IWO JIMA – Eighty years ago, U.S. Marines launched one of the most courageous assaults of WWII on the remote island of Iwo Jima. To this day, veterans return to honor the fallen & remember the horrors they endured. This year, CBN News joined them.

It was in February of 1945 when nearly 70,000 U.S. Marines landed on this fierce battleground. What they encountered was unlike anything they’d faced before – an enemy they couldn’t see, a battlefield designed to kill, and a fight that would test every ounce of courage.

Iwo Jima Veteran Frank Wright recalls, “They were fighting with anything they had, it was just immediate. They were fighting with shovels. They were fighting with rocks. They were fighting with their guns. Anything that they had… We weren’t going down again. We took that.”

The Japanese defenders had turned the island itself into a weapon, fortifying it with hidden strongholds and miles of tunnels, all part of a deadly strategy that made every inch of ground a fight to the death.

James Oelke-Farley, WWII Historian, explains, “Oftentimes, the United States service members never saw a Japanese person. So it is an odd battle for us. And it’s the Japanese at this time of the war using a thing called ‘fuku’ in Japanese, which is defense in depth… They knew they were going to die. There was no going home from Iwo Jima. Every single man on that island knew that this was the end, and they fought accordingly.”

When the Marines landed on Iwo Jima, most of them didn’t see a whole lot of enemy soldiers. That’s because there weren’t many of them in the open, even though there were up to 23,000 enemy troops on the island. They weren’t on the island so much as in the island. 

The Japanese were hidden in caves – they had dug almost 11 miles of caves throughout the island, some of them as many as seven stories tall under Mount Suribachi. So, when the U.S. dropped bombs on the island and struck with artillery, they really didn’t kill too many of the enemy troops because they were all safely underground. 

Amid the chaos and carnage, a single moment gave the nation hope: the raising of the American flag atop Mount Suribachi which became an iconic photo from that battle. But for the men still fighting, it was just the beginning.

Oelke-Farley says, “Battle for Iwo Jima is 36 days in length. A lot of people talk about the flag raising, which happened on the fourth day, like that’s the culmination of the battle, when in reality, it was just the very beginning of the battle. It is an island that saw 6,821 Americans killed in action… a thousand men a day dying on an island in the middle of the Pacific.”

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PHOTO: U.S. Marines raise the U.S. flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, Feb. 23, 1945. Strategically located 660 miles from Tokyo, the Pacific island was the site of one of the bloodiest battles of WWII with Japan. (AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal, File)

Iwo Jima Veteran Charles Cram recalls, “I didn’t know what to think. I mean, they told us not to get real too happy over the thing. The war wasn’t over. It wasn’t over at all. We were still gonna have to push to the other end of the island.”

Red Beach is quiet and peaceful today. But on that day, the day of the invasion, it was nothing but blood and chaos and courage. Up and down this beach, the men who landed here did so with very little hope of ever getting home unscathed. And you have to think about the high value they must have placed on what they were doing to continue to charge this beach, even over the bodies of the 566 men who died here on the first day alone. The cost was staggering. More Americans died on Iwo Jima than in any other Pacific battle. But the lessons learned would shape the future of warfare and medicine for decades to come.

Oelke-Farley explains, “We spent ten-odd years in Iraq, 14, 15 years in Afghanistan combined. In that period, we lost less fewer men than we lost on the island of Iwo in 36 days. That’s a frightening statistic. But it also is an amazing statistic, telling you the advances of military medicine, telling you the advances in tactics and strategy. We learned the lessons from this battle and continue to teach them in our war colleges.”

For many who served, the memories are carved deeper than the island’s caves—and the cost of victory still echoes today.

Iwo Jima veteran Wright says, “War is hell. I gave a speech to the Rotary Club about war—what war is. Don’t… don’t send the kids in there.”

Eight decades later, the veterans who survived Iwo Jima are now in their late 90s or older. So few remain; this may be the last year any of them are able to return, to walk these beaches once more and honor the comrades they left behind.

James Caminiti, another Iwo Jima veteran, tells CBN News, “My daughter-in-law says to me, ‘Why are they always honoring you for?’ I says, ‘Not honoring me. They honor the service.’ And I says, ‘The real people that should be honored—the people that’s in the ground.’ I said, ‘Those are the heroes and not the ones that came back, you know?'”