Letter from Iwo Jima is from the Japanese perspective. Flags of our Fathers is from the American perspective.

@@aldreenbautista2375 The Japanese perspective was a better film, 8/10

They did a great job capturing the moment the flag was raised on Surubachi. I knew what was coming but it still gave me the shivers and I even met some onion ninjas

I haven't see the movie but I keep forgetting about. I'm VERY forgetful.

Thanks for the movie tips

One of my neighbors was there and was severely wounded. He died in the 90's from the indirect result of his wounds. A clot had formed in the area where the doctors had left a bullet de to the danger of removing it. The clot dislodged and went to his heart. Salutes to your father, my neighbor, and all the men who took part.

Grandfather was CB on Iwo.

Purple heart recipient?

Ran across an old Marine a few years ago who landed both at Iwo and pelelu. Most awestruck I've ever been in my entire life, and I've met men who have won the MOH.

Il near St. Louis?

I wonder if that's part of the reason there was a trend toward using rocket artillery for bombardments (among other things).

Very intersting. Thank you. Would be most interesting making a video on the impact this phenomenon had on the entire war.

I briefly had the same thought before I watched the video as far as barrel wear being one reason the Navy didn’t go “full bore.”

Thanks for the information! I hadn’t given that much thought. I was an artillery mechanic in the Marine Corps and we tracked rounds fired in gun books assigned to each gun. And used EFC’s as a unit of measure. Effective Full Charge. Which is similar to what you described.

IMPRESSIVE! HOKEY SMOKES YOU KNOW YOUR GUNS! BTW. Naval guns are the only true definition of a "gun" and a very big one at that! I cringe everytime someone calls a rifle or a pistol a "gun" as they have totally bastardize the word!

Yeah I'm totally assuming but looking at how the Japanese managed labor it was probably POW forced labor.

@@theredacted3805 agreed. There were also apparently also civilians there until July 1944

I wonder if the earthquake bombs or grand slam bombs used by the British would have made a difference on the tunnels and bunkers in the mountains?

@@Luis-be9mi Some tunnels could possibly collapse but at the same time, underground structures are somewhat more resistant to earthquakes. I think an alternate strategy to weed them out of the tunnels would be to fire enough white phosphorus and other smoke generating munitions into the tunnels trying to suffocate them out would've been more effective.

The beaches were covered in volcanic ash which further complicated The invasion efforts of the Marines. Tanks had trouble climbing it amphibious tractors had trouble you name it couldn't get up those Banks. You go to climb and you'd be in it a your knees. One thing not mentioned was the expensive minefields that the Japanese had dug in. Some of the minds were essentially anti-shipping mines buried in the ground. That would be a 500 lb roughly mine.

The defense works was constructed by expending the lives of tens of thousands of Chinese, Phillipines and Korean slave labors who were literally worked to death.

What other channel ? I'd love to see it too.

​@@billotto602 not sure but i guess it is operations room

@@billotto602 Yes, Operations Room. If you liked this video you are in for a treat.

The Operations Room gives the timeline of an event. The Intel Report gives the context of said event.

I read somewhere that it is currently also rising out of the water so as to expose ships that were sunk during the war to form a breakwater.

Adam, that, indeed, is a really "Fun Fact!"👍

Very interesting....

He had a great strategy and was a good tactician.

Yeah, he is one of the few Japanese generals who really knows how to fight the US. It's really lucky that he is a minority, other Japanese generals are a group of fools who only know brute force and simple tactics and send their soldiers to die in vain.

Too bad his leadership sent him on a suicide mission along with every other Japanese soldier in their military. If he was actually intelligent he would've realized he should just surrendered the island over to the Americans instead being responsible for thousands of deaths in both his own country men and their future allies. Such a shame he decided to be one of the worst humans to live in the name of "his family honor"

@@FoxSnootz Self-sacrifice is something few Westerners can understand. It's a lot easier to be brave when you're backed up by the largest industrial base in history and one of the largest, most well-equipped militaries than it is to be brave in the face of insurmountable odds and certain death on a desert island almost certain to be pummeled into dust.

@@FoxSnootz 1. if he would have tried to surrender, his underlings would have prevented it and probably killed him. 2. If he did surrender and somehow convinced his troops to surrender, and they survived the war, they would have been a tiny percentage of Japanese that surrendered. They wouldn’t have had no home, rejected at home, which means no life. The shame wouldn’t have been bearable, being called a pathetic coward, no career, rejected by family after the war.

