THIS WAS REPORTED TODAY, MARCH 6, 1945:
(Iwo's Beachhead Was
Toughest of Them All) (A must read; e.t.)
Wisconsin
Rapids, Wis. Tuesday, March 6, 1945.
2,050 Marines
Meet Death in
Iwo Campaign
BY
LEONARD'MILLIMAN
Associated
Press War Editor
A dashing 86-mile advance by British
armored and airborne units endangered the entire Japanese position in Burma
today.
The maneuver slashed every
communication line between Mandalay and Rangoon. Eight airdromes were seized
intact Great stores were destroyed or captured and 1,600 Japanese killed.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur reported
about 90,000 Japanese have been killed on Luzon island in the Philippines and
the remaining 60,000
have been cut into disconnected units.
On blood-covered Iwo island Navy Secretary
James Forrestal disclosed 2,500 marines have been killed— one for every six
Japanese known to have been slain. He made no estimate of the American wounded.
The last complete U. S. casualty
report on Iwo listed seven
wounded for each marine slain. Japs Say 20,000 Wounded An unconfirmed Japanese
communique estimated American wounded as 20,000, about the number of the
original Nipponese garrison.
For the second successive day,
Adm. Chester W. Nimitz reported battle lines were unchanged. The three marine
divisions broke up repeated Japanese attempts to infiltrate through the lines.
Trained dogs joined the marines in hunting down enemy troops still hiding in caves
behind the lines, where the Yanks killed them or sealed up their underground
hideouts.
Iwo's Beachhead Was
Toughest of Them All
(Editor's note:
Why was Iwo Jima, tiny Pacific island so hard for
the tough
American marines to conquer? This story explains Iwo's toughness—one of the world’s
most heavily fortified bases which was giving the Leathernecks one of
the bitterest battles in 168 years of marine corps history).
BY
JAMES LINDSLEY
Iwo Jima (via Navy Radio)—(3?)—Iwo's
beachhead—Hack, sandy,
treacherous—was the toughest of
them all.
The U. S. marines took heavy
casualties at Tarawa and the conquests
of Roi, Namur, Saipan and Tinian
were fighting jobs for a fighting
service. But nowhere were the
forces of nature and of the Japanese
lined up in the measure they were
at Iwo Jima.
Tarawa? Yes, it was flat, exposed
and highly fortified. But it was
a 76-hour campaign. Iwo has
already blazed with fury and death for 16
days and the narrow, littered
beach has felt the shock of enemy resistance
throughout.
Across open, heavy surf, the Iwo
beach-master moved thousands of
troops of three marine divisions,
the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth,
their guns, food, water,
ammunition and all the countless supplies needed
for the great battle.
There was no harbor. No shelter.
The material piled up in, a great
scene of apparent confusion on the constantly shelled southeast beach
Iwo is covered with what appears
to be decomposed volcanic rock, which shifts and slides under foot. It is
difficult to walk on and, at the outset, was a veritable death trap for tanks
and trucks. Yet, the marines soon had on the beach more
vehicles than the island had ever
seen
The beach slopes sharply upward from
the water. Early advances were in yards as the marines of the Fourth and Fifth
divisions pushed forward under intense enemy fire. Initial resistance was
comparatively light but the hours of the day and night that followed were
filled with suffering and death for the brave men who would not be shoved off the
beachhead. The Third division was thrown into the battle two days after the
initial invasion.
Move
In On Island
I saw long lines of amphibious tanks
moving in on the island that sunny morning of D-day, February 19 as the first
wave of marines made their assault on the forbidding coast.
Many of the men were laughing and
joking as the tanks waddled ridiculously past our control boat, standing
offshore. Some waved and
yelled but the brisk wind whipped
See—IWO—Page
Iwo
(Continued
from Page One)
their words away. There was this
thought: "How many of these men will be dead -ten minutes from now.
Then terrible carnage broke
loose on the beach itself. The sounds of
war—the boom and crack of naval guns all around us—was unleashed in full fury.
For a while the hellish nightmare ashore was too great to absorb.
So, the sharpest memory is of boys,
light hearted and without pretense, going into the worst mission the marines
have ever been called upon to undertake.
