USS Lowndes Beach Party's Iwo Jima Yellow Beach Landing Photo (D-Day - 1)


1945 Notes from Fred Brinkman:

Photograph of Yellow Beach One of Iwo Jima which was taken one day before D-Day assualt on the island. (February 19th, 1945). The scene of the picture is just below Iwo's biggest airfield on the southern end of the island. The heap of wreckage at top of photo is the result of the naval bombardment from our warships which were in action for three days along with an air attack from carrier-based planes. The wrecked planes are all Jap bombers, none of which left the ground of the Motoyama air strip. The remains of the planes which are visible are ones which have been smashed off the airfield. The airfield, itself lies above. "X" is the line of the beach. We landed the next day at the point "XXXX." The battle hadn't yet begun and none of our troops had landed when this picture was taken, nor any Jap opposition had been met, even though the tops of all pillboxes and other structures have already been leveled to the ground.
"XX" is the steep terrace just above the beach where the bloodiest battle occurred the next day. Although they are well camouflaged, "XXX" marks the line where most of the Jap pillboxes were buried which raised plenty of hell the next day. Below the airfield, and to the left-center of the photo, is the remains of some big Jap blockhouses. The beach and water-line are smooth in this photo, but they were converted to a much-worse heap of wreckage than the airfield after we landed. Our beach party was set up here for four days, although we had to evacuate most of our casualties 500 yards down the beach (to the left.)
"XXXXX" is the location of the pillbox where the Jap snippers made their attack on our evacuation station which we set up just below the pillbox. Other sniper attacks came from pillboxes just to the right and left of this one. Most of the mortor fire dropped from the northern hills (to the right of photo) and from Mount Suribachi (to the left of the photo). Machine gun and artillery firing hit us hardest when the Japs counter-attacked from the airfield the second night.

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