Fought in February and March 1945, the Battle of Iwo Jima remains a revered moment in the history of World War II and the story of Allied victory over Japan. For 36 days, U.S. Marines fought their way across eight square miles of black sand against unwavering enemy resistance. Arguably, the island presented American forces with the most formidable defensive scheme of the entire Pacific war. For the first and only time in the conflict, U.S. Marines suffered a higher total casualty count than their Japanese counterparts. As Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz reflected after the victory, it took “uncommon valor” to seize the hardened island.1
And yet, despite the battle’s acclaim, popular memory fails to capture the full story of American triumph on Iwo Jima. Postwar films and books transformed Nimitz’s genuine reflection into a dominant narrative that ignored the complexity of the assault and the tactical cooperation that delivered Allied victory. In the 1949 classic film Sands of Iwo Jima, John Wayne advanced the simplistic and triumphant tale even further: Heroic Marines armed with élan and M1 Garands overwhelmed their Japanese opponents. The Marine rifle squad—personified by Wayne’s character, Sergeant John M. Stryker—secured Iwo Jima with courage and grit. Books, too, advanced this well-meaning but incomplete account. In Richard Newcomb’s Iwo Jima (1965), Richard Wheeler’s Iwo (1980), and Joseph Alexander’s Storm Landings (1997), infantrymen dominate the tale, and martial valor wins the day.2 Even HBO’s more recent 2010 series The Pacific struggled to revise the conventional narrative.
Determined infantrymen were essential to victory, and their story demands preservation. But this incomplete account betrays the contributions of a much broader American triphibious (land, sea, and air) force that first neutralized and then secured Iwo Jima in 1945. Despite “the Duke’s” splendid on-screen performance, Sergeant Stryker’s squad did not secure victory by itself. On D-Day alone, the U.S. naval task force delivered more than 30,000 5-inch shells, 1,500 14-inch shells, and 1,900 16-inch shells in support of the Marines ashore. As the landing force gained a foothold, U.S. air liaison parties directed the release of 100- and 1,000-pound bombs from above.3 In reality, the Marines landed and then advanced behind a symphony of destructive firepower. Victory at Iwo Jima revealed not only the courage and resolve of frontline troops, but it also gave testament to the specialized skills and tactical synergy of U.S. field artillery, naval gunfire, and air support.
Preparing for Iwo Jima
For both contemporary observers and postwar historians, the summer of 1944 settled the outcome of the Pacific war. With the Marianas in hand, Allied victory could no longer be questioned. The United States operated at an overpowering industrial and operational stride, while Japan’s capacity to make war slipped deeper and deeper beneath the waves of the vast Pacific. At the June Battle of the Philippine Sea alone, Japan lost three carriers and more than 400 aircraft.4 Triumph, in time, would belong to the Americans.
For Allied and Axis forces, however, certainty over the war’s outcome provided no relief. Japan remained intransigent, hoping against reason to achieve a conditional peace. And if their enemy would not oblige, the Americans had few options. To sustain their offensive, support B-29 bombing missions over Tokyo, and prepare for the likelihood of a Home Islands invasion, the Allies determined to seize the Japanese outpost at Iwo Jima in the early months of 1945. The Pacific bloodletting would continue.
Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, hand-selected by Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, was to lead the spirited and suicidal defense at Iwo Jima. For months, Kuribayashi constructed an elaborate defense-in-depth across the inhospitable island. With 23,000 troops, Kuribayashi manned 642 concrete pillboxes and blockhouses, 120 large naval guns, 300 antiaircraft guns, and 130 howitzers. The Japanese stockpiled 22 million rounds of small-caliber ammunition and buried the general’s command post 75 feet beneath the island’s surface.5 War is destructive, of course, but Kuribayashi’s backdrop seemed more suggestive of an Armageddon than a purposeful military engagement.
Impressive as his physical defenses were, Kuribayashi did not stop at material preparation. The general actively prepared his men for the moral struggle that he envisioned, fanning the heightened flames of Japanese zeal and fidelity. He encouraged “bodily attacks on enemy tanks” and drilled his men in rhetorical pledges emphasizing the Bushido code. Resolved to bleed his attackers white, Kuribayashi directed each defender to take ten American lives before perishing.6
Japanese advantages were many, but the Americans intended to level the playing field with mass, both in troops and in firepower. Major General Harry Schmidt’s landing force—the V Amphibious Corps—comprised 71,000 Marines and would enjoy the support of 16 carriers from Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58. Another three battleship divisions, three destroyer divisions, and one cruiser division from Task Force 54 stood in support. With 111,308 total men and 495 ships, the Americans were committed to a full triphibious assault—intent on punishing Iwo Jima from the sand, surf, and sky.7
Offshore Fires
While men of the 3d, 4th, and 5th Marine divisions donned their combat gear in the early hours of 19 February, the V Amphibious Corps prepared for the boldest fire-support coordination effort of the entire war. Precisely 55 minutes before the Marines were scheduled to hit the shore and following an intense preparatory bombardment, U.S. naval guns went cold as 36 fighters, 18 torpedo bombers, and 18 dive bombers struck Japanese positions on and behind the landing beaches. Several aircraft focused their effects on Mount Suribachi, while a fighter-heavy contingent crosscut the shoreline with strafing fire. After the 20-minute air show, warships closed their distances and the naval guns continued the barrage. Steaming as close as 2,000 and—in some cases—even 1,000 yards from Iwo Jima’s black sand, U.S. battleships filled their assigned sectors with “unremitting, close destructive fires.”8
With Marine landing craft closing on the beaches, the Americans dialed their fire-support coordination to new heights. At the insistence of its naval gunfire officer, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Donald Weller, the V Corps had spent weeks refining plans for a “rolling” naval barrage on Iwo Jima. Inspired by a World War I field artillery concept, Weller’s staff would coordinate a mobile “curtain” of naval firepower immediately in front of the landing force. Initially designed to protect European armies in “no man’s land,” the concept seemed equally suited for the vulnerable amphibious transition from ship to shore. In his bold gamble, Weller intended to “wring the last ounce of potential out of the naval gun.”9
As the Marines rode ashore, Weller triggered his dramatic rolling barrage. Airborne observers radioed to their respective warships the progress of the landing force, carefully nudging their curtain of firepower forward in 200-yard increments. While neutralizing enemy positions just beyond the beach, the barrage helped protect the landing of M-4 Sherman tanks and advance elements of the 14th Artillery Regiment. Though it took until dusk for gunners to register their howitzers, the Marines’ capacity for destruction had multiplied swiftly in the opening hours of the attack.10
To control and coordinate the growing mass of fires from sea, sky, and shore, the V Corps surged forward specialized elements of its joint assault signal companies (JASCOs). Formed over more than two years of iterative combat operations across the Central Pacific, the JASCOs assumed responsibility for the ongoing rolling barrage as well as an increasing volume of “on-call” naval fire missions. Bringing relative order to the chaos, the JASCO shore fire-control parties managed incoming requests, ensured responsive fires, and provided invaluable awareness as the Marines fought their way onto Iwo Jima.11
While the JASCOs delivered frontline expertise, the V Corps also matured its command-and-control capabilities to match Kuribayashi’s challenge. Within its command tent, the V Corps integrated senior air, artillery, and naval gunfire representatives responsible for supervising and prioritizing fire missions. These seasoned staff officers maintained the authority to intervene, adjust, and reassign active fire missions based on their collective awareness of the tactical situation and the availability of fire support.12 Informally, the nerve center on Iwo became known as the “supporting arms tent,” a direct predecessor to the Marine Corps’ present fire support coordination center.
