Declassified WWII Diaries: The Brutal Tactics the Japanese Hated in American Marines!

On February 19th, 1945, a 28-year-old Marine sergeant from Raritan, New Jersey, wrote his last letter to his wife. They had been married for 7 months. He told her not to worry. He told her he would come home. A few hours later, he was dead on a black sand beach 8,000 miles from her kitchen table.

His name was John Basilone. He already had the Medal of Honor. He didn’t have to be on that beach. The Marine Corps had begged him to stay home, to sell war bonds, to shake hands with movie stars, and speak on the radio. He had asked to go back to combat. He had asked three times. When they finally let him go, he ended up on an island called Iwo Jima, defended by a Japanese general who had once once driven a Chevrolet across Texas, and understood, better than almost anyone in the Imperial Army, what he was about to face.

Some of you had a father who came home from the Pacific. Some of you had an uncle who never spoke of it. Some of you grew up in houses where a folded flag sat on the mantel, and no one ever explained why. This is the story that belongs to those flags. It is the story of why Japanese soldiers, men raised on the code of the samurai, came to fear the United States Marines more than any other unit in the American military.

Not the army, not the navy. Not the British. Not the Australians. The Marines. A specific certainty that when the Marines came, the men who had to stop them would die. The Imperial Japanese Army never solved the problem the Marines gave them. They tried. Their best generals tried.

Three of the finest defensive commanders Japan ever produced spent the last years of their lives trying to find an answer. Each of them, before he died, admitted in his final messages that he had failed. Each of them understood something their soldiers were never told. The Marines could not be be delayed. They could only be bled. And in the end, no matter how much blood was spilled, they would come to understand that fear, you have to understand two men who would never meet.

Two men separated by 5,200 mi of ocean, by language, by culture, by the certainty that each was fighting for something worth dying for. The first was a Japanese general named Tadamichi Kuribayashi. He was born on July 7th, 1891 in a rural district of Nagano Prefecture, the son of a minor samurai family. He entered the Imperial Japanese Army Academy as a young man and rose steadily through the ranks.

But something about Kuribayashi set him apart from most of his fellow officers. In 1928, at the age of 37, he was sent to the United States as a military attaché. He studied at Fort Bliss in Texas. He studied at Fort Riley in Kansas. He drove a Chevrolet across the American Southwest. He wrote letters home describing the vast industrial power of the country he was observing.

He wrote that any war with the United States would be a mistake. He was 53 years old when he stood on the black sands of Iwo Jima in June of 1944 and understood that his final mission would be to prove himself right. The second man was the American Marine sergeant we have already met. John Basilone was born on November 4th, 1916 in Buffalo, New York, the son of Italian immigrants.

His family moved to Raritan, New Jersey when he was still a child. He grew up on a small farm, dropped out of school in the eighth grade, and enlisted in the United States Army at 17. He served 3 years in the Philippines, earned the nickname Manila John, and returned home to work as a truck driver. In 1940, he enlisted again, this time in the Marine Corps.

By the summer of 1942, he was 25 years old, a machine gunner in the 1st Marine Division, and he was about to land on an island whose name almost no one in America had ever heard, Guadalcanal. Between these two men, between the general who had seen America with his own eyes, and the sergeant who was about to bring America’s fury ashore, lay the truth about why Japanese soldiers came to fear the Marines above all others.

That truth begins with the code that shaped every Japanese soldier who fought in the Pacific War. On January 8th, 1941, 11 months before Pearl Harbor, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo signed a document that would define the war for millions of men. It was called the Senjinkun, the field service code. It was distributed to every soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army, every recruit memorized its contents, every officer taught its principles.

The code contained a single sentence that mattered more than all the others. Do not survive the shame of capture. In eight words, the Senjinkun eliminated the possibility of surrender. Japanese soldiers were taught that being taken prisoner brought unbearable dishonor to their families, their ancestors, and the emperor himself.

Death in battle was glorious. Death by one’s own hand was acceptable. Capture was worse than death. This was the doctrine that shaped the men who would face the Marines, but something curious happened when Japanese intelligence began compiling reports on the United States Marine Corps. The initial assessments were dismissive.

