Marine Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith said, “This is the toughest fight in the 169 years of our Corps,” during the Battle of Iwo Jima. His assessment still stands a half-century later.
Iwo Jima represents a paradox in U.S. naval history. The battle resulted in total victory, acquisition of strategic airfields virtually on Japan’s doorstep, and an enduring symbolic legacy. Yet it also was the bloodiest battle in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps, the only major Pacific assault where the landing force sustained higher casualties than they inflicted on the Japanese garrison. What made “Sulfur Island” such a tough nut to crack?
The Americans suspected the Japanese had spent years preparing Iwo’s intricate, mutually supporting defenses. They would be surprised to learn later that the fortifications they encountered in February 1945 had resulted largely from a crash construction program completed barely a week before the invasion. As late as February 1944 only 1,500 troops occupied the unfortified site. It took the U.S. Central Pacific drive to alert Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) to Iwo Jima’s strategic vulnerability. And it would take a strong-willed, imaginative island commander to turn it into the most formidable fortress in the Pacific— in a hurry.
Faced with the loss of the Marshall Islands, the IGHQ created the 31st Army under Lieutenant General Eiryo Obata to defend the Marianas, eastern Carolines, and Bonins (Iwo Jima, technically in the Volcano Islands, was generally lumped into “The Bonins” by both antagonists). Backwater Iwo Jima was the least of Obata’s worries, but he did manage one visit on 6 April 1944- Obata directed the Iwo garrison to prepare a perimeter defense at the water’s edge. This was the standard Japanese doctrine for island defense: destroy the enemy in the water; overwhelm any penetration with a massive counterattack.
Aware that General Obata’s geographic responsibilities were unrealistic, the IGHQ in late May established a separate command to cover the various islands south and east of the homelands, including those within the administrative prefecture of Tokyo, such as Marcus and Iwo Jima. Army garrison forces would be consolidated under a newly established 109th Division. Navy forces, as usual, would be expected “to cooperate.”
Then came the U.S. invasion of the Marianas and naval victory in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. General Obata died ingloriously; the 31st Army was practically annihilated. Possession of airfields in the Marianas by U.S. forces alarmed Japanese strategists, who realized their homeland was now within range of U.S. B-29 bombers. A tiny dot on the map about halfway between Saipan and Tokyo caught their eye immediately: Iwo Jima. Quick reference to the order of battle list brought some reassurance. Command of the 109th Division had just been assigned to an officer virtually unknown to U.S. commanders but favored by the Emperor and highly regarded by the General Staff, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi.
Kuribayashi may have been a stranger in mid-1944, but by the following March certain U.S. Marine riflemen were calling him “the best damned general on this stinking island.” With the approval of the Emperor, the 31-year veteran cavalry officer had taken command of the Imperial Guard Division in Tokyo. From this post in late May 1944 Prime Minister Hideki Tojo selected him to command the suddenly vital island called Iwo Jima.
Kuribayashi’s military record provides few clues as to what made him such a formidable commander at Iwo Jima. His experience commanding men in combat was an obvious asset, but this pales against the combat record of his contemporaries, who fought tougher battles in Malaya, Burma, or New Guinea. He was an unabashed cavalryman, refusing to “transition” into tanks and armored warfare. He was therefore of diminishing tactical value to his service. As a colonel assigned to the Ministry of the Army in 1937, for example, he served not in the more prestigious war plans or mobilization sections but rather as head of equestrian affairs in the logistics branch.
Given Kuribayashi’s comparatively undistinguished record, it is small wonder that U.S. intelligence analysts failed to predict his forthcoming brilliance at Iwo Jima. Nearly 100 other generals in the Imperial Japanese Army at the time had more impressive combat experience or technical expertise. The exigencies of Iwo Jima somehow caused a metamorphosis for Kuribayashi. In his final command he proved to be tough, coolheaded, pragmatic, innovative, and fearless—a warrior in the best definition of any nation’s army. According to Major Mitsuaki Hara, his only surviving battalion commander, Kuribayashi was “a professional soldier, sternly disciplined, very strict with his subordinates,” who was disliked by the troops “for these very attributes.” Holland Smith stated the U.S. post-battle assessment best: “Of all our adversaries in the Pacific, Kuribayashi was the most redoubtable.”
