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{"descriptions":["At Iwo Jima, 100 American swimmers in trunks and axle grease were sent toward a beach that had stayed silent under bombardment for a day and a half — until the hidden Japanese guns suddenly opened fire. The mission was not an assault landing, but a dangerous reconnaissance swim to measure depth, check for obstacles, and map the black volcanic sand before the Marines came in. What the teams found would change the final day of naval gunfire and reveal how carefully General Kuribayashi had built his defense around concealed batteries and range markers.\n\nThe story follows Lt. Joe Artman, the underwater demolition teams, and the small gunboat crews that moved in front of them as moving shields. When the guns finally exposed themselves, the ships took devastating hits, men were killed and wounded, and the Navy learned exactly where the strongest defenses were hidden. From the Pensacola to the rocket-firing landing craft and the later bombardment by Tennessee and Idaho, this is a detailed WWII military history story about Iwo Jima, naval reconnaissance, and the cost of seeing the battlefield first.\n\nA gripping WW2 story, military history narration, and documentary-style battlefield account for listeners who search for Iwo Jima history, Pacific War stories, naval warfare, Marine Corps history, and World War 2 stories. It also fits fans of calm historical narration, battlefield analysis, and long-form history listening with strong search intent around WWII documentaries and forgotten war stories.","Iwo Jima’s hidden guns were forced to reveal themselves when American swimmers, demolition men, and small gunboats moved in under fire to map the beach before the Marines landed. The transcript traces the tense hours of February 17–18, 1945, from Joe Artman’s swim and the discovery of the black volcanic shoreline to the devastating hits on the gunboats and the later bombardment that reshaped the assault plan. It is a tightly narrated military history account built around reconnaissance, naval gunfire, and the fight to understand a fortified Pacific island before the main landing force arrived.\n\nThis is also a story of battlefield intelligence: lead lines, tobacco sacks, range markers, and the decision to use tiny landing craft and rocket boats to cover swimmers while the fleet marked every exposed battery. The result was not a clean victory, but crucial information that helped the Marines reach the beach and showed how much depended on a single morning of observation under fire. The narration blends action, history, and tactical detail, making it a strong fit for listeners who enjoy WWII history, Pacific theater documentaries, and war stories told in a clear, immersive style.\n\nCreated for fans of World War 2 stories, Iwo Jima documentary content, military history narration, naval warfare analysis, and long-form history listening. If you search for Pacific War stories, Marine Corps history, forgotten WWII accounts, or battlefield reconnaissance stories, this episode delivers the kind of detailed war history that works for focused listening, background history study, and documentary-style discovery.","Before the Marines ever hit Iwo Jima’s shore, a small team of American swimmers was sent into the water to do the one thing photographs could not: see what the Japanese had hidden. What followed was a brutal hour of reconnaissance under fire, with demolition men measuring depth, checking the volcanic sand, and trying to identify obstacles while gunboats and battleships drew enemy fire away from them. The hidden batteries, carefully preserved by General Kuribayashi, finally revealed themselves — and the fleet answered with a devastating round of naval fire.\n\nThe video reconstructs the full sequence of that morning, including the Pensacola’s earlier damage, the rocket-firing landing craft, the losses aboard the gunboats, and the later decision to concentrate bombardment on the landing beaches themselves. It is a WWII history narrative that mixes action, tactical analysis, and human cost, showing how a seemingly small reconnaissance mission helped shape the assault on one of the most heavily fortified islands in the Pacific.\n\nIdeal for viewers and listeners looking for WWII stories, Iwo Jima history, military documentary narration, Pacific theater war stories, naval history, and Marine Corps battlefield accounts. This is the kind of long-form historical storytelling that works for history podcasts, documentary-style listening, and search terms like World War 2 stories, naval warfare history, and forgotten battles of the Pacific."]}
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LearningTranscript
00:00At 10.45 on the morning of February 17, 1945, 700 yards off the southeast shore of Iwo Jima,
00:08a 20-year-old ensign named Joe Artman sat on the gunwale of a small plywood landing boat,
00:14wearing swim trunks, a face mask, a pair of hard rubber fins, and a coat of axle grease.
00:20That was the uniform. No helmet, no rifle. A knife on a belt, a sheet of plexiglass with
00:28a pencil tied to it, and a lead weight on a line for measuring depth. The grease was for the
00:34cold.
00:35The water under him was around 60 degrees, and nobody had yet issued a swimmer anything better.
00:41Artman had boxed at 155 pounds for the University of Oklahoma. He belonged to underwater demolition
00:49team 12, and in a few minutes he was going to roll backward off that boat with his swim partner
00:54and start kicking toward a beach the United States Navy had been shelling since the previous morning.
01:01Now here is what he could see from the gunwale. Dead ahead, two miles of black sand, rising in
01:07terraces. On his left, close enough to feel like it was leaning over him, Mount Suribachi,
01:15550 feet of dead volcano. Far up the beach on his right, a gray cliff with an old rock quarry
01:22cut into
01:23its face. And between those two shoulders, nothing. No movement, no muzzle flash. A battery high on the
01:34northern cliffs had fired on the ships that morning, and I'll come back to what it did. But the beach
01:39itself, the place where some 30,000 marines were scheduled to come ashore in 48 hours, had not
01:46answered a single shell. Keep that quarry in mind. Keep the foot of that mountain in mind. On the
01:55intelligence map the fleet was working from, the quarry carried a short, careful note. Four possible
02:01anti-tank guns. That phrase is going to matter more than almost anything else in this story.
02:08Artman went over the side. So did roughly a hundred other men along the length of that beach.