Quite right

I was about to say, if a 20mm piece manages to take down either a battleship or a heavy cruiser (even though both were naval treats ships) is nothing short of miraculous.

Yeah I was wondering about that. My first thought was, "What were the Japanese doing firing 20mm at a cruiser? Trying to scratch the paint?"

well that invalidates the veracity of the whole piece. based on this gross error i doubt that there WAS a so called "world war 2"

@@johnthompson7420 That's not what he said. If there's an error, it should be pointed out. If I said something that was historically wrong, I'd want someone to say where I was inaccurate. This isn't a gotcha thing.

better than sandbags because the brittle structure will absorb alot of any sharp sudden impacts and shatter without transferring as much energy Iwo Jima is like the most defensible landmass on the planet, I don't know if another week of bombardment would have mattered

​@@NewMitchell-wh3fj "is like the most defensible landmass on the planet" " then how Americans were able to win there? The Battle of Monte Cassino was the real deal and Germans lost only because Allies got Polish troops there to do what dosens of other nations before them failed to do. Only Polish soldiers graveyard is visible from the mountain, as other soldiers were not even able to get to the hills not to mention capture it. Most of the heavy battles of the Americans in this war do not even compare to the battles on the Eastern Front where the battles ended with millions of dead soldiers.

@@Bialy_1 My wife dad was in that battle. Anzio Invasion. I tried asking him about it over years and years but he politely refused to say a word about his service. Pretty sure he saw alot of hand to hand. I have read alot about the Anzio Invasion it was incredibly brutal fighting very high US loss. My father in law was a tough dude. His Burial Flag in its display box has a prominent and proud place in my living room to this day.

Yeah the Filipinos still use the ash from Mt. Pinatubo for construction

The fortifications on Iwo were so deep even a hit wouldn't affect them.

I think it more points out that there's no replacement for boots on the ground. That even with the age of drone warfare we will always need brave men to go into harms way. It would be interesting to war game out this attack and defence with present day technology and tactic. See what's has changed and what remains the same.

PFC Leo Greene, from Great Falls MT, KIA on the 3rd day of the invasion. He was with 2nd Battalion, 28th Marine Regiment (2/28 in Marine terms), the Battalion that raised the flag. He was a veteran of Tarawa, and had gotten in trouble in Hawaii and been reduced in rank. KIA at the age of 19. Just a Montana farm boy who never got to live a full life. The letter from his battalion commander said that he was shot in the neck by a sniper and died instantly. Think about him and the thousands like him. Semper Fidelis, Uncle Sharkey (Leo Greene), my uncle. MGySgt USMC (Ret)

I'm curious. What kind of souvenirs did you manage to find?

@@battleshiparmorlord some of the ceramic grenades were found by others. I found some battle dress white uniforms (Japanese Navy). Ceramic landmines were every where.

​@@surfboy344 any paranormal stories?? I would imagine those tunnels are filled with horrible memories and energy

@@battleshiparmorlord Hey: look at these cool souvenir grenades I brought home!

The bombardment isn't supposed to eliminate them. It is supposed to weaken their position greatly. Poison gas should've been used. How is poison gas off limits but fire bombing wasn't? Or, they should've blanketed the island in fire bombing and smoked them out

@@pyropulseIXXI "How is poison gas off limits but fire bombing wasn't?" Like, laws of war? Chemical weapons were outlawed after ww1, incendiary bombs weren't. Also why do you think that fire would've been able to magically do what normal explosives couldn't? Fire bombardment is good, because fire spreads. Fire won't spread through a rock tunnel, as there's nothing to burn.

@@vitkosbence3705 there is oxygen to burn though...

@@jaythomson5942 Do you lack an elementary education? The three components of fire are, fuel heat and oxygen. I've never suggested we lack oxygen, I'm saying we lack fuel... sure the bomb does carry some amount but that's only enough to burn the area of impact, causing damage similar in scale to what a simple HE bomb would cause.

@@jaythomson5942 oxygen isn't a fuel, so it can't spread the fire.

Ridgeway found a solution to that. 105's dug in with the infantry and aimed point blank at Chinese hoards as they started there assault. They died in heaps. Joseph Stalins answer to Victory over Bazi Germany- kill Germans. Ridgeway's answer to defeating Chinaman hoards- kill Chinese! Seemed to work well in 1951. Why Ridgeway wasn't given a fifth star is beyond me.

Relearning old lessons, really. As I recall, the lack of effect of heavy bombardment on prepared defenses was noted as far back as the Age of Sail, and relearned many times since.

and vietnam too. linebacker was a such a waste of resource so now they use targeted laser guided bombs

@@SnakebitSTI but back then balls wherent accurate hence the race for making bigger and bigger cannons

@@SnakebitSTI The commander of the military base in Alaska where they test military vehicles, when asked if they had any problems, stated that every few years they had to relearn that water freezes at 32°F.

@@SnakebitSTI I mean it's not that the US Navy wouldn't have liked to but the Japanese were very effective at making their fortifications impossible to effectively target so you are only left with area fire

I think you mean 'Samurai'

And Phillipines.

There were 100,000's of Allied and civilian POW's in the Philippines. MacArthur rightly stated that the US had a supreme responsibility to free them as soon as it was possible. Every allied government felt the same way......the conditions our people captured were forced to endure were an abomination. The Navy Cabal in Washington constantly delayed Mac in this quest, opting instead to take small islands at horrendous cost.

Nobody cares about cannon fodder stories.

Average Japanese made even the most hardened SS look civilized.

In US ground forces you stood a 1.78% chance of being KIA in the Pacific Campaign compared with a 0.36% chance in the European theater. About 24.2% of Japanese soldiers and 19.7% of Japanese sailors died during the Second World War, contrasted with 3.66% of U.S. Marines, 2.5% of U.S. soldiers, and 1.5% of U.S. sailors.

So yeah he would have increased his odds of getting killed by 500%!!!! by transferring to the Pacific. Wow!

I believe apart from the battle of Hong Kong the Aleutian campaign was the only Pacific battle Canadian ground forces participated in.

It should have destroyed the machine gun bunkers and larger guns and arty

There were many guns, especially on the side of Surubachi, that faced seaward in order to cover the beaches. Like those 120mm guns that duked it out with the battleships, more of those could have been destroyed, or maybe the lower ones blocked by debris from the upper part of the mountain Maybe they could have worked out a recon system, like a destroyer getting REALLY close, spotting holes in the mountain, lighting it up with 20mm tracers and the battleships blasting them. Maybe that would trigger the Japanese to shoot back, especially at the destroyers, causing casualties but also giving their positions away even more Not saying it would have worked. Just saying it could

@@sjonnieplayfull5859 i was kinda of thinking along those lines. tough to say though and hindsight is always 20/20. sadly i think Iwo Jima wouldve turned into a blood bath no matter what.

@@sjonnieplayfull5859 Funny thing as well as those 120mm guns would’ve done little damage to the battleships

@@MrOiram46 there are many parts without armor on a battleship, and their radar and fire control systems are always vulnerable. Also during the duel mentioned in the battle the US battleships DID suffer casualties among the crew

"Tried massive pre-deployment bombardment with everything we could think of. Didn't really work." is an exceedingly common thing in military history. "Tried massive pre-deployment bombardment. Was super effective." is rare.

@@michaelcook7107 In the case of Dieppe it was intended to suppress the movement of reinforcements not the destruction of hardened positions. The planners had all come through WW 1 and understood the limits of artillery when it came to destroying entrenched enemies and had planned to use tanks against the bunkers and pill boxes inside the town. As it happens it wouldn't have helped as, without knowing anything about the raid, the Germans had been conducting a routine drill and had all of their positions fully manned.

So many inaccuracies in that ridiculous statement…not the least being that the army decided against bombing the town so the streets wouldn’t be blocked for their tanks. Pretty standard for KZfaq though.

@@annoyingbstard9407 Could you point me to the source for that please? Everything I've seen (admittedly told from the Canadian side) says that bombing support was requested and Harris pulled a fast one to avoid it. Specifically he asked the ground commander if there were any circumstances where the attack would be made without bomber support. The ground commander replied that, if the troops were already in the landing craft and half way to shore and the bombing mission was cancelled he'd still have to send in the troops as they were already exposed to German batteries. Harris used that as an excuse to refuse the air support as, he chose to interpret the ground commander's comment as meaning that bomber support wasn't essential for the success of the mission.

What a mistake. Had the UK and US done more and earlier work on ground penetrators, it would have made a vast difference in what our troops would face and it might had saved the lives of many pilots and crews. This only slight risk bombing targets near to coast as compared to flying over much of Germany.

I find most Europeans are more or less clueless when it comes to the nature of the war in the Pacific, in the same way that most Americans are more or less clueless about the war in the Mediterranean. Normally, an American history of the war will devote 40-50% of its coverage of the war to events in the Pacific. I watched a British documentary on the war, and it spent approximately 6% of its run time on the Pacific war and less than half of that was on any of the events after the fall of Singapore. Less actually minutes were spent on the Pacific campaign than on the siege and defense of Malta (which in turn might get only a passing mention in an American history of the war). The impression you will get then if you use European sources is that the USA entered the war, and then dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan and that was the story of the Pacific theater. And without the context, the decision to drop nuclear bombs seems strange and unreasonable. It's necessary to study the actions and history of both sides to get to the inexorable and horrible logic that led to the decision to use the bomb.

@@celebrim1 True, I've found that the prevailing thought about WWII in the US is that "we won". That's often construed as "we" as in the US won but most folks lump the whole allied effort into the "we". But the narrative almost allways starts with D-Day, stops in Paris and ends in Bastogne and voila! WWII = Over. But America's "real" war was in the Pacific. From day one. Its first major campaigns were in the Pacific, it's greatest innovations came out of that theater and it's true enemy was Japan.

They probably would have simply destroyed the airfield facilities with bombing raids as they had already done and otherwise left the garrison to rot with no supply. With hindsight available to us about the terrain the effort and expenditure required to have an effective bombardment would not have been considered worth it. You'll see some level of apologism about the battle trying to find some kind of silver lining to glean from it, but in truth the capture of the airfield had very limited utility for the war effort. This is understandable because it can be really hard to accept that so much was lost for what amounted to almost nothing. All of that said, it's one thing to make decisions when you know their outcome, it's another matter entirely to make them when you don't. We can talk about who said what and who wanted what, but at the end of the day they had no way of knowing what the island was like without boots on the ground and even with every ship slated for the bombardment and a full 10 days of hell letting loose there is little indication that it would have made an appreciable difference. Ultimately, they made their decisions and in another circumstance on another island it might have turned out another way.

I highly doubt it. The radiation risk was known to the Manhattan project, they wouldn’t have dropped any bombs where they would later have to deploy troops. The island was of strategic value and had to remain occupied by the allies. It would be like peeing all over your bed before bedtime, except with deadly radiation.

@@joshlampe3458 Why deploy troops there are at all. One of the primary reasons for taking the island at is that it was "in the way". The base acted as an emergency landing strip not a full on airfield. I'd like to see someone reason how little lives it would have taken for it to have been worth it to assault an obvious trap in hindsight.

There is one point that is often (almost always) missed when talking about how few pilots ended using Iwo as an emergency strip. If the war had gone on and the mainland invaded, it would have been used much, much more than it was. Who would have known that two "super weapons" would remove the need to invade mainland? If we had thought there would be thousands of sortee to the mainland, we would have also wanted an emergency strip. They just didn't know the future.

No the civilians were the target of the nuke not soldiers. Specifically the high Catholic population in the 2 cities, which were the top 2 for Japanese Catholics at the time Our President just happened to be a Freemason, who according to the Alta Vandeta from the Freemasons themselves are the enemies of the Church.

Sounds like the western front in 1914-18...

Lindy beige did a whole video on bombardment alone, and some of its shortcomings .

@@brennab2697that was a good video 👍

Still haven't

Thank you for item #1, which deserves more attention than it usually gets. Even given that Japanese guns had been pre-zeroed in to specific target points, it seems like taking away their clear view of the beach would have made it much harder to know exactly when to fire to hit actual concentrations of men and supplies, and to observe the fall of shot to adjust their aim. Regarding the trajectory of naval gunfire being too flat, by 1944 couldn’t most ships’ guns be elevated enough to provide plunging fire? Didn’t Bismarck (probably) destroy HMS Hood with such fire three years earlier?

I thought almost the same thing about having “ground truth.” I agree that advanced raids by special forces would have helped the main invasion. However it’s hard for me to know if most of the forward recon units would have been killed by the time any main force arrived to relieve them. So anyway to slice it, a lot of soldiers were going to die on Iwo Jima.

@@jesseeswain3079 the lead up that came before Normandy in June 1944 showed what proper recon looks like. After the failed Dieppe the planners knew they had to ensure beaches will support vehicles. When the Underwater Demolition teams began preparation for the landings on Iwo, some Japanese positions opened fire early. The positions were identified and engaged by the shore bombardment force. Since only 1 beach offered landing ground and the Japanese knew we were coming I see it is a failure of planning to not keep probing the defenses. They only assumed the defenders were dead and in disarray.

Umm .. it's a tiny island with tens of thousands Japan soldier stationed there. The island was swarmed with Japan soldier that any reconnaissance men would be easily detected and eliminated.

@@gorilladisco9108 hence they would know the bombardment was ineffective

More to come!

Yes the commanding General of Okinawa had managed to fight the U.S . Forces to near standstill only ro be convinced by his subordinares that a banzai attack had to be made for yhe honor of the Imperial Army I guess. So stupid! After that unsuccessful foray the Japanese garrison's fate was sealed. So stupid, so unnecessary!

Glad it was helpful!

Today’s thermobaric bombs would’ve also been very effective, but at this point in time, they were in infancy stages

Not knowing where those bunkers are could pose a problem too.

If i'm not mistaken, the general idea at the time was that they would have to invade Mainland Japan itself. So in that scenario, Iwo Jima would've been vital.

They were also using planes from this island’s airbase to harass bombers

Using Iwo as a fighter base was only half the reason for its invasion. It was also intended to be used as an emergency landing airfield for B-29s returning to the Marianas after bombing Japan that were damaged or short on fuel. Hundreds of USAAF air crew members that would have had to bail out over the ocean or ditch in the Pacific have a very biased view on the value of invading and capturing Iwo Jima.

Why when they had Okinawa much closer

@@michaeldavid6284 March 4 the first B-29 made an emergency landing, By the end of hostilities, 36 Superforts had landed on Iwo Jima.

Gee, we'll never know.

Except that back in WWI one of the earliest learnings about artillery bombardment was that it was mostly good to keep the enemy's head down. Even massed guns were only just able to break the Liege forts and Vaux and Duamont still had to be taken hand to hand even with the mincer in full effect. This was heavy land artillery with massive supply and ammo dumps sat behind a huge and intact rail network. No naval bombardment was going to do more than bounce the sand on top of completed defenses.

Can't hit what you cannot see.

Hey it's good to have a worthy adversary. It makes for a more epic tale. The Battle of Iwo Jima is the stuff of legend today. Our Marines are all better for it now too.

you should look up fort drum, its a very similar story

Imagine a 16 inch round of AP or HE hitting your bunker. It was about the efficiency of the gun and projectile, more about tactics and intelligence.

These days you could just spend a week or so flying drones,collapsing all the tunnel entrances you found, rinse and repeat.

@@crabmansteve6844 You've got to find the tunnel entrance. This Island might seem small, but try walking such an area. Small is relative,

They're called Cruise missiles.

I expect that those types of munitions would have been more effective, but the US forces didn’t have a full understanding of what they were facing. By the time they did know, it was too late.

Weebish comment tbh

And died in drives because of it.

@@chuckbuckbobuck you must meen "droves"... And yes they died in droves,because you must be very strong Mentaly,knowing that you gonna die,and not even finch for a second to think abaut that . It needs a very strong man,to not care abaut his own life,just with the purpose of defending his own beliefs till the end no matter how. Like the bushido code says " Death is light like a feather,duty is heavy like a mountain". Strong and Brave man.

@@jpmtlhead39 Pardon the typo! Yes droves. The glory of dying for the Emperor. Concept way beyond me to wrap my head around but a tragedy to me-all the wasted life! I just saw a picture of a pile of Japanese corpses from Tarawa that I had never seen before and it was so sad-all nice looking Japanese men in the prime of their lives now expired and ready to be bulldozed in a massive pitt as there was no time to properly bury them and putrification happens pretty quick in the tropical sun so away they went pushed in a mass grave and smoldering in anonymity for eternity. SOME GLORY TO THE EMPEROR!

@@chuckbuckbobuck yes,its a concept that only strong will driven individuals can accept has part of their lifes in this Earth.