Sea, Air and the B-29s: Kamikazes, Fighters and the Emergency Field

On the afternoon of 4 March 1945 a crippled B-29 Superfortress named Dinah Might, returning from a raid over Tokyo, came down on the main airstrip of Iwo Jima while Marines were still fighting to the north. Its wing clipped a field telephone pole, and it rolled to a stop “less than 50 feet from the bitter end of the strip.” Within half an hour mechanics had made field repairs, and the pilot, Lt. Fred Malo, took the 65-ton bomber and his 10-man crew home to Tinian (Alexander, Closing In). The Marine monograph records it more plainly: the first damaged B-29 landed on Airfield No. 1 on D plus 13 (Bartley, p. 210). This final chapter steps back from the ridges to the sea and the sky: the fleet that carried and fed the landing force, the carriers and gunships that supported it, the kamikazes that struck it, the engineers who rebuilt the airfields under fire, and the argument, still alive, over what those airfields were worth. For the whole battle, see the Battle of Iwo Jima hub.

Why it mattered

Iwo Jima was taken for its airfields. The planners’ list of purposes, as Bartley gives it, began with the need to “provide fighter escort for very long range operations,” to supply fields for staging heavy bombers against Japan, and to give an intermediate base “where damaged bombers could find secure haven” (Bartley, p. 23). The Army Air Forces history puts it the same way: in American hands the island would be “an emergency landing field for B-29’s in distress” and “a staging field for northbound planes,” and the idea of seizing it came from “its potential value as an advanced base for the Twentieth Air Force” (Craven and Cate, ch. 19).

Before February 1945 the island also worked against the B-29s: fighters based there attacked unescorted bombers, and bombers flying from Iwo raided the Superfortress fields in the Marianas (Alexander, Closing In). The land battle told in the first eight chapters was in large part a fight for three strips of volcanic ash. This chapter sets out what the record does and does not support about what those strips were worth.

Terrain and objectives

Iwo Jima is about 4 2/3 miles long and 2 1/2 miles wide, roughly 7 1/2 square miles, about 660 nautical miles from Tokyo and 625 from Saipan. It had no harbor. Everything the Marines needed came over open, steep beaches of loose volcanic ash, open to the surf. The Japanese had built two airfields and begun a third. Airfield No. 1, called Motoyama No. 1 by the Japanese and later South Field by the Americans, lay on the plateau north of Mount Suribachi just inland from the eastern landing beaches. Airfield No. 2, later Central Field, sat on the higher central plateau. Airfield No. 3, unfinished, lay farther north near Motoyama village and later became part of North Field.

The airfield plan, WORKMAN, called for a 5,000-foot fighter runway on Airfield No. 1 by D plus 7 and fighter strips on the other two fields by D plus 10 and D plus 50, all 200 feet wide (Craven and Cate, pp. 594–596). The Marine plan gave Airfield No. 1 to the 62d Naval Construction Battalion and assigned the 31st Seabees to lengthen No. 2 to 7,000 feet for B-29s by D plus 10 (Bartley, pp. 33–34). The Japanese defense, which held the ground around No. 2 for more than a week, broke both schedules.

Before D-Day: the carriers over Japan and the bombardment, 16–18 February

Task Force 58 strikes the Tokyo area

While the support force opened fire on Iwo Jima, Spruance sent the fast carriers north. Bartley describes Mitscher’s Fast Carrier Force striking the Tokyo area as a covering action, meant to draw Japanese attention away from the Volcano-Bonin attack; the strike continued through the 17th, and Mitscher then withdrew to a point from which he could support Iwo Jima by 19 February (Bartley, p. 44). The Navy’s own summary says sixteen carriers closed to within 60 miles of the Japanese coast and launched the first carrier sweeps and strikes of the war over the home islands (NHHC, H-Gram 042). The Air Forces history notes the targets: on the 16th the Nakajima aircraft plant at Ota, on the 17th the Musashi engine plant at Tokyo; a third strike planned for the 18th was canceled for weather (Craven and Cate, ch. 19).

