Word: motoyama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When the first waves of marines went ashore on Iwo Jima, Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone was there, commanding an assault team of the 27th Regiment, 5th Division. By noon Medal-of-Honorman Basilone had his outfit on the edge of Motoyama airfield. There he met the shell that had his number on it. By nightfall John Basilone, a good marine, was dead...
...General was still around on D-plus-twelve, he must have seen something to pack his belly with anguish: a huge cloud of yellow dust rising over Motoyama Airfield No. 1. The dust was lifted by big U.S. transport planes landing from Saipan. The Americans were putting to use what they had come to Iwo to get, and the incoming planes were tokens of the approaching end of the hardest amphibious campaign in the Pacific. Iwo Jima was not yet secure, but for practical purposes the ugly, sulfurous, mean little island was theirs...
Until last week it seemed that this might not be so. At the end of the tenth day Major General Graves B. Erskine's hell-for-leather 3rd Division recovered from its long stymie around Motoyama Airfield No. 2, finally broke through for a 1,000-yd. gain straight up the middle of Iwo Jima. Here it seemed that the Japs might crack wide open. But the Jap flanks held and they tightened their grip on the craggy ravines. Instead of falling apart, the Japs fought more fanatically than ever and postponed their downfall...