Very
early on when American Marines landed on Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, in fine
weather, war correspondent Robert L. Sherrod of Time magazine could see
that the Japanese had buried themselves deep underground. The pre-invasion
bombardment of 7,500 tons of shells looked good as they hit the beaches, the
northern plateau, and the sides of Mount Suribachi, but Sherrod could see no
flames rise in their wake. “Though I have seen this many times,” Sherrod wrote
of the intense bombardment, “I can’t help thinking, ‘nobody can live through
this.’ But I know better.”
At
the beginning of the landings for Operation Detachment, progress had been slow,
but steady. As the Marines struggled to make their way from the beaches inland,
however, the Japanese began to hit them with heavy artillery fire from hidden
positions, including huge mortar shells as large as 320-mm. “You can lick
machine guns with infantry, but mortars are tougher,” Major General Clifton Cates
told Sherrod. Some assault battalions had suffered casualty figures of 20
percent to 25 percent storming the invasion beaches. The coarse, loose black
sand that made it difficult for the marines to move also hampered tracked
vehicles. “Many of our indispensable tanks stalled in the sand soon after they
hit the beaches,” Sherrod said. “There they became easy marks for heavy
gunfire.”
Late
in the afternoon, when Sherrod’s landing boat was ready to load on the USS Bayfield’s port side, the correspondent
realized that the transport seemed to be “a nice haven, a precious place to
be.” He could see on the beaches between Motoyama Airfield Number 1 and the
water line tremendous mortar shells exploding one right after the other. The
high-explosive charges—dubbed “floating ash cans”—crashed into the thin line of
marines or among the boats bringing in reinforcements, “throwing sand, water
and even pieces of human flesh a hundred feet into the air.” The Japanese had
the Americans covered from both ends of the island, Sherrod noted. “They [the
Marines] could only advance and die,” he said, “paving the way for the men who
came behind them.” The cost of battle suddenly appeared right in front of him.
Sherrod saw a boat pull alongside the Bayfield
carrying three psychiatric cases, with one man screaming and twisting
violently in his stretcher. “No man can look at a severe psychiatric case without
thinking, ‘There is war at its worst,’” he said.
At
about five o’clock orders came for Colonel Walter Irvine Jordan to take his
Twenty-Fourth Regiment of the Fourth Division into the beach. Sherrod had been
assigned as one of the sixteen men in the landing boat of Jordan’s executive
officer, Lieutenant Colonel Austin R. Brenelli. As he climbed down the cargo
net from the transport to Boat X-2, Sherrod started to feel that he had no
business being there, feeling the law of averages weighing against his
survival. But when he turned and asked a marine in the boat what he thought,
the man answered, “I believe the worst is over now.” Sherrod knew better, as
did the marine, actually, but “it made me feel good to hear the lie.”
Before reaching land, Sherrod came across fellow correspondent Keith
Wheeler of the Chicago Tribune, who
had gone ashore in one of the earlier waves. Wheeler had nothing but grim news
to relay, telling Sherrod, “There’s more hell in there than I’ve seen in the
rest of the war put together. The Nips have got the beaches blanketed with
mortars. There are dead Marines scattered from one end to the other, and looks
like nearly every boat is getting smashed before it can pull out.” He advised
his friend that it would be “plain foolishness” to land with the troops that
day.
At first, Sherrod had taken Wheeler’s advice. “After all,” Sherrod
later reflected, “this business of taking long chances could be carried too
far.” He changed his mind, however, when he saw the faces of the marines from
the Fourth Marine Division he had been scheduled to land with—faces that had
written on them “the same fear that gripped at my guts.” Sherrod knew they
could not, as he could, decide to stay behind, but “had to go in.” He had cast
his lot with the Marines when they had set out for shore “and this was no time
to desert. I put on my jacket, buckled on my belt, and shouldered my pack.”
Colonel Brunelli appeared and asked the correspondent, “Ready to go?” Sherrod
said, “Sure,” very bravely, “though I was mighty scared.”
When
the boat hit the beach, Sherrod dashed a couple of yards inland through the
semi-darkness. As he ran, a shovel in his hand, the correspondent noticed dark
forms scattered on the loose earth—about twenty dead marines—and the smell of
death began to waft through the cool evening air. Fashioning a foxhole out of
that loose sand was, in the words of a marine from the Deep South, like trying
“to dig a hole in a barrel of wheat.” Whenever Sherrod scooped up a shovelful,
three-quarters of it would roll back into the hole. But by the time darkness
had settled over the island, he had scratched out a hole two-feet deep and
six-feet long. “That first night on Iwo Jima can only be described as a
nightmare in hell,” Sherrod said.
Although
he expected an enemy counterattack to come at any moment, Sherrod managed to
get a few hours’ sleep. Slightly after four o’clock in the morning, however,
the Japanese unleashed a terrific mortar barrage on the center of the beachhead,
shattering any sense of security Sherrod had. The heavy shells started bursting
around his foxhole every few seconds; he timed the explosions and counted
twenty within fifty yards of his position in one minute. “In the midst of this
thunder and lightning there was a thud in the bank of my foxhole, next to my
left arm,” he recalled. “I reached over and dug out a piece of hot steel that
must have weighed a half pound.”
When
daylight broke over the island, Sherrod shook off the sand that had covered him
during the night and downed a two-ounce bottle of medicinal brandy a ship’s
doctor had kindly stuck in his pocket. Next to his collapsed foxhole lay two
unexploded Japanese mines and, ten yards away in a shell hole, there were eight
marines who had been killed by a direct hit the day before.
After
a visit to the Twenty-Fourth’s command post, where he endured another round of
Japanese shelling, Sherrod, ducking the occasional enemy sniper, surveyed the
scene and saw the sloping sands spotted with dead Marines. The Japanese and
American bodies had one thing in common, he noted: “They died with the greatest
possible violence. Nowhere in the Pacific war have I seen such badly mangled
bodies. Many were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay 50 ft. [feet] away
from any body. Only the legs were easy to identify—Japanese if wrapped in khaki
puttees, American if covered by canvas leggings. In one spot on the sand, far
from the nearest clusters of dead men, I saw a string of guts 15 ft. [feet]
long.” In some areas, he added, the smell of burning flesh overpowered one’s
senses.
To
report on the horrors he had seen, and the uncommon courage displayed by the marines,
Sherrod, as night approached, walked to the beach to catch a ride to the Bayfield. The good weather during the initial
landing, however, had turned rough, and boats were having a hard time
evacuating the wounded that littered the beach. He turned back to spend another
restless night on Iwo Jima, during which Sherrod endured the earth trembling
beneath him with a sound “not unlike someone banging on the radiator in the
apartment below.” Although many around him agreed that the tremors were
probably Iwo’s “own manifestation of an earthquake,” nobody laughed when a
sergeant suggested that the enemy had been able to dig under the position and
were about to “blow up the damn island.”
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