80 Years After His Dad Fought On Iwo Jima, Dan Starks Makes Rare Visit To Island

Six men on Iwo Jima raised a flag that captured the world’s attention 80 years ago this year. While the famous photo of the flag seems to proclaim victory, that actually wouldn’t come until more than a month later.

The battle for Iwo Jima — a tiny volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean — would wind up being one of World War II’s bloodiest and was only just getting started when the famous flag image was made. 

The Battle of Iwo Jima ran from Feb. 19 to March 26, 1945, and marks its 80^th anniversary this year. That battle and its place in World War II history were highlighted in Wyoming by the National Museum of Military Vehicles this month.

Dan Starks, the museum’s owner, is among a small number of Americans who can say they’ve made a pilgrimage to the island, which is only open one day a year for a Reunion of Honor ceremony. 

Starks was at the ceremony this year and said it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. 

“It’s by invitation only,” Starks said. “And the starting point was that you needed to be an Iwo Jima veteran, or accompanying an Iwo Jima veteran. But we have very few Iwo Jima veterans alive anymore, so then it gets to be family members of Iwo Jima veterans.”

Starks’ father was among those who stood on top of Mount Suribachi after the Battle of Iwo Jima was over, and Starks got to retrace his dad’s footsteps while he was there.

“I never expected to have a chance to visit Iwo Jima, much less climb to the top of Mount Suribachi,” Starks said. “It was really an experience. And it sure did give me insight into what Americans went through on Iwo Jima.”

Starks was so impressed with the experience, it inspired him to invite the executive director of the Iwo Jima Association, Shayne Jarosz, to the National Museum of Military Vehicles to talk about Iwo Jima, as well as explore why this battle still matters today.

About The Famous Flag Photo Flap

Jarosz started with a closer look at the famous flag-raising photo that won Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal a Pulitzer — but not without some controversy first.

“When Rosenthal was coming up, he missed the first flag raising,” Jarosz said. “So, he hears they’re going to put a second flag up, and he’s, like, excited to go up and get a flag-raising picture.”

The other reporters weren’t interested in taking photos of the second flag raising, even if that flag was bigger and about to be better located, since they’d already gotten a photo of the first.

“So, they get to the top there and Joe is putzing around,” Jarosz said. “He’s at a vantage point below where they’re going to raise the flag. So, he walks around and he starts collecting all of the huge boulders of lava, stacking them up.”

That’s when he hears someone say, “Joe, the flag is going up!”

“So, he’s sitting there trying to balance, and he just clicks the shutter,” Jarosz said. “He doesn’t aim. He doesn’t do anything. All he does is click. So this (famous image) is the accident. An amazing accident.”

But Rosenthal didn’t know that at the time. These were the days of film and darkrooms, where photographers had no idea what they had taken until the film was developed.

Not only was that shot a last-second Hail Mary click, he dropped his camera in the water on his way down to the landing beaches, Jarosz said.

So, Rosenthal did what most reporters in that situation would do. He staged a second photo around one of the flags, just to make sure he’d have something to send the darkroom by deadline. 

“Within 24 hours, the accidental shot is across every single newspaper in the free world,” Jarosz said. 

Rosenthal, after he leaves the island, has no idea that the accidental shot he took had gone around the world. He still thought it was the second, staged photo.

So, when he’s asked whether he staged his flag-raising photo, he tells reporters, “I sure did.”

That led to a cycle of stories claiming the amazing photo had been faked and put Rosenthal on the defensive. Fortunately, there was a live video taken as well, so Rosenthal was able to prove his accidental shot was genuine.

But another controversy soon developed.

Some of the men in the photo were misidentified. That led to another investigation of the photo, one that involved the FBI, to figure out who was really in it.

Despite all the controversy that ensued over misidentified people and questions about whether the photograph was staged, Rosenthal eventually got his Pulitzer.

The photo is still considered one of the most iconic ever taken of the American flag, earning it a spot in history.

The Bushido Code

While the photo had people thinking the battle was already over, in truth, the Battle for Iwo Jima had barely begun. 

Iwo Jima would go on to be one of the bloodiest battles of World War II, with more than 27,000 Americans and Japanese losing their lives on the volcanic island, whose name means “island of sulfur,” Jarosz said. Of those, 6,821 were Americans.

“You hear people talk about the black sands of Iwo Jima,” Jarosz said. “That’s a misnomer. The beaches are black, but they’re black with volcanic ash. And so the difference between ash and sand is you can walk over the top of sand.”

Ash, though, is more like walking through wet coffee grounds. 

“It doesn’t have a bottom,” Jarosz said. “You’re going to sink where you wouldn’t sink if you were walking over sand.”

The ash was part of a death trap the Japanese set for American troops landing on the island. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi knew that his small force of 18,000 Japanese soldiers could not defeat the 70,000 U.S. Marines invading the island on Feb. 19, 1945. 

All Kuribayashi could do was ensure the cost of taking the island would be as dear as possible, in hopes high American casualties would turn the force aside.

This wasn’t just a strategic maneuver. It was also cultural. Kuribayashi was the fifth generation of his family to serve emperors as samurai. He was raised on the Bushido code, which translates to “the way of the warrior.” 

The Bushido moral code demanded not just virtues like loyalty and courage, but also death before dishonor. 

Kuribayashi had been taught from birth that to surrender was a disgrace. 

He and his soldiers would fight to the death rather than endure the unendurable shame of surrendering.

A Different Defense

Before the war, Kuribayashi had trained in the United States at one of its military colleges, where he’d learned about the power of improvisation and doing what the enemy doesn’t expect.

When he landed on Iwo Jima and saw his men digging the typical trench lines that had already failed on so many other beaches, he ordered his men to stop what they were doing.

“This hasn’t worked the entire time,” Jarosz said the general told his men. “We’re not doing that. We’re going down, underneath the island.”

Kuribayashi and his men dug miles and miles of tunnels under the island and inside Mount Suribachi — 12 miles in all, with 1,000 cave entrances and pillboxes.

When U.S. Marines arrived at Iwo Jima, the Japanese were maybe a month away from connecting the main island’s system of tunnels to those in Mount Suribachi. 

“That thing was just about impenetrable,” Jarosz said. “If they would have been able to connect the main portion of the island with Mount Suribachi, man, that would have really — we would have still taken the island, but it would have been with a lot more casualties.”

Kuribayashi prepared his men for what he knew was to come.

“We are here to defend this island to the limit of our strength,” he told his men. “We must devote ourselves to that task entirely. Each of your shots must kill many Americans. We cannot allow ourselves to be captured by the enemy. 

“If our positions are overrun, we will take bombs and grenades and throw ourselves under the tanks to destroy them,” he continued. “We will infiltrate the enemy’s lines to exterminate him. No man must die until he has killed 10 Americans. We will harass the enemy with guerrilla actions until the last of us has perished. Long live the Emperor!”

No Way Forward, No Way Back

The American forces had no idea where the Japanese were on the island when they arrived. The notion that they were tunneling underground wasn’t something anyone expected.

The invasion of the island started with a typical aerial assault.

“We spent 74 days just peppering this small island with all kinds of bombs,” Jarosz said. “We just hammered that island with bombs.”

Then the Navy came in and pounded the island for three more days with bigger bombs.

Finally, it was time for the Marines to land, and Kuribayashi was watching all of that from the tunnels.

He had told his men to let the Americans land without firing a single shot, knowing that if he and his men were patient and waited, the American soldiers would become mired in that coffee-ground ash — unable to retreat and unable to move forward.

The first wave of unsuspecting troops landed on the ash-covered beach with not a single shot fired, Jarosz said. So, a second wave landed, bringing all the heavy artillery and other supplies with them.

That was some tough going, Jarosz said.

“You can’t even dig a foxhole in ash,” he said. “It’s like digging a foxhole in a grain silo. The scoop you removed just fills right back in. So, instead of everybody getting off the beach and moving in, we’re stacking up.”

