Flame Throwers and Stink.

The Pacific theater is often an understudied part of WWII, compared to the European front and Holocaust history. Still, I wonder if anyone remembers reading how U.S. warships pounded Iwo Jima for days before the American ground invasion.

Marines could not believe anything was left living, but soon found out otherwise.

For weeks, they battled to take the island, from the enemy soldiers who had dug in and were fighting like gophers: Pop up, take out a soldier or two, back into the tunnel to pop up somewhere else. At night, they would often sneak into foxholes and brutally kill American soldiers* -- one at a time, so the numbers added up.

I can't help but reading of the Israeli incursion in Gaza: the toll is adding up, and wonder how Israel will extricate her soldiers from this one. Either way it seems, they lose. As the civilian bodies pile up on the streets... as long as even a skeleton crew of Hamas fighters survive... Palestine wins, no?

GAZA CITY — Sixty Palestinians were killed Sunday in a heavy bombardment of a Gaza neighborhood and 13 Israeli soldiers were slain in clashes in the most intense day of fighting in Israel’s ongoing offensive against Hamas fighters, officials said.

The casualties brought the total number of Israeli military deaths to 18 since the armed forces launched a ground operation Thursday after days of airstrikes on the coastal strip, the Israeli military said.
...
Israel pummeled a neighborhood in east Gaza overnight Sunday, producing gruesome images of bodies in the streets amid masses of rubble. The Gaza Health Ministry said 60 Palestinians were killed in the fighting.

Thousands of panicked residents were pouring out of the area in mass flight Sunday morning. The scene at Shifa Medical Center, Gaza’s main hospital, was chaotic. Ambulance drivers reported great difficulty entering the east Gaza town called Shijaiyah, which bore the brunt of continuous fire.

After a brief lull at dawn, midmorning Sunday saw an increase of artillery and tank shelling. Explosions sounded closer to the center of Gaza City, and the sky was filled with Israeli drones witnessing the exodus of civilians.
...
Capt. Eytan Buchman, an Israeli military spokesman, said that the military had no intention of reoccupying Gaza and that the main objective of the ground offensive hadn’t changed: to destroy the tunnel network and rocket launchers that Hamas militants have used to attack Israel.

“We’ve expanded the forces on the ground in order to accomplish that mission,” Buchman said. “All of Gaza is an underground city, and the amount of infrastructure Hamas built up over the years is immense. There are