Battle of Iwo Jima

What Happened

The Battle of Iwo Jima (硫黄島の戦い, Iōtō no Tatakai) was fought from 19 February to 26 March 1945, when American forces landed on and captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. The American invasion, code-named Operation Detachment, aimed to seize the island and its two airfields, South Field and Central Field. The battle was part of the larger Volcano and Ryukyu Islands campaign.

The Japanese defenders had heavily fortified the island with a dense network of bunkers, hidden artillery positions, and roughly 18 kilometres (11 miles) of tunnels. American ground forces relied on extensive naval artillery support and enjoyed complete air supremacy throughout the battle, provided by US Navy, Army, and Marine Corps aviators. The five-week fight produced some of the fiercest and bloodiest combat of the Pacific War.

Uniquely among Pacific War amphibious island battles, total American casualties exceeded Japanese casualties, at a ratio of three American casualties for every two Japanese. Of the approximately 21,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima at the start of the battle, only 216 were taken prisoner, and some of those were captured only because they had been knocked unconscious or otherwise disabled. Most Japanese defenders were killed in action, but 3,000 or more continued to resist inside cave systems after major fighting had ended, until US Army forces hunted them down; some eventually surrendered.

Background

By early 1945, American forces had advanced across the Pacific and were preparing for the final push toward Japan. Iwo Jima, a volcanic island roughly midway between the Mariana Islands and the Japanese home islands, held two airfields that could serve American bombers. The island also posed a threat as a Japanese early-warning outpost, though the Japanese continued to maintain radar capabilities on the nearby island of Rota, which American forces never invaded.

Experiences with earlier Pacific island battles suggested that Iwo Jima would be heavily defended and that seizing it would cost significant casualties. The Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had prepared a defence built around underground fortifications and mutually supporting firing positions, rather than attempting to hold the beaches. This strategy forced American forces into a slow, grinding advance against concealed positions.

The American invasion force consisted of the United States Marine Corps, United States Navy, and United States Army. Naval artillery and carrier-based aircraft provided overwhelming firepower, but the island's terrain — dominated by the 169-metre (554-foot) Mount Suribachi at its southern tip — favoured the defenders.

Why It Mattered

The invasion of Iwo Jima was controversial even at the time. Retired Chief of Naval Operations William V. Pratt stated that the island was useless to the Army as a staging base and useless to the Navy as a fleet base. The airfields did support P-51 Mustang long-range escort fighters protecting B-29 Superfortress bombers en route to Japan, and also served as emergency landing strips for damaged B-29s, though these functions proved of limited value so late in the war.

The battle's cost in lives and its limited strategic payoff made it a subject of ongoing debate. However, the lessons learned on Iwo Jima directly shaped American planning for the Battle of Okinawa two months later and for the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. The fighting demonstrated the extreme difficulty of dislodging a determined, well-entrenched defender from fortified volcanic terrain.

The battle also produced one of the most famous images of the Pacific War: Joe Rosenthal's Associated Press photograph of six Marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi. That photograph became an enduring symbol of the battle and of the American war effort in the Pacific.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name for the battle is 硫黄島の戦い, read as いおうとうのたたかい in hiragana, and romanised as Iōtō no Tatakai. The name is also sometimes read as Iōjima no Tatakai, reflecting an alternative reading of the island's name.

Breaking down the characters:

• 硫 (いおう, iō) — "sulphur". This character is composed of the stone radical and the phonetic element 流. It appears only in this compound in common usage.
• 黄 (おう, ō) — "yellow". Combined with 硫, it forms 硫黄 (いおう, iō), meaning "sulphur", literally "yellow stone".
• 島 (とう or じま, tō or jima) — "island". The reading changes depending on context: 硫黄島 is read Iōtō or Iōjima, with the island name itself having two accepted pronunciations.
• の (の, no) — the possessive particle, meaning "of" or "'s".
• 戦い (たたかい, tatakai) — "battle" or "fight". The character 戦 means "war" or "battle", and in this form it is a noun derived from the verb 戦う (たたかう, tatakau), "to fight".

So 硫黄島の戦い literally means "The Battle of Sulphur Island". The island's name refers to the volcanic sulphur deposits found there, a feature that also gave the island its English name, Iwo Jima, from the same Japanese characters.

Key Figures

Tadamichi Kuribayashi (栗林忠通) commanded the Japanese garrison on Iwo Jima. He was responsible for the island's defensive strategy, which abandoned the beaches in favour of a deep, tunnel-based defence designed to inflict maximum casualties on the attacking Americans. He remained on the island throughout the battle and was killed in the fighting.

William V. Pratt was a retired Chief of Naval Operations of the United States Navy. After the battle, he publicly criticised the invasion, arguing that Iwo Jima held little strategic value either as an Army staging base or as a Navy fleet base. His comments became part of the ongoing controversy over the operation's necessity.

Joe Rosenthal was an Associated Press photographer who took the photograph of the American flag being raised on Mount Suribachi. His image, captured on 23 February 1945, became the most famous visual record of the battle and won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography.