History 335
Oral History
Final Term paper
Professor: Dr. J. Hirsch
By Hoby Youngblood
An Eyewitness To History
Introduction:
My understanding of history changed after exposure to a college class aptly named Oral History. Previously, my thoughts of history have been American History, European History, Ancient History, or some aspects of wars or events that have occurred in the past. The authors have been unnamed and unimportant for the most part, just someone who had written the text book/s used in class. The change occurred with an interview with Keith Lawson, a long-time friend, conducted on October 9, 2006; the interview lasted for 45 minutes. In a class period, following the interview, my classmates analyzed the result and, clearly, let me know I was not thorough enough. On October 23, 2006, a second interview with Keith lasted an hour and thirty minutes together. The questions, more in-depth than those of the first interview, revealed information that caused me to see Keith as history, not as in “he’s history,” a term we sometimes use of someone who isn’t around anymore. I shudder to think, though Keith is only 84 years old, what a wealth of information that could have been lost had he died before the interviews.
This paper is the result of Keith’s answer to one of the questions I asked:
“Hoby: “Any memorable experiences you can think of?”
Keith: “Particularly Iwo Jima. We carried 500 Marines in, no tanks just troops, and we only brought back 50. Being on a landing ship, we laid close to the shore all the time. We could see the battle going on. We could see the cannons come out of the caves.”
As the information began to unfold, Keith turned out to be an eyewitness to at least a portion of the battle for control of Iwo Jima.
Some Historical Information
Iwo Jima is a small island, shaped much like a pork chop, located within a chain of islands known as Nanpo Shoto. This chain is composed of three island groups, the Izu Shoto, the Ogasawara Gunto, and the Kazan Retto (Volcano Islands), the later of which Iwo Jima is a part. The word Iwo means sulfur. The entire island is only four and three forth miles long and a width that varies from two & one half miles and narrowing to less than one half mile wide. The entire area is seven and one half square miles. Surf conditions at Iwo, even in normal weather, are difficult for all classes of landing crafts. The steep beaches cause the waves to come close inshore before breaking, so that most of the force expended, is in a downward motion that adversely affect the bows of incoming or beached small boats. Also the on winds greatly increase the severity of the surf, often making unloading on the windward side of the island precarious. Natural cover on Iwo Jima is sparse. In the sterile soil, coarse grasses, gnarled bushes, and trees struggle to survive.
In 1823, an American captain, Reuben Coffin of Nantucket, landed the whaler “transit” at Haha Jima and claimed the island for the United States. Several years later, a British consul asserted his nation’s sovereignty over the area and sent a group of colonists from Hawaii to Chichi Jima. Among the Portuguese, Italian and the English, there was one American, Nathaniel Savory of Massachusetts, who sold a beach to Admiral Perry in 1853 for use as a coaling station. Perry was unable to persuade Washington of the value of the property. Soon the United States’ influence waned at every place except on Chichi Jima. Nathaniel Savory’s descendants, well into the 1910s, celebrated Washington’s Birthday and July 4 by flying the American flag.
The Nanpo Shoto stretch like a string of pacific pearls from the Marianas to Tokyo. In 1887, the mayor of Tokyo made a stop at Iwo Jima aboard the SS Meiji and incorporated Iwo into the prefecture of the capital. When WW II broke out, Iwo Jima became very significant; as a part of the Japanese homeland.
“There Will Be No Changes; I Have Complete Confidence In You.”
With the American Navy in shambles the result of the attack on Pearl Harbor the President picked the fifty six year old soft-spoken Texan William Nimitz to bring order out of chaos. Just eighteen days earlier, those with the responsibility of protecting the United States, watched in angry frustration and bewilderment, at their powerlessness to strike back, as the Japanese attack created the catastrophic devastation. The Commander-in-Chief was sure that Admiral Nimitz was the right pick to rebuild the American fleet and use it to turn the tide of the war in the Pacific. Naval brass were expecting heads to roll and careers to be shattered---wherever blame might lay. They didn’t expect the Nimitz bombshell. “There will be no changes; I have complete confidence in you.”
Admiral Nimitz’s task was to be monumental. The ships in the Japanese fleet outnumbered the American fleet by more than two to one in aircraft carriers and battleships. When the Pearl Harbor attack occurred, only two United States aircraft carriers were at sea and escaped damage. The number of other vessels between Japan and the U.S. were not as pronounced in the number of submarines, destroyers, cruisers, troop transports and other support crafts. But it would be a long time before the United States could produce the ships, planes, guns, ammunitions, and the other things necessary to fuel an offensive fighting machine.
