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🇺🇸 February 15, 1945 ~ The Battle of Iwo Jima, an epic military campaign between U.S. Marines and the Imperial Army of Japan in early 1945. Located 750 miles off the coast of Japan, the island of Iwo Jima had three airfields that could serve as a staging facility for a potential invasion of mainland Japan. 🇺🇸 American forces invaded the island on February 19, 1945, and the ensuing Battle of Iwo Jima lasted for five weeks. In some of the bloodiest fighting of World War II, it’s believed that all but 200 or so of the 21,000 Japanese forces on the island were killed, as were almost 7,000 Marines. 🇺🇸 In a letter to a friend (which on November 19, 1945, found its way into the Congressional Record), Lieutenant junior grade Alan Wood, of Sierra Madre, Calif., (serving as the LST’s communications officer at the time) described his first impressions of the battle for Iwo Jima. “On the 19th of February—a clear, cool, beautiful day—we rolled up to Iwo, which was a mass of smoke and dust,” he wrote. “The big ships of the Navy circled the island and were leisurely pumping a steady barrage of shells at it. Overhead our planes buzzed and roared as wave after wave dove at the beaches and Mount Suribachi. It didn’t seem possible there could be a living thing left on Iwo when the Marines got there. It looked like a pushover. But that afternoon as we cruised around, several thousand yards off the beach, we could tell by looking through binoculars that the Japs were doing a lot of fighting back.” 🇺🇸