_Like some recently killed prehistoric monsters, these LVTs lie on
their sides, completely destroyed on the beach by Japanese mines and
heavy artillery fire._]
General Schmidt also committed one battery of 155mm howitzers of the
corps artillery to the narrow beachhead on D+1. Somehow these weapons
managed to reach the beach intact, but it then took hours to get
tractors to drag the heavy guns up over the terraces. These, too,
commenced firing before dark, their deep bark a welcome sound to the
infantry.
Concern with the heavy casualties in the first 24 hours led Schmidt to
commit the 21st Marines from corps reserve. The seas proved to be too
rough. The troops had harrowing experiences trying to debark down cargo
nets into the small boats bobbing violently alongside the transports;
several fell into the water. The boating process took hours. Once
afloat, the troops circled endlessly in their small Higgins boats,
waiting for the call to land. Wiser heads prevailed. After six hours of
awful seasickness, the 21st Marines returned to its ships for the night.
Even the larger landing craft, the LCTs and LSMs, had great difficulty
beaching. Sea anchors needed to maintain the craft perpendicular to
the breakers rarely held fast in the steep, soft bottom. “Dropping
those stern anchors was like dropping a spoon in a bowl of mush,” said
Admiral Hill.
Hill contributed significantly to the development of amphibious
expertise in the Pacific War. For Iwo Jima, he and his staff developed
armored bulldozers to land in the assault waves. They also experimented
with hinged Marston matting, used for expeditionary airfields, as a
temporary roadway to get wheeled vehicles over soft sand. On the beach
at Iwo, the bulldozers proved to be worth their weights in gold. The
Marston matting was only partially successful--LVTs kept chewing it up
in passage--but all hands could see its potential.
[Illustration: _“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” acrylic on
masonite, is by Col Charles H. Waterhouse, wounded in his arm on D+2
and evacuated from Iwo Jima._
Marine Corps Combat Art Collection
]
Admiral Hill also worked with the Naval Construction Battalion (NCB)
personnel, Seabees, as they were called, in the attempt to bring
supply-laden causeways and pontoon barges ashore. Again the surf
prevailed, broaching the craft, spilling the cargo. In desperation,
Hill’s beachmasters turned to round-the-clock use of DUKWs and LVTs to
keep combat cargo flowing. Once the DUKWs got free of the crippling
load of 105mm howitzers they did fine. LVTs were probably better,
because they could cross the soft beach without assistance and conduct
resupply or medevac missions directly along the front lines. Both
vehicles suffered from inexperienced LST crews in the transport area
who too often would not lower their bow ramps to accommodate LVTs or
DUKWs approaching after dark. In too many cases, vehicles loaded with
wounded Marines thus rejected became lost in the darkness, ran out of
gas and sank. The amphibian tractor battalions lost 148 LVTs at Iwo
Jima. Unlike Tarawa, Japanese gunfire and mines accounted for less
than 20 percent of this total. Thirty-four LVTs fell victim to Iwo’s
crushing surf; 88 sank in deep water, mostly at night.
Once ashore and clear of the loose sand along the beaches, the tanks,
half-tracks, and armored bulldozers of the landing force ran into
the strongest minefield defenses yet encountered in the Pacific War.
Under General Kuribayashi’s direction, Japanese engineers had planted
irregular rows of antitank mines and the now-familiar horned antiboat
mines along all possible exits from both beaches. The Japanese
supplemented these weapons by rigging enormous makeshift explosives
from 500-pound aerial bombs, depth charges, and torpedo heads, each
triggered by an accompanying pressure mine. Worse, Iwo’s loose soil
retained enough metallic characteristics to render the standard mine
detectors unreliable. The Marines were reduced to using their own
engineers on their hands and knees out in front of the tanks, probing
for mines with bayonets and wooden sticks.
While the 28th Marines fought to encircle Suribachi and the
beachmasters and shore party attempted to clear the wreckage from
the beaches, the remaining assault units of the VAC resumed their
collective assault against Airfield No. 1. In the 5th Marine Division’s
zone, the relatively fresh troops of the 1st Battalion, 26th Marines,
and the 3d Battalion, 27th Marines, quickly became bloodied in forcing
their way across the western runways, taking heavy casualties from
time-fuzed air bursts fired by Japanese dual-purpose antiaircraft guns
zeroed along the exposed ground. In the adjacent 4th Division zone, the
23d Marines completed the capture of the airstrip, advancing 800 yards
but sustaining high losses.
[Illustration: