"The Greatest Possible Violence": Robert L. Sherrod on Iwo Jima

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.”