Why Japanese Dreaded Fighting American Marines More Than Any Other Unit

For anyone watching this who grew up in the 1950s and60s whose father or uncle or older brother came home from the Pacific and would not speak of it, this story is for you. It is the story of a question your family never got a straight answer to. Why did the Japanese fear the American Marine more than any other soldier the United States sent to that war? The answer begins on a black volcanic beach called Ewima on the morning of the 19th of February 1945.

A young sergeant from Franklin Burrow, Pennsylvania, named Michael Strank, 25 years old, the son of a Slovak coal miner, waded ashore in the second wave with the men of Easy Company, Second Battalion, 28th Marines. 4 days later on the 23rd of February, Strank would help raise the second flag on the summit of Mount Sbachi and Joe Rosenthal would take the photograph.

6 days after that, on the 1st of March, Sergeant Strank would be killed by an artillery shell that was almost certainly American fired short of its target. His mother would receive the telegram in April. And on a coral island 600 m to the south in a hidden headquarters cave, a Japanese colonel who had spent the whole war reading intelligence reports about men like Michael Strank was at the very same hour beginning to understand why his country could not defeat them.

We start with him. The morning of the 23rd of June, 1945, a cave on the southern tip of Okinawa. The stone walls held the smell of blood and old smoke, and the air was so thick with the breath of dying men that a candle would not stay lit. Colonel Hiomichi Yahara crawled out through a fissure in the coral.

He was 42 years old. He had not slept in 9 days. His uniform was black with dried mud and the blood of officers who no longer needed it. And in the pocket over his heart he carried a bundle of papers wrapped in oilcloth. The papers were his life. The papers were also his sentence. His commanding general had ordered him to live.

That order was heavier than any bullet. Above him on the ridge of Mabuni, the last radios of the 32nd Army had gone silent an hour before dawn. Below him, along the beaches and the ruined coral cliffs, American Marines were still moving. They had been moving for 82 days. They had lost nearly 50,000 men killed and wounded on this island alone.

And still they moved in careful teams with flamethrowers and satchel charges, methodically clearing every hole where a Japanese soldier might still be breathing. Yahara pressed himself against the rock and watched them. He had spent nearly 3 years studying these men from a distance through intelligence reports and the diaries of the dead.

He had built the defensive plan that killed the most of them. And now at the end of everything, he understood something that no other senior Japanese officer had lived long enough to write down. The Marines were not brave in the way the Empire had told him they were. They were not soft in the way the Empire had told him they were.

They were something else, something the Empire had never learned to name. And in his oil cloth bundle, in a hand cramped from days of hiding, Yahara had begun to write down what they were, and why the men of Japan had feared them more than any other soldier in the American arsenal. He looked once at the sun rising over the East China Sea. Then he began to crawl.

To understand what Colonel Yahara had learned, we have to go back 17 years to a country that was not yet at war and to a man who saw the future before almost anyone else in Japan. Autumn 1928, the port of Yokohama. A steamer pulled away from the pier bound for San Francisco. and on its upper deck stood a stocky, round-faced army major named Tadamichi Kuribayashi.

He was 37 years old. He was a graduate of the Imperial Army Academy and the Army Staff College. He was a horseman, a calligrapher, a father of three children he had already begun to miss. And he had just been appointed military ataché to the Japanese embassy in Washington DC. Kuribayashi would spend the next two years crossing the United States.

He rode on troop trains through Kansas and Texas. He walked through the stockyards of Chicago and the steel mills of Pittsburgh. He counted railway cars. He timed the loading of freighters. He watched American factories churn out automobiles at a speed that no Japanese planner had prepared him to understand.

He was a soldier of the empire. and he was studying the enemy of the future. He wrote long letters home to his wife Yoshi. In one of them written in 1929, he set down a sentence that would haunt every Japanese officer who ever read it. He wrote in careful characters, “The United States is the last country in the world Japan should ever fight.

” He would put on his general’s uniform 16 years later on a black volcanic island and he would prove that he had meant every word. But the American Marines who would eventually kill him were in 1928 still an obscure branch of a small peacetime military. The core was less than 18,000 men. It was fighting bandits in Nicaragua.

It was chasing rebels in Haiti. It was the smallest, poorest, and most eccentric of the American services. And yet, 7 years earlier, in July of 1921, a thin chain smoking Lieutenant Colonel named Earl Hancock Ellis had sat in a locked office at the headquarters of the Marine Corps and had typed out a document that ran to more than 30,000 words.

Its title was Operation Plan 712H, Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia. Its subject was a war that would not begin for another 20 years. Ellis was 41 years old. He was an alcoholic. He was probably dying. And he had done something that no other American strategist had done. He had looked at the map of the Central Pacific at the chains of coral atoles the League of Nations had handed to Japan after the First World War.

And he had predicted in almost photographic detail the war that would come. He wrote that Japan would strike first. He wrote that America would have to fight its way westward across thousands of miles of ocean. He wrote that this war would be decided not by battleships in open water, but by infantry landing from small boats onto beaches ringed with coral and machine guns.

He listed the islands where the fighting would happen. He named the Marshall Islands. He named the Carolines. He named a tiny volcanic outcrop called Ewuima. 20 years before the first bomb fell on Pearl Harbor, a dying marine wrote down the map of the war that would kill 60,000 of his own core. Ellis died 2 years later on a Japanese-held island in the Pacific under circumstances that have never been fully explained.

But his plan survived through the 1920s and the 1930s. While the Japanese army was conquering Manuria and China, small groups of American marines were quietly practicing his ideas. They were experimenting with amphibious tractors. They were writing manuals on closeair support. They were learning to fight systematically and without illusion the exact war that Ellis had prophesied.

By December of 1941, the United States Marine Corps still numbered fewer than 70,000 men. But it possessed something no other American service possessed. It possessed a completed, tested, and rehearsed doctrine for taking islands from an enemy that would not surrender. It had been waiting quietly for 20 years.

The Empire of Japan did not know this. The Empire of Japan believed something entirely different. In the first months of the Pacific War, the Imperial Japanese Army seemed to conquer everything it touched. Malaya fell in 70 days. Singapore, called the Gibralar of the East, surrendered in February of 1942 with more than 80,000 British and Commonwealth troops marching into captivity.

The Philippines fell in April. 12,000 American and Filipino soldiers surrendered on the Batan Peninsula and were driven north on foot in what would come to be called the Batan Death March. Thousands died on the road. The men who conquered these places were veterans of the China campaign. They believed and they had been taught to believe that their spirit was the decisive factor in modern war.

They had been taught that Western soldiers were soft, individualistic, unwilling to die for their comrades. They had been taught that the American Marine Corps in particular was a second rate naval infantry, a colonial constabularary that had spent the last 20 years chasing peasants in the Caribbean. They had been taught that a determined Japanese assault delivered at night with fixed bayonets would break Americans the way it had broken the British at Singapore.

Every one of these beliefs was about to be tested. Every one of them was about to fail catastrophically. And the man who would deliver the first proof was a 50-year-old colonel named Keonau Ichiki. Colonel Ichiki had a face like a wooden mask. He had commanded infantry in China.

He was a graduate of the Rkugun Shikan Gako and he was a believer in the deepest and most literal sense in the Bushido code as the imperial army had rewritten it. He believed that the will of the Japanese soldier expressed through the bayonet at close range could overcome any material advantage. His superiors believed it too. In early August of 1942, Colonel Ichiki was on Guam with the first element of the Ichiki detachment, roughly 917 picked infantrymen of the 28th Infantry Regiment.

He was preparing to invade Midway. That operation had been cancelled after the disaster at the naval battle in June, and he was now waiting for a new mission. On the 7th of August, that mission arrived. At dawn that morning, 16,000 Marines of the First Marine Division under Major General Alexander Archer Vandergrift [music] had waded ashore on an island most of them had never heard of in the southern Solomons, a place called Guadal Canal.

They had taken the unfinished Japanese airirstrip on the northern coast with almost no resistance, renamed it Henderson Field, and dug in. It was America’s first ground offensive of the entire war. Tokyo did not believe it was a real invasion. Imperial General Headquarters, in a decision that would be studied by historians for the next 80 years, concluded that the landing was a raid.

Perhaps 2,000 Marines, they thought, perhaps 3,000. A defiant gesture. It would be brushed aside by a single reinforced Japanese regiment moving fast. They sent Colonel Ichiki. He landed on the eastern end of Guadal Canal on the night of the 18th of August at a place called Tyu Point with roughly 900 men of his first echelon. He was under orders to cross about 30 km of jungle, cross the mouth of a small river the Marines had named Alligator Creek and retake Henderson Field.

He was not to wait for the rest of his regiment. He was not to wait for artillery. He was to attack at night with the bayonet. He believed the Americans in his path would be exhausted, undersupplied, and psychologically brittle. He was wrong on every count. The Marines of Vanderrift’s first division were tired.

They were poorly supplied. Their rations had been cut. Their transports had left before all the ammunition was unloaded. But they had spent 10 days digging. They had strung barbed wire along the western bank of Alligator Creek. They had registered every meter of the sandbar at its mouth for artillery. And they had waited.

On the afternoon of the 20th of August, Ichiki sent a small scouting patrol forward under a captain Shibuya. 38 men. The patrol was to reach the American perimeter, observe, and return. It never came back. Marine ambushes killed the entire party. Ichiki learned that his scouts had disappeared. He looked at the report.

He made his decision. He decided the road ahead was clear. Historians would spend 70 years trying to understand this choice. The most careful reconstruction in Richard Frank’s Guaddle Canel published in 1990 concludes that Ichiki interpreted the silence of his scouts as evidence that they had penetrated undetected. In the doctrine he had learned, a lost patrol was proof of a weak enemy, not a strong one.

He did not consider the alternative. He did not know that marine engineers had already recovered the body of one of Shibuya’s men from the water and had [music] cut from that body a map of the intended attack. He did not know that Vandergri’s officers sitting under a canvas tent on the western bank of Alligator Creek were now holding his complete plan of assault.

He did not know that every mortar and every machine gun in the first marine division second battalion of the first regiment had been shifted one by one into the positions his own map had marked for him. He did not know he was walking into a killing ground built to the precise dimensions of his own intention.

At about half 1 in the morning of the 21st of August 1942, the first wave of the Ichuki detachment burst from the tree line east of Alligator Creek and ran across the sandbar. There were roughly 200 of them in the first rush. They wore full field packs. They carried bolt-action Arasaka rifles with long, thin, unfixed bayonets.

