Marine Corps Lessons Learned. 
Spoke Sunday 30 with Major General Fred Haynes, USMC (ret.), author with James A. Warren the new and stunning memoir, "The Lions of Iwo Jima: The Story of Combat Team 28 and the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history," and again listened to unbelievable facts of the relentless massacre of the battle for Iwo Jima in February and March of 1945.
Fred Haynes is one of the few remaining with us of the survivors of the outfit that was tasked to land on the island on D-Day and capture the massively fortified Mt. Suribachi at the southern tip of the porkchop-shaped island. He was operations officer of about 3200 Marines of Combat Team 28, and in the first hour, 0859 hours February 19, a sunny, easy day, he was in a free boat directing traffic as the landing craft touched on Green Beach (right, with Suribachi, several weeks after the capture). The mission was to cross the neck of the island, about 600 yards, cut off the naked rocky 554 foot high plateau of Mt. Suribachi, and then attack south to capture the high ground that the Japanese were using as spotting to direct artillery fire upon all the Marines of the island. The first fifty minutes of the operation went along smoothly, with Marine assault teams trudging heavily through the deep black sand and preparing to move out onto the rock. It was a trap. The Japanese defenders were ordered to hold fire until CT 28, and CT 27 just below it, were crowded into the narrow beach zones. Then the gunfire began in a steady rain that did not cease for weeks. The Japanese spotters knew to wait for Marines to crowd into shell holes before ordering rounds to kill as many as possible. The casualty rate from the first barrage was ruinous, and eventually CT 28 would take 70% casualties of killed and wounded of the initial deployment. There was no retreat possible, no flanking possible; the only tactic was straight on assault by infanty in order to destroy dug in enemy firing positions, with every step under enemy guns and peppered by incoming artillery fire. Iwo Jima is a very small, black sand atoll. It was defended in February 1945 by 22,000 Japanese army soldiers, led by the determined samurai descendant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who had directed his engineers to construct eleven miles of underground tunnels connecting concrete reinforced bunkers, pill boxes, redoubts. The island was a warren of firing positions and traps, and the defenders were spiritually committed, according to the then bizarre and irrational army cult of
manhood, to perishing on the island. The Japanese soldiers were told to kill ten Marines for
every one of their loses, and, as Fred Haynes told me, they came close to this rate in the first few days. Capturing Suribachi was a battle within the larger battle, and for four days CT 28 threw its combat teams, tanks and artillery against the rocky high ground. The defenders were not actually on the plateau: they were dug in around the base of the hill north and south, and it was necessary for CT 28 to advance under machine gun and mortar fire, fully in the open, to capture the rings of positions. The Japanese fought savagely and so did the Marines. Surrender was rare, and the few captured Japanese were taken before they could kill themselves or throw themselves unarmed at the Marine fire. The Japanese dragged their dead and dying from the field at night and threw the bodies into caves, where mounds of corpses were eventually discovered, in order to deny the Marines a sense of achievement the next day. Wounded Marines were stacked up on Green BEach waiting for evacuation when shell fire would walk through the living and dying and scatter body parts on the black sand.
The world famous Joe Rosenthal (right) photograph of men of CT 28 raising the American flag on Suribachi was actually the second flag-raising that morning of February 23. The first was on a broken pipe at hand used for a pole for the first flag, and it was considered too small for men below on the island to see (right, see both flags at once). But that moment, now the iconic center of the Marine Corps, was just the beginning of the tragedy; and three of the six men in the second photograph would not survive the next five weeks of hand to hand comba to secure the island. Ahead for Fred Haynes and CT 28, and the more than 100,000 Marines and Navy who battled the defenders, was the worst, bloodiest, costliest and still most controversial battle the Marines have fought to date. What was it for? At the time, FDR approved the Navy decision that the island could not be bypassed, that the airfields on Iwo Jima were necessary to keep up the steady B-29 bombing of the Japanese homeland in order to force surrender. Eventually, when the fire-bombings and high explosive bombings of the Japanese cities and military did not move the military dictatorship cult to surrender in what was a doomed resistance, the liberated Iwo Jima was used as a support field for the atomic bomb sent to Nagasaki. Ernie Tibbets flying the Enola Gay rendezvoused with the two support aircraft right over the island on their way to the strike. However at war's end, the questions came again why the sacrifice and madness of Iwo Jima was required. The question continues and is a hard lesson of Iwo Jima. Why the US sends its people into battle must be clear, even 63 years later, it must be clear. Fred Haynes writes that none of the men he knows who survived Iwo Jima doubted Harry Truman's decision to use the atomic weapons. The estimates for American casualties for an invasion of the homeland were unacceptable but blunt. My father, Lt. Calvin R. Batchelor, was designated to ship from Europe to the Pacific for the invasion and well might not have survived, which means that I would not be writing this what-if. Still, to read of the five weeks of cruelty and death is hard without asking what did it achieve? The best case is to say that the casualties on Iwo Jima, and Okinawa soon after, helped convince Harry Truman that the invasion of the homeland must be a last resort and that the atomic weapons were logical and justifiable. Even today this is still a contentious logical and a negative lesson. What positive lesson learned? Fred Haynes provided me a most surprising turn in the course of our conversation. What he and the Marines discovered on Iwo Jima was the positive lesson of treating prisoners of war with humanity and dignity in order to save American lives.
Fred Haynes, Jim Jones and GITMO.
The surprise of the conversation with the charming Fred Haynes was to learn that he is passionate about the human treatment of POWS and has been campaigning for more
than two years to press this point with all presidential candidates. He and forty other general officers have briefed all the major players, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John McCain, and have good prospect to get their thinking applied in the new administration. Chiefly, Fred told me they want GITMO closed, secret prisons abolished, and torture by proxy ruled out. Fred Haynes made his case to the candidates, and now to the president-elect and the secretary of state nominee, by telling the story of Master Sergeant Taizo Sakai, who was captured by CT 28 on MArch 17, 1945. Sakai was General Kuribiyashi's chief code clerk. Sakai was also educated and sophisticated, a graduate of Tokyo University, and understood the futulity and waste of the Japanese self-destruction. Sakai surrendered to Lt. Fio Lopardo, a Notre Dame graduate. They could not communicate until Sakai and Lopardo realized they were both school taught French speakers. Because CT 28 treated Sakai well, he not only assisted the Marines with ending the fighting in the last four insane days killing in Bloody Gorge at the north tip of the island, but eventually was a beacon for other Japanese soldiers who understood that their place in the future of Japan was more important than their destruction. Fred Haynes speaks persuasively today that the lesson of Sakai is critical to understand why GITMO is wrong for the war on terror. Fred Hayes also told me that he is close friends with General Jim Jones, (above) USMC (ret), who recommends this book as 32nd Commandant of the Marine Corps, and who is now named by President-Elect Obama to be the National Security Adviser in the new administration beginning January. Fred Hayes is of a mind to say that the closing of GITMO is a vital step in war-fighting, and that he believes the president-elect's inaugural speech will contain a simple sentence that GITMO will be closed immediately, with the concurrence of the Marine Corps. The lesson of Iwo Jima today (below, Suribachi memorial) will then go into the new conduct of the war on the jihadists, who fight with the same futility and delusions as did the doomed defenders on Iwo Jima.
What's the alternative? To kill everything that moves immediately? To surrender any chance we have at securing intel? To let them continue killing us until they have an epiphany and start liking us?
Yesterday it was “India Security” that was at fault for the Mumbai massacre. Today it's the media (see "Media Narratives Feed Terrorist Fantasies" by Bret Stephens in today's WSJ.) Soon, we will blame America. (Oh, excuse me. That field has already been hoed. Yesterday's WSJ again, “Deepak Blames America" by Dorothy Rabinowitz.) Surely, Bush's turn on the hot seat will be next. And we might even find enough additional reasons and culprits (like Gitmo, Israel, Mohammed with a funny hat, etc. to fill the papers and take us through all the days until the next attack, when we can mercifully reset and start the game all over again.
Oh, I forgot to tell you: It's against the rules of this game to blame Islamist extremists. Do that - you lose automatically.
My uncle, my mother's sister's husband, was a Navy Yeoman at Iwo. He was with a Navy personnel detachment commanded by a Navy Captain.