Marines were described as elite troops, yes, but ultimately still Americans, products of a soft democratic society, men who valued individual comfort over collective sacrifice, men who would break under pressure. The Imperial Japanese Army believed that Japanese spirit would defeat American materialism. They were about to discover something they had not anticipated.

On the morning of August 7th, 1942, the transports of the 1st Marine Division appeared off the coast of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. 16,000 Marines waded ashore under the command of Major General Alexander Vandegrift, a 55-year-old Virginian who had spent his entire adult life in the Corps. The Japanese garrison on the island was caught completely by surprise.

The Marines seized the airfield within hours. They named it Henderson Field. Tokyo’s response was immediate and confident. Reinforcements would be sent. The Americans would be pushed back into the sea. The Marines would be taught a lesson about facing the Imperial Japanese Army. The man selected to teach that lesson was Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki.

He was 50 years old, a veteran of the China campaigns, a hard disciplined officer who had commanded troops in in of the war’s most successful operations. His unit was designated the Ichiki Detachment. The first echelon numbered 917 men. They landed on Guadalcanal on August 18th, 1942 at Taivu Point, roughly 20 mi east of Henderson Field.

Ichiki was told that the Marines were exhausted, demoralized, and could be defeated by a rapid night attack. He believed it. On the night of August 20th, he marched his men westward through the jungle toward the American perimeter. He did not wait for the second echelon to arrive. He did not conduct reconnaissance. He was operating on doctrine that had worked against Chinese forces for years.

Attack at night. Attack with speed. Attack with absolute commitment. The Americans would panic. At approximately 1:30 in the morning on August 21st, the Ichiki Detachment reached the mouth of a stream the Marines called Alligator Creek. The Marines were waiting. They had prepared positions along the western bank.

Machine guns were sighted to sweep the sandbar at on the killing ground. The Marines had learned in just 2 weeks on Guadalcanal that the Japanese would come at night, and they had prepared accordingly. The first Japanese wave crossed the sandbar in complete darkness screaming as they charged.

The Marine machine guns opened fire at point-blank range. What followed was not a battle in any traditional sense. It was a slaughter. The Japanese doctrine of night assault, which had shattered Chinese divisions for years, met an enemy that did not run. The Marines held their positions. They fired until their barrels glowed. When the Japanese survivors tried to swim across the creek, they were shot in the water.

When they tried to retreat, artillery cut them down in the palm grove behind them. By dawn, approximately 800 Japanese soldiers were dead. The Marines had lost 44. Colonel Ichiki, sitting in the jungle with the shattered remnants of his command, understood what had happened. His assessment of the enemy had been catastrophically wrong.

His superior’s assessment had been catastrophically wrong. Everything the Imperial Japanese Army believed about the Americans was catastrophically wrong. He burned the regimental colors, then he died. Some accounts say by his own hand, some say in a final charge. The truth was buried with him in the jungle by the creek.

The Battle of the Tenaru, as the Marines called it, was the first time in the Pacific War that the United States Marine Corps had faced a determined Japanese assault. And the first time that Japanese confidence in the racial and spiritual superiority of the Imperial Army had been shattered on the battlefield. The reports that filtered back to Tokyo were quietly disturbing.

Intelligence officers began the slow, painful work of revising their assessments. The Marines, it turned out, did not panic at night. They had, in fact, prepared for night attacks with a level of tactical precision that suggested extensive training. The Marines did not retreat when surrounded. They did not surrender when their positions became difficult.

And most disturbing of all, they counterattacked with an aggression that Japanese officers had assumed was a uniquely Japanese quality. The old assessments were quietly filed away. New assessments began to emerge. Reports that used a phrase that would become common in Japanese military documents over the next 3 years, shock troops.

The Marines were being reclassified not as ordinary American infantry, but as something else. Something that required a different tactical response. Something that could not be dismissed with the old certainties. But the man who would drive this lesson home to the Imperial Japanese Army was not a general. He was not a strategist.

He was a 25-year-old machine gunner from a farm in New Jersey. On the night of October 24th, 1942, John Basilone lay behind a section of water-cooled M1919A4 Browning machine guns on a section of the perimeter defending Henderson Field. 3,000 Japanese soldiers were massing in the jungle in front of them. They came in waves. They came screaming.

