Iwo Jima and Iraq - how similar?
Re-examining Iwo Jima - was the battle unnecessary?

Glenn Reynolds links to Stephen Green's essay comparing and contrasting the battle for Iwo Jima with the war in Iraq. Overall, it's a pretty good essay and made me re-examine some aspects of the battle.

Stephen correctly observes that when the attack on Iwo was planned, none of the planners knew about the Manhattan Project and so thought the war would end only after Japan was invaded and subdued, which they thought would take well into 1946. The invasion was scheduled for the fall of 1945.

Stephen says the entire rationale for invading Iwo was to provide an emergency landing strip for B-29s returning from bombing mission over Japan. This is a widely-accepted view, and one that until I re-studied the history, one that I held myself. Yet according to Robert S Burrell. writing in "The Journal of Military History," Oct. 2004 (text here), pre-invasion planners never considered the idea of using Iwo as am emergency strip.

Stephen recounts the horrific casualties the Marines suffered taking Iwo Jima, especially the 6,821 killed. Then he says that "Iwo ended up as a net loss" of lives killed in action versus aircrew lives saved.

One account of the battle says that by the war's end the strip had saved the lives of 30,000 airmen, more men than were killed and wounded taking the island. In fairness, the 30K figure is the high estimate, based on the fact that 11 men crewed a B-29 and no one knows for certain how many bombers landed there. A lower estimate is that 2,220 bombers landed, making the number of airmen saved about 24,420. Either way, it's more than the number of Marines who died taking the island.

One of the repulsive things (of many) about war is the sanguinary calculus like that of comparing the number of Marines who died with the number of airmen saved and then trying to answer, was it worth it. Would the families of the Marines say yes, and would the airmen say no?

Be that as it may, Burrell's article about the battle makes me doubt that Iwo Jima was invaded to provide an emergency bomber strip. That it turned out to be one was a happy bonus to the island's seizure. Seizing the sirstrip was indeed the objective (there was nothing else of interest on the island) but it's intended use was principally not as an emergency base for Superfortresses but as a base for American long-range fighters to escort B-29s over Japan.

But fighter operations the Army Air Force had envisioned for Iwo Jima never panned out. Iwo Jima was about 750 miles from the main Japanese island of Honshu, where most B-29 targets were. A round-trip mission from Iwo was thus 1,500 miles. Theoretically, a P-51D Mustang could fly 2,000 miles unrefueled, but in practice from Iwo such ranges were mostly unobtainable because of air maneuvering over Japan and the fact that winds to and from Japan were often extremely strong, requiring fuel use that the fighters couldn't spare. In fact, a number of fighters were lost from weather alone. As well, the P-51 had primitive navigation equipment, even for its day, making the fighters' ability to link up with the bombers difficult and fuel consuming.

One of the greatest limiting factors of fighter escorts from Iwo was the human factor. The B-29 was heated and pressurized. Compared to the unheated, unpressurized P-51, the bomber crews sat in secure comfort. The punishment on the fighter pilots' bodies was compounded by the extremely high altutudes they flew to escort the bombers, usually more than 30,000 feet. This was several thousand feet higher than fighter pilots flew in Europe, escorting B-17 and B-24 bombers. The round trip from Iwo to Japan and back was nine hours, most of which was spent in a physically battered state.

A grand total of only 10 escort missions were flown from Iwo Jima before the whole idea was scrapped. And yet fighter escort was practically the sole reason the Marines were sent to take the island.

It can be argued - and has, by some historians - that the "emergency airfield" rationale for invading Iwo Jima was post-war rationalization for the attack. The first bomber to use Iwo Jima did make an emergency landing while the battle still raged. Newsreel crews filmed the landing, servicing and subsequent takeoff of the bomber, and these reels, shown in stateside theaters, did more than anything else to cement the notion that Iwo Jima was invaded just for that purpose. But the pre-invasion planning documents don't address this facet.

There is also the fact that of the 2,000-plus bombers that landed on Iwo, probably only a small minority were making actual lifesaving landings. So the figure of 24K-30K airmen "saved" is suspect to begin with. Most of the bomber landings on Iwo were made during training flights, scheduled refuelings or to await the passing of bad weather over the target in Japan. Of the true emergency landings, there can be little doubt that a large number of the planes would have made it back to Marianas, since the B-29 could fly with only two engines running, even if the engines were on the same wing.

So was the invasion of Iwo Jima actually necessary? Burrell says no, and documents why all the explanations for its necessity don't hold up.

That makes Stephen Green's thesis harder to uphold:

We went into Iwo Jima for one reason, but got multiple benefits for doing so.

We went into Iraq hoping to bring revolutionary change to the Arab people, who have suffered under odious regimes.

Reading the news this week, it looks like our efforts in Iraq are paying off.