Iwo Jima is a tiny sliver of an island 1,200 km south of Tokyo, an unlikely setting for anything historical, let alone what has been called "the worst battle in world history." American forces stormed it on Feb. 19, 1945. There were Japanese at this point who knew the war was lost. Iwo Jima's commander, Lieutenant-General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, was one of them. Some months earlier he had told a colleague, "I was in the United States for about five years. If war comes, the great peacetime industries of America can be converted into a wartime industry at a moment's notice with just one command. Japan's war planners did not realize this. ... There is absolutely no chance for Japan to win this war. But we must continue to fight until the end."
They did, of course, costing the Americans 23,000 casualties before the island was finally taken six weeks later. It was the first American incursion onto Japanese territory — the first incursion by any foreign enemy since the 13th-century Mongol invasions. Its enduring symbol is the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of five Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi. That photograph symbolizes something else as well — the fact that we only know the carnage of Iwo Jima from the American viewpoint. The Japanese participants — and their stories — were all but wiped out. Twenty thousand of 21,000 Japanese defenders died, either in battle against hopeless odds or by suicide. Only four senior officers survived. One of them was Major Yoshitaka Horie, the author of this book.
He survived because in July 1944 he was abruptly transferred to nearby Chichijima island as a logistics expert charged with forwarding emergency supplies to Iwo Jima. "What a peaceful island it was, especially when compared to Iwo Jima!" he writes in a rare burst of lyricism. His preferred style is dry, clinical, technical — to the point of discouraging the nonmilitary reader. What keeps you going, if anything does, is the book's significance as Japanese testimony, otherwise almost nonexistent, concerning those fatal few weeks of history.