[The following is in relation to the beginning of the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. For context: The Japanese had long planned for the island to be invaded by American forces. Their strategy was to kill as many American soldiers as possible. They did so by constructing a vast underground fortress, complete with an enormous amount of pillboxes and bunkers on the surface. Their opening strategy was to let the Americans make an uncontested landing, letting as many of them mill about on the beach as possible. As soon as they started to venture inland, the entire island’s defenses would erupt at once, slaughtering them.]
The “cinch” [uncontested landing] lasted about an hour. The false calm was part of General Kuribayashi’s radical strategy: to hold off from firing at once, as every other Japanese force had done in the island campaign, and wait until the funneling attackers had filled the beach.
Easy Company had been ashore some twenty minutes and in their assembly area when the slaughter began.
Smoke and earsplitting noise suddenly filled the universe. The almost unnoticed blockhouses on the flat ground facing the ocean began raking the exposed troops with machine-gun bullets. But the real firestorm erupted from the mountain, from Suribachi: mortars, heavy artillery shells, and machine-gun rounds ripped into the stunned Americans. Two thousand hidden Japanese were gunning them down with everything from rifles to coastal defense guns. “It was so loud it was almost like it was quiet,” one stunned Marine remembered. To Lieutenant Keith Wells, Doc’s 3rd Platoon leader, Suribachi turned into a monstrous Christmas tree with blinking lights. The lights were gun barrels discharging ammunition at him and his men.
There was no protection. Now the mortars and bullets were tearing in from all over the island: General Kuribayashi had designed an elaborate cross fire from other units to the north. Entire platoons were engulfed in fireballs. Boys clawed frantically at the soft ash, trying to dig holes, but the ash filled in each swipe of the land or shovel. Heavy rounds sent jeeps and armored tractors spinning into the air in fragments. Some Marines hit by these rounds were not just killed; their bodies ceased to exist.
More than Marines. “I was watching an amtrac to the side of us as we went in,” Robert Leader remembers. “then there was this enormous blast and it disappeared. I looked for wreckage and survivors, but nothing. I couldn’t believe it. Everything just vaporized.”
Source:
Bradley, James, and Ron Powers. “D-Day.” Flags of Our Fathers. Bantam Dell, a Division of Random House, Inc., 2006. 155-56. Print.
Further Reading:
General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (栗林 忠道)
John Henry "Jack" "Doc" Bradley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bradley_(United_States_Navy)
Battle of Iwo Jima / Operation Detachment
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