Seventy-five years ago, U.S. naval and Japanese forces locked horns over a remote volcanic island in the western Pacific Ocean. The importance to both sides of Iwo Jima, which is about 800 miles south of Tokyo, was vastly out of proportion to the island’s size—only eight square miles. Strategically, the battle for Iwo Jima was part of the Allies’ global offensive against the Axis powers. In Europe, the Soviet Union and the Western Allies were poised to close in on Berlin from the east and west. In January 1945, General Douglas MacArthur continued a vengeful return to the Philippines by launching a massive amphibious invasion of Luzon. And Iwo Jima lay in the path of Admiral Chester A. Nimitz’s central Pacific drive toward Japan.
In October 1944, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had ordered Nimitz to mount invasions of Okinawa and Iwo Jima within the first four months of 1945. In what was code-named Operation Detachment, Nimitz ordered Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet to seize Iwo Jima to deny the enemy use of its airfields, which instead would be put into service for the U.S. Army Air Forces’ B-29 Superfortresses.1 Iwo Jima would serve the dual purpose of allowing fighter escorts to join B-29s flying from the Marianas toward Japanese Home Island targets, while also providing airstrips for emergency bomber landings on the return trip.
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