Part II

Organization, Structure & Regiments

As organized for the Iwo Jima campaign, the 5th Marine Division was a combined-arms team of extraordinary power. The heart of the division was its three infantry regiments — the 26th, 27th, and 28th Marines — supported by an array of artillery, engineer, tank, and service units that gave the organization both firepower and staying power. This structure reflected the hard-won lessons of nearly three years of Pacific combat, lessons purchased at terrible cost on islands from Guadalcanal to Peleliu.

Infantry Regiments

The 26th Marine Regiment, commanded by Colonel Chester B. Graham, was one of the division's three infantry spears. The regiment would distinguish itself in the grinding battle for the northern plateau of Iwo Jima, fighting through a labyrinth of bunkers, caves, and fortified ridges that the Japanese had spent years constructing. Within the 26th Marines' ranks were several Marines who would receive the Medal of Honor for their actions on the island.

The 27th Marine Regiment, under Colonel Thomas A. Wornham, served as the division's center element during the assault on Iwo Jima. Tasked with driving north after the initial landings, the 27th Marines bore the brunt of some of the most ferocious Japanese counterattacks of the entire battle. The regiment's advance through the central portion of the island required savage fighting on terrain that favored the defender at every turn.

The 28th Marine Regiment, commanded by Colonel Harry B. Liversedge — a two-time All-American football player at the University of California before the war — was assigned the division's most symbolically charged mission: the capture of Mount Suribachi, the volcanic cone that dominated the southern tip of Iwo Jima and from whose summit the Japanese could observe and direct fire upon every inch of the landing beaches. The 28th Marines' assault on Suribachi and the subsequent raising of the American flag on its summit would produce the most famous photographic image of the Second World War.

Part III

Commanders of the Spearhead Division

Major General Keller E. Rockey — Commanding General

The 5th Marine Division was shaped, trained, and led into its one and only campaign by Major General Keller E. Rockey, one of the most capable and admired officers in the Marine Corps. Born in 1888 in Columbia City, Indiana, Rockey was a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point — one of the relatively few senior Marine officers of his era with an Army background — and had served in France during the First World War, earning the Distinguished Service Medal for his actions as an infantry officer with the 4th Marine Brigade during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.

By the time Rockey assumed command of the 5th Marine Division, he had spent nearly three decades honing his understanding of tactics, logistics, and the human dynamics of military leadership. He was known among his subordinates as a demanding but fair commander, a man who set exacting standards but who also inspired profound loyalty. His calm professionalism under fire at Iwo Jima earned him the Navy Cross — the nation's second-highest military decoration — and the admiration of every Marine under his command. Rockey understood that the key to success in the Pacific island campaigns lay not just in firepower but in the relentless, grinding determination of individual Marines to close with and destroy the enemy, and he worked tirelessly to cultivate that spirit of aggressive action throughout the 5th Division.

Brigadier General Leo D. Hermle — Assistant Division Commander

Serving as the assistant division commander was Brigadier General Leo D. Hermle, a veteran officer who provided essential experience and continuity to the divisional staff. Hermle's role was critical in the early, chaotic hours of the Iwo Jima landing, when the beach was under intense fire and communication between units was frequently disrupted. His steady presence in the command structure helped maintain coherence during the most difficult moments of the battle.

Colonel Harry B. Liversedge — Commander, 28th Marines

Among the regimental commanders, Colonel Harry "Harry the Horse" Liversedge stands out as a figure of particular historical significance. A decorated veteran of the Guadalcanal and New Georgia campaigns, Liversedge was given command of the 28th Marines precisely because planners recognized that the assault on Mount Suribachi would require a commander of exceptional ability and resolve. His management of that assault — methodical, aggressive, and ultimately successful — represents one of the outstanding feats of regimental command in American military history. Liversedge would later rise to the rank of Major General.

Part IV

Training in Hawaii: The Road to Readiness

After its initial activation and training at Camp Pendleton, the 5th Marine Division was transferred to the Big Island of Hawaii in the late summer and autumn of 1944, where it continued its intensive preparation for amphibious assault operations at the Camp Tarawa training facility near Kamuela. The Big Island's volcanic terrain — stark black lava fields, steep ridgelines, and windswept plateaus — would prove, perhaps unknowingly to the planners who selected it, to be remarkably similar to the terrain the division would encounter on Iwo Jima.

At Camp Tarawa, the division rehearsed every element of the amphibious assault in painstaking detail. Amtracs (amphibious tractors) and Higgins boats were used to practice beach landings. Artillery fired live rounds in support of infantry advances. The 5th Tank Battalion worked through the complex choreography of tank-infantry coordination, practicing the use of flamethrower-equipped Sherman tanks — the "Zippos" — that would prove essential against the fortified positions on Iwo Jima. Combat engineers practiced breaching minefields and destroying bunkers with demolition charges and flamethrowers. Naval gunfire liaison teams coordinated with Navy ships to practice calling in support fire.

This period of intense preparation was not without cost. Training accidents claimed lives and caused serious injuries. The psychological strain of months-long preparation, combined with the certain knowledge that combat — and all of its attendant horrors — lay ahead, tested the mental resilience of every man in the division. Yet the Marine Corps' training philosophy, grounded in the conviction that the harder the preparation, the lower the casualties in battle, ultimately served the 5th Division well.

Part V

Operation Detachment: The Battle of Iwo Jima

Strategic Significance and Pre-Landing Bombardment

By late 1944, the logic of American Pacific strategy pointed inexorably toward the Japanese home islands. Iwo Jima, a sulfur-reeking volcanic rock of barely eight square miles in the Bonin Islands chain, stood at the intersection of this strategic calculation in ways that made its capture essential. The island lay approximately 660 miles south of Tokyo, within fighter range of the Japanese capital. It housed three airfields — one operational, two under construction — from which Japanese interceptor aircraft had been harassing American B-29 Superfortress bombers flying from the Mariana Islands to strike Japan. An American-held Iwo Jima would provide a fighter escort base for those bombers, an emergency landing strip for damaged aircraft that might not otherwise make the 1,500-mile return to the Marianas, and a staging base for the eventual invasion of Kyushu.

The Japanese commander on the island, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, understood all of this with perfect clarity. A sophisticated, Westernized officer who had served as a military attaché in the United States and who harbored no illusions about the ultimate outcome of the Pacific War, Kuribayashi was determined to make the capture of Iwo Jima as costly as possible for the Americans. He abandoned the conventional Japanese tactic of defending at the waterline in favor of an elastic defense built around an interconnected network of underground bunkers, tunnels, and firing positions that extended deep into the island's volcanic rock. By the time the 5th Marine Division landed, Iwo Jima had been transformed into what one Marine officer later described as "the most heavily fortified small piece of ground on earth."

The pre-landing naval bombardment that preceded the assault on Iwo Jima was the most sustained such bombardment of the Pacific War. For 72 days prior to the landing, American aircraft and naval vessels pounded the island. In the immediate pre-landing period, American fire support vessels delivered more than 22,000 shells, rockets, and aerial bombs. Yet despite this stupendous expenditure of ordnance, Kuribayashi's deeply buried defensive network survived largely intact. The Marines of the 5th and 4th Divisions, who had requested ten days of pre-landing bombardment, received only three — a decision that would haunt the invasion planning.

D-Day: February 19, 1945 — Hell on the Black Sand Beaches

At 0902 on February 19, 1945 — D-Day for Operation Detachment — the first waves of Marines from the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions began hitting the beaches of Iwo Jima. The landing area consisted of two black volcanic sand beaches extending about 3,500 yards along the southeastern coast of the island. The sand, composed of coarse volcanic ash, was unlike anything the Marines had trained on; it was so deep and so loose that men sank to their ankles with every step, vehicles bogged down, and the normal forward momentum of an amphibious assault was dramatically impeded before a single shot had been fired.

The 5th Marine Division landed on the left (southern) sector of the beach, designated Green, Red, Yellow, and Blue beaches, with the 28th Marines on the far left nearest Mount Suribachi and the 27th Marines in the center. For approximately twenty minutes after the initial waves landed, there was an eerie, ominous silence from the Japanese defenses — the enemy had been ordered to hold their fire until the beaches were packed with men and equipment. Then Kuribayashi's guns opened up all at once, and the beaches became a charnel house.