General Kuribayashi came to Iwo Jima during the second week of June 1944, and at once his heart sank. The small garrison was ill-prepared for war. It was a hodgepodge of squabbling units at each other’s throats. Several disasters occurred in short order. On 15 and 24 June, Rear Admiral Joseph J. (“Jocko”) Clark’s fast carrier task group struck Iwo hard, sweeping away aircraft piloted by inexperienced Japanese airmen and bombing the island with impunity. Then during 4-5 July U.S. battleships and cruisers bombarded the island at leisure. Recorded one member of the Japanese garrison: “For two days we cowered like rats, trying to dig ourselves deeper into the acrid volcanic dust and ash of Iwo Jima. Never have I felt so helpless, so puny.”
Alarmed by Iwo’s abject vulnerability, the new island commander realized his most urgent need was time to train his troops and prepare an integrated defense. Relief came from an unexpected quarter. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff opted to tackle the Palaus after the Marianas, thereby giving the Japanese a half-year grace period with which to fortify Iwo Jima. Kuribayashi took full advantage of this lull. “The Americans will surely invade this Iwo Jima en route to the mainland of Japan,” Kuribayashi wrote his wife shortly after arriving on the island, “and the time of their assault will be very soon.”
Kuribayashi also benefited from several new arrivals that summer. With the fall of Saipan, IGHQ diverted the veteran 145th Infantry Regiment, earmarked to reinforce the Marianas, to Iwo Jima for duty. This was a windfall. Although numbering only 2,700 troops, the ranks of the 145th were filled with men from Kagoshima in Kyushu, renowned fighters commanded by Colonel Masuo Ikeda. Kuribayashi would build his defense with this regiment as its core; he would die with Ikeda at his side. In early August, Rear Admiral Toshinosuke Ichimaru reported to Iwo for duty, a legendary naval aviator, long crippled, hungry for a fight. The next week Major General Joichiro Sanada, Operations Chief of the Army General Staff, visited the island. Like Kuribayashi, he was appalled at the lack of combat readiness he saw. As he recorded in his diary, “Kuribayashi warns that if an American task force of the size of the July 4th fleet returns with a division and a half of troops he could sustain the defense for at best a week to ten days.” Sanada had great influence in Tokyo. Soon, more troops, weapons, and ammo began flowing to Iwo Jima.
Kuribayashi took time to evaluate past Japanese efforts to withstand enemy advances against island outposts. Here his pragmatism served him well. He discounted the myths of the invincibility of the Combined Fleet and the naval air arm; those days were past. Also foolhardy, he concluded, was clinging to the myth that U.S. infantry had no stomach for close combat. The U.S. Marines had overwhelmed a very good and heavily fortified Special Naval Landing Force at Tarawa in three days. The U.S. forces seemed capable of breaching the traditional Japanese linear defenses at will. Beachfront fortifications became easy targets for battleships. Moreover, the massive, predictable banzai attacks, in which all hands rose up to repel the invaders in hand-to-hand fighting, had all failed abysmally. As Kuribayashi saw it, these attacks were of more benefit to the invaders than the defenders, little more than sacrificial slaughter without military value.
As Kuribayashi studied the topography of the Volcano and Bonin islands, he concluded that Iwo Jima was the only one with the potential for a bomber strip. This would inevitably attract a U.S. attack. Kuribayashi saw the paradox. Iwo Jima served only a limited tactical advantage to the Japanese as an early warning site and fighter-interceptor base. On the larger scale, the island was a strategic liability to the Japanese. Seizure of Iwo by U.S. forces would be catastrophic to the Japanese war effort, bringing the home islands within range of medium bombers and fighter escorts to augment the B-29s. Sensing this, Kuribayashi and several of his staff officers spent weeks determining whether the Japanese would be better off simply blowing up the island—or at least sinking the central plateau into the sea. Demolition experts said it could not be done.
Realizing his only recourse would be to defend the island to the death, Kuribayashi turned again to his study of tactical options. He knew he could not count on the fleet or any substantial air force to intervene decisively. When a staff officer returned from a top-level meeting with the commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet on the subject of reinforcement and counter-landing plans for the islands, Kuribayashi waved him off. “It’s no use,” he said.
Kuribayashi instead examined recent examples of a different defensive policy employed with some success by Japanese commanders defending Biak, Peleliu, Angaur, and Luzon. In each case the Japanese mounted only minimal resistance at the point of landing but established interior positions in depth. While the U.S. forces at Peleliu had scoffed at these tactics as “the cornered rat defense,” their ultimate victory had come only at a very high cost in casualties and after an unexpectedly protracted campaign. Kuribayashi concluded that this was the best he could expect to accomplish: fortify the interior of the island so expertly that the U.S. forces would take exorbitant casualties and perhaps lose heart. If all else failed, a prolonged and lethal defense of Iwo Jima might give the American public second thoughts about invading Japan itself.