Behind them, the officers screamed in high thin voices the old ceremonial phrase tenno ha banzai 10,000 years to his majesty the emperor. The marines let them come to within 30 m. Then the machine guns opened. For the men who lived through it, the memory that stayed with them was not the sound. It was the light.

The muzzle flashes of the water-cooled Browning 30 caliber guns firing continuously threw a stuttering glare across the sandbar that made the running men look like figures in a broken lantern. Anti-tank guns firing canister rounds, each shell packed with over a 100 steel balls swept the beach at knee height and cut down entire ranks in single flashes.

The first wave died on the sand. The second wave, launched perhaps 40 minutes later, tried to swim the creek east of the sandbar. Marines on the far bank shot them in the water. The bodies caught in the current and drifted out into Iron Bottom Sound, where the sharks found them by morning. By dawn, Colonel Ichiki understood that his attack had failed.

Remnants of his detachment, perhaps 200 men still capable of fighting, pulled back into the coconut grove east of the creek. He believed he could regroup. He did not know that Vandergrift, from the observation post above the beach, had already ordered a battalion of the First Marines to cross the creek upstream, swing east, and cut him off.

He did not know that five M3 Stewart light tanks were already grinding through the palms to finish the work. By late afternoon of the 21st of August, the encirclement was closed. The Marines walked through the grove behind the tanks, killing everything that moved. In the last hours, wounded Japanese soldiers who had raised their hands as if to surrender detonated grenades under their own bodies as Marines came near.

12 Marines died to those grenades. A policy hardened that day in the ranks of the first marine division that would harden further on every island for the next 3 years. By nightfall on the 21st of August, the Ichiki detachment as a fighting force no longer existed. Roughly 780 Japanese lay dead in an area smaller than a soccer field.

Marine casualties totaled about 35 killed and 75 wounded. Colonel Ichiki himself was not among the survivors. American sources reported that he burned his regimental colors and shot himself. The more recent Japanese scholarship suggests he died in the final charge. The truth cannot now be recovered. Both versions were in their own way useful to their governments.

What matters is what the Japanese army ministry did next. Ichiki’s defeat should have been the first great warning of the Pacific War. It should have been studied. It should have been circulated. It should have shaken every assumption the Imperial Army had made about the American Marines. It was not.

Imperial General Headquarters classified the details. The critical internal review of Ichiki’s decisions, particularly his failure to recognize the disappearance of Captain Shibuya’s patrol as a warning, was buried inside restricted staff files. Officers who had known Ichiki in China and who tried in private to explain that his tactics had not merely failed but had been anticipated and prepared for were told to be silent.

To acknowledge at that early moment that a marine battalion had comprehensively outthought a veteran Japanese regiment would have cracked the founding myth of the empire’s ground war. The banzai charge was not tactical doctrine. It was national identity. It could not be questioned. And so the lesson of Alligator Creek was not learned.

Instead, over the next 3 months, Imperial General Headquarters sent a full brigade under Major General Kyote Kawaguchi to Guadal Canal and then most of a division under General Herukichi Hiakutake. And they attacked Hendersonfield again and again. And each time the Marines killed them by the hundreds and then by the thousands.

And each time the survivors staggered back into the jungle and starved. By February of 1943, when the Japanese Navy at last evacuated, what was left of Guadal Canal’s defenders, roughly 19,000 Japanese soldiers, had died on the island. Marine and Army ground casualties killed were fewer than 2,000. Colonel Kurabayashi, then serving in Tokyo, read the classified reports as they came in. He said very little.

[music] His colleagues remembered that he grew quieter month by month as the summaries thickened. He had written a letter home in 1929, whose meaning was now written in the casualty lists on his desk. He was almost certainly the only senior officer in the Imperial Army who was not surprised by what was happening on Guadal Canal.

He was also, though he did not yet know it, being watched by his own government as a possible future commander for the defensive battles that were coming. He had studied America. He had understood the Marines before the Marines had understood themselves. When the moment came, the Empire would send him precisely because he alone had never believed the lies.

They would send him to an island of black sand. Before the island of black sand, there was a ridge of raw grass above Henderson Field. 12th September 1942, Guadal Canal. 3 weeks after Colonel Ichiki’s men had bled out on the sandbar of Alligator Creek. The air over the ridge was thick with the smell of rotting jungle, and the men who held it were so tired they could no longer feel the mosquitoes on their necks.

Their commander was a lieutenant colonel named Merritt Austin Edson. [music] He was 45 years old. He was a small, thin, pale man with red hair going gray, and his own marines had nicknamed him Red Mike. He had commanded gunboats on Chinese rivers. He had chased bandits in Nicaragua.

He spoke in a voice so quiet that officers reporting to him had to lean forward to hear him. [music] And men who had served with him for years said that they had never seen him blink under fire. Edson had roughly 840 men on the ridge. The first marine raider battalion under strength. The remnants of the first parachute battalion further under strength.

They were sick. They were on half rations. Some of them had already begun to show signs of malaria. They had been dug in on the ridge for 2 days on ground so thin that their foxholes filled with rain every night. Coming toward them through the jungle to the south was Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi.

He was 50 years old. He commanded the 35th Infantry Brigade. Roughly 3,000 men, hardened veterans of Borneo and the Philippines. He had orders to take Henderson Field. Kawaguchi had not wanted this attack. He had told Tokyo in writing that he needed 5 to 7 days to move his brigade into position to conduct proper reconnaissance to encircle the marine perimeter from three sides.

