The Pittsburgh Press (March 2, 1945)
Main defense belt on Iwo breached
Marines’ campaign near last phases
GUAM (UP) – U. S. Marines broke through the enemy’s main defense belt on Iwo in a hotly-contested advance to within 1,200 yards of the north coast today.
“The Iwo campaign is moving into its last phases,” United Press writer Mac R. Johnson reported from the invasion flagship off Japan’s tiny front doorstep island.
“The end of the campaign may come within three to four days if the Marine tempo of 400 to 600-yard daily average advance is maintained,” he said.
The 3rd Marine Division at the center of the front breached the enemy’s main defense line in an 800-yard advance that carried across the western end of Iwo’s third and last airfield.
The breakthrough at the center threatened to split the surviving garrison of probably fewer than 10,000 Japs in Iwo for piecemeal annihilation.
Both the eastern and western flanks of the enemy line were also under attack, but the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions in these sectors still have as much as 2,500 yards to go to reach the northern beaches.
In the west, however. Maj. Gen. Keller E. Rockey’s 5th Division seized Hill 362, one of the highest observation posts in the northern area.
Maj Gen. Greaves B. Erskine, commander of the 3rd Division, reported the central breakthrough to Lt. Gen. Holland M. Smith, invasion commander, aboard Vice Adm. Richmond K. Turner’s flagship.
Gen. Erskine said his veterans of the Guam and Saipan campaign, had battled through a belt of blockhouses and pillboxes on high ground from which the Japs swept the advancing Marines with murderous crossfire.
A Marine spokesman aboard Adm. Turner’s flagship said the fighting for the defense line was at the closest range of the entire 11-day campaign.
“When our men got into the enemy-held ground, they found the Japs still were there,” he said. “They had to fight it out and killed them in what could nearly be called ‘hand-to-hand’ fighting.”
It was believed the remaining enemy defenses guarding the north coast were not so strong as those which the Americans have just pierced.
Behind their lines, 3rd Division forces cleared encircled Motoyama village, administrative center and largest town on Iwo.
The northern airfield on Iwo – Motoyama Airfield No. 3 – now partly occupied by the 3rd Division, was never completed by the Japs. Their other two airfields are in American hands.
A Tokyo broadcast said Jap planes had spotted and attacked a “concentration of American convoys” off the Bonin Islands, just north of Iwo.
The Marines captured their largest one-day bag of prisoners of the 11-day campaign yesterday. Seventeen were rounded up by the 3rd Division, bringing the total since the invasion February 19 to 27.
U.S. carrier planes carried out harassing attacks on enemy installations on Chichi in the Bonin islands, north of Iwo, Wednesday night.
In the Marianas, 37 more Japs were killed and 52 captured in mopping-up operations on Saipan, 35 killed and 11 captured on Guam, and seven killed and two captured on Tinian.