The Battle of Iwo Jima (February 1945) was a pivotal Pacific Theater engagement where the US Navy assembled one of the largest fleets ever assembled—17 aircraft carriers, 6 battleships, 58 destroyers, 13 cruisers, and over 1,000 aircraft—to support the amphibious invasion of the volcanic island. The Japanese defenders had prepared extensive underground tunnel networks and fortified positions, forcing Marines to fight brutal close-quarters combat in volcanic ash and black sand terrain. The battle resulted in devastating casualties on both sides, with flamethrower operators suffering 92% casualty rates, and ultimately led to the iconic flag raising on Mount Suribachi, which became one of the most famous photographs in American military history.
Episode 413 - The Battle of Iwo Jima: Part 2Añadido:
Hey everyone, Joe here. Me, Tom, and Nate are all going to be live May 29th in London at the Rich Mix. So, get your tickets and come down and see us. It's going to be a great show. We're going to have some new merch, some shirts, some pins, maybe some book stuff because it coincides with the launch of my book, The Highlands Burn. And if you can't make it, that's okay. We're going to be live streaming it. Check out our show notes. Make sure you click on the right link for live show and live stream tickets, whichever one you need, and get your tickets now. The Highlands Burn, my debut fantasy novel, releases May 29th and is now available for digital pre-order. You can find the link in the show notes wherever it is you're listening to this. Just like this show, this book is a completely independent production. To the crack of rifles in the acrid stench of sorcery, a sudden invasion sweeps through the highlands of the confederation. Inside's peaceful village life breaks with the dawn. A sole survivor amid the smoking ruins of all that he held dear. Sai must make a choice. Is pursuing revenge against the mercenaries that took everything from him worth becoming one himself? As his escape pushes him to the gruff embrace of the foundling brigade, he must learn to tread a path between his need to understand why his people were targeted for destruction and the new responsibilities of his soldiers life.
Even as each new encounter with the horrors of battle force him to confront the terrible cost of his oath. Before long, the shifting fog of war casts old certainties into a haze of doubt, while the stuff of legend seems as clear as day. And Scat finds himself drawn into a much larger conflict than he could possibly imagine.
[music] >> [music] [music] >> Hey everyone and welcome back to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. The only military history podcast in the entire known world. I'm Joe. With me is Tom and Nate. Fellas, thank you for joining me in this cave that I have dug in the nearby mountain. How are you doing? I'm very much enjoying being trapped on Fart Island. [laughter] >> I refuse to accept the water is bad for you and I'm going to keep on drinking it. Eventually, I'll get there. You know, it's like the spirit of taking Ivormectin is eternal and it occurs throughout human history. I'm just its current manifestation. what they needed to do is uh do what this guy that I used to follow on TikTok who did Olympic weightlifting and he blew up because someone asked him was like what's your diet regimen and he didn't mention that he drinks water and someone was like do you not drink any water he's like no I just drink white monster and milk [laughter] >> that's the extra white monster >> that's like you know and his explanation was so funny cuz he was like well like milk is like 90% water and so is monster Why do I need to drink water? It's like I need energy and I need calories. And I'm like, bro, got that cow energy. I mean, it might help you to lift powerfully couple of times, maybe on couple of months, years even, but at some point you will experience what uh my soldiers experience in an environment not too dissimilar from fart island known as a hot desert plateau of Afghanistan. Uh maybe less humid, I don't know. In which you get the world's biggest kidney stone. You [laughter] get the Hope diamond of kidney stones when you do that. I'm just saying.
>> Let me tell you, as someone who got a kidney stone at 21 because all I drank was alcohol, they're not fun.
>> Uh going back to an episode that Nate and I did a few weeks back. Got to do something with all this milk. [laughter] >> Yeah, exactly. Milk's got to go somewhere. The milk is the preparatory agent before one applies the actual medicine, which is tobacco smoke shotgun hits up your butthole. If you want to know more about that, listen to our episode about the 30 Years War, uh, the Battle of Rocka. But we're not talking about Rocka today. We're talking about what happens when a high desert plateau with grass on it, catches on fire. The Highlands Burn, [laughter] Joe's book, which is coming out on May 29th.
>> You're a natural pitch, man. I I love it.
>> And if you want to see uh a group of men who have drank nothing but Milk and Monster for 3 days, come to our live show on May 29th in Rich Mix in London.
Tickets available in the link below.
>> If we sell out, I will drink a milk monster on stage. That is my promise to you.
>> To be fair, someone after the Glasgow show last year came up to me and was like, "Man, did you like do something before the show and was like, "No, I've just had three cans of Monster today and like no water. That's why I'm like like vibrating on stage and extremely red."
Small warning though. Uh, normally we do a meet and greet after the show. If I drink the milk monster, I might be a little late for that. I am lactose intolerant. [laughter] >> There's this phenomenon called the Chunderstorm. Uh, you're about to learn all about it. And I would say too that if you come to the live show, but you're feeling bad because you want to like it and yet for some reason you always find a way to hate it. Well, that's the name of my band's album coming out on May 5th.
>> Damn. Damn, that's smooth. Speaking of smooth, like the inside of a soldier being splashed across the rocks of Euima, we are at part two in our series of the Battle of Euima. And you guys are definitely better at those segways than I am. And when we left you last time on the first part of our series, the Americans had finally settled on the invasion of the island in order to open and secure their route to the Japanese home islands. Meanwhile, the Japanese garrison on the tiny volcanic hell hole of Euima were forced to toil and dig in some of the worst conditions we've really ever talked about on the show.
Tired, thirsty, sweating, and geothermal caves had been filled with diarrhea and disease to the point that being liquefied by an American naval bombardment probably wasn't sounding like such a bad fate.
>> And listen, that's enough about the average Russian experience. [laughter] >> Nobody's whipping anybody with pine reads. Birch reads. I think it might be birch.
>> It's birch branches. It's birch branches. Yeah. So, there's no need for medicine. You just go in the sauna and get your bare ass whipped with birch branches and it will heal all illnesses.
>> A dude who's really into King just really misunderstanding the John Burch Society and [laughter] then as Robert Matthews.
>> They get so hardcore in anti-communism they become anti-Russian. And it's like, and yet you have so much in common. You also love getting whipped in the ass with uh branches, flails. I feel like in one of these steamy caves, someone's definitely getting hit with a kendo stick. So, that's almost the same thing.
>> I don't know. I I guess to me, it's like you have Sulfur Island. Everything smells horrible. It smells like farts.
It smells like rotten eggs. Uh it's hot.
Water's terrible. You've dug basically like the New York City subway system into Volcanic [clears throat] Island. Uh so, you can get deeper into the source of the fart smell. I feel as though like [laughter] >> I hate being deployed in the garrison led by fartlave 74. [laughter] >> I feel as though at this point you are just you're like you know what our goal is to kill as many Americans as possible and I kind of wish they just [ __ ] get on with it because otherwise like we're basically doing the like tunneling for diamonds but there's no diamonds.
There's just a stronger fart smell. Like [laughter] I [clears throat] don't sympathize with the Japanese Imperial Army's ethos, but I do kind of feel bad for these youth because it's like I would definitely want to die as quickly as possible.
>> And the good news for the Japanese soldiers was that was coming as soon as the fleet task force 58 appeared off the coast of Euima. An observing Japanese soldier said it looked like a mountain had risen out of the sea. The task force was massive, one of the largest fleets ever assembled. 17 aircraft carriers, six battleships, 58 destroyers, 13 cruisers, over 1,000 aircraft, all under the command of Admiral Mark Mitcher, and charge with the air and navy support for the coming mission. And this is only part of the greater fifth fleet under Admiral Spruent. The Navy at this point is legitimately terrifying. It could never be equaled in size. It It just wouldn't make sense in the modern context. The bombardments and bombings that had hit Iuima so far were little more than a light dusting for what was about to rain down from the sky.
According to Japanese soldier Takahashi Tashiharu, quote, "On the island, there was a huge earthquake. There were pillars of fire that looked as if they would touch the sky. Black smoke covered the island and shrapnel was flying all over the place with a shrieking sound.
The few trees with trunks 1 meter across were blown out of the ground. The sound was deafening, as terrible as a couple of a 100 thunderclaps all coming down on my head at once. Even in a cave 30 m underground, my body was jerked up off the ground. It was hell on earth. So, kind of like how we joked about in our last episode, they're having their skeleton shaken until they've accidentally invented hobber. [laughter] That is confirmed.
>> Do you want to feel like the ice cubes in a shaker while a martini is being made?
>> Jesus Christ. So many shells and bombs slammed into the island that sailors on the ships out at sea felt a concussive blast of their impact, which is nuts.
The island vanished in a growing cloud of fire and smoke. Under this cover, the mind sweepers moved in, picking their way towards the beach, clearing the way for the landing troops of the fourth and fifth marine divisions that made up Task Force 53 that were going to be arriving in a few hours. The task force brought with them 111,000 men. And though they did make up every branch of the military that was there, virtually all of the landing force would be made up of US Marines. With them came over 100,000 tons of supplies, hundreds of Amtraks, hundreds of supply trucks, all of which had been preloaded with landing supplies before being put on the ships. And that was just for the initial landing. That's not counting for the entire campaign.
And it's also not accounting for the hundreds of thousands of tons of supplies that the fleet itself would need, like ammo, food, and water, and fuel, necessary things.
>> I mean, unless you're a Japanese soldier sipping devil juice out of a puddle.
[laughter] >> No, we need to tell someone about uh, you know, the devil juice water from Euima actually has like healing properties, and we can convince a dude on Instagram res to go and drink it.
>> I'm 100% convinced that's why the Japanese government doesn't allow you to just go to the island. Like you have to go in tour groups specifically connected to like the historical battlefield cuz they don't want like wellness influencers killing themselves there.
>> Mhm. It's like the gum gum fruit from One Piece.
>> Yeah. Except it just makes you [ __ ] yourself. [laughter] You're growing a third arm out of your ass.
>> I was thinking more along the lines of the guy who was like, "It's woke and soy to stay on the marked path at uh was it Yellowstone National Park? This geyser will absolutely not dissolve me." And then just got fully [ __ ] dissolved by it. Yep. At the end of the day, there's enough on Euima that you you don't want to go um you know, off piece spelunking, I suppose, because uh yeah, the environment is there to make bad things happen to you.
>> I don't think you can spelunk Euima more than it's already been spelunked.
>> Yeah, it's been pretty thoroughly spelunked.
>> Aggressively spelunked perhaps.
[laughter] >> Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You can say it's been comprehensively spelunked.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Who Who [laughter] I hate when my island is comprehensively spelunked. Once again, this podcast creates sentences that have never been said before.
>> Also, the devil juice energy drink would be the thing that we would pitch if we were ever given a marketing deal, which is why it would never happen.
>> I'm just thinking Dark Souls font comprehensively. [laughter] >> That's a t-shirt.
>> Oh, [ __ ] sake.
>> Put that one in the bank for later.
[laughter] >> Just a Japanese soldier in a loin cloth.
You know those videos where it's like, "Oh, this guy got stuck in a cave spalunking for 20 hours and got pulled in half when he escaped and it's just like upside down and the guy is the same color as Saddam Hussein in his hiding [laughter] place."
>> I don't want to mention Fart Island on a t-shirt because that feels like it's designed either for like a 9-year-old sense of humor or like a Gen Xer sense of humor. But I definitely think comprehensively Spoke is very, very funny. Sorry, I didn't intend it to be, but like I just said some dumb [ __ ] but you guys laughed. That's my only barometer of if anything I'm saying is funny.
>> That's how our company meetings tend to go and we're like, "What shirt should we bring to the live show that something called comprehensively belong to Kurs?"
[laughter] Uh, now uh Holland Smith, the commander of the Marine Landing Force, requested 10 days of pre-landing bombardment, but he wouldn't get it. It was pointed out that if the US Navy opened up fully for 10 days on Euajiba, they would burn through all of their ammunition that was meant to last through the entire campaign. Instead, they would be slotted 3 days of pre-landing bombardment with each ship allotted 6 hours to fire, stop, check everything to make sure nothing had broken, fix what had, reload, and begin firing again. Because for our non-gun heads out there, obviously myself included, which I wouldn't know this if I hadn't used some of them, firing guns a whole lot tends to break them. And that gets uh magnified a million times when it's a naval cannon. You can't just fire things unendingly without maintaining them. And also something too is that like all rifle barrels, smooth gun barrels, whatever it is, will eventually sustain heat damage if you use them continuously. Yeah.
>> And you can imagine that like it's a pretty big muscle movement to change out, for example, the barrels in a 50 caliber machine gun. Something Joe and I have had to do in training. Uh I don't know if you ever had to do it downrange.
If your first lieutenant is changing the 50 cal barrel in combat, something has gone really [ __ ] terribly wrong.
>> Yeah, like catastrophically wrong. You have been catastrophically spelunked.
>> No, I be catastrophically, [laughter] but you know, like exactly. Uh yeah, trying to take my head space and timing gauge while I'm getting catastrophically spelunked. Uh I [laughter] would say I don't even know if you can change the barrel on a naval gun. I presume you could, but it's going to involve a [ __ ] crane. So like >> Yeah, it requires a shipyard.
>> Yeah, it's a problem. So yeah, obviously. And then you think about like all of the action on those things, the pistons, whatever the mechanical parts for moving it. They're just going to be gigantic. Like it's not a thing you can take it down to the arms room and be like, "Hey yo, can you fix my naval guns?" Like >> bringing it down, holding it like a baby. Hey bro, could you just like fix this real quick? [laughter] >> That's an infrastructure project.
>> Your assigned weapon being a naval gun is like that's like the meanest specialist's best idea for hazing the dumbest private. [laughter] like it won't actually work. Like I'm going to make you do ready up drills with a naval gun. And it's like, yeah, let me know how that works. Though there's wrinkles to this thing, right?
Nothing works perfectly. No plans ever go great, especially if we're talking about them on this show. Weather was cloudy and rainy, which in turn impacted the accuracy and scouting of the bombardments, or sometimes they couldn't fire at all. Marine Commander Harry Schmidt said, only partially joking, that out of the 36 hours that they were given for pre-landing bombardment, the Navy was only able to fire during 13 of them. Holland Smith, the marine commander we talked about previously on our episode about the Battle of Saipan, blamed the Navy for not giving them enough support, saying that he had to haggle with the Navy like he was quote a horse trader for bombardments. Uh, these words have managed to survive for way too long in my opinion. Holland Smith has kind of a known track record for being an [ __ ] and he obviously had no understanding of the fleet's needs. For example, the Navy had never done a bombardment for as long as the one he was requesting. And the ships that were out there still had to worry about a possible counterattack. Remember the size of that fleet that I just talked about? They're sitting there static out in the middle of the ocean. They would be sitting ducks for any aerial or naval attack and had to retain ammo in the off chance they would have to defend themselves. There's also another wrinkle here. Smith is 62 years old and is being forced not to command from the front anymore. And he is very, very unhappy with that. And he was going to be a catty [ __ ] the whole time. [laughter] >> Yes, we love an old queen making it everyone else's problem. Smith is kind of a [ __ ] that's gone down in history for being a [ __ ] And he's not the worst [ __ ] we're going to talk about here. That's definitely Admiral Kelly Turner. Now, the reason why Smith wasn't stuck behind a desk or forced to retire due to his age at this point was because Kelly Turner personally liked him. Turner was commander of Task Force 50 and considered the father of what would become known as underwater demolitions teams or as we know them today as SEALs.
>> Yep.
>> So yeah, thanks [ __ ] He was also probably one of the best known [ __ ] in the US Navy or possibly even the US military maybe ever. I think it's an insane thing to be known as the biggest [ __ ] going when you're in the same army as Douglas and MacArthur >> at the same time. Even >> at the same time, >> I will say also though, and I'm speaking from a little bit of personal experience here, just from having done combined joint stuff, um the Navy officer culture is really weird and petty and really like in their own world, completely separate. Like they make it a big deal of like officers do officer things completely separate from enlisted men.
And that was only worse back then. That definitely is a tendency that existed throughout the US military more so back then than it does now in general.
Certainly for like things like the Army and Marine Corps. But in the Navy, it's still very very like upper decks, lower decks. It's weird. And like the level of just being a petty weirdo and being kind of insane. For lack of a better word, I've seen some [ __ ] with Navy officers in my life. I'm like, do you live on another planet? I not only can I not believe you're in the military, I can't believe you're alive.
>> For more on that, listen to our episode on the USS Summers.
>> And so [laughter] all I'm gonna say is is that thinking now go back 80 odd years. You can only imagine the level of just weird personal idiosyncrasy, but everyone has to basically this guy thinks that the right way to walk is to walk backwards. So everyone's just [ __ ] walking backwards.
>> Yeah, >> that is the US Navy. And to further underline how much of an outlier uh Kelly Turner is here, he was a hardcore alcoholic. And you know it was bad when it's noted as he was drinking too much in the Navy in the 1940s.
>> Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Yeah.
>> He was quote often inoperative at night and fully operative in the morning. So [laughter] So >> what a great way to [ __ ] phrase it.
Inoperative. He always looked haggarded as [ __ ] too. [laughter] >> I want to say a friend of mine shared a thing that he saw. This is from Vietnam.
His dad's ration card in the Navy in Vietnam for like alcohol and tobacco and it was something like the equivalent of like two-fifths of liquor a week was on [laughter] your ration card.
>> Yeah, that's some hard drink in there >> for one person. I'm sorry. I have drank quite a bit in my lifetime. At times I don't really drink anymore. going through two two full bottle like a liter and a half of hard liquor in a week >> as one person assuming everyone else in the party also gets that. So it's not like you're just doing it solo. That's so much. And that's 30 years after this.
I can only imagine what it would take to get noticed for being an alcoholic back then.
>> Like I was a lower enlisted dude in the US Army. So, like I it goes without saying that I have I have put some drinking behind me, but I with full confidence say I would be put under the table by any single person in the US Navy in the 40s. I'm pretty sure if I tried to drink with Kelly, he'd kill me.
This is why I'm so excited to go to Vietnam on Sunday because I'm going to go buy a jacket that someone's granddaddy fit two big bottles of vodka in a week in Vietnam before it got blown to bits.
>> Yeah, right, Tom. You're going to go there and you're going to have an ice coffee so good it's going to change your life and like you you're going to finish building the studio and then sell up and go to Vietnam. Just [laughter] why?
Kelly Turner was known for being such a costic piece of [ __ ] that he in his position uh as director of war plans in the office of the chief of naval operations had created such a toxic, horrible, distrustful work environment due to how he treated people mixed with his constant drinking that it led to the intelligence failures that caused the attack on Pearl Harbor.
[laughter] Listen, I have made some mistakes and [ __ ] up some things because of my drinking earlier in my life, but uh I've never caused Pearl Harbor to be a >> I was going to say Bush did do 9/11, but he didn't do it cuz he had relapses. I understand it. He was sober. So, this guy got so drunk he caused Pearl Harbor.
>> But this is why, you know, it's incredible that like Pete Hegth is going to bring about 9/11, too, because of his drinking cuz he's going to [ __ ] something up so bad and Iran's going to drop a nuke on New York >> someday. we will start doing Pete Hagsth bits. I one time saw somebody was like, "Oh, we have a a camouflage like secret flasks in the shape of 30 round magazines." I was like, "If those had existed when Pete Hagsets was in the army, he wouldn't be a problem for us anymore."
>> Yeah. [laughter] Hey, look, the only thing I'll say is I hope one day he conquers his uh drinking problem in the same way that my father did. Now, [laughter] Kelly was also in command during the Battle of Tsavo Island, where the US Navy suffered easily their biggest defeat of the war, not known as Pearl Harbor. And despite all of this, Turer was not only not fired, but he was found to be good at something very specific and something that would become very important, commanding amphibious landings. He had been at the helm during Guad Canal, Tinian, Min, Guam, Saipan, and others. If there was a place where a marine went to shore in the Pacific and you have heard of it, he was almost certainly in command of its attack force. If the war had continued and the US invaded the Japanese home islands during Operation Downfall, he would have been in command of it. So, he was good at something and that was mostly filling marine caskets, but also taking land while doing it. I also have to say this too that when somebody is that much of an alcoholic like they become completely incoherent really quickly and it's like I'm just thinking of the high stakes fast-paced environment of being in combat and you have a guy who basically it's like 4:00 and he's talking like Woody Harelson playing Larry Flint after he's been shot [laughter] like and that's like a day ending in why and nobody likes this dude not at a personal level not at a professional level nobody gets along with him other than Holland Smith because Holland Smith is the same kind of contankerous old [ __ ] who's also a drunk. So despite Smith officially being too old to command from the front, he keeps his job, but only to sit on Turner's ship and be his liaison to the Marine Corps because he was the only man who could stand to be in the same room as him.
Meanwhile, Harry Schmidt would actually be in command of the Marines on the ground. So they had to invent a job for Smith of being the asshole's babysitter or something. Sorry, we fell into a bit of a Turner hole there. Uh though that has also been spelunked.
>> Yeah, put a rubber stamp on it. Turner.
Comprehensively spelunk.
>> Comprehensively spelunk to a permanent head. [laughter] >> That's what the kidney stones are doing to his insides. [laughter] >> The plans for the landing at EU were simple. We talked about this somewhat during our last episode, but there are two marine divisions, the fourth and the fifth. They were to land on EO's southeast beaches and gun it inlands for airfields one and two. The fifth division would then turn south and march for Mount Siachi. Once Surabachi was secured, the two divisions would link back up and kind of march in a line for the north at the Japanese citadel at Modyama Plateau. Another division, the third, would remain on transport as reserves to be thrown into the meat grinder, not if, but when they were needed because planners all knew they'd be needed at some point. It's important to remember they planned for a blood bath. They didn't plan for the one that they got, but they planned for the worst casualties they had yet suffered. So, they knew the reserves were going to be used at some point. Normally, when we talk about these landings, we always end up saying the same thing. The Marines took horrific amounts of casualties to the shock of many. And while that is true, in the case of EO, like I said, the planners went into this expecting a blood bath. They thought at best case scenario, 15,000 casualties. Like I already spoiled here, they undersshot that by quite a bit. Yeah. Four tank landing ships have been converted to be floating triage centers. Two hospital ships were on standby. and logistics pipeline of health care was provided to funnel the worst off through all of those to hospitals in Guam and Saipan where thousands of open beds and surgery teams were waiting. But just because the American fleet was one of the largest ever assembled in human history and was plastering Euima with an apocalyptic level of explosives, it didn't mean that the Japanese weren't already fighting back. But also remember from our last episode, these are all the former Navy positions who wanted to fight them immediately. They couldn't reach out and hit the fleet anywhere. Their guns weren't big enough. They didn't have planes. They had no navy to speak of.
But occasionally, when a ship got too close to shore, like when they ordered to cover the mine sweepers, Japanese guns would shoot at them. The USS Pensacola got rocked with seven shells in quick succession and was forced to retreat after 17 sailors died and hundreds were wounded. Small demolition team sent ashore to clear any shore obstacles were blown to pieces and the rescue ships sent to go get them were hit as well, killing several more sailors. As the Marines began to climb down the netting into the landing crafts, the ocean exploded around them as Japanese shore batteries flung shells in their direction. And despite when all of this began, sea conditions were about as good as you could hope for for a sea landing, they were still sitting out in the open Pacific and the Amtraks were getting rocked to [ __ ] And then as the loading is happening, the weather turns on them and the sea starts getting rough as hell. One dude falls off the rope that they're climbing on. So, in case people have never seen it, how you got on these landing craft is climbing down like big rope nets.
>> Yeah.
>> Down the side of ships onto them from the top of these big Navy ships. So, it's a hell of a fall from the top to the bottom. And more than one dude takes a straight header directly down into the landing craft, injuring or killing them, but there's no way to like take them back up on the ship.
>> Oh god.
>> So, they just have to stay there and die on the bottom of the landing craft.
There's just a guy like squeegeeing Gary off the deck.
>> Oh, it happened again. Remember, if you're falling, aim for Steve.
[laughter] Nobody likes him.
>> And while all of this is happening, the Navy is still firing their guns off right over these guys' head. Just adding to a a wonderful tossed salad and ways of how to get a concussive brain injury.
By 8:40 a.m., the single was given, and the Amtrak started making their way to the shore. They're getting so battered by waves that men start to get seasick, getting all thrown around the interior, which is now very slick with vomit. And some of the Amtraks get so swamped with waves that like people on the ship they just left from couldn't even see them anymore. And also, they're being shot at. The naval machine guns and mortars and artillery begin to open fire as they get closer. And then because sometimes real life is actually a Michael Bay film, an American plane pulling up over the ocean after completing their strafing run on the beach is shot down, catches on fire, and crashes into the sea right in front of an Amtrak.
[laughter] So they accidentally almost kamicazi themselves. Nearly 2 m tall waves picked up the Amtraks and slammed them down as they got closer to the shore. And the Navymen piloting them had a really hard time getting them into position so the men could actually get out. In some occasions like the waves were so bad and the beach immediately climbs up into an incline. So with those two things uh like combined, some of the Amtraks were trying to drop men off while the front of them was like straight up in the air so nobody could get out. So they finally do. The ramps drop. Marines storm ashore under withering gunfire and find that the black sand isn't actually sand at all. Remember, most of these marines have landed at at least what other beach at this point. So they're kind of expecting sand to be something that they knew and were comfortable with.
>> Mhm.
>> Instead, they sink up to the top of their boots with one marine saying it wasn't sand. It was like running through coffee grounds.
>> Ooh.
>> Okay. And remember, they're going up an immediate incline and a steep one. So like they're like slipping and sliding and stuff.
>> Wet coffee grounds or dry coffee grounds. I wonder I realize you may not know the answer.
>> Let's go dry for now. Maybe a combination of the two.
>> Dry would be you'd be falling, slipping.
It'd be difficult. No purchase. Wet would be that would be uncomfortable.
>> Well, don't worry. The rain is coming to Euima. So, >> all right. At first, let's go with dry because they're talking about slipping and falling back down the incline and they're just sinking in it. When vehicles try to advance, they sink up to their hubs and uh like the track vehicles begin to suck this up into uh its sprockets in the back, which I can tell you from firstirhand experience of being a tank crewman is a perfect recipe of how you destroy your track and what is known as the final drive, which is the the big sprocket in the back. It just shreds it. Despite all of this, the landings did seem to be going well.
Yeah, they were taking fire, but it isn't nearly as much as anyone imagined it would be. And of course, that's because what we know, and the Marines do not, is that they're only fighting those forward naval positions from the Imperial Japanese Navy that they insisted on having.
