Two miles of Iwo beach filled with wreckage – all ours
Japs aimed weapons at shore long before Yanks landed – and they didn’t miss
By Sgt. David Dempsey, USMC combat correspondent
IWO JIMA – The invasion beach of this island, stormed four days ago by Marines in the face of blistering Jap mortar and artillery fire, today is a scene of indescribable wreckage – all of it ours.
For two miles extending from Mt. Suribachi at the southern tip of the island is a thick layer of debris. Wrecked hulls of scores of boats testify to the price we paid to get our troops ashore on this vital island.
For two continuous days and nights, Jap artillery, rockets and heavy mortars laid a curtain of fire along the shore. Their weapons had been aimed at the beach long before we landed. They couldn’t miss and they didn’t.
Volcanic sand on this beach is so soft that many of our vehicles were mired down before they had gone 10 feet. In addition, a terrace a few yards from the water hampered their movements so that they became an easy prey for Jap gunners.
Only a few trucks got ashore and for two days practically all supplies moved by hand to the front. Even the unconquerable jeep was stuck.
One can see amphibian tractors turned upside down like pancakes on a griddle; derricks brought ashore to unload cargo are tilted at insane angles where shells blasted them; anti-tank guns were smashed before they had a chance to fire a shot. Even some bulldozers landed too early to clear a path for following vehicles. Artillery could not be landed for 24 hours.
Packs, clothing, gas masks and toilet articles, many of them ripped, by shrapnel, are scattered across the sand for five miles. Rifles are blown in half. Even letters are strewn among the debris as though the war insisted on prying into a man’s personal life.
Scattered amid the wreckage is death. Perhaps the real heroes of this battle for Iwo Jima are the boys who sweated out the invasion. They are the coxswains who steered the landing boats through a gauntlet of fire and who didn’t get back. They are the unloading parties who for one entire day unloaded hardly a boat because few boats made it.
Instead, they hugged the beach while shells hit into the sand all around them.
On D-Day, beach parties suffered heavy casualties in killed and wounded.
And there were the aid and evacuation stations which couldn’t move up to the comparative safety of the forward area. Our battalion aid station lost 11 of its 26 corpsmen in the first two days.
Death is not a pretty sight, but it has taken possession of our beach. An officer in charge of a tank landing boat received a direct shell hit while trying to free his boat from the sand. He was blown in half. A life preserver supports the trunk of his body in the water.
Marines killed on the beach were buried under the sand as the tide came in.
On the third day, we began to get vehicles and supplies ashore in quantity. Wire matting made the beach passable and naval gunfire knocked out most of the Jap artillery.
The miracle was that we were able to supply our troops at all during the two days of increasing shelling on this beach.
The boys who did it, as the saying goes, deserve a medal, but a lot of them won’t be around when the medals are passed out.