Japanese Troops Never Expected America’s Flamethrower Tanks at Iwo Jima

6,821 Americans died on an island most of you have never heard of. It is 8 square miles of volcanic rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On a map, it is barely visible. In American history, it produced more medals of honor than any battle before or since. 27. One went to a 21-year-old Marine from West Virginia named Hershel Woodro Williams, who lived to be 98 years old, and who never, not once, in 77 years, was able to fully explain what happened during 4 hours on the morning of February 23rd, 19. He was

the last of them. When he died on June 29th, 2022, he took something with him that this country will never get back. This is the story of what he did that morning. It is the story of eight tanks that arrived on that black beach carrying a weapon the Japanese defenders had never imagined could exist.

Built in a warehouse in Hawaii by men whose names appear in almost no history. And it is the story of a question that every one of those six 821 dead Marines deserves an honest answer to. Was it worth it? Let me tell you what happened. Then you decide. The morning of February 23rd, 1945, on the summit of Mount Surabbachi, a group of United States Marines pushed a length of Japanese iron pipe into the black volcanic soil.

Attached to it, a flag. It was the second flag raised on that summit that morning, a larger replacement for the first one that had gone up 2 hours earlier. The wind caught the fabric. A photographer named Joe Rosenthal pressed his shutter. That single frame would become the most reproduced image in American. But two miles north of that mountain, at the same hour on the same island, something else was h a Sherman tank was moving through a field of black ash toward the mouth of a cave.

Only it was not exactly a Sherman. Where the 75 mm main gun should have been, there was a nozzle. The tank [music] moved slowly, deliberately, the way a predator moves when it knows the prey has nowhere left to run. Inside the cave, Japanese soldiers watched through the dark. They did not know what they were looking at. They were about to find out.

To understand how eight machines like this one arrived on an island 750 mi from Tokyo, we have to go back 8 months back to June of 1944 [music] to the moment a 53-year-old Japanese general stepped off a transport plane onto black volcanic sand and understood with perfect clarity that he had been sent here to.

His name was Kuri Bayashi Tadamichi. He was not what the American public imagined when they pictured a Japanese general. He was not a fanatic. He was not a screaming zealot. He was a quiet, thoughtful officer with graying hair and tired eyes who wrote long letters home to his wife Yoshi and his three children in to he had lived in the United States from 1928 to 1930.

Kurabayachi had served as a deputy military atache in Washington. He had traveled by train across the American continent. He had visited Detroit and seen the assembly lines where Ford and General Mopers were building automobiles at a scale no other nation on earth could match. He had studied at Fort Bliss and Fort.

He had watched American children play in America and he had understood something that most of his fellow officers refused to understand. Japan could not win a long war against the United States. He had said this quietly in private to officers who did not want to hear it. Now, in June of 1944, those same officers had given him command of Ewima.

It was not a promotion. It was a sentence. His orders were simple. Make the Americans [music] bleed. Make them bleed so badly for such a small piece of ground that when they looked at the map of Japan itself and considered invading the home islands, they would hesitate. They would count the bodies of Evoima and multiply the number by 100. That was the mission.

Buri Bayashi accepted it without complaint. Then he did something no Japanese commander before him had done. He forbade the banzai charge. For centuries, the doctrine of Japanese warfare had rested on a single principle. When the moment came, a soldier charged. He ran forward screaming with sword or bayonet raised and he died glory.

This was the way of the samurai. And on every island of the Pacific War from Guadal Canal to Saipan, Japanese soldiers had died this way in [music] waves in thousands. It had accomplished nothing. It had saved no one. Kuribayashi issued a written order to every officer on Euima. There would be no banzai attacks.

Instead, every man would fight from underground. Every man would remain hidden. Every man would kill 10 Americans before he died. That was the standing order. And to make it possible, Kuribayashi ordered his men to dig. They dug for 8 months. 21,000 soldiers with picks, shovels, drills, and dynamite carved tunnels into the volcanic rock.

They worked in temperatures that reached 120° Fahrenheit inside the sh. They breathed air poisoned with sulfur fumes. Some collapsed and did not get up again. They dug anyway. By February of 1945, they had completed 11 mi of interconnected tunnels. The plan called for 18. The completed sections reached seven stories below the surf.

5,000 caves and underground chambers had been carved from the volcanic rock. 1,500 fortified positions d concrete bunkers with walls 4 feet [music] thick. Underground hospitals, operating theaters, communication centers 75 ft below the surface, ventilation shafts [music] disguised as natural rock formations, storage chambers stocked with enough rice, water, and ammunition to sustain a 2-month siege.

[music] The Americans knew none of For 74 consecutive days, American aircraft bombed the island. 6,800 tons of high explo 22,000 naval shells followed. American planners believed this bombardment would eliminate most resistance. They projected that Ewoima would fall in 5 days. They were wrong. Of the 1500 fortified positions Kuribayashi had built, fewer than 200 were destroyed by the preliminary.

Most Japanese soldiers had not even been scratched. They were waiting. But before we return to the beach, there is one more man who must end. A man whose presence on Ewima was so improbable, so heavy with irony that when American intelligence officers first learned he was there, they refused to believe it. His name was Nishi Takichi, Colonel Baron, commander of the 26th Tank Regiment of the Imper.

And in 1932 at the Los Angeles Summer Olympics, he had won the gold medal in equestrian show. Baron Nishi was a celebrity in the United States before the war. He [music] had ridden his horse, Uranus, into the stadium in Los Angeles and jumped his way into the record books. Afterwards, Hollywood had opened its doors to him.

He had dined with Douglas Fairbanks. He had been photographed with Mary Pigford. He was handsome. He was aristocrat. He was in the language of the 1930s newspapers, a symbol of the friendship between two great Pacific. 12 years later, that same man was on Ewoima, wounded, commanding the northern armored defenses that would soon face the United States Marine Corps in the most brutal fighting of the Pacific War.

The man who had once symbolized Japanese American friendship would now direct the killing of American Marines. He had not changed sides. The world had Meanwhile, 4,000 mi away on the island of Oahu, a different story was being written of 1944. Inside a warehouse guarded by military police, a colonel named George F.

Unmuted was studying a problem that no American officer had [music] solved. Unmuted was chemical warfare service, a career officer approaching the end of a long his mission assigned by the staff of Admiral Chester Nimttz was classified at the highest level. The Marine Corps was losing too many men against [music] Japanese caves and bump.

Conventional weapons were not enough. The Japanese had learned to build fortifications that no explosive could reliably destroy. Something new was needed. Unmocked started with what he had, the 43rd Chemical Laboratory Company. Not enough men, not enough talent. He requested reinforcement and he received it. 25 men from the 117th Naval Construction Battalion.

The CBS, the mechanical engineers of the United States Navy, whose reputation for building anything, anywhere, under any conditions was legendary throughout the Pacific. They came into the warehouse at Scoffield Barracks and began to work. They worked 20-our days. They slept in shifts [music] beside their welding equipment. They ate at their workbenches.

They took existing flamethrower systems, [music] the British Ronson, the American Navy Mark1, and they took them apart. They studied. They combined the best elements of each [music] and they built something new. They designated it POA CWSH1 Pacific Ocean Areas Chemical Warfare Service Hawaii Model 1. It was a flamethrower system, but it was not mounted on a soldier’s back.

It was mounted on a tank. Eight M4 A3 Sherman medium tanks, 35 tons of American steel, had been quietly requisitioned for conversion. The CBS stripped out the 75mm main gun. In their place, they installed the flamethrower nozzles. They ran fuel lines through the turret. They pressurized the system with compressed nitrogen, not compressed air because nitrogen would not support combustion if the tank was hit.

They filled the tanks with a mixture of diesel fuel, gasoline, and napal thickener. 290 gall per tank, enough for approximately 55 to 80 seconds of continuous. The effective range was 60 to 80 yards. Under ideal conditions, the maximum range could reach 150 yards. The temperature at the point of impact would [music] exceed 1,500° F.

And here was the most important detail, the detail that Kurib Bayashi’s soldiers on Ewima could not possibly have anti. From the outside, the converted tanks looked identical to ordinary Sherman. Same silhouette, same paint, same tracks, same turret until they fired. No observer could tell them apart.

The CBS who built them received almost no public recognition for their work. Their names would not appear in newspapers. When the war ended, they would return to civilian life and go back to ordinary job. But what they had built inside that warehouse would kill more Japanese soldiers on Ewima than any other single weapon system in the American.

And nobody outside a small circle at Scenepack Packord headquarters even knew the machines existed. By early February of 1945, the eight tanks had been loaded onto transport ships bound for [music] the Pacific. They were assigned to the fifth Marine Tank Battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel William R. Collins and to the fourth Marine Tank.

Even the Marines who would fight alongside them did not know what the overall commander of the invasion force was Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith. Howland Mad Smith, 63 years old, veteran of every major marine campaign since [music] the beginning of the war. Beneath him, Major General Harry Schmidt would command the landing force itself. Their orders were clear.

Take the The plan called for 5 days of combat. Nobody on either side understood just how wrong that plan. On the morning of February 19th, 1945, at 9:02 hours local time, the first wave of United States Marines stepped onto the black volcanic beach of Eoima. They sank to their calves in ash. The beach was silent. The Japanese guns did not fire.

The Marines advanced inland cautiously at first, then with growing conf. Maybe the bombardment had worked. Maybe the defenders had been buried. Maybe this would be a quick fight after all. Behind them, more Marines poured onto the beach. Somewhere in the second wave, a 39-year-old Marine named John Basselone was walking through the ash toward a life he had already accepted.

[music] He would probably not survive. You may not know his, but in 1945, every American did. Basselone was the son of Italian immigrants from Raritan, New Jersey. He had joined the army first in the 1930s and served in the Philippines. Then he had joined the Marines on Guadal Canal in October of 1942. He had held a position with two machine guns and a handful of ammunition through a night attack by an entire Japanese regiment.

When it was over, he was one of three Americans still alive at his position. He had received the Medal of Honor for what he did that night. He had come home to a country that treated him like a hero. He had toured for war bonds. He had raised millions of dollars. He had married a Marine sergeant named Lena Riggy in July of 1944.

He could have spent the rest of the war stateside, smiling for cameras, safe. He asked to go back. The Marine Corps did not want him to go. His wife did not want him to go. The war bond tours were making more money than any single Marine could make in combat. But Basselon said the same thing to everyone who asked him.

His boys were still fighting. He was going back. He landed on Iwo Jima with the fifth marine division on the morning of February 19th. Within minutes of coming ashore, he began organizing men who had been pinned down under Japanese mortar fire. He led them across the beach up toward Motoyama airfield number one.

He personally attacked and destroyed a Japanese. He guided a Sherman tank through a minefield to keep it moving forward. Then at approximately 10:45 hours on his first morning back in combat, a Japanese mortar round landed among him and four of his marines. John Basselone died in the black ash of Ewima before he had been on the island for 2 hours. He was 38 years old.

His wife Lena would never remarry. She wore her wedding ring for the next 54 years until she died in 1999. She’s buried next to a stone that carried his name, though his body remained in Arlington National [music] Cemetery, where it had been laid to rest in 1948 after being brought home from the Pacific.

By nightfall on February 19th, [music] the invasion force had advanced less than 700 yd from the 2,420 Marines were casualties. The D-Day objective had called for the capture of the first airfield. They had not even come close. [music] And the eight flamethrower tanks, they sat. They sat in reserve as order for the first 24 hours of the largest amphibious assault in Marine Corps history.

The single weapon system best suited to destroy the fortifications killing American men remained. The commanders had wanted to assess the tactical situation before committing valuable and irreplaceable assets. On paper, it was a prudent decision. In practice, it was a bureaucratic tragedy of the kind that has followed every army in every war since armies were invented.

While staff officers assessed the tactical situation, Marines died on the beach. The engineers who had built the tanks in Hawaii would never know how many men their creations might have saved on February 19th if only someone had given the order to send them for. The order did not come, not that day, February 20th.

Day two, the third battalion of the 21st Marines was pinned down in front of Motoyama airfield number one. Three Japanese pillboxes [music] dominated the approach. Their machine guns had been positioned to create interlocking fields of fire, a killing zone 200 yards wide through which no infantrymen could pass. The battalion had lost 35% of its strength in less than 48 hours.

At the battalion command post, a decision was made. Send the flame tanks. At approximately 4 and 20 hours on the afternoon of February 20th, the first PACWS H1 flamethrower tank rolled forward into combat. It looked like a Sherman. It sounded like a sh to the Japanese defenders watching from their pill boxes. It was a Sherman. The tank advanced toward the first pill box using the wreckage of a destroyed Japanese aircraft as partial cover.

It moved carefully. The fiveman crew inside could feel the vibrations of Japanese small arms fire pinging harmlessly off the frontal armor. At close range, the tank stopped, the turret traversed, and then for the first time in the history of the Pacific War, a POA CWSH1 flamethrower opened fire in com. The Japanese soldiers inside the pillbox did not understand what they were seeing.

[music] There was no muzzle flash. There was no explosion. There was only a stream of orange liquid arcing through the air with impossible reach carried on a cushion of compressed nitrogen. The compressed nitrogen made a sound like a snake that had swallowed a train. The stream struck the front of the pillbox and did not stop. [music] It flowed.

It spread. It found the narrow horizontal slit through which the machine gun barrel protruded and it poured through that slit like water pouring through a doorway. Inside the concrete structure, the temperature rose past 1,000° F in a matter of the oxygen was consumed so rapidly that most of the men inside suffocated before the flame.

Those who tried to run out the rear exit were cut down by marine riflemen who had learned to position themselves for exactly this eventuality. The pillbox went silent. [music] Black smoke poured from every aperture. The tank commander gave a single order over the intercom and the driver moved the vehicle forward [music] toward the time. The defenders react.