They came with bayonets fixed and grenades in their hands. They came believing, as Colonel Ichiki had believed, that the Americans would break. Basilone did not break. For 72 hours with fetch ammunition through jungle held by enemy troops, with his hands burned raw from the scalding barrels of his guns, with the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers piling up in front of his position until he had to leave his gun and push them aside so he could keep firing, John Basilone held the line.

When his ammunition ran out, he crawled through Japanese lines to bring back more. When his machine guns jammed, he stripped them down and repaired them in the dark. When the Japanese broke through in other sectors, he moved to plug the gap. By the time it was over, the field in front of his position was carpeted with Japanese dead.

Estimates varied. Some sources said several hundred, some said more. Basilone himself refused for the rest of his short life to give a number. He would receive the Medal of Honor. He would become the first enlisted Marine in the Second World War to earn America’s highest military decoration, and he would carry in his silent moments the knowledge of what he had done.

That knowledge and what it would cost him belonged to a future that had not yet arrived. In Tokyo, the reports from Guadalcanal continued to accumulate, and in the offices of the Imperial General Staff, a new understanding was beginning to form. The Americans had sent something to the Pacific that Japan had not anticipated.

The Americans had sent an enemy that would not stop, but Guadalcanal had only been the introduction. The atoll was called Tarawa. If you looked at it on a map, you would barely see it. A scattered ring of coral in the central Pacific, so small that a man could walk across the largest island in 20 minutes. That island was called Betio.

It was less than 3 miles long, less than a thousand yards wide at its widest point. It held the most heavily fortified position per square yard in the history of warfare. The man who built it was Rear Admiral K.G. Shibasaki. He was 49 years old, a career naval officer, a specialist in coastal defense, he had spent months turning Betio into a fortress.

500 concrete pillboxes, 14 coastal guns, 40 artillery pieces, 14 tanks buried up to their turrets in the sand, barbed wire, anti-tank ditches, mines beneath every stretch of beach where an American might come ashore, and 4,500 men. Nearly 3,000 of them were Japanese naval infantry, the special naval landing force, considered the equivalent of Marines.

The rest were construction troops and Korean laborers. Shibasaki stood on Betio in October of 1943 and made a statement that would be repeated in Japanese newspapers, in propaganda broadcasts, and in the memoirs of his own subordinates, “A million men in 100 years could not take Tarawa.” He was 50% right. They took it in 76 hours.

The 2nd Marine Division arrived off Betio on the morning of November 20th, 1943. 18,000 Marines, the naval bombardment began before dawn. Battleships, cruisers, destroyers, thousands of shells poured onto an island less than 3 miles long. Aircraft from the carriers off the coast dropped bombs on every visible target.

When it was over, observers on the ships said, “No one could possibly be alive on Betio.” They were wrong. The Japanese had built their fortifications to withstand exactly this kind of bombardment. Concrete 4 ft thick, coconut logs and coral rubble absorbing the shock. Men waited in the darkness beneath the earth, and when the shelling stopped, they emerged into their firing positions and looked out at the lagoon.

The lagoon was full of Marines. And then something happened that no one had planned for. The tide did not come in. Tarawa lies in a region of the Pacific where a phenomenon called a neap tide can occur. The tides that day were the lowest anyone could remember. The reef that surrounded Betio, which the Marine planners had expected to be covered by 5 ft of water, was instead covered by 3 ft.

The landing craft carrying the first waves of Marines struck coral hundreds of yards from shore. They could not go forward. They could not go back. The Marines climbed out of the boats into water that came up to their chests, and they began to walk. 500 yards. 500 yards of open water, chest deep under machine-gun fire from every fortified position on the beach.

Men fell. They fell and they did not come up. The lagoon turned red in places. Rifles were held overheads to keep them dry. Radios drowned. Officers died. Sergeants took over. Sergeants died. Corporals took over, and the Marines kept walking. The man who took command on that beach was Colonel David Shoup. He was 38 years old from a farm in Indiana.

He had been shot through the leg early on the first day. He did not evacuate. He sat on a wooden crate behind a Japanese pillbox holding the beachhead together with a radio and a voice hoarse from shouting, and he refused to leave. He would receive the Medal of Honor. He would later say of the men who died in the water at Tarawa that he could not think of them without shame at his own survival.

But somewhere in the chaos of that first morning something else happened. Something no one on either side would understand until the battle was over. Rear Admiral Shibasaki was killed. The exact circumstances are debated to this day. What is known is that on the first day of the battle, Shibasaki attempted to move his command post from a heavily fortified bunker to a different location on the island.

He may have wanted to give the original bunker to wounded men. He may have needed better communications. Whatever his reason, he left the safety of his headquarters and American naval gunfire found him. American naval gunfire found him. The commander of the fortress that a million men could not take in 100 years was killed by a shell fired from a ship he could not see in the first 24 hours of a battle he had promised to win.

His death was catastrophic for the Japanese defense. The intricate system of interlocking fire he had designed depended on centralized command. With Shibasaki dead and the communications network shattered by naval shelling, the defenders of Betio fought without coordination. Each bunker became its own war.

Each pillbox fought until it was destroyed. The Marines came through the water. They reached the seawall. They climbed over it one at a time and they began to kill their way inland. 76 hours later, it was finished. Of the 4,500 defenders, 17 surrendered. 17. The Marines lost 1,009 killed, 2,101 wounded.

Over 1,000 dead in 3 days on an island a man could walk across in 20 minutes. When the photographs reached the United States, there was a national outcry. Americans could not believe the cost. Some newspapers called it a disaster. Some called it a scandal. Wives and mothers wrote letters demanding to know why so many boys had died on a piece of coral no one had ever heard of.

If you were a boy sitting on a living room floor in 1943, listening to the radio while your mother wept in the kitchen, this was the battle she was weeping about. The Marines knew why. They had proven at Tarawa that they would take any objective, no matter the cost, no matter the odds, no matter what the tide did. The Japanese intelligence officers who studied Tarawa understood something the American public did not.

The Marines had walked into a killing zone that would have broken any other army in the world. They had absorbed casualty rates that European armies in the First World War had considered impossible, and they had won. The reports flowed back to Tokyo. The reports were read by a colonel named Kunio Nakagawa. He was 46 years old.

A quiet, thoughtful officer with a reputation for tactical intelligence. He had studied the Marines from a distance for over a year. He had read the reports from Guadalcanal. He had read the reports from Tarawa. He had read the interrogations of the few Japanese survivors from those battles, and he had come to a conclusion that would change the Pacific War.

The banzai charge did not work. For centuries, the massed frontal assault had been the ultimate expression of Japanese martial spirit. On battlefield after battlefield, from the wars against Russia to the campaigns in China, Soldat Butler had proven that a determined bayonet charge could break enemy formations that outnumbered him three to one.

Against the Marines, it did nothing. Against the Marines, it was suicide. Nakagawa had been given command of the defense of an island called Peleliu in the Palau group. It was scheduled to be invaded in September of 1944, and Nakagawa was going to try something new. He was going to make the Marines come to him.

He built his defenses inside the mountain, a ridge of coral limestone called Umurbrogol dominated the center of Peleliu. Nakagawa turned it into a fortress. 500 caves, some were natural. Some were dynamited out of the rock. They were connected by tunnels. They were sighted to cover each other with interlocking fire. They contained artillery, machine guns, mortars, sleeping quarters, and ammunition dumps.

He did not plan to attack the Marines when they landed. He planned to let them come inland. He planned to bleed them from every direction, from every ridge, from every hidden gun port in the coral until the price of taking his position became so terrible that the Americans would give up. He was fighting a war of attrition.

He was fighting it against an enemy who accepted attrition as the cost of victory. And he did not know in September of 1944 that his innovation would shape every remaining battle of the Pacific War. The 1st Marine Division arrived off Peleliu on the morning of September 15th, 1944. Their commander expected the battle to last four days. It would last 73.

Among the Marines waiting ashore that morning was a 20-year-old private first class from Mobile, Alabama. His name was Eugene Sledge. He was a member of K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. He had enlisted in a program that allowed college students to complete their studies before being called to active duty, but he had dropped out to fight. His father was a doctor.

