Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Iwo Jima. Was it worth the cost?

Diesel has a point. Up to now, the Marshalls, Iwo and Okinawa were necessary in order to allow strategic bombing of the Jap mainland. The Phillippines were needed to keep Jap resources there rather than concentrated either on the Chinese mainland, or Burma, or on the strategic islands -- Iwo and Ok. But yeah, if the Communist left manages to win America, it was all, and I mean all, for nothing.

Lots of things look different, 75 years later. At the time though, is when decisions have to be made, and with the information at hand.

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My Granddad fought in WWI, My Uncle, a Marine died fighting in the Pacific theater, My dad joined at 17 (lied about his age) to go looking for his brother.

So my family has given significantly for the freedoms this country has enjoyed. It was the good fight. At some point it will be my duty to stand up for those who have done their part.

I hope there are many who have similar views.

Think they did what they did with the information that they had at the time.

Looking at things from this point in time is a good mental exercise but does not much.

We bypassed a hell of a lot of Japanese-held islands in the Pacific, if 75 years later someone feels compelled to say why we fought one battle too many, I'm ok with that.

Keep in mind, that when the decision was made to go for Iwo, the people making that decision didn't know about the Bomb. As far as they knew, Operation Olympic, the invasion of Japan was the plan. In that case, Iwo was critical to the logistics of the plan.

Also, as a B-29 emergency field... it sounds chitty, but at the time, Marines were cheaper than B-29 bombers and their crews.

hmm, ever see the steel airplane landing pads? They had them all over as sidewalks in US Army.

I've landed and taken off on them.

Since when in war is it an obvious blunder to seek out the enemy and destroy him.

Marston mats.

Mesabi--thanks for the info, my wife's uncle was wounded at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, he never talked about it, I always wondered what other battles he was in during the 3 years between Guadalcanal and Iwo, it must have been a rough 3 years. We lost, with a lot of great Marines during the battle of Iwo Jima, including John Basilone, Medal of Honor recipient from New Jersey!

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But IIRC the article does state we weren’t expecting that level of resistance going in, believing most of the Japanese forces were still on Chichi Jima (??), an island we did skip.

Hindsight.

The Russians defeated the Germans by throwing wave after wave of troops at them, not caring how many were killed, until the Germans were overwhelmed. We have criticized Stalin and his generals for that ever since, yet in some ways, we did the same, if only on a smaller scale. Iwo Jima was not the only island upon which American lives may have been needlessly thrown away.

I have read as much of the history of WW2 as I could for the past 60 years or so. That includes many, many books, a lot of which make light of the conflict between and Army and Navy, as to who should be in charge in the Pacific. I think it can be said with a certain amount of certainty, that many American lives were lost as a result/

It was not until after the war in Europe ceased that we really learned how good a job we'd done on the Germans, but not in the way most folks think. You have to understand that German civilian morale was exceedingly high until very late in the war. We kept bombing the snot out of the big cities, and the folks kept shaking their fists at the sky. However, the effect was cumulative. Eventually, the population turned. It was the strategic bombing that did it.

I read an assessment of the situation a few years ago. Basically, you had Helga, your average big-city factory worker. She'd hop the tram from her partially bombed apartment to her partially bombed factory through partially bombed streets day after day. She'd spend her nights in the shelter. She'd take the news of her father and mother dying in a raid, the loss of her brothers at the front-- you name it. She would take it in stride and go to work no matter what, because she was a proud German and it was the right thing to do. One day, probably after a raid, she gave up and stopped going into work. This is what caused the war in Europe to end. It happened to all the Helgas and Marias and Klauses almost overnight. This is why we were eventually able to roll into Germany in the end without partisan sniping and harassment.

Also, understand that no one at the top levels understood what strategic bombing was doing. They had their goals, and those goals were somewhat of a flop. Industrial output kept increasing. The Germans kept innovating and every bombed out factory was replaced with a better one either hidden in the countryside or buried underground. The success of strategic bombing was not really known until after hostilities had stopped and the post-action assessments were made.

One other thing: we got all pussified after the war about bombing the cities. The truth of the matter was that Germany had a very centralized transportation system for both road and rail. It was an integral part of the city. You didn't have ring roads or train bypasses. Everything went right into the heart of the big cities and came back out again. That meant men and materiel were also having to go through the center of town. Answer: Bomb the center of town.

In regards to Japan:

Look 20-20 hindsight would tell us that we should have waited for the successful submarine blockade to throttle the Japanese economy and let them all starve. However, that was not going to happen.

Remember that we had done a lot of island hopping in the PTO and strategically bypassed a lot of Japanese strongholds in order to hit seemingly meaningless islands so that we could effectively pinch off resupply to these strongholds. We saved tens of thousands of Allied lives through this strategy. When we did hit the Japs, it was with overwhelming force.

LeMay needed Iwo so that there would be a place for B29's to land that was closer to home islands than Tinian. We had been losing bombers into the drink since the beginning of the B29's career and the losses had become unacceptable. B29's and their crews were far more expensive and the budget to put them into action was bigger than the Manhattan Project, and had been in the works a lot longer. Each B29 and its crew was a huge investment. Everything had to be done to make sure the planes got through and got back. Remember as well, that when the plans were put in motion to take Iwo Jima, the Bomb was not a sure thing. We needed Iwo as a platform for softening up the home islands prior to ground invasion.

While the bombing campaign by the Americans and British most certainly helped win the war, I believe it was Russia that brought down Germany. The Germans could have stood off the British and the Americans for a long azz time, maybe even forever, but they could not fight on two fronts, and the Eastern Front was what bled Germany to death in the form of both men and materials. The Soviets could afford losses of ten to one, the Germans could not.

Same here. The bloodiest battle in the Marine Corps history and totally unnecessary. My Marine FIL made three Pacific landings and finally got wounded and taken out of the war on Peleliu.

Good article, thanks.

Thank you.

It was the air war that crippled Germanies access to petrol which played a critical role in the German Collapse. Without this aspect of the airwar the whole war would of looked much different.