He had studied the ground in his mind from the aerial photographs and the marching reports and he had understood that a frontal assault against a prepared American position would fail. His superior Lieutenant General Heruki Chiki of the 17th Army told him he had 3 days. Hiakutake was under pressure. The disaster of the Ichuki detachment had embarrassed Tokyo.

The emperor’s staff wanted a victory. There was no time for reconnaissance. There was no time to encircle. There was time only for another charge. Delivered fast and delivered with spirit. Kawaguchi wrote a formal protest. It survives in the Japanese Defense Ministry’s official war history, the Seniho. He argued for delay.

He was overruled. He was told that his objections were evidence of weakness. He was told to attack. He obeyed. On the night of the 13th of September 1942, in a black rain, the men of Kawaguchi’s brigade climbed the southern slopes of the ridge above Henderson Field and threw themselves against Edson’s raiders. They came in waves, screaming the old ceremonial cry.

They came with fixed bayonets and hand grenades. In some places, they broke through the marine line. In some places, they reached the crest. Edson stood behind the ridge in the open in his light green sweater and directed artillery down onto his own positions as the Japanese overran them. Marines rose out of foxholes and killed at arms length with knives and entrenching tools.

A marine pharmacist’s mate, a corman, ran back and forth through the fire, treating men who had already begun to die. By dawn on the 14th of September, the ridge was still held. Roughly 830 of Kawaguchi’s men lay on its slopes, most of them within 20 m of the marine line. Marine casualties on the ridge and in the supporting positions were about 59 killed and 204 wounded.

The battle would be called forever after Edson’s Ridge. Kawaguchi’s brigade, broken, retreated into the jungle. His men had marched 40 km over broken ground on rations of a handful of rice per day. Now they marched back without their wounded into the malarial dark. Many did not come out.

The general himself was relieved of command a week later. He was accused in the whispered language of Imperial staff politics of a failure of spirit. He was sent back to the rear. He would spend the rest of the war in obscurity and he would die forgotten by the empire he had served in 1961. The man who had seen the Marines most clearly, who had told Tokyo the truth, was silenced by his own high command.

This pattern would repeat itself across every island of the central Pacific for the next 3 years. It was in the end not the courage of the Japanese soldier that failed. It was the machine that commanded him. 20 November 1943, the Gilbert Islands, 1,400 nautical miles northeast of Guadal Canal. A coral atal called Tarowa and at its southwest corner a single fortified eyelet called Bio.

Bio is smaller than Central Park in New York. It is roughly 3 km long and at its widest 800 m across. It has no natural cover. It is flat and hot and shadeless. On the morning of the 20th of November 1943, it was the most heavily fortified piece of ground per square meter that the Japanese Empire ever built. Its commander was a naval officer, Rear Admiral Ki Shibazaki.

He was 49 years old. He had been given roughly 4,500 men, most of them elite special naval landing force troops, the RKUI, the closest thing the Imperial Navy had to a Marine Corps of its own. He had been given 14 coastal guns, some of them vicar’s 8-in guns purchased from Britain before the First World War. He had been given 50 pill boxes of steel reinforced concrete and hundreds of smaller strong points and a wire obstacle in the lagoon designed to break up American landing craft.

He had been given, he believed, a fortress that could not be taken. He said so publicly. In a speech to his men in October of 1943, Shibazaki declared that a million men could not take Tarawa in a 100 years. He was killed on the second day. The Marines who came for him were the Second Marine Division, roughly 18,000 strong, under Major General Julian Constable Smith, aged 58, a quiet Virginia who had been in the core since 1909.

The assault landing was led by a stocky red-faced full colonel of 38 named David Monroe Shupe. Shupe carried the operational plan for the entire landing in his head. He was wounded in the leg by a mortar fragment before he ever stepped ashore. And he ran the battle for the next two days from behind a Japanese pillbox on the beach with his blood soaking through the bandage and into his boot.

And he never sat down. The landing was a catastrophe. The naval bombardment, 3 hours of 8 in and 14in shells, had looked from the ships like the annihilation of the island. It was not. Shibazaki’s bunkers were built of concrete and coral and coconut logs stacked in alternating layers, and the shells largely bounced off.

When the first waves of Marines came in in landing craft that grounded on the reef 600 m short of the beach, they had to wade the rest of the way in chest deep water under interlocking machine gun firefight from bunkers that were almost entirely intact. They died by the hundreds in the lagoon. They died face down in the surf.

They died on the seaw wall where the amphibious tractors, the LVTs, could carry them all the way in, they lived. Where the tractors ran out, and Higgins boats were forced to hang up on the reef, they died. By the end of the first day, roughly 1500 Marines were casualties. Shupe had perhaps 5,000 men ashore, most of them pinned within 30 m of the beach.

Julian Smith, aboard the flagship Maryland, sent a message to Vice Admiral Hill that would become famous. He said the issue was in doubt. It was in doubt for perhaps 18 more hours. What broke the deadlock was not a plan. There was no plan left. What broke the deadlock was small groups of Marines, corporals, and sergeants and lieutenants.

None of them senior enough to have been briefed on the overall scheme of maneuver making independent decisions in the smoke and heat, working their way inland pillbox by pillbox with satchel charges and flamethrowers. The core had trained for 20 years to fight this way. The junior leaders had been taught to act without orders. on Betio on the 21st of November.