>> At Green Beach in the south, Marines faced almost no incoming fire at all and just pretty much calmly walked a few hundred meters off the beach into the island. In the northern beach called Red 2, nicknamed the rock quarry due to the fact that it was just terrace rock faces and gorges. The Marines landed directly into a horrible, horrible amount of gunfire. That the amount that everybody had imagined that they would be facing everywhere. The Japanese Navy had turned the rock quarry into funnels of death to assault through this. I mean, the whole area is just a series of natural barriers, and there's only so many ways that they could go. And the Navy, of course, knew this. The Japanese had had planned this quite well. So, all of these gorges kind of created natural trails that the Marines would follow, and they made sure all of them were covered by machine guns. It was here in the Rock Quarry where gunnery sergeant John Basselone landed. Now, John Basselone is something of a hero in the United States Marine Corps. He's a guy who earned a Medal of Honor already during the Battle of Guad Canal where he alone picked up a crewerved machine gun and fired it while cradling it in his arms. So, they're deploying the World War II Primark.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's not spoil this yet.
>> Oh, [ __ ] >> So, he's cradling this cruerve machine gun in his hands while also barefoot.
And that barrel of a cruer machine gun gets very hot and he melts the skin on his arm while cradling this gun. And he almost singlehandedly fights off a Japanese counterattack for hours. I promise his brief explainer really does not do it justice. The HBO show The Pacific does a really good job of covering John Basselone's life.
>> Mhm. But after this, John Basselone again, he's awarded the Medal of Honor.
He returns back to the United States.
He's put on the war bond tour. Uh he becomes a celebrity. He does things that a male celebrity tends to do.
>> Oh no, >> not in that way.
>> Okay. [laughter] >> At least not that we know of. And he hated every [ __ ] second of it. Like he's doing like ad reads effectively going to like red carpet premieres, hanging out with supermodels. He [ __ ] hates this [ __ ] Well, imagine just being a Japanese soldier and the last thing you see before you get turned to mulch is a dude with a machine gun and his dogs out.
>> Yeah. [laughter] >> Getting killed by the grip reaper.
>> Getting [ __ ] obliterated by the dude from Toad the Wet Sprocket who always has to [ __ ] be barefoot on stage.
>> He constantly requested to the Marines to send him back to the Pacific to go back to war. The Marines refused because they realized the bad PR that would come if their war hero got killed and instead offered to promote him to become an officer or take command of a training unit. Uh he refused all of this. Uh the thing that finally got the Marines the cave and sent him back to war is that he was just going to get out of the Marines. His contract was up in 6 months and he's like that's fine. I'll just become a civilian. Obviously he's really good for PR and they want to make him happy. So like okay fine. They promoted him and they sent him back to war. And here he is landing at the rock quarry.
Bro, he hit red two beach and advanced forward commanding a machine gun section. They fought inland coming across a string of blockouses and bunkers. What happened next? We know thanks to Baselone soldier Chuck Tatum who despite having quite possibly the most American name ever, goes on to have the most American job ever and after leaving the Marine Corps becomes a race car driver. cuz that's just something that [laughter] used to happen.
Yes. According to Tatum, Basso was doing crazy [ __ ] like assaulting Japanese positions alone, throwing grenades through the windows of blockhouses, grabbing a machine gun again on his own, and running around like it was Call of Duty. Though this time, he had a purpose-built handle that went around the barrel so he didn't burn his arm off a second time. Bason by all accounts punched by himself a big enough hole for the rest of them in the area to exploit and continue their advance. But being at the front of all of this is really really bad. And Bazalone, seeing how bad it was getting, told Tatum to stay and hold where he was, he was going to run back and make sure reinforcements came up. As he was running, he paused to help a tank navigate a minefield because of course he did. And then died. He's either killed by shrapnel from a mortar burst or hit from uh from bullets from a machine gun. There's some debate on which. Nobody can really agree on it.
Some eyewitnesses say one thing, some say the other. This happened with an eyeshot of Tatum and hundreds of other men. There was not a single man in the US Marine Corps who didn't know who John Basselone was. Again, he's a celebrity.
Uh and watching him die was a massive blow to their morale. I can't imagine watching like Brad Pitt get destroyed by an IED in Afghanistan, you know?
[laughter] >> Oh, they're deploying the death watch.
It was like, yeah, this dude is too insane to live in the real world.
>> As Tatum put it, if John Basselone could get killed, we all wondered what was going to happen to the rest of us.
>> Yeah. Yeah, there's that. This will never happen again in US military history. There will not be a a famous person who joins the military for P and PR is huge and then he gets killed.
Well, in John Basselon's defense, uh, he was just a normal like Italian-American dude from Jersey when he enlisted. He wasn't famous beforehand.
>> That's true. And also in John Basson's case, he didn't get [ __ ] killed by his own guys.
>> That is true. At least as far as we know. Yeah. For the men at the Rock Quarry, that was a serious question. As they advanced, word of Balon's death within an hour of landing spread through the ranks while they were left scrambling up of these up these terrace rock faces fighting pillboxes, caves, and bunkers at close quarters. And that's something that I think that the Pacific does really well, the show on HBO, of showing just how fast John Baselone gets killed. like it's often shown as like this heroic stand or whatever because that's how everybody would like to imagine it, but he just dies within an hour because that's that's how that tends to happen. Since these were isolated positions for the Japanese, not connected to the greater network that had been built underground, each one of these positions fought to the death. One Marine Lieutenant, Benjamin Roselle, had his personal hell documented in Derek Wright's book, Ewima, 1945. Quote, "Within a minute, a mortar shell exploded amongst the group.
His left foot and ankle hung from his leg, held on by a ribbon of flesh.
Within minutes, a second round landed near him and fragments tore at his other leg. For nearly an hour, he wondered where the next shell would land. He was soon to find out as a shell burst almost on top of him, wounding him for a third time in the shoulder. Almost at once, another explosion bounced him several feet in the air and hot shards ripped into both thighs. As he lifted his arms to look at his watch, a mortar shell exploded only feet away and blasted the watch from his wrist and tore a large jagged hole in his forearm. Lieutenant Roselle later said, quote, "I was beginning to know what it must be like to be crucified."
>> This war [ __ ] uh directed by G.
Ellison, who did The Boys.
>> Imagine looking down to try to find your uh your watch and there's just nothing there anymore. Like [ __ ] can the next one just kill me?
>> Yeah. Yeah. Aim better, you [ __ ] >> I really don't like getting the military version of getting attacked by the clone stamp in Photoshop. It's just removing limbs. It's like, wow, there wasn't just ground there. Why is that rock pattern just repeating over and [laughter] over again? Where's my arm? Getting evacuated back to the hospital and getting your purple heart and the officer getting it just so confused over how many times you've been wounded. Just dumps a bucket of purple hearts on top of you.
[laughter] It's like, we're going to be honest with you, chief. We don't know here. Just take as many as you think is necessary.
>> Ending up as the like the guy in the Metallica one video.
>> About 900 Marines landed to take the rock quarry. By nightfall of the first day of the attack, only 150 of them were still able to fight and one celebrity was killed. And then things got worse. I said the thing. The Japanese artillery finally opened the hell up. Now, the reason for this is despite the Navy's insistence, the Army had pre-registered their guns to hit the beaches further inland than the shore. That way, they would wait until more landing craft showed up and more marines gathered on the shore and grouped together and began to advance over open sand rather than try to hit ships in the water, which is way harder to do. So, now the Japanese army's guns opened fire. These guns were set back on both Sarabachi and Motoyama and every single one of them had survived the bombardments. This also meant that despite what we talked about like Basilone hitting the beach and dying within an hour, that first wave had it easier than everybody else because of this. By 11 a.m. when more waves were coming in, they got hit way harder. Worse still, when they ran ashore to join the others and everybody tried to dig in for some kind of protection from the incoming artillery, they found that the coffee ground fart hellscape just collapsed as soon as they dug in. This didn't stop them from trying to dig with shovels and helmets and even their own hands, but none of it mattered. Then came the armored support in the form of Sherman tanks. You probably already know where this is going. Yes. The uh the big heavy tank operating on what is essentially soft silty ground.
>> Yep. They immediately get stuck. Others don't get stuck. It's the incline. Like the combination of the sand and the incline kills them.
>> Uh they become sitting ducks for Japanese gunners which target them immediately. Some tanks don't even make it that far. Uh due to choppy waves, they get dropped out of their vehicles too soon and just get swamped in the surf. And remember, there's crews in these. [laughter] I just imagine him being the tank driver like, "Huh, engine's not responding.
It's getting awfully moist in here." And you don't know that you've surprise you're a submarine now.
>> Whoops. [laughter] The ones that were able to pull off the beach didn't get far, like I said, thanks to the incline. But some were able to get over that and then found all the landmines or fell into the tank traps. After a while, the tanks landing behind those ones, had such a hard time navigating the beach that was so full of stuck and destroyed vehicles, not to mention the growing pile of dead bodies, which they just had to run over that they also got trapped, unable to move.
They created a giant dead traffic jam.
This growing pile of wreckage and the slope coming off of the beach were cleared by Navy CBS or combat engineers with bulldozers while under small arms and artillery fire. CBS were counted in horror that they had no choice but to bulldoze dead bodies, vehicles, and sand into piles in order to create something like a smooth road to make offloading easier. So, we got another corpse road.
