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In February 1945, some 80,000 U.S. Marines attacked the heavily defended fortress that the Japanese had constructed on the tiny Pacific island of Iwo Jima. Leaders of the Army Air Forces said they needed the airfields there to provide fighter escort for their B-29 bombers. At the cost of 28,000 American casualties, the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions dutifully conquered this desolate piece of hell with a determination and sacrifice that have become legendary in the annals of war, immortalized in the photograph of six Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi.
But the Army Air Forces’ fighter operations on Iwo Jima subsequently proved both unproductive and unnecessary. After the fact, a number of other justifications were generated to rationalize this tragically expensive battle. Ultimately, misleading statistics were presented to contend that the number of lives saved by B-29 emergency landings on Iwo Jima outweighed the cost of its capture.
In The Ghosts of Iwo Jima, Captain Robert S. Burrell masterfully reconsiders the costs of taking Iwo Jima and its role in the war effort. His thought-provoking analysis also highlights the greater contribution of Iwo Jima’s valiant dead: They inspired a reverence for the Marine Corps that proved critical to its institutional survival and its embodiment of American national spirit. From the 7th War Loan Campaign of 1945 through the flag-raising at Ground Zero in 2001, the immortal image of Iwo Jima has become a symbol of American patriotism itself.
Burrell’s searching account of this fabled island conflict will advance our understanding of World War II and its continuing legacy for the twenty-first century. At last, the battle’s ghosts may unveil its ultimate, and most crucial, lessons.
- Sales Rank: #1037846 in Books
- Published on: 2011-11-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.02" h x .64" w x 5.98" l, .92 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 280 pages
Review
"[Burrell's] analysis and conclusions will revolutionize current scholarship in this area and have a significant impact on a wide range of issues, including topics beyond Iwo Jima . . . This book should have a dramatic impact on scholarly and public views of the campaign and larger issues such as strategic planning and decision-making during the war."--Col. Jon T. Hoffman, USMCR, former deputy director of the Marine Corps History and Museum Division and author of "Chesty: The Story of Lt. Gen Lewis B. Puller"
Review
". . . this is the first book they should pick up if they want to seriously understand both the realities and the power of one of our most sacred icons."
From the Publisher
Burrell's searching account of this fabled island conflict will advance our understanding of World War II and its continuing legacy for the twenty-first century. At last, the battle's ghosts may unveil its ultimate, and most crucial, lessons.
Most helpful customer reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Intriguing thesis, but needs work.
By W. Armstrong
This should have been an important book, but it suffers from errors that invite serious revision. Burrell's main point is that the reasons Iwo was invaded (a fighter escort base being chief among them) were not worth the price paid, and that post-battle attempts to sugarcoat Marine losses (`Iwo eventually saved the lives of many more B-29 crewmen') are based in fallacy...not to mention that those excuses miss the point of the actual invasion.
This main portion of Burrell's argument seems to have the strongest weight: Iwo was seized as an escort fighter base at an enormous cost of life, and yet the fighter escorts based there are little more than a footnote in WWII history (in large part because of the switch from high-altitude daylight to low-level nighttime B-29 raids, and also because the Japanese possessed comparatively limited high-altitude fighter strength in the closing months of the war).
Beyond that, there are serious problems, many appearing to arise from a lack of familiarity with USAAF and USN operations (surprising, given that Burrell blames interservice rivalry for leading to Iwo's unnecessary invasion). These don't necessarily contradict Burrell's thesis, but they don't help it either.
Some of Burrell's arguments are made with the clear advantage of hindsight. Although there were other invasion targets available in the Bonins, Burrell himself states that intelligence indicated that Iwo was less-well defended, even if that was proved wrong. This makes the Iwo story more tragic, but one cannot necessarily condemn the decision to invade based on the intelligence available at the time (many wartime decisions relied on less-than-accurate intelligence). As Burrell himself points out, it is unlikely that the same Marine divisions slated for the Iwo invasion would have also been slated for the Okinawa invasion if Iwo had been expected to be a rough fight. This sets Iwo apart from, say, Peleliu, which arguably was invaded despite a clear indication that it was unnecessary well before the invasion began. Plus, it is doubtful that most commanders could have foreseen the limited utility of the P-51 fighter escorts in the Pacific, or the dramatic change in strategy caused by the limitations of high-altitude strategic bombardment of Japan for that matter, by the time Iwo was invaded. Air war planners were using the European experience as a model, and it took time to learn that Japan would be different. It must be remembered that the first successful low-level firebombing raid on Japan was launched three weeks after the Iwo invasion, and the tactic was a controversial one.
Other arguments are made with an apparent lack of familiarity with the big picture being discussed, particularly with regard to B-29 operations--especially when Burrell begins trying to calculate a more accurate estimate of the number of B-29 crews saved by making emergency landings on Iwo. For instance, the 15-plane 509th Composite Group becomes the 48-plane "509th Bomber Group" (no such unit) in Burrell's calculations, falsely inflating his tally of non-emergency "training" missions flown to Iwo. No mention is made of the fact that as the unit selected to deliver the atomic bomb, the 509th was hardly a representative USAAF unit. Meanwhile, falsely deflating his training-flight tally, the 73rd Bomb Wing with perhaps 192 planes is reduced to the 48-plane "73rd Bombardment Group" in Burrell's calculations (no such unit, and O'Donnell was the wing, not group, commander). In short, many of his calculations are wrong, and in fact if corrected and taken together might result in more landings on Iwo than have ever been reported, undermining his claim that Iwo didn't really save that many B-29 crews. He may still be right, but the miscalculations are such that it is impossible to tell.
