- 2 days ago
Japanese defenders on Iwo Jima never knew that U.S. Marines had already trained on a Hawaiian hillside built to match their exact bunker layout. The payoff was huge: the 28th Marines landed with a rehearsal in their legs, while American photo interpreters, mapmakers, and naval planners used pre-invasion reconnaissance to turn an invisible island fortress into a targetable battlefield.
This military history story follows the intelligence work behind the Pacific War’s most brutal island assault, from early aerial photography and joint enemy installation maps to the bombardment, beach landing, and the first days of fighting around Mount Suribachi and the Motoyama Plateau. It also shows where the system failed, as underground tunnels, hidden artillery, and volcanic ash turned a planned assault into a grinding fight for every cave and ridge.
For listeners who enjoy World War II documentaries, Marine Corps history, Pacific theater stories, and narrated military analysis, this is a detailed look at reconnaissance, bunker warfare, amphibious invasion planning, and the human cost of Iwo Jima. It’s ideal for fans of WW2 stories, battlefield history, war narration, and long-form history listening.
Created for searchers looking for World War II history, Iwo Jima documentary, Marine Corps stories, Pacific War analysis, military history narration, and WW2 battle stories. Also a strong fit for history podcasts, battlefield breakdowns, and narrated war stories for background listening.
This military history story follows the intelligence work behind the Pacific War’s most brutal island assault, from early aerial photography and joint enemy installation maps to the bombardment, beach landing, and the first days of fighting around Mount Suribachi and the Motoyama Plateau. It also shows where the system failed, as underground tunnels, hidden artillery, and volcanic ash turned a planned assault into a grinding fight for every cave and ridge.
For listeners who enjoy World War II documentaries, Marine Corps history, Pacific theater stories, and narrated military analysis, this is a detailed look at reconnaissance, bunker warfare, amphibious invasion planning, and the human cost of Iwo Jima. It’s ideal for fans of WW2 stories, battlefield history, war narration, and long-form history listening.
Created for searchers looking for World War II history, Iwo Jima documentary, Marine Corps stories, Pacific War analysis, military history narration, and WW2 battle stories. Also a strong fit for history podcasts, battlefield breakdowns, and narrated war stories for background listening.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the morning of December 22nd, 1944, at Camp Terawa in the high-saddle country of Hawaii,
00:06a Marine of the 5th Division opened the Honolulu Advertiser and stopped reading.
00:11Two photographs.
00:13Bombs falling away from an aircraft toward a small island shot from directly above.
00:18Underneath them, a caption naming the place.
00:21Iwo Jima.
00:23He had seen that shape before.
00:25Not on a map of the Pacific.
00:27On a chart in a briefing tent.
00:30Stamped with a name that meant nothing.
00:32Island X.
00:34He had been attacking that shape for weeks.
00:36He had waded onto beaches chosen because they resembled it.
00:40He had climbed a hill his officers had picked because of the way it stood at one end of a
00:45narrow strip of ground,
00:46and his battalion had rehearsed, again and again, cutting straight across the neck of that ground,
00:52and then turning to swallow the hill from behind.
00:56Nobody in his battalion had ever seen Iwo Jima.
00:58Not one man.
01:00The island sat 750 miles from Tokyo, sealed, garrisoned, and visible to Americans only from the air.
01:09Its civilians had been taken off months earlier.
01:12Its defenders had been ordered underground.
01:14And here, in a newspaper anybody in Hawaii could buy for a nickel, was the island they had been rehearsing
01:20to capture.
01:21Up the slope behind him stood a wooden building beside division headquarters.
01:25Its windows were blacked out.
01:27Its door carried two locks.
01:29Barbed wire ran around it, and military police stood on it around the clock, and no man went inside without
01:35a special pass.
01:36In that building were the reasons the rehearsals looked the way they looked—photographs, overlays, and a growing list of things
01:44on Iwo Jima that had numbers instead of names.
01:48Hold on to that picture, because it is the whole question of this story.
01:52Somewhere out in the western Pacific, a Japanese general had spent half a year making certain that no one on
01:58earth could see what he was building.
02:00And 4,000 miles away, marines who could not have found Iwo Jima on a chart were practicing against it—the
02:07right beaches, the right hill, the right direction of attack.
02:12I want to show you how that was possible, and exactly where it stopped being possible, because it did stop,
02:18and that place cost more American lives than any battle in Marine Corps history.
02:24If you want more stories about what American troops actually knew before they went ashore, hit like and subscribe.
02:31It helps this kind of history find the people who care about it.
02:34Start with the ground in Hawaii.
02:37The 5th Marine Division had come to Camp Tarawa in the late summer and autumn of 1944, a new division
02:43stuffed with veterans,
02:45camped on Parker Ranch between two volcanoes where the wind never stopped and the dust got into everything.
02:52Then, General Keller Rocky and his key staff were called to Pearl Harbor, told the target, and sent home.
02:59After that, the training orders changed.
03:02They now called for repeated attacks on a target the division knew only as Island X.
03:09An Island X was not an abstraction.
03:12It was a piece of Hawaii, selected to match, as closely as the Hawaiian islands allowed, the 5th Division's own
03:18sector of an island none of them had seen.
03:21The heaviest emphasis fell on one regiment.
03:25Colonel Harry Liversedge's 28th Marines had been handed the hardest single geographic problem of the operation.
03:32And so, an effort was made to find terrain that resembled southern Iwo Jima.
03:37Each battalion of that regiment practiced landing on beaches thought to resemble Iwo's beaches.
03:43Each battalion practiced enveloping a hill mass described in the official record as remarkably like Mount Suribachi.
03:52An area was marked off on the ground to represent the objective.
03:55And inside that marked area, elements of the division physically executed the scheme of maneuver they would use on the
04:02day.
04:03Think about what that means for a 19-year-old rifleman.
04:07He is not studying a map.
04:09He is walking the ground.
04:11His squad is learning how long the cut across the neck takes at a run, with a machine gun on
04:16a shoulder.
04:17By February, he will step off a landing craft onto black sand 7,000 miles from Hawaii.
04:24And something in him will already know where he is going.
04:28But all of that rests on one enormous assumption.
04:31To build a rehearsal of an enemy's ground, you must already know that ground.
04:38Not roughly.
04:39Specifically.
04:41Where the beaches shelve.
04:43Where the terraces rise.
04:45Where the guns are.
04:46And how many.
04:47And what kind.
04:48And what kind.
04:49On June 8, 1944, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi had stepped ashore on Iwo Jima,
04:57with orders to turn it into something the Americans could not take.
05:01By late July, he had removed every civilian from the island.
05:06Mining engineers arrived from Japan to draw blueprints for tunnels at varying levels.
05:11Ventilated.
05:12Deep.
05:12Deep.
05:13Designed so a shell bursting at one entrance would not kill the men inside.
05:18He was building a fortress specifically designed to be invisible from above.
05:23So here is what I want you to carry into the next part.
05:26The photographs that mattered most were not the ones taken just before the landing.
05:31The most valuable pictures of Iwo Jima were taken in the summer of 1944,
05:36when there was almost nothing on that island worth photographing at all.
05:41That sounds backward.
05:43It is not.
05:44Because of what those early pictures made possible,
05:46a group of officers in a room on Guam would eventually be able to look at Iwo Jima and see,
05:52not what was on it, but what had changed on it.
05:55And by the second week of February, what had changed was very bad news.
06:00On June 15, 1944, while the Marines were going ashore on Saipan, 700 miles to the south,
06:07American carrier aircraft came over Iwo Jima and photographed it.
06:10Not bombed it, though they did that too.
06:14Photographed it.
06:15Whole.
06:16End to end, coast to coast, in clear air.
06:20Those pictures are the reason for everything you saw in the last part.
06:23And I want to be precise about why.
06:26Because the reason is not the one people expect.
06:29It is not that the June photographs showed the Americans where the Japanese defenses were.
06:34In June of 1944, there were barely any defenses to show.
06:38Saipan had not yet fallen.
06:40Kuribayashi had been on the island exactly one week.
06:43The serious fortification of Iwo Jima had not started.
06:46What those photographs captured was an almost empty island.
06:51Every ridge.
06:52Every gully.
06:54Every stretch of black sand.
06:55The shape of the terraces above the beaches.
06:58The exact rise of Suribachi at the southern tip.
07:01All of it recorded before a single one of Kuribayashi's engineers had put a shovel in the ground.
07:07One Marine officer who worked that problem, Colonel G.A. Roll,
07:11later wrote to the Commandant that the Navy photography over Iwo Jima during those June strikes
07:16was never bettered by anything flown afterward.
07:20He meant it as a technical compliment.
07:22It was actually something much larger.
07:25Because an accurate picture of an island with nothing on it is a baseline.
07:30And a baseline is a weapon.
07:33Understand what a baseline lets you do.
07:35From that day forward, an American, looking at a new photograph of Iwo Jima,
07:40did not have to identify what he was seeing.
07:42He only had to notice what had appeared since June.
07:46Every mound that had not been there.
07:48Every scar in the ash.
07:51Every patch of ground where the shadows fell differently than they used to.
07:56Kuribayashi was about to build the most sophisticated concealment scheme in the Pacific War.
08:01And the Americans had a photograph of the island from before he built it.
08:06Now watch his answer.
08:08Because he had one.
08:10Through the second half of 1944,
08:12on an island where the ground in places is too hot to sit on,
08:16where the air in the tunnels carry sulfur and there is no water you can drink.
08:21Japanese soldiers dug.
08:23Mining engineers had come from Japan with blueprints.
08:26The tunnels ran at varying levels, ventilated,
08:30deliberately laid out so a shell bursting in one entrance would not kill the men in the next chamber.
08:36Inside Tsuribachi, they hollowed out a structure that eventually ran seven stories deep.
08:42Across the island, they cut something on the order of ten miles of tunnel and thousands of cave mouths.
08:48Every yard of it was a message to the camera.
08:52You cannot see me.
08:53And here is the move that tells you how good this man was.
08:58Kuribayashi left some of his trenches out in the open, uncovered,
09:02exactly where an American photo interpreter would find them and mark them down.
09:07He was not being careless.
09:09He was feeding them.
09:11So now you have a race.
09:13And it runs for eight months.
09:15One side is putting its army underground.
09:18The other side is flying over that ground and comparing it to a photograph of what used to be there.
09:25The American effort was relentless.
09:28During the planning phase for the operation, 371 photographic sorties were flown over Iwo Jima.
09:36Navy Photographic Squadrons 4 and 5 and the 28th Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron of the Army Air Forces carried most of
09:44that load.
09:45And every bombing mission added its own strike photographs on the way through.
09:50Starting on December 8th, 7th Air Force Liberators hit the Volcano and Bonin Islands for 74 consecutive days.
09:5974 days without a break.
10:03Think about what that actually means on the receiving end.
10:07It means that for two and a half months, every single day,
10:10Kuribayashi's men were being bombed by aircraft that were also taking their picture.
10:16In early December, something stranger happened.
10:19The submarine's spearfish came in close to the coast of Iwo Jima and hung there while her commander watched Japanese
10:25troops through the periscope.
10:27He wrote down what he saw.
10:29Photographs were taken through the scope, and the whole package was circulated widely through the invasion force.
10:35A submarine skipper's eyeball, 300 feet off a hostile beach, checking whether the pictures from 20,000 feet were telling
10:42the truth.
10:43Which brings us to a room on Guam in the last days of January 1945.
10:49Photo interpretation officers came in from everywhere.
10:52From Fleet Marine Force Pacific.
10:54From the 5th Amphibious Corps.
10:56From the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions.
10:59From the Joint Expeditionary Force.
11:01From Amphibious Group 2.
11:03Every unit that would fight on Iwo Jima or support the men who did, sitting in the same room, working
11:10the same photographs,
11:10they were there to do one thing.
11:13Produce a single, joint-enemy installation map.
11:17So that every organization making or supporting the assault would be looking at exactly the same island.
11:24Not the Navy's Iwo Jima and the Marines' Iwo Jima.
11:28One Iwo Jima.
11:30When the last excellent photographs arrived, covering the 2nd through the 10th of February, they finished it.
11:38That map is the answer to how a Marine in Hawaii could climb a hill that stood in for Suribachi.
11:45Remember it. It comes back.
11:48But finishing the map meant somebody had to count what was on it.
11:52On February 13th, a comparison went out to commanders showing how the island had changed since December 3rd.
12:00The Marines read that page.
12:02Then they went to the Navy with a request that was refused four separate times.
12:07Here is the page that went out to commanders on February 13th.
12:11And I want you to read it the way they read it.
12:13Because at first glance, it looks almost reassuring.
12:16Since the 3rd of December, the number of Japanese machine gun positions the interpreters could find on Iwo Jima had
12:22gone down.
12:24352, then 292.
12:27Open artillery positions had collapsed from 40 to 5.
12:32Anti-tank and anti-boat guns from 18 to 3.
12:36If you stopped reading there, you would think the 74 days of bombing were working.
12:41Now the other column.
12:44Coast defense guns had doubled.
12:46Covered artillery positions had gone from 39 to 67.
12:51Automatic anti-aircraft had climbed from 151 to 203.
12:56And dual-purpose guns, the heavy weapons that could kill an aircraft or a landing craft equally well, had gone
13:04from 16 to 42.
13:06That is an increase of 162% on an island that had been bombed every day for two and a
13:14half months.
13:15The Corps intelligence officer wrote down what that combination actually meant.
13:19And it is one of the coldest sentences in the whole file.
13:23The apparent reduction in machine guns, he said, may simply be offset by the heavy increase in blockhouses and pillboxes.
13:32The blockhouses could hold fixed artillery.
13:35Many were built so that mobile guns could be wheeled inside.
13:39Each pillbox could mount one or more machine guns.
13:43Read that again.
13:44The guns were not disappearing.
13:46They were going indoors.
13:49Total installations counted.
13:52642.
13:53Of those, 724 targets in the two highest priority categories were assigned to the ships that would shoot at them.
14:01And that number is larger than the first because some positions carried more than one target.
14:08642 positions on eight square miles, waiting for 80,000 Marines.
14:14So, Major General Harry Schmidt did the arithmetic and asked the Navy for time.
14:19His first request was for ten days of naval bombardment before the landing, by three battleships and a cruiser division.
14:26Refused.
14:27He came back and asked for nine.
14:30Refused.
14:31He gave ground and asked for four.
14:34One more day than the Navy intended to give him.
14:37Refused again.
14:39On his fourth attempt, he stopped asking for days.
14:43He asked instead that if there were only going to be three,
14:46the shells be concentrated on and beside the landing beaches, rather than spread across the island.
14:52Holland Smith backed every one of those four letters.
14:56Admiral Turner and Admiral Spruance held to the original plan.
15:00The Navy's reasons were not stupid, and you should hear them.
15:03The bombardment had to start in step with Mitcher's carrier strike on Tokyo,
15:07to keep Japanese aircraft looking the wrong way.
15:11Ships were scarce, and ammunition could not easily be replaced that far forward.
15:16Every extra day off a hostile coast was another day for enemy submarines and aircraft to find the fleet.
15:23And the airmen had already worked the island over for 74 days.
15:28Three days.
15:30642 positions.
15:32That was the arrangement.
15:34The first day, February 16th, was very nearly wasted.
15:38Firing opened at 8 in the morning behind the minesweepers, at long range.
15:42And then the weather closed down.
15:44The rule was that ships could shoot only at targets they could identify,
15:48an impact they could observe from the air.
15:50And the ceiling was so low that spotters could see almost nothing.
15:54Where the sky did open, anti-aircraft fire drove the observation planes above 3,000 feet.
16:01At the end of the day, damage to the enemy installations appeared negligible.
16:05The 17th was clear.
16:07It was also the day Kuribayashi made his only mistake.
16:12At 20 minutes to 9, a Japanese shell hit the battleship Tennessee.
16:16An hour later, the cruiser Pensacola took several direct hits and near misses.
16:22115 casualties.
16:2417 men killed.
16:26And among the dead was the ship's executive officer.
16:30At a quarter to 11, the swimmers went in.
16:33The underwater demolition teams had a job on the eastern beaches.
16:36Check the surf.
16:38Check the gradient.
16:39Find obstacles.
16:41Blow anything they found.
16:43Twelve small gunboats came in to 1,000 yards to cover them,
16:47throwing rockets and 40mm fire at the shoreline.
16:50And the swimmers went about it, in the words of the report,
16:54in a business-as-usual manner, under heavier mortar and small arms fire
16:58than any of them had ever worked in before.
17:02Some of them crawled out of the water onto the beach.
17:05Not to fight.
17:06To fill bags with sand.
17:09Hold that image, because we will come back to it, and it will not be comfortable.
17:15Men lying on black volcanic ash under mortar fire,
17:19scooping that ash into containers so it could be examined aboard ship.
17:24Then, at about 11 o'clock, the island did something that eight months of photography had never made it do.
17:31The Japanese gunners looked at twelve gunboats, close in, firing rockets, with swimmers in the water,
17:40and concluded that this was the invasion.
17:43And they opened up.
17:46With mortars, and with heavy fixed artillery that had never been seen before,
17:51from positions no interpreter had ever marked.
17:55In 45 minutes, nine of the twelve gunboats were knocked out of action.
18:01That was the price.
18:03And it bought something.
18:05Because the old battleship Nevada was standing right there,
18:08and she turned her 14-inch guns onto batteries that had just told her exactly where they lived,
18:13and kept firing until twenty to one.
18:17That afternoon, the 5th Amphibious Corps Naval Gunfire Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Donald Weller,
18:24made a recommendation based on what those gunboats had just paid for.
18:28Admiral Blandy approved it immediately.
18:31It changed where the last day of shells would fall.
18:34Weller's recommendation was simple, and it was brutal in its logic.
18:37If the Navy would not give the Marines more days, then the last day should stop being spread across eight
18:43square miles,
18:44and start falling on the ground where men would actually be walking.
18:49Blandy approved it on the spot.
18:51And on the morning of February 18th, the shooting changed character completely.
18:57Four battleships and a heavy cruiser closed to 2,500 yards,
19:01and put their entire armament, 5-inch, 8-inch, and 14-inch, into a blanket over the landing areas.
19:09Ships were told they could fire off every round they had, holding back only what they needed for D-Day.
19:16And Blandy gave two specific orders that morning, and I want you to notice where they point.
19:22The batteries at the foot of Mount Suribachi were to be positively destroyed.
19:28And so were the coast defense guns, emplaced on the rim of a quarry,
19:32about 400 yards inland, north of the East Boat Basin.
19:37Look at those two places on a map, and you are looking at the two ends of the landing beach.
19:42Suribachi anchors the left. The quarry cliffs dominate the right.
19:47Every Marine coming ashore would be walking into a corridor between them.
19:52The Tennessee took Suribachi.
19:54She fired salvo after salvo into those positions for four and three-quarter hours, 333 rounds.
20:03The Idaho worked alongside her and put out 280.
20:07That is a battleship spending most of a working day on one hillside.
20:11By evening it was over, and Admiral Blandy sent his assessment to Admiral Turner.
20:17He said the weather had not let his ships spend their full allowance of ammunition,
20:21and that more installations could be found and destroyed with one more day.
20:26Then he said the landing could go ahead tomorrow, if necessary.
20:30Turner ordered the plan executed without modification.
20:34D-Day for Iwo Jima remained the 19th of February.
20:38At half past nine that night, one more thing happened that almost nobody tells you about.
20:44A low-flying Japanese aircraft put a single bomb into the transport blessman.
20:50It struck the troop space above the forward fire room.
20:54On board were the men of Underwater Demolition Team 15, the swimmers who had gone into those beaches the day
21:01before.
21:03Two of them were killed, and twenty were wounded, along with eleven of the ship's crew.
21:09The men who had crawled onto the black sand under mortar fire and lived were hit in their bunks the
21:15night before the invasion.
21:17Now, that's sand. Remember I told you to hold onto it?
21:22The swimmers had done their job and reported honestly.
21:26Beach and surf conditions were suitable for a landing.
21:29There were no obstacles in the water or on the shore, and the single mine they found was destroyed.
21:35It was accurate, as far as anyone could tell, from a bag of samples on a ship's deck.
21:41But the beach diagrams the planners had been working from went back to photographs taken the previous July.
21:47And those diagrams described the volcanic sand of Iwo Jima with a word that would haunt the 4th and 5th
21:53Marine Divisions.
21:55Firm.
21:56Firm enough, they said, for the movement of vehicles.
22:00That is the first crack in the picture, and I want to be exact about where the crack runs.
22:05Not in the count of the guns.
22:07In the ground itself.
22:09At 20 minutes to 7 on the morning of February 19th, the big guns opened again.
22:15And this time, the Washington and the North Carolina were there, with 16-inch rifles.
22:21Five minutes later, the rocket ships began firing.
22:24For the next hour and a half, the heavy support ships worked the coast defense and anti-aircraft positions to
22:31cover the transports as they moved in and the men went down the nets.
22:35Between 5 minutes past 8 and 25 past, 120 aircraft from Mitcher's carriers came in low over the landing beaches.
22:44When they cleared, the naval guns picked up again, and something new was tried.
22:48A rolling barrage.
22:50Five-inch batteries walking their fire inland ahead of the troops, keeping a 400-yard margin in front of the
22:57leading marines, lifting according to the best estimate of how fast the men were advancing.
23:02At 9 o'clock, 68 armored amphibians of the first wave crossed the line of departure and headed for Iwo
23:09Jima.
23:10And the island said nothing.
23:12There was some fire, scattered, nothing organized.
23:15The first wave got ashore.
23:17The second, third, and fourth waves came in behind them and got ashore too.
23:22Men who had rehearsed for months against a hillside in Hawaii walked up onto black sand in the middle of
23:28the heaviest preparation of the Pacific War, and the thought went through the ranks like a current.
23:34Maybe it worked.
23:35Maybe there is nobody left.
23:37Maybe the whole thing has been blown flat.
23:40Two things happened next, almost together, and only one of them was a Japanese decision.
23:45The first was the sand.
23:48The amphibian tractors hit those terraces above the waterline.
23:51Eight to fifteen feet of loose volcanic ash rising in steps, and could not climb them.
23:58Men sank to their ankles and then their calves.
24:01Wheels dug in and stopped.
24:03Within minutes, the beach was filling with troops and machines that could not get off it.
24:08The second belonged to Kuribayashi, and he had been waiting eight months for exactly this.
24:14But on the far left of the core, on Green Beach, under the shadow of Suribachi, a corporal from Dayton,
24:21Ohio, was already moving inland.
24:23He had been a toolmaker before the war.
24:25He had thrown away his boots and his helmet, and he was carrying a weapon that did not officially exist.
24:32Kuribayashi's order had been to hold fire.
24:34Let them land.
24:36Let them stack up.
24:37Let the beach fill with men and vehicles until it is solid.
24:41And then, open every weapon on the island at once.
24:46That is what happened, roughly an hour after the first wave touched the sand.
24:51Mortars came down on ground that had nowhere to disperse to.
24:55Machine guns opened an enfilade along the terraces.
24:58And from the two ends of the corridor, from the slopes of Suribachi on the left, and from the quarry
25:03cliffs on the right,
25:04the exact two places Admiral Blandy had ordered positively destroyed,
25:09artillery began working the beach from behind and above.
25:13Some of those positions had been killed by the Tennessee and the Idaho.
25:17Not all of them.
25:18That is the whole difference between a map and a result.
25:23Now I want to slow down and put you next to one man,
25:26because everything this video has been building toward is visible in about 90 minutes of his life.
25:32Corporal Tony Stein, Company A, 1st Battalion, 28th Marines.
25:3823 years old.
25:40From Dayton, Ohio.
25:41A tool and die maker before the war, and a paratrooper before he was a rifleman.
25:47On Bougainville, he had shot five snipers in a day.
25:51In Hawaii, he had built himself a weapon out of a wrecked Navy fighter.
25:55The aircraft machine gun stripped out of it, cut down, fitted with a trigger and a sight,
26:01capable of over 1,300 rounds a minute.
26:04He called it the Stinger.
26:07He came ashore on Green Beach, and he was the first man of his unit in position.
26:12Then he did something that sounds like madness, and is actually a technique.
26:16He stood up, upright, in the open, waving, so that the Japanese guns would fire at him.
26:24Because a gun that fires reveals a firing port, and a firing port reveals a pillbox.
26:30He got them to shoot.
26:32He marked where the flashes came from.
26:34And then he went at them, alone, one after another, with the Stinger, and killed more than 20 men.
26:43The Stinger ate ammunition at a rate no man could carry.
26:47So he went back to the beach.
26:49Eight times.
26:51Under fire, across that ash, eight round trips.
26:56And every single time he came back, he brought a wounded Marine out with him.
27:01He had already thrown away his boots and his helmet, because they slowed him down.
27:06Twice, enemy fire knocked a weapon out of his hands.
27:09Twice, he picked it up and kept going.
27:13Here is why I put you next to him, instead of just telling you the beach was bad.
27:18Tony Stein was not wandering through unknown country, looking for trouble.
27:22The ground in front of him had been photographed, interpreted, numbered, and drawn onto the joint-enemy installation map that
27:29came out of that room on Guam.
27:32His officers knew there were fortified positions in that zone, roughly where they were.
27:37And his regiment had spent weeks in Hawaii practicing this exact movement across this exact shape of ground.
27:44The map told him where.
27:47It could not tell him that they would still be alive.
27:50That is the whole equation of the first day.
27:53And it cuts both ways.
27:54The intelligence system delivered a Marine to the correct doorstep with the correct plan.
28:00Three days of naval gunfire failed to make the door safe to open.
28:04So a toolmaker from Ohio opened it by hand.
28:08And now, watch the rehearsal pay.
28:11Colonel Harry Liversedge's mission was not Suribachi itself.
28:15It was the neck.
28:16The 28th Marines had to cross the narrowest part of Iwo Jima, from the eastern beaches to the western shore,
28:23and cut the mountain off from the rest of the island.
28:26The identical maneuver those battalions had walked, over and over, on a piece of Hawaii marked off to represent this
28:34ground.
28:35The distance was about 700 yards.
28:38Under that fire, 700 yards is a country.
28:42They did it by about half past ten in the morning.