By the time the third wave moved in, Americans covered every inch of the black ash beach. That was exactly what Kuribayashi was waiting for.

“They had their guns pre-registered to the landing beach,” Jarosz said. “If you look at some of the pictures of the assault on Iwo Jima, these guys (Americans) are all laying down there getting shot at. They’re getting shot from the sides and from the front.”

The only safe place was back into the ocean. But, stuck as they were in the quicksand ash, there was no way they were able to do that either.

“This was an absolute killing field,” Jarosz said. “And we taught Kuribayashi how to do that at the U.S. Military War College. We did a really good job teaching him that.”

While some later scholars have suggested that America could have skipped over Iwo Jima and saved many lives, that’s not an interpretation Jarosz agrees with.

“If you look at the bombing runs we did from Saipan and Tinian all the way up to Japan, you have to cross over the Bonin Island chain, and Iwo Jima is dead in the middle of that thing,” he said. “So, we had to have those airstrips.”

There just wasn’t enough fuel capacity to avoid taking the island. 

“Because the United States Marines took the island of Iwo Jima, it is estimated that we saved about 45,000 air crew lives,” Jarosz said. “Because they had to fly over Iwo Jima. They had to. There was no way around it.

“So, this was a battle that had to happen and, as a result of that, it saved a lot of American lives.”

What It’s Like To Walk The Beaches Of Iwo Jima

The exhaustion of walking on Iwo Jima’s beaches is something Jarosz loves to help others experience.

It’s also one of the things that particularly stood out to Starks when he went to the island earlier this year for the Reunion of Honor ceremony.

“Dad never did talk about Iwo Jima,” Starks said. “But the trip sure did give me insight into what Americans went through. It was, you couldn’t believe it. There was no transportation, so once you landed onto the island, you had to walk. And I think the round trip was about 12 miles.”

Not only was the ash itself difficult to walk in, but the temperature on the volcanic island can be life threatening.

“The ground was so hot,” Starks said. “I mean, I was cooking from my feet up all along that 12-mile hike.”

Despite having plenty of water and wearing light clothing, Starks still suffered heat stroke while there.

“My body temperature was above 104 degrees,” he said. “They ended up taking me to an aid station and giving me 2 liters of fluids with an IV and packing me with ice and stuff. Just imagine being there 24 hours a day, and again and again and again in combat, with all that exertion.”

Starks has read many accounts of the battle, how often the men were on the verge of collapse due to lack of water.

“Somebody goes back to the landing beaches to bring a little water up,” Starks said. “And so you get a little bit of water, and you stay in combat, and just all the exertion of combat activity and sweating and all that stuff.”

Starks already had a healthy respect for World War II veterans, what they went through and what they were able to accomplish. But being on the black ashen beaches of Iwo Jima brought new insight.

“You can’t get that just from reading an account or reading a book or anything like that,” Starks said. “Being there just really, having the physical conditions impact me personally, my experience was so much more superficial and light. These were just wonderful Americans who fought there for 36 days.”

A Horror For Everybody

In one of the letters Starks’ dad wrote to his mom, his dad talks about throwing rocks up on top of Mount Suribachi into the volcano crater.

“He’s just a kid, you know,” Starks said. “But it’s like, ‘Wow, I never even knew he was on Iwo Jima, except I see it in his letter to my mom.’ And so it was, ‘Boy, I can climb up there,’ and my dad was right here in 1945, and I was there in 2025.”

It was an unforgettable day for Starks. 

“Nobody has gone there to fix up the island after the battle,” he said. “I was able to see destroyed fighting positions. And as I was hiking it back and forth and stuff, just getting a sense of it, my goodness, I mean the whole battlefield, it was one big defensive position for the Japanese — 21,000 defenders on such a small island.

“And they just absolutely covered the island. Every bit of that cover was deadly.”

As hot as things are above ground on the island, Starks said the tunnels are even hotter.