The sheer violence of the Japanese response was staggering. Mortar rounds, artillery shells, and machine-gun fire swept the beaches in a sustained hurricane of metal. Amtracs were hit and burned. Landing craft were swamped by the surf or destroyed by shells. Men were killed and wounded in enormous numbers before they had advanced a single step beyond the waterline. The volcanic sand, which had slowed the advance, now saved lives as Marines instinctively dove into whatever depression they could find for cover. The chaos of those first hours on the beach was total.

Yet despite the ferocious defensive fire, the Marines kept coming. Wave after wave of landing craft disgorged men onto the beach, and by sheer force of will and training the assault elements began to push inland. The 28th Marines, tasked with driving across the narrow neck of the island at its southern end to isolate Mount Suribachi, accomplished this mission by the end of D-Day, though at terrible cost. The 27th Marines pushed northward, engaging Japanese positions that seemed impervious to everything thrown at them. By nightfall, the division had a tenuous foothold, but the battle had only just begun.

The Assault on Mount Suribachi

The capture of Mount Suribachi, the extinct volcano that rose 556 feet above the southern tip of Iwo Jima, was the 28th Marine Regiment's primary mission, and it was among the most difficult tactical assignments of the entire Pacific War. Suribachi was not merely a geographic feature; it was a fortress within a fortress, its slopes honeycombed with caves and tunnels that housed artillery, mortars, machine guns, and nearly 2,000 Japanese defenders who had been ordered to fight to the last man. From its summit, Japanese observers could direct fire against every inch of the landing beaches.

The assault on Suribachi began on February 20, the day after the landings, as the 28th Marines methodically worked their way up the volcano's flanks. Progress was measured in yards, each gained at the cost of Marine lives. Riflemen and flamethrower teams attacked individual cave and bunker positions, supported by tanks, artillery, and close air support. Corpsmen — Navy medical personnel who served with Marine infantry units and who displayed extraordinary courage in administering aid under fire — moved across the shell-torn ground to treat the wounded.

On February 23, 1945, four days after the landing, a patrol from the 28th Marines reached the summit of Mount Suribachi and raised a small American flag — the first enemy territory under the American flag raised on Japanese soil. Hours later, a larger flag was carried up and raised in its place, and the photographer Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press captured the image that would become the iconic representation of American military sacrifice and determination in the Second World War. Five Marines — Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block, Private First Class Franklin Sousley, Private First Class Ira Hayes, and Private First Class Rene Gagnon — and Navy Corpsman John Bradley were immortalized in that photograph. Three of them — Strank, Block, and Sousley — would be killed before the island was secured. Ira Hayes, a Pima Native American from Arizona, and Rene Gagnon both returned home to grapple with the complicated weight of having become living symbols.

The fall of Suribachi was a tremendous psychological and tactical victory, but it did not end the battle. The bulk of Kuribayashi's defensive strength lay not on Suribachi but in the island's northern plateau and the heavily fortified central zone around Airfield No. 2, and it was there that the 5th Marine Division would fight its longest and most costly engagements.

The Drive North: Weeks of Attrition

With Suribachi secured, the 5th Marine Division pivoted northward and joined the other Marine divisions in the grinding advance toward the island's northern coast. This phase of the battle, which lasted from late February through the official declaration of the island's capture on March 26, 1945, was a nightmare of close-quarters combat against a defender who refused to yield, who exploited every topographic advantage, and who had constructed a defensive network of almost incomprehensible sophistication.

The terrain in the northern part of Iwo Jima was hellish: shattered rock, ravines, ridges, and plateaus with evocative names like "Hill 362-A," "Nishi Ridge," "Cushman's Pocket," and the "Gorge" — a canyon complex in the island's northwest that became the final redoubt of Kuribayashi's surviving forces and the site of some of the bloodiest fighting of the entire campaign. Japanese defenders in the northern sector often could not be seen until they opened fire; they moved through underground tunnels to emerge behind Marine lines, attacked patrols from cave openings that seemed to appear and disappear at will, and maintained a ferocious defensive effort even as their numbers dwindled.

