Pretty good article reconsiders the WW2 invasion of Iwo Jima.
Worth The Cost?
I found this to be pretty thought provoking, and thought maybe some others would as well.
7mm

With the beauty of hindsight, no. Hindsight is always 20-20.

Wow..
That is a big question!

I don't know enough about the big picture Pacific strategy to even start on that one.
Not to mention supply lines and a hundred other things...

Did it cost a lot in men?
Yes.
Did it change the course?
No idea.

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

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.

One photo got us what? Fifth war loan? So quite possibly.

Pretty easy to criticize someone 75 years after the fact. They made the best decision they could at the time with the invformation they had.

Was Pickett's charge at Gettysburg a big mistake by Robert E. Lee? Hell yes.

Was Cornwallis's decision to hole up in Yorktown, which got him surrounded by the French Navy and Washington's troops, a mistake? Hell yes.

What about the whole Vietnam War? The purpose was to prevent the North from taking over the South because that would lead to the "domino theory," whereby "monolithic communism" would take over all the other Southeast Asian countries one at a time. That whole theory was totally flawed. At least at Iwo Jima we didn't end up with 58,000 dead Americans, didn't lose the battle, and didn't end up a few years later with big American corporations falling all over themselves to build plants in the enemy's territory.

That. It's a long way to swim out there.

It was essential for the air war. The air war beat Japan, even though the air war didn't beat Germany.

It is true the air war didn't beat Germany but both strategic and tac air played a very large role.

I think the war in Europe would have looked very much different post D-Day without the cumulative drubbing the Germans took from the air before and after the landing.
While the outcome would probably have been the same, I believe the cost would have been very much higher.

The Germans lost tremendous amounts of material and heavy equipment not to mention men whenever they moved. Logistics was simply a nightmare.
Monty might still be trying to take Caen without the 2000 bombers that supported the British operation Goodwood.

Having explored rural Okinawa quite a bit in 1964, examined some of the bunkers and caves, even finding some unexploded ordnance...if we needed the island strategically, I'd say the butcher's bill could have been a lot less had the areas suitable for ports and airfields been secured...and left the Japs to slowly starve or surrender. The Japs at that point had no supply options. But, I'm just another armchair E-4.

What if scenario lil man bomb dropped on Iwo Jima no US casualties Japan sees and surrenders ?

Gettysburg would have been different if Jackson had been there instead of Ewell

Interesting article. I didn’t realize that there was that level of debate over Iwo Jima. I thought Peleliu was supposed to have been the mistake.

Oh Dear God, not this stuff again.
I’ve heard this line all my life, mostly from Southerners, but occasionally someone else. I’ve read as much about Gettysburg, and spent as much time on the battlefield as anybody who isn’t a paid historian.
The line about Jackson winning Gettysburg displays a great lack of knowledge about the tactical situation the Confederate Army faced during the invasion of Pennsylvania.
Especially given the lack of effective Rebel intelligence at Gettysburg. Not trying to sound like an azzhole, just stating a simple fact.
7mm

I think the submariners would argue that. The shipping they sunk (almost all of Japan's merchant ships) stopped the flow of oil, foodstuffs, coal, ore, everything the Japanese needed to continue the war. They also put a whupping on Japan's lesser warships. That was all after they got all the torpedo issues fixed, of course, but once that happened, the submarines went nuts and sunk everything they saw with a Japanese flag on it. While LeMay did lay waste to the cities, the subs starved them out.

I can see that point of view as a look back 20/20 view that we have the luxury of. Bypass it and cut off the supply chain to them. Let em rot!

Speaking of the Pacific theater in WWII, my wife's deceased GP was in many of the well known battles as a Marine. Aside from Tarawa, which he talked to me about, I have no idea which other battles he was involved in. Does anyone have a link to a resource that I could plug his name into and discover which division, etc., he was in so that I can get a better idea and understanding what he was involved in?

FWIW, he was one of my favorite people for the short time I knew him. Taxidermist, hunter, fisherman, and general outdoorsman with tons of knowledge. For a short time, he was a real grandpa to me, as mine all passed when I was very young.

Thanks, Skot.

Good read

Was it worth the cost?

I would answer with the long view. If we don't stop what the left is doing to our country right now, the answer will be no.

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.

You can try Fold3.com

They have paid memberships to get full access, but they give a free trial offer so you can see if you find any information.

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!

Can’t get it to open on my iPhone without subscribing.

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.

There were more B-29s lost to engine fires and other problems than to the Japanese. While the subs did a remarkable job of cutting off the supply line to Japan the B-29s mined many harbors with good results. In fact, the longest B-29 combat mission was dropping mines. The B-29s were an extremely valuable asset. Before Lemay changed the maintenance protocols for the B-29 engines several were lost on takeoff. They had to have max power on all 4 engines to make takeoff possible. The engine cooling cowl flaps had to be closed because of the drag they caused. Due to the ambient air temps I'll wager the engines ran a bit hot. The R3350 compound engines were radical for the time and produced a lot of power for the size. Like anything pushed to the limits there was a price. All of the accessory cases (pumps and generators) were made of magnesium and if an engine fire occurred and the magnesium ignited there was no putting the fire out and behind the front wing spar were the fuel tanks. The cowl flaps for engine cooling were quite large and if stuck open caused too much drag in flight. So much drag they couldn't make it back to home bases. Iwo was the midway point for the bombing campaign and the bombers were the only option to bomb the home islands until Iwo was taken. The navy put a picket line of subs to rescue downed B-29 crews that had to bail out or ditch. Taking Iwo likely released several subs for combat action. Like already posted, the plan to nuke Japan wasn't known.

Not really. German arms production was HIGHER in 44-45 than it was in 41-42. It was actually tactical aviation that had the greater impact by taking out transport. Albert Speer had German factories humming until the end.

IIRC the great strategic debate at the time was between Nimitz and MacArthur.

The rough carpentry version: NImitz (Navy) wanted to go straight for the jugular (Japan) from the West, while MacArthur (Army) wanted to island hop starting from the Southwest in a Northeasterly direction.

MacArthur convinced Truman that island hopping was the way, and so that's the basket we put most of our eggs in.

IMO Nimitz' bold plan was the better of the two, but you know what they say about hindsight...

At the time maybe. Today no we are giving it all way.

In and of itself it didn't beat Germany, but it did play an important role. Hitler's foolishness and Russia's resolve are much of what beat Germany.

Yep, turning the escort fighters loose on their return to England for low level strafing any military targets they came across destroyed more than the bombers in the last year of the war in Europe.

You can get copies of his service record from the National Archives. Your wife may have to be the applicant since she is a blood relative. Go to the Archives website and you can find the requirements. One warning there was a fire in 1991 and a lot of the service records were lost. Also you may be able to find information on him in Ancestry. They have quite a bit on my dad.

Doesn't matter how much you make if ya can't get it to the front. Fighters and Resistance fighters played hell with the infrastructure. British Tiffies were especially good at vehicular interdiction.

And it's good to have control of the skies over the ground forces.

MacArthur's ego? hummm...... MacArthur owned a Brewery and other property in the Phillipines. 250K lives would have been saved had they bi passed the Philippines and this was a hot topic at the time.

It's not good, it's absolutely necessary.

That is, unless ROE has your hands tied...

My father was one of the guys that fought the Island hopping campaign in the Pacific, yes it was worth it

My Father was with the Army's 77th Infantry Division at Guam, Philippines, and Okinawa. He only had doubts about one landing (one that he did not participate in) and that was Peleliu. The rest he felt were necessary to varying degrees.

He was not an Officer, nor did he participate in any planning, those were just his opinions.

So too, I believe was everyone else's. Except perhaps for Japan(I forget when oil, rubber and steel shortages began to hamper them.


Denial of opposition possession of the skies is the reason the Germans advanced as far as they did into Russia. Arguably due to Stalin's own disregard of intelligence.

Denial of the airfield to the Japanese was as important as gaining possession for the allies.

And having that possession denied is the reason the Invasion of England was abandoned.

Without Iwo Jima we wouldn't have the photo that boosted public moral and sold enough war bonds to carry America over the finish line.

Bit of both imho. Sound military decision based upon the amount of Japs there and the resources they could draw from it in the US rear should we have bypassed it but ultimately devastating to the Philippines and the people. In hindsight...ole Mac might have even said we should have bypassed it.

Japs should have declared Manila an open city. The blood is on their hands

American bombing campaigns in Europe were mass murder...nothing more nothing less. Didn’t end [bleep] other than the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians

Germany didn’t loose the war due to material production shortages. They lost it due to the barbarian hordes from the east overrunning them

I mean to disparage no one...I have the benefit of hindsight.

Well to be fair I do mean to disparage allied air command...they were murderous war criminals and a pox on American righteousness.

Senior Commanders had instructed that Manila be abandoned, for lack of a better term, I can't recall if it was to be declared an Open City. It was some Junior Commanders' decision to stand and fight. The code of Bushido had been firmly implanted and they were going to fight, and fight they did!

Of course, Manila caught hell.

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....

God Bless Diesel, to you and those of your family who served...

My grandmother sent 6 sons to serve in WW 2.. three came home.. three didn't...

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.

My great uncle General Graves Erskine commanded the 3rd Marine Division on Iwo Jima

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.