Leading Up To the Battle
Now, sure of victory, which had not been the case on the bleak Christmas day in 1941 when President Roosevelt had picked him to take over the beleaguered, decimated command of the American fleet, Admiral Chester William Nimitz, a Rural Texas country native, assembled his admirals and generals to make final plans for the invasion of Iwo Jima. With the invasion of the Marshall Islands early in February 1944, followed by a crippling strikes against Truk in the same month, it became clear to Japanese Imperial headquarters that the Maranas-Carolines area was threatened. (Truk was the base for Japanese operations against Allied forces in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.)
Operation Hailstone, executed by the United States in 1944, culminated in one of the most important naval battles of the war at Truk. Twelve Japanese warships, thirty-two merchant ships, and two hundred forty nine aircraft destroyed, although the larger ships that had received advance warning and were already at sea.
The build up of Iwo Jima had begun years earlier in 1940-41. Until 1940, the census counted 1,091 permanent residents on the island, mostly farmers and workers in the refinery that sent sulfur to the home island. March and April of 1944 saw the Japanese began, in earnest, a build up of military forces on Iwo Jima. By 1945, twenty-one thousand troops were entrenched in an underground network of defensive installations. There were more than 750 gun emplacements, scores of blockhouses with five-foot thick concrete walls, 13,000 yards of tunnels beneath Mount Suribachi, a complete hospital and, 1,000 pillboxes were in place on the island.
. Japan built barracks to house a naval detachment of 93 men placed on the island. The civilian population removed; an airstrip constructed along the narrow saddle of land that joins Mount Suribachi to the broader plateau at the north. After the war, signboards were found in the blasted landscape of Iwo Jima written in Japanese and English that prohibited the taking of pictures and making of maps. These signs, dating from 1937, suggest that military preparations were already underway four years before Pearl Harbor.
The Allies used Guam, Saipan, and Tinian to launch attacks on Japan proper. Japanese fighter aircraft based on Iwo Jima hindered their flight pattern. The fighters would scramble and intercept the B-29 bombers flying out of the Marianas, on their way to mainland Japan.
“Without Iwo Jima,” General Curtis Le May told the chief of the American task force bearing down on the island in January 1945, I can’t bomb Japan effectively.”
When the orders came to take the island, the question was how? It would be taken in hand-to-hand combat, by determined and courageous men prepared to pay for “eight square miles of hell” with their lives.
“Victory was never in doubt. Its cost was . . . 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…?” ---Major General Graves B. Erskine at the dedication of the Third Marine Division Cemetery at Iwo Jima, March 14, 1945
The Battle
After dropping 5,800 tons of explosives and 2,700 missions, aerial photographs indicated there was no appreciable effect on the Japanese entrenchment. General Holland Smith requested a ten-day period for a naval bombardment and got only three. Twenty one thousand nine hundred twenty six shells were rained down on the island, which resulted in approximately 22 percent of the enemy’s defenses effected (a fact established after the war).
“To his day, among military historians and veterans, the navy’s role in the Iwo Jima campaign remains one of the most controversial aspects of the Pacific war.”
As things stood in February 1945, the fourth and fifth marine division would land “in full knowledge that most of Iwo Jima’s defenses were intact” and lethal.
“The first night on Iwo Jima can only be described as a nightmare in hell. Iwo is the most difficult amphibious operation in U.S. History” said war correspondent, Robert Sherrod in a radio dispatch to Time March 1945”
“It wasn’t beautiful; it wasn’t worth 50 cents at a sheriff’s sale,” said one marine.
As the attack started, reports began coming in of light-to-no resistance. There was no surprised for the Japanese general Kuribayashi by what was happening; he had planned it that way. The key to his battle plan was ambush. The shrewd samurai bided his time for nearly an hour. He let the troops land with little or no opposition. The U.S. naval ships ceased their island shelling in order to avoid hitting their own troops. Kuribayashi allowed the beach to fill up with troops and equipment. Then he let loose with hell on earth. This stopped any reinforcements from coming ashore, allowing those already there to bleed to death.
