Malden residents were there when Iwo Jima became first Japanese territory captured in World War II

Who knew the brutal, bloody battle would rage 32 days after iconic flag-raising?

Editor’s Note: The following is Part One of what will be a two-part series on the Battle of Iwo Jima. Part Two will appear in next week’s Malden Advocate.

By Kevin Jarvis

On Feb. 19, 70 years ago, Feb. 19, 1945, at 0900 hours, thousands of U.S. Marines stormed ashore on the island of Iwo Jima, the first Japanese territory to be conquered during World War II.

On that fateful day, two Malden residents, both U.S. Marines – Staff Sergeant Joseph J. Topor, a platoon Sergeant with A Company, First Battalion, 28th Marines, 5th Marine Division, and Lieutenant Edward W. Mulcahy, a platoon leader with B Company, First Battalion, Twenty-first Marines, 3rd Marine Division – would lead their men onto the beach in the first waves of Marines to attack Iwo Jima. My father, Quartermaster Sergeant John F. Jarvis with the Second Separate Engineer Battalion, Fifth Amphibious Corps, would land on the invasion beach on D+1 (the day after D-Day) as the Battalion Quartermaster for his Engineer Battalion. These Malden men, Joe Topor from Milton Street, Ed Mulcahy from Chester Street and John Jarvis from Cross Street, were some of the first U.S. Marines to set foot on Japanese soil in World War II as part of the initial invasion force to capture Iwo Jima.

The battle for Iwo Jima lasted 36 days: from Feb. 19 to March 26, 1945. It was some of the fiercest fighting of the war and considered to be the bloodiest battle in the Pacific. The American invasion, known as Operation Detachment, was charged with capturing the airfields on Iwo Jima.

Iwo Jima was located halfway between mainland Japan and Guam, which was part of the Mariana Islands, which had just been recaptured from the Japanese a few months earlier. Iwo Jima is a small island about 8 square miles in size. In comparison, Malden is about 5 square miles.

Like many other Marines that day, Topor, Mulcahy and Jarvis were already combat veterans. These men had already fought in some of the famous battles of World War II, in places like Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and at Guam, Saipan and Tinian in the Mariana Islands, before landing on Iwo Jima.

Within days, 72,000 U.S. Marines, Navy Seabees, Corpsmen and some U.S. Army personnel would land on the heavily fortified island of Iwo Jima as the spearhead of a veteran amphibious force at its greatest strength. Iwo Jima was the largest Marine amphibious operation during World War II. It was also the costliest. The landing force sustained more than 26,000 casualties (including 2,600 battle fatigue cases), the equivalent of losing a division and a half of Marines. More than 6,000 died. So did 21,000 or more Japanese troops.

The Japanese were not on Iwo Jima, they were inside Iwo Jima. When the Marines first landed on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945, they were surprised not to encounter any enemy fire or artillery. They also did not see any of the estimated 12,000 Japanese defenders. Many of the Marines who landed in the first wave thought naval and air bombardment had killed all of the Japanese. It was quiet on the beaches and the Marines were beginning to get anxious.

Only when Marines advanced inland in search of the Japanese positions did Japanese gunners open up on the Marines. Many concealed Japanese bunkers and firing positions opened up and shot on the invading Marines, and the first wave of Marines took devastating losses from the machine guns. Besides the Japanese defenses on the beaches, the Marines would also face heavy fire from Mount Suribachi at the south of the island overlooking the two-mile stretch of invasion beach.

Marines had trouble advancing because the beaches and terraces above the beach consisted of volcanic ash. This ash allowed for neither a secure footing nor the construction of foxholes to protect the Marines from hostile fire. However, the ash did help to absorb some of the fragments from Japanese artillery.

American military commanders knew the Japanese had thousands of troops on the island, but were not sure of their exact locations. B-24 bombers from U.S. Air bases in the Marianas islands dropped their bombs on Iwo Jima for 10 weeks prior to D-Day, and the U.S. Navy would shell the island for 72 hours prior to the Marines stepping foot on the black sands of Iwo Jima. Pre-invasion Naval bombardment would help uncover their artillery and gun positions.

On D-Day minus 2, the Japanese inadvertently assisted intelligence efforts by opening up on the U.S. flotilla approaching the beaches to deliver the “frogmen” swimmers. This revealed the location of most of the big guns overlooking the landing beaches. The old battleships, many resurrected from the ruins of Pearl Harbor and fresh from supporting the great Allied landings at Normandy, moved in daringly close to destroy these gun positions.

The U.S. Navy superb shooting saved hundreds of lives on D-Day.

Mount Suribachi dominated the southern part of the island at 556 feet. The Japanese had built a seven-story interior structure filled with heavy guns, artillery, mortars and machine guns. They would wheel out the big guns on railroad tracks to direct gunfire directly down on the Americans troops on the beach. The Japanese would roll their heavy guns back into the mountain to protect them from U.S. Naval gunfire.

The Japanese had plenty of weapons, ammunition, radios, fuel and rations. They had everything but fresh water, always at a premium on that sulfuric rock. American intelligence experts concluded that the island could support no more than 13,000 defenders because of the acute water shortage.

The Japanese had nearly twice as many as that estimate, but all of them were on half-rations of water for weeks before the invasion even began. Intelligence estimates indicated that there were about 12,000 Japanese on the island. That estimate turned out to be off by thousands and there was a very good reason for that. Unknown to the Marines when they landed, they would rarely see the Japanese defenders on Iwo Jima. The 22,000 Japanese defenders were concealed inside Iwo Jima – hidden inside caves, bunkers and machine gun nests – all connected by 16 miles of tunnels connecting the Japanese command center in the northern part of the island to the stronghold inside Mount Suribachi on the southern tip of Iwo Jima.