Mitscher took with him all eight Marine fighter squadrons then on the fast carriers, which the Marines resented. Task Force 58 came back for D-Day, when VMF-124 and VMF-213 under Lt. Col. William A. Millington flew from USS Essex and strafed the beaches just ahead of the assault waves, and then, Alexander writes, left “for good” two days later (Alexander, Closing In).

Three days of fire

The Marines had asked for ten days of preliminary bombardment and got three (Bartley, pp. 40–42), a story told in Chapter 1. Task Force 54, the Gunfire and Covering Force, was assigned 724 priority targets for “six old battleships, four heavy cruisers and one light cruiser,” and the support carrier group, Task Group 52.2, brought eleven escort carriers, among them Lunga Point and Bismarck Sea (pp. 42, 44). The Seventh Air Force had already bombed the island for 74 consecutive days (p. 39).

On 16 February low ceilings limited spotting and the damage appeared “negligible”; carrier planes flew 158 sorties (Bartley, p. 44). On the 17th the gunboats that covered the underwater demolition teams were savaged, as told in Chapter 1, and the heavy cruiser Pensacola was hit several times, suffering “extensive damage and 115 casualties” (p. 44). At 2130 on the 18th a single bomb struck the destroyer transport Blessman (APD-48) (p. 48). More than 100 Navy personnel were dead before the first Marine landed (NHHC, H-Gram 042). Brig. Gen. William W. Rogers complained, “We got about thirteen hours’ worth of fire support during the thirty-four hours of available daylight,” though Alexander notes the three days still delivered four times the shells fired at Tarawa (Alexander, Closing In).

How naval gunfire and air support worked

Ships on call, day and night

On D-Day the old battleship Nevada led the bombardment ships in as close as 2,000 yards, and a modified rolling barrage moved 400 yards ahead of the troops, paced by air spotters (Alexander, Closing In). Once the Marines were ashore the system became call fire: each maneuver unit had a cruiser or destroyer it could call through its shore fire control party, and Schmidt had “plenty of naval gun fire support available” even when he lacked corps artillery (Alexander, Closing In). By day the ships fired scheduled missions and calls from the front; by night, harassing and counterbattery fire and illumination (Bartley, pp. 203–204).

The volume was enormous. From D minus 3 through D plus 35 the ships fired 152,000 rounds of 5-inch common and 17,000 star shells; all ordnance larger than 40mm came to 291,300 rounds, or 14,250 tons (Bartley, p. 204). Garand and Strobridge give about 14,650 tons of naval ammunition, including 2,400 rounds of 16-inch (Garand and Strobridge, p. 610); the two counts likely differ in what they include, and neither should be added to the other. The record also has its failures. On the second day, Alexander writes, “misguided salvos from an unidentified gunfire support ship took down 90 more” Marines (Alexander, Closing In).

Bartley judged that almost all the blockhouses and pillboxes in the east coast landing area were knocked out before the assault, but the pillboxes between Airfields No. 1 and No. 2 were left largely untouched, and clearing that ground took eight days (Bartley, pp. 202–203). The most telling assessment came from the other side.

In their words

We need to reconsider the power of bombardment from ships.

Air support from the carriers

After the fast carriers left, Navy pilots from the escort carriers flew the close air support. Marines complained of “slow response time,” “light payloads (rarely greater than 100-pound bombs),” and “high delivery altitudes,” and napalm often failed to ignite (Alexander, Closing In). Bartley counts 341 missions from D-Day through D plus 24, with about 1,315 tons of bombs, 12,148 rockets and 456 napalm bombs; strikes sometimes arrived within 15 minutes of a request, but troops often waited more than an hour (Bartley, pp. 204–205).

Fighter-type aircraft of VOC-1 spotted for the guns, the first such extensive use in the Pacific, and once the airfields were usable the light planes of VMO-4 and VMO-5 flew from shore, even at night from unlit strips (Bartley, p. 205). The price in the air was real: antiaircraft fire, “moderate to intense” early in the operation, cost 26 aircraft lost and nine seriously damaged, and aircrew casualties came to 36, of whom 32 were killed or missing (Bartley, pp. 206–207).

