The American Spectator

Special Report

(Page 2 of 5)

There are so many flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks and such a chorus of narrators and disembodied voices that part of the first twenty or so minutes seems like orientation week at Iwo U.

JUST AS SPIELBERG GAVE us a taste of death, dismemberment, and mutilation during the wordless invasion preface to Saving Private Ryan, Eastwood gives us a taste of death by confusion during the first part of Flags of Our Fathers.

The battle for the tiny volcanic island of Iwo Jima was one of the two last great amphibious battles of the Pacific in World War II. In order to pursue the grand strategy of the final stage of the war -- the invasion and occupation of the home islands of Japan -- it was necessary to capture Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Japanese knew that neither island could be denied the Americans, and thus the aim of any defense would be not to meet any invasion on the beaches, but to mount protracted campaigns that might sap the American's will to proceed with an invasion of the Japanese home islands.

Iwo was the first of these to be invaded, on February 19, 1945. For 72 days prior to the invasion Iwo Jima was bombarded by sea and air -- the longest bombardment afforded any island in the Pacific theater of operations. But the effectiveness of air and naval bombardment was largely offset by a combination of the deep, soft volcanic sand which covered the island and the Japanese preparation of a dense network of deeply placed tunnels, caves, and concrete gun emplacements designed so that no American Marine would be protected from withering cross-fire. The net result of this defensive preparation made it almost impossible for the invasion forces to see the enemy or to know where they were shooting from.

Iwo was small and shaped like an ice-cream cone -- 10,000 yards bottom to top, and 4,000 yards across the top part of the cone. At the bottom of the cone was what was left of an extinct volcano about 550 feet high -- Mt. Suribachi -- which contained hundreds of concrete pillboxes where the defenders lurked behind machine guns waiting for Marines to get within firing range and pick them off. Inside the volcano there were over a thousand Japanese soldiers free to move about in interconnecting tunnels and get to where they had the best opportunity to kill Americans.

The island contained 21,000 of some of the Japanese army's toughest and most determined troops, under the command of Lieut. General Tadamichi Kuribyashi. He had already issued an order to his officers: "Every man's position will be his tomb." And after 36 days of the most horrendous fighting, that was exactly the outcome for the Japanese -- 21,000 men dead. The aim of this suicidal tactic was to kill, maim, mutilate, and demoralize as many American Marines as possible.

One of the first major targets of the invasion was Mt. Suribachi, an elevated and formidable fortress able to rain fire down on any part of the little island. The Americans landed in three Marine divisions -- 70,000 men -- and fought on Suribachi for five days with many casualties before the stars and stripes was raised on its crest. That famous moment is the central focus of Eastwood's movie.

How fierce and cruel the fighting on Iwo Jima was for more than a month can be expressed abstractly in numbers. It was the highest casualty rate of any engagement up to that time in 168 years of Marine Corps history -- 6,821 killed in action, and 19,217 maimed, mutilated, wounded. Admiral Nimitz issued a statement saying that "On Iwo island uncommon valor was a common virtue." There were 353 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded during the Second World War; 84 of these were awarded to Marines fighting in the South Pacific, and of these 27 were awarded to the men fighting on Iwo Jima during that single month -- a record unsurpassed by any battle in U.S. history.

Such unique wartime struggles always result in ironies, myths, betrayals, guilt, and, more than anything, the need for heroes. The raising of the flag on Mt. Suribachi on D+4 is an event surrounded by powerful myths and Bradley's book is an attempt to get to the truth of the great iconic photograph that recorded that event.

THE TRUE STORY, AS PIECED TOGETHER by James Bradley over a period of several years from hundreds of interviews and documents, goes something like this. By the fifth day of savage fighting, Mt. Suribachi seemed uncharacteristically quiet. It was then that Col. Chandler Johnson sent a platoon of 40 men to reconnoiter the peak of the mountain. "Just before the forty man patrol began its climb....Johnson called Lieutenant Schrier [leader of the platoon] aside....'If you get to the top,' the colonel told Schrier, 'put [this] up.'

"What Johnson handed the lieutenant was an American flag...relatively small...measuring fifty-four by twenty-eight inches."

As they snaked their way up the hill neither the men nor their officers, nor the growing audience of Marines all over the island watching them as they climbed higher and higher, believed they would make it to the top. They were afraid that they were walking into a trap and that as they drew closer to the summit they would be attacked.

John Bradley, known to the other members of the company as "Doc" because he was their medical corpsman, was in the group making the climb, as was a photographer from Leatherneck Magazine, Louis Lowry. The patrol clawed its way to the top at about 10 a.m. as Sgt. Lowry photographed their ascent.

p>Searching for a staff to attach the flag to, the men found a length of pipe that was usable. br>

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