His mother had begged him not to go. He went anyway. He carried a copy of the New Testament in his pocket. He would carry it through every day of what was coming. And when he came home, if he came home, he would write about it. Decades later, a book that would become one of the finest memoirs of the Pacific War ever written.

Some of you have read it. Some of you have sons who watched the HBO series that came from it. Either way, the man who lived those pages was on that beach on that morning, and he was scared. The Marines took the airfield on the first day. And then they reached Umurbrogol. And Nakagawa’s plan began to work.

The 1st Marine Regiment was commanded by Colonel Lewis Puller. He was known as Chesty. He was 46 years old. He had already earned four Navy Crosses. He was, by 1944, >> [gasps] >> a living legend in the Marine Corps, a man whose reputation for aggression and personal courage was so extreme that other Marines told stories about him around fires at night.

Puller took his regiment into Umurbrogol. He kept them there for 6 days. By the time he was ordered to withdraw them, 1,749 men of his 3,000 were casualties. 56% of the regiment gone. When his superiors finally ordered his regiment relieved. Puller protested. He believed his Marines could take the ridge. They could not. No one could.

The Japanese in the caves were fighting from positions where American artillery could not reach them. Naval gunfire bounced off the coral, aircraft dropped bombs that did nothing. When Marines climbed the ridges, they were shot from openings in the rock they could not see. When they retreated, they were shot in the back.

When they held their positions, they were shelled by mortars they could not locate. The only way to take Nakagawa’s fortress was to burn it out. The Marines developed a technique they called it the corkscrew and blowtorch. Flamethrowers to burn the defenders out of the caves, explosives to seal the cave so no one could ever emerge again.

The men of the flamethrower teams had a life expectancy measured in days. The fuel tanks on their backs made them targets. Snipers and machine gunners waited for them. They kept advancing. Eugene Sledge kept advancing. He would write decades later about the smell. He would write about how the flies coated the corpses is so thickly that the bodies seemed to move.

He would write about the mud that formed from crushed coral and human remains. He would write about the day he sat on a corpse to eat his rations because there was nowhere else to sit. He would write that Peleliu changed him. That the man who walked out of Umurbrogol was not the same man who walked in. The battle that was supposed to last four days ground on for weeks, then for months.

The 1st Marine Division was withdrawn, its combat power destroyed. Army units replaced them. The fighting continued, and on November 24th, 1944, deep in his headquarters cave at the heart of Umurbrogol, Colonel Kunio Nakagawa understood that the end had come. His food was gone. His water was almost gone. His ammunition was running out.

Only a few hundred of his men were still alive. He burned the regimental colors. He wrote a final report to Tokyo, and then he committed suicide. He had done something no other Japanese commander had done. He had made the Marines pay a price that horrified the American public.

He had killed or wounded nearly 10,000 Marines and Army soldiers. He had prolonged a battle that was supposed to last four days into a nightmare that lasted 73. He had also lost his entire garrison of 11,000 men was dead or dying. Only a small number of Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner. The Marines had taken Peleliu, but Nakagawa’s real victory would come later.

His tactics would be studied by the man now preparing to defend a small volcanic island in the North Pacific. A man who had once studied at Fort Bliss and Fort Riley. A man who had driven a Chevrolet across the American Southwest and understood in his bones what he was about to face. Tadamichi Kuribayashi read the reports from Peleliu, and he began to prepare.

The island he was defending was called Iwo Jima. It was less than 8 square miles. It contained an airfield the Americans wanted for their B-29 bombers. Kuribayashi had 21,000 men. He had 18 km of tunnels being dug into the volcanic rock. He had 1,500 prepared positions, and he had a strategy he had learned from Nakagawa, refined with his own understanding of American power.

He would not defend the beaches. He would let the Marines come ashore. He would let them fill the black volcanic sand with their landing craft, their tanks, their supplies. And then, when the beach was so crowded that every shell would find a target, he would open fire from positions the Marines could not reach and could not silence.

He wrote a letter to his wife, Yoshi. He wrote to his young daughter, Takako. He told them he would not be coming home. He told them he had made his peace with dying. He did not tell them what was coming for the men who were about to land on his beach. >> [sighs] >> But somewhere in the Pacific, on a troop ship carrying reinforcements to a war that would not end, a 28-year-old sergeant from Raritan, New Jersey was writing his own letters home.

John Basilone was on his way to Iwo Jima. He did not have to be there. He had earned the right to be somewhere else, but he was on that ship and in the days ahead, on a black sand beach beneath a dead volcano, his story and Kuribayashi’s story would meet. Only one of them would be alive to see the flag raised.

Neither would be alive to see the war end. After Guadalcanal, after the Medal of Honor, after the 72 hours behind those machine guns where he had killed so many men he refused to count them, the Marine Corps had brought Basilone home. They put him on a war bond tour. They sent him to factories and stadiums and radio studios. He shook hands with the President of the United States.

He was photographed with movie stars. He was for a brief time in 1943 the most famous enlisted man in America. He hated it. He wrote letters to his commanding officers begging to return to combat. He was told no. He was told he was worth more as a symbol than as a rifleman. He was told his job now was to inspire other men to enlist, not to fight beside them. He kept asking.

In late 1943, they finally let him go back. He was assigned to the newly formed 5th Marine Division at Camp Pendleton in California. And it was there in the months that followed that John Basilone met Sergeant Lena Riggi. She was a Marine. A member of the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, which had been established just 2 years earlier.

She was of Italian descent like Basilone. She was quiet. She was serious. She worked in the mess at Camp Pendleton, and she had no idea when she first met the man everyone called Manila John who he was or what he had done. He liked that about her. They were married on July 10th, 1944. There was no honeymoon. The 5th Marine Division was preparing to ship out. Lena went back to her duties.

John went back to training the young Marines who would follow him ashore on an island none of them had heard of. He wrote her letters. He told her he would come home. He told her not to worry. On February 19th, 1945 in the pre-dawn darkness off the coast of Iwo Jima, John Basilone climbed down a cargo net into a landing craft with the men of C Company, 1st Battalion, 27th Marines.

He was 28 years old. He had been in the Marine Corps for almost 5 years. And in a few hours on a beach of black volcanic sand, he would prove one more time what a Marine was. The landing began at 9:00 in the morning. The first waves crossed the beach without significant resistance. General Kuribayashi was letting them come. He was waiting.

He was waiting for the beach to fill. When it did, he opened fire. Every meter of that sand had been pre-registered. Every landing craft was a target. Mortars fell in patterns. Artillery from Mount Suribachi swept the shore. Marines died where they stood, where they crouched, where they tried to dig into sand so loose it collapsed on itself as fast as they could scoop it away.

John Basilone did what he had been trained to do. He led his section forward across the beach through the fire toward a Japanese blockhouse that was killing the men around him. He worked his way to a position where he could attack it. He assaulted it with grenades and demolition charges. He silenced it.

Then he let his men off the beach toward the airfield. Somewhere along that path, in the confusion of that morning, a Japanese mortar round found him. He was killed almost instantly. The Marines who saw him fall said he was calm. They said he had been moving from position to position, doing his job, showing his young men how to survive.

They said he died with them, not because of them. He had been on Iwo Jima for a few months. He would receive the Navy Cross posthumously. He would be the only enlisted man of the Second World War to receive both the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. Lena Basilone was told 2 weeks later. She was 28 years old.

They had been married for 7 months. She would never remarry. She would live for another 54 years quiet and private. She was buried at Riverside National Cemetery in California when she died in 1999. John Basilone lies at Arlington National Cemetery in section 12 where visitors still leave flowers and Marine Corps coins on the stone.

In death, as in so much of their short marriage, they remained apart. But she had chosen him. And she had chosen to belong to no one else. If you have ever walked past that stone at Arlington on a Memorial Day when the flags stand in every row, you have walked past a man who did not have to be on that beach and went anyway. The battle for Iwo Jima did not end with John Basilone.

It went on for another 5 weeks. Three Marine divisions, 70,000 men, fought their way inland through a landscape that seemed designed for their destruction. The black sand gave no cover. The volcanic rock could not be dug into. Every ridge concealed a bunker. Every cave held a machine gun. General Kuribayashi’s tunnels ran beneath their feet and Japanese soldiers emerged from ports the Marines had already passed killing men in the rear areas of a battle that had no rear areas.