A Japanese 47 mm anti-tank gun opened fire at close range. The shell struck the Sherman’s frontal [music] armor, ricocheted upward, and disappeared into the sky. The tank shuddered, but did not stop. The second pillbox went silent. The third pillbox was harder. It sat behind a rocky outcropping, protected from direct engage.

To reach it, the tank had to expose itself to Japanese infantry hidden in spider holes. Small camouflaged pits from which a soldier could emerge with a satchel charge or a magnetic mine and attempt to destroy a tank at close [music] range. Two Japanese soldiers emerged. They reached the tank’s blind spot before the bow gunner could react.

And then the crew did something the Japanese defenders could not have anticipated. The turret rotated not 15°, not 30, but a full 180°. The turret continued past the point where the 75 mm main gun would have hit the tank’s own engine deck. Because there was no 75 mil, there was a flamethrower nozzle, and a flamethrower nozzle could point directly behind the tank.

The two Japanese infantrymen died before they could arm their charges. The third pill box went silent. Word traveled quickly through the American command structure. The flame tanks worked not as a novelty, not as an experiment, but as a decisive weapon against fortifications that had absorbed everything else the United States military had thrown.

Within 6 hours, all eight flamethrower tanks were in action across the front. They worked in pairs and in groups. They developed tactics on the fly, techniques that had never been taught in any manual because no manual for these vehicles yet. The Marines who fought alongside them learned to walk 50 yards behind the tanks close enough to exploit the shock of the flame attack far enough back to avoid the heat that could singe a man’s eyebrows at 30 yards of Japanese defenders in one sector began abandoning their positions before

the tanks had even fired. Soldiers who had been trained to die at their posts, who had been ordered by Kurabayashi himself to kill 10 Americans before [music] dying, were now crawling out of the rear exits of their bunkers and running. For the first time in the history of the Imperial Japanese Army, [music] entire defensive sectors were collapsing, not from being overrun, but from being abandoned.

But the flame tanks were not invincible. They ran out of fuel. In 80 seconds of total fire time, a single tank could destroy perhaps 20 defensive positions if the targets were near each other. Then the tank had to withdraw. To refuel required a return to a specialized supply point behind the lines, the process took a minimum of 2 hours.

During those two hours, the Japanese reorganized. Three of the eight original tanks were disabled in the first two weeks by mines and anti-tank fire. The other five worked around the clock the morning of February 23rd, 19 halfway across the island in a narrow ravine between two ridges, a place the Marines had already started calling the amphitheater.

A company of the 21st Marines was pinned down in front of a network of Japanese pillar. The tanks could not reach the ravine. The terrain was too narrow. The volcanic rock was too broken. Any tank that tried to enter would either throw a track on the sharp stone or expose its sidearm to Japanese anti-tank fire from the ridges.

The infantry would have to advance without armor. And then a 21-year-old Marine Corporal from Quiet Dell, West Virginia picked up an M22 flamethrower and stood up. His name was Hershel Woodro. His friends called him Woody. He was 5′ 6 in tall. He weighed 140 lb. The flamethrower on his back weighed 68 lbs when fully loaded. It was a portable version of the same weapon system that had been mounted on the tanks, a compressed fuel tank, a nozzle, an igniter, had an effective range of about 20 yard.

To use it, the operator had to walk within 20 yard of the enemy position in full view of anyone who wanted to shoot him. Portable flamethrower operators had a survival rate on Pacific islands that hovered near zero. Snipers hunted them specific. Machine gunners concentrated fire on the distinctive [music] twin tank. Infantry practiced rushing them with bayonets.

Woody Williams understood all of this. He picked up the weapon anyway. Four Marine riflemen went with him as protection. [music] Two of them would not come back. For the next 4 hours, Corporal Williams worked his way across the ravine. He would later say in interviews given decades after the war that he could not remember most of what happened during his memory of that afternoon was fragmentaryary.

He remembered advancing toward a pillbox. He remembered pulling the trigger on the flamethrower. He remembered the two riflemen who died protecting him. The Marine Corps memory of that afternoon is more complete. In 4 hours, Woody Williams destroyed seven Japanese pill. He crawled to within feet of one of them and pushed the flamethrower nozzle through a ventilation shaft before triggering [music] the fuel.

He climbed on top of another one and fired the weapon straight down through a firing slit. He advanced through machine gun fire that killed the men on either side of him. He reloaded his flamethrower repeatedly, which meant returning to a supply point, having a fresh tank strapped [music] to his back, and walking forward again into the same fire that had already killed his companion.

At the end of 4 hours, the amphitheater was silent. The 21st Marines advanced. Woody Williams walked back to the rear, sat down, and did not speak. 8 months later, on October 5th, 1945, President Harry Truman would hang the Medal of Honor around his neck at the White. And this was the moment, the very moment that revealed the deepest truth about the eight flamethrower.

They were not a magic weapon. They were not a substitute for men like Woody Williams. There were places on Euoima that no tank could reach. Ravines too narrow, cliffs too steep, caves too deep. In those places, and there were many of them, the only way forward was still a 21-year-old with 68 lb of fuel on his back, and four riflemen praying he would not be shot before he got close enough to fight.

The tanks changed the arithmetic of Ewima. They did not change the fundamental fact that men had to walk into fire. Somewhere on the northern plateau during those same February days, a Japanese colonel who had once ridden a horse into the Los Angeles Coliseum was directing the defense [music] of the second airfield.

Nishi Takichi, the Olympic gold medal, the friend of Douglas Fairbanks, the baron who had once represented Japan in the last great festival of international friendship before the world caught fire. He had been wounded during the fight. He commanded from a cave surrounded by the men of his tank regiment. Although by this point in the battle, most of his tanks had been destroyed by American aircraft and naval gunfire and his men were fighting as infant.

American intelligence learned that he was on the island. According to the post-war memoirs of Major Hier Yoshitaka, Kuri Bayashi’s staff officers stationed on nearby Chiima. Someone arranged for a broadcast in Japanese appealing to Nishi as an Olympian as a [music] man of the world as someone who had lived among Americans and been welcomed by it.

asked him to surrender. Nishi did not respond. He never surrendered. The exact date of his death is not recorded in any surviving Japanese document. The best evidence suggests that Nishi died sometime in the second half of March 1945. His body was never ident. The man who had once symbolized peace between two Pacific nations died in a cave on an island that was already by early March the fighting had shifted to the northern plateau.

The Marines had a name for it, the meat grinder. The terrain was a nightmare of sulfur pits, jagged volcanic rock, and twisted ravines. Tanks broke their tracks on stone that could slice through steel. The volcanic ash worked its way into everything. Boots, socks, food wound, never washed out. Marines who came home from Ewima said for years afterward that they could not eat certain kinds of meat.

The smell was too close. A new tactic was developed. It was given a name that would enter Marine Corps doctrine for the next 30 years. blowtorrch and corkcrew. The blowtorrch was the flame tank would fire into a cave entrance until nothing living remained inside. Corkscrew was the demolition team that followed [music] marine engineers with satchel charges of TNT who would enter the burned out cave, place charges to bring down the internal chambers and seal the position permanent.

Between the flame tanks and the engineers, the Marines began systematically dismantling Kuribayashi’s underground fortress, one cave at a time. Each cave took hours. There were thousands of ca. Meanwhile, deep beneath hill 382 in a chamber lit by kerosene lamps, Kuribayashi Tadamichi was writing letters.

He wrote to his wife, Yoshi. He wrote to his son, Taro, and to his daughters, Yoko and Takacoako. The letters were not military communications. They were domestic. They were the letters of a father who knew he was not coming home. He wrote about the kitchen floor at home, which he had never gotten around to repair.

He wrote about the boarded window that let cold air into the house in winter. He wrote about his son’s shoes, which needed replacing. He wrote to his wife about being a good mother in his absence, and about not worrying too much, and about the small daily happinesses that a family could still find without him. The letters were smuggled out to Chichiima by the last submarines that still risked the Major Hi Yoshitaka received them and preserved them.

After the war, they would be published in Japan under the title Gyokusai Soi Noetagami. Letters from the commander who would not retreat. They are among the most heartbreaking documents to survive. The general who was killing more American Marines than any Japanese commander in the war spent his final weeks writing about a broken window and a pair of children’s shoe. He was not a monster.

He was a father who had been given an impossible job and who was doing it because his country had asked him to and who did not want his family to suffer for what he had already accepted as his own fate. The letters would arrive in Tokyo weeks after his death. His wife would read them alone.

By the middle of March, the tank crews were exhausted. Some of them had not slept more than 4 hours at a [music] stretch since since the invasion began. Their uniforms were black with volcanic ash. Their faces were burned by the heat that radiated back from the fuel streams they were firing. They kept working. [music] The Japanese defenders continued to fight from positions that were being incinerated around.

Some of them killed themselves with grenades rather than face the flames. Some of them ran into American gunfire, preferring bullets to burning. A handful of them surrendered, prisoners taken alive after the fires had passed through their bunkers, who told American interrogators that incineration was worse than they had been told anything could be.

On March 17th, 1945, Kuri Bayashi was promoted to full general by imperial order. The promotion arrived when he was already accepting that the battle was lost. He sent his final reports to imperial headquarters in Tokyo over the following days. The reports were short. They described the American flame tanks as more effective than all of the enemy’s artillery and aerial bombardment combined.