General Kuribayashi triggered the trap shortly after ten o’ clock. Machine-gun fire came from guns hardly visible above ground level, mortars fell from hundreds of hidden pits, heavy artillery and rapid firing antiaircraft guns with barrels lowered slammed shells into incoming landing crafts, and land mines, sown in the ground like crops, began to take their murderous toll. Every square yard of beach was under attack. Sixty thousand two hundred men were pinned down, unable to advance or retreat. As landing crafts began backing off, many hit in the water. Within five minutes, seven landing crafts demolished and sank with trucks, tanks, and ammunitions still on board.
However General Kuribayashi made a fatal mistake; he waited too long to spring his ambush. He had given the six thousand well-trained, disciplined, proud, brave, and determined Marines an hour before launching his attack. They were in place and had taken charge of a piece of real estate, small, yes! However, it was a beachhead. With the bulldozers and tanks that had survived, they pushed through the sand terraces and the trained, large guns on the Sherman tanks began returning fire.
For thirty-six days in early 1945, almost seventy five thousand United States Marines stayed locked in an epic struggle with twenty two thousand Japanese troops defending to the last man a seemingly impregnable flyspeck Pacific island called Iwo Jima.
In the 1,364 days from the Pearl Harbor attack until the surrender of Japan, three hundred fifty three men received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest decoration for valor “above and beyond the call of duty.” Twenty-seven medals were from actions at Iwo Jima; thirteen awarded posthumously. In the 36 days of the twenty five eight hundred fifty one troops on the ground, six thousand eight hundred twenty one were killed, died from their wounds or were missing in action. Of the twenty plus thousand Japanese, only one thousand eight three were taken prisoner and survived. The extremely bitter and protracted assault on Iwo Jima imposed a tremendous burden on supporting medical units. From the first bloody days, when doctors and corpsmen clung grimly to fire swept beaches, to the end of the battle, a stream of wounded men passed along the chain of evacuation to receive excellent medical attention in spite of the difficult military and supply situation. Hospital LST’s lying 2,000 yards offshore played an important part during the first nine days, receiving casualties from the beaches and distributing them to APA’s and hospital ships for further treatment. In response to my question about the battles, he was in Keith answers as following.
Hoby: What was the difference when you were in friendly waters or when there was a threat of battle?
Keith: I remember one time at night, right after dark, of course, there is no light at night, everything is out except on the inside, and they started dropping flares and this was when I was on this 3 inch 50m gun. They told us to fire in the direction above the flares, why I don’t know, but the gun lets off a big flash too, and of course that kind of gave away our spot. The next thing you knew you heard an airplane. Right below us was a 20 mm gun with two men on it. It sounded like its engines were cut and so the guys on the 20 mm opened fire in the direction of the sound, we could watch the tracers. We watched the tracers hit the port engine of this bomber, if they hadn’t hit the plane, which swerved when hit. I wouldn’t be here today for it was headed right toward the ship itself. It would have hit us on the stern. Of course, others started opening fire and when it came by the ship, it was the same level as the gun I was on. We could see the two guys sitting in the cockpit of the Japanese plane.
Conclusion
Iwo Jima in American hands meant that 24,751 Army air corps crewmen would be saved from the disabled aircraft ditching in the icy waters of the North Pacific, with an almost certain loss of the most of them. By war’s end, 2,251 emergency landings on the island by B-29 Super fortress bombers not only saved lives and prevented many who otherwise would become prisoners of war. Thus, Iwo Jima gave the Untied States a forward airbase at the front door of the Japanese homeland, a bastion that cleared the way and made feasible the dropping of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to win the war. Although supposition on my part, perhaps as President Truman saw the tenacity of the Japanese fighting for their home land, if this battle didn’t have an effect on his decision to drop the atomic bomb?
Bibliography
Bartlely, Whitman S. Lt. Col. USMC, Iwo Jima: Amphibious Epic Historical Branch G-3
Division Headquarters U. S. Marine Corps 1954. (Reprinted Nashville the Battery Press, 1997).
Lawson, Keith, interview by Hobert Youngblood October 9, 2006, interview #1, a veteran from WW II for Oral History 335, transcript of a digital recording.
Lawson, Keith, interview by Hobert Youngblood October 23, 2006, interview #2, a veteran from WW II for Oral History 335, transcript of a digital recording.
Marling, Karal Ann and John Wetenhall, Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American
Hero. (Massachusetts, Harvard University press Cambridge. 1991).
Ross, Bill D., Iwo Jima: Legacy of Valor, (New York, Vintage Book Division of Random house,
1986).
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