During those same weeks, U.S. intelligence analysts in Guam and Pearl Harbor marveled at the Japanese garrison’s apparent disappearing act. Iwo Jima had been bombed, strafed, and blasted for eight months; it had been shelled from offshore, bombed by B-24s and B-29s based in the nearby Marianas, and visited a dozen times by carrier task forces. Craters upon craters had been punched into the island’s soft volcanic ash. The B-24s alone had hit the island for the past seventy consecutive days, dropping thousands of tons of bombs. But during this same period, Iwo Jima’s underground fortifications
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