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I HAVE PLACED THIS CACHE AT THE SITE OF A BEAUTIFUL MURAL ON THE SIDE OF A LOCAL BUILDING. YOU CAN PARK 1 FOOT FROM GROUND ZERO OF THE CACHE. WHEN I GET THE ARTIST NAME I WILL POST IT.
For the 70,000 Americans, Iwo Jima was the step to the Japanese heartland and to the end of an awful war. For the 22,000 Japanese defenders, Iwo Jima was the defense of their very hearths and homes as it was part of the Tokyo Imperial Prefecture (county). It was assaulted by the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions of the Fifth Marine Amphibious Corps, which included supporting sea and air units.
Iwo Jima was the only Marine battle where the American casualties, 26,000, exceeded the Japanese -- most of the 22,000 defending the island. The 6,800 American servicemen killed doubled the deaths of the Twin-Towers of 9/11.
The Japanese defense was headed by General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, resourceful, resolute, much admired by his men and respected by the Americans. LtCol Justice M. Chambers (Medal of Honor) commanding 3rd Bn, 25th Marines, 4th Marine Division, recalled how General Kuribayashi ordered each soldier to kill ten Marines -- "for a while he was beating their quotas."
Four miles long, shaped like a pork chop, covering eight square miles, Iwo had no front lines, no rear, every inch a battleground. There were complex, subterranean levels, some two stories down. From these the defenders could approach the enemy on the surface virtually anywhere through warrens, spider holes, caves, and crevices.
"At great cost, you'd take a hill to find then the same enemy suddenly on your flank or rear. The Japanese were not on Iwo Jima. They were in it!
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima" is a historic photograph taken on 23 February 1945 by Joe Rosenthal. It depicts five Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman raising the flag of the United States atop Mount Suribachi. The photograph was extremely popular, being reprinted in thousands of publications. Later, it became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication, and ultimately came to be regarded as one of the most significant and recognizable images of the war, and possibly the most reproduced photograph of all time. Of the six men depicted in the picture, three (Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, and Michael Strank) did not survive the battle; the three survivors (John Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes) became celebrities upon the publication of the photo. For a while, it was believed that the man now known to be Block was actually Hank Hansen, but Hayes set the record straight. The picture was later used by Felix de Weldon to sculpt the Marine Corps War Memorial, located adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery.
By the morning of 23 February, Mount Suribachi was effectively cut off from the rest of the island — above ground. By then, the Marines knew that the Japanese defenders had an extensive network of below-ground defenses, and knew that in spite of its isolation above ground, the volcano was still connected to Japanese defenders via the tunnel network. They expected a fierce fight for the summit. Two four-man patrols were sent up the volcano to reconnoiter routes on the mountain's north face. Popular legend (embroidered by the press in the aftermath of the release of the famous photo) has it that the Marines fought all the way up to the summit. The American riflemen expected an ambush, but none materialized. The Marines did encounter small groups of Japanese defenders on Suribachi, but the majority of the Japanese troops stayed in the tunnel network and only occasionally attacked in small groups and were generally all killed. The patrols made it to the summit and scrambled down again, reporting the lack of enemy contact to Colonel Chandler Johnson. Johnson then called for a platoon of Marines to climb Suribachi; with them, he sent a small American flag to fly if they reached the summit. Again, Marines began the ascent, expecting to be ambushed at any moment, but reached the top of Mount Suribachi without incident. Using a length of pipe they found among the wreckage atop the mountain, the Marines hoisted the U.S. flag over Mount Suribachi: the first foreign flag to fly on Japanese soil. A photograph of this "first flag raising" was taken by photographer Louis R. Lowery.
As the flag went up, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had just landed on the beach at the foot of Mount Suribachi and decided that he wanted the flag as a souvenir. Popular legend has it that Colonel Johnson wanted the flag for himself, but, in fact, he believed that the flag belonged to the 2nd Battalion 28th Marines, who had captured that section of the island. Johnson sent Sergeant Mike Strank to take a second (larger) flag up the volcano to replace the first. As the first flag came down, the second went up. It was after the second flag went up that Rosenthal took the famous photograph "Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima" of the replacement flag being planted on the mountain's summit.
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