General Kuribayashi then announced his decisions. First, he would establish headquarters of his 109th division on Iwo Jima, not on the larger, safer, more comfortable island of Chichi Jima. Second, he ordered the evacuation of all civilians from the island, including the “comfort girls.” Third, he ordered all facilities to be moved underground. Finally, and most controversial of all, he stated his plan to concede the amphibious landing and instead concentrate his defenses in depth amid the broken terrain of the central and northern highlands. Further, he forbade any large- scale banzai attacks. Only small units would execute counterattacks, and for limited tactical objectives. He would make maximum use of the night, sending out “prowling wolves,” small groups of marauders to gather intelligence, destroy enemy crew-served weapons, or kill sentries.
To many of Kuribayashi’s senior officers—and to many members of the IGHQ—this was blatant heresy. The warrior ethic embedded in the officer ranks for centuries viewed the defensive with disdain, at best a temporary situation pending a glorious, all-out counterattack. Deliberately to forfeit a defense at the point of attack and an immediate counterattack in favor of an interior defense and a battle of attrition was anathema to these officers.
Navy Captain Tsunezo Wachi, whom Kuribayashi relieved as island commander in June, remained on Iwo for several more months, transferring back to Tokyo before the battle. In 1964 he told historian Fred Saito the following:
Arguments raged in July, August, and September. Arguments were not confined to Iwo command alone, but taken to Tokyo’s Army and Navy staffs. In August Tokyo asked Nazi Germany General Staffs opinion. Germany replied that waterfront repulse was unfeasible under overwhelming U.S. shelling and bombing.
Kuribayashi’s difficulties over this unpopular decision multiplied with the duality in service command lines that continued to fracture Japanese operations. He was clearly senior to Admiral Ichimaru, and the two actually got along very well in comparison to other island garrisons, but Ichimaru felt pressured by some of his own hot-headed officers and the Navy General Staff to argue for beachfront defenses. Against his better judgment Kuribayashi agreed to a compromise. He would permit construction of 135 pillboxes along the obvious landing beaches in the southern part of the island. The project took three months; the U.S. forces would overrun all of them in the battle’s first three hours.
Kuribayashi countenanced no more opposition, especially within the Army ranks. In December he relieved 18 senior officers, including his own chief of staff and the commanding general of the 2d Independent Mixed Brigade, his largest combat component. Major General Sadusue Senda took over the 2d Brigade; Colonel Tadashi Takaishi became chief of staff.
General Sanada continued to ramrod support for Kuribayashi from the Army General Staff. Surprisingly, Kuribayashi did not ask for more troops. The arrival of the 26th Tank Regiment commanded by the colorful Baron Takeichi Nishi, added to Ikeda’s troops, gave Kuribayashi a solid core of veterans. Many of the newly formed battalions in the 2d Independent Mixed Brigade contained little more than raw recruits, more liabilities than assets. Kuribayashi did not want to saturate his defenses. Nor did he want to overwhelm the island’s meager water supplies. He had the guns and the shooters; he needed fortification specialists. Sanada quickly provided mining engineers, quarry experts, fortress units, and labor battalions. The island’s volcanic ash lent itself to efficient cement mix, and its soft interior rock yielded to thousands of picks and spades.
The island commander divided his forces into three shifts: one to dig, one to stand watch, one to train. Kuribayashi kept his training simple: antitank defenses, night infiltrations, marksmanship. Each man’s defensive position was to be his grave, his military shrine. The men took it upon themselves to improve these positions daily. Knowing how isolated the battlefield would quickly become, the general posted “Courageous Battle Vows” in each bunker. If each man took ten enemy lives for his own, he told them, Japan would win a glorious victory.
The troops needed a morale boost, because by this time the U.S. 7th Air Force was making daily bombing runs over the island. Each pass resulted in updated aerial photographs. The U.S. air crews could tell something unusual was happening on Iwo. Photo analysts detected more fortifications and strongpoints but saw less and less evidence of the garrison. Kuribayashi’s men had become moles.
