No escape, relief or hope -- only duty

(Dr. Robert Sligh, 5th Air Force historian, recently traveled to Iwo To – pronounced “toe” – 65 years after the Pacific War’s bloodiest battle began.)

It’s called Iwo To, but to Americans it will always be known as Iwo Jima.

I’m not sure what I expected to find as the 374th Airlift Wing’s C-130 flew to the island. I’m a “Boomer,” born a decade after World War II. My father was too young to serve but I knew a lot of men who did. They didn’t talk much about the war, but stories circulated around the neighborhood boys’ network. Mr. King was captured on Corregidor and endured over three years as a prisoner of the Japanese. His brother was a B-17 pilot, shot down over Germany, had lost a leg, and became a “Kriegie” in a Luftstalag (prisoner-of-war camp). Then there was Mr. Martin who had been wounded in Europe. His shoulder had a permanent “dent” in it from a bullet wound. We saw it every time he mowed the yard. Mr. Burleson down the street had been a Marine. I don’t know if he was at Iwo Jima—like the others, he didn’t talk about his experiences—but at the entrance to the Burleson home was Joe Rosenthal’s famous photo of the second flag raising at Mt. Suribachi. It was an icon of sacrifice and victory. The lesson was clear to a young boy in the early ‘60s—you plant your flag on it and it’s yours.

Of course, there was the Hollywood version of World War II. Americans were the good guys, the enemy was always sneaky, cowardly, underhanded, and couldn’t be trusted. Americans died in these movies, but usually cleanly, bravely and with “mother” on their lips. Hundreds of World War II movies like these came out after the war, and, of course, we ate them up. Chief among them was “Sands of Iwo Jima.” It had all of those elements and epitomized the struggle and sacrifice Americans made in the Pacific. John Wayne’s death at the end—shot in the back, no less—drove home the lesson. As a historian, I know life isn’t that black and white. There’s usually more than one side to the story...

In recent years my “cultural background” has changed. It started with John Tolland’s book “Rising Sun,” which presented the Pacific War from the Japanese point of view. More recently, the book and movie “Letters from Iwo Jima” showed what Japanese soldiers endured. That lesson was about to be driven home as we touched down on Iwo To.

The air field dominates the central part of the island, and that was our jumping off point. I probably expected a near lunar landscape, and as we progressed around the island there was some of that. But mostly there was a mix of lush jungle, scrub lands and dramatic cliffs. Birds were the only visible wildlife. Outcroppings of sulfur and steam vents would make the island a geologist’s dream.

Major Kikuchi, Japanese Air Self-Defense Forces, was our guide. He started with a rather innocuous visit to the old sulfur mine. The steaming vents reminded us that this was a hot, stinking volcanic land that was still growing. As we left the sulfur vents, we passed a single, slender granite stele. At its base were some rusting bits of metal. Someone in the group asked him what it was. A marker for a cave, he told us, a cave where Japanese soldiers died. The metal bits were bomb fragments. We passed dozens of these simple, silent markers as we went along our way, many have small bowls. I began to realize the price Iwo’s defenders paid. One stop was to Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s underground headquarters. Sited in the bottom of a U-shaped ravine, you’d be hard-pressed to find it unless you knew it was there. Two at a time, Major Kikuchi took us into the man-made cave—a bunker, really. The walls were seven feet thick, the ceiling low. From here General Kuribayashi directed Iwo Jima’s hopeless defense. “Winning” was not his objective. He knew the island would eventually fall. His mission was inflicting maximum casualties to make the American leaders rethink their plans to invade mainland Japan.

It was sobering to think of men in this and other underground forts enduring the heat and the constant impact of artillery rounds, knowing that there was no escape, no relief, no hope—only duty. The naval hospital cave was even more sobering. The entrance was spacious with a large, rusted-through oxygen cylinder outside. Lining the walls insider were artifacts left decades ago by men long since gone. The main tunnel was cool, vented with large shafts in the ceiling. It seemed to go on forever. It was only when we turned into a side passage that we were hit by hot sulfurous steam. The further we went, the hotter it got. Japanese soldiers had dug miles of these tunnels at Iwo Jima, enduring hot, acrid conditions. Some wore gas masks, most did not. The digging went on for months with a man able to dig for only 10 minutes at a time before another took his place.

Before Major Kikuchi took us into General Kuribayashi’s bunker and the hospital cave, he sprinkled water at each caves’ mouth. At first we thought it was to clear the way of sulfur fumes. But that didn’t make sense. I asked him why he did it. He said many men died of thirst in those caves. It was a fitting offering.

Near the end of our tour, we walked up Mt. Suribachi. The dome-shaped rock is itself a sort of icon. It hasn’t changed much from the 1945 photos. It’s not a difficult walk up the hill, but we had to remind ourselves that there’s a paved road now and no one was shooting at us. At the top are simple memorials to the men who fought and died on that hill. Where Marines once planted a flag there’s now a white memorial. Metal racks stand before it where present-day Marines leave their dog tags as tribute to their forbearers. A few yards away is the Japanese memorial, showing where the defenders came from.

Standing on Suribachi’s summit was a fulfillment of a boyhood dream. I was treading on hallowed ground. The island stretched before me. I thought of all the hundreds of thousands of bombs dropped and all the tens of thousands of lives lost. But I couldn’t see the Iwo Jima of 1945 on the Iwo To of today. The traces of that war are few now and hard to see. Nature will all too soon erase those that remain. What must remain is the memory of the bravery and sacrifice of men on both sides. They have lessons to teach us, if we are willing to listen.