“As you’d expect from an active volcano, there’s no natural water source on Iwo Jima,” Starks said. “So they collected water, as (Jarosz) mentioned, and the Japanese had nowhere near enough water. They were water-deprived the whole time, underground in heated chambers with bad oxygen and dust and in the dark.”

Throughout the aerial bombardment, prior to the Marine landing, the Japanese continued to dig tunnels in those heated chambers, trying to connect with Mount Suribachi, Starks added.

“The human experience for everybody who participated in Iwo Jima, whether it was Japanese or American, is just really hard to fathom,” he said. “So, that’s where this memorial, this annual ceremony of honor for the Japanese and the Americans together (comes in).

“Because both sides went through that kind of hell, so both sides respect the experience of the other, and all of that was just a horror for everybody.”

Deciding To Drop The Bomb

Making sure that it’s remembered and doesn’t become dead history is what the Iwo Jima Association is all about, but it’s also what Starks’ museum is also about.

“This is something that should never be forgotten,” Starks said. “This is something that both Japanese and Americans ought to be educated on to know this is what our predecessors did, and what a big deal it was.

“With Iwo Jima, in particular, and (Jarosz) touched on it a little bit, but part of the big significance of Iwo Jima was its impact on our ability to drop the atomic bomb.”

The high casualty rates on both Iwo Jima and Okinawa underscored the mindset of the Japanese. This was not a culture given to surrender. Nor was Japan’s military easy to defeat. 

“When we went into Japan, and I’ve known several Marines who were in the occupation forces that fought on either Okinawa or Iwo Jima,” Jarosz said. “And when they went into Japan, they said it was surreal. They were absolutely shocked because the Japanese were training their 4-year-old kids on how to fight with sharpened bamboo spikes.”

On Okinawa, the lives of 110,000 Japanese defenders were taken, alongside 142,000 Japanese civilians. 

Americans suffered nearly 50,000 casualties, including about 12,500 killed, according to the National World War II Museum. 

Invading Japan, with 4 million Japanese defenders and 28 million combat capable civilians, would have meant a death toll of at least 10 million people, Starks said, assuming similar casualty rates held true. 

“I always ask people, if it was your decision to make, which decision would you make?” Starks said about dropping a pair of atomic bombs. “Would you say, as a matter of ethics, I’m only going to attack a military target, it’d be immoral to attack defenseless civilians?

“Or would you say I’m going to deliberately attack innocent Japanese civilians in an effort to save something in the ballpark of another 9.8 million lives, including 5 million innocent Japanese civilians and a million Americans and millions of Japanese military defenders? Which choice would you make?”

Saving The Japanese Race

Dropping bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima killed more than 200,000 people, including those who would later die of radiation sickness and cancer. 

But it also brought about what had been unthinkable to the Japanese mind set at the time — surrender.

Truman, in his warning, had told Japan he would annihilate the entire country if the nation did not surrender. That fueled speculation that another bomb was coming for Tokyo next, even though America had used both of its bombs already.

“And so that’s what (Emperor Showa) was looking at when he decided that he wanted to talk to his military, which was hard-wired under the Bushido code multi-generations back to samurai times, that you never surrender,” Starks said. “He wanted to get them to surrender.”

It wasn’t going to be easy. The emperor knew his only chance to save his people was to make the case in his own voice.

“He goes on the radio, and he’s talking to his military and he tells them, ‘We’re going to endure the unendurable together,’” Jarosz said. “’We’re going to lay down our weapons. We’re going to let the Americans land. And when they land, we’re going to do what they tell us. We’re doing this to save the Japanese race.”

Despite the logic behind the Emperor’s words, there was still an assassination attempt against him by groups that did not want to surrender. 

“Out of everything we do, this is just the most incredible place I’ve ever been,” Jarosz said. “We’re trying to keep this open for the American public, which is why I’m here (in Wyoming). I love talking about the island of Iwo Jima, and I try to inform as well as educate, as to how we have to keep this island open.”

Keeping the island open preserves the Reunion of Honor ceremony, Jarosz said, and is a powerful reminder of all the sacrifices made during World War II.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.