Inevitable Island

On Iwo Jima the battle ground forward, slowly, bloodily but steadily. According to Japanese custom, the enemy garrison, now estimated at an original 20,000, was fighting a rear-guard action with no hope of reinforcement or relief.

According to American custom, the battlefield had been isolated. Throughout the bombardment and invasion of Iwo, air strikes from carriers in Admiral Raymond Ames Spruance's Fifth Fleet kept Japanese heads down on Chichi Jima in the Bonins, where a single airstrip had a potential nuisance value. Last week, for the second time, Vice Admiral Marc Andrew Mitscher took the famed fast carrier Task Force 58 into Japanese home waters, and sent off air strikes against airfields around Tokyo. This time coordination with Major General Curtis E. ("Old Ironpants") LeMay's 21st Bomber Command was closer: hot on the vapor trails of Mitscher's planes came more than 200 B-29s with more than 1,000 tons of bombs to batter the Tokyo area and secondary targets, further isolating the battlefield.

As the Navy pointed out last week, Iwo had been an inevitable point of invasion--regardless of cost. From its fields Jap planes had menaced U.S. B-29s based in the Marianas; from the same fields U.S. long-range fighters will be able to give the Superforts escort to Tokyo. Perhaps even more important, an Iwo base will let low-level photo-reconnaissance planes do a thorough job on Japan's coast. (Highflying B-29s could not make satisfactory photo-maps because of persistent cloud cover.)

Which Way to Turn? The Japs knew all this. They knew that there was no island within fighter-plane range of their homeland which would serve the U.S. purpose as well as Iwo. (Chichi's terrain would not take enough airfields.) There was no surprise on either side.

Beyond Iwo, the Japanese cannot hope to outguess the attackers. Chichi Jima might eventually be taken as a platform for launching robot bombs against Tokyo (615 miles away). The only thing the Japs can be sure of is that their home islands, soon to be mapped in detail by U.S. photo-interpreters, are the eventual objective. They cannot be sure whether the assault troops will come direct, or by way of the Kurils, Ryukyus, China or Korea. They cannot be strong at every point of possible attack. They can either spread their forces thin or concentrate them at the likeliest points. Either way, U.S. photoplanes will tell Fleet Admiral Nimitz what the dispositions are.

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