That training paid its full price. Rear Admiral Shibazaki did not live to see it. Sometime around noon on the second day, a naval shell or possibly a strafing run struck the entrance of his command bunker. He was killed instantly along with most of his staff. Command of the island’s defense fragmented within an hour.

By the end of the third day, the atal was overrun. 76 hours, 990 Marines killed, roughly 2,200 wounded. On the Japanese side, of the roughly 4,800 defenders and Korean laborers on the island, only about 146 were taken alive, and of those, only 17 were Japanese combat troops. The rest had died, almost all of them. The Marines had lost more men in 76 hours than the whole of the Guadal Canal ground campaign had cost them in 6 months.

The photographs of the dead on the beach at BTO, published in Life magazine in early 1944, shocked the American public in a way no earlier images of the war had done. In some cities, marine recruiters were briefly ordered to lower their public numbers because the photographs were being read by many Americans as evidence that the core had failed.

It had not failed. It had done exactly what the Ellis plan of 1921 had said the core would have to do. It had proved that a heavily fortified atal could be taken by direct assault at cost in days rather than weeks. Every landing that followed at Quadeline and Eniwatok and Saipan and Guam and Pelu and Iwoima would be planned by officers who had read the afteraction reports of Tarowa.

The tractors would be improved. The bombardment doctrine would be rewritten. The junior leaders would be trained even harder. The Empire meanwhile drew its own conclusion from Tarowa and drew it in secret. At Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, a small group of staff officers working through the winter of 1943 and into the spring of 1944 wrote a series of classified directives on the defense of Pacific Islands.

They concluded that beach defense was no longer viable. American naval gunfire and air power could destroy any position within range of the water. The Banzai charge that great ceremonial expression of the Imperial spirit was likewise no longer viable. Marine automatic weapons and pre-registered artillery would butcher any mass charge across open ground before it closed to bayonet range.

The new doctrine was defense in depth. Bunkers dug into the interior of an island, mutually supporting, connected by tunnels hidden inside caves. Defenders would give up the beach. They would let the Marines come inland. They would fight from underground, invisible, and they would trade head meters of coral for American blood.

The goal was no longer victory. The goal was cost. The goal was to make the Marines pay so heavily for each island that Washington might in the end negotiate rather than invade the home islands of Japan. These directives were distributed. They were labeled with the highest security classification the Imperial Army possessed.

And here is the thing that changed the war, and that has almost never been told outside the Japanese archives. The directives did not reach every commander in time. They reached in the spring of 1944 a 46-year-old colonel named Kuno Nakagawa, commanding the Second Infantry Regiment, then reinforcing the garrison of the Palao Islands. They reached his superior, Lieutenant General Kra Sedai Inu, commanding the 14th division.

Nakaguawa read them and he understood them and he began methodically in the summer of 1944 to convert the coral limestone of a small island called Pelu into the exact underground fortress the new doctrine described. More than 500 caves into banzai charges, not one. They did not reach in time and in usable war from a 53-year-old lieutenant general on the island of Seapan in the Marianosus named Yoshitsuguaitto.

Seaitto was a cavalry officer of the old school. His command had been thrown together in haste from desperate garrisons in the spring of 1944. His communications with Tokyo were poor. When the second and fourth marine divisions came ashore on Cypen on the 15th of June 1944, he defended the beaches in the old way.

When those defenses collapsed, he fell back into the hills and he fought. But he was operating on the doctrine he had learned in China, not on the doctrine Tokyo had in principle adopted. On the night of the 6th of July 1944, with his command shattered and his position on the northern end of Saipan collapsing, General Seaitto ordered his surviving troops, roughly 4,300 men, into the last great banza charge of the Pacific War.

Some of them had rifles, many did not. Some had only bamboo poles with bayonets lashed to the ends. Wounded men on crutches joined the assault. They came out of the ravines at dawn on the 7th of July, screaming, running at the American lines around Tanipag. The Marines and Army soldiers of the 27th Infantry Division cut them down in the open in front of Tanipag village in what would be remembered as the largest banzai charge of the war.

Roughly 4,300 Japanese died in a single morning. General Seaitto himself in a cave 2 km to the rear cut his own belly open with a ceremonial short sword and had his agitant finish him with a pistol shot. The most bitter fact of that morning is not that Saito was outfought. It is that the doctrine that killed his men had been abolished in a series of secret directives from Tokyo several months before he ordered the charge.

The Empire had learned how to fight the Marines, but the Empire’s bureaucracy had not been able to tell all its own generals in time. Its own paperwork killed more of its soldiers a single morning on Saipan than the Marines killed in the entire twoe ground campaign that preceded it. The men who understood the Marines died anyway because the machine that commanded them was too slow and too proud and too afraid of its own myths to admit what it now knew.

Colonel Nakagawa on Pelleu did understand. He had received the directives he had in the summer of 1944 drilled his soldiers of the second infantry regiment in the new methods until they had memorized them. Do not counterattack in the open. Do not charge. Stay underground. Kill from the caves.

Let the Americans come to you and take one marine for every meter. On the 15th of September, 1944 at 8:30 in the morning, the first marine division came ashore on Pelleu under Major General William Henry Rupertus. The division commander briefing his officers before the landing had predicted that the island would fall in 72 hours, perhaps in 4 days.

It took 73. The first marine regiment commanded on the ground in the early phase by Colonel Lewis Burwal Puller, then 46 years old, a squat, thickchested career marine known throughout the core as Chesty, went ashore on the extreme left of the landing zone at White Beach. Puller had already been wounded twice in his career.

He had fought in Nicaragua and in Haiti. He had commanded a battalion on Guadal Canal. He had survived Cape Gloucester. He was by 1944 the most famous fighting colonel in the United States Marine Corps. His regiment was destroyed on Pelleu. Colonel Nakagawa’s men waited in the coral heights of a ridge system. The Marines came to call bloody nose or the um Brogal.

From caves so well camouflaged that Marines walked past them and were shot in the back. From mortar positions dug into the reverse slopes from anti-tank guns that took Sherman tanks under fire from unexpected angles. Nakagawa’s regiment killed and kept killing. The temperature on the coral in the direct sun reached over 115° F. There was no water on the ridges.

Marines fought for days on cantens of water that had been carried up under fire in 5gallon cans. Some of the water was stored in old oil drums, and the men who drank it vomited. Chesty Puller’s first Marines, which had come ashore with roughly 3,200 men, lost more than 1,700 killed and wounded in 6 days on the Umarraal.

56% casualties. The regiment was pulled off the line on the 21st of September, effectively destroyed as a fighting formation. Rupertus on the ridge refused for weeks to admit that army units would have to be brought in to finish the campaign. When the 81st Infantry Division of the United States Army did land, elements of it and later the whole of it took over the reduction of the last pockets.

The battle went on into November. Colonel Nakagawa in a cave command post in the last high pocket remained in radio contact with headquarters on Coror until the 24th of November 1944. On that day his position finally overrun. He burned the regimental colors of the second infantry regiment faced his few remaining staff officers and took his own life.

The Empire postumously promoted him to lieutenant general. Down among the Marines who had taken Pelu, there was a 20-year-old private first class in K Company, third battalion, fifth Marines from Mobile, Alabama named Eugene Bondant Sledge. He had a college notebook in his pocket and a small pencil, and he had been writing in tiny letters whenever he could.

37 years later in 1981 he would publish what he had seen on Pelleu and on Okinawa in a book called with the old brie. In that book Sledge who was a devout man and a gentle one described things that no earlier American memoir of the Pacific had described. He described Marines cutting the gold teeth out of the mouths of Japanese soldiers who were not yet fully dead.

He described a marine defecating in the open, exhausted, [music] staring at nothing. He described the smell of the ridges, which was the smell of unburied bodies in tropical heat. And he described how after a while he stopped noticing it. Life magazine in its issue of the 22nd of May 1944 had already published a photograph of a young woman in Arizona named Natalie Nickerson sitting at a writing desk gazing thoughtfully at a Japanese skull that had been sent to her as a souvenir by her Navy boyfriend serving in the Pacific.

The caption was polite. The image was not. The Empire had ordered the massacre of American and Filipino prisoners on the Batan Peninsula in April of 1942. Japanese troops in Manila in February of 1945 would murder roughly 100,000 Philip Pepino civilians in a matter of weeks. The Kempai, the military police, ran torture centers across occupied Asia.

Unit 731 in Manuria conducted humans experiments on prisoners that killed thousands. The Empire as a system committed crimes on a scale that the crimes of individual marines on individual islands never approached. But the crimes of the Marines were real. Sledge wrote them down. It was one of the reasons his book, when it appeared, could not be dismissed.

North of Pelu, on a chain of small islands rising toward the home archipelago, another Japanese officer, one of the last aristocrats left in the Imperial Army, was preparing to die. His name was Takichi Nishi. He was 42 years old. He was one of the last serving baronss in the Imperial Army, a hereditary noble who still held both his periage and his military commission.

He was also, and this is the thing that made him famous, an Olympic gold medalist. In August of 1932 at the Los Angeles Games, riding a horse named Uranus, Nishi had won gold in the individual showjumping event. He had been photographed with American athletes. He had attended parties in Hollywood.

Actors and starlets had signed his notebook. In the summer of 1944, the Baron Nishi was ordered to Ewima with the 26th tank regiment. He had 22 tanks. They were type 97 mediums, obsolete by 1944, thin skinned and under gunned. Nishi understood immediately and without illusion that his tanks could not fight American Shermans in the open.

He gave a series of orders that no proud cavalryman gives lightly. He ordered his tanks buried up to their turrets in the volcanic sand of Ewima. They would become in effect fixed pill boxes. His crews would fight from inside them until they were burned out. The last Olympic champion, still in uniform, ended his career by turning his own weapons into coffins for his own men.

He did it because it was the only useful thing they could still do against the Marines. He would die on Ewima sometime in late March of 1945. The exact circumstances are not known. Japanese and American sources disagree on the date and the manner. What is not disputed is that when the Marines finally closed on the position where his regimental headquarters had been, there was nothing left to bury.

Above the buried tanks, above the ridges, above everything, on the highest point of the island, waited the man who had written the letter about the last country Japan should ever fight. Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, [music] now 53 years old, was ready. He had spent 8 months turning Ewima into a fortress of a kind the Marines had not yet faced.

18 km of tunnels, 1,500 rooms and passages carved into the volcanic rock. Every approach registered for mortar and artillery fire. And a written order issued to every officer under his command that stated in unmistakable language that any officer who ordered a banzai charge would be considered to have failed in his duty to the emperor.

