The Battle of Iwo Jima is famous in WWII US history for one of the hardest fought battles of the Pacific campaign. It amazes me how tough that tiny little island was to take. And by tiny I do mean tiny (eight square miles).
The US was well in control of the Pacific at that point and assembled an armada off-shore and flat-out pummeled the island for days. Then they went ashore and despite flattening the island for days they were met with intense resistance. As already mentioned, it became one of the hardest fought battles of the war.
So, why? Why not just blast the air strips and planes there and then leave a few ships to stop re-supply? Starve them out.
Was invasion and the cost it took really the best or only choice here?
ETA: Why did the Japanese invest so much into this tiny speck of an island?
One justification is that the US wanted to deny the the airstrips to the Japanese (who were using the island as a fighter base from which they could intercept B-29 raids). The US also wanted to use the island as an emergency landing facility for damaged bombers; I don’t have the exact figures, but I do recall reading that more USAAF personnel were saved than USMC deaths taking the island.
Paging @TokyoBayer, who can quite possibly provide more/better insight.
Iwo Jima had 3 airstrips that the US wanted as an escort fighter base and emergency landing strips for B-29 raids over Japan. That said, they weren’t expecting the level of resistance they got after the intense pre-invasion bombardment, but at that point you’ve already committed and you may as well finish the job.
Almost every book, journal article, encyclopedia entry and website that addresses the battle justifies the nearly 7,000 American dead with the “emergency landing” theory. Essentially, the theory argues that 2,251 B-29 Superfortresses landed on Iwo Jima and each carried eleven crewmen; accordingly, Operation Detachment saved the lives of 24,761 Americans.
However, the emergency landing theory does not stand up to scrutiny. The absurdity of the claim demonstrates the extent to which the battle has been misunderstood.
The surprisingly thorough article (for *Navy Times) goes on to address other supposed justifications, such as fighter escort, and their efficacy.
*Possibly it is a reproduction (same author) of this article:
However, during the entire war, more USAAF personnel were killed than Marines. Being a bomber crewman was one of the more insanely risky jobs you could do- up there with German U-Boat crews or EOD technicians.
That’s an amazingly poorly-written and un-thorough article. The very long article can be summarized as follows:
1: The original intent behind the attack on Iwo Jima was to deny its use to Japan, and to provide a forward fighter base for the US.
2: When neither of those objectives were very successful, the US later justified it by its use as an emergency landing site for B-29s.
3: The justification as an emergency landing site is absurd.
4: Here’s a long list of reasons why it wasn’t successful at providing a forward fighter base.
5: Here’s another long list of reasons why it wasn’t a big loss to Japanese operations.
6: There was one other island that the Air Force could have used for emergency landings, Chichi Jima. But it was even more strongly defended than Iwo Jima, and if captured, its airfields would have required extensive improvements before it could have served as a landing site for B-29s.
7: Therefore, the notion that Iwo Jima was valuable as an emergency landing site is absurd.
Nowhere in all of those pages is there any justification for the actual claim of the article, that the justification based on emergency bomber landings was absurd. The only attempt the article even makes at an argument is that there was one other island that could have served that purpose, and then the article shoots down that argument by pointing out that Chichi Jima was even more defended and had an unsuitable airbase. Instead, it spends many pages rehashing why the original purposes didn’t hold up, a proposition that is historically wholly uncontroversial.
I’ll grant the author could do a better job of spelling it out explicitly in the conclusion, but the dots are there to connect. Namely:
Essentially, the theory argues that 2,251 B-29 Superfortresses landed on Iwo Jima and each carried eleven crewmen; accordingly, Operation Detachment saved the lives of 24,761 Americans.
In American hands, Iwo Jima did provide an intermediate airfield for staging bombing missions against Japan. B-29s could extend their range and slightly increase their payloads by refueling there.
Some missions used the island as a staging area, and doing so improved bombing efficiency, but the staging area did not provide critical aid to the war effort.
