whitehall
Diamond Member
Everybody knows what happened but nobody wants to discuss why 7,000 Marines died between Feb 19 1945 and March 11 1945 to take a God forsaken hunk of smelly land that could have and should have been bypassed. The Navy bowed out after having bombed the island for three days instead of the requested 30 days. Intelligence claimed that the island would be taken in a week. The initial mission statement was that the airfield needed to be taken to stop Japanese fighter plane harassment of U.S. bombers but that didn't make much sense at the time because the U.S. had almost total air superiority and could have bombed the Iwo air field into volcanic ash. Most people educated by the FDR propaganda historians weren't aware that the initial mission statement was changed after the Marines took the island. The revised propaganda message would justify the loss of an incredible 7,000 Marines in a month by claiming that the island was taken in order to provide a landing zone for crippled bombers. The question is where did the crippled bombers land before Iwo Jima was taken and how many bombers were lost because they were directed to and couldn't find a tiny island when they could have flown to China or the Philippines? The point is that nobody wants to consider the fact that the Marines were sacrificed by the FDR administration to gauge how well the Japanese would defend their own turf when they had forty years to defend it . It was a part of justifying the use of the Bomb.
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