He had told his men in a farewell message posted in every unit that not one of them should expect to see Japan again. He was at that moment the most dangerous defensive commander the empire still had in the field. He was waiting for the Marines. He knew they would come and he knew better than any general in Tokyo exactly what they were going to do.

19th February 1945 0 900 hours the volcanic beaches of Ewokoima the first waves of the fourth and fifth marine divisions came ashore on a strip of black sand so soft that men sank to their ankles with every step and the tracked landing vehicles bogged down and turned sideways in the surf above them the flanks of Mount Suribachi rose 550 ft into a gray sky behind the black sand a low terrace of loose volcanic ash climbed inland toward the interior of the island.

For the first hour, there was almost no fire. The Marines pushed forward past the terrace into the open ground beyond. Officers looked at each other. Some of them later remembered thinking that Kuribayashi had gambled and lost, that the naval bombardment had done its work, that the island was going to fall quickly. Then Kuribayashi opened his mortars.

He had held his fire for nearly 90 minutes. He had let the marines come inland, past the beaches, past the terrace, into ground where every meter had been surveyed, and every angle pre-registered by his artillery observers, hidden in the ridges to the north. When the first shells fell, they fell on top of tens of thousands of men, crowded into an area they could not leave because the sand behind them was still filling up with landing craft, and the sand in front of them was rising into the low hills where his machine guns

waited. The killing that followed lasted 36 days. By the end of that first day, roughly 2400 Marines were casualties. It was the worst first day the core had ever suffered. It would not be the worst day of the campaign. 19,000 Marines would be wounded on Ewima, nearly 7,000 would be killed. Of the roughly 21,000 Japanese defenders on the island, only 216 would be taken prisoner during the battle.

The rest died in the tunnels or were sealed inside them or came out at night in small groups to fight until they were shot down. Ewima is the only major battle in the Pacific War in which American casualties exceeded Japanese casualties. Kuribajashi had built the killing ground he had promised to build.

On the 23rd of February, on the fifth day of the battle, six Marines climbed to the summit of Mount Surabbachi [music] and raised an American flag. A Marine sergeant named Louis Lowry photographed the first flag. Then a larger flag was found and a second raising was staged so the first flag could be preserved. And this second raising was photographed by an Associated Press photographer named Joe Rosenthal.

Rosenthal’s photograph would become the most reproduced image in American history. Of the six men in that photograph, three did not live to leave the island. Sergeant Michael Strank, the young sergeant from Franklin Burough, with whom this story began, was killed on the 1st of March by what was almost certainly American artillery fire falling short.

Corporal Harlon Block was killed the same day a few hours later. Private first class Franklin Sley was killed on the 21st of March, shot by a Japanese sniper on a ridge in the north of the island. Kuribayashi was still alive, still transmitting on the 21st of March. On that day, he sent his last full message to Tokyo in a radio transmission that survives in the archives of the Imperial Japanese Army records at the National Institute for Defense Studies.

In that message, he described the Marines as the finest soldiers he had encountered in the whole of his career. He wrote that Japan could not defeat such an enemy. He wrote that the only remaining service he and his men could offer the empire was the price of their own lives so that the empire might negotiate rather than be invaded.

Tokyo had ordered him in the last week to conduct a final banzai charge, a mass suicide assault, the old ceremony one last time for the honor of the emperor. He refused. He did not send the order. Instead, he broke his surviving force into small units and told them to keep killing from the caves, one marine at a time, until they were killed themselves.

He wrote a farewell poem for his family. He then walked out into the northern ridges with a small group of officers and he disappeared. His body was never found. After the war, the empire, then no longer an empire, promoted him postuously to full general. The internal army histories produced in the 1950s, quietly omitted the fact that in the last week of his life, he had disobeyed a direct order from Imperial General Headquarters.

to have recorded that would have meant recording that Tokyo at the very end had still not learned what Kuribayashi had learned in 1928. It was easier to promote him and stay silent. South and west of Ewoima on the largest island of the Ryuku chain, the last great land battle of the Pacific War was already being planned.

Okinawa. And it is in the story of Okinawa that we return to the man we left crawling out of a cave at the beginning of this account. Colonel Hiomichi Yahara. Yahara, 42 years old, was the senior operations officer of the 32nd Army under Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushiima, 57. The chief of staff of the army was Lieutenant General Isamucho, 50.

Ushijima was a calm, deliberate soldier, a former commandant of the Imperial Military Academy. Cho was something else. Cho had been implicated as a young officer in the political murder plots of the 1930s. He was aggressive, emotional, and loud. He believed in the offensive. He believed in the spirit of the imperial army. Yahara did not.

Yahara had studied the reports of Pelu and Iima. He had read what Colonel Nakagawa had done in the coral of the Yumural. He had read what Kuribayashi had done in the ridges of Ewo. He proposed to Ushiima an Okinawa defense that was the logical extension of what those men had built. Give up the beaches. Give up the northern half of the island.

concentrate the entire 32nd army in the ridges of the south on the Shuri line and force the Marines and the army divisions of the 10th army into a slow grinding attritional battle on ground of Japanese choosing. Ushiima agreed. On the 1st of April 1945, the American landing on the western beaches of Okinawa met almost no resistance.

