Remember that the USA already used an “island hopping” strategy of bypassing and starving out every Japanese garrison that it could. So the question is why Iwo Jima got listed as one of the islands that the USA did need to take as an air or naval base. ETA: more or less, the closer US forces got to Japan, the more important every island became and the less scope there was for bypassing. Before August 1945 everyone presumed that the war would never be over until the Japanese home islands were invaded and conquered, and all strategy was geared towards making that possible. I’ve never heard that Iwo was valuable as a logistics base but presumably it had some capacity in that role.
I’m going back and forth on the question. My earlier answer was based on historians who support the necessity of the base for the B-29 bombers, and I want to study it more…
Since this thread came out, I’ve started reading The Ghosts of Iwo Jima by Robert Burrell*. It’s interesting and discusses the decision making process.
*author of the article linked by @ASL_v2.0
Here are some replies to other posters.
Not reallly. The problem was that it didn’t have a protected anchorage so it was pretty much useless for the navy as a logistics base. It also meant that the USAAF couldn’t expand the base to house bombers. It could support them, but couldn’t function well as the home base because of the logistics. Burrell says that the Navy wasn’t interested in Iwo Jima because of the lack of a protected harbor, but went along with the USAAF’s plan.
In general, because of the long distances involved in the Pacific Asian War, having forward bases for refueling was quite common all during the war. It happened more often for fighters because of their lesser range.
The B-29 had a combat radius of 1,600 miles, and the distance from the Marianas to Tokyo is about 1,500 miles. That wasn’t much leeway, especially because of the high winds and other weather conditions.
The bomb load wasn’t a significant factor. The B-29 had a large payload and towards the end, they didn’t have as many bombs as they wanted.
With the massive number of planes in a single mission, it would have been impossible to systematically refuel all of the bombers in a mission so it they did not do that.
Perhaps “routine reflueling” means that if a bomber was only questionable for returning to the Marianas, they stopped in to Iwo Jima.
Yup. It’s crazy.
There doesn’t look like a way to determine how many actual emergency landings there were. As noted, the Japanese AAA wasn’t particularly good and they lacked fighters which could reach them at the high altitudes when the US was unsuccessing trying daylight missions or good nightfighers.
They were bypassing a lot of bases, including others in the Bonin Island group that includes Iwo Jima.
The decision making process for which places to invade was quite haphazard. The Army and Navy were split on strategies, and fought over resources. MacArthur wanted to be in charge of the whole Pacific theater and the Navy refused to consider that. The Navy wanted to go through the Central Pacific and the Joint Chiefs of Staff eventually compromised and let the Navy and the Marines go through Central Pacific and let MacArthur go through New Guinea.
Towards the end of the war, MacArthur wanted to invade the Philippines and Adm. King, head of the Navy, wanted to bypass the Philippines and invade Formosa.
After the Marianas were captured, which put Japan within striking distance of the B-29s, the USAAF got involved with promoting their own interests.
Gen. Arnold, commanding general of the USAAF, pushed the Navy to take Iwo Jima to allow the P-51s to be stationed there to provide fighter escort for the B-29s. Having fighter escorts were critical in Europe, and he presumed they would be needed in the Pacific as well.
It winds up that escorts weren’t needed and even if they were needed, there were critical issues with the choice of Iwo Jima and the P-51, including their rudamentary navagation systems.
The Army believed that Japan would have to be invaded for them to surrender. The Navy believed that an invasion would be too costly in casualties and that a blockade by submarines and mines would work, and the USAAF believed they could burn down enough of Japan to get them to quit.
There was a lot of horse trading and compromises and more so as the war drew closer to the main islands. Obviously, the Philippines were invaded while Formosa was bypassed.
Iwo Jima wasn’t even the worst mistake by the Navy, if it’s deemed a mistake. The Battle of Peleliu also have a high rate of casualties (but fewer total casualties) and even less strategic importance.
It’s been called Nimitz’s worse mistake of the war. MacArthur believed that the Japanese airbase there could intervene with his invasion of the Philippines, but it was neutralized and not a factor.
Some historians I really respect fall of the side of saying it was necessary. Burrell ands others disagree.
I think this is an underappreciated factor in this discussion. The defenders changed tactics dramatically from the previous islands America had taken, with the specific intention of making them think twice about how costly it would be to invade the home islands. Maybe it worked too well.
Yeah, it wasnt so much that Iwo Jima was critical, it was useful and they thought it could be taken easily.
Actually, the defenders had changed strategy from before Iwo Jima, and the US hadn’t learned the lesson yet.
After a long string of defeats, in mid 1944, the Imperial Japanese Army studied their methodology and found it wanting. They had been stationing their troop on the shoreline and hoped to drive the Marines back into the ocean. They would also condduct banzai attacks at night. The problem was that the naval bombardments were killing the troops, and the US troops were getting damn good at using machine guns to cut down screaming Japanese.
The first test of the new strategy was at a place most people haven’t heard about, the Battle of Biak May 27 to August 17, 1944. Rather than the Marines landing on this island, it was the US Army as part of the New Guinea campaign
It was the first major effort by the Japanese to allow uncontested landings for the purpose of creating a kill zone inland.
The planners anticipated a week-long operation and drastically underestimated the number of Japanese.
And, yes, this is going to be exactly the problem at Iwo Jima, over confidence and lack of intellegence.
Rather than seven days, it took 84, and instead of being a cakewalk, the Army suffered 438 killed, 2,361 wounded and 7,234 non battle casualties (mostly Scrub typhus).
Of course, the Navy and Marines aren’t going to learn from the Army’s mistakes, so in the Battle of Peleliu, the Marine General proclaimed that it would take them four days and instead, it took 74, and produced the highest casualty rate in the war. All over a meaningless rock. This was 15 September to 27 November 1944, months before Iwo Jima.
Again, rather than have their troop slaughtered by Naval guns, the Japanese had defence in depth, and fought the Marines from caves and fortified positions.
I don’t know how much the Army and Marines were talking to each other about Japanese tactics. However, Palepiu was a job by the Marines and they should have been studying this because it came up in Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
In Iwo Jima, military intelligence failed to notice the huge buildup in the summer. Adm. Spruance, wanted to invade Iwo Jima in the summer of 1944, when there were only only about 4,000 troops there, and they hadn’t dug all those tunnels yet.
I don’t have Sakai Saburo’s memoir to hand, but my recollection is that he was stationed on Iwo during that time period and was absolutely astounded that a US raid wasn’t followed up by an invasion (he felt the Marines could have taken the island with a battalion, if not a company). He was further gobsmacked that the US turned aside and went for the Philippines, but then he wasn’t privy to the strongarm tactics being employed.
Yes, he was posted to Iwo Jima during the summer of 1944. While his thoughts that Iwo Jima could be readily taken was correct, he was an ace pilot and not an infantry officer. A company would have been around 200 troops plus or minus and a battalion would have been 900 to 1000. I presume he was talking more about how deplorible the conditions of the defense was rather than be a literal statement.