02:15In pairs, each pair responsible for a strip of water 100 yards wide. They were all in the water by
02:22ten past eleven, and within minutes that silent shoreline came apart. Guns nobody had mapped opened
02:30from the foot of the mountain and from the face of the quarry. Heavy naval guns firing flat across
02:36the water at close range. Mortar rounds walked through the boat lanes. Artman said later that the
02:43sea was dead calm that morning, not a swell to hide behind. So he and the men around him went
02:48under,
02:49and stayed under, as long as their lungs allowed. He remembered bullets, spent by the water,
02:55sinking past him slowly enough to catch in his hands. So that's the picture. Men in bathing trunks,
03:03a few hundred yards from one of the most heavily fortified islands on earth. And the island chooses
03:09that moment, of all moments, to show its hand. Why? Japan's commander on Iwo Jima had spent eight
03:16months building a defense around one idea. Those guns must stay hidden until the beach was packed with
03:23marines. What happened in the next hour broke that idea. How it happened, who paid for it,
03:30and what the Navy did with what it learned, is the question we're going to follow all the way through.
03:36Before we go on, if you value careful history of what U.S. sailors and marines did in the Pacific,
03:42and what it cost them, please like this video and subscribe.
03:47To understand why that hour mattered, you have to understand the problem the fleet was sitting on.
03:54Iwo Jima is eight square miles. By February, American photo interpreters had plotted more than
04:00700 targets on it. Blockhouses, pillboxes, gun pits. The plan gave the bombardment ships three days to
04:09destroy them. On the first day, in rain and low cloud, they destroyed 17. Think about that ratio
04:17for a second. 17 out of more than 700, with a third of the time already gone. And those were
04:24only the
04:25targets somebody had found. Here is the part that kept gunnery officers awake. A gun dug into a cliff
04:32behind several feet of concrete with its firing slit covered looks like cliff. You can photograph it
04:39every day for a month and never see it. You can fly over it at 500 feet and never see
04:45it. You see it
04:47when it fires. And the gunners on Iwo Jima had been told not to fire. That order came from Lieutenant
04:54General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. He had studied what American battleships did to defenders who fought at the
05:01water line. And he had drawn the cold conclusion. Do not contest the approach. Do not answer the
05:08bombardment. Let them land. Let the beach fill with men and machines. Then open. It was working.
05:18For a day and a half, the heaviest ships in the Pacific had been firing at an island that mostly
05:22refused to fire back. And every hour of that silence was an hour in which the fleet learned nothing.
05:29There was a Marine on the Admiral's staff whose job was to worry about exactly this.
05:34Lieutenant Colonel Donald Weller, the Landing Force's naval gunfire officer. Remember the name.
05:41He had asked for more days of bombardment and been turned down. And by the evening of this day,
05:47he will be holding something he did not have that morning. Because here is where things stood at 1045.
05:54The most dangerous guns on the island, the ones sighted to fire straight down the boat lanes,
06:00were the ones the fleet knew least about. A battleship cannot hit what it cannot find.
06:06And in two days, Marines would ride into those lanes in thin-skinned tractors.
06:11So what made disciplined gunners, under a standing order, give themselves away?
06:17Here's the first thing to know. It wasn't the swimmers alone. Behind Artman, coming up slowly
06:23through the destroyer line, were 12 small ships that had never been built to fight anything.
06:28What they were, and what the men on that island believed they were, is where this turns.
06:34Go back two hours, to 935 that same morning, because the island had already given the fleet
06:39one warning. The heavy cruiser Pensacola was on her firing station off the northern end of Iwo Jima
06:46when a battery high on the cliff face opened on her. Six hits in quick succession. Her scout plane
06:53burned on its catapult. Her combat information center went dark. Compartments flooded, the sick
06:59bay among them. Seventeen men were killed, including her executive officer, and 98 were wounded.
07:06Pensacola pulled out, fought her fires, and then, and this tells you something about that crew,
07:12went back to her station and resumed firing. So every officer in the bombardment force now knew
07:18what a single hidden battery could do to 9,000 tons of armored cruiser. And the plan for 11 o
07:24'clock
07:24was to send men toward the beach wearing nothing. The man who owned that decision was Captain B.
07:30Hall Hanlon, commanding all four demolition teams from the fast transport Gilmer. His chief of staff
07:37was Commander Draper Kaufman. Neither of them called it off. The reason is simple, and it is the
07:44reason this whole mission existed. In 48 hours, the Marines were coming, and nobody could tell them
07:50whether there were mines in that water, whether there were steel obstacles under the surf, how steeply
07:55the bottom shelved, or whether that black sand would hold the weight of a vehicle. A photograph
08:00could not answer any of it. A man with a lead line and a tobacco sack could. On the Battleship
08:08Tennessee that morning, there was a civilian watching through binoculars. John P. Marquand,
08:13the novelist, traveling with the fleet as a correspondent. He saw the small open boats start in with their
08:19swimmers, crews in K-POC life jackets, and he asked the officer beside him why anyone would be sent in
08:25there like that. He wrote down the answer he got. Someone has to see. At 10.25, the heavy ships
08:33were
08:33ordered to open the range and clear the lanes. The destroyers closed to about 3,000 yards. And through
08:39the destroyer line, at a walking pace, came the 12 ships I told you about. On paper, they were LCI
08:47gunboats,
08:47Group 8, Flotilla 3. Here is what that meant to the men standing on them. 158 feet of flat-bottomed
08:56hull
08:56that rolled in any sea. Steel plating about a quarter of an inch thick. They had been designed
09:03for one job, to run 200 infantrymen up onto a beach, and they still had the long, low silhouette of
09:10a
09:11troop carrier. Somebody had since bolted on 40mm and 20mm guns and racks of 4.5-inch rockets.
