The Battle for Iwo Jima
Robert Leckie
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 074348682X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Iwo Jima is one of the most famous battles in World War II, and the greatest battle fought by the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II. From that battle came the most famous image of the war, the raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi. Robert Leckie, the bestselling author of Helmet for My Pillow has written an extraordinary story of one of th bloodiest battles in Marine Corps history.
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If the fighters could not shoot down a B-29, then they tried to ram it. As a result, the Americans were losing far too many Superforts over Japan. Others were so crippled by the attacks that they crashed into the sea during the long 1500-mile trip back to the Marianas. The American commanders saw at once that if they captured Iwo their bombers could fly closer to Japan without being detected. Next, Iwo would give them a base for fighter planes, which could then escort the bombers to and from
half the island was still in Japanese hands. CHAPTER 7 BREAKTHROUGH Now that the Americans had taken more than half of Iwo Jima they discovered that “Sulphur Island” was indeed as strange as it was ugly. At the southern end of the island and around the airfields, Marines still shivered in their foxholes at night. But farther north they had come to the Japanese sulphur wells. Here, General Smith said, “it looked like something left over when they finished building Hell.” The air
the Marines on Iwo Jima rested. General Schmidt gave his tired men a “day off.” They read letters, ate hot “chow,” and where possible they scrubbed Iwo’s gritty gray grime off their bodies or treated themselves to the luxury of a shave. In the meantime, the divisions reorganized. Generals Schmidt and Smith had decided on a coordinated attack the next day by all three divisions. This, they hoped, would break through Kuribayashi’s last line and bring a quick victory. The quest for quick victory
advance. He knocked it out, using only his pistol. But an enemy bullet opened a gash in his neck. Mears waited for it to be bandaged, and returned to the attack. Now a bullet ripped through his jaw. Blood spurted out and clotted the sand. Mears kept on. But at last he sank to the sand. A private ran up and tried to protect him. “Get out of here,” Mears gasped. “I’ll be all right.” Then Navy medical corpsmen picked him up, and for a while it looked as if he might be saved, but the gallant captain
supplies into the hands of the Marines, roads from the beaches had to be cut through the sand terraces which had already blocked the passage of so many vehicles. To do this, a battalion of Seabees came into Iwo Jima. Seabees are sailor-specialists from Naval Construction Battalions. Their colorful nickname comes from the abbreviation C.B. Many of these highly trained technicians and mechanics were men in their thirties—or forties—who had put their civilian skills and crafts at their country’s
