Hubris is one of the great renewable resources
PJ O'Rourke
Seventy-nine years ago Japanese military thinkers decided to occupy Southeast Asia betting that the British would surrender in advance, which they did, bomb the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor to intimidate the United States, which it didn't, and land paratroopers to a photo opportunity in Indonesia where the Dutch and British forgot to destroy the oil refineries on the way out the door.
The Japanese did not count on the will of the United States Marine Corps to hunt them down island by island, grain of sand by grain of sand, and reclaim the Pacific against Japanese troops prepared to fight to a Samurai death. In Operation Detachment seventy-seven thousand Marines on Iwo Jima killed 19,000 Japanese. Five of those Marines and a Navy Corpsman planted a flag on Mount Suribachi, a scene that is memorialized in the Iwo Jima monument in Washington, DC. Three of the Marines who planted the flag did not leave the island alive.
The Marines captured Iwo Jima and the airfields for fighters to escort bombers headed to mainland Japan to return the favor of Pearl Harbor. Dolittle's Raiders would go on to the first bombing of Japan with just enough fuel to make the run and ditch in friendly China, a warm-up for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That was seventy-five years ago.
Two of those Iwo Jima Marines now aged 105 and 95 celebrated the 245th birthday of the Marine Corps in their dress blues.
Semper Fi
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