09:19Marquand, watching them go by, described them as small vessels that had never been designed for
09:25heavy combat. Hold on to that silhouette. An infantry landing craft, seen bow on from a mile away,
09:32looks like an infantry landing craft, no matter what you have bolted to the deck. Seven of them
09:39formed a line abreast, covering the whole two-mile front. Five more hung back in reserve. Their
09:45orders were to close to about 1,000 yards, put their guns and rockets onto the beach, and keep
09:51every Japanese rifleman's head down while a hundred men swam in under them. One more detail,
09:57and I'd ask you to file it next to the silhouette. Demolition swimmers had worked beaches before,
10:04at Saipan, at Guam, at Pelelu. But this was the first time rocket gunboats had gone in with them
10:11ahead of a landing. Nobody on that island had ever seen what a reconnaissance looked like with rockets
10:17in it. On the bridge of Gunboat 449 stood Lieutenant Junior Grade Rufus Getty Herring, 23 years old,
10:25from Roseboro, North Carolina. He had fought through the Marshals and the Marianas as a junior officer.
10:32This was his first time taking a ship into action as her captain. His crew was about 70 men,
10:38and most of them were very young. Junior Hollowell was 18, from Tulsa, Oklahoma. His closest friend
10:45aboard was a steward's mate named Ralphel Johnson, the only black sailor in the crew, who served a 20-millimeter
10:52gun in action. Before the run-in, Hollowell buckled Johnson into the gun's shoulder harness himself.
10:59Another 18-year-old, Charles Hightower, from Russellville, Arkansas, tried years afterward to
11:05explain what it was like among those gun crews, and all he could find was this. You'd just die for
11:13them.
11:14At 10.20, the gunboats had turned toward the beach. By 10.45, Herring was looking up at Suribachi,
11:21and the thought that came to him, he said, was that it looked like a Japanese woodblock print.
11:27Quiet. Almost pretty. Up in the bow, a gunner's mate named Chuck Banco was calling the range off for
11:36his 40-millimeter crew. 1900 yards. 1800. 1700. Marquand had his glasses on them from the Tennessee.
11:46He noticed that the men at the gun tubs were standing absolutely still, like figures in a
11:51photograph, and he took it for calm. Later, one of those gunners set him straight. It was because
11:58we were scared to death. Commander Kaufman, by the way, was not watching from the Gilmer.
12:04He had gone aboard the center gunboat of the line, to be as close to his swimmers as a ship
12:09could get
12:09him. So picture the whole thing from above. A line of destroyers. Ahead of them, seven gunboats
12:17abreast, coming on slowly. Behind the gunboats, the little plywood boats with the swimmers,
12:22running into their drop points. And ahead of all of it, two miles of empty black sand.
12:29Somewhere around 1700 yards, Banco saw a shell strike the gunboat nearest to him,
12:35the 441. Smoke came out of her hull. Then the gunboats reached their line, and the first rockets
12:42left the racks. At 10.55, the first round found the 449. Rufus Herring had exactly four minutes left on
12:51his bridge. The first round hit the 449 near the bow, beside the ready ammunition locker for the forward
12:5740mm gun. It killed two men where they stood, blew two more over the side, and started a fire among
13:04the
13:04shells. That was 10.55. At 10.57, the second round landed between the two 40mm mounts just below the
13:13bridge. At 10.59, the third one took away the starboard side of the conning tower. The mast went
13:21over the side with the flag still on it. Most of the ship's officers were killed or mortally wounded
13:26in that instant. Rufus Herring was thrown off his bridge and down onto the gun deck, torn open at
13:32the shoulder. And the 449, with nobody conning her and her engines stopped, lay dead in the water less
13:39than a thousand yards off the beach. Three hits. Four minutes. Now leave Herring on that deck for a moment,
13:47because he isn't finished, and look down the rest of the line. The gunboat facing Red Beach 2,
13:53the 474, took 10 shells in about five minutes. Her guns were knocked out, four compartments flooded,
14:00and she had two holes at the waterline you could have walked through. The 450 took heavy shells through
14:07her forecastle and began to burn next to her forward magazine. The 473 lost her power, then her steering,
14:15then her engines. The 438 was holed at the waterline by something her captain judged to be a very large
14:22gun indeed, and started to list. On the group flagship, the 457, machine gun fire from the beach
14:31raked the decks and wrecked the rocket launchers. Seven gunboats had gone in. Within about 10 minutes,
14:38every one of them had been hit. Now I want to stop the clock and turn the whole scene around.
14:45Stand for one minute where the gunners on that island were standing. Not to tell their story,
14:52to understand what they did. You are behind a concrete slit at the foot of Suribachi,
14:57or in a casemate cut into that quarry face. You have a naval gun, something in the range of five
15:04to six
15:04inches. You have been under bombardment for a day and a half, and you have obeyed your order.
15:10You have not fired. Then the battleships pull back. That is what a fleet does just before a landing,
15:18to clear the lanes. Destroyers close in. And through them comes a line of landing craft.
15:25Infantry landing craft, the type that carries 200 soldiers each. Seven of them, evenly spaced across the
15:32entire landing front, bows toward you. Behind them, smaller boats, low in the water, coming on fast.
15:41And then the landing craft do the one thing American landing craft do in the last minutes before troops
15:46hit the sand. They fire rockets onto the beach. An officer on one of the reserve gunboats, Lieutenant
15:53Junior Grade Alvin Rosenblum, wrote in his report that the Japanese had probably fired on them,
15:59supposing them to be troop transports. A survivor of the 441 reached the same conclusion from the other
16:06end. The island held its fire, he said, right up until the rockets went. The Marine Corps' own history
16:14of the battle adopted that explanation, and added the detail I asked you to hold on to. It was the
16:20first time rockets had ever been used to cover swimmers before a landing. The men behind those
16:27slits had no way to know that this is what an American reconnaissance could look like. Here I
16:33have to be straight with you about the limits of the record. Almost nobody who manned those batteries
16:38survived the battle, and I have found no Japanese document that says who gave the word. What the American
16:45reports give us is what it looked like from seaward. And what it looked like was a garrison that believed
16:51the invasion had started. And there is one more piece of evidence, one the gunboat crews only
16:56understood afterward. There were small buoys floating off those beaches. Nobody had thought much about
17:03them. They were range markers. The Japanese gunners had surveyed that water in advance, yard by yard,
17:10for the morning the landing craft came. When the gunboats crossed the buoys, the batteries did not
17:16need to find the range. They already had it. Think about what that means. Those guns were not firing
17:23wildly at a surprise. They were executing the plan they had been built for, the plan Kuribayashi had spent
17:30eight months protecting. They were simply executing it, two days early, against seven small ships and a
17:37hundred swimmers, instead of against 30,000 marines. Which is a cold way of describing what it was like
17:44to be on the receiving end. Back to the 449. Ralph L. Johnson, strapped into the 20 millimeter gun his
17:52friend had buckled him into, had been hit in the face and the right arm. Junior Hollowell got to him.