>> I was going to say a corpse, >> a corpse pier, corpse road, corpse burm, also >> corpse mulberry harbor. Yeah. Shore crews attempted to set up a pontoon causeway to come off of the beach to make offloading easier, but the rough surf broke it free. And now that is just being thrown all over the place around other landing vehicles and stuff. So it's just more threats being added into the landing, but now one of them is just a flying piece of pontoon.
Admiral Turner is fully aware of just how horrible all of this is going. But that left him with a very important question to answer that people often ask us whenever we talk about these episodes. Well, what do you do to fix this? The men on the shore, the ones who had already landed, needed supply. so they could keep fighting. They needed more men so they can keep pushing. But the landing is turning into a [ __ ] show full of buried corpses and blown up tanks. However, you can't stop landing or you're dooming the men who already have to defeat. Worse still, Turner knew that he had to do this fast because nightfall is coming. They need to push far enough inland to set stakes and prepare for a counterattack at night.
Something that the Japanese were known for doing. The Japanese Imperial military probably launched more night attacks than anyone else during World War II. So, he had no choice but to keep feeding men and machines into the meat grinder. On the beach, men were forced to answer the same question. The landings were going terribly. Whole units were scrambling in every direction, and men were trapped in at best platoon- sized elements of about 30 men. If they sat in the holes that they dug and then were collapsed into, the artillery would obliterate them. But if they advanced, the machine guns would tear them apart. Adding to this horror was the Japanese 320 mm spigot mortar.
>> Yeah.
>> This thing fired a nearly 700 lb shell at such a low velocity that Marines could watch it fly through the sky. And it looked like it was wobbling as it did. So, [laughter] >> what the what the [ __ ] >> Yeah, they nicknamed it several things.
The flying ash can is is a good one. The wobbling bobber is another, which sounds like something that that you'd call [ __ ] in 1930. That sounds like uh very British coded. I have to be honest with you.
>> You want to wobble my bobber?
>> Yeah, >> wobbling bobber sounds similar to me to like, you know, reefer madness.
[laughter] All damn kids getting down with this wobbling bobber. or my personal favorite nickname, the Screaming Jesus.
New band name. New band name.
>> Screaming Jesus. Yeah. The Wobbling Bobbers are opening up for Screaming Jesus.
>> And somehow David Yeah. was in both of them.
>> Yeah. This is basically like [ __ ] It's like a Brit pop band in the early 90s. Very inongressly opening for grunge band in the early '9s. So it's Yeah.
Wobbling bobber opening up for Screaming Jesus. Now, Navy Corman, otherwise known as the medics for the Marines, discovered something new and terrible.
That was when a man was injured, obviously, blood would start coming out, right? It would contaminate the loose black sand, which would then get into the wound and then turn into a strange volcanic paste, making treating almost any injury virtually impossible. Oh.
>> Oh no. I got volcanoes in my wounds. Cuz I presume you'd have to irrigate the wound a lot and it's not as if they had a lot of water to do that with. Not at this point. No. Like at this point since they're still coming to shore, they got cantens. That's it. Like I I read accounts of Navy Corman just leaving that paste in the wound and then just bandaging over it, hoping that the paste would keep the insides in. Oh my god.
>> I'm at least happy that we've discovered a new goo on this show. You know, >> we're discovering new kinds of goo.
>> Yeah. I mean, like, it's kind of because if your only other option is like you can't use all of your drinking water on it, that's not going to work. And sea water also is going to bring its own problems of serious contamination. Yeah.
I mean, plus once you're inland, you can't be like, "Yo, go get me some ocean water." So, >> yeah. It's not It's not good.
>> The only dude previous to this who like experienced this very specific type of ailment was the guy who was jerking it crazy style when Vuvius erupted.
[laughter] >> Oh god. Nobody wants to be the the Marine Corpsman who has to improvise volcano medicine on the beach.
>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing is like it's so [ __ ] up what you're describing, but it's like you can't really fault them for that decision because like there aren't really any other options. It's just like I guess at the end of the day it's it's kind of a weird [ __ ] up pus. So, there it is.
You know, >> guys, I have an idea to shove more of the goo inside. The outside goo keeps the inside goo inside. Once again, this is why they won't let uh, you know, new age hippie health people on emojima because it's like they're going to create the goo that cures everything.
>> Yeah. They're going to cut them do a little like preparatory wound so they can try out the fart island quick clot.
[laughter] >> Yeah. Some some marine in 1945 was the first man to discover a quick clot when his leg got blown off and he just shoved it full of volcano goo. I mean, technically speaking, the dudes getting triaged and treated for lower like lower extremities injuries probably also did the first instance of Eoima but hole sunning. [laughter] God.
Now, the advance on the ground kept moving despite all of this. They eventually made it to the southern tip of airfield number one. The capture of which was actually a day one objective, but they would not achieve it. They only made it to the airfield. They couldn't take it over. But not every mission was a failure on the first day. The left flank of the Marine advance managed to cut across the island at its narrowest point, linking up with the Marines on the other side and isolating Mount Siachi. A lot of this is thanks to the unending stream of naval and air support being called in by forward observers.
Some that you may have heard of, the Navajo code talkers.
>> Mhm.
>> Yes. Now, other native languages were used in code as well, but the Navajo was the most well-known code thanks to how complex the Navajo language was, is, and was completely unknown to outsiders. The man who first pitched this code to the US military said it thought it'd be a good idea because according to him at best 30 people in the entire world outside the Navajo himself had any functional knowledge of the language at all >> and none of them were Japanese or German.
>> Exactly.
>> Yep. I remember hearing about this too.
Yeah.
>> So a code was developed using their language. Sometimes it's thought that they simply spoke using their language over the radio and that is not true. It was a code using words from the language. And owing to American racism and white men at the time not really being able to tell the difference between a Native American and a Japanese person, the code talkers were given a bodyguard to follow them around to make sure Americans didn't accidentally shoot them. If you want to experience what it would would have been like trying to break this code, h you should come to our live show on May 29th and try and have a conversation with me after I've had four points after I've gotten off stage. Yeah, he's he's going to become a a county cork code talker.
>> The Feny and wind talker is a whole new [laughter] story.
>> Now, it was never published policy, but one code talker, Bill Toledo, I'm not making fun of his surname, for the only time said that the bodyguards were given orders to shoot them if they thought that they might fall into Japanese hands because the Japanese were aware of the code talker program, even if they had no understanding of it as a whole. Though I should point out here, there's no evidence that this statement is true.
Uh, Bill also said that this never actually happened. No bodyguard ever shot anybody. But this did make it into the terrible John Woo film Wind Talkers, which we did a bonus episode about many, many years ago. If you ever want to see US Marines literally doing karate for some reason with flamethrowers, it's a [ __ ] movie. It's so bad. But as far as we're aware and as anybody's ever been able to prove, there was no policy to kill the code talkers. That was just kind of assumed. Like a lot of the code talkers believe that the bodyguard was there to kill them. Um cuz you could assume that the bodyguards were pretty racist [ __ ] I mean this is 1940s we're talking about here. But the code talkers made it rain constantly and famously they never made a mistake in passing their code back and forth. and their code remains the only unbroken spoken military code in history. Uh we'll eventually do a full episode on the code talkers. I just wanted to make sure that everybody knew that they were there in their role in this battle cuz they were incredibly important.
>> Mhm.
>> And I know this isn't important and has nothing to do with anything, but it's strange just how many officers involved in this battle have something in common with one another. The commander of the unit that cut off Surabbachi, Colonel Harry Liver's Edge was also a former Olympian. He competed in 1920 and 1924 in the shotput and won bronze in 1920.
He also commanded our favorite screwdriver wielding psychopaths, the Marine Raiders, and had a nickname Harry the Horse because he was [ __ ] jacked.
[laughter] >> He was a shot put thrower. He was huge.
Dude's got one massively developed side delt. You You don't want to try and uh punch him from slightly too far to the side.
>> Yeah. The other possibility for his nickname is that his fellow Marines had to make sure to feed him with a flat hand, otherwise they'd lose a finger. I don't know. [laughter] >> Hey, listen. You got to be careful.
Henry's nibbling again.
>> Oh, Henry the nibbler. Anyway, by nightfall of day one, there were 40,000 Marines on Euima. All of them dug in the shitty soil and collapsing positions, waiting for the all but assured Japanese counterattack. But they never came. The US was pretty used to the Japanese nighttime tactics by this point. So instead of just sitting there and waiting, the Navy opened fire with a constant barrage of illumination rounds, turning pitch black into bright daylight. They fired over 1,000 of the things on night one, so it was never actually dark. [ __ ] Now, this also meant that Marines did not sleep at all.