The 5th Marine Division's attack in the western sector of the island's northern zone was characterized by a methodical, systematic effort to reduce Japanese positions one by one, using every weapon available: rifle fire, grenades, flamethrowers, demolition charges, artillery, naval gunfire, and close air support. Tanks proved invaluable, particularly the specially modified M4A3 Sherman tanks equipped with flamethrower systems in place of their main guns — the Marines called them "Zippos" — which could project streams of burning napalm gel directly into cave mouths and bunker apertures. Yet even these weapons could not guarantee quick or easy progress; Kuribayashi's men simply refused to stop fighting.

The toll on the 5th Marine Division during these weeks of attrition was staggering. Rifle companies that had landed 200-strong were reduced to effective strengths of 50 or 60 men. Platoon leaders — typically second lieutenants fresh from officer candidate school — became casualties in the first days of the battle, and their platoons were led by sergeants and corporals who adapted with the characteristic flexibility of Marine small-unit leadership. The division's corpsmen — technically Navy medical personnel but considered Marines by every man they served alongside — performed acts of selfless heroism that beggared description, advancing across open ground under fire to reach the wounded and administer aid that saved countless lives.

Part VI

Medal of Honor Recipients of the 5th Marine Division

The Battle of Iwo Jima produced more Medals of Honor than any other single battle in Marine Corps history, and the 5th Marine Division contributed a significant portion of those awards. Each represents a moment of transcendent courage — a moment when a Marine or sailor chose sacrifice over survival. Of the 27 Medals of Honor awarded for the Battle of Iwo Jima overall, 14 went to members or attachments of the 5th Marine Division, a testament to the extraordinary valor of the men who served in the Spearhead Division.

Part VII

Other Marines of Note

The Flag Raisers

Beyond the Medal of Honor recipients, several Marines of the 5th Division achieved historical fame through the circumstance of the flag raising on Suribachi. Private First Class Ira Hayes, a Pima Native American from Sacaton, Arizona, became perhaps the most famous of the surviving flag raisers, but his post-war life was marked by the psychological trauma of combat and the burden of being celebrated for a moment that felt disconnected from the daily horror of the battle. Hayes died in 1955 at the age of 32, and his story has been told in books, films, and the song "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." Private Rene Gagnon also returned home to find himself unable to escape the shadow of the photograph, struggling to find his footing in civilian life after the war.

Sergeant Michael Strank, who led the patrol that raised the second flag and was the senior Marine in the famous photograph, was killed by a mortar round on March 1, 1945 — just six days after the flag raising. Born in Czechoslovakia (present-day Slovakia), Strank had immigrated to the United States with his family as a child and had enlisted in the Marine Corps before the war. He was regarded by the men of his company as one of the finest non-commissioned officers in the battalion. Corporal Harlon Block, a Texas high school football star, was killed by a mortar round on March 1 as well. Private First Class Franklin Sousley, from Hilltop, Kentucky, was killed by a sniper on March 21, 1945, less than a week before the island was declared secure.

Colonel Harry B. Liversedge — Beyond Suribachi

Colonel Liversedge's achievement in capturing Mount Suribachi should not be allowed to overshadow the full scope of his leadership during the battle. After the fall of Suribachi, the 28th Marines were thrown into the northern fighting, participating in some of the most brutal engagements of the campaign. Liversedge's steady, experienced hand guided his regiment through 36 days of continuous combat, and his performance at Iwo Jima was a major factor in his subsequent promotion and his eventual rise to the rank of Major General.

Notable Junior Officers and NCOs

Throughout the ranks of the 5th Marine Division, the battle produced countless acts of heroism by officers and men who received no formal recognition beyond the respect of their fellow Marines. Platoon commanders who kept their men alive and moving forward through seemingly impossible defensive positions, NCOs who improvised tactical solutions under fire, and individual riflemen who performed extraordinary feats of courage in moments that went unobserved by any officer who might have submitted a citation — these men are the true fabric of the division's history, and their stories, preserved in the oral histories and memoirs of the survivors, provide the most vivid picture of what it actually meant to fight and survive on Iwo Jima.

