Island Hopping - Iwo Jima and Okinawa - GE/TT

The following information

Island Hopping and
Preparation to END the War

You remember from our discussion earlier how the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Then you remember how we defeated the Japanese at the Battle of Midway June 4th-7th, 1942. That was all OK, but to defeat Japan once and for all we had to dig them out of every island and every other country they had captured, and make our way to their Home Islands. They fought our attacks hard, and we had to come up with a plan to defeat them.

That plan came to be called “Island Hopping” because we would attack and capture an island from the Japanese, and then use it as a base to attack another island where the Japanese were. The goal was to get to their main Home Islands, because capturing those islands was thought to be the ONLY way to get the Japanese to give up and surrender.  

The green arrows on this map show how the U.S. moved (hopped) from island to island, always moving closer to Japan

Iwo Jima : February 19th – March 26th, 1945


U.S. Marine artillery firing at the Japanese on Mount Suribachi

As we got closer to the Japanese Home Islands the Japanese soldiers fought harder and harder. At Iwo Jima we had 80,000 men attacking 20,00 Japanese soldiers.  Yes, we outnumbered them by A LOT, but they had dug tunnels and caves all over the Island, which helped them defend themselves.


This shows the inside of a cave many years after the war. Kind of just like they left it.

The final death toll among Marines was 5,931 killed in action, died of wounds or missing in action and presumed dead — more than twice as many Marines than had been killed in all of World War One.   In all, more than 800 Americans gave their lives for every square mile of Iwo Jima.

U.S. Marine graves on Iwo Jima

Of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers present at the beginning of the battle, over 20,000 were killed and only 216 taken prisoner. We began to find out just what it would cost if we DID have to invade their Home Islands. They would fight to the death.

U.S. Marines and a Navy salior raising the flag on Mount Suribachi during the battle

Okinawa:April 1st – June 21st, 1945



Okinawa is at the bottom of the map, and shows up in red. See how close is it to Japan? It is only about 340 miles away.

The Japanese considered this island almost like it was part of their Home Islands. We knew we would need to bring a lot of force to attack and defeat. We had over 60,000 Marines and Army soldiers to attack. We used over 1,300 ships to fire their big cannons at the Japanese before the soldiers landed.

During the first 24 hours of the attack those ships fired 7,600,000 pounds of cannon shells (That is = 3,800 mid sized SUV’s if each car weighs 2,000lbs.).  

This is a bit long, but it DOES show U.S. artillery hitting the island before our Marines and soldiers went in

When it was all over we had won, gotten closer to Japan for the next step, which would be to attack their Home Islands. But there was a cost:

* 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing,
   * More than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan soldiers killed of the 117,00 who were alive when the battle started (That is 91% killed)
  * 100,000 Okinawan civilians (not army soldiers)  killed.

The Japanese demonstrated they were not going to surrender easily, and that they were not afraid to fight where there were civilians in the way.