The Terrifying Job of .30 Cal Machine Gunners at Iwo Jima

Time life correspondent Robert Sherid was on the beach at Euima on February 19th, 1945, and he described what he saw in a single sentence. It began as a ragged rattle of machine gun bullets, growing gradually lower and fiercer [music] until at last all the pent-up fury of a 100 hurricanes seemed to be breaking upon the heads of the Americans. Every hummock of black volcanic sand was firing. The ground itself was detonating under their feet. Marines walking erect, crumpled, and fell into that. The 30 caliber machine

gunners went in with the first waves. The M1919 A4 Browning, 31 lb, beltfed, capable of around 500 rounds per minute, was one of the two crews served weapons the Marines depended on to suppress Japanese defensive positions long enough for everyone else to move. The two men who carried it ashore understood what the assignment required. One pulled the trigger, the other fed the belt and stayed alive. Their job was to find Japanese positions, put fire on them, and hold that [music] fire while infantry worked around the flanks. On

any other island in the Pacific, that had been difficult [music] enough. On Ewima, the island itself had been engineered to make it impossible. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi spent months designing Euima as a killing field for exactly the kind of Marines who were coming to take it. And the machine gun teams were near the top of his list. He understood that American suppression fire was what allowed American infantry to maneuver. So he built his defenses to eliminate it at the source. The island was eight square

miles of volcanic rock, black ash, sulfur vents, and terrain that offered cover to defenders and almost none to attackers. Curry Bayashi placed 800 pill boxes across the island, connected by 18 km of tunnels dug deep enough that 9 months of American bombardment had not destroyed them. Each position was sighted to support the ones beside it. So that attacking any single pillbox meant moving through the kill zones of three others. He personally sighted the lines of fire for each defensive belt and arranged them so that every part of

the island was under Japanese fire at all times. There was no dead ground. There was no covered approach. For a twoman gun crew, this presented a problem without a clean answer. Their weapon was the loudest, most visible thing in a rifle company. Every time they opened up, muzzle flash and sound broadcast their position to every Japanese observer on their ark. To suppress a position, they had to stay on the gun long enough to keep defenders heads down, which meant staying exposed long enough to be found and targeted.

Moving meant abandoning the suppression and stalling the infantry. Staying meant dying. That was the choice every day on Euima for 5 weeks. The tunnel system made it worse in a way that no amount of preparation had fully anticipated. A Japanese position that a gun crew suppressed and infantry cleared might be occupied again within the hour. Defenders moving 60 ft underground through passages the Americans had no way to see, emerging behind the forward line of advance through exits that looked like nothing from the surface.

The machine gun team that had just taken casualties to suppress that pillbox would find it firing again from a slightly different angle, manned by fresh men. The work had to be done again. It always had to be done again. The volcanic ash that covered the beaches of Uima was unlike anything the Marines had fought on before. Fine, black, and soft enough to swallow a boot with every step. It gave the tripod legs of a machine gun no solid base at all. Setting up a firing position in ground that shifted and compressed underfoot

was a problem under the best conditions. Under fire with men down around you and the need to get the gun running immediately, it became a different kind of problem entirely. The tripod had to be reset constantly as each burst drove the legs deeper and a gun that was properly sighted on the first belt might be sinking and offt target by the third. The ash added a second hazard for the M1919 A4 specifically. The Browning’s air cooled design required disciplined fire. Short bursts, 3 to five rounds,

barrel cooling between poles because sustained fire overheated the metal, degraded accuracy, and risked cookoffs that could put the gun out of action. In the geothermal conditions of Euima, where surface temperatures were elevated by volcanic activity below, sulfur vents fouled the air, and the black ash became almost untouchable in direct sun. Gun crews were managing a weapon pushed toward its limits before the first shot. Gunnery Sergeant John Basselone had already thought about the heat problem

before the invasion. During training at Camp Pendleton, he developed a wooden handle that could be clamped to the barrel. Marines called it the basselone bail, allowing the gunner to carry and reposition the weapon without burning his hands on hot metal. It sounds simple. What it was in practice was the difference between a gun that could be moved in seconds and one that couldn’t be touched. Basselone had been through Henderson Field at Guadal Canal in 1942, and he understood exactly what happened

to a unit when its machine gun went silent at the wrong moment. The bail was his answer to that. Baselon came ashore on Red Beach 2 on the morning of February 19th as a machine gun section leader with Sea Company, First Battalion, 27th Marines. He was 28 years old, already a Medal of Honor recipient for Guadal Canal, where he had held his position through the night against a Japanese regiment, crossed through enemy fire to resupply his gunners when their belts ran dry, and come back alive when most of the men

around him hadn’t. The Marine Corps brought him home after that, put him on a war bond tour, gave him every reason to stay. He asked to go back. They let him. On Red Beach 2 that morning, his company’s advance was stopped immediately by the concentrated fire of a heavily fortified Japanese blockhouse. Basselone didn’t stay behind the gun. He worked around the flank of the position until he was on top of it, attacked with grenades and demolitions, destroyed the blockhouse and its garrison. Then he

