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

Was the taking back of the Philippines worth it or was it mainly to satisfy MacArthur's ego?...these kinda questions will always exist but we don't live in the times and will never truly know.

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.

to Satisfy MacArthur's ego.....so said one of my grand mother's brothers who served on his staff.... and is one of the guy in the photo shoot of him wading ashore, with his " I will return' promise to the Phillipinos...

it was a waste of time, money and loss of life, just to float his ego.... Japan couldn't even support or resupply the troops left there.. it was a right off...

in fact the Philippines gave the Japanese people pride in the fact that the troops there could tie up so much American resources there, with very little ..

if the US had so many troops tied up there, then the invasion of Japan would be put off for a year or more and allow Japan to build up more defenses and equipment to fight to save the homeland...

Intelligence would tell MacArthur's staff about seeing 10 Japanese troops running up a mountain in the Jungle... he'd order a thousand troops sent after them...and with orders to keep after them until they captured or killed every one of them....our casualties from Jungle fever to crotch rot, were way more than just the loss of 10 Troops...

MacArthur was a self centered pompous dick head...his ego was more important than American lives...at least to him....

The other thing that 20/20 hindsight blinds us to in this case is exactly how flummoxed we were over the Japanese mindset. Nowadays, it's much easier to see how ill-prepared Japan was to prosecute a war like this. However, I don't think even the Japanese ever really caught on as to how dysfunctional their military was.

I had a friend that used to work in mental health. He'd worked at the state hospital until it closed and then volunteered here and there around town. One day, he showed up at my place in a particularly foul mood. It took a while for me to sort out what was the matter. The police had cornered some guy at a half-way house that had gone off the deep end. The loon tried to threaten the 6 cops with a steak knife and the cops had responded by pumping a dozen rounds into him. John was all upset over this. He'd befriended the loon years ago. Yes, he was nuts. Yes, he had a history of doing stupid stuff like this. John had needed to disarm him on one occasion. I forget the guy's name. We'll call him Joey.

"Everyone else was panicked," said John. "I walked up to Joey, and he was threatening to stab anyone that came near him. All the while, he was humming a tune. I recognized the tune and started humming it along with him. Pretty soon, Joey calmed down and gave me the knife. That's all it took."

Japan is Joey in this story. If you didn't get the totally alien mindset of the Japanese, they seemed to be absolutely crazy. The U.S. were the 6 cops. I frankly didn't agree with John on his assessment. Yes, maybe if the cops had all been trained social workers, Joey might still be alive today running around half-way houses threatening the staff. The reality of the situation is both Japan and Joey went off the rails to such an extent that they needed to be put down like mad dogs and the sooner the better.


" I don't think even the Japanese ever really caught on as to how dysfunctional their military was." This is another key, but it needs explaining. So much of what drove the Japanese military was just plain ka-ka. Take any engagement we had with Japan and you can see some really weird, counter-productive and even self-destructive behaviors. I'm not going to go into details here; you can probably all cite examples. If you want to discuss it, we'll start another thread. My point is that so much of Japan's efforts in the Pacific were wickedly stupid.

I wo was necessary not only for damaged B-29s, but hundreds of P-51s could run partial escort services into and out of Japan for the B-29s.

I'd say that Iwo was completely necessary based upon the situation at the moment. Okinawa, on the other hand, was far more costly with allied deaths being nearly twice what they were at Iwo, and by the time it was captured, the first a-bomb detonation was only three weeks away.

Top War Dept. and governmental officials knew that the a-bomb test was imminent when Okinawa was invaded, yet they still made the decision to proceed. Nimitz and MacArthur both knew the casualties would be much higher than any previous battle, and so did the folks in DC.

It was important because it had a long enough runway for crippled B29s to land on and it was much closer to japan than any previous Island airfield

I'm not going to dispute the facts you present.

BTW: My Dad was on his way to Okinawa when the first bomb was dropped. It was still considered a war zone, so when the boat arrived, he got 2 weeks combat pay staying aboard the transport. That was okay by him; he and a buddy owned the crap table (actually just a rug) and were getting a piece of all the action.

1) I don't think anyone really knew how the Japs were going to react to The Bomb. Indeed, it took the Emperor himself throwing in the towel and the generals reacted by attempting a failed coup.
2) All of the islands from Guadacanal on were learning experiences. We were learning how to best take the Japanese apart in a land invasion.
3) Okinawa was going to be a strategic jumping-off point for hitting the beaches on the mainland. Dad heard he was going to someplace codenamed "Landau," and he was going to train at Okinawa in a mock landing before being shipped off for the invasion.


To the bigger question:

Was all this unnecessary? Well, yes. You can say that Normandy was useless if you figure that in a year and a half, we could have nuked Hitler.
Dragoon could have been canceled as well. The Anzio landings? Piffle. Sicily? Useless! What the hell were we doing in North Africa?


Rather than second guess these situations, the more intriguing question for me is Why Iwo Jima? Why Okinawa? Why was MacArthur treated as a God? What were the motivations of the players involved? What did they know? What didn't they know?