MORE THAN 26,000 AMERICANS WERE KILLED OR WOUNDED IN THE ASSAULT ON IWO JIMA - THE ONLY BATTLE OF THE WAR IN WHICH U . S . CASUALTIES EX- CEEDED THOSE OF THE JAPANESE .
now approaching an island that was only two-and-a-half miles wide and five miles long . We could never have imagined it would take 36 days to claim that little piece of rock , but we didn ’ t have much intelligence . We didn ’ t know that the Japanese had 23,000 soldiers on the island . We didn ’ t know all the miles of tunnels they had hollowed out . The pillboxes were pretty well concealed because they would dig them out and then pile sand on top of them , which if you were up in the air looking down , were nearly invisible . Even if you could make out the outline of a pillbox from the air , we didn ’ t know the number of pillboxes that were there . I later read they had as many as 800 pill boxes on that little island .
When we got there , we were way out in the ocean . We could hear the explosions , but we couldn ’ t see anything . We were just sort of waiting to see whether they would ever need us or not . Forty thousand Marines hit the island on the first day . Prior to Iwo
Jima , Japanese defense had primarily focused on keeping the enemy from coming ashore . If we never made it ashore , we couldn ’ t capture the island , so it seemed like a sound strategy . But the Japanese commanding general on Iwo Jima took a different approach . His strategy was to let us ashore , figuring that once we touched ground , we ’ d have nowhere to go . The landing beaches were only so big , and he had his weapons centered on the one and a half miles of beach . The result was one Marine after another coming ashore with nowhere to go . Needless to say , we lost a lot of men on that first day and by the evening we knew we ’ d be heading ashore .
We had breakfast at 3 a . m . the next morning and boarded boats headed to the rendezvous area . The waves that
ON OCTOBER 5 , 1945 , WOODY WILLIAMS WAS AWARDED THE MEDAL OF HONOR BY PRESIDENT HARRY S . TRUMAN .
day were rough , running 10 to 12 feet high . We went out and had a group of 15 Higgins boats running in a circle off the shore . We were waiting on the signal from the beach master on shore to come in , but it never came . We bobbed around in those boats all day long . Everyone got sea sick . It was a terrible day . We went back aboard the ship that night before going through the same procedure again the following day . Fortunately , by noon that next day the 4th Division had cleared enough of the beach for us to move in . Once we landed , we became the spearhead of the group . It was our job to move forward with the 4th and 5th divisions on our left and right moving up the coastlines on either side .
As we made our way across the island , we had to pass over one of these airfields and we lost even more Marines because there was really no protection . There was a shell crater that had formed when a bomb or piece of artillery had landed there , but since the hole would quickly fill with Marines , we were told not to take cover there . Of course , survival became more important than simply following orders , so we did what we had to do . But we lost many Marines running across that airfield . For those of us that made it to the other side , we came across a line of reinforced concrete pill boxes ; metal and concrete structures that couldn ’ t be destroyed by bombing or artillery fire . Even bazookas couldn ’ t take them down since they were so thick and well supported by iron rods . The Japanese had all the advantage with a full field of fire , but our men had to aim for the little apertures along an otherwise impenetrable wall .
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