Iwo Jima has always been beautiful, a volcanic chunk of rock surrounded by cobalt sea. But a World War II battle 80 years ago this month turned the Japanese island into a byword for desperate, deadly combat — and for American triumph.

On Feb. 23, 1945, a contingent of American Marines climbed to the top of Mount Suribachi, the highest point of Iwo Jima. Atop the rubble of war and volcanic eruption, they pitched forward and raised an American flag. A photographer for The Associated Press, Joe Rosenthal, snapped an image, indelible and iconic.

My father, Keyes Beech, was also there, on that lonely island flung in the Pacific Ocean. He was a technical sergeant attached to the U.S. Marine Corps Fifth Division, a division that is no longer active in this more peaceful era. His job as a combat correspondent meant that he was to write about American valor and, hopefully, victory. But the conquest of Iwo Jima, despite the famous flag-raising four days into the battle, did not come for another month.

On the day the Stars and Stripes were unfurled on Mount Suribachi — twice, for good measure — my father told me he was jammed in a foxhole, trying not to get killed by the Japanese, something that would eventually happen to one of his friends, and then another, and then another.

Confined to an island then less than eight square miles, about the size of a busy international airport today, the Americans and Japanese were reduced to a kind of caged combat. Iwo Jima means “sulfur island” in Japanese, and the Japanese Imperial army had fortified its caves with tunnels and other defenses. The charred island smoldered. Its bluffs and beaches became a vast cemetery, volcanic ash and black sand burying the dead.

Roughly 70,000 American soldiers fought to take Iwo Jima. More than 6,500 were killed. Of the 20,000 or so Japanese defending the island, about 19,000 were killed in combat. Some died in a final banzai charge; others ended their own lives rather than surrender to the Americans. Two hid in the warren of caves until 1949, emerging to a changed world nearly four years after the war had ended.

On March 26, 1945, Iwo Jima became the first chunk of Japanese land to be formally captured by the Americans. Less than five months later, the Japanese emperor surrendered, ending an imperial march across Asia that cut short millions of lives. American bombs, both atomic and incendiary, had devastated Japan as well.

After the war was over, the United States built a military base on Iwo Jima. In 1968, the island was given back to Japan. The Japanese villagers who were evacuated in 1944, as the island geared up for the coming battle, never returned. In 2007, the island was officially renamed Iwo To, as it was known before the battle, using a different pronunciation of the word “island.”

My father, like many veterans of that generation, did not talk much of World War II. He didn’t hold a grudge. He lived in Japan for about 30 years and married a Japanese woman, my mother.

He covered other battles in the Pacific, including ones Americans did not win. But Iwo, as he called it, pierced him. With American soldiers still fighting in the Pacific theater, my father joined a war bond tour, lurching around the United States with some of the flag-raising soldiers to drum up financial support for what turned out to be the waning days of World War II.

They drank far too much. It was the way back then. The term “post-traumatic stress disorder” didn’t exist.

When I was in middle school, we would drive in the Washington area, in our Nissan or our Plymouth — we had one car for each country — and we would sometimes pass the Marine Corps War Memorial, Mr. Rosenthal’s photo cast as a bronze statue. My father would go quiet. One hand stayed on the steering wheel. With his other, he would grip my hand. I knew to squeeze back.



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