Initially stationed on this field were 1,500 Japanese navy air force personnel and 20 aircraft. On Iwo Jima, the Japanese navy had constructed an airfield about 2,000 yards (1830 m) north-east of Mt Suribachi. At the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, a Japanese army force of some 3,700 to 3,800 men garrisoned Chichi Jima, the largest of the Ogasawara Gunto’s islands, and the Japanese navy had some 1,200 men at the Chichi Jima naval base, a small seaplane base, a radio and weather station, and various gunboat, submarine chaser and minesweeper units. The island has an area of less than 8 sq miles (20.7 km²), relies on trapped rain for its fresh water, and in its simplest terms is a very rugged plateau dominated at its northern end by a mass of low but sharp ridges and ravines, and at its southern tip by Mt Suribachi, the 546-ft (166-m) stump of an extinct volcano and the island’s highest point. On its north-east/south-west axis the island is less than 5 miles (8 km) long, and its width varies from about 2.5 miles (4 km) in the north to a mere 0.5 mile (0.8 km) in the south. Iwo Jima is one of the Kazan Retto (Volcano islands), the southernmost part of the Ogasawara Gunto (Bonin islands), which lies about 670 miles (1080 km) to the south of Tokyo and 625 miles (1130 km) to the north of Saipan in the Marianas, and thus almost exactly half-way between Tokyo and Saipan. At the psychological level the operation also signalled to the Japanese the fact that the US forces were still driving forward on Japan and that the island’s loss was a clear sign of inevitable defeat, with only Okinawa left between the advancing Americans and the home islands. These could therefore escort the bombers operating from the large bases on the Mariana islands. These could then be brought into service for emergency landings by Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers damaged over Japan and unlikely to make it back to their main bases in the Mariana islands, which had been seized by US forces in ‘Forager’ between 15 June and 10 August 1944, and could also serve as the bases for long-range fighters. The importance of this undertaking lay in the fact that Iwo Jima’s capture provided the US forces with two completed airfields and one incomplete airfield. ‘Detachment’ was completed between 19 February and 26 March 1945. On 19 February 2011 it will be the 76 th anniversary of Operation ‘Detachment’, which was the US strategic undertaking to take and hold the tiny island of Iwo Jima, which was seen as the last but one step in the advance of the US Army and US Navy’s forces north toward what was expected to end with the amphibious landings on and conquest of the Japanese home islands from a time late in 1945.

Toy defense 2 iwo jima level 10