17:58Johnson told him, I'm dying, Junior. He was right. He died there, on the deck. Below, in the radio room,
18:08Radioman Lawrence Paglia was dead at his set. Of roughly 70 men aboard, 20 were killed or dying, and 21
18:16more
18:17were wounded. And Herring came too. Bleeding heavily, unable to stand, he had himself propped up against a pile of
18:26empty
18:26shell cases so he could see over the deck. And from there, he started giving orders.
18:32Now here is the question the next few minutes turn on. Those gunboats were not pinned. They had engines,
18:40most of them, and open sea behind them. A quarter inch of steel against six inch naval guns is not
18:46a
18:47fight. And every captain on that line knew it. An officer who was out there that morning, Lieutenant
18:53Junior Grade Donald Murray, put it in five words. The fire from shore was unmerciful.
19:00They could have turned around. But a hundred men in swim trunks had just gone into the water between
19:06them and the beach. And the only thing standing between those swimmers and every rifle on that
19:12shoreline was the gunboat's fire. From the water, Joe Artman could see almost nothing of the fight behind
19:18him. A swimmer's world is about 18 inches high. What he had was the bottom, his partner, and the job.
19:26And the job was oddly quiet work. Each pair owned a strip 100 yards wide, from the drop point to
19:34the
19:34sand. You swam a line toward the beach, and every so often you stopped, let the lead weight run down
19:40to
19:40the bottom, read the depth off the knots in the cord, and wrote it on the plexiglass slate with a
19:45grease
19:46pencil. Then you looked. For steel rails set in concrete. For log cribs, wire, the horned shapes of
19:55mines. For coral heads that would tear the bottom out of a landing craft. Men had smeared gray-blue paint
20:03over their faces and shoulders, so that from the beach, a head would look like one more patch of chop.
20:09Except there was no chop. Artman said it more than once in later years. The sea that morning was flat.
20:17So the swimmers did the only thing left to them. They worked underwater, came up for one breath,
20:23and went down again. One of them described what the surface looked like when he did come up.
20:29Gunfire splashed all around us. Mortars and heavy shells, which doused us.
20:35There were marines out there too, which is easy to miss. Twenty-two men from the reconnaissance
20:40companies of the assault divisions had gone in with the teams, some carrying cameras, to photograph
20:46the ground their own regiments would have to cross. They rode the small boats along that shoreline with
20:52anti-boat guns bracketing them. Splashed to the left, splashed to the right.
20:57Now here is the detail that tells you the most about these men. Finding out how deep the water was
21:03would not have been enough. Somebody at headquarters needed to know about the sand.
21:09Iwo's beach is not sand as you and I know it. It is coarse volcanic cinder, and nobody could say
21:15whether a tank or a truck would climb it or sink in it. So each team carried small cloth tobacco
21:22sacks,
21:22and several swimmers, having reached the surf line under the muzzles of an alerted garrison,
21:28kept going. They crawled out of the water, onto the beach itself, in swim trunks, filled the sacks,
21:34and crawled back in. One of them summed it up later, about as flatly as a man can.
21:40We took a little fire doing that, but we got our samples and swam back out.
21:46That was possible for exactly one reason. The riflemen and machine gunners dug in behind
21:51that beach were not looking at swimmers. They were looking at the gunboats.
21:56So go back out to the line, because this is where the morning stops being an ambush,
22:01and becomes something else. By about five past eleven, the original seven were in pieces.
22:08The 473, without power or steering, had to be taken under tow. The flagship was flooding forward.
22:15The 438 was limping off at four knots with a list. The 450 was backing away with a fire beside
22:23her
22:23magazine. And the five gunboats in reserve, whose captains had just watched all of that happen through
22:28binoculars, came forward to take the empty places. The 466 went in to replace the 473.
22:35One of her officers was Ensign Thomas Lennox of New Orleans, commissioned only five months earlier.
22:41At 1112, she opened fire. At 1123, 1200 yards off the beach, three heavy shells hit her almost together.
22:50Two took out guns. The third destroyed the pilot house and cut every line of communication
22:56between the men conning the ship and the men steering her. They got her out by shouting,
23:02one sailor to the next, a chain of voices running from the conning tower down to the steering gear
23:07and the engine room. Lennox was hit in the arm and both legs. He sat down in a gun tub
23:14beside another
23:15sailor and, with what he had, helped work the shrapnel out of a wounded shipmate.
23:20There was a demolition man on that deck as well. Ensign Frank Jierke of Team 12,
23:25Artman's own team, had been riding a gunboat to spot fire for his swimmers. When that boat was knocked
23:31out, he moved to the 466 to keep doing it. A shell burst close aboard and smashed both his feet.
23:39He gave himself his own morphine. He lost both feet.
23:45And Draper Kaufman, the chief of staff who had chosen to ride the center gunboat.
23:50Within about 10 minutes, his ship was hit and in danger of sinking, so he crossed to a second gunboat.
23:56That one was hit too, and the radio man standing next to him was killed.
24:01He ended the morning on a destroyer, still trying to keep track of a hundred men in the water.
24:07The 471 took the place of the 438. The 469 relieved the flagship. Each of them was hit in turn.
