Samurai-born and steeled in Japan's harsh military culture, Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi had lived five years in North America but was largely unknown to Washington's leaders when he was ordered to defend Iwo Jima "at all costs." The U.S. would pay dearly for underestimating him.
In the summer of 1929, he must have been an odd sight: a middle-aged Japanese man driving alone across the American Midwest in a Chevrolet, drawing spindly sketches of the people and places he saw.
Beneath the bucolic calm of the endlessly rolling farmland, though, dark forces churned unseen: the Great Depression loomed just weeks away, East Asia simmered uneasily with the conflict that would soon rip the region apart, and in Europe an unknown Austrian artist was building the foundations of the Nazi Party.