Military planners in the United States did not entirely underestimate the difficulties that assaulting Iwo Jima presented. The island’s hydrography and topography obviously favored the defenders, and the evidence of increased fortifications was alarming enough to cause the V Amphibious Corps to embark the 3d Marine Division, the corps reserve, instead of leaving them on call in Guam as originally planned. But senior commanders expected another Saipan, another General Obata. They anticipated a vigorous defense along the perimeter, followed by a massive banzai attack the first night. Evidently, they discounted a 5 January 1945 intelligence report that forecast a defense organized in depth along the lines of Peleliu, a radical change from expectations.
By 11 February Kuribayashi had accomplished most of his fortification projects and training programs. The compromise diversion of effort to build beachfront strongpoints for the Navy had prevented the general from extending the underground tunnel system from the northern plateau to Mount Suribachi in the south, but in most respects the island stood ready for the coming invasion.
In the 145th Infantry Regiment, the 26th Tank Regiment, and some of the artillery units, Kuribayashi had first- rate troops, a credit to any armed force. In Colonel Chosaku Kaido, commanding the composite artillery brigade, Kuribayashi had one of the finest gunners in the Empire. The island fairly bristled with 268 guns and mortars of 75-mm and larger, plus 69 antitank weapons and 200 dual-purpose heavy machine guns of 20-mm and larger. Kuribayashi, Ikeda, and Kaido had walked over the potential battlefield in its entirety several times, noting likely sites for U.S. command posts and observation points. Each of these Kaido skillfully covered with pre-registered indirect fire. In the battle to come, this would account for the high incidence of casualties among U.S. infantry battalion commanders.
On the negative side, the 109th Division was hardly one of the Empire’s best. It could never expect to match in open combat the task organization, fire power, and unit integrity of any one of the three U.S. Marine Corps divisions steaming toward Iwo. Further, while Kuribayashi had been able to stockpile plenty of food and weapons in advance, he did not have that luxury in terms of artillery, mortar, and rocket ammunition. Only on D-Day would his gunners enjoy unrestricted firing. The very proliferation of types and calibers of major weapons would further complicate ammunition supply and distribution. Some weapons were simply inappropriate. The enormous 320-mm spigot mortars would scare hell out of the Marines, but their 675- pound shells would often prove more hazardous to the handling crews; the launchers had an operating life of only five to six rounds.
Finally, much of this analysis is immaterial in the face of the totality of “battlespace dominance” the U.S. forces would inflict against the target island. Without external intervention, Kuribayashi and his troops had simply prepared an elaborate killing ground for both sides. Time was the only unknown factor, not the eventual outcome.
When Japanese scout planes reported the departure of hundreds of U.S. ships from Ulithi and Saipan on 13 February, the general ordered his men into their final bunkers and moved into his command post in the Motoyama highlands. “I pray for a heroic fight,” he said.
The Japanese general made only one tactical mistake in the ensuing battle. On 17 February (D-2), a sizable U.S. task unit of landing craft, gunboats, and destroyers approached the eastern beaches in broad daylight. Kuribayashi believed it to be the main invasion and authorized his sector commanders to open fire with their masked batteries along the slopes of Suribachi and the Rock Quarry. He had no way of knowing this was simply a covering force to enable the swimmer teams to reconnoiter the beach. Media mention of the newly created “Navy Combat Demolition Teams,” last employed at Tinian under cover of darkness, had been censored. Regardless, the Japanese coast defense batteries concealed along the cliffs opened a hot fire. The duel was dramatic, and when U.S. forces withdrew (the swimmer recon mission accomplished), Kuribayashi thought he had repelled a major invasion and radioed to Tokyo.
But the U.S. invaders had found out the location of the big guns that stood to dominate the beaches on D-Day. For the next day and a half their battleships and cruisers moved in to blast these positions point-blank. A chagrined Kuribayashi then reported:
Although we lost only 95 casualties, the top of Suribachi-yama disappeared by a quarter, all six reinforced concrete pillboxes on southern coast were totally destroyed and eight Navy flat-shooting batteries were destroyed. We also lost four 140-mm guns, four 120-mm guns, three 120-mm AA [antiaircraft] guns, one 80-mm AA gun, one 75-mm field gun, seven 25-mm machine guns, two trench mortars, and two searchlight units.
This was a disastrous loss for the Japanese. While the U.S. Marines suffered 2,400 casualties on D-Day, their beachhead was never in doubt. Radio Tokyo described it as a foothold “the size of the forehead of a cat.” Kuribayashi knew better. By nightfall, 30,000 troops U.S. troops had come ashore, the island had been severed, Suribachi invested, the Imperial Navy’s extensive line of beachfront positions overrun. “The Army listened too much to the complaints of the Navy,” he signaled to the General Staff.