Uh, but I think it's fair to assume they probably weren't going to anyway. It's night one after a beach invasion. I think they're mostly just sitting there and be like, "Kmells like farts. I'm really scared. I'm afraid of fireworks now." American commanders were learning that they weren't dealing with a Japanese commander like they had in the past. They expecting large-scale bonsai attacks immediately, counterattacks over open ground that allowed the Americans to obliterate them with superior firepower. But that wasn't happening.
the Japanese would remain in their positions and force the Americans to fight them tooth and nail over every single one. Whereas Holland Smith said, quote, "I don't know who he is, but this Japanese general run the show is one smart bastard." Though I should point out he did not say Japanese. I had to change that so I could speak it.
[laughter] Use your imagination.
>> You're you're creating racist mad lies.
sometimes like, you know, I I do my best like in in some episodes when somebody uses something of an outdated term like Indian instead of Native American, I will say it because like that's at least not a slur.
>> It's just it's just old timey and wrong.
Um, this is not one of those cases, guys. [laughter] >> He used the n-word, and I don't mean the the one for for black people. I mean the one for Japanese people. You know what it is. I don't have to say it. H.
Anyway, the second day, Liver Edg's Marines would be given orders to continue their stated mission of securing Mount Sabbachi, or as the Marines had nicknamed it, the hot rocks due to, well, yeah, they're really hot and the rocks. The constant fart clouds of hot sulfur that kept venting themselves from the ground. This feels like the closest you can get to actually being in hell >> where you have to tactically invade hell. like the biblical version of hell.
Like beaches covered in black sand, sulfur. There's definitely a dude who's just like completely red running around.
[laughter] There's a lot of really red guys. Not for long. The down is an Indians, I suppose.
>> And just so you can picture this in your head, Surabachi and the general area around it look like the surface of the moon. And you can look up pictures of it today. It still looks virtually the same, though significantly fewer dead bodies these days. It's barren. There's no trees or plants, nothing. It's the same black volcanic soils, everything else with the occasional rocky ridge breaking everything up. There's no cover. At the base of the mountain were a collection of 70 reinforced concrete bunkers all dug into the mountain itself with all of the accompanying tunnels and whatnot. These were also camouflaged with the same black sand or failing that painted black. And because of how Sarabachi is, there's no way to flank the mountain, go up a different way, nothing like that. You would have to assault through these bunkers with a frontal attack. And again, Marines assaulting Japanese positions at this point was a known tactic. Uh Marines trained for this before they were sent to the Pacific. First naval bombardment, Arab bombardment with explosives followed by napalm that would lift.
Infantry and tanks would advance. The tanks would fire smoke rounds directly at the bunkers so Japanese machine gunners could still, you know, they'd still be able to fire, but they couldn't aim. Then the infantry would, under a wall of tank fire, advance close enough to throw satchel charges into the firing ports while other teams try to find like side or back doors into the bunker to rush in and kill anybody who survived.
We've talked about this in other island hopping episodes. Not this time. Nope.
[clears throat and laughter] Remember all the added difficulty here?
the sand, the incline, the mountain, the rocks. Uh tank support was not able to move around freely. So Marines had to drag 37 millimeter guns up like they became horses uh so they could fire on the bunkers. Sometimes these are able to blast the bunkers apart right then and there, but often times it wouldn't be enough. And since these are dug into the mountain itself, there's no like side door. There's nothing to assault except the firing ports themselves. Mhm. So they would hit them with explosives either from the tanks, their towed guns or the satchel charges. These would blow chunks off of the bunker so the Marines could kind of get in and then they would get in like hand to hand combat constantly while trying to clear these bunkers at the base of Surbachi. Though the Marines advance without bayonets attached, not because they didn't have them, but because climbing up Surabachi was a real pain in the [ __ ] ass.
They're like they're slipping and falling in the sand. And adding weight to the front of your rifle doesn't necessarily make things easier for you.
So as this gap is closed, Marines and Japanese soldiers get into every kind of fight you can imagine. All to the death.
Swords, knives, bayonets, rifles, helmets, rocks, teeth, fists, and other times were to get around the world's worst mosh pit. Armored bulldozers were brought up and simply buried the bunkers with sand with everybody still inside.
>> Just deploying a tactical Italian American from New Jersey called Jimmy the Tooth. He just taken a a massive chomp out of a bunker. The Japanese didn't pay their sanitation bill on time. Bring in the bulldozer. [laughter] Still other times, flamethrower tanks, nicknamed Zippo tanks, were brought up, or more often than not, Marines carrying flamethrowers on their back. They would spray the gunports or cave openings they found with napalm, killing everybody inside in just about the worst way imaginable. And the Japanese were more afraid of the flamethrowers than anything else. And I'd say a pretty good [ __ ] reason. So, they were targeted immediately, >> honestly. Yeah, cuz you're in an enclosed bunker on a [ __ ] volcanic island and some like cornfed redneck with a flamethrower just pointed at your face. Yes. I I would feel like I've just met the great Western Satan.
>> Yeah. Uh they they were targeted immediately by snipers, riflemen. As soon as anybody saw one of these dudes amling up the cliff, everybody shot at them.
>> It's basically a human version of the big red barrels in Golden I 007.
>> Quite literally, cuz they explode.
>> They explode. Exactly. Um, like if the tanks got hit in in such a way, the flamethrower man themselves would go up like a torch. They only have a range of about 40 m, so they have to get pretty up close and personal. The M2 flamethrower, the one that they carried, also weighed over 70 lb.
>> Yeah.
>> So, they weren't exactly moving very quickly. Only made worse by the fact that they're going up the world's worst slip and slide. For a reference for people who aren't nearly 40 years old, it was like the mission in Call of Duty World at War where you are in the Pacific campaign with a flamethrower and there's like dudes in the tree shooting at you.
>> Yeah. The second you appear, everybody's trying to kill you. Like that's one thing that the surviving dudes who carry these things, spoiler alert here, there's not many survivors. All said like this second that I appeared in the open, it was like the world exploded around me cuz everybody's trying to kill me.
>> Mhm. All of these factors combined meant that carrying a flamethrower at Euima was statistically almost a certain death sentence. The average casualty rate for them across the board was 92%.
Which is the highest in the entire military.
>> Jesus Christ. A lot of people don't know the briefing for I think it's the 2007 uh Capcom showcase of Dynasty Warriors was actually based on training for Japanese soldiers at Eoima's like aim at red mark for massive damage.
[ __ ] off 1 million troops. I mean, [laughter] in a way, you can kind of understand then why Japanese video games made in the 80s and 90s featured the big red glowing thing that you shoot at because >> that used to just be some guy named Carl.
>> I was going to say it was the epigenetic memory of encountering Americans. Yeah.
Nate, you know, Sergeant Al [ __ ] who's climbing up the hill with the 70 lb flamethrower just like moving really slowly making Dark Souls pain noises the entire time he's going up the hill. is because the Japanese imagination, they metastasized, you know, the the trauma of the dropping of the nuclear bomb into Godzilla and they, you know, metastasized the trauma of being faced with a guy from Iowa with literally a a handheld dragon spitting fire at you, but with a giant crab with a glowing red spot on its chest.
>> And like if you look at pictures of these flamethrower guys actually in the field, you notice that they're always standing by themselves.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Obviously, cuz no one wants to be glad to go.
>> Even the Marines knew that like, yeah, that guy's going to [ __ ] explode.
>> Yeah. Guy writing letter homes, you know, from from private, you know, Clem Grumpton, first marine division, flamethrower company. He's just like, no one wants to be friends with me.
[laughter] It's a solo.
>> Wants to be friends with Johnny Boom Boom.
>> This happened all along the base of the mountain, and the fighting went on for 2 days before the Japanese line around Sarabachi was broken. Though unlike before, the Japanese fought day and night, though still without the infamous bonsai charge. Instead, in small teams, they would try to attack individual foxholes and then run back into their caves. Then, if that wasn't mind [ __ ] enough for Marines in the middle of the night, after attacks on these marine positions, other teams of Japanese soldiers who had learned a few words of English would sit back and scream out, "Cmen!
Corman!" which was the universal marine word for calling a medic y for help.
>> So the medics would run out looking for wounded right into an ambush. Tactics like this as well as just the general hell of the battle at large would lead to navy corman having the highest casualty rate after flamethrower guys with some units losing 85% of their corman leaving a lot of units with no medics whatsoever as the battle went on.
So casualty rates increased. Once the lines were broken, the Japanese commander at Sarabachi recognized his position was doomed and ordered the only mass counterattack during this episode of the battle. This was not a suicide charge, though. There's no bonsai related shenanigans. It's important to remember the difference here. Like a bonsai charge has no meaningful tactical purpose. Like they're literally just running directly at a machine gun to die, right?
>> Bonsai related shenanigans is such a great phrase. [laughter] Do you reckon that the soldiers before the bonsai charge would like play pranks on each other? Like tie their shoelaces together. The guy [laughter] just falls straight down.
>> Oh, you got me again, you [ __ ] >> Oh, you prick.
>> I'll get you next time. Well, actually, I suppose I won't [laughter] given the fact of what we're about to do.
>> Godamn you, Fukushi. Not again.
>> You go to pull out your sword and someone took the blade off, so it's just like the handle.
>> It just failed. The emperor gave me this. [laughter] Rather, this was a breakout attempt.