24:16The official tally is short. Between 11 o'clock and 11.45, all 12 gunboats were hit. Nine were put
24:25out of action.
24:26On those 12 small ships, there were about 720 officers and men, and roughly one in four of them was
24:34killed or wounded in three quarters of an hour.
24:38Captain Hanlon, who commanded the swimmers, wrote afterward about how those crews had left the line.
24:45They held their stations, he said, until their guns were knocked out, or their fires were out of control, or
24:52their ships were sinking.
24:54So now you have the price, but you don't yet have what it bought, and that is the half of
25:00this story that almost never gets told.
25:03Because while the gunboats were being taken apart, other Americans were doing something very calm.
25:09On the destroyers, in the spotting tops of the battleships, in the observation planes circling overhead, men with binoculars and
25:18grid charts were watching the foot of Suribachi and the face of the quarry.
25:23And every time one of those hidden guns fired, somebody put a pencil mark on a map.
25:29One battleship captain had already decided he was not going to wait for tomorrow to use those marks.
25:35He had just been ordered to withdraw. The battleship was the Nevada.
25:39If the name stirs something, it should.
25:42She was the one battleship that got underway at Pearl Harbor, hit and burning, and had to be run aground
25:48to keep from sinking in the channel.
25:50Three years later, she was two miles off Iwo Jima, and her captain was a man named H. L. Grosskop,
25:57known through the fleet as Pop.
25:59When the gunboats began to burn, the heavy ships were under orders to stand clear of the swimmer's lanes.
26:05Grosskop had 14-inch guns, a clear view of muzzle flashes coming out of positions that had not existed on
26:12anyone's chart an hour earlier, and an order to withdraw.
26:16The Navy's own historians describe what he did next with a reference every sailor understands.
26:22He turned a blind eye to it, the way Nelson did at Copenhagen.
26:26Nevada stayed. She laid her main battery on the newly revealed guns and kept up that fire until 20 minutes
26:33to one.
26:34And while she was doing it, one of the wrecked gunboats came to her for help.
26:38The 441, with her steering damaged, six of her men dead and 27 wounded, tied up alongside the battleship and
26:47passed her casualties up the gray steel side.
26:51Now the swimmers.
26:52By about 10 to 12, they had what they came for, and they faced the part of the job every
26:57one of them liked least.
26:59Getting out.
27:01Here is how it was done.
27:02You did not climb into a stopped boat, because a stopped boat, 700 yards off that beach, was a dead
27:09boat.
27:10The swimmers strung themselves out in a line, treading water, about 25 yards apart.
27:16The pickup boat came down that line at full throttle, with a rubber raft lashed to its seaward side.
27:23A sailor knelt in the raft, holding out a loop of rubber hose.
27:27Each swimmer threw up an arm, hooked the loop at speed, and was flung into the raft like a fish.
27:33One of the sailors who did the snatching said it plainly.
27:37We hooked their arms and swung them aboard.
27:40To cover that, Captain Hanlon called for white phosphorus.
27:43Tennessee, Nevada, and Idaho dropped shells along the waterline until a wall of white smoke stood between the beach and
27:50the boats.
27:51The pickup started at 11.55.
27:54By 12.20, every swimmer who could be found was back aboard his ship.
27:58Before I give you the count, guess at it.
28:02A hundred men, in trunks, for an hour, under the guns that had just wrecked twelve warships.
28:10One swimmer did not come back.
28:13Carpenter's mate First Class Edward Anderson, of Team 12, was last seen in the water and was never found.
28:20In the boats, motor machinist's mate Frank Sumter was shot in the head and died of the wound.
28:26A handful more were hurt.
28:29That is the arithmetic of the morning.
28:31The men in swim trunks came home almost untouched, because the men in the gunboats had made themselves the target.
28:38Team 13's own history says it without decoration.
28:42Without that fire support, the team would probably not have been able to survive.
28:47So let's go and find the 449.
28:50When we left her, she was dead in the water inside a thousand yards, mast gone, her captain propped against
28:55a heap of shell cases.
28:57The one officer still on his feet was the engineering officer, Ensign Leo Bedell.
29:03He got hoses onto the fires and men onto the wounded.
29:07In the pilot house, the officer at the wheel was bleeding and in shock, and a boatswain's mate, second class,
29:13named Frank Blow, took the helm from him, got the engines answering, and rang up everything she had.
29:19About 12 knots.
29:22Herring's Medal of Honor citation describes the captain's own part.
29:26Unable to stand, he rallied his men to the aid of the wounded, and conned his crippled ship to safety.
29:33They had no radio, so a signalman named Arthur Lewis, whose legs were shredded and whose abdomen was torn open,
29:40had himself held up and spelled out a message by hand flags to the nearest gunboat.
29:45He did not have flags.
29:47He used dish rags from the galley.
29:50Urgent.
29:50Multiple casualties.
29:52The pharmacist's mate, Henry Buchman, had been knocked flat by one of the blasts.
29:57He got up and worked his way down that deck, man by man, alone.
30:03They made for the mine layer Terror, which was serving as a casualty ship, and the Terror's crew waved them
30:08off.
30:09Not out of coldness.
30:11The 449 still had her rockets in the racks, five dozen of them, armed, on a burning ship, and nobody
30:18was going to let her tie up alongside a vessel full of wounded.
30:21So her surviving crew lowered those rockets over the side on lines, one at a time, down to the seafloor.
30:28Then they were allowed in.
30:30About 90 minutes had passed since the first hit.
30:33Up the line, the 466 had come alongside the Tennessee.
30:38Marquand was at the rail.
30:39He wrote that there was blood on her main deck, washing back and forth as she rolled in the swell.
30:45Twenty-five wounded went up to the battleship in wire baskets.
30:49Four men from that gunboat were buried at sea before dark.
30:53And the 474?
30:55Her captain, Lieutenant Junior Grade Matthew Reichel, had gotten his crew off.
31:00At 1230, he went back aboard with four volunteers to see if she could be saved.
31:05She rolled over on them.
31:07At two in the afternoon, the destroyer Caps sank her with gunfire.
31:12That was the gunboat's day.
31:14One sunk, 11 damaged, close to 200 men killed or wounded.
31:21Now here is where I ask you to hold two things in your head at once.
31:25By early afternoon, the swimmer's slates and tobacco sacks were on a table aboard the flagship.
31:31And beside them lay a chart of Iwo Jima with fresh pencil marks on it, at the foot of the
31:37mountain and across the face of the quarry.
31:40One of those two things contained a surprise that nobody on the staff had expected.
31:45The other was about to change the entire plan for the last day before the landing.
31:51And in Tokyo, a radio announcer was getting ready to tell Japan what had happened that morning.
31:57What he said tells you exactly how completely that garrison had been deceived.
32:03Start with the surprise, because it came from the swimmers.
32:06When the slates from all four teams were laid side by side that afternoon, they added up to one word.
32:13Nothing.
32:14No steel rails, no concrete blocks, no log barriers, no wire under the surf, no minefields.
32:23In two miles of Landing Beach, the swimmers had found a single mine off Red Beach 2.
32:30The bottom shelved steeply, the surf was manageable, and landing craft could run straight in.
32:36Now think about what that blank report actually says.
32:39At Normandy, eight months earlier, the Germans had planted the tidal flats with thousands of obstacles.
32:47Tadamichi Kuribayashi had the same eight months on Iwo Jima, and put almost nothing in the water at all.
32:54He was not careless.
32:56He was the opposite of careless.
32:58It means he had staked the defense of those beaches on something else.
33:03And the something else was now drawn in pencil on the chart lying next to the slates.
33:10Here is the fact I've been walking you towards since the first minute.
33:13Remember the note on the intelligence map, the side the quarry.
33:17Four possible anti-tank guns.
33:19When the spotter's marks were plotted, and the shell fragments dug out of the gunboats were measured, that note was
33:25rewritten.
33:26The fire had come from 13 high-velocity naval guns of 120 millimeters or larger.
33:33Some of the fragments pointed to guns of around 150 millimeters.
33:37Six-inch guns.
33:39Cruiser guns.
33:40In concrete.
33:41At the foot of Suribachi on one flank, and in the quarry face on the other.
33:46Of the four guns covering the right flank, three had not been on the map in any form.
33:52Look at where they sat.
33:54One group on the left shoulder of the beach, one on the right, both firing sideways, not out to sea,
34:02along the beach.
34:04Every landing craft, every amphibious tractor carrying marines, would have crossed in front of those muzzles, broadside on, at ranges
34:13under a mile, over water that had already been surveyed and marked with range buoys.
34:18The admiral's report put the stakes in one unusually blunt sentence for an official document.
34:24Unless those batteries were knocked out, it said, the success of the landing itself would be seriously jeopardized.
34:31So that is what the morning had bought.
34:34Not a victory.
34:36Information.
34:37And it had a shelf life of about 40 hours.
34:41Which brings us to Tokyo.
34:43That same day, the Japanese news agency, Domei, went on the air with a bulletin, and American papers picked it
34:51up within hours.
34:52The Pittsburgh Press ran it.
34:54American forces, Tokyo announced, had attempted landings on Iwo Jima, on the southeastern beach and the southwestern beach.
35:03And the garrison had, in the agency's words, successfully repulsed them, with severe losses inflicted on the invaders.
35:11Sit with that for a second.
35:13On the island and in the capital, the understanding was the same.
35:18The Americans had come to land, and the guns had driven them off.
35:23From behind a firing slit, that is exactly what it had looked like.
35:27Landing craft came in.
35:28Landing craft burned and turned away.
35:31In reality, not one American had been ordered ashore.
35:36A hundred men had gone for a swim with pencils.
35:39And they had gotten everything they came for.
35:42And the price of that so-called victory, for the men who believed in it,
35:47was the one thing their commander had told them never to give up.
35:52The fleet now knew where they were.
35:55And the Navy did something that afternoon, which shows you how the men running this operation thought.
36:00They sent the swimmers back in.
36:03The western beaches, on the far side of the island, were the alternate landing site.
36:09And somebody had to see those, too.
36:11It was supposed to happen at three.
36:14Because of the morning, it started at a quarter past four.
36:18No gunboats this time.
36:20There were none left fit to go.
36:23Battleships and destroyers covered instead.
36:26And a plane flew the length of the shore, laying smoke.
36:29A CB with Team 15, Arthur Hedema, remembered that swim for one thing.
36:36We could see the gun emplacements on the beach, he said.
36:39The swimmers worked for an hour and a half under rifle and automatic weapons fire.
36:44And were all back aboard around six, without losing a man.
36:49But notice what did not happen.
36:51No heavy battery on that coast opened up.
36:55Whatever had been believed on the island at 11 that morning, by four in the afternoon, the big guns were
37:01silent again.
37:02The lesson had been learned.
37:04It had simply been learned five hours too late.
37:08Now we come to the room where it turned.
37:11That evening, aboard the command ship Estes, Rear Admiral William Blandy held his conference.
37:18The mood was not good.
37:20Two of the three bombardment days were gone.
37:24The ships had fired at hundreds of targets on a fixed schedule, working methodically across the whole island.
37:30And the photographs showed how little had actually been destroyed.
37:34This is where the Marine I asked you to remember steps forward.
37:38Lieutenant Colonel Donald Weller had been arguing since January that the fire should be concentrated on the landing beaches, and
37:45had lost that argument.
37:47Tonight he had the pencil marks.
37:49His recommendation is in the record.
37:52A maximum concentration of bombardment placed on and near the preferred landing beaches.
37:58In plain terms, tear up the schedule.
38:01Stop spreading shells over eight square miles.