Kuribayashi figured Mount Suribachi was a lost cause but hoped it would hold out for ten days. He assigned 2,000 men under Major Hisahiko Matsushita, who commanded one of the antitank units, to defend its rough slopes and hollow interior. At the last minute, Kuribayashi sent Colonel Kanehiko Atsuji, a superannuated staff officer, to the mountain as an “adviser.” This potentially awkward command relationship solved itself on D+1 when a 5th Marine Division tank gunner fired a 75-mm round into a cave entrance, killing Atsuji instantly. Thereafter, the 28th Marines struggled against Matsushita’s tough defenses around Suribachi’s lower slopes, losing 400 men but overrunning the mountain and raising the U.S. flag on the summit on D+3.
Kuribayashi rued the abrupt loss of the highest peak on the island, but he knew the U.S. force had yet to encounter his real defensive masterpiece in the central highlands. That battle commenced directly with three Marine divisions attacking abreast. Each paid dearly for every yard, every redoubt. As the senior V Amphibious Corps surgeon reported, the corps averaged 1,000 casualties a day during the first three weeks of the landing. After D-Day, most of these came at the hands of Kuribayashi’s disciplined gunners in the north, obediently manning their “gravesites” to the bitter end. Their marksmanship, with weapons ranging from horizontally-fired antiaircraft guns to 7.7-mm rifles, was superb. Throughout this period the Marines rarely saw a live Japanese soldier in the daytime.
But despite their “courageous battle vows,” Kuribayashi’s troops failed to exact the ten-to-one kill ratio sought by the commander. His men died by the hundreds, many sealed up in caves and tunnels, or burned alive by flamethrowing tanks. They had not anticipated the proficiency of U.S. troops in combined arms, small unit leadership, individual courage, or dogged resilience. And nothing had prepared them for the intensity of U.S. fire power, delivered day after day from ships, planes, artillery pieces, and rocket trucks. “We need to reconsider the power of bombardment from ships,” he telegraphed the Chief of the General Staff. “The violence of the enemy’s bombardments are far beyond description. . . . The power of the U.S. warships and aircraft makes every landing operation possible to whatever beachhead they like.”
The Japanese Navy made no serious effort to intervene at Iwo Jima. A handful of submarines, each transporting a kaiten suicide midget sub, failed to penetrate the antisubmarine warfare screen around the amphibious task force. One wave of 50 kamikaze planes attacked the U.S. task force the night of 22 February, sinking the escort carrier Bismarck Sea (CVE-95) and heavily damaging the fleet carrier Saratoga (CV-3). More of this effort might have influenced the battle ashore, but the great waves of kamikazes, did not appear again until the Okinawa campaign later that spring. Japanese attempts at aerial resupply proved ludicrous. According to Navy Chief Petty Officer Kei Kanai, a plane flew over Japanese positions in the north one night and dropped packages—of bamboo spears.
By 4 March, the end of the second week of fighting ashore, U.S. Marines had suffered 13,000 casualties, and the end seemed nowhere in sight. At that point the first crippled B-29 landed on Iwo’s main runway, a great boost to U.S. morale. Morale would have been boosted further had they known that they had pierced the main defensive belt, killed as many Japanese as their own casualty total, and forced Kuribayashi that very day to abandon his forward command post and seek shelter in a cave near Kitano Point, prepared to make his last stand. “Send me air and naval support, and I will hold the island,” he telegraphed Tokyo. “Without these things I cannot hold.”
This was the beginning of the end for the Japanese garrison. On the following day a heavy U.S. bombardment killed Colonel Kaido in his artillery command post at Turkey Knob. That afternoon Kuribayashi at first reported that his troops in the north had repelled all assaults by the 5th Marine Division. Two hours later, very possibly as a result of the 300-yard penetration created by the “U.S. banzai charge” of the survivors of Lieutenant Jack Lummus’s unit [see Mary Hartman’s touching memoir immediately following this account], Kuribayashi amended his report by saying “I am very sorry that I have let the enemy occupy one part of our territory.”
Kuribayashi lost control of most of his surviving subordinate units when he moved north to his cave. In the eastern sector, Major General Senda’s brigade and Captain Samaji Inouye’s naval guard troops had put up a fierce resistance against the 4th Marine Division for weeks. In the absence of Kuribayashi’s direct supervision, Senda and Inouye decided to disobey their commander’s edict against banzai attacks. During the night of 8-9 March, the two officers donned ceremonial head sashes and led some 800 soldiers and sailors against the Marine lines. For a few moments the fighting was hand-to-hand and “glorious,” but these same Marines had withstood larger counterattacks at Saipan and Tinian. The slaughter was terrific. Morning light revealed 200 dead Marines, 800 fallen Japanese. Unrecognizable among the latter were the bodies of Senda and Inouye. Attributed to Kuribayashi was the requiem: “the brave fight of the officers and men is enough to make the gods weep.”
That same morning a patrol from the 3d Marine Division reached the northern coast- Five days later the entire eastern sector fell to the 4th Marine Division. The next day, 17 March, proved equally pivotal. The 5th Marine Division swept over Hill 165, trapping the remnants of Kuribayashi’s forces in what would be called “The Bloody Gorge.” Colonel Ikeda burned his regimental colors. Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz declared victory. Although Marines fighting in the north considered this a rash proclamation, Nimitz was correct in strategic terms. A huge force of B-29s flattened Kobe; 13 shot-up Superforts made emergency landings on I wo Jima. And Kuribayashi bade an emotional farewell to the people of Japan. That evening Prime Minister Kuni-aki Koiso made an unprecedented announcement over Radio Tokyo to a shocked nation: Iwo had fallen.
General Kuribayashi and several hundred survivors held out another nine days, making the 5th Marine Division bleed for every bitter yard in The Gorge. The division commander tried to get Kuribayashi to surrender, praising his fierce fight, asking him to spare his remnants. Imperial General Headquarters announced field promotions: Kuribayashi to General, Ichimaru to Vice Admiral, Ikeda to Major General. There was no response. The promotions all were posthumous.
Kuribayashi’s last known message came on 21 March, saying “We have not eaten nor drank for five days but our fighting spirit is still running high. We are going to fight bravely till the end.” His body was never identified. Accounts of his death vary widely. Some survivors claim he committed hari-kari in his cave the night of the 25th. Others claim he participated in the final “all-out-attack” against the U.S. bivouac at Airfield Number 2 during the predawn of 26 March, the last day of the battle. The accounts in Senshi Sosho indicate the general was wounded in this attack and for a while allowed himself to be carried into action on the back of his sergeant major. At length he asked to be taken from the field. He shot himself, and his staff buried him in a shell hole near the outcropping the Japanese called Osakayama (Hill 362-A to the Marines). This is the stuff of legend; no survivor has yet claimed to have witnessed the commander’s actual death. The details are not particularly germane. Kuribayashi fought a good fight and died. So did 22,000 other Japanese and 6,000 U.S. troops. The Americans had gained operational airfields on Japanese territory within three hours’ flying time of Tokyo.
In the end, Kuribayashi’s imaginative and radical defensive plans achieved nothing more than attrition of three Marine divisions and prolonging the campaign for 36 brutal days. Notwithstanding his personal valor, his achievements proved meaningless in the larger strategic sense. Earlier in the war a U.S. amphibious task force tethered to an island for five weeks would have been cut to pieces by counterattacking naval, air, and submarine forces. At Iwo Jima, with one exception, the supporting U.S. fleet remained essentially unmolested. In the campaign, the U.S. forces immediately neutralized Iwo’s limited tactical advantage to the Japanese and within two weeks turned the island to their own strategic benefit, even while the fighting still raged. Nor did Kuribayashi’s dearly-bought 36 days affect the subsequent Okinawa campaign. Operation Iceberg kicked off on schedule on 1 April using many of the same ships and aircraft first employed at Iwo.
Kuribayashi’s principal contribution to the conduct of the remainder of the Pacific War was the portent he provided to the world of what to expect should the Japanese home islands be invaded: savage, no-quarter fighting on a massive, protracted scale. On the other hand, the Japanese high command was sobered by Iwo Jima’s inexorable loss. The U.S. force had seized one of the most heavily defended islands in the history of warfare, conquered it in spite of the bravery and ingenuity of Kuribayashi and his men, and did this in the face of daunting losses. The Americans, it was quite clear, had the ways and means—and will—to inflict their “storm landings” against any defended shore. By 8 March Prime Minister Kosio announced on Radio Tokyo that a U.S. invasion of the Japanese homeland was imminent.