Within hours of the landing on D-Day (Feb. 19, 1945), every American now knew where Iwo Jima was located and about the tremendous struggle of our thousands of American servicemen fighting bravely to seize that island from the Japanese Empire.

For about one hour the Japanese held their fire, allowing the beaches to become saturated with U.S. Marines and Navy Corpsmen. At about 10 a.m., the Japanese opened up and rained hell down upon them.

By nightfall on D-Day, 30,000 Marines would make it ashore onto the sands of Iwo Jima, where the beaches of Iwo Jima resembled the worst images of hell. The cost for taking the beachhead on Iwo Jima resulted in thousands of Marine and Navy casualties on the first day alone, which is comparable to American losses at Omaha Beach on Normandy’s D-Day the previous June.

By the end of D-Day on Iwo Jima, 2,400 Americans would be killed or wounded. In comparison, that is approximately the number of American lives lost in 13 years of the war in Afghanistan. Some 4,507 American military were killed in the Iraqi War, which lasted nine years.

Fighting on the beachhead at Iwo Jima was very brutal. Advancing Marines were stalled by numerous defensive positions augmented by artillery pieces. Marines were ambushed by Japanese troops who would appear from tunnels and hidden foxholes. During the hours of darkness, the Japanese would leave their defensive positions to attack American foxholes, but fortunately U.S. Navy ships fired star shells to deny them the cover of darkness.

The Marine Corps’ initial mission was to capture Iwo Jima from the Japanese so it could not be used as an advance warning base to notify mainland Japan of B-29 bombing raids leaving from the recently liberated Mariana Islands of Guam, Tinian and Saipan. It would also be the very first Japanese soil assaulted by U.S. Marines during the war and would prove to be a morale booster for the troops and the American homeland. More importantly, the U.S. needed to eliminate the Japanese ability to intercept U.S. aircraft flying near the island. B-29 bombers were also having trouble making the round trip from the Mariana Islands to Japan and back. Some B-29s were running out of fuel or were severely damaged, and Iwo Jima served as an emergency runway for crippled aircraft even before the island was secured.

On Feb. 23, 1945, the Marines raised the flag on top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. A historic photograph was taken that day by Joe Rosenthal. It depicts five Marines and a Navy Corpsman raising a U.S. flag 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 came to be regarded in the United States as one of the most significant and recognizable images of the war, and possibly the most reproduced photograph of all time.

The flag raising was a morale booster, but only lasted for moments as Marines looked up from the beaches and other locations on the island, cheering loudly as they saw Old Glory waiving from the highest point on the island. Three Marines depicted in the photograph – Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley and Michael Strank – were killed in action within a few days. The three surviving flag-raisers were Marines Rene Gagnon and Ira Hayes and sailor John Bradley. They were brought back to the U.S. for a fund-raising campaign and were depicted in Clint Eastwood’s film “Flags of our Fathers.” The image of that flag-raising photo was later used by Felix de Weldon to sculpt the Marine Corps War Memorial, which is located adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery just outside Washington, D.C.

Our Marines were proud to see that flag raised on top of Mount Suribachi that day, but reality quickly set in and the battle raged for another month and thousands of Marines and sailors would die before the island was secure. Iwo Jima would be the first Japanese homeland soil captured by the Americans. Defending the island became a matter of honor for the Japanese to prevent its capture.

The summit of Suribachi was one of the most important locations on the island. From that location, the Japanese were able to fire artillery directly down on the Americans, concentrating on thousands of Marines on the landing beaches.

Once the Japanese lost Mount Suribachi, the Japanese would fight the remainder of the battle from inside miles of underground bunkers and pillboxes. Drastic measures were needed to vanquish the Japanese, who would fight to the death or commit suicide instead of surrender to the Americans. The Marines would use flamethrowers and blow up entrances of caves and bunkers killing the enemy and sealing them in what would become their tombs.

My father’s first cousin George Jarvis from Rhode Island also fought at Iwo Jima with the 5th Engineer Battalion, 5th Marine Division and told me stories about the Japanese refusing to surrender and how he and many other Marine Engineers threw explosive charges into caves, sealing them shut.

Iwo Jima was the only Marine Corps battle where the 26,000 American casualties, to include 6,821 Americans killed, exceeded the 22,000 Japanese defending the island. Not surprisingly, most casualties in the first weeks of the battle resulted from high explosives, mortars, artillery, mines, grenades and rocket bombs. Time magazine combat correspondent Robert Sherrod, a veteran of earlier landings in the Aleutians, Gilberts and Mariana Islands, reported that the dead at Iwo Jima, whether Japanese or American, had one thing in common: “They all died with the greatest possible violence. Nowhere in the Pacific war had I seen such badly mangled bodies.”

U.S. Navy medical crews paid an exorbitant price in the savage fighting at Iwo Jima. Twenty-three doctors and 827 corpsmen were killed or wounded in action, a casualty rate twice as high as the bloody battle at Saipan.

The Japanese defense was commanded by General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, a much-admired leader and respected by his men. Before the Americans landed, General Kuribayashi ordered each soldier to kill 10 Marines, and for a while, they were beating their quotas.

The Japanese paid particular attention to Navy Corpsmen who treated wounded Marines on the battlefield. They theorized that if you could kill a Corpsman then maybe 10 Marines would die due to lack of treatment for their wounds.

Four miles long, shaped like a pork chop, covering eight square miles, Iwo had no front lines, no rear, every inch a battleground.

Kevin Jarvis, a former Marine, is a member of the Board of Directors for the Iwo Jima Association of America (IJAA). He is the son of John F. Jarvis, a lifelong friend of Joe Topor and as a child lived in the same two-family home as Ed Mulcahy and his family. He currently serves as the Veterans’ Services Officer for the City of Malden.