The Last Lieutenant: A Foxhole View of the Epic Battle for Iwo Jima

Notes

Notes 1.PreludetoWar 1. Toland, The Rising Sun, 212. 2. Young, First Twenty-four Hours of War in the Pacic, ix. 3. This landing took place 80 minutes before the bombs began falling on Pearl Harbor, and so, strictly speaking, the war began in Malaya rather than at Pearl Harbor. 3.PlatoonLeader 1. Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing, 67. 2. Wilbur Jones, Gyrene: The World War II United States Marine (Shippensburg , Pa.: White Mane Books, 1998). 3. On Iwo Jima, as an ofcer, Jim was issued the lighter-weight M1 carbine rather than the M1 Garand, which was the principal weapon of the enlisted men of a rie platoon. 4. According to the Internet’s Wikipedia site, the Rocket Launcher, M1A1, “was one of the rst antitank weapons based on the HEAT shell to enter service, used by the United States Armed Forces in World War II. It was nicknamed ‘bazooka’ from a vague resemblance to the musical instrument of the same name.” The bazooka “consisted of a four-foot tube with a simple wooden stock and sights, into which 60mm rocket grenades were inserted at the rear. A small battery provided a charge to ignite the rocket when the trigger was pulled. The main drawback to the weapon was the large backblast and smoke trail, which gave away the position of the shooter.” 5. The Marine Corps organizational table was set up based on the principle that one man could effectively manage only three other men or units at a time. This principle applied from top to bottom. The Fifth Amphibious Corps (VAC) was composed of three divisions, the 3rd, 4th, and 5th. The 4th Marine Division was divided into three regiments, the 23rd, 24th, and the 25th. The designation when referring to the 24th regiment was “24th Marines.” There was no 24th regiment in the other Marine Divisions (the Fifth Marine Division, for example, consisted of the 26th, 27th, and 28th Marines). A regiment was divided into battalions. There were three battalions in the 24th Marines—1st, 2nd, and 3rd. Each battalion was further divided into three companies designated by a letter. In 1944 the 3rd battalion of any Marine regiment was divided into companies I, K, and L (there was no J company). Each company was divided into three platoons, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. A Marine rie platoon was the smallest unit designation. The hierarchy was thus, Division, Regiment, Battalion, Company, and Platoon. The usual complement of a rie platoon in World War II was 45 Marines plus the platoon leader. 124 | Notes to pages 33–68 6. Some of these same boats had been used in the Normandy landings in France six months earlier. They were manufactured in New Orleans and named after their designer, Andrew Higgins. 7. D-Day was originally set for 20 January 1945. 4.MovementtotheObjective 1. It was well known that memorizing the exact location of enemy positions on a beach targeted for amphibious assault usually did not make much difference in the nal outcome. Landing parties rarely landed exactly where they were supposed to land, and bombing before the invasion often changed the landscape enough that it no longer resembled the pictures. Still, it was not a waste of time to review the maps and the pictures. It gave the Marines an idea of what the terrain was like and a general lay of the land. It also may have provided a psychological benet to the men of knowing that they weren’t going into the battle blind. 5.WelcometoHell 1. Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964, 351. 2. News correspondent Keith Wheeler, who had witnessed the slaughter on Tarawa, said of the ghting on Iwo Jima, “There’s more hell in there than I’ve seen in the rest of this war put together. The Nips have got the beaches blanketed with mortars. There are dead Marines scattered from one end to the other.” Robert Sherrod , who had been with the Marines on Tarawa and Saipan, offered this chilling description to his readers of Time and Life magazines: “The rst night on Iwo Jima can only be described as a nightmare in hell. About the beach in the morning lay the dead. They had died with the greatest possible violence. Nowhere in the Pacic have I seen such badly mangled bodies. Many were cut squarely in half. Legs and arms lay fty feet from any body.” 3. A gunwale is the...