66 years ago the United States Marine Corps landed on Iwo Jima!
"The raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, means a Marine Corps for the next 50) 500 years." ~ James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy
"Of the Marines on Iwo Jima, uncommon valor was a common virtue" ~ Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz
Iwo Jima WWII
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"I know I’m going to heaven. I put in 36 days in hell." – Lloyd Keland, a machine gunner and one of the first Marines to land on Iwo Jima
“When you go home
Tell them for us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today”
chiseled outside a cemetery on Iwo Jima
It had taken twenty-two crowded transports to bring the 5th Division to the island. The survivors fit comfortably onto eight departing ships. The American boys had killed about 21,000 Japanese, but suffered more than 26,000 casualties doing so. This would be the only battle in the Pacific where the invaders suffered higher casualties than the defenders. The Marines fought in World War II for forty-three months. Yet in one month on Iwo Jima, one third of their total deaths occurred. They left behind the Pacific's largest cemeteries: nearly 6,800 graves in all; mounds with their crosses and stars. Thousands of families would not have the solace of a body to bid farewell: just the abstract information that the Marine had "died in the performance of his duty" and was buried in a plot, aligned in a row with numbers on his grave
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