From the viewpoint of Marine company commanders, having their own “artillery,” in the form of 60mm mortars, was a very satisfying matter. A 60mm mortar crew is at work, in a natural depression, lobbing round after round at enemy positions.
General Erskine came down with pneumonia during this period, but refused to be evacuated. Colonel Robert E. Hogaboom, his chief of staff, quietly kept the war moving. The division continued to advance. When Erskine recovered, Hogaboom adjusted accordingly; the two were a highly effective team.
Erskine had long sought the opportunity to conduct a battalion-sized night operation. It rankled him that throughout the war the Americans seemed to have conceded the night to the Japanese. When Hill 362-C continued to thwart his advance, Erskine directed a pre-dawn advance devoid of the trappings of prep fires which always seemed to identify the time and place of attack. The distinction of making this unusual assault went to Lieutenant Colonel Harold C. “Bing” Boehm, commanding the 3d Battalion, 9th Marines. Unfortunately this battalion was new to this particular sector and received the attack order too late the previous day to reconnoiter effectively. The absence of advance orientation notwithstanding, the battalion crossed the line of departure promptly and silently at 0500 and headed for Hill 362-C. The unit attained total surprise along its axis of advance. Before the sleepy Japanese knew it, the battalion had hurried across 500 yards of broken ground, sweeping by the outposts and roasting the occasional strongpoint with flamethrowers. Then it was Boehm’s turn to be surprised. Daylight revealed his battalion had captured the wrong hill, an intermediate objective. Hill 362-C still lay 250 yards distant; now he was surrounded by a sea of wide-awake and furiously counterattacking Japanese infantry. Boehm did what seemed natural: he redeployed his battalion and attacked towards the original objective. This proved very rough going and took much of the day, but before dark the 3d Battalion, 9th Marines stood in sole possession of Hill 362-C, one of Kuribayashi’s main defensive anchors.
Boehm’s success, followed shortly by General Senda’s costly counterattack against the 4th Marine Division, seemed to represent another turning point of the battle. On D+18 a patrol from the 3d Marine Division reached the northeast coast. The squad leader filled a canteen with salt water and sent it back to General Schmidt marked “For inspection—not consumption.” Schmidt welcomed the symbolism. The next day the 4th Marine Division finally pinched out Turkey Knob, moving out of The Amphitheater towards the east coast. The end seemed tantalizingly close, but the intensity of Japanese resistance hardly waned. Within the 5th Marine Division’s zone in the west, the 2d Battalion, 26th Marines, was reporting an aggregate casualty rate approaching 70 percent. General Rockey warned of a state of “extreme exhaustion and fatigue.”
The division commanders began to look elsewhere for relief of their shot-up battalions. In the 4th Marine Division, General Cates formed a provisional battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Melvin L. Krulewitch which conducted a series of attacks against the many bypassed enemy positions. The term “mopping up” as applied to Iwo Jima, whether by service troops or subsequent Army garrison units, should be considered relative. Many pockets of Japanese held out indefinitely, well-armed and defiant to the end. Rooting them out was never easy. Other divisions used cannoneers, pioneers, motor transport units, and amtrackers as light infantry units, either to augment front-line battalions or conduct combat patrols throughout rear areas. By this time, however, the extreme rear area at Iwo had become overconfident. Movies were being shown every night. Ice cream could be found on the beach. Men swam in the surf and slept in tents. This all provided a false and deadly sense of security.
Not very far to the north, Lieutenant Colonel Cushman’s 2d Battalion, 9th Marines, became engaged in a sustained battle in extremely broken terrain east of the third airfield. The Marines eventually encircled the Japanese positions, but the battle for “Cushman’s Pocket” raged on. As the battalion commander reported the action:
The enemy position was a maze of caves, pillboxes, emplaced tanks, stone walls and trenches.... We beat against this position for eight continuous days, using every supporting weapon. The core—main objective of the sector—still remained. The battalion was exhausted. Almost all leaders were gone and the battalion numbered about 400, including 350 replacements.
Cushman’s 2d Battalion, 9th Marines, was relieved, but other elements of the 9th and 21st Marines, equally exhausted, had just as difficult a time. Erskine truly had no reserves. He called Cushman back into the pocket. By 16 March (D+25), Japanese resistance in this thicket of jumbled rocks ended. The 4th Marine Division, meanwhile, poured over the hills along the east, seizing the coast road and blasting the last Japanese strongpoints from the rear. Ninety percent of Iwo Jima now lay in American hands. Radio Tokyo carried the mournful remarks of Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso, who announced the fall of Iwo Jima as “the most unfortunate thing in the whole war situation.”
General Smith took the opportunity to declare victory and conduct a flag-raising ceremony. With that, the old warhorse departed. Admiral Turner had sailed previously. Admiral Hill and General Schmidt finally had the campaign to themselves. Survivors of the 4th Division began backloading on board ship, their battle finally over.