World War II: The Battle of Iwo Jima - The Unnecessary Battle, Marine Corps Public Affairs, Flag Raising Photograph, Military Campaign, Lessons for Today, Mythological Reverence of the Heroic Battle

These excellent reports have been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. Iwo Jima: The Unnecessary Battle posits that Iwo Jima could have been taken with substantially fewer casualties if the Navy had established a blockade of the island and targeted a vital resource for Japanese survival. In February and March of 1945 the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history was waged on a small island 700 miles from Tokyo, Japan known as Iwo Jima. Joe Rosenthal's iconic photograph of the flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi would serve as a rallying cry for America and a representation of the Marine Corps and the war in the Pacific. With an estimated 24,000 U.S. casualties and over 21,000 dead Japanese, those involved in the planning of the campaign have cemented in history that the island had to be taken for fighter aircraft escorts of strategic bombers trying to end the war. In reality it can be shown that the necessity for taking the island was severely diminished by February 1945 and that divergent strategies by three General Officers led to the battle for the island. Almost all the objectives for taking the island as listed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff were met prior to any Marine setting foot on the volcanic sand. The lack of a unified command and service rivalry blinded those involved in conducting the operation. Along with prior experiences from air battles in Germany and resultant poor bomber tactics, the solution to winning the war seemed to lie with the airfields of Iwo Jima. With the dominance of the Navy, Army Air Force, and a weakening Japanese defense network a naval blockade could have accomplished four of the five Joint Chiefs of Staff objectives necessitating Iwo Jima. The fifth reason would be met a short time later when the Marines took Okinawa. Even if the island had to be taken, those involved missed targeting the most critical resource on the island; water. The only source of water on the island was rain water collected in large cisterns. By directly targeting the visible and unprotected concrete water cisterns on the island during a naval blockade, the Japanese would have been forced to surrender or die of dehydration. Iwo Jima would be nothing more than a passing note in history vice the mythological reverence it receives today if naval guns had sought to break the concrete on cisterns instead of pillboxes. Even the most vocal argument in history that 24,000 airmen were saved because of the Marines falls apart with a detailed look at the B-29 landings that took place on the islands. While the bravery and valor of the island is to be celebrated and mourned, the battle should have never been fought.
Conclusion: A constant update of operational objectives must be made prior to the possible sacrifice of American blood and treasure. Iwo Jima is a story of heroism, both American and Japanese; however, that heroic and horrific battle should never have taken place.

Marine Public Affairs and the Battle of Iwo Jima submits that the Marine Corps used aggressive public affairst to take one of the bloodiest battles in its history and turn it into an icon of military valor. The battle for Iwo Jima was bloody and a strong argument can be made that had the United States used different tactics, it might have suffered fewer casualties. It is often believed that the U.S. media during World War II was accepting of high casualties and the censorship of the Allied military judgment. A review of the literature, however, shows that the media did ask the hard questions and did analyze the actions of our military. However, by aggressively trying to accommodate the media combined with open honesty, Marine Corps public affairs "won-over" most media objections.