38:05Take every heavy gun in the force and put it on the ground the Marines have to cross, and on
38:10the batteries that revealed themselves this morning.
38:14Weller understood exactly what he was giving up.
38:16He said so.
38:18Never mind the artillery, mortars, and anti-aircraft still undestroyed.
38:22He was telling an admiral to leave most of the island's guns alone, on purpose, in order to kill the
38:30ones that mattered in the first hour.
38:33Blandy approved it on the spot.
38:35There is the decision.
38:37Twelve small ships had been shot to pieces to produce a few pencil marks.
38:42And inside, one evening, an admiral and a lieutenant colonel rebuilt the last day of a three-day bombardment around
38:49them.
38:50One day.
38:52That was all that was left to make it count.
38:55And before that day was over, the war would come looking for the swimmers a second time, in a place
39:01where trunks and grease pencils were no use at all.
39:05February 18th, 1945.
39:07The last day.
39:09It came up gray, with low cloud and rain squalls drifting across the island.
39:14The worst kind of weather for a spotter trying to see a concrete slit in a cliff.
39:20At a quarter to eight, Rear Admiral Bertram Rogers, commanding the bombardment ships, sent his battleships an order that had
39:27none of the usual staff language in it.
39:30Close beach and get going.
39:32They closed to 2,500 yards, a mile and a quarter, for a battleship that is not gunnery range, that
39:40is pointing.
39:42Blandy had given two ships a single task each.
39:45Tennessee and Idaho were to destroy the batteries at the foot of Suribachi and the coast defense guns in the
39:51quarry.
39:52A young officer on Blandy's staff, Lieutenant Junior Grade Baxter Sparks, watched how the Admiral placed them.
40:00Blandy had the two battleships fall in behind his own command ship, led them in himself, swung the Estes around
40:07in a tight circle to mark the spot, and signaled,
40:09Drop anchor and fire for effect.
40:13Anchored Battleships.
40:14Think about what that says.
40:1624 hours earlier, any ship holding still inside two miles of that shore would have been asking for what the
40:23Pensacola got.
40:24Now the guns that could punish it had been located, and the battleship sat on top of them and went
40:29to work, one case made at a time.
40:32A 14-inch shell weighs about three-quarters of a ton.
40:36Tennessee put 333 of them into those positions in under five hours.
40:42Idaho fired 280.
40:45Up the coast, the old Texas spent the morning on the cliff battery believed to have hit the Pensacola, then
40:51moved in to a mile and a half with the rest.
40:54Here are the numbers from that evening, and they are the hinge of this whole story.
40:59In the landing area, the staff had listed 201 important targets.
41:05By nightfall on the 18th, 97 were destroyed and 18 more badly damaged.
41:1111 coast defense guns, gone.
41:1422 of the 33 5-inch guns.
41:1716 of 20 large blockhouses.
41:2148 of 93 pillboxes.
41:24Set that beside the first day's score.
41:2717 targets, on the whole island.
41:30The difference between those two days was not more ships or more shells.
41:35It was knowing where to put them.
41:38Weller did not pretend it was more than it was.
41:41Around midnight, he sent his own assessment up to the Marine commander, Lieutenant General Holland Smith.
41:47The landing could be made, he reported.
41:50It would be made at heavy cost.
41:54Blandy told his superiors the same thing in his own words, and the date held.
41:59February 19th.
42:01But the 18th was not finished with the swimmers.
42:04At about 9.20 that night, the fast transport Blessman was running at speed through the dark to take up
42:10her station.
42:11She carried Team 15.
42:13The men were off duty, a day and a half past their swims.
42:18Many of them were in the mess hall, writing letters, playing cards.
42:22The ship's wake was glowing.
42:24In those waters, a fast hull stirs up phosphorescence, a bright green arrow on a black sea, pointing straight at
42:32the stern.
42:34A Japanese bomber followed it in low and dropped one bomb.
42:38It went through the deck and exploded in the mess hall.
42:42It took out the galley and the forward engine room and left a hole in the main deck, 40 feet
42:47by 60.
42:49The ship went dark and dead in the water, burning, with tons of the team's own demolition explosives stowed aboard.
42:58The flagship Gilmer, Captain Hanlon's ship, came alongside around 11 and put her hoses across.
43:06The fire was stopped short of the explosives.
43:0940 men died on the Blessman that night.
43:1215 or 16 of them, depending on which roll you read, were swimmers of Team 15, and 23 more of
43:20the team were wounded.
43:21They were buried at sea.
43:24It was the worst single loss the demolition teams took in the entire Pacific War.
43:30Men who had crawled onto an enemy beach in daylight and swum away were killed at a mess table.
43:36And then it was morning.
43:38February 19th.
43:39Joe Artman was in the water again, in a boat this time, off Red Beach.
43:44The men who had measured that approach were now guiding others down it.
43:49Artman led the first wave of the 27th Marines in toward the sand, and held about 40 yards off the
43:54beach as the tractors went past him.
43:56And here, at last, is the answer to what all of it was for.
44:01Those first waves crossed the water that had been marked with range buoys.
44:05They passed in front of the foot of Suribachi on one side, and the quarry on the other.
44:10And the Navy's report on the landing records what came out of those positions.
44:15Little gunfire from fixed guns was experienced.
44:18The amphibious tractors reached the beach.
44:21The Marines got out and started up the terraces.
44:24I am not going to tell you the bombardment won Iwo Jima, because every man who was there knew better.
44:31Weller had said never mind the artillery inland, and that artillery was still there.
44:36About an hour after the first waves landed, with the beach crowded exactly the way Kuribayashi had always wanted it,
44:44his remaining guns and mortars opened, and that beach became one of the worst places Americans fought in the whole
44:50war.
44:51The sand the swimmers had carried out in tobacco sacks turned out to be as bad as feared.
44:57Vehicles sank in it to their axles.
44:59Over the next five weeks, 6,821 Americans died on that island.