Furthermore, Burrell seems dismissive of the B-29's range limitations, the unexpected weather that inhibited early high-level raids and caused excessive use of fuel, and the plane's temperamental engines ("the bomber could actually fly on just two"). When he dismisses many of the Iwo B-29 landings--"more than 80 percent"--as being "simply for refueling," he does not appear to consider the fact that in many cases that fuel may have been a necessity--the B-29s were being sent on missions that had them at the maximum extent of their range. Burrell never located a definitive tally of total landings on Iwo, and never addresses the question of how many of the refueling-only stops likely prevented certain loss of a bomber due to fuel starvation. He also does not address the role of Iwo in planning for the atomic bomb missions. Burrell at times seems dismissive of the problem-plagued B-29 force as a whole, seeming to argue that the bombing campaign had little value except as the Air Force's means of playing a decisive role in the victory. While strategic bombardment was an Air Force preoccupation that certainly did have enormous costs and limitations, that type of thinking seems to neglect the big picture, and the question of how the war would have progressed without the use of the B-29s.
Burrell's analysis is also based on ideas that some might find controversial, such as Sherry's criticisms of American strategic bombardment, the notion that seeking the unconditional surrender of Japan was unnecessary, and the argument that the ferocity of the Iwo Jima fight intensified Japanese resolve to the point that the atomic bombs were necessary to acheive unconditional surrender (I seriously question whether Iwo Jima, in the grand scheme of things, changed the nature of Japan's outlook on the war in any meaningful way, even if it may have captured the public's attention as no prior battle had; if not Iwo, there would still have been Okinawa). At times it feels as if Burrell is content to call the Pacific War "done" with the seizure of the Marianas and the blockade of Japan. Perhaps in hindsight he is right, but it is difficult to imagine any Allied military commander making that argument in early 1945.
Burrell may indeed be right in many of his arguments, but he needs to come up with more accurate and complete information and a more balanced analysis to prove it. Until then, this book is primarily useful as a reminder of the original reasons that Iwo was invaded, rather than as an assessment of the invasion's value.
30 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
The ghosts of Iwo Jima are alive and well.
By Robert E. Allen
From those first words, "On the morning of 19 February 1945," through the final sentence, "The specters finally came home, and through the flag raising image, they will revisit our nation for eternity," I found myself glued to the written pages of Burrell's "The Ghosts of Iwo Jima. It is profoundly well written and thoroughly researched. Although the book contains little new information, it brings many things into proper context. Unfortunately, from the beginning I had the sensation the writer was pursuing his own agenda, and that was to condemn the Iwo Jima Campaign as unnecessary.
His analysis of the cost in human life versus the value of the island to the United States in winning the war left no doubt in the mind of the readers that the taking of Iwo Jima was questionable. However, other than to state that the Air Force felt they needed Iwo Jima as an airfield from which to provide fighter escort, there is no examination of the reasoning behind the decision to take Iwo Jima. The planners recognized a number of other advantages in having Iwo Jima and all of Nanpo Shoto under American control.
Burrell's failure to lift up the many benefits derived from having Iwo Jima in American hands does a disservice to the 6,821 men making the ultimate sacrifice on Iwo Jima. Their sacrifice was not in vain!!
Inter-service rivalry did raise its ugly head from time to time, but the four branches of services were dependent on each other. This rivalry never threatened their collective effort in their determination to bring the war in the Pacific to a victorious end. The Navy, Army, Army Air Force and the Coast Guard worked hand in hand with the Marine Corps in the capture of Iwo Jima. Burrell's notion that either General Arnold or General LeMay put the interests of the Air Force over defeating the enemy is not believable.
I hope other historians will reevaluate the emergency landings on Iwo and bring the benefit derived from those landings into proper perspective.
I have always credited Korean war Marines like General Ray Davis with preserving the Marine Corps we have today. As a survisor of the Iwo conflict, it gives me a warm feeling to think we, too, may have helped save the Corps as we know it today.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Lessons For Today
By D. Murray
Plain and simple, Robert Burrell indicts the Marine Corps Iwo Jima battle as a wasted effort. Burrell details how some of the top leaders of the US Navy, Army and Air Force planned a campaign with inadequate forces and poor strategy. A costly and bloody mistake was after the fact justified as military nescessity.
Burrell makes an excellent case for the sacrifice of Marines on Iwo as a crucible which formed the Corps into a permanent American institution. Bringing the Ghost of Iwo Jima into the light of today, Burrell illustrates the folly of poor leadership at the highest levels and how inter-service politics led to tragedy. The USMC emerges as both the victim and victor of Ghosts. A great read.
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