On February 23rd, 4 days after the landing, a patrol from the 28th Marines reached the summit of Mount Suribachi and raised a small American flag. A few hours later, a larger flag was brought up to replace it. A Navy photographer named Joe Rosenthal took his photograph. It would become the most reproduced image in the history of American journalism.

It would be pressed onto stamps. It would be sculpted 30 ft tall in bronze at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, where some of you have taken your grandchildren. Three of the six men in that picture would be dead before the battle ended. The fighting ground on day after day, yard after yard. The Marines used Nakagawa’s lessons against Kuribayashi’s men.

Flamethrowers, shh, demolition charges, corkscrew, and blowtorch. The volcanic rock filled with the smell of burning men. General Kuribayashi kept sending reports to Tokyo. His messages grew shorter, his tone grew calmer. On March 16th, he transmitted his final situation report. He apologized to the emperor for failing to hold the island.

He listed the names of officers who had performed with special distinction. He wrote a farewell poem. Then he stopped transmitting. What happened to him after that is unknown. His body was never identified. Some Japanese sources say he led a final attack. Some say he committed suicide in his command post.

His fate was one more mystery of Iwo Jima buried beneath the black sand. When the battle ended, the numbers told their own story. 6,821 Marines dead. 19,217 wounded. Of the 21,000 Japanese defenders, only 216 were taken prisoner. The rest died on that island, and the war was not over. On April 1st, 1945, 6 days after Iwo Jima was declared secure, the Marines landed on Okinawa.

The 1st Marine Division, the 6th Marine Division, alongside four Army divisions. Nearly 200,000 American servicemen against a Japanese garrison of over 100,000. The Japanese commander was Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima. He was 57 years old. He had studied the reports from Peleliu.

He had studied the reports from Iwo Jima and he understood better than almost any Japanese officer what Nakagawa and Kuribayashi had learned. You could not stop the Marines. You could only make them pay. Ushijima built his defenses in the southern half of Okinawa. Caves, tunnels, interlocking positions. He gave up the beaches without a fight.

He gave up the airfields. He let the Americans come inland, deep inland, and then he made stand along the Shuri line. The Battle for Okinawa lasted 82 days. 12,520 Americans died. 36,000 were wounded. Over 100,000 Japanese soldiers were killed. And in the caves and villages and rice paddies of southern Okinawa, more than 100,000 Okinawan civilians died.

Men, women, and children caught between two armies. Some killed themselves rather than face capture, having been told by Japanese propaganda that the Americans were monsters. Some were killed by Japanese soldiers for the crime of trying to surrender. Eugene Sledge was there, second island, same K company. He would write about Okinawa, too.

He would write that the mud was worse than Peleliu. He would write that a place called Half Moon Hill smelled like something no living human should have to describe. On June 22nd, 1945, in a cave overlooking the sea at a place called Mabuni, General Ushijima committed suicide. He was the third of Japan’s most capable defensive commanders to reach the same conclusion before he died.

Nakagawa on Peleliu, Kuribayashi on Iwo Jima, Ushijima on Okinawa. Three different men on three different islands over the course of eight terrible truth, the Marines act could not be stopped. They had reported this truth up their chains of command. They had written it in their final messages. They had died knowing it. But the young soldiers who followed them into those caves, the sons of farmers and factory workers and shopkeepers from every prefecture of Japan, were never told.

They died believing what the Senjinkun had told them. They died triumph. They died believing lies their own generals had stopped to believing long before. That was the deepest tragedy of the Pacific War. And it was almost over. By the summer of 1945, American planners were preparing Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands.

It was scheduled to begin in November on the island of Kyushu. Estimates of American casualties ranged from 500,000 to over a million. Japanese casualties were expected to be many times higher. The Marines had already been briefed. They knew that Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been a preview of what was coming. >> [sighs] >> If your father came home from the Pacific, he came home because that invasion never happened.

On August 6th, 1945, a single American bomber dropped a single bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Three days later, another bomb fell on Nagasaki. On August 15th, 1945, the emperor of Japan broadcast a message to his people. His voice had never been heard on radio before. Many Japanese civilians could not understand the archaic language he used.

But the meaning was clear. The war was over. The Marines who were preparing for downfall put down their gear. Men who had made their peace with dying discovered that they were going to live. Some of them wept. Some of them could not speak. Some of them sat alone for hours trying to understand what it meant that they had a future.

Eugene Sledge came home to Alabama. He went back to college. He became a biologist. He taught at the University of Montevallo, a quiet campus in the piney woods of central Alabama, where his students knew him as a gentle professor who kept a picture of his old company on the wall of his office. He kept his Marine Corps experience to himself for over three decades.

Then in 1981, he published a book called With the Old Breed. It became one of the most respected memoirs of the Second World War ever written. It was studied at military academies. It was read by presidents. And in 2010, 30 years after its publication and 9 years after Sledge’s death, it became the basis for the HBO mini-series The Pacific.

His voice reached a new generation. His voice reached grandsons who had never asked their grandfathers what they had done. His voice made men in living rooms across America pick up the phone and finally have a conversation 40 years too late. That was his gift. But the story does not quite end there.

In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the battle, a small group of men returned to Iwo Jima. They were old men now. Some walked with canes. Some needed help climbing the slope of Mount Suribachi. And waiting for them at the summit, on the black rock where the flag had risen 40 years before, was a group of Japanese veterans. The men who had tried to kill each other in 1945 embraced each other in 1985.

They called it the reunion of honor. A monument was dedicated. It reads in English on one side and Japanese on the other that they had come together to commemorate all those who fought and died and to renew their pledge that such tragedies must never be repeated. The old Marines and the old Japanese soldiers stood together and looked out at the ocean.

They did not need to speak the same language to understand each other. They had all learned in the deepest and most terrible way what modern war did to the men who fought it. They had all buried friends in the black sand. They had all lived when so many others had not with the weight of that survival pressing on them for four decades.

They had all discovered in the end that the fear their nations had drilled into them, the hatred, the racial certainty, the propaganda about the enemy as something less than human had been the greatest lie of the war. The Marines had faced Japanese soldiers of enormous courage, men who had died for what they believed in, men who had earned, in the memoirs written by Marine veterans decades later, a respect that surprised everyone.

The Japanese had faced Marines who possessed everything their propaganda had promised the Imperial Army possessed, the Bushido spirit, the willingness to die, the refusal to surrender. But the Marines also possess something Imperial Japan could never match. They had industry behind them, ships behind them, aircraft behind them, ammunition behind them, medical care that saved men who would have died in any other army.

A logistical system that could sustain the impossible. They had spirit and material. That was the answer to the question this story began with. That was why Japanese soldiers came to fear the Marines above all others. Not because the Marines were more brutal, not because the Marines hated them more, but because the Marines combined a warrior culture as fierce as their own with the full weight of American industry behind them.

And there was no defense against that combination, only delay, only sacrifice, only death. It was a lesson that cost hundreds of thousands of lives to learn. The old men on Mount Suribachi in 1985 knew what it had cost. They knew what had been lost on both sides in the water at Tarawa, in the caves at Peleliu, in the black sand of Iwo Jima, in the mud of Okinawa.

In cities that no longer existed, in families that would never be whole again. Some of you knew those families. Some of you were those families. Some of you are still all these years later waiting for a father who came back changed or an uncle who never came back at all to tell you what happened out there.

This is what happened. The flag still flies on Mount Suribachi. Below it, deep in the volcanic rock, some of the tunnels General Kuribayashi built are still there. Sealed, silent, >> [gasps] >> holding what remains of the men who never came out. They belong to history now. They belong to the ocean and the wind.

They belong to a story that must be told and told again so that we may remember what our fathers and grandfathers did on islands most of us will never see in a war that shaped everything that came after. The Marines said they would take those islands. They took them. They paid the price and they came home changed. That is the whole story.

That is why the Japanese soldiers who survived remembered them the way they did and that is why 80 years later we are still telling it. If your father, your uncle, your grandfather served in the Pacific, tell us his name in the comments below. Tell us where he served. Tell us what he did or did not say when he came home. Let their names live again.

Let this be the place where the boys of that generation are remembered one by one by the men and women who loved them. They were ours. They will always be ours and they will not be forgotten.