Word: tarawa
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Last week the nation learned just how many Marine soldiers, carrying rifles and grenades, had paid the price to take Iwo Jima: 4,189 dead, 441 missing, 15,308 wounded-total casualties of 19,938. This was as high as Tarawa and Saipan combined, higher than the number of Union casualties in any of the bloody battles of the Civil War except Gettysburg...
...Shores of Iwo Jima (Paramount), a nine-minute newsreel taken by Navy, Coast Guard and Marine Corps cameramen of the fiercest fight in Marine Corps history, is worthy, or almost worthy, to rank with such great war records as With the Marines at Tarawa (TIME, March 20, 1944). Shot chiefly on a terrain as shapeless as an ash-heap, as mortally featureless and cryptic as the flank of Captain Ahab's White Whale in their ultimate engagement, it lacks the relative coherence and clarity of most of its predecessors. It demonstrates, in fact, more clearly than any previous film...
From bloody Iwo Jima, TIME Correspondent Robert Sherrod, veteran of the Aleutians and Tarawa, last week radioed this account of a night in a front-line Marine hospital...
...Tarawa the 2nd Division marines paid the highest relative price: 1,000 killed and 2,000 wounded in exchange for one square mile of land. The 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions and the 27th Army Division suffered 16,500 casualties to win Saipan's 75 square miles. Iwo Jima is smaller (eight square miles) than Saipan, and its casualty ratio will hardly equal Tarawa's, but at the end of a fortnight's bloody fighting there is no longer any doubt that Iwo is the most difficult amphibious operation in U.S. history...
Said the editorial: "American forces are paying heavily for [Iwo Jima]-perhaps too heavily. . . . The same thing . . . happened at Tarawa and Saipan. . . . The American forces are in danger of being worn out before they ever reach [Japan], Plainly, what we need is ... General MacArthur. ... He outwits and outmaneuvers the Japanese. HE SAVES THE LIVES or HIS OWN MEN. . . ." That was not the way to talk to marines, and they had come to tell somebody...