21 February: the special attack

Late in the afternoon of D plus 2, Japanese aircraft reached the fleet. Bartley describes “an estimated 50 enemy planes” in a three-hour kamikaze attack (Bartley, p. 75), and Alexander writes that fifty pilots of a Mitate special attack unit flew from Katori airbase and all 50 planes were expended (Alexander, Closing In). The Navy’s H-Gram counts “about 28 aircraft on a 600-mile, one-way ‘special attack’ mission” (NHHC, H-Gram 042), and the Air Forces history describes about a dozen in a low-level attack on a carrier unit (Craven and Cate, ch. 19). The sources may be counting different things; the record does not settle it. It was the only significant Japanese air attack of the battle (Alexander, Closing In).

Saratoga

The old fleet carrier Saratoga (CV-3) was off Iwo Jima as a night carrier and had been assigned night patrols over the island (Wilgus, Naval History, 2025); Bartley notes that she carried the night tactical observers (Bartley, p. 206). The Naval History and Heritage Command says six Japanese aircraft attacked, “scoring five hits on the carrier in just three minutes,” wrecking the forward flight deck and starting large fires in the hangar (NHHC, USS Saratoga). Wilgus puts the first hits just after 1700 and a second wave at about 1814, when a bomb holed the flight deck. She lost 123 killed and 192 wounded (NHHC, H-Gram 042) and had to leave for repairs (Bartley, p. 75). She did not return to combat.

Bismarck Sea

The escort carrier Bismarck Sea (CVE-95) had just recovered aircraft from a strike when the attack came that evening. Her official history describes two planes. The first crashed near the after elevator, knocking torpedoes onto the hangar deck; the glow of that fire drew a second, which killed or mortally wounded the fire-fighting party and set off an explosion below. With gasoline feeding the fire, the captain ordered the ship abandoned, and after two hours of burning she rolled over and sank. Three destroyers and three destroyer escorts spent 12 hours picking up survivors from rough, cold water, where some men were also strafed (DANFS, Bismarck Sea). Wilgus gives about 1845 for the fatal hit, 1905 for the order to abandon ship, and 605 men rescued (Wilgus). She lost 318 men and was the last American aircraft carrier sunk in the Second World War (NHHC, H-Gram 042).

Lunga Point, Keokuk and LST 477

The escort carrier Lunga Point (CVE-94) was hit but kept operating, with “only minor damage” (Bartley, pp. 75–76; DANFS, Lunga Point). Just before sunset a torpedo bomber dove out of the clouds into the starboard side of the net cargo ship Keokuk (AKN-4), killing 17 and wounding 44 (DANFS, Keokuk). LST 477 was badly damaged but still unloaded on the beach before returning to Saipan (Bartley, p. 76).

By the numbers

21 February 1945: the cost at sea

Navy casualties on the three ships with published counts. Red bars are killed or lost; blue bars are wounded.

Bismarck Sea, lost318

Saratoga, killed123

Saratoga, wounded192

Keokuk, killed17

Keokuk, wounded44

Below the surface

Japan also sent submarines. Three boats each carried five Kaiten, the manned suicide torpedoes. I-368 and I-370 were sunk with their Kaiten and all hands, and I-44 escaped without launching. RO-43, on a conventional patrol, was also sunk with all hands (NHHC, H-Gram 042).

Over the beaches: logistics, LSTs and the shore party

An amphibious assault lives on what crosses the beach, and at Iwo Jima the beach was the problem. Larger landing craft had trouble grounding on the steep, soft slope. On D plus 1, one observer wrote, “For two miles the debris was so thick” that boats could barely land; causeways and pontoon barges broached in the surf; and the seas grew “too rough” for the 21st Marines, who went back to their ships (Alexander, Closing In). Tugs pulled stranded LSTs and LSMs free, and unloading went on around the clock (Garand and Strobridge, p. 601).

Amphibian vehicles carried the load the boats could not. LVTs and DUKWs ran supplies in and casualties out, though Alexander records that inexperienced LST crews often refused after dark to lower their bow ramps for the tractors and DUKWs coming alongside (Alexander, Closing In). Marston matting (pierced steel plank) and armored bulldozers got vehicles across the ash, and Bartley quotes a Captain Anderson’s judgment that they “contributed materially to the success of the landing” (Bartley, pp. 196–197).

The shore party mixed Seabees of the 133d and 31st Naval Construction Battalions, Army port and DUKW companies and Marine depot troops, under V Amphibious Corps control from D plus 6 (Garand and Strobridge, p. 602). General unloading began that day, and the western beaches opened to small craft on D plus 11 (Bartley, p. 198).

The only serious shortage was ammunition: artillery and mortars used up the seven units of fire carried in the assault shipping, and minor shortages were filled by air from Saipan, the Marine Corps’ first extensive use of air resupply (Bartley, pp. 198–199).

The wounded: hospital ships, LSTs and the first air evacuation

The medical plan assigned the hospital ships Samaritan and Solace, the hospital transport Pinkney and the landing ship Ozark as an auxiliary hospital ship, with Bountiful scheduled later. Four hospital LSTs, LST(H)s, were to lie 2,000 yards off the beaches as evacuation control centers, sorting casualties to the ships. The Marianas had 5,000 beds waiting (Bartley, p. 34). On the night Lt. Col. Justice Chambers was wounded at the Quarry, he went out on a DUKW “making the evening’s last run out to the hospital ships” (Alexander, Closing In).

Ashore, the Army’s 38th Field Hospital landed on 25 February and a 200-bed Navy evacuation hospital opened on Purple Beach on D plus 6. The hospital LSTs were released on D plus 9, and serious cases then went straight from shore to “hospital ships and transports” (Garand and Strobridge, pp. 603–604). About 12,600 pints of whole blood were used, flown in by seaplane until 8 March and then on the evacuation planes (Bartley, p. 194; Garand and Strobridge, p. 604).

Air evacuation began as soon as a strip could take a transport. On 2 March an R4D (the Navy’s version of the C-47) of an air evacuation squadron left Iwo Jima with 12 wounded Marines (Garand and Strobridge, p. 597). By D plus 14 more than 9,500 casualties had been evacuated, 125 of them by air (p. 604). Bartley’s final totals are 13,737 casualties evacuated by sea and 2,449 flown to the Marianas. Flight surgeons screened each patient before takeoff, and no one died aboard the planes (Bartley, p. 194). The medical people paid with their own: doctors and corpsmen suffered 738 casualties, 197 of them killed (Bartley, p. 195).

Seabees and aviation engineers: rebuilding the airfields

Three Seabee units went ashore with the assault troops (Craven and Cate, ch. 19). The 133d Naval Construction Battalion was so hard hit on D-Day that it had to reorganize (Garand and Strobridge, pp. 594–595); it lost 45 dead or missing and more than 275 wounded, the most of any Seabee battalion (NHHC, H-Gram 042). The work on Airfield No. 1 fell to the 2d Separate Engineer Battalion under Lt. Col. Charles O. Clark, the 62d Naval Construction Battalion under Lt. Cmdr. Frank B. Campbell and the 31st under Lt. Cmdr. Dominick J. Ermilio (Garand and Strobridge, pp. 594–595).

By late afternoon on 25 February the engineers had rolled 1,500 feet of runway, and the next day two OY-1s of VMO-4 landed on it (Garand and Strobridge, p. 595). The sources then differ: a strip graded to 4,000 feet by 2 March (Craven and Cate, p. 595), a 4,700-foot runway by 2 March (Garand and Strobridge, p. 597), or two short runways on 4 March (Bartley, p. 201). All agree that a 5,800-foot strip was handling heavy traffic by 12 March. Central Field, Airfield No. 2, was operational on 16 March (Craven and Cate, p. 595; Garand and Strobridge, p. 600).

The larger job went to Commodore R. C. Johnson’s 9th Naval Construction Brigade, with the 8th and 41st Naval Construction Regiments and the Army Air Forces’ 811th Engineer Aviation Battalion (Craven and Cate, pp. 594–596). Col. William E. Robinson’s plan combined Central and North Fields into one airdrome with B-29 runways of 9,800 and 9,400 feet; LeMay approved it on 26 March and Nimitz on 4 April. The first B-29 runway was paved to its full 9,800 feet by 12 July; the second was graded but never surfaced; and the South Field fighter strip was paved to 6,000 feet by July (Craven and Cate, pp. 595–596; Garand and Strobridge, p. 600).

4 March: Dinah Might

On 4 March, D plus 13, all three Marine divisions were still attacking in the north when Dinah Might, damaged on a raid over Tokyo, came in to Airfield No. 1 (Alexander, Closing In). Garand and Strobridge record that a returning B-29 “made a forced landing,” refueled and resumed its flight (p. 597), and Bartley counts it as the first damaged B-29 to land (p. 210).

Some details are less certain. Alexander calls the pilot Lt. Fred Malo; the Pacific Wrecks database lists 1st Lt. Raymond Malo and identifies the aircraft as B-29 42-65286 of the 1st Bomb Squadron, 9th Bomb Group, flying from North Field, Tinian. The National WWII Museum’s historian says the bomber was low on fuel and the crew fixed a faulty fuel valve (Curatola, 2025). We found no government source naming the rest of the crew. The Air Forces history dates the first emergency landing to “the 9th” of March (Craven and Cate, p. 595); the Marine histories agree on 4 March, and we follow them.

The same day a Marine R5C transport flown by Lt. Col. Malcolm S. Mackay of VMR-952 landed with about 5,500 pounds of mortar shells and ammunition from Guam by way of Saipan, the first Marine transport to reach the island (Garand and Strobridge, p. 597). By 14 March, D plus 23, 24 B-29s had made emergency landings (p. 598); by 26 March, Bartley counts 35 more after the first (Bartley, p. 210).

Timeline

The sea and air war around Iwo Jima

1. 16 FebBombardment of Iwo Jima begins; Task Force 58 strikes the Tokyo area, continuing through the 17th.
2. 17 FebLCI(G) gunboats covering the UDTs are shot up; Pensacola takes 115 casualties.
3. 18 Feb, 2130A bomb hits the destroyer transport Blessman.
4. 19 Feb, 0900H-Hour. Marine fighters from Essex strafe the beaches ahead of the first waves.
5. 21 Feb, duskKamikaze attack: Bismarck Sea sunk; Saratoga knocked out of the war; Lunga Point, Keokuk and LST 477 damaged.
6. 25–26 Feb1,500 feet of runway rolled on Airfield No. 1; two OY-1s of VMO-4 land.
7. 2 MarFirst air evacuation: an R4D leaves with 12 wounded Marines.
8. 4 Mar, afternoonDinah Might makes the first B-29 emergency landing.
9. 6 MarBGen. Ernest Moore arrives with 28 P-51s and 12 P-61s of VII Fighter Command.
10. 11 MarFirst strike by Iwo-based P-51s, against Chichi Jima.
11. 12 MarA 5,800-foot strip on Airfield No. 1 is handling heavy traffic.
12. 16 MarCentral Field (Airfield No. 2) operational.
13. 26 Mar, about 0515The last Japanese attack hits the VII Fighter Command and 5th Pioneer Battalion camps.
14. 7 AprP-51s fly the first escort mission from Iwo Jima to Tokyo.
15. 12 JulFirst B-29 runway paved to its full 9,800 feet.

Mustangs on Iwo: VII Fighter Command, March to April

Col. Vernon E. Megee ran air control ashore as Commander, Landing Force Air Control Unit (Garand and Strobridge, p. 597). On 6 March Brig. Gen. Ernest Moore of VII Fighter Command arrived with 28 P-51 Mustangs and 12 P-61 Black Widow night fighters (p. 598); the 15th Fighter Group’s P-51s flew their first close-support mission on the 8th (Craven and Cate, ch. 19). On 11 March Iwo-based Mustangs struck Chichi Jima (Garand and Strobridge, p. 598). The 21st Fighter Group followed on 23 March (Craven and Cate, ch. 19).

The fighter camps near the western beaches were the target of the last organized Japanese attack, at about 0515 on 26 March, described in The Gorge and the Last Attack. VII Fighter Command lost 44 killed and 88 wounded that morning (Bartley, p. 192).

The escort mission the island was taken for came on 7 April 1945, when, Bartley writes, 108 P-51s flew from Iwo to cover a daylight B-29 attack on Tokyo (Bartley, p. 210). The Air Force Museum confirms the date as the first escort mission to Japan (National Museum of the U.S. Air Force). A 36th Wing feature on af.mil gives 80 P-51s, 21 Japanese aircraft shot down and one P-51 lost; we have not confirmed those figures in the official history. On 12 April, 102 P-51s escorted B-29s back to Tokyo (Craven and Cate, ch. 21). Craven and Cate count “some 1,700 escort sorties” in all; Garand and Strobridge give about 1,191 escort and 3,081 strike sorties (p. 601).

The emergency field: counting landings and lives

The numbers most often attached to Iwo Jima’s airfields come from two official histories that do not quite agree. Bartley’s Marine Corps monograph says: “By the end of the war, a total of 2,251 Superforts carrying 24,761 crewmen landed on the island” (Bartley, p. 210). The Army Air Forces history says “about 2,400 Superforts had made emergency landings on its runways,” and with eleven-man crews puts the men aboard at some 25,000 (Craven and Cate, p. 598). Garand and Strobridge repeat the Air Forces figures, about 2,400 bombers and 25,000 airmen (p. 601). A later Air Force feature gives 2,451 forced landings and 26,961 crewmen. The difference between 2,251 and about 2,400 is small, but it shows that these were tallies compiled after the fact, and the sources do not say exactly what each counted as a landing.

By the numbers

B-29 landings on Iwo Jima: what the sources count

Cumulative B-29 landings, early and to the end of the war, as each source gives them

By 14 Mar (Garand and Strobridge)24

By 26 Mar (Bartley)36

War’s end (Bartley, Marine Corps)2,251

War’s end (Craven and Cate, AAF)~2,400

The harder question is what those landings meant. Claims that Iwo Jima saved as many lives as the number of airmen who landed there are common. The Army Air Forces’ own historians were skeptical: “Estimates of AAF lives saved because of Iwo’s strips have run as high as 20,000, but this seems a gross exaggeration” (Craven and Cate, pp. 597–598). Their footnote traces the 20,000 figure to an unnamed Air Forces source cited in Holland Smith’s memoir, Coral and Brass. They gave two reasons: not every plane that landed would otherwise have gone down, since many could have reached the Marianas; and about half of the B-29 crewmen who did go down at sea were rescued. They judged most accurate Admiral King’s more careful claim, that the lives saved “exceeded lives lost in the capture of the island itself” (Craven and Cate, p. 598).

The modern critique is sharper. In “Breaking the Cycle of Iwo Jima Mythology,” published in the Journal of Military History in October 2004, and in his book The Ghosts of Iwo Jima (2006), Robert S. Burrell argued that most of the recorded landings were not emergencies at all but stops for training, fuel or bomb loads; that without the island most of the bombers could have flown on to the Marianas; and that many crews forced down at sea would have been picked up. His conclusion, as summarized when the article appeared, was that Iwo Jima helped the bombing campaign but was not worth what it cost (Burrell, 2004, as summarized by Boot, 2005). The Naval History and Heritage Command’s H-Gram on the battle reaches a similar judgment: “the great majority of those B-29s would have reached the Marianas,” and “with 20–20 armchair hindsight,” it concludes, the answer to whether the battle was worth it “is probably ‘no’” (NHHC, H-Gram 042).

What the record supports is narrower than either side of the popular argument. Thousands of B-29s landed at Iwo Jima, and some, Dinah Might among them, would very likely have been lost without it; the record does not show how many. Bartley’s summary states the Marine Corps’ case: “Strategically located Iwo Jima had to be taken” (Bartley, p. 210). Readers can weigh it against the 6,821 American dead (Bartley, p. 210) and the critics above.

People

The sailors of this chapter are mostly unnamed in the official histories: the 318 men of Bismarck Sea, the 123 of Saratoga, the 17 of Keokuk, and the boat crews who ran the surf for five weeks. The first Medal of Honor of the campaign went to Lt. (j.g.) Rufus G. Herring of LCI(G)-449 for 17 February, told in Chapter 1 (see the hub); of the 27 for Iwo Jima, five went to Navy men, Herring and four hospital corpsmen (NHHC, H-Gram 042). None was awarded for the air and sea actions this chapter covers, so it has no Medal of Honor box.

The engineers and aviators named in the record include Clark, Campbell and Ermilio of the airfield units; Lt. Fred Malo of Dinah Might; Lt. Col. Malcolm S. Mackay of VMR-952; and Brig. Gen. Ernest Moore. Ens. Jane Kendeigh, USNR, a Navy flight nurse, was photographed on the airstrip on 6 March tending a wounded Marine.

On the Japanese side, the pilots of 21 February flew from Katori, east of Tokyo, on one-way missions, and the official histories record them only as numbers. Kuribayashi’s own telegram to Tokyo, quoted above, conceded the power of the American ships’ guns. The island’s civilians had been evacuated before the battle; about 1,000 people lived there before the war, and in 2007 their descendants’ wish to restore the prewar name, Iwo To, led Japan to change it (Associated Press, 2007).

Losses and uncertainty

Bartley’s casualty appendix counts 2,798 Navy casualties for the operation, 881 of them dead, alongside 37 Army casualties, 9 of them dead (Bartley, App. III). The ship losses of 21 February account for a large share of the Navy dead: 318 on Bismarck Sea, 123 on Saratoga and 17 on Keokuk, 458 in all from three ships on one evening. Air losses in support of the landing were 26 aircraft and 32 aircrew killed or missing (Bartley, pp. 206–207).

Where sources disagree we have given both: the number of Japanese aircraft on 21 February (about a dozen to an estimated 50), naval ammunition tonnage (14,250 or about 14,650), the date of the first B-29 landing (4 or 9 March), the P-51s on the first escort (108 or 80) and B-29 landings by war’s end (2,251 or about 2,400). The “lives saved” figure is not a count at all but an estimate.

Questions readers ask

Did Iwo Jima really save 25,000 airmen?

No source supports that as a count of lives saved. About 25,000 is the number of crewmen aboard B-29s that landed on the island (Bartley gives 24,761). The Army Air Forces history called the claim of 20,000 lives saved “a gross exaggeration,” and Robert Burrell argued that most landings were not true emergencies (Craven and Cate, pp. 597–598; Burrell, 2004).

Was Dinah Might really the first B-29 to land on Iwo Jima?

The Marine histories say so, dating its landing on Airfield No. 1 to the afternoon of 4 March 1945 (Alexander, Closing In; Bartley, p. 210; Garand and Strobridge, p. 597). The Army Air Forces history dates the first emergency landing to 9 March without naming the aircraft (Craven and Cate, p. 595).

How many wounded were flown out?

Bartley counts 2,449 patients flown to the Marianas, beginning with an R4D carrying 12 wounded Marines on 2 March, and no deaths in flight. Far more, 13,737, went out by ship (Bartley, p. 194; Garand and Strobridge, p. 597).

How it connects

The gunboats of 17 February and Herring’s Medal of Honor open the story in Chapter 1; the fight for Airfield No. 2 was a fight for the ground these engineers needed; and the Mustang pilots who flew from these fields were caught in the final attack told in the previous chapter, The Gorge and the Last Attack. This is the last of the nine chapters. For the atlas, timeline and the other chapters, return to the Battle of Iwo Jima hub; for the companion collections, including the Battle of the Bulge, see the World War II hub.

What happened afterward

Iwo Jima became, in Bartley’s words, an intermediate base that “greatly increased the efficiency of B-29 operations against the Empire” once the bombers turned to night incendiary raids (Bartley, p. 210). The fighters paid their own price. On 1 June 1945, P-51s flying from Iwo were caught in a weather front and a number of them collided; 27 planes and 24 pilots were lost (Craven and Cate, ch. 20). The Army’s 147th Infantry, which took over the island’s ground defense on 4 April, afterward killed 1,602 more Japanese and captured 867 (Bartley).

Saratoga spent the rest of the war training pilots at Pearl Harbor and was “mortally damaged” in the underwater atomic test at Bikini in 1946 (NHHC, USS Saratoga). The United States returned Iwo Jima to Japanese jurisdiction in 1968. In June 2007 Japan’s Geographical Survey Institute, at the urging of former islanders and their descendants, restored the prewar name, Iwo To; its only inhabitants are Japanese military personnel, and the U.S. Navy was then still using its airstrip to train carrier pilots (Associated Press, 2007). Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare puts the Japanese dead at about 21,900, with about 11,110 sets of remains still unrecovered as of July 2026.