Even against these highly evolved coordination units and procedures, Kuribayashi’s troops maintained their discipline. The defenders avoided piecemeal counterattacks and forced the Americans to isolate and clear each individual fighting position. In turn, the Marines pulled their artillery units forward while the JASCOs sustained support overhead and offshore. Underneath the triphibious deluge, infantrymen added bayonets, hand grenades, and flamethrowers. Conditions ranged from vicious to unimaginable. The result led frontline reporter Robert Sherrod—no stranger to the ferocity of war—to describe 21 February as the “greatest concentration of fire I had ever seen.”13
Amid the intensity and horror surrounding them, the Marines celebrated a moment of encouragement on 23 February. Under close fire support from nearby battleships, a patrol of the 28th Regiment fought its way to the summit of Mount Suribachi on the southern tip of the island. From that peak, the Marines raised their American colors over the battlefield below. After replacing their first flag with a larger ensign, photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped the iconic photograph that would come to symbolize Marine courage for decades to come. Unfortunately for the troops ashore, however, the image provided only momentary relief. A photograph could make heroes, encourage war bonds, and solidify organizational stories, but it could not clear the bunkers of Iwo Jima.14
The next few days brought a miserable and monotonous routine of violence. On the 24th, Sherrod narrated the near-daily script of events: “At 0800 our heavy naval barrage signaled the beginning of a new offensive against the hard-to-crack center of the Jap line. The battleships joined the destroyers and cruisers, the 105’s and 155’s [howitzers] . . . and the infantry mortars.” Soon, planes appeared, “dropping bombs, strafing Jap positions, and firing their sizzling rockets.” The combined destructive power resulted in “a haze of black smoke, billowing topsoil, and flying debris” that crept its way across the island. “On Iwo,” wrote Sherrod, “we really had the power.”15
No one observed this American power like the Japanese troops who fought so tenaciously to resist it. Enduring blitz after blitz from U.S. warships, aircraft, tanks, and artillery, Lieutenant Satoru Ōmagari lived the carnage firsthand. “Men didn’t just die on Iwo Jima,” he remembered, “they were ripped apart, torn to shreds and scattered.”16 In many ways, the scene was a crescendo to the Pacific war itself. It provided a somber testament to the proficiency of each force: for the United States, the mastery of assaulting a defended island, and for the Japanese, the near perfection of resisting such an attack. The clash produced, at Iwo Jima, “annihilation of the highest order.”17
Bombs Away
As if to match Donald Weller’s ambitious naval gunfire barrage, U.S. air coordinators and air liaison teams introduced their own revolutionary techniques on Iwo Jima. Driven by an equally daring Marine officer, Colonel Vernon Megee, the V Corps organized an experimental team to establish frontline aviation control for all close support missions on the island—from Helldivers to Corsairs. In previous campaigns, all such missions had fallen under the strict control of shipboard Navy command centers.18 Although air liaison parties previously joined the landing force in its assault ashore, these small teams carried limited responsibility: advising infantry units on the use of air power and managing requests for aviation support. The authority to direct aircraft around the battlefield remained afloat with the Navy.
On Iwo Jima, Megee meant to turn this arrangement on its head. Convinced that responsive and agile aviation support required a direct line between ground commanders and aviators, he submitted the concept of a landing force air support control unit (LFASCU). Through frontline control and coordination, Megee promised a more effective and efficient application of air power and a greater precision of fires. If Megee’s Marine-led teams could govern their own air support on the beach, they could provide more integrated fires for the landing force. Control authority, Megee argued, could not reside “out on some ship.”19
On the morning of 1 March, Megee’s men assumed formal authority for the airspace over Iwo Jima, making the colonel’s vision a reality. As they directed close air support, combat air patrol, and air observation missions, the LFASCU officers introduced minimum strike altitudes according to the tactical circumstances ashore. They set clear deconfliction guidelines for missions in which ground-based mortar, artillery, and rocket units were firing within 2,500 yards of close air support missions, and—to protect U.S. aviators—they designed a graduated series of artificial “ceilings” for all land-based fires. When supervising the most difficult air-ground coordination, LFASCU officers could order all ground artillery units and naval gunfire ships to cease fire while pilots executed bold, low-altitude attacks against entrenched Japanese positions.20 Together, these measures provided Megee’s LFASCU with a variety of precise control measures that optimized both the efficiency and the synergy of U.S. triphibious firepower at Iwo Jima.
As American air controllers orchestrated the “terrific firepower of the air and sea arms” in the early days of March, the V Amphibious Corps ground its way forward across Kuribayashi’s island fortress.21 Each day seemed to replay the same dreadful nightmare: intense naval and aerial barrages followed by flamethrower assaults and hand-to-hand combat. In a single 30-minute attack, one infantry company expended more than 400 hand grenades. In another case, Marine tankers used more than 1,000 gallons of flamethrower fuel in an attack on a Japanese blockhouse.22 On Iwo Jima, destruction reigned.
