A volcanic island honeycombed with tunnels by a Japanese commander who deliberately abandoned his army’s own doctrine to make the fighting as slow and costly as possible. The world remembers it through a single photograph of a flag; the man who built the defence the photograph was taken over left behind letters, not slogans.
At a glance
Iwo Jima — renamed Ioto by Japan in 2007, its more historically accurate reading — is a small volcanic island roughly 1,200 km south of Tokyo, dominated by the extinct cone of Mount Suribachi at its southern tip. Under Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese garrison broke with imperial doctrine: rather than defend the beaches or mount suicidal banzai charges, they dug a deep network of tunnels and fortified positions designed to draw out the fighting and inflict maximum American casualties. It worked: the 36-day battle became the costliest single action in US Marine Corps history.
This is a documentary entry, not a visitor’s guide. Iwo Jima is not open to the public. It remains under the control of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, which operates an airfield there, and civilian access is limited to official commemorative ceremonies attended by veterans’ descendants, military officials and, on occasion, heads of state.
Key facts
- Defensive doctrine: Kuribayashi explicitly abandoned coastal defence and mass banzai attacks in favour of defence in depth, following the pattern of recent Japanese defences at Biak and Peleliu — documented in the US Marine Corps’ own official history of the battle.
- Tunnels: an extensive network linked key positions, including one installation inside Mount Suribachi that the Marine Corps’ official history describes as seven storeys deep; secondary sources put the total tunnel length anywhere from roughly 18 to 27 km — a range this account reports as such, since no verified primary figure was found.
- Garrison strength: US intelligence estimated 12,000–13,000 defenders; the Marine Corps’ own official history states the true figure was roughly twice that. Other sources put it at 21,000–22,000.
- The landing: roughly 30,000 US Marines went ashore on 19 February 1945, D-Day of Operation Detachment, under the V Amphibious Corps.
- US casualties: the Marine Corps’ official history records 24,053 casualties among assault units, 6,140 of them dead — the highest single-action losses in Marine Corps history. Broader tallies that include additional Navy and air units put total casualties as high as 28,000, with roughly 6,800 dead.
- Japanese losses: of the garrison, approximately 21,000–22,000 were killed; only around 200–1,000 were taken prisoner, depending on the source.
- Coordinates: 24.7505° N, 141.2892° E (Mount Suribachi).
How it was built
Kuribayashi arrived on Iwo Jima in June 1944 already convinced that a beach defence could not survive American naval and air bombardment, and set his garrison to digging rather than fortifying the shoreline. Volcanic rock made the work brutal — heat, sulphur fumes and poor ventilation inside the tunnels were constant hazards even before combat began — but it produced a defence in depth built to absorb an invasion rather than repel it at the water’s edge, with interlocking positions, multiple exits per cave, and, beneath Suribachi itself, a command installation dug seven storeys into the mountain.
The fact
American Marines landed on 19 February 1945 expecting the beach fighting typical of earlier Pacific landings; Kuribayashi’s men let them land largely unopposed, then opened fire from concealed positions inland, inflicting heavy losses as the Marines pushed north and south with no front line to break through. Mount Suribachi fell after four days of fighting on the island’s southern tip; on 23 February, Marines raised a small flag at its summit, then replaced it hours later with a larger one for a battalion to keep the first as a trophy — the second raising was photographed by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press and became the war’s most reproduced image. The rest of the island held out for another month, as Japanese defenders fought from tunnels and caves rather than surrender; organised resistance ended on 26 March 1945, though isolated holdouts remained for years afterward.
Who tells it, and where the accounts diverge
The American memory of Iwo Jima is an image: the flag, reproduced on a postage stamp and cast in bronze for the Marine Corps War Memorial, standing for collective sacrifice rather than any one person’s story. The Japanese memory, where it survives in detail, is closer to a single man’s private reckoning. Kuribayashi’s letters home to his wife and children — published in English as Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief and drawn on extensively by the historian Kumiko Kakehashi for her study So Sad to Fall in Battle, based on interviews with his surviving family, fellow officers and American veterans — show a commander who questioned the war’s costs even as he prosecuted its defence with calculated ruthlessness. He built a strategy meant to kill as many Americans as possible for as long as possible, in a defence he privately regarded as a losing cause; that combination sits uneasily beside both the American iconography of heroism and any straightforward Japanese narrative of heroic sacrifice.
What remains
- Mount Suribachi and its summit memorial marker, the site of both flag-raisings.
- The tunnel network and fortified positions across the island, largely undisturbed since 1945.
- Cemetery and memorial sites maintained jointly by Japan and the United States for annual commemorative visits.
Access
Iwo Jima/Ioto has no public access. The island is administered by the Japan Self-Defense Forces, which operate an airfield there, and civilian entry is limited to organised commemorative events — among them the annual Reunion of Honor ceremony attended by American and Japanese veterans’ groups and officials, and state visits marking major anniversaries, including a visit by Japan’s Emperor Naruhito in April 2025 for the 80th anniversary of the battle.
Sources
- US Marine Corps official history, Closing In: Marines in the Seizure of Iwo Jima (npshistory.com mirror) — defensive doctrine, garrison strength, casualty figures.
- Kumiko Kakehashi, So Sad to Fall in Battle: An Account of War — Kuribayashi’s letters and family testimony.
- Tadamichi Kuribayashi, Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief (English translation) — primary source for Kuribayashi’s private views.
- History.com and Military.com, on the two flag-raisings of 23 February 1945 and the photographers who recorded them.
- US National Archives (unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov) and Japan Times, on current access restrictions and 2024–2025 commemorative visits.
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