Part VIII

Casualties, the End of the Battle, and Legacy

The Cost of Victory

The statistics of the Battle of Iwo Jima are almost numbing in their magnitude. Of the approximately 70,000 Marines who participated in the operation across all three Marine divisions, nearly 6,821 were killed and more than 19,217 were wounded — a casualty rate of approximately 37 percent of the landing force. The 5th Marine Division's share of these losses was staggering: the division suffered approximately 2,949 men killed in action and more than 8,500 wounded, making it one of the most costly campaigns ever fought by any American division in any theater of the Second World War.

The Japanese losses were even more catastrophic in proportional terms. Of the approximately 22,000 Japanese defenders on Iwo Jima, only 216 were taken prisoner. The rest — more than 21,000 men — fought to the death. Lieutenant General Kuribayashi himself apparently died in the final stages of the battle; his body was never positively identified. It was, as Admiral Chester Nimitz famously observed, a battle in which "uncommon valor was a common virtue."

The capture of Iwo Jima proved its strategic worth almost immediately. Within weeks of the island's fall, damaged B-29s began making emergency landings on the island's captured airfields. By the end of the war, an estimated 2,400 B-29s carrying approximately 27,000 airmen had made emergency landings on Iwo Jima — each one of those aircraft, and each crew member aboard them, potentially owed their survival to the Marines who fought and died to take the island.

Post-Battle Operations and Deactivation

After Iwo Jima was secured on March 26, 1945, the 5th Marine Division was withdrawn and sent to Hawaii to rest, refit, and prepare for the next operation. In the event, that next operation — the invasion of the Japanese home islands, code-named Operation Downfall — never took place. The use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, combined with Soviet entry into the Pacific War, precipitated the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945, and the formal surrender ceremony aboard USS Missouri on September 2. The division was subsequently sent to Japan as part of the occupation force, landing on Kyushu in September 1945. The 5th Marine Division was officially deactivated on February 5, 1946, at Sasebo, Japan, its brief but extraordinary existence brought to a close with the end of the war it was created to fight.

The Enduring Legacy of the Spearhead Division

The legacy of the 5th Marine Division extends far beyond its brief operational history. The division and the men who served in it have left an indelible mark on American military culture and national memory. The flag-raising photograph taken on Suribachi became the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial — the iconic bronze statue at the edge of Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia — dedicated in 1954 and still visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year. The image, reproduced billions of times on posters, stamps, books, and screens in the eight decades since it was taken, remains one of the most universally recognized symbols of American sacrifice and determination.

The division's 14 Medals of Honor represent not merely individual acts of valor but a collective testament to the character of the men who served in the Spearhead Division — men who, when faced with the ultimate test, chose courage over survival, chose their comrades over themselves. Their example has inspired generations of subsequent Marines and service members, and the Medal of Honor citations from Iwo Jima remain among the most frequently read and studied documents in the history of American military education.

More broadly, the 5th Marine Division's role in the Battle of Iwo Jima represents a pivotal moment in the history of American arms. The battle demonstrated the extraordinary capability of the United States Marine Corps in the most demanding form of warfare — the deliberate assault of a heavily fortified position against a determined defender — and it validated the Marine Corps' doctrine of amphibious assault that had been developed in the interwar years and refined through four years of Pacific combat. The lessons of Iwo Jima, paid for in blood by the men of the 5th and other Marine divisions, informed American military thinking for decades thereafter.

The 5th Marine Division was eventually reactivated during the Cold War era, though it never again saw the kind of sustained, all-consuming combat that defined its World War II existence. The memory of Iwo Jima and the men of the Spearhead Division remains, however, a living part of Marine Corps culture — honored in ceremonies, preserved in memorials, and carried in the institutional DNA of a service that takes its history as seriously as it takes its training. Every Marine who has passed through the gates of Camp Pendleton since 1945 has walked ground where the men of the 5th Division once learned to fight, and they have done so in the shadow of an achievement that has never been surpassed.