Perhaps perhaps not but he was the father of combined operations warfare and forever changed the way modern war was fought. He was imho the greatest allied commander of the war and his men took comparatively little casualties.

With Mac you take the good with the bad. Most generals were pompous and arrogant. Hell look at the krauts

I think the thing that most people today forget is the mindset of those who were fighting WW2. It was total war, a war for survival, especially for the British, Russians, and many of the smaller European countries.. They did what they thought they had to do to win, and the cost of human life didn't really fit in to the equation.

We're used to fighting political wars here.............starting with Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq, and everywhere else we've stuck our noses. The American press delights in telling us how bad wars are, especially if a Republican president is in office. Imagine what it would be like today if WW2 was taking place, with CNN telling the American people about all the innocent civilians our bombing campaigns were killing. Can't you just see CBS news doing a special investigation on the lack of women and Negroes commanding the troops.

We have the advantage of sitting here today and judging the way things were done 75-80 years. There is no doubt in my mind that we would see them totally different had we lived through them.

The war in the Pacific became a war of extermination once the American military learned how the Japanese waged war.

It got very personal for the American military personnel who engaged in it,...officers and enlisted men both.

The Japanese fought the way East Asian militaries fight. The Chinese basically fought the same way in Korea.

Most of the older people that I knew, the ones who lived in the WW2 era, had little to say about the Germans, and that included a number of them who fought the Germans. BUT........it was not so about the Japanese, as they hated the Japs. I knew some people who wouldn't buy anything if they thought it was made in Japan.

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?

It wasn't Japanese occupied, either. It was a Japanese owned island, IIRC. There was a psych component there also, as for the first time we were on their territory - but the B-26 thing was vital at the time.

Yes, IMHO.

It helped Truman make the decision to use the A Bombs as they planned the invasion of the Home Islands and began to understand the human cost to the US of such an invasion. The 700,000 Purple Hearts that Truman ordered thinking they would be used in 1945, 46, and 47 are still being used today and for a very long time.... So when they really grasped the human toll of Iwo Jima and the fact they were preparing the West Coast of the US for 100,000 casualties a month, It was worth it. Dropped 2 A Bombs and when the Japanese took two days to respond to the surrender demands, Truman authorized 9 more A Bombs to be ready in November 1945. There’s a great book title “Hell to Pay” if anyone wants to read more on this time period. The war was over in Germany, and the US Gov had to get everyone ready for the coming casualties after the perception in the press was that we had won.... There’s the press screwing it up again,.,,, or before, or over and over...

I like these threads!

Shaman,
Given that there were islands where Japanese remained holed up in caves for -- what was it 13 years? -- I am ok with the combat pay too!

I've heard the US only had two bombs, many things could have gone wrong. So counting on the 'bomb", to end the war was iffy at best.

Many on here have probably read With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge.

The first action many Marines had seen was at Peleliu. From there they went to Okinawa. Peleliu was just a small atoll. Okinawa was a large Island with a local population. The Japanese had 100,000 troops on Okinawa.

The vast majority of Marines who landed on Okinawa had already seen combat against the Japanese and understood that the Japanese weren't much on surrender.

That must have been quite a mental burden for the Marines,....landing on an island which held 100,000 enemy troops and knowing that you weren't leaving until the whole bunch of them had been eradicated,...and that you had to accomplish it without getting killed.

The war in Europe was plenty harsh. But in Europe war came with a couple of options,...such as surrender if you found yourself in a no-win situation. Also, it was expected that, in Europe, the enemy would call it off once defeat became inevitable.

That didn't exist in the Pacific. East Asians have different attitudes about war than Europeans.

To defeat East Asians in war requires eradication of their entire people. The Japanese were more or less resigned to that fact before the bombs demonstrated to them exactly what form their eradication would take and how rapidly it could be accomplished.

,...and it took two of them.

I lost my Grandfather in Europe so i don't mean to disparage our heroes there but like it or not we fought the B team of a defeated Germany. That war was decided in the winter of 41 by the godless scumbag soviets.


In the pacific...we fought the A team all the way. Well dug in and financial. Their Navy, Their Air Corps, and their Army. We kicked their asses and paid for the glory in blood. That was our war and we won a hard fought victory.

God Bless our armed forces past and present.

Piss on Truman

I think it was in the book "Flags of our Fathers" where it was told about Japs keeping a prisoner barely alive so they could eat him bit by bit...slicing off a non vital piece now and then, saving the best for last....remember the "Rape of Nanking" where as many as 100,000 Chinese women, aged 7 to 70 were raped by Jap troops in a matter of a few weeks....

So imagine, if by some chance, they had landed on the West coast....this was a mindset from a culture that maybe only the use of nuclear weapons could sway?