U.S. vets, Japanese mark anniversary of Iwo Jima

This reminds me of the beautiful but sad protest song, "The Ballad of Ira Hayes". Ira Hayes was a Pima Indian and one of the five Marines and one Navy Corpsman who became famous for having raised the flag on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima.

The U.S. wanted the airfields for its fighter escort planes.

It also wanted the airfields for B29s too damaged by anti-aircraft fire to make it back to their bases in Guam, Saipan and Tinian.

An older cousin of my wife vanished somewhere unknown during the Pacific War. One day my wife and I were visiting Yasukuni Shrine here in Tokyo when we decided to go into the compound's war registration office where the names of most or all of the WWII Japanese soldiers are kept. We checked on her cousin and found that his last duty station was Iwo Jima. So that presumably is where he met his fate and probably remains today.

Nice both sides can get tougher in friendship and peace.

Let's move on.

Way to exclude any and all mention of the Comfort Women and the forced Korean laborers who suffered the most on Iwo Jima.

Q1: How many comfort women were on the island? (something a bit shy of 28,000, I would imagine)

Q2: How can you suffer "the most" when over 28,000 people lost their lives - sometimes after hours and even days of a slow and lingering death? Kind of hard to suffer more than dying.

Kind of hard to suffer more than dying.

Its not the fall that kills you, its the sudden stop at the end. But the length of the fall surely equals more terror. The battle only lasted about a month. Who knows what hell sex slaves and other slave laborers suffered in the months prior? Raped repeatedly until dying of a veneral disease? Sounds worse than dying of a bullet wound, especially when probably have a sidearm handy to put yourself out of your own misery.

I am going to agree that civilian and slave deaths deserve more mention than the deaths of soldiers who abused them.

Ah gents, there were no civilians on the island. The civilian population was evacuated by force in July 1944. There were no sex slave, conscripted workers, etc. There was no suicide cliffs, they were on other islands.

In reality, these tunnels that Japanese dug up were very small and very dark, with only a handful of them lit at all. Also, the tunnels were infested with rodents and insects. The living conditions involves the stench of sulfur on Iwo Jima. The smell in the tunnels probably was unbearable. Iwo Jima was a large base, so comfort women would have been important to the island.

melonbarmonster, everything had to be brought in to the island. There was no supplies for them. The Japanese troops did all of the labor. Please give me some sources. If that many were on island, the Americans would of found a lot of their bodies. There is no report of such. How about the reports of many Japanese remains without heads?

Anyhow this is a touching story of Americans and Japanese meeting on an old battlefield.

Its really not so surprising that the soldiers can become friends. There was no personal grudge between them, no real one anyway. All they had to do was erase government propaganda from their minds, and there was plenty on both sides.

What is amazing is that they fell for the propaganda in the first place. Sadly, people still keep doing it, and people falling for government lies, like the Japanese did, is the primary reason we can have large scale organized wars.

If people would just smarten up, and refuse to join the military unless their country is under direct attack, governments could not give us war. Even for America, WWII was the last war of actual defense, and the last war that I can honor American soldiers for fighting. The only exception is the token few who only went after al-Quaida in Afghanistan, and those days are long gone.

Have you people ever heard of the draft? Large numbers of people on both sides were ordered into the military, and America was attacked. My ex wife had an Uncle who died in the Imperial Army during WWII, probably in Manchuria.

Seavey: Its really not so surprising that the soldiers can become friends. There was no personal grudge between them, no real one anyway.

That's really true. At the beginning of WWII in Europe, casualties were surprisingly low on both sides (my father was a tank commander there). Turns out that often the boys who had just graduated from high school really couldn't see themselves killing someone their own age, so casualties were low compared to the amount of ammunition used (they shot but deliberately missed). Of course, that changed as the war went on.

Given the current restrictions around Iwo To, it is gratifying to see that some American veterans are still allowed to visit and pay their respects there. The harsh and stark environs on Iwo Jima apparently did not discourage some hardcore Imperial soldiers from holding out for years on this volcanic isle. The last two soldiers from Lt. Ohno's squad eventually gave up in 1951, after six long years of living in caves and waiting for a counterinvasion from the Mainland that never came.