For those on the front lines, supporting arms had become indispensable. As Schmidt’s Marine divisions carried out their unenviable bunker-clearing tasks, they continued to leverage naval and aerial fires against persistent targets. In certain cases, the Marines willingly traded risk of friendly fire for continued coverage in the attack. While official doctrine called for a “one-yard-to-one-pound” standoff distance (in which aviators were not to use a 500-pound bomb within 500 yards of a friendly troop), field commanders begged Megee’s LFASCU operators to authorize exceptions. Fighting across the Motoyama Plateau, one battalion commander radioed Megee that his friendly fire “can’t hurt us any worse than we’re being hurt” and assured him that if he authorized a nearby attack, “We’ll keep everybody’s head down in the fox holes.”23
In the closing weeks of the battle, triphibious firepower drove the American assault forward. In a single day, Schmidt’s forces fired more than 22,500 rounds of 155-, 105-, and 75-mm ammunition while coordinating another 22,000 naval shells from U.S. ships. Suggestive of the Marines’ dependence on supporting arms, JASCO units directed fire as close as 75 yards from friendly positions.24 Fighting alongside their tanks and amphibian tractors, the Marines’ individual courage and sacrifice added the final—and equally essential—ingredient to U.S. victory. Though localized resistance would continue for another two weeks as isolated Japanese units fought to their dying breath, the Allies announced the island secure on 16 March. After a month of grisly combat, Iwo Jima belonged to the Americans.
Iwo Jima Secure
The Marines’ assault on Kuribayashi’s citadel was one of the most difficult operations in American military history. The island’s topography itself was troublesome, but much of the Marines’ challenge lay in the general’s exceptional defensive scheme. Stirring complete and zealous obedience from his troops, Kuribayashi maximized the destructive capacity of his detachment. As intended, nearly every one of his 23,000 men gave his life in selfless but suicidal loyalty to his Emperor (just 216 Japanese soldiers surrendered). In exchange, they inflicted some 26,000 casualties on the U.S. force, nearly 7,000 of whom were killed in action.25 In the words of Marine historian Allan Millett, the battle was the very “pinnacle” of the seaborne assault, both “in skill and cost.”26
Victory depended on the heroism and courage of thousands of individual Marines, many of them front-line infantrymen. But in isolation, even their Herculean efforts would have been insufficient. Success demanded close and committed cooperation between the land, sea, and air elements of the U.S. task force. Few could speak to the effectiveness of this coordination like Kuribayashi himself. From an underground bunker late in the battle, the Japanese general dictated: “I am not afraid of the fighting power of only three American Marine Divisions if there are no bombardments from aircraft and warships. . . . This is the only reason why we have to see such a miserable situation.”27
The specialized forces that controlled, coordinated, and calibrated American triphibious firepower at Iwo Jima were essential to the success of the assault. Joint assault signal companies, shore fire control parties, air liaison parties, and the landing force air support control unit—along with the troops they supported—cooperated to deliver an avalanche of fires that made the U.S. seizure possible. Their collective achievement was a testament to the proficiency of the V Amphibious Corps and its wartime evolution, principally its ability to deliver tactical harmony across a dynamic and forbidding battlefield.
Leaders across the naval service were quick to acknowledge the contribution of specialized triphibious units and their oversized impact on the battle. Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, a seasoned veteran of amphibious warfare, concluded that “no operation has ever shown a more close and sincere cooperation amongst the services.”28 Lieutenant General Holland Smith—so often tempted by service parochialism—reinforced a similar message: “I think we have one of the finest fighting teams in the world right here in the V Amphibious Force, which includes men in all the services. Credit belongs to all of them as American fighting men—not to any one branch of the service.”29
To this day, the Marine Corps War Memorial stands near the nation’s hallowed cemetery at Arlington, commemorating the Battle of Iwo Jima. As intended, the sculpture provides a magnificent tribute to the Marines who have lost their lives in service to the nation. And yet, even as it fulfills its commissioned purpose, the memorial is an equally fitting representation of the distinct and concerted teamwork that took Iwo Jima in 1945. The six Americans raising their national colors to the sky could easily symbolize any component of the highly evolved and interdependent triphibious force that stormed and secured Kuribayashi’s formidable outpost. Iwo Jima was not only a triumph of courage and resolve; it was a victory of cooperation.
1. Whitman S. Bartley, Iwo Jima: Amphibious Epic (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954), iii.
2. Richard F. Newcomb, Iwo Jima (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1965); Richard Wheeler, Iwo (New York: Lippincott & Cromwell, 1980); and Col Joseph H. Alexander, USMC (Ret.), Storm Landings: Epic Amphibious Battles in the Central Pacific (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997) and Closing In: Marines in the Seizure of Iwo Jima (Washington DC: Marine Corps Historical Center, 1994).
3. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. 14, Victory in the Pacific: 1945 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964), 35; Alexander, Closing In, 12–17.
4. Craig Symonds, World War II at Sea: A Global History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 551–52.
5. Yoshitaka Horie, Explanation of Japanese Defense Plan and Battle of Iwo Jima, 25 January 1946, World War II Documents Collection, National Museum of the Pacific War, Fredericksburg, TX (hereafter NMPW).
6. Horie, Explanation of Japanese Defense Plan; Dan King, A Tomb Called Iwo Jima: Firsthand Accounts from Japanese Survivors (North Charleston, SC: Pacific Press, 2020), 96.
7. Amphibious Operations: Capture of Iwo Jima, 16 February to 16 March 1945, Special Collections and Archives, U.S. Naval Academy (hereafter SC&A, USNA), 1-4 through 1-6; “Ammunition Expenditure,” in Secret Information Bulletin No. 23: Battle Experience: Bombardments of Iwo Jima, November 1944–January 1945, 14 May 1945, SC&A, USNA, 79-24 through 79-26.
8. MajGen Donald M. Weller, USMC (Ret.), Interview, Session 2, by Benis M. Frank, 9 April 1970, Marine Corps Oral History Collection, Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division (hereafter MCHD), Quantico, VA.
9. Weller Interview, Session 2.
10. “G-3 Special Action Report, Iwo Jima Campaign,” enc. in Fifth Amphibious Corps Report on Iwo Jima Campaign, 31 March 1945, COLL/3692, MCHD, 10-1, 11-12; Amphibious Operations, 2-3; Morison, Victory in the Pacific, 35.
11. “G-3 Special Action Report,” 10-11; “Annex George to Operation Plan No. 1-45,” enc. in “Operations Plan, Iwo Jima, 4th Marine Division,” 14 January 1945, NMPW, 6-7.
12. “Naval Gunfire,” enc. in 3d Marine Division Reinforced Iwo Jima Action Report, 30 April 1945, COLL/3692, MCHD, 52–54; Bartley, Iwo Jima, 207–8.
13. Robert Sherrod, On to Westward: War in the Central Pacific (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1945), 186; “G-3 Special Action Report, Iwo Jima Campaign,” 13.
14. On the complicated history of the Marines’ flag raising, see Breanne Robertson, ed., Investigating Iwo: The Flag Raisings in Myth, Memory & Esprit de Corps (Quantico, VA: MCHD, 2019).
15. Sherrod, On to Westward, 195.
16. Satoru Ōmagari quoted in King, A Tomb Called Iwo Jima, 131.
17. Chris K. Hemler, Delivering Destruction: American Firepower and Amphibious Assault from Tarawa to Iwo Jima (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2023), 134.
18. Here, “control” refers to directing the physical path of an aircraft (altitude, heading, etc.).
19. LtGen Vernon E. Megee, USMC (Ret.), Interview, Session 2, by Benis M. Frank, 17 May 1967, Marine Corps Oral History Collection, MCHD, Quantico, VA, 28.
20. Megee, “Landing Force Air Support Control Unit 1,” 17 March 1945, COLL/3692, MCHD, 2; Megee, “Coordination of Artillery, Naval Gunfire and Air,” 13 August 1946, Megee Personal Papers, COLL/3983, MCHD; “Annex George to Operation Plan No. 1-45,” 4.
21. Megee, “Coordination of Artillery, Naval Gunfire and Air,” 5.
22. Raymond Henri et al., “The U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima,” Infantry Journal, 1945, repr. 2019, 76; “Annex Jig to Fourth Marine Division Operations Report, Iwo Jima: 4th Tank Battalion Report,” 30 May 1945, World War II Operational Documents, Combined Arms Research Library, 8.
23. Megee Interview, Session 2, 46.
24. Ian W. Toll, Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944–1945 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), 505–6; Gen Holland M. Smith, USMC (Ret.), and Percy Finch, Coral and Brass (1948; repr., New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 250; “Naval Gunfire,” 54.
25. Carsten Fries, “Battle of Iwo Jima: 19 February–26 March 1945,” Naval History and Heritage Command, February 2020.
26. Col Allan R. Millett, USMCR (Ret.), Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps, rev. ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 432.
27. Kuribayashi quoted in Horie, “Value of Bombardment of American Air Forces and Vessels,” enc. in Explanation of Japanese Defense Plan.
28. Richard S. Pryor, “Radio Interview with Vice Admiral R. K. Turner and General H. M. Smith, Transcript,” 24 February 1945, World War II Documents Collection, NMPW, 2.
29. Pryor, “Radio Interview,” 2.
