About this episode
This episode explores the battle of Iwo Jima and the soldiers who continued to fight long after the war ended.
On January 6, 1949, two starving Japanese machine gunners walked out of the caves on Iwo Jima and surrendered to American airmen who had no idea they were there. The war had been over for more than three years. They're where this episode ends, and they're the reason it exists. Before them came the battle. This one goes deep into the fight for a stinking scrap of volcanic ash 650 miles south of Tokyo, and the general who turned it into one of the worst killing grounds of the Pacific war. Tadamichi Kuribayashi knew Japan couldn't win, so he buried his garrison 16 miles deep in the rock and ordered his men to make the island cost more than it was worth. It worked. American casualties came out higher than the entire Japanese force defending the place, the only major Pacific battle where that ever happened. We walk through the ash-trap landing, the flag on Mount Suribachi and what the famous photograph left out, the blowtorch-and-corkscrew cave fighting up north, and the roughly 3,000 Japanese soldiers still alive inside the island the day it was declared secure. Then the episode follows the men who never stopped. Two Navy machine gunners held out in the tunnels until 1949. A captain…
Topics covered
- World War II
- Iwo Jima
- Japanese soldiers
- American military history
- guerrilla warfare
- battle tactics
Keywords
- Iwo Jima
- Tadamichi Kuribayashi
- Sakae Oba
- Shoichi Yokoi
- Pacific war
- guerrilla campaign
- Japanese soldiers
- American casualties
Mentioned in this episode
Places: Iwo Jima, Tokyo, Saipan, Anatahan, Guam
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