They stated that the Japanese defenders had no effective counter to this weapon. The reports ended with a formal apology to the emperor for the failure of the defense. Then Kuri Bayashi burned his personal papers. He gathered the last 300 [music] men still capable of walking and he prepared for the final act. The night of March 25th, 1945, the northern plateau of Euima was quiet.

For 34 days, the island had been a place of continuous sound. Artillery, machine guns, aircraft engines, the deep mechanical growl of tank tracks grinding across volcan. Now, in the last hours before dawn, that sound had faded to something else. The distant rumble of a generator, the low voices of Marines on watch, the occasional crack of a rifle from somewhere in the darkness where a Japanese soldier alone in his cave had decided to end his own war.

Ewima had been declared secured 9 days earlier on paper. On paper, at approximately 0500 hours on the morning of March 26th in a bivoak area near the second airfield, roughly 300 men from the United States Army Air Forces, the CBS, and marine service units were sleeping in their tents. They were not frontline troops.

They were mechanics, radio pilots waiting for their aircraft to be repaired. The port personnel who had come ashore in the final days of the battle to prepare the airfield for its intended purpose as a way station for B29 bombers. They were unprepared for combat. 300 yd away in the darkness roughly 300 Japanese soldiers rose from the volcanic rock.

They had been hiding for days. They had eaten almost nothing. They were the last of Kurabayashi’s command. And at the head of the column, if the surviving accounts are to be believed, was Kurabayashi Tadamichi himself. He had held the island as long as he could. Now he was going to die. The attack was not a traditional Banzai charge.

Kurabayashi had spent 8 months forbidding Banzai. He led with something different, a coordinated infiltration, executed in silence, aimed at maximum damage against a soft target that had let its guard down. The Japanese soldiers moved through the darkness with their rifles slung [music] and their bayonets fixed. Some carried grenades, a few carried swords.

They reached the American tents before anyone realized they were there. Then they opened fire. For the next 3 hours, the second airfield became the last battlefield of the Ewima [music] campaign. Marines from the fifth Pioneer Battalion, roused from sleep by the sound of gunfire, ran toward the fighting in their underwear, carrying weapons they had grabbed on the way out of their tent.

The airmen and support personnel who had been the target of the attack fought back with whatever they could find. Some of them died before they understood what was happening. Some of them killed Japanese soldiers with pistols at pointlank range. Some of them did both. By sunrise, the fighting was the bodies of more than 250 Japanese soldiers lay in and around the American bivwaka.

53 Americans were dead. More than 100 were wounded. Somewhere in the volcanic sand in a place that has never been definitively identified lay the body of General Kuribayashi Tadamichi. His body was never found. There is no confirmed grave for the man who commanded [music] the defense of Ewokim.

Some historians believe he died during the final attack. Others believe he committed ritual suicide in a cave nearby and was buried by his aids before the Americans arrived. Japanese survivors interviewed after the war gave different accounts. None of them could be verified. His wife Yoshi received the last of his letters weeks after his she read them alone.

In a Tokyo that was itself being bombed by the B29s his sacrifice had failed to prevent. The kitchen floor was never repaired. The boarded window was never replaced. The shoes were never bought. The final count is a mathematics problem that has no comfortable answer. 26,038 American casualties. 6,821 American Approximately 18,000 Japanese dead.

[music] The exact number will never be known because so many bodies were sealed inside collapsed tunnels or reduced to ash by the flame tanks that no accurate count was ever. 216 Japanese prisoners out of 21,000 defenders. Ewoima was the only battle in the Pacific War in which American casualties exceeded Japanese casualties. Let that sentence stand alone for a moment.

The only [music] battle in every other engagement of the war, Guadal Canal, Tarawa, Saipon, Peli and eventually Okinawa. The Americans for all their losses killed more Japanese soldiers than the Japanese killed. Ewima was the exception. Kuri Bayashi had done what he had been asked to do. He had made the island cost more than it was worth.

27 medals of honor were awarded for actions on Ioima. More than any other battle in United States history. 22 of them went to Marines. Five of them went to S. Many of them were awarded P. One of them went to John Basselone who had died in the black ash on the first morning. One of them went to a 21-year-old corporal from Quiet Dell, West Virginia, who had walked into an amphitheater of Japanese pill boxes with 68 lbs of fuel on his back and had come out alive when so many others had not. The eight tanks that had

started the campaign did not all survive. Post battle analysis credited the flame tanks with destroying a large percentage of the fortified Japanese positions that were neutralized during the campaign. The exact contribution has been debated by historians for decades. What is not debated is that the tanks changed the mathematics of the B.