45:07So measure the gunboat's mourning honestly.
45:09It did not make Iwo Jima cheap.
45:12It decided whether the Marines would be killed in their boats or would reach the ground where they could fight
45:17back.
45:18Two historians who studied the landing in detail after the war, Jeter Isley and Philip Crowell,
45:25concluded that the Japanese error on the 17th very probably prevented heavy losses in the landing itself.
45:32Thirteen naval guns firing sideways into thin-skinned tractors at buoyed ranges.
45:39That is the landing that did not happen.
45:42And the men who had paid to prevent it were, by then, already gone from those waters.
45:49One of them was on his way to a hospital in the United States, where a letter from Washington would
45:54eventually find him.
45:55The letter found Rufus Herring in a naval hospital.
45:58In September 1945, he stood in Washington, his wounds mostly healed, and was handed the Medal of Honor.
46:06Twenty-seven were awarded for Iwo Jima, more than for any other single operation of the war.
46:12His was the first of them to be earned, two days before a Marine set foot on the island.
46:17And he was the only naval officer among the 27.
46:21Then he went home to Roseboro, North Carolina.
46:24He went into the poultry business.
46:26He served three years as the town's mayor.
46:30He was active in his church.
46:32He died in Roseboro in January 1996, in the same county where he was born.
46:38And by most accounts, he was not a man who talked much about a February morning off a black beach.
46:45Seven others from the 449 were decorated.
46:48Among them, Leo Bedell, who put out her fires.
46:52Frank Blow, who took her wheel.
46:54Henry Buickman, who worked her deck alone.
46:57And Arthur Lewis, who signaled for help with dish rags.
47:01Bedell lived into old age in Ohio.
47:04Asked about that day, near the end of his life, he said only this.
47:08When you live with something like that, it stays with you forever.
47:13Every one of the 12 gunboat captains was decorated.
47:16Ten of them received the Navy Cross, which may be a record for a single hour's work by ships that
47:22size.
47:23The group received the presidential unit citation.
47:26And here is something worth knowing about how the Navy itself judged that morning.
47:31Nobody dressed it up as a clever plan.
47:34No one had sent those gunboats in as bait.
47:38Admiral Blandy wrote in his report that gunboats of that kind should never again be used in close support of
47:45swimmers off a heavily fortified shore until the defenses had first been beaten down.
47:50In other words, the Navy looked at what had revealed those guns and said,
47:55We must not ask men to do this twice.
48:00Captain Hanlon, who had commanded the swimmers and watched the gunboats cover them, wrote the sentence their crews kept.
48:07Flotilla 3, he said, made naval history and added a fine page to our naval tradition.
48:13Thomas Lennox, the ensign from New Orleans who sat in a gun tub with shrapnel in his arm and legs,
48:19spent nine days in the Tennessee's sickbay and went home with an arm that never straightened.
48:25Pieces of metal worked their way out of him for years.
48:29He kept the details to himself.
48:31He died in 2019, at 97.
48:35Frank Jurka, the demolition ensign who lost both feet on the deck of the 466, went to medical school.
48:42He became a surgeon, and in the 1980s, he served as president of the American Medical Association.
48:50Draper Kaufman, who had two gunboats shot out from under him in a morning, stayed in the Navy and retired
48:56a rear admiral.
48:58Edward Anderson, carpenter's mate first class, the one swimmer who did not come back to the boats, was never found.
49:05Ralph L. Johnson, who died in the harness his friend had buckled, was buried at sea with the others from
49:11the 449.
49:13And the men behind the firing slits.
49:16I told you the record does not say who gave the order to open fire that morning, and it never
49:21will.
49:22Of roughly 21,000 Japanese on Iwo Jima, 216 were taken alive during the battle.
49:29The gunners at the foot of the mountain, and in the quarry, were not among the people left to explain
49:35themselves.
49:36All we have is what they did.
49:39For a day and a half, they obeyed one of the hardest orders a soldier can be given.
49:44To sit under bombardment and not shoot back.
49:48Then they saw what looked like the thing they had been waiting for, and they did what they were there
49:53to do.
49:54And they did it well.
49:56It was the wrong morning.
49:58So let me take you back to where we started, and to the question.
50:02A 20-year-old in swim trunks and axle grease, sitting on the gunwale of a plywood boat,
50:07looking at two miles of beach that would not answer.
50:11Joe Artman was not finished with that beach when the landing was over.
50:15For nine days, his team worked the surf line in daylight, four to six hours at a stretch,
50:21blowing up and towing away more than a hundred wrecked landing craft so that supplies could keep coming in.
50:27He had a saying about it.
50:29Six or eight feet of water is as good as a foxhole.
50:32Then he went on to Okinawa and did it all again.
50:36After the war, he worked 35 years for Texaco and retired to El Paso.
50:40Those hard rubber fins had done something to his joints, and he lived with the arthritis for the rest of
50:46his life.
50:47He died in January 2006 at 81.
50:52When he told the story of that morning, he gave the whole explanation in seven words.
50:58The Japanese thought it was the real invasion.
51:02Why did a disciplined garrison expose the guns it had hidden for eight months?
51:07Because a hundred Americans were willing to swim up to that beach with pencils,
51:10and twelve small crews were willing to stay between them and the shore until their ships would no longer float.
51:17The island saw an invasion.
51:20What it was actually looking at was the nerve of the people coming to take it.
51:25Thank you for watching this one through to the end.
51:27If it was worth your time, a like genuinely helps,
51:30because that is how a story about American sailors and swimmers off Iwo Jima reaches someone who has never heard
51:36it.
51:37If you'd like more history told this way, subscribe and turn on the bell so the next one finds you.
51:42And tell me in the comments where you're watching from.
51:45If your father, your grandfather, or an uncle served in the Second World War,
51:50write his name and his unit below.
51:52A ship's number, a regiment, a squadron, whatever you have.
51:57Those names deserve to be read by somebody.