting in 115-degree heat to root
out the last Japanese defenders, at the cost of 6,000
soldiers and Marines.

Iwo Jima would be the first island of the Japanese
homeland to be attacked. The Japanese had put in miles
of tunnels and bunkers, with 361 artillery pieces, 65
heavy mortars, 33 large naval guns, and 21,000
defenders determined to fight to the death. Their
motto was, "kill 10 of the enemy before dying."
American commanders expected 40% casualties on the
first assault. "We have taken such losses before,"
remarked the Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Holland M. Smith,
"and if we have to, we can do it again." 




Even before the attack, the Navy's bombardment of Iwo
Jima cost more ships and men than it lost on D-Day,
without making a significant dent in the Japanese
defenses. Then, beginning at 9 a.m. on the 19th,
Marines loaded down with 70 to 100 pounds of equipment
each hit the beach, and immediately sank into the
thick volcanic ash. They found themselves on a barren
moonscape stripped of any cover or vegetation, where
Japanese artillery could pound them with unrelenting
fury. Scores of wounded Marines helplessly waiting to
be evacuated off the beach were killed "with the
greatest possible violence," as veteran war reporter
Robert Sherrod put it. Shells tore bodies in half and
scattered arms and legs in all directions, while so
much underground steam rose from the churned up soil
the survivors broke up C-ration crates to sit on in
order to keep from being scalded. Some 2,300 Marines
were killed or wounded in the first 18 hours. It was,
Sherrod said, "a nightmare in hell."
And overlooking it all, rising 556 feet above the
carnage, stood Mount Suribachi, where the Japanese
could direct their fire along the entire beach. Taking
Suribachi became the key to victory. It took four days
of bloody fighting to reach the summit, and when
Marines did, they planted an American flag. When it
was replaced with a larger one, photographer Joe
Rosenthal recorded the scene--the most famous
photograph of World War II and the most enduring
symbol of a modern democracy at war.

Yet, in the end, a symbol of what? Certainly not
victory. The capture of Suribachi only marked the
beginning of the battle for Iwo Jima, which dragged on
for another month and cost nearly 26,000 men--all for
an island whose future as a major air base never
materialized. Forty men were in the platoon which
raised the flag on Suribachi. Only four would survive
the battle unhurt. Their company, E Company, Second
Battalion, 28th Regiment, Fifth Marine Division, would
suffer 75% casualties. Of the seven officers who led
it into battle, only one was left when it was over.

But the Marines pushed on. Over the next agonizing
weeks, they took the rest of the island yard by yard,
bunker by bunker, cave by cave. They fought through
places with names like "Bloody Gorge" and "The Meat
Grinder." They learned to take no prisoners in
fighting a skilled and fanatical enemy who gave no
quarter and expected none. Twenty out of every 21
Japanese defenders would die where they stood. One in
three Marines on Iwo Jima would either be killed or
wounded, including 19 of 24 battalion commanders.
Twenty-seven Marines and naval medical corpsmen would
win Medals of Honor--more than in any other battle in
history--and 13 of them posthumously. As Admiral
Chester W. Nimitz, commander in chief of the U.S.
Pacific Command, said, "Among the Americans who served
on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue."





Yet even this valor and sacrifice is not the full
story of what Iwo Jima means, or what Rosenthal's
immortal photograph truly symbolizes. The lesson of
Iwo Jima is in fact an ancient one, going back to
Machiavelli: that sometimes free societies must be as
tough and unrelenting as their enemies. Totalitarians
test their opponents by generating extreme conditions
of brutality and violence; in those conditions--in the
streets and beheadings of Fallujah or on the beach and
in the bunkers of Iwo Jima--they believe weak
democratic nerves will crack. This in turn
demonstrates their moral superiority: that by giving
up their own decency and humanity they have become
stronger than those who have not.
Free societies can afford only one response. There
were no complicated legal issues or questions of
"moral equivalence" on Iwo Jima: It was kill or be
killed. That remains the nature of war even for
democratic societies. The real question is, who
outlasts whom. In 1945 on Iwo Jima, it was the
Americans, as the monument at Arlington Cemetery,
based on Rosenthal's photograph, proudly attests. In
the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s, it
was the totalitarians--with terrible consequences.

Today, some in this country think the totalitarians
may still win in Iraq and elsewhere. A few even hope
so. Only one thing is certain: As long as Americans
cherish the memory of those who served at Iwo Jima,
and grasp the crucial lesson they offer all free
societies, the totalitarians will never win.

Mr. Herman, a historian, is the author, most recently,
of "To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the
Modern World" (HarperCollins, 2004). 





		
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