In sectors where the flame tanks operated, marine casualties dropped substantially compared to unsupported attack. Somewhere in those numbers, impossible to pinpoint precisely, impossible to name individually, are American Marines who came home from Ewima because of eight machines built in a warehouse in Hawaii by men whose names nobody would ever remember.

The United States Marine Corps requested more of them immed by June of 1945, the 713th Tank Battalion of the United States Army had been converted entirely to flamethrower. It was deployed to Okinawa. Over the course of the Okinawa campaign, those tanks consumed hundreds of thousands of gallons of napalm thickened fuel. The flame tank concept, born of desperation in the summer of 1944, had become standard American doctrine within 12 months.

It would remain doctrine through the Korean War where American flame tanks would destroy Chinese bunker positions during [music] the fighting at Heartbreak Ridge and the P. It would remain doctrine through the early years of Vietnam. The M132 armored flamethrower, the last American vehicle in this lineage, was [music] retired from service in the late 1970s.

The story of the flamethrower tank in American arms, had begun with eight Shermans on a black volcanic beach and ended more than three decades later in a quiet decommissioning that nobody attended. But the question of Ewima itself, the deeper question, the one that has haunted American military history for 80 years, is harder to answer.

Was it worth it? The official justification for the invasion had always been Ewoima was to serve as a base for P-51 fighter escorts and as an emergency landing field for damaged B-29 bombers returning from raids over Japan. The number cited most frequently in post-war histories is that approximately 2,400 B29s made landings on Ewima before the war ended.

That number has come under sustained scrutiny in the last 20 years. Historian Robert Burell, whose book The Ghosts of Evo Gima remains the most rigorous re-examination of the campaign, has argued that the 2,400 figure conflates true emergency combat landings with routine non-combat landings, training flights, weather diversions, and administrative flights that did not represent live.

The number of B-29s that actually made emergency combat landings that saved crews from certain death was significantly smaller. Meanwhile, the P-51 fighter escort mission proved less successful than anticipated. The distance from Ewima to Japan was too great. By the time the airfields were fully operational, the B-29 campaign was shifting to lowaltitude night incendiary raids that did not require fighter e.

None of this diminishes the courage of the men who fought. None of this changes the meaning of the sacrifices that were made. But it does mean that historians in this century look at Eoima with more troubled eyes than the American public did in 1945. The battle that produced the most famous photograph in American military history may [music] also have been by the cold arithmetic of strategic effect less necessary than it was made to seem at the time.

Burbayashi’s family paid a price for a defense that could not stop what was coming. Lena Basselone spent 54 years wearing a wedding ring for a man who had come home to her for 11 months and then had gone back to a beach he did not have to go. The families of six 821 dead Americans paid a price for airfields whose military value has been questioned by every serious historian since.

And 4 months after the island was declared secured on August 6th and August 9th of 1945, two aircraft that never needed to land on Eoima at all dropped weapons that ended the Pacific War in a manner none of the men who died in the volcanic ash had anticipated. The atomic bombs were not launched from Eoima. They did not require Eoima. Whether the war would have ended without the atomic bombs, whether an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have been necessary, whether Ewoima’s capture materially contributed [music] to Japanese surrender. These are questions

that historians will still be arguing when everyone reading this and everyone writing it has [music] passed into me. The men who died on that black beach did not know the answers. They did their duty. They died believing it mattered. Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps it has to be.

There is a story about Iwo Jima that most Americans have never heard. It concerns two Japanese sailors named Matsudo Linsoki and Yamakag Kufuku. They were part of the original garrison. They survived the fighting. They did not surrender with the 216 prisoners taken during the battle. Instead, when the American occupation of the island became permanent, they retreated into the cave system that Kuri Bayashi had built.

And they hid. They hid for nearly 4 years. They lived on food they scavenged from American guard. They drank water from natural springs deep inside the volcanic rock. They watched from concealed positions as the American airfield was expanded as buildings were constructed as the routines of peacetime military life took hold on the island where they had once been ordered to kill 10 Americans [music] each before dying.

They did not know the war was over. Or perhaps they knew and did not believe. Perhaps they believed the Americans were lying. that the surrender broadcasts were tricks, that Japan was still fighting somewhere, and that they had a duty to continue. The record does not tell us what they thought. The record only tells us what they did.

On January 6th, 1949, more than 3 years after Japan had formally surrendered aboard the battleship Missouri, Matsudo Linsoki and Yamakaga Kufuku walked out of a cave on Ewima and surrendered to the American occup. They were still wearing their Imperial Japanese Navy uniforms. The uniforms were rags. They had held the island longer than any other Japanese servicemen of the Second World War.

They were not shot. They were fed, given medical care, and eventually repatriated to a Japan they no longer recognized. A Japan that had been rebuilt occup and thrust into the early years of the Cold War. While they had lived like ghosts in [music] the volcanic dark, we do not know what became of them after they went home.

