Satoru Omagari was a 23-year-old mechanic and a sub-lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Force when he was ordered to the defense of Iwo Jima in 1944. Before he was drafted into the military he was a university student. Here, published for the first time in English, are some of his horrific recollections of the battle.
At 18:00 on March 8, 1945, 20 days after U.S. forces had landed on Iwo Jima, we were ordered to launch a full-scale attack on Mount Suribachi.
I was leading a group of 100 troops. We wandered into Commander Nishi's Tank Unit Bunker Headquarters on the way there, and I was persuaded by Nishi to stay and regroup his units. The unit had already lost all its tanks from mortar attacks and the Americans' M4 combat tanks. We organized the men who had gathered at the bunker into five to eight groups of three or four people and hid ourselves at 4 a.m. at points where we expected the enemy the next morning.