The Marines and the soldiers of the 10th Army walked ashore for 4 days. They moved inland almost unopposed. Then they hit the Shuri line and the killing began. For 6 weeks, the Americans battered themselves against Yahara’s defenses. Casualties climbed toward 20,000. The 10th Army Commander, Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr.

was under intense pressure from Nimttz and from Washington to break through. Newspapers at home were beginning to publish maps showing lines that had not moved. And inside the Shuri caves on the night of the 3rd of May, 1945, General Cho made a case to General Ushima that Yahara had feared for a month was coming.

Cho argued that the moment had arrived for a great counteroffensive, a mass assault. The Imperial Army spirit applied at scale to shatter the American line. Yahara argued the opposite. He said in a formal briefing that the attritional defense was working, that every additional week bought time for the home islands. He said in as many words as a colonel is permitted to say to a lieutenant general that a counter offensive would destroy them. Ushiima chose Cho.

The counteroffensive went in on the 4th of May. It was a disaster. Roughly 5,000 Japanese soldiers died in less than 72 hours for no ground gained. The Shury line was gutted of its best remaining troops. The subsequent American advance, which had been costing me per day, began to cost hundreds of meters per day.

On the night of the 5th of May, in the deep cave of the 32nd Army headquarters at Shuri Castle, General Ushima turned to Colonel Yahara. He did this in front of witnesses which is how we know. He said quietly that Yahara had been right and that he Ushiima had been wrong. This is the only recorded instance in the entire Pacific War in which a Japanese lieutenant general in field command admitted to a subordinate that he had been wrong about how to fight the American Marines.

Yahara did not answer. There was nothing to answer. 6 weeks later at Mabuni at the very southern tip of Okinawa, the 32nd Army finished dying. On the 22nd of June 1945, in a small cave overlooking the sea, General Ushima and General Cho committed suicide together in the traditional manner.

Before Ushiima cut himself open, he gave Yahara his final order. He forbade him to die. He ordered him to surrender, to be captured, to survive, and to tell the truth about what had happened. He said Japan would need someone who had been there. Yahar obeyed. He put on the uniform of an enlisted man. He hid in a cave for several days.

On the 4th of July, 1945, he was taken alive by American troops. He was interned. He was interrogated. He was eventually released. He returned to a country that had lost the war he had told his generals it was going to lose and he did what General Ushijima had ordered him to do. He was silent for 27 years.

Then in 1972 he published a memoir in Japanese. Its title was Okinawa Kessan meaning the decisive battle of Okinawa. It was the first honest account of the campaign written by any senior Japanese officer who had lived through it. It named names. It described the argument between Cho and himself. It described Ushiima’s apology.

It described what the Marines had done and how and why. The book was translated into English in 1995 by Roger Pino and Masatoshi Wihara under the title The Battle for Okinawa. Yahara died in 1981 at the age of 78 in the country he had not been permitted to die for. His book is still in print. So we come back to the question with which this story began.

Why did the Japanese soldier fear the American Marine more than any other unit he faced in that war? The answer is not the answer the Empire’s own wartime propaganda later tried to construct. It is not that the Marine was uniquely brave. Japanese soldiers were brave. The men of the Ichiki detachment walked across an open sandbar into pre-registered artillery.

The men of Kawaguchi’s brigade climbed a raed ridge in the rain. The Ricoenti of Bio fought until there were 17 of them left alive on the entire island. The tank crews of Baroni died inside their buried turrets. The garrison of Ewoima, 21,000 men, went into the ground and refused to come out. Bravery was not the difference. The difference was the institution behind the man.

The United States Marine Corps had spent the 20 years between the World Wars on tiny budgets in Nicaragua and Haiti and at Quantico and at San Diego, deliberately preparing itself for exactly the war it eventually fought. It had written the doctrine before the doctrine was needed. It had trained its junior leaders, its sergeants and corporals and lieutenants to make decisions in the smoke and the dust without waiting for orders from above.

It had absorbed the whole industrial capacity of the United States, the steel and the aviation gasoline and the plasma and the amphibious tractors. And it had put that capacity behind the individual riflemen on the beach. The Imperial Japanese Army had spirit. It had in the men we have named tonight some of the finest field commanders any army has ever produced.

Kuribayashi understood the Marines better than most marine generals understood themselves. Nakagawa at Pelu wrote a defensive campaign that is still studied at Quantico today. Yahara at Okinawa saw the truth and had the courage to tell his commanding general to his face. But the empire buried the officer who understood.

It killed Kawaguchi’s career. It silenced the afteraction report on Ichiki. It sent Seaitto to his death on Saipan because its own secret directives had not reached him in usable form. It punished the men who told the truth and it promoted the men who told the lie. The Marine Corps did the opposite. It listened to its junior officers.

It rewrote its doctrine after Tarowa. It buried its dead and then it published the afteraction reports and then it did it better on the next island. That is what the Japanese soldier faced and that is why he came to fear it more than anything else in the American arsenal. Not the flamethrower, not the Sherman tank, not the artillery, the institution, the one that made all of those things arrive together on the same beach at the same hour and kept coming and kept coming until the men who stood in its way were gone.

In February of 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the landing, American and Japanese veterans met on the black sand of Ewima. They stood together at a stone marker inscribed in both languages. They shook hands. Some of them wept. There were survivors on that beach who had once killed each other’s friends and who understood better than any historian ever would what had happened there.

Somewhere in the volcanic rock beneath their feet lay the body of Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who had written a letter home in 1929, and who had been right and whose country had not listened. The sea came in. The sea went out.