World Battlefronts: Beautiful Iwo

The marines who took Iwo Jima last March called the eight-square-mile volcanic island a beachhead in hell. Sulfur fumes belched from fissures in the steaming rocks. Rumbling noises echoed from the bowels of the harsh, scarred earth. Ugly Iwo cost 22,000 casualties, including 5,445 killed.*

But B-29 pilots returning from bombing Japan often call Iwo “the most beautiful place in the world.” Reason: by last week 1,400 of the Superforts (carrying 15,400 airmen) had made emergency landings on Iwo’s runways. Lieut. Alvin Beck of Fort Wayne had flown eleven missions and landed on Iwo five times. Said Lieut. Don Midlam of Lima, Ohio: “Whenever I land on this island, I thank God, and the men who fought for it.”

B-29 losses between last November and March were higher than could be revealed at the time. Many planes shot up over Japan were being lost on the way home. Dumbo rescue planes could save most of the men who hit the water between Iwo and Saipan, but could recover almost none from the freezing water between Tokyo and Iwo. Morale and combat efficiency among B-29 crews are sky-high nowadays; it was not so in the months before last March.

Men who hit the beach on D-day would hardly recognize their hellish beachhead nowadays. Eight thousand Seabees under Commodore Robert Johnson have built some of the world’s longest runways, moved four million cubic yards of earth and even sliced the top off Mt. Suribachi. A Japanese major who recently came out of a cave blinked around and paid the Seabees the ultimate tribute. Said he: “Impossible!”

*Of the wounded, 8% died—a high percentage.