moved forward under continuing fire toward airfield number one where he guided a marine tank safely through a minefield under artillery and mortar fire. He was struck down near the edge of the airfield shortly afterward. He had been on the island for less than 2 hours. One of his men, Chuck Tatum, watched it happen and later recalled, “It wasn’t 10:30 in the morning, and this caused a shock wave throughout the troops because if John Basselone could get killed, we all wondered what was going to happen to the rest of us.” What

happened was 35 more days of the same. While the standard gun teams worked through the pillbox belts, a small group of Marines from the 28th Regiment were carrying a weapon that didn’t officially exist. built in the weeks before the invasion by a sergeant who had concluded that the standard approach was not going to be sufficient. Sergeant Mel Grevich had salvaged&M two machine guns from wrecked aircraft. The airborne variant of the 30 caliber Browning was designed to be cooled by the slipstream of a dive

bomber, making it significantly lighter than the M1919 A4 and capable of firing at nearly three times the rate, around 1,350 rounds per minute. Grevich added a Garand rifle stock, a BAR bipod, [music] improvised sights, and a fabricated trigger mechanism. The result was a weapon the Marines called the Stinger. Six were made. None survived the battle. One went to Corporal Tony Stein. On the first day of the landing, Stein moved inland ahead of his platoon, firing his stinger at Japanese positions to reveal and

suppress them, then deliberately drawing fire onto himself so his men could pinpoint the enemy’s location. When he exhausted his ammunition, which the stinger did quickly, he ran back to the beach to resupply. He removed his helmet and boots so he could move faster, and every trip back, he brought a wounded marine with him. He made eight round trips to the beach under fire. He killed at least 20 defenders and knocked out several pill boxes. He was wounded during the fighting for Mount Surabachi

on February 23rd and evacuated. He returned to his regiment on March 1st and was killed that same day leading a patrol against a fortified position on Hill 362A. He was 24 years old. The Medal of Honor was presented to his widow one year to the day after his landing. None of this could be made safe with better tactics or better equipment. Kuribayashi had built Ewuima specifically around the assumption that Americans would use machine guns for suppression. And his answer was to ensure that every gun position on the

island could be covered from multiple angles at once. The gunner who set up and opened fire was announcing himself to every observer within range, and the island had been arranged so those observers could respond. The answer the Marines found had nothing to do with tactics. The gun had to keep firing. So men accepted the exposure and stayed on the trigger. Sergeant Ronaldo Martini, a machine gun section leader in sea company, moved forward to a shell hole directly in front of a Japanese bunker on the morning of February 19th and

stood up in full view. Stood up in the open and fired from the hip, holding the defenders long enough for a demolition’s team to move up and destroy the position. He received the Silver Star. He was doing the only thing that worked. Day after day, the twoman crews rebuilt the same equation. Find the position, set up, open fire, and hold it until the infantry moved or until the crew couldn’t. The ash shifted under the tripod. The barrel climbed toward its limit. Japanese defenders moving through 60 ft

of tunnels underground could reinforce a position that appeared destroyed and have it firing again within the hour. Sometimes from an entirely different angle behind the American line. The crews adapted, moved, and opened fire again. They did this on a battlefield where Marine infantry casualty rates ran close to 30% across 36 days of combat. The gunner was the most conspicuous man in the company on a weapon louder than anything else at his level in a defensive environment designed from the beginning to find and kill him. The

assistant fed the belt and took the gun when the gunner went down. Both of them knew the math. Both of them kept going. What kept going meant in practice was not a heroic abstraction. It meant picking up the gun after the man who had it was hit. before you had processed what just happened in ground that was shifting under your feet and air that smelled of sulfur and the dead. It meant burning your hands on hot metal because there wasn’t time to wait. It meant firing at a position you couldn’t

clearly see in a direction you could only estimate because the infantry moving beside you needed 30 seconds of cover and 30 seconds was what you had to give. The Marines who carried the 30 caliber at Ewima were not men who had been promised anything. They had been given a job and they did it. And 35 days later, the flag was up and the island was taken. The battle was declared secure on March 26th, 1945. Nearly 7,000 Marines were killed. Another 20,000 were wounded. Of approximately 21,000 Japanese defenders,

fewer than 300 survived to be taken prisoner, the rest died in the tunnels and ravines that Kuri Bayashi had prepared for this purpose. The gun crews were in the center of all of it. Not in the rear, not behind armor, but in the assault waves, in the positions every Japanese observer had been told to prioritize. What they carried was what made the infantry advance possible. where they had to stand to use it was where survival was least likely. They stood there anyway, every day for 5 weeks on 8

square miles of volcanic rock and black ash until the island was taken. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimttz in his review of the battle offered the assessment that became the inscription on the Marine Corps War Memorial. Uncommon valor was a common virtue. He was not talking about officers. He was talking about the men who went in first. The riflemen, the demolitions teams, the flamethrower operators, and the twoman crews who set up the 30 caliber in the open and held it there until the position ahead of

them was taken, or they were not. If you watch this to the end, you already understand what this channel is trying to do. Not every story gets told the way it deserves. These ones will. Subscribe to Warfare Unclassified. Hit the bell so you don’t miss an upload. And if this video meant something to you, pass it on.