The Battle of Iwo Jima broke out from February 19 to March 26, 1945 in the Pacific theater of World War II. Next to the bodies of U.S. Marines who died on their backs, the backs of Japanese garrison members who died in battle were scattered on the sandy beach of Iwo Jima. Behind those corpses crawled the flames of the U.S. Army's flame throwers.
At 6 p.m. on February 21, about five hours after landing on Iwo Jima, the U.S. military announced on February 22 that over 5,000 casualties had been reported. The U.S. casualties were 644 killed in action, 4108 wounded in action, and 560 missing in action, for a total of 5,312 casualties.
The casualties at Iwo Jima were higher than during the fierce battle of Tarawa and the Normandy landings. casualties since the Battle of Gettysburg, the most intense battle of the Civil War (casualties reached about 40,000 killed or wounded and more than 10,000 prisoners of war or missing). The battle was the deadliest in the history of the war. In the fierce battle of Tarawa Island in the Gilbert Islands (November 1943), in which about 4,500 Japanese troops were crushed to ashes, 934 were killed and 2,385 were wounded. During the Normandy landings, about 150,000 Allied troops as a whole landed on the island and about 9,000 were killed or wounded, while the U.S. casualties were 2,500. The three days of fighting that followed the landing on Iwo Jima were especially quite costly.
American casualties continued to mount, and the battle of Mount Suribachi, which began on February 20, the day after the landing, lasted five days. There alone, the number of American soldiers killed and wounded reached 1,039 and 3,741, respectively, with about 558 deserting the front due to fatigue, for a total of 5,338 casualties. Combined with the losses on the day of landing, the casualties were approximately 7758.
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