Like they were trying to get out of Sarabachi and make it all the way back to Motoyama Plateau on the northern tip of the island. There's a tactical idea in mind for this. This is not a suicide charge. But as you can imagine, trying to break out from a network of bombed out and half burnt bunkers through miles of open ground across the island was probably not going to work out well for them. And it didn't. Uh they were obliterated in short order. Though somehow apparently according to letters at Motoyama, 25 of the 1,000 or so of the mountain garrison did managed to turn up at the plateau and nobody's entirely sure how. [gasps] Just running across the whole island like, "Oh, maybe they just think I'm a civilian. This is crazy." This was the first real hint to Kurib Bayashi that things were going much, much worse than he thought they would. writing in his diary, he is not shocked that Surbachi fell. Remember, the whole point of this battle from day one is he knows he's going to lose. But he thought it would take 10 days of fighting to take Surbachi. Instead, it took three. He was like, "Oh, we're going to die a lot faster than I thought we were going to, boys." Yeah. Jesus.
So, in case you were listening to the series to learn about the flag raising at Mount Sabbachi, we're finally there because oh boy, is this whole saga confusing. And also most of what you know about it is probably not right. So after the breakout attempt, resistance on Mount Sabbachi was done. Organized resistance, I should say. The Marines are not charging up a mountain to plant a flag under fire. Instead, a small patrol of 40 Marines marched up the mountain towards the summit after a bombardment on the fourth day of the battle, February 23rd. There were still small groups of Japanese soldiers that opened fire on them as they advanced, but there was nothing coordinated. They were easily dealt with, including a lone Japanese officer who popped out of a hole in the ground, armed only with a sword and tried to kill a journalist.
>> Mhm.
>> He got shot. Many Japanese soldiers, most of them were too wounded or too sick to take part in the breakout attempt, killed themselves with grenades. Marines heard them constantly exploding under their feet as they advanced up the summit, which must have just been a strange experience. It's like they they said they were like hearing popping noises and they weren't entirely sure what it was until they realized they were just standing on top of an antill of tunnels. The patrol walked up the mountain collapsing cave entrances with explosive charges or blasting them with flamethrowers.
According to the men, the whole place was just about the worst smelling battlefield they've ever been to. Uh rotting corpses by the hundreds mixed with the everpresent fart smell of sulfur. On top of the mountain, Marines from E Company's second battalion rigged up a flag pole out of some iron pipes they found that the Japanese have been using as part of a water collection system and ran a small American flag up to its top and marine photographer Lewis Lowry snapped a picture of this flag.
>> Mhm.
>> This is the first picture on Mount Sabbachi.
>> This was spotted by just about everybody. And remember, Yuima is on a very big island. Mount Serbachi is the biggest part of it and it's overlooking the beach. So everybody's like, "Hey, look, it's a flag. Sick." Uh, one of these men happened to be the secretary of the Navy, Jim Foresttol, who decided it would be a good time to come ashore to Euima personally while the battle was still going on. Sometimes it's framed that Forestall was shot at or came under artillery fire. That's not true. We know this because Forestall himself said it never happened. This seemed to be something the press just kind of made up because we'll talk about this later, but there are still routinely artillery shells coming down on the beach. Like no part of Euima is ever safe from artillery due to the size of itself and the guns at play. So you were never too far away to get hit. What is generally not known is that pretty much only seconds after the first flag was raised, the men at the top were ambushed by a group of surviving Japanese soldiers.
Oh, Lowry, the man who took the picture, was nearly killed when a grenade blew him off of a rgeline and set his camera flying.
>> Holy [ __ ] >> Yep. We almost lost the first picture altogether. Uh-huh. Then about 3 hours later, a group of Marines went up to the mount with a much larger flag to replace a smaller one so it could be seen better. This patrol went up with a journalist, Joe Rosenthal. Some people tend to think that this whole thing was done for Joe Rosenthal and that picture, which would become easily the most well-known photo in American military history. Mhm.
>> But if that was the case, nobody told Rosenthal. He thought so little of the situation, he didn't even raise the viewfinder on his camera to his eye before taking the picture, and he nearly missed the raising altogether. Though next to him was a marine cameraman who recorded the whole thing in color.
Obviously, all these things survive today. There is further confusion on this as well. Rosenthal was asked by his editor if he staged the photo because it does kind of look too perfect. It is a great picture.
>> It is as a picture. It is perfectly composed. It's per the It's perfectly exposed as well, which is so rare considering it's on a battlefield on a [ __ ] volcanic island on a somewhat overcast day.
>> And then the film had to be transported all the way back to Guam to be developed. Rosenthal thought he meant a different picture, a clearly staged photo of a group of Marines sitting next to the flag, which has been since nicknamed the gung-ho picture. This is just a normal group photo of the guys who had done the flag raising. So Rosenthal said, "Yeah." His editor then published the photo mentioning that it was staged when it was not. He had just gotten very, very lucky. And Rosenthal spent the rest of his life trying to correct the fact that the photo was not staged.
>> And this is actually like a big rarity in very famous war photography. Like the very famous picture from the Valley of Death is staged. It's one of the very first uh war like famous war photographs. they like moved the cannonballs and like dragged corpses around and like it's completely staged and it is one of the most famous war photographs and a lot of them since then are including um >> there's quite a few during the American Civil War that were were uh set up.
There is um the god I can't remember his name now. He came to shore during D-Day.
>> Robert Kappa. Yeah, Robert Kappa was found uh staging photos earlier and later in his career as well. Also, other stuff that like details not necessarily lining up with his D-Day photos either.
Um it's it's pretty common, but there is no evidence to suggest that this was that this was set up.
>> And I know a little bit about Bob Kappa and yeah, like he there were some things where it's like you're you're correct and there's some photos where it absolutely is not staged and it's just like I think the culture of it was different back then. Um, I would say in Bob Cabba's case, he wasn't really able to correct the record because he, if I remember correctly, stepped on a landmine in Vietnam in when it was still the French war in Vietnam and died. Um >> yeah, it's it's kind of why um a lot of Lee Miller's uh photographs at the end of the war going through Europe are like so striking because she was doing like fashion photography and then and kind of our photography then was taking photos in London and in Britain during the Blitz and like so much of her stuff in on the continent is like very very um natural and diioetic. like the only kind of state I saw an exhibition of her stuff um and there's a huge section of her of her work from the end of World War II and there's a photo of her and her photography partner at the time taking photos in Hitler's bath >> and it's the most striking [ __ ] ever and it's like all the photos of like you know the prison guards in the concentration camps that had been gotten the [ __ ] kicked out of them by allied soldiers and stuff was like it's so natural and like a lot of People think that's staged, but there is a huge history of war photography being very very very staged.
>> Like I said, Rosenthal's film was sent to Guam to be developed and then was published. FDR saw the picture and said, "Hell yeah, this slaps. We should use this." And then he orders the men to return to the United States, the men that were in the photo for a press tour after the Battle of Euima's over. This is where the confusion begins. This caused a slight problem. Nobody knows who the [ __ ] these Marines are because Rosenthal nor anybody else ever bothered to note who was in the picture because they didn't think it was a big deal.
>> Making things even more confusing was that a Coast Guard photographer who was there who might have remembered was killed at Euima as was the guy running that video camera who was there with Rosenthal. So any other like people there taking pictures and possibly taking notes was dead. One man, Renee Gagnon, was mentioned by his commander as definitely being in the photo. And if you haven't seen the photo, which would be surprising to me, but look it up.
Nobody's face is really clearly visible.
>> Gagnan then was told to name the men who were with him. So he tried to remembered who was there and he gave the names Henry Hansen, Franklin Sousley, John Bradley, and Michael Strank. Salley, Shrank, and Hansen had all been killed later on during the same battle in Euima. The last man that he knew was probably the most famous Ira Hayes, but he refused to name Hayes to his commander because Hayes knew he was in the photo, knew they were looking for him, and threatened to beat Gagnon's ass cuz he didn't want to become famous. Oh my god. Then Gagnon caved when the Marines threatened to punish him for withholding Ira's name. However, Gagnon wasn't right. He [ __ ] up. Maybe his memory was wrong. He had forgotten or he was simply pressured to try and remember this 5-second event in the middle of, you know, the Battle of Euima. Ira Hayes, upon returning to the United States, contended that Gagnon had gotten some of the names wrong. He instead said that a man named Harlon Block was in the photo, not Hansen. going so far as to hitchhike all the way to Block's family home and tell them that their kid was in the picture because Block had also died at Euima. Though at this point, Hayes was pretty troubled guy. Uh he was pretty shattered from PTSD and uh from not only Euima but the war in general.
And he crawled hard into a bottle. He became such an issue personalitywise that the army kicked him off the press tour because he kept causing he kept getting very very drunk and starting problems. There's also a tinge of racism to it because Ira Hayes is a Native American. Uh so there's a lot going on there though Hayes was dealing with a lot of [ __ ] demons. That part is undeniable. Here's the thing though.