They faded back into a nation that did not know how to talk about them. Woody Williams lived a long time. He came home from the war and went back to West Virginia. He got married. He worked for the Veterans Administration for 33. He counseledled other veterans, men who had come back from Korea, from Vietnam, eventually from the Gulf War through the same kind of pain he carried but rarely spoke.

He founded a charitable organization dedicated to the gold star families of American service members killed in action. He traveled. He gave interviews. He appeared at commemorations, always in a suit, always with the medal of honor around his neck. Always with a slight smile that softened the weight of what he had done. When asked in his later years what he remembered about February 23rd, 1945, the day he had walked into the amphitheater with a flamethrower on his back, he would say the same thing.

He didn’t remember much. He remembered the two Marines who had died protecting him. He said their names in every interview until he could no longer give interviews. The rest of it was gone. He said he was not a hero. He said he had done a job. He said the Medal of Honor belonged to the men who had died, to the Marines who had walked forward with him and had not wy Williams died on June 29th, 2022 at the age of 98.

He was the last surviving Medal of Honor recipient of the Second World War. With him died the last living memory of what it had felt like to carry 68 lb of fuel across black volcanic sand toward a machine gun that had been designed to kill him. With him died a direct line to Ewoima that had connected Americans of every subsequent generation to the men who had fought there.

He was buried in West Virginia. [music] His grave is quiet. The men who built the tanks are gone. Colonel George unmocked retired from the army after the war and lived out his remaining years in relative obscurity. His classified work at Scoffield barracks unknown to the American public. The CBS who had welded the fuel lines and machined the nozzles went home to civilian jobs.

Their names appear in almost no history books. Their photographs appear in no memorials. What they built saved American life. What they built killed Japanese soldiers in a manner so terrible that some of the men who operated the weapons could not speak of [music] it for the rest of their lives. Both things are true. Both things have to be true.

That is what war is [snorts] today. If you fly over the island, which is now called EO2 by the Japanese, its original name restored, you will see something that would have been unimaginable to the men who fought there. It is quiet. The black volcanic beach is still black. Mount Surabachi still rises from the southern tip. The airfields are still there, though they are used now by the Japan Self-Defense Force for training purposes.

Civilians are not permitted to live on the island. It remains in a sense that no other Pacific battlefield remains. A grave sealed inside the volcanic rock in caves that were never fully cleared in tunnels that were bombed shut and never reopened are the remains of thousands of Japanese soldiers who died in the fight.

Every year, Japanese recovery teams work to find and identify them. Every year, they succeed in bringing home a few more. Every year, thousands more remain. The kitchen floor Kurabayashi wrote about his wife had it repaired years after the war. [music] She lived a long life. She never remarried. The children grew up.

His daughter, Takacoako, who was a small child when her father sailed for Ewoima, spent much of her life working to preserve his letters and to ensure that Japanese school children learned the truth about who he had been, not the caricature of the [music] fanatical Japanese general. But the tired father who had written home about kitchen floors and children’s shoes while commanding a doomed defense.

The letters are available in English. Now you can read them. You should read them. They will not make you feel better about Ewima. They are not meant to. They are meant to remind you that on the other side of every American marine who died on that black beach was a Japanese soldier who also and that behind every Japanese soldier was a family that also grieved.

[music] and that the arithmetic of war never balances out to anything a human being can understand. Eight machines, eight Shermans, eight assemblies of American steel and American engineering welded together in a warehouse in Hawaii by men who worked 20our days and slept in shifts beside their wel. They arrived on a black beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean [music] at a moment when the United States Marine Corps was dying by the hundreds every day.

They fired their weapons. They saved some men. They killed other men. They ran out of fuel. They were refueled. They were repaired. They fought until the battle was over. Then they were gone. Their crews went home. Their designers went home. The Japanese soldiers who had watched them approach through the black ash.

The ones who survived, the 216 went home also eventually to a Japan that was no longer the country they everyone went home except the 6821 who did not. Except the 18,000 Japanese who did not. Except John Basselone, who is buried at Arlington under a stone his wife visited for 54. Except Kuribayashi Tatamichi, whose body was never found, whose grave does not exist.

Whose last thoughts were of a broken window in a house he would never Except the men who cannot be counted, whose names are in no book, whose stories were carried into the dark by the people who loved them and were kept there until those people also passed into the dark. The flames on Euoima went out a long time ago. The wind blows across the black sand.

The Pacific is still there. And the island waits, quiet now, empty, holy in the way that only places can be holy, where so many young men once stopped being young. That is the story of the eight tanks. That is the story of Ewima. Rest easy, gentlemen. You did what your country asked you to do. You do not need to explain it to anyone anymore.