28:45Men with flamethrowers and satchel charges went at the pillboxes at the base of the mountain the way they had
28:51trained to.
28:51One team, fixing the position.
28:54Another, coming in from the flank.
28:55Fire and demolition.
28:57Then move.
28:58Charles Lindbergh, a flamethrower operator with Easy Company of the 2nd Battalion, was working that line.
29:05Ninety minutes after the mountain began killing them, the Suribachi garrison was cut off from the rest of the island.
29:11That is what training on the enemy's own layout buys you.
29:14Not safety.
29:15Speed.
29:16The men on the left flank did not have to spend the morning discovering what shape the island was.
29:22Meanwhile, on the far right of the Corps, Colonel John Lanigan's 25th Marines were pushing toward those quarry cliffs,
29:29and there the same map produced a very different day.
29:32The high ground on that flank overlooked everything, and it had been reinforced and dug and re-dug all winter.
29:39The regiment took casualties on a scale that would gut it.
29:44Same intelligence.
29:46Same photographs.
29:47Same map.
29:49Two ends of one beach.
29:52And two entirely different wars.
29:56Before the sun went down on the 19th of February, the Americans had learned several things about Iwo Jima that
30:03no photograph had ever shown them.
30:04But the largest thing they had wrong was not a gun position, not a trench line, and not the sand.
30:13It was a man.
30:15Every intelligence estimate the Marines carried ashore that morning said that Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi
30:22was directing the defense of the Volcano Islands from his headquarters on Chichijima.
30:27And that Iwo Jima was being run by somebody else.
30:30He was not on Chichijima.
30:33He was under their feet.
30:35On the morning of February 23rd, four days after the landing,
30:39Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson looked up at Mount Suribachi
30:43and decided to find out whether anyone was still shooting from the top.
30:47He sent a patrol, about 40 men under Lieutenant Harold Schreier,
30:52with an American flag from one of the transports,
30:54and told them that if they got up there, they should put it where it could be seen.
30:59Charles Lindbergh went up that morning with a flamethrower on his back, burning out caves along the way.
31:06They reached the rim and found the crater largely quiet.
31:09They tied the flag to a length of Japanese iron water pipe they found lying on the summit,
31:14and at about half past ten in the morning, they raised it.
31:19Down on the beaches, men who had been pinned there for four days stood up and shouted.
31:25Ships blew their whistles.
31:27A few hours later, a second, larger flag went up,
31:31and a photographer named Joe Rosenthal took the picture that would outlive everyone in it.
31:37Four days.
31:39Hold that number, because it is the answer to the question in the title of this video,
31:43and it is not the answer people expect.
31:46Mount Suribachi was not weak.
31:48It contained a fortified structure that eventually ran seven stories into the rock.
31:53The Japanese had spent months on it.
31:55And it was taken, from a standing start on a beach, in four days.
32:00Why?
32:01Because Suribachi was the part of Iwo Jima the Americans could see.
32:05It stood at the southern tip.
32:07It had been photographed empty in June of 1944.
32:11It had been photographed again and again through the autumn,
32:14so that every new mound and every new shadow could be compared against that first clean picture.
32:19Its guns were on the joint enemy installation map.
32:22Two battleships spent most of a day firing into the foot of it on direct orders.
32:27And an entire marine regiment had walked the shape of that ground on a hillside in Hawaii until the maneuver
32:33was in their legs.
32:34The system worked.
32:36On the southern third of the island, it worked exactly as designed.
32:41Now turn around and look north, because that is where this story changes.
32:47The Marines still had two-thirds of an island in front of them.
32:50The plateau, the ridges, the gorges.
32:53And they were about to spend 32 more days on it.
32:57And the intelligence picture that had carried them so precisely onto the beach began to come apart in their hands.
33:05Here is the sentence that tells you how badly.
33:09Senior American intelligence officers did not realize until the 27th of February, the ninth day of the battle,
33:16that Kuribayashi was actually on Iwo Jima.
33:21They also did not know, until that same week, that they were fighting roughly half again as many men as
33:27their estimate had allowed for.
33:2913,000 had been the figure.
33:32The real number was closer to 21,000.
33:37Now, I want to be fair here, because it is easy to sneer at an intelligence estimate from 70 years'
33:43distance.
33:44The organization behind that estimate was not casual.
33:47The Joint Intelligence Center supporting the Pacific Ocean areas employed a staff of 1,767 Army, Navy, and Marine specialists,
33:59working photographs, prisoner interrogations, captured documents, and intercepted enemy communications.
34:07It was one of the most sophisticated intelligence machines any nation had ever built.
34:12And it got the number of defenders wrong by 8,000 men.
34:18The reasons are worth understanding, because each one is a limit on what the whole system could physically do.
34:25The troop estimate leaned heavily on documents captured on Saipan in June of 1944.
34:32Those documents were excellent, and they described the volcano islands before the reinforcement of Iwo Jima had really begun.
34:39Every battalion that arrived afterward arrived into a blind spot.
34:46A photograph counts concrete. It does not count men.
34:50You can photograph a blockhouse from 20,000 feet.
34:54You cannot photograph how many soldiers are sleeping four levels beneath it.
34:58And in late January, just as the February photographs began showing that dramatic increase in installations,
35:06the center lost experienced photo interpreters to a Navy personnel rotation policy.
35:12The most demanding photographs of the entire campaign arrived on the desks of people with the least time to work
35:19them.
35:20So stand back and look at the shape of the thing.
35:24Because this is the real answer.
35:27The American system was not a machine for seeing.
35:31It was a machine for seeing change.
35:34Give it a clean picture of an island in June, and a new picture in February,
35:39and it will tell you with remarkable precision everything a man has built on the surface of that island in
35:46between.
35:47Kuribayashi understood that.
35:49It is why he stopped building on the surface.
35:52He did not out-hide the cameras in the south, and he lost the south in four days.
35:59In the north, he built a fortress with almost no outside.
36:03Guns wheeled into blockhouses, artillery below ground, ten miles of tunnel, thousands of cave mouths,
36:11positions with no silhouette to compare against anything.
36:14The Marines had trained on his layout.
36:17What they had not trained on, because nobody on earth had a picture of it, was the layout under his
36:23layout.
36:24And that is where the 5th Division discovered something that would decide the rest of the battle.
36:29The thing that finally let Americans fight an enemy they could not see was not a photograph,
36:35and it did not come from a room on Guam.
36:38It came from the front line, and it worked in a way the Japanese never adapted to.
36:44Imagine you are a 20-year-old Marine on the 1st of March, 1945, looking north across the Motoyama Plateau.
36:51There is nothing there. Broken rock, ash, a few ridges, some scrub.
36:57No trench line, no wire, no visible enemy.
37:01The overlay in your platoon leader's pocket, the one built from 371 photo sorties,
37:07and finished on Guam three weeks ago, shows very little in this sector.
37:12And for once, the overlay is telling the truth.
37:14There genuinely is very little here. Everything is underneath.
37:20And it gets worse.
37:22For the first week of the drive north, the Japanese on Iwo Jima actually had the Marines outgunned.
37:29Kuribayashi's 150mm howitzers and 120mm mortars were better than most of what the landing force had brought ashore,
37:36and they were firing from inside the rock, from positions that showed nothing when they were not shooting.
37:43So how do you fight that?
37:45The answer the Marines arrived at is the second half of this story,
37:49and it is the opposite of everything you have heard so far.
37:53No cameras, no interpreters, no baseline photograph from the previous summer.
38:00They stopped trying to find the enemy from a distance, and built a machine for making him come out.
38:06The core of that machine was eight tanks.
38:10Eight M4A3 Shermans with a Navy Mark I flamethrower where the main gun should have been.
38:16The Marines called them Zippos.
38:19They had come ashore on D-Day and gone into action on the 21st of February, cautiously at first,
38:25and by March, they were the most valuable weapons on the island.
38:29That is not my judgment. That is the official Marine Corps assessment.
38:34Here is why.
38:36A cave mouth or a blockhouse embrasure is a hole.
38:41Shells bounce off the concrete around it or explode outside it.
38:46Flame does not care about the concrete.
38:49Flame goes in the hole, and it goes around corners, and it consumes the air.
38:55On Iwo Jima, the Americans burned roughly 10,000 gallons of flame fuel every single day.
39:02Over 36 days, something near 360,000 gallons went into that island.
39:08Roughly a third of all the Japanese killed on Iwo Jima were killed by flame.
39:14But eight tanks cannot walk into a gorge alone.
39:17And this is where the human price of the answer becomes very clear.
39:21The assault teams went with them.
39:23A man with a portable flamethrower, four and a half gallons on his back, seven to nine seconds of fuel
39:29if he held the trigger down,
39:31had to get within 20 or 30 yards of a firing port to use it.
39:35When he released the pressure, the hiss told every Japanese soldier nearby exactly where he was standing.
39:42In one battalion, the portable flame unit took 92% casualties.
39:4892 out of 100.
39:50There were so few trained operators left that other men had to pick up the tanks and learn on the
39:55job.
39:57Now watch what this actually produced, because it is not only a weapon, it is an intelligence system.
40:03Every position those teams burned out was a position that had never been on any map.
40:08And each one got reported, passed back through the platoon, the company, the battalion, marked, added, and sent forward again
40:16to the units on either flank.
40:17The Americans were rebuilding the enemy installation map of northern Iwo Jima in real time, at walking pace, in contact,
40:26one cave at a time.
40:27That is why the speed of the radio mattered so much.
40:31Major Howard Connor, the 5th Division signal officer, had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock through the first
40:38two days.
40:39Those six men sent and received more than 800 messages without a single error.
40:45Connor said afterward that without the Navajos, the Marines would not have taken Iwo Jima.
40:51So here, finally, is the whole answer to the question this video started with.
40:56The Marines trained on the Japanese layout, and Kuribayashi never knew it, and it did not make the battle easy.
41:04What it did was decide the southern third of the island in four days.
41:08The beachhead, the mountain, the first airfield.
41:13Everything the camera could see, the Americans took at the speed of a rehearsal.
41:18Everything the camera could not see, they had to buy back with men, one hole in the ground at a
41:23time.
41:25And the reason they could do that, is that the same institution which put a joint enemy installation map together
41:31in a room on Guam,
41:32could also rebuild that map in the ash, at squad level, faster than a general with 10 miles of tunnel
41:39could redesign his defense.
41:43Kuribayashi had built the perfect answer to a photograph.
41:46He had no answer at all to a flame tank and a rifle squad that reported what they found.
41:52And his discipline held almost to the end.
41:56He would not spend his men on the great screaming Banzai charges that had thrown away Japanese garrisons everywhere else
42:02in the Pacific,
42:04because those charges gave Americans what Americans wanted most, which was a target in the open.
42:10His counterattacks were small, deliberate, preceded by artillery, aimed at limited objectives.
42:17Almost to the end.
42:19On the night of the 8th of March, one of his generals, Sadasu Senda, boxed in by the 4th Marine
42:25Division and out of options,
42:28took 800 surviving men and came out of the ground into the open.
42:32For the first time in 18 days, the Marines could see the enemy without digging for him.
42:39And on the 26th of March, after the island had been declared secured,
42:43several hundred more came out in the dark and walked toward a camp full of sleeping pilots and sea bees.
42:49They came out at night on the 26th of March, in the last hours of the battle.
42:54About 300 of them, moving quietly through the dark toward a bivouac area,
42:58where pilots, sea bees, and shore party men were sleeping.
43:03Many of them had no idea the enemy was still on the island.
43:07A lieutenant of the 5th Pioneer Battalion, named Harry Martin,
43:11pulled together whatever men he could find, organized a line, and stopped them.
43:15He was killed doing it.
43:17His was the 27th Medal of Honor awarded for Iwo Jima,
43:21more than any other single operation in American history.
43:2636 Days
43:27More than 26,000 American casualties, including about 6,800 dead.
43:34Of roughly 20,000 Japanese defenders, 1,083 were still alive at the end.
43:41Kuribayashi's body was never found, and it is not there to be found.
43:45The island is a mass grave, and around 12,000 Japanese soldiers are still inside it.
43:51In the last weeks, in a hole under that island, Kuribayashi wrote letters home.
43:57Not to Tokyo.
43:58To his wife and his children.
44:01About ordinary things.
44:02About the kitchen floor in their house, and what they should do without him.
44:07Now let me tell you what happened to the men in this story.
44:10Tony Stein, the toolmaker from Dayton with the homemade machine gun, was wounded in the fight for Suribachi,
44:17and taken off to a hospital ship.
44:19He went back to his company.
44:21On the 1st of March, leading a patrol against the ridges in the north, he was killed.
44:27He was 23.
44:29He is buried in Calvary Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio, and the Medal of Honor his officers recommended was awarded to
44:36his family.
44:37Chandler Johnson, the battalion commander who sent the patrol up the mountain with a flag,
44:42was killed by a shell in the drive north, less than two weeks after he gave that order.
44:49Charles Lindbergh, the flamethrower operator who burned out caves on the way up Suribachi
44:53and helped raise that first flag, came home.
44:57He spent much of the rest of his life explaining to people that there had been two flags,
45:01and that he had been part of the first one.
45:04And that the men in the famous photograph were not the men who took the mountain.
45:08He lived until 2007.
45:11And the island did what it had been bought for.
45:14Beginning in March of 1945, crippled B-29s coming back from Japan
45:18started putting down on those airstrips instead of ditching in the Pacific.
45:23By the end of the war, more than 2,200 of those bombers had landed on Iwo Jima.
45:28The crews aboard them numbered around 24,000 men, young men from Ohio and Kansas,
45:35who never knew the names of the Marines who bought them that runway.
45:39In March, the survivors of the 5th Marine Division sailed back to Hawaii.
45:44They went up the road they knew, past the sugar cane, into the wind, and back to Camp Tarawa.
45:50The tents were still there.
45:52The wooden building with the blacked-out windows and the double locks was still there.
45:56So was the hill they had climbed every day for months, the one that stood in for Sudabachi,
46:02sitting quietly above the town of Waimea, with nobody shooting from the top of it.
46:07They rested there.
46:09They absorbed thousands of replacements, boys who had never heard a shot.
46:14And they began training again.
46:16Because the next island on the list was Japan itself.
46:19And nobody in that camp expected to survive it.
46:24It is still there today.
46:26You can drive past it.
46:28That hill is the answer to the question in the title of this video.
46:32And I want to give it plainly.
46:34The Japanese defenders never knew that American Marines had rehearsed against their layout.
46:39Because Kuribayashi had done everything a soldier can do to prevent it.
46:44He emptied the island of civilians.
46:47He put his army underground.
46:49He left decoy trenches in the open to feed the cameras.
46:53He designed a fortress with no outside.
46:56But he could not undo one afternoon in June of 1944, when American aircraft photographed Iwo Jima while it was
47:05still nearly empty, before he had built anything at all.
47:10Everything after that was subtraction.
47:13Every new picture was compared to that first clean one.
47:16And every mound that had not been there before went onto a map.
47:20And that map went to the men who would have to walk on it.
47:24You cannot hide a fortress from someone who has a photograph of the ground before you started building.
47:32That is why the southern third of Iwo Jima fell in four days.
47:36And it is why the rest of it took 32 more and cost what it cost.
47:41Because in the north, Kuribayashi finally found the one thing a camera cannot photograph.
47:47Which is the inside of a mountain.
47:51Thank you for staying with me through all of this.
47:54If this story meant something to you, please take a second to hit the like button.
47:59It genuinely does help this history reach more people.
48:02And the marines who took that island deserve to be remembered by more than one photograph.
48:07Subscribe and turn on the bell if you want more of it.
48:09Because there is a great deal more to tell.
48:12And I would like to hear from you in the comments.
48:15Where in the world are you watching from?
48:17And if your father, your grandfather, your uncle served in the Second World War,
48:23tell me his name and where he served.
48:25I read them.
48:27I hope others read them too.