There's a very good reason as to why Hayes and Gagnon had two very different memories regarding the photo. Gagnon wasn't in the photo at all. Ah, >> I was waiting to get there. [laughter] >> Now, Gagnagdon carried the second flag up the mountain, but was not in the photo. As for did Gagnon lie or get caught up in the whole well, everything behind it being misidentified himself, then suddenly finding himself talking to the [ __ ] president? Well, we'll never know, ever. He wasn't concretely proven to not being in the photo until long after his death in 1979. and he never changed his story. Muddying everything further, another man who is not in the picture but was named being there by Gagnon, John Bradley, agreed that Gagnut had gotten the names correct. And then if that wasn't weird enough, Ira Hayes, a man who was definitely there, insisted that Gagnon had been there with him, but he was right about all of the other names other than Hansen. So there's so many layers of this thing. So like Gagnon wasn't there. Hayes insisted he was, but then Gagnon got all the names right anyway, other than Hansen.
It's so confusing. Everybody looks the same when you're covered in volcanic salt. It wasn't until 2019 that the full story and the real identification of all of the men involved was finally probably figured out. Hayes was right. Haron Block was in the photo, as was Harold Keller, previously believed to be Gagnon. Sousley was accurate as was Strank, but Bradley was wrong. Instead, it was a guy named Harold Schultz. And what is interesting here is that both Schultz and Keller survived the war fully knowing that it was them in the picture. Weirdly, they never tried to make it a thing. It does seem that Keller tried to correct his account in 1945, but was told that he must be wrong. Uh, it's important to remember here that he was a private and he was speaking to a Marine general. Nobody believes a private when they say anything. And I'm not saying that you're wrong not to believe them. I was a private once and I lied to many people like Nate trying to get out of work.
[laughter] >> Fair enough. He mentioned it again in a letter to his wife Ruby, which was posted from Euima in the immediate aftermath, but after that, nothing.
Schultz never told a soul other than in a single conversation with his stepdaughter over dinner. decades later and then never brought it up again.
Hayes contends that he did try to correct the whole block for Hansen thing to a colonel immediately afterwards, but was told to shut the [ __ ] up. The colonel contends this never happened.
And I'm not one to side with a colonel on anything. But Hayes was also pretty troubled at this point of his life. He's not a very reliable narrator and he's hardly ever sober. That aside, I would not be surprised if what he said was true. Again, think of the context. He's a lower enlisted guy trying to correct a PR blitz while not only being kind of sauced most of the time, but also a Native American. Nobody is going to listen to him.
>> Yeah.
>> But even if Hayes was right about that, and he was, that doesn't explain anything else that happened along the way. So why did Gagnon lie? Why did Hayes agree with him? It's important to remember here as well. Hayes went to his grave, insisting Gagnon was there when he wasn't. Why did Bradley lie? We legitimately have no idea because they all died before the truth came out. Just for the funsies.
>> I don't think it is anybody any favors to come up with reasons why or think that there's some kind of vast government coverup because of this photo. There's no evidence that there is and there's no evidence that there ever was. The thing to remember is that like these guys have just, you know, stormed an island and literally landed on hell and are making some gains. Is like I think their minds are kind of preoccupied with other [ __ ] than like remembering who they raised the flag with that they're, you know, their commanding officer says go run up that hill and raise that flag again.
>> Yeah, there's a lot going on. I'd also say too, yeah, that like there's some certain things when I look back on it, like details about stuff that I experienced in when I was deployed, which was by, you know, tiny hundreds fractions, you know, as intense as what these guys were experiencing in this campaign. There are some things where I'm like, you put me on the stand, I I'll tell you exactly as I remember it, but that might also be wrong. I might genuinely just not remember correctly because it was a long time ago and like stuff gets mixed up in your head. You know what I mean? So, it's like that's a natural thing. And then I guess none of these guys had any idea this was going to be this symbol that like you said, Joe, probably the most famous US military photo ever. Yeah.
>> I can't think of any other one that's been I mean the Marine Corps memorial has this photo, you know, made into a statue. Like it's this is it. This is the most the most famous photo from World War II, I think, from the US military. Certainly the Pacific, but probably the most famous. Like going off of what Nate said, um, like it's really easy to fall into this thing like, "Oh, these guys must have been lying." And like, look, I'm not going to debate the fact that Gagnon was certainly lying. He had to have known he was not in that picture. Why he did it, no idea. But as far as everyone else, specifically Ira Hayes, like I've been in firefights before, obviously not comparing that to Euima, but my account of that firefight is much different than a guy that was 5 m away from me. Like, nobody remembers the same thing. And especially going through traumatic experiences, your brain deletes some things sometimes invents others that never happened or maybe were seemed a lot worse to you than someone else. Yeah.
>> Like it's not surprising that Hayes didn't necessarily know that Gagnan wasn't there. Maybe he remembered he was there cuz Gagnon was on top of Mount Sarabachi for example. Like so you know your brain gets kind of put in a blender. And not to mention this whole thing only takes a couple minutes. And also think about how much intense like sleep deprivation, starvation, pain, heat, everything like water deprivation, all this stuff that's going on. Like it's completely natural. I mean, the closest I ever got to like flat out getting killed was uh the friendly fire thing shot at us and like a bullet hit close enough that like it hit a concrete wall and I don't recall that I felt the chunks of it hitting me, but I definitely like I heard the rocks, the bullets, everything coming really close to me. I didn't get like any scratches from it. That's the closest. But like in my mind, I have no idea. I couldn't tell you flat out like how far away I was at this point. I remember it happening in my head. Remember where I was. I remember hearing seeing the gun, hearing the shot, hearing the impact. Like it was all in one blur. But it was it was it a meter? Was it 2 meters? I don't know. I have no idea. I just know it was very close to me.
>> Your brain doesn't have the ability to tell you those things any real accuracy.
>> And the picture is so [ __ ] hazy. Even though I can remember exactly what it looked like, it's still so [ __ ] hazy that I really couldn't tell you, you know? And I was not sleep deprived that day.
>> Yeah. And there's like there's questions within questions, you know? There's two dudes who are definitely lying and they knew they were lying. Why didn't they say anything? Would you?
>> Who knows?
>> Who knows?
>> Yeah.
>> I'm not here to judge them for it. Like, they're just trying to get along with their lives through the worst stretch imaginable. These are dudes who are teens or in their early 20s when it happens. They are dealing with wildly untreated post-traumatic stress disorder. You're not going to get a straight story out of anything.
>> And also in an era where like talking about it like all the ways in which we've learned about processing trauma like that wasn't really there were some people who were kind of like trailblazing on it but in general it wasn't a thing that was done. It certainly wasn't a thing that was like accepted amongst the general like veteran populace at all.
>> Yeah. The idea of treating it was like have you tried hitting your soldier and calling him a [ __ ] >> Yeah. And the idea of, you know, treating it in yourself after the war was forget about it and never talk about it. And it's like >> or drink, which is what they all did.
And that's what eventually killed Ira Hayes. He had a very rough life and it was done no favors and was treated terribly by the military and the government. Uh it's just all of this is just one of those things that we'll never know for sure. We know according to the Marine Corps office of the historian that these names are accurate for now.
>> Mhm. They could also still be wrong. We don't know. It's just another one of those things about the battle of Euima that we'll just never know for sure. And we're going to have some more of those on part three when we pick up next time on the conclusion to our series on the battle of Euima. So yeah, we got to the Mount Sabbachi part. I hope everybody's happy. I know that's what everybody was listening for.
>> There was a [laughter] flag flag mentioned. Flag mentioned tab tab on the thing. Weird Spotify autogenerated subtitles that we can't [ __ ] change.
Says flag. I'm going there. Want to hear about the flag? Flag content only.
>> They better not. They'll miss all the spelunking parts.
>> I know. Exactly. Comprehensive spelunking. Catastrophic spelunking.
>> Welcome to uh the end of part two of the battle of Emojima where we say the lyrics and tonight will be the night I'll raise the flag for you over again.
[laughter] >> You guys are [ __ ] killing me, man.
You're [ __ ] killing me. But speaking of being catastrophically Splunk to a permanent end, you can come see us live May 29th in London, uh, tickets are available both live stream and in person and video on demand. So if you can't make the time, time zone or whatever, your stream will still be available for you. There, I managed to segue into a plug. And I am worse at it than you guys. But you guys host other podcasts.
Plug those podcasts. Trash Future, Kill James Bond, No Gods, No Mayors, and also I'm in a band called Second Homes. We have an album coming out on May 5th.
It's available on Band Camp and there will be a link in the description as well.
>> Uh Bene Skin show about the history of everything told the history of tattooing blood work show about the economy of violence and very soon if you are Londonbased or internationally based and want to have a space to produce your own audio or video podcast, you can come and rent my studio name TBD. But uh yes, the Goo Crew Studios LLC. Welcome to the Morty Goo Crew. [laughter] It's Joe and the Grunch. Uh, this is the only show that I host. Thank you so much for listening to it. Consider supporting us on Patreon. We're an independent podcast and supporting us allows us to stay that way and continue to be adree as we have been for coming on a decade now. Leave us a review on wherever it is you listen to podcasts. Until next time, catastrophically spelunk your way to part
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