The absurdity is in the assumption that every instance of a B-29 touching down on Iwo Jima (2,251 times in all) represents an emergency landing. Clearly, that is false, in light of the fact that the airfield was also used to extend range by allowing bombers to make planned refueling stops.
And beyond this (not addressing the article, but my own estimation of the claim itself), consider that the 24,761 figure on its own represents an implausible number of lives supposedly saves, considering that in the entire bombing campaign over Europe, the US Eighth Air Force had 26,000 KIA. So we’re supposed to believe that an intermediate base on Iwo Jima saved, in a matter of months, almost as many lives as the Eighth Air Force lost in a matter of years? It just doesn’t add up.
Yeah, that looks a lot like after-the-fact ass covering. But it’s also an analysis based entirely on hindsight.
Sure, after the battle and after the war, it became clear that it wasn’t really worth the price. The problem is, the people planning the war before the battle had no way to know that. “Deny the enemy a valuable resource while allowing us to use said resource” isn’t a bad idea, and probably works out well pretty often. In this case, it turned out to be a poor trade, but that doesn’t change the logic they used on the information they had at the time.
So yeah, they wanted the airbase, they got the airbase, and only then realized it wasn’t worth it.
So if you want to refute that, then give the numbers. How many emergency landings were there?
But even with what it said, the article argued against its own point. The article says that only “some” missions used the island as a staging point, and that this wasn’t significant. That makes it more likely, not less, that any given landing there was an emergency.
They knew they were going to invade Okinawa, which is larger and much closer to Japan than the Marianas (where the B-29s that would have benefited from Iwo Jima were based).
Sorry, not how this works. That which is asserted without evidence may be rejected without evidence.
Some missions being relative to the whole carried out from the Marianas. As in, there were a lot of missions from the Marianas (some with up to 500 B-29s in a single operation) and only some of those missions used Iwo Jima as a staging point.
ETA’: Consider also that Japan’s air defenses were infamously outmatched by this stage in the war. In fact, not 500 B-29s were lost during the entire bombing campaign against Japan. And yet we’re supposed to believe that’s because some 2000 landings that occurred on Iwo Jima were all (or even just largely!) emergency landings where the aircraft were both sufficiently intact as to make it hundreds of miles from Japan to Iwo Jima… but not so much that they could have made it further to Saipan?
I kind of had the impression that @OttoDaFe might have been confusing his statistics.
There seems to have been a bit of hard-nosedness going on as well; in hindsight there were a fair number of choices the US/Allied side could have made that would have been less costly and not prolongued the war overly much, but there seemed to be a desire to destroy the Japanese wherever they were, rather than just starving them out or playing a longer game.
Yeah, but how did they know they were going to be able to take Okinawa?
So you capture the Marianas. Why bother to go any further, since your B-29s can reach Japan from there? Well, a B-25 or P-47 can hit southern Japan from Iwo Jima. That will certainly come in handy if troops have to invade the home islands. Okinawa is even closer, but if we can’t capture Okinawa we still have Iwo Jima.
It turned out that Iwo Jima wasn’t necessary because we didn’t invade Japan. But strictly speaking, Okinawa wasn’t necessary, either. But we didn’t know that in February 1945.
Iwo Jima was considered strategically important since it provided an air base for Japanese fighter planes to intercept long-range B-29 Superfortress bombers flying to strike targets in Japan. In addition, it was used by the Japanese to stage intermittent air attacks on the Mariana Islands from November 1944 to January 1945. The capture of Iwo Jima would eliminate those problems. The island’s airfield would also support P-51 Mustang fighters, which could escort and protect bombers en route to Japan.[16]
American intelligence sources were confident that Iwo Jima would fall in one week. In light of optimistic intelligence reports, the decision was made to invade Iwo Jima, and the operation was codenamed Operation Detachment.[25]
So, the enemy was launching attacks on our bombers, and the Marianas. Some decent reasons, and since it will be a cakewalk lets do it!
OK, then, what was the value of that routine refueling? Did it enable bombers to reach targets they couldn’t have reached without that refueling? Did it enable them to carry larger bomb loads (thus allowing the use of fewer planes for the same missions)?
lets do it!