Army bombers and Navy carriers. The two services could work together for a campaign but they rarely organized joint operations on an ongoing basis.
It situations where they did work together in the long term it was because one service was clearly the primary service and was placed in overall control. So the Central Pacific under Nimitz was a Navy operation with Army units attached to it and the South Pacific under MacArthur was an Army operation with Navy units attached to it.
But strategic bombers and carriers were too important to their services for them to be given up to the other service. The Army wasn’t going to give control of its bombers to the Navy and the Navy wasn’t going to give control of its carriers to the Army.
What would have been far more effective at Iwo Jima than an atomic bomb would have been poison gas; it would have transformed the underground shelters into death traps. But despite the bitter hatred against an enemy regarded as subhuman, despite rhetoric about exterminating the Japanese, resorting to gas was a can of worms the US didn’t want to open; and as mentioned upthread the fierceness of the struggle was unanticipated.
Ironically, that was one factor that led to the decision to use the atomic bomb: war planners took the casualty rate at Iwo and multiplied by the total effective resistance of the Japanese home islands and came up with a horrendous figure.
There were a number of other survivors in the same building he was in who didn’t survive the firestorm. In his account, he talks about not being able to pull them from the ruins after he got out of the basement. There were other close-in survivors above ground in reinforced concrete buildings - Akiko Takakura in a bank about 300 meters from the hypocenter, and a teacher at Honkawa Elementary School at about 400 meters. All of their accounts of the bombing make it clear there were other survivors near them who didn’t make it out of the firestorm…all in heavily-built, solid buildings, many of which were repaired after the fires and are still in use today.
It’s impossible to state with certainty about an event that didn’t happen. But the likelihood is the planners underestimated the casualty figures.
Post-war investigation showed that the Japanese military was planning on resisting an invasion. And there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t have resisted at least as much in Japan itself as they had in various island campaigns.
So the allied planners based their estimate on their best guess of how much the Japanese military would be able to resist. And they were wrong. They were looking at evidence that showed Japan was running low on equipment by 1945. But what they didn’t realize is that the reason it appeared Japan was running low was because it was shorting its frontlines in order to build up its stockpiles in Japan in anticipation for the invasion. So the forces in Japan were much better equipped than the allies realized.
And the Japanese had decided that rather than try to defend everywhere, they would concentrate their forces at what they felt were the most likely invasion sites. And they guessed correctly. The places where the Americans were planning on landing were the most heavily defended areas in Japan. The landings would have been a bloodbath.
That made my parent so angry. My parent was of the opinion that Iwo Jima and Okinawa were like Korea, places that the Japanese conqured, and that giving them “back” was like giving Shanghi “back” to them.
You might have a point with Okinawa but Iwo Jima and the rest of the Bonin Islands were apparently uninhabited before Japan began settling them. There is no native population to give the Bonin Islands back to.
There were a handful of European settlers on some of the Bonin islands (though not, I believe, Iwo Jima) before the Japanese incorporated them in the 19th century. But I think it was less than 100 people and they became Japanese almost a century before the war so it’s hard for me to get worked up about it.
I’m not sure about that. Here is a picture of a P-51 instrument panel. This is a simulated version. And here is an F6F Hellcat instrument panel. They both have basic VFR instrumentation. VOR wasn’t available until after the war. (And anyway, they’d have to build the transmitter stations on islands full of Japanese soldiers.) So navigation would have been by pilotage (‘OK, there’s Island X; so I’m here. Or is it Island Y?’) and dead (or ‘ded’) reckoning (‘I hope the weather guys got the winds right!’).
As an armchair military theorist (that means I think of crazy stuff and then ask the internet why it would not have worked) I was wondering about the use of some other gasses on Iwo Jima that might have been more acceptable. They are steam and carbon monoxide.
The marines were already using flamethrowers. Could a tactic of drilling into the many tunnels and injecting them with napalm, CO or steam have reduced US casualties?
If most of the casualties were the result of artillery from hidden, distant guns, then this idea is not much good. Some of the casualties seem to have come from infantry ambushes from caves and bunkers previously thought cleared, but actually connected somewhere else by tunnel.
All the ships around the island had big boilers that could make steam.
I don’t think this was or is a usual method of warfare, so my idea has to be not only doable, but able to be improvised in a short period. There were better plans than putting the pacific war on hold for a year to wait for ships full of oil pipe.
Peleliu was another place this might have been useful and/or a place where the idea could have presented itself as something to develop for future campaigns, such as Iwo Jima.
This mine from WWI shows the use of tunneling by combat engineers.
That, of course, is a silly argument. The Ryukyu Kingdom had been invaded and forced into a tributary relationship with Japan back in 1609. Not exactly the same thing as Korea.
Despite the terrible tragedies inflicted in the Battle of Okinawa, including forced civilian suicides by the IJA, Okinawans were in favor of returning to Japan, undoubtedly because the US didn’t treat them well during the occupation.
I suppose that he perhaps should have chosen a different phrase since we have large numbers of non-Americans on this site, but I’m pretty sure most non-Americans weren’t upset by the use of the phrase.
World War I made the use of gas a virtual no-no for almost all combatants during World War II. With the exception the Japanese army using small amounts in China and obviously the death camps in Nazi Germany, gas wasn’t a factor during the war.
The major problem with nuking Iwo Jima is that the Trinity Test took place in July of 1945. That was four months after the major combat operations on Iwo had already occurred. There were no functional bombs (there were the mockups which became Fat Man and Little Boy and the assembly which became the Trinity device) and there was no proof until July 16, 1945 that an atomic bomb would actually work.
So even if the Trinity test had been moved up until the winter of 1944 (which would exceptionally difficult given the problems they had creating enough fissile material) it still would have been at least a month or two before a weapon was ready for use. If there had been one, it would have been better to have held it in reserve in case the Japanese refused to surrender or if the Germans got a lucky break during the Battle of the Bulge or on the Eastern Front and forced the war into the fall of 1945.
