Kuribayashi, Nishi and the Japanese Troops Who Chose Death Over Surrender at Iwo Jima

Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi arrived on the island of Iwo Jima in June 1944. He found a garrison led by men who argued over water rationing. Navy commanders demanded the troops defend the island at the beach. Artillery sat exposed in the open. American carrier strikes had already hit the island twice. 

Kuribayashi would spend the next eight months transforming the island of Iwo Jima into one of the most elaborate defensive networks in the entire Pacific. When American forces landed in February 1945, they would suffer horrendous losses. Even American commanders admitted Kuribayashi led one of the most successful Japanese defenses during the war.

By the end of the battle, nearly the entire Japanese garrison, including Kuribayashi himself, were dead. While the Marines had won and famously raised their flag over Mount Suribachi, the battle became the only Pacific campaign where American losses were higher than Japanese losses.

Tadamichi Kuribayashi

Kuribayashi came from Nagano Prefecture, the sixth generation of a samurai family. As a teenager he wanted to be a journalist, an ambition his teachers at Nagano High School steered him away from. They eventually redirecting him toward the Imperial Japanese Army Academy.

He was not an easy student to contain. Years later, Vice Adm. Shegeji Kaneko, who had been a classmate, recalled a young man the school nearly expelled. 

"He once organized a strike against the school authorities," Kaneko said. "He just escaped expulsion by a hair. In those days, he was already good in poetry-writing, composition and speech-making. He was a young literary enthusiast."

In the 1920s, Army service took him to the United States, including time training with cavalry units at Fort Bliss, Texas. What he saw in America followed him through the rest of his career. 

He wrote to his wife that the United States was "the last country in the world Japan should fight. Its industrial potential is huge and fabulous, and the people are energetic and versatile. One must never underestimate the American fighting ability."

Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto had visited the same region years before and reached the same conclusion. Both men would find themselves at war against the U.S., despite their concerns. Soon after Pearl Harbor, Kuribayashi served with Japanese forces in the Battle for Hong Kong, before commanding several Army divisions on garrison duty.

As a leader, he astonished his own men by sharing in their hardships, leading from the front and even visiting wounded soldiers in the hospital, something most Japanese leaders refused to do.

By 1943, he had become outspoken about Japan's prospects of defeating the U.S. militarily. Many in the Imperial staff labeled him a defeatist.

In late May 1944, Prime Minister Gen. Hideki Tojo handed Kuribayashi the order to command forces on Iwo Jima. Emperor Hirohito received him in a private audience before he left Tokyo. American intelligence officers who reviewed his service history noted that roughly 100 of his contemporaries in the Imperial Japanese Army had more combat experience. 

Japanese leaders likely saw the assignment as a suicide mission that would finally silence the outspoken commander. Meanwhile, American planners assumed taking Iwo Jima from him would only take a few days given his lack of experience.

In a letter to his wife after the momentous assignment, Kuribayashi simply expressed regret at failing to make some repairs to the kitchen in their home, while leaving instructions for his son to complete the repairs while he was gone.

The Defenses on Iwo Jima

The fall of Saipan and the brutal grinding fight at Peleliu had shown Kuribayashi all he needed to know about what not to do. Piling defenders on the beaches where American naval gunfire and carrier aircraft could chew them apart before a single Marine touched the sand was not a good strategy.

Despite the demands of his peers and leaders, he chose to dig underground and create an elaborate bunker complex that would bleed the Americans dry for every inch of ground.

His soldiers cut roughly 18 kilometers of tunnels through the island's volcanic rock, connecting fighting bunkers, artillery positions, and command posts into a single network. Individual positions ranged from small fighting holes to chambers capable of holding several hundred men. 

Tunnel openings were angled to deflect direct naval gunfire hits. Every installation had multiple exits. By the end of 1944, a quarter of the entire garrison had been pulled from other duties and put to work digging.

The work was brutal. Japanese soldier Takeo Abe described what that work felt like. 

"By the end of 1944, we were forced to spare rations for battle and we foraged around for edible weeds," Abe said. "Suffering from chronic diarrhea, empty stomachs, and lack of water, we dug bunkers in the sand under a merciless sun and constructed underground shelters that were steamy with heat. We used salt water, lukewarm from a well on the beach, for cooking, and saved what little rainwater we could for drinking. But one water-bottle a day was the most we ever had to drink."

Reinforcements flowed in through the summer. The 145th Infantry Regiment, originally bound for the Marianas before Saipan fell, was rerouted to the island with 2,700 soldiers from Kagoshima. Rear Adm. Rinosuke Ichimaru arrived in August with more than 2,100 sailors, aviators, and naval ground troops. When the buildup was finished, roughly 21,000 men held the island across five defensive sectors.

Conventional officers and Naval leaders pushed hard for a strong beach defense. Kuribayashi refused. The dispute reached Tokyo, and the Germans, whose general staff was consulted, sided with him. As a concession to his critics, 135 pillboxes were placed near the southern beaches. The rest of the defense stayed buried under the sand and into the side of Mount Suribachi.

He wrote to his wife that September. 

"It must be destiny that we as a family must face this," he told her. "Please accept this and stand tall with the children at your side. I will be with you always."

The Japanese Commanders

Col. Baron Takeichi Nishi was probably the most famous soldier on Iwo Jima when he arrived, though his fame was established long before the war.

He had won a gold medal in show jumping at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, befriended Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks during his time in California. He returned home to Japan as a genuine celebrity. By 1944, the cavalry officer commanded the 26th Tank Regiment.

On July 18, 1944, while en route to the island, the transport carrying his regiment was struck by a torpedo from the submarine USS Cobia. All 28 tanks went to the bottom. Nishi returned to Tokyo, secured 22 replacements, and came back. The volcanic terrain made conventional armored warfare useless, so he ordered the tanks buried to their turrets to be used as fixed gun positions. He walked the island in Hermès riding boots, scouting for fields of fire and likely American approaches.

His fame exceeded his own command. Throughout the battle, U.S. Marines would broadcast daily radio appeals addressed to him by name, telling him the world couldn't afford to lose someone like Baron Nishi.

Meanwhile, Ichimaru was a pioneering naval aviator who had spent years in administrative work after a serious injury ended his flying. At Iwo Jima he placed his entire force under Kuribayashi's command. Though not as experienced in ground warfare, his troops would fight to the death like any other Japanese soldier.

Before the battle, he drafted a letter in English addressed to President Franklin Roosevelt, intending for American troops to find it when the island fell.

The letter opened with Commodore Perry's arrival in Japan a century earlier and moved through the long accumulation of friction between Japan and the West. It accused the Allied powers of building their wealth and security by stripping resources and autonomy from Asia.

Ichimaru asked how Roosevelt could condemn Nazi Germany while partnered with the Soviet Union, then closed by invoking Woodrow Wilson, who had reached the height of his power and thrown it away. It was not a letter written by someone expecting to be alive when it was found.

The Invasion: Feb. 19, 1945

The Marines came ashore the morning of Feb. 19, 1945. Kuribayashi ordered his troops to hold fire.

The first waves labored across black volcanic sand that swallowed boots and bogged down tracked vehicles. The beach had no natural cover of any kind. Troops and equipment compressed against the steep sand terraces above the waterline, stacking up with nowhere to advance and no way to see what was waiting for them north. Kuribayashi let the congestion build.

Then he opened up everything he had at once.

Artillery from the northern ridgelines, machine gun positions wired into the tunnel network and mortars pre-registered on the landing zones all fired simultaneously. Marines caught on the open beach had no angles on the sources. Casualties in those first hours were severe enough to stagger officers aboard the command ship USS Eldorado as the reports came in.

That night, Lt. Gen. Holland Smith gathered correspondents on the deck of the command ship. Not one Japanese soldier had charged the beach as expected.

"I don't know who he is," Smith said, "but the Japanese General running this show is one smart bastard."

Kuribayashi had ordered no mass charges. Maj. Mitsuaki Hara, the only one of his battalion commanders to survive the entire battle, described him as "a professional soldier, sternly disciplined, very strict with his subordinates," and said the troops "disliked him for these very attributes."

Kuribayashi had spelled out his thinking in a letter to his wife before the first shot was ever fired. 

"Americans have always taken casualties very seriously," he wrote. "When the number of casualties is too high, public opinion will boil up and condemn an operation as a failure, even if [they] get the upper hand militarily."

Four days after the landing, the Marines reached the base of Mount Suribachi. It fell Feb. 23. The famous flag photograph by Joe Rosenthal was taken that afternoon. The moment meant something for morale on both sides, but Kuribayashi's main defensive line was in the north. The hard fighting had barely begun.

The Battle Continues

The month that followed ground down some of the best units the Marine Corps had.

The Japanese defense in the north had been built around one idea. Never give the Americans anything without making them pay for it. When a position was overrun, the survivors moved through the tunnels to the next one and the line reconstituted. The Marines cleared hundreds of fortified positions and found hundreds more waiting.