The Japanese had hundreds of mortar
and artillery pieces deeply entrenched on high ground covering every inch of
the beaches They opened up just after the first assault elements charged
ashore.
U, S, navy guns had knocked out some
enemy positions in the terrific shelling that hadn't ceased until five minutes
before the actual landing. But hundreds more were still in action.
Wreckage
Litters Beach
In a short time, the wreckage of landing
boats, trucks, amphibious tractors and other equipment littered the shoreline.
Surviving crews were forced to take
shelter with the marines in shell and bomb craters until they had an
opportunity to charge tip the
steep slope to the rim of the
southern Motoyama airfield, which was the initial objective.
That goal was reached the first day—taken
by the first battalion of the 23rd
marines, commanded by Col. W. W. Wetisinger, of Fremont, Ohio, and Lajolla,
Calif. It took these men from "H" hour (9 a. m.) until nightfall to
advance the 500
yards from the beach to the
airfield. Just how grim the fighting was I learned, first hand after going ashore
with the Third battalion of the 23rd marines, commanded by Maj. James L. Scales
of Stoneville, N. C.
I was pinned down on the beach. A
shell hole seemed the only place to be while the enemy poured the concentration
of fire on us. There was no turning back.
Jumble
of Impressions
Out of the jumble of impressions,
several stand out sharply in retrospect.
There was the heroism ofCapt.
John W. Thomason, 3rd, mild-mannered Fourth division public relations officer
and former Houston (Tex,) Chronicle reporter, who rallied the medical corpsmen
and helped carry out the wounded under fire.
There was the sight of the
gravely wounded marine in a crater five feet away, who laboriously removed the
canteen from his belt but lacked the strength to lift it to his mouth.
There was the stupefying crash as
a landing boat received a direct hit, tpa"'nsj one crewman in two while another,
standing only two or three feet away, apparently was unharmed.
There was the story of the
marine, with both feet gone, who politely replied to an inquiry from his sergeant
just before he died: "I'm very sorry but I don't know."
On the lighter side, remains the memory
of the unidentified marine charging ashore and tearing off his lifebelt, while
he declared In a southern drawl: "That thing's not
going to save my life now,
Mac."
Military
Value of
City Gone
BULLETIN
With
the U. S. First Army
—(.-AP)—
The
fall of Cologne was officially announced
tonight.
Paris—
(AP) —
American
troops fought through Cologne to the Rhine tonight, and in the south the U. S.
Third army spurted 25 miles toward the Rhine in the Coblenz
area.
American
first army tanks and troops fought past the famous Dom cathedral in Cologne,
Germany's fourth city, and a front dispatch declared "Cologne for all
military purposes has fallen."
Germans
retreated south from Cologne along a corridor to Bonn. The Third army tanks
broke out of their Kjll river bridgehead farther south yesterday morning and in
30 hours raced 25 miles, or more than halfway the distance to the Rhine, They
were meeting "only medium resistance" in the push to the river in
this sector, more than 1,500 Germans including a corps commander were captured.
Capture
Ford Plant
American troops had driven to the
Rhine all along a line north of Cologne
except for a bend in the river south of Duesseldorf, and capured for Ford motor
plant just
north of the city.
RUSSIAN
DRIVE
REACHES
ODER
NEAR
STETTIN
BULLETIN
London—(AP) —
Russian troops have reached Stettin bay and
captured Cantnin, Marshal Stalin announced tonight. Earlier Stalin reported
Marshal
Gregory Zhukov's First White Russian army has captured Griefenberg, 14 miles
from the Baltic toast.
BY
RICHARD KAS1SCHKE
London—(AP) — Russian troops closing on Stettin have reached the Oder near
Greifenhagen, 11 miles south of the port, a Moscow dispatch said today. The
Germans declared the Soviets had thrust to within 13 miles of Stettin bay and
85 of the U-boat base of
Swinemuende. Red army artillery was shelling
Stettin, the port of Berlin at
the Oder's mouth.
The river divides into two main channels
at Griefenhagen.
Wheeling
Westward
The
German high command said Marshal Gregory Zhukov's First White Russian army was
–wheeling westward on a 40-mile front from Stargard to Greifenberg, the latter town
14 miles from the Baltic coast and 17 northeast of captured Naugard.
