19 February 1945
U.S. Forces Land on Iwo Jima
The American conquest of Saipan (location #25) gave the Allies an air base close enough to allow heavy bombers to begin targeting Japanese cities. However, the Japanese began assigning fighters to defend those cities, and bombers began to be shot down. This led Allied military planners to seek control of an island even closer to Japan; one that was within range for fighters to accompany the bombers. They settled on Iwo Jima, which was 660 nautical miles from Japan. The Japanese, anticipating that Iwo Jima would be a target, had begun reinforcing and fortifying the island in mid-1944, so that by the beginning of 1945 it held 21,000 Japanese soldiers and was honeycombed with pillboxes and gun emplacements connected by underground passages.

Naval and air bombardment of Iwo Jima began in the final weeks of 1944, but the landings did not begin until February 19. The invaders met fierce resistance, including Kamikaze attacks that sunk one U.S. aircraft carrier and damaged another. However, four days afterward American soldiers captured Mount Suribachi, the highest point on the island, which became the scene for one of the most famous photographs of the war. Japanese resistance on the island continued through March in what would end up being the costliest battle of the war thus far; there were 25,000 U.S. casualties, including nearly 7,000 dead. Fewer than 1,100 of the Japanese garrison survived; the final two did not lay down their arms until 1951—six years after the war ended.

History:
Iwo Jima

Campaign Maps:
Invasion of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, 1945
Battle of Iwo Jima

Personal Accounts:
Iwo Jima—One Man Remembers
Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II: Interview with Robert Lauffer
Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II: Interview with James T. Wells
Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II: Interview with Leon Canick
Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II: Interview with W. Wallace Kaenzig
Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II: Interview with Bernard W. Koft
Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II: Interview with John Berglund
Oral History—Iwo Jima Flag Raising

Photographs:
Marines of the 5th Division inch their way up a slope on Red Beach No. 1 toward Surbachi Yama as the smoke of the battle drifts about them
Across the litter on Iwo Jima's black sands, Marines of the 4th Division shell Japanese positions cleverly concealed back from the beaches
Smashed by Japanese mortar and shellfire, trapped by Iwo's treacherous black-ash sands, amtracs and other vehicles of war lay knocked out on the black sands of the volcanic fortress