A network of hills, draws, and ravines on the island's eastern plateau chewed through attacking units for weeks. Marines called it the Meat Grinder. A shattered, cave-riddled gully in the far north became known as the Gorge and held out until nearly the final day of organized fighting. 

Nishi's buried tanks provided direct fire support across the northern approach corridors through the early weeks, covering ground that infantry positions alone couldn't hold. Flamethrowers and satchel charges were used to seal cave and bunker entrances, literally burying Japanese troops alive.

As the Marines approached one bunker, another concealed one would open up. The Americans had to assault both positions simultaneously while suffering heavy losses, only to come under fire from even more Japanese defenses.

The Japanese command structure started to come apart through March. 

Nishi's regiment had started the battle with 450 men. By March 19, only 60 were still able to fight. Nishi died around March 22. While the details of his death are unconfirmed, it is believed he led his few remaining men in a charge against American forces that day, before he was cut down.

Kuribayashi transmitted his final message to the garrison on Chichi Jima on the night of March 23. 

"All officers and men of Chichi Jima — goodbye from Iwo." 

Maj. Tomitara Hori, who received it, spent three days trying to raise the island in response. 

"In the end I received no answer," he said.

Before dawn on March 26, several hundred survivors moved against sleeping Marines and Army Air Forces ground personnel near the airfields. They killed and wounded more than 100 Americans before the attack was stopped. Kuribayashi is thought to have died just before or during the assault.

Ichimaru also died that day. He carried an Edo period sword into the final fighting, a blade his daughter Haruko later said had saved his life three separate times before Iwo Jima. American troops took it from his body.

Decades later it surfaced in the United States, eventually traced through Richard F. Newcomb's 1965 book "Iwo Jima" to a professor who had served in the battle and recognized a description of the sword he had bought as a war souvenir. It was returned to Japan and eventually to Ichimaru's family.

Imperial General Headquarters had already issued posthumous promotions for leaders on the island. Kuribayashi became a full general. Ichimaru was elevated to vice admiral. Col. Masuo Ikeda, who commanded the 145th Infantry Regiment and died in the final days, was promoted to major general.

The island was declared secured the morning after the final assault.

Of the roughly 21,000-man garrison, 216 were taken prisoner. Perhaps 3,000 more scattered into the tunnel network. Most were eventually killed or captured by Army troops over the summer. A small holdout group refused to accept Japan's surrender that August and continued fighting until 1949. 

Kuribayashi's remains were never recovered.

The Japanese Legacy on Iwo Jima

Kuribayashi wrote constantly from the island. Letters to his wife, to his son Taro, to friends and family across Japan. He wrote about American cities he had visited years earlier with the eye of the journalist he had once planned to become. He said his goodbyes without bitterness and without pretending he didn't know what was coming.

Journalist Kumiko Kakehashi spent years gathering those letters and tracking down survivors who had known him, publishing her account in 2005 as "So Sad to Fall in Battle." Clint Eastwood used Kakehashi's work and Kuribayashi's correspondence as the foundation for his 2006 film "Letters from Iwo Jima" which was filmed alongside "Flags of our Fathers."

The film told the entire battle from the Japanese perspective and earned four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Japanese audiences made it the highest-grossing film in the country for five consecutive weeks. Critics noted that Eastwood had given Kuribayashi the kind of interior life and dignity that Japanese characters rarely received from Hollywood.

Takeo Abe was one of the few Japanese soldiers who survived the battle. He spent the rest of his life trying to bring his comrades home. Most of them are still there.

More than 10,000 Japanese soldiers remain sealed inside the tunnel network beneath the island. The Japanese government limits access to what is now called Ioto to official memorial ceremonies. Recovery operations continue to find Japanese remains on the island.

Iwo Jima was the only battle of the Pacific War in which total American casualties, roughly 26,000 killed and wounded, exceeded the size of the entire Japanese defending force. 

Gen. Smith later gave his own assessment of the man responsible for the massive losses on Iwo Jima. 

"Of all our adversaries in the Pacific," he said, "Kuribayashi was the most redoubtable."

Sources: U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command; U.S. Marine Corps Historical Division, "Iwo Jima: Amphibious Epic"; U.S. Marine Corps Historical Division, "The Final Campaign: Marines in the Victory on Iwo Jima"; National Park Service, "Closing In: Marines in the Seizure of Iwo Jima"; The National WWII Museum; National Museum of the Pacific War; Kumiko Kakehashi, "So Sad to Fall in Battle: An Account of War" (2005); Richard F. Newcomb, "Iwo Jima" (1965).