Walking the ground today

Iwo To is a Japan Self-Defense Forces base and is closed to the public; there is no civilian travel to the island. Americans reach the island on the annual Reunion of Honor, a joint U.S.-Japanese memorial ceremony on the island; the 80th was held on 29 March 2025. At home, the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, beside Arlington National Cemetery, renders the second flag raising in bronze, and the National Museum of the Marine Corps at Triangle, Virginia, has galleries on the battle. The ships of this chapter have their own graves: Bismarck Sea lies off Iwo Jima, and Saratoga lies in the lagoon at Bikini Atoll.

Sources and further reading

• Lt. Col. Whitman S. Bartley, Iwo Jima: Amphibious Epic (USMC Historical Branch, 1954), especially “Plans and Preparations,” pp. 23–48; “HOTROCKS,” pp. 75–76; “The Final Phase,” p. 192; “Recapitulation,” pp. 194–210; Appendix III, Casualties: HyperWar text.
• Col. Joseph H. Alexander, Closing In: Marines in the Seizure of Iwo Jima (USMC History and Museums Division, 1994), including the Dinah Might landing, the bombardment, the 21 February attack and air support: HyperWar text.
• George W. Garand and Truman R. Strobridge, Western Pacific Operations (History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, vol. IV, 1971), Part VI, ch. 8, “Airfield Development and Activities Behind the Lines,” pp. 594–611: HyperWar text.
• Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. V, ch. 19, “Iwo Jima,” pp. 577–598 (airfield program, first landings, emergency landings and the “lives saved” estimate, n. 86): HyperWar text; ch. 20, “Urban Area Attacks” (1 June 1945 losses): HyperWar text; ch. 21, “The All-Out B-29 Attack” (12 April escort): HyperWar text.
• Naval History and Heritage Command, H-Gram 042, “Iwo Jima” (Task Force 58 strikes, gunboats, 21 February attack, submarines, Seabee losses, the “worth it” assessment): history.navy.mil.
• Naval History and Heritage Command, “USS Saratoga (CV-3)”: history.navy.mil.
• Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships: Bismarck Sea (CVE-95); Keokuk II (AKN-4, later CMc-6); Lunga Point (CVE-94).
• Cmdr. J. Brandon Wilgus, USN (Ret.), “Iwo Jima: A Tale of Two Carriers,” Naval History, February 2025 (timings and figures for Saratoga and Bismarck Sea): usni.org.
• Robert S. Burrell, “Breaking the Cycle of Iwo Jima Mythology,” Journal of Military History 68, no. 4 (October 2004); and The Ghosts of Iwo Jima (Texas A&M University Press, 2006): Project MUSE. Summarized in Max Boot, “Iwo Jima: A Battle of Choice Waged on the Basis of Faulty Intelligence and Bad Planning,” Los Angeles Times, reprinted by History News Network, 14 March 2005: historynewsnetwork.org.
• John Curatola, “Iwo Jima: Sacrifice and Sanctuary,” The National WWII Museum, 17 February 2025: nationalww2museum.org.
• National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, “Iwo Jima” fact sheet: nationalmuseum.af.mil; Capt. Timothy Lundberg, 36th Wing Public Affairs, “Remembering Iwo Jima and its importance to strategic airpower”: af.mil.
• Pacific Wrecks, “B-29 Superfortress 42-65286 Dinah Might” (unit and serial data): pacificwrecks.com.
• Associated Press, “Japan changes name of Iwo Jima to Iwo To,” 21 June 2007, as published by the Deseret News: deseret.com.
• Congressional Medal of Honor Society, citation for Lt. (j.g.) Rufus G. Herring (Chapter 1).

Photographs: U.S. Navy, U.S. Army Air Forces and U.S. government photographs, public domain, several via Wikimedia Commons. Landing-beach photograph: U.S. Navy NH 104371-KN, Naval History and Heritage Command. Airfield photograph: official USMC photograph, Thayer Soule Collection (COLL/2266), Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division, CC BY 2.0. The featured photograph shows B-29 42-65286, Dinah Might, after the first emergency landing on 4 March 1945 (U.S. Air Force photograph, public domain).