They came up after the first wave and set up card tables with manual type-writers to prepare the casualty reports and the awards citations for the Marines.
As it turned out, there were a great many of both.
Periodically, Japanese shells would land. The black sand tended to reduce fragmentation and blast effect. The Navy Captain would say, "F#(}
His granddaughter, who is 8, was recently pleasantly informed by the "World War II" documentary that we had held the Canal and that we won on Iwo. I was pleased to tell her of her grandfather's contribution.
If we want information, there are other ways to get it that generally work better.
Of course, what is torture? Is broadcasting braying rabbits being slaughtered over loudspeakers in the practice of sleep deprivation? Is playing Barney the dinosaur's theme song (I love you, you love me) constantly into the solitary cell of a potential informer who may have some knowledge we could use to save lives? Is water- boarding? Let's reflect on how they have tortured ours and the unknown innocent ones. Oh right, I forgot, they do despicable deeds because we don't understand them and because we make them do these terrible things and they really aren't bad people at all. We are the devils and the "mean" ones .
And how many of these Islamists that have been released in prisoner swaps and bargains have returned to the fight and been recaptured or killed because their religious ideology requires that they fight on. What is the solution to that? Can they be rehabilitated and brought back from their practice in the cult of death? It just doesn't sound very smart to open the prisons and let the prisoners return to the same practices of making war against their sworn enemy that just released them to return to the same practices of making war, etc, etc, ad infinitum...
Yeah, it so nice and really fluffy and cuddly to think about being civil to an enemy. But, then they start coming at you in waves and are hell bent on your destruction or they send commandos to march into public places where women and children are shopping or playing and they start shooting everybody and blowing things up.
Sound familiar? Which war? It's all the wars ever fought. Are we at war or not? If we are then destroy the enemy with all resource. If we aren't, then why "Can't we all just get along?"
"...[T]heir place in the future of Japan was more important than their destruction."
Iwo Jima was a brutal battle won by the fearless and unflinching U.S. Marines. The lesson gained from the battle is most valuable: showing respect builds rather than destroys the future.
Hmm Theo
What do you mean "showing respect builds rather than destroys" is a valuable lesson? This is contrary to the hand to hand, tunnel entry to tunnel entry, cove by cove, nest by nest, inch by inch reality of Iwo. The respect shown amounted to the same as respecting the situation one is in while walking up to a nest that has been raining lead on you and your friends all night and day for weeks and they just will not stop. Yep, one respects that when walking upon that ground and knowing you have to torch them out because they just will not stop.
I'm not sure what you meant by most everything you wrote. Sorry, trying to understand.
So, when enemy combatants are captured on a battleground, what is their destination?
Take their playthings and send them home to Mama? Make good friends with them and cook up some bar-b?
If there are no incarceration and interrogation points, what do you do with them?
Marry your sister?
UBL has a fatwa that states 5 million innocent people is an acceptable casualty for a single event. That's 5 million of elderly, of women and children, of Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Atheist, Jewish, any "ist" or "ism" you can think of for the furtherance of the ideology of a one "ism." And he can still get to heaven accordingly, or, so say these maniacs.
This Kasab POS says 5 thousand was their goal... they are failures then and should be denied whatever it was they were promised, right? What do you do with someone like that? No one likes slacker pieces of sh*t. Plastic surgery (at the expense of taxpayers)?
Security for the rest of his life? What if his role was to be the voice of diversion and it was intended that he survived and talked?
I have some suggestions what to do with him... but, then maybe he can change all his buddie's minds and they can create a whole new wonderful existence for themselves. In that case, my first thought is compromised. NOT!
Maybe it's just late but I really fail to see a solid connection between Iwo and Gitmo, 'cept they both end in "o". I support the immediate closure of Gitmo, because those men should have been tried and convicted long since if there were sufficient evidence to do it. Sure there may be a few bad eggs in there. So let 'em out, follow 'em, wait until they connect with their old buddies in al-Qaida, and then kill the whole bunch at great savings to the American taxpayer. Some small part of my income taxes is going towards feeding both the guards and the prisoners at Gitmo. I miss the good old days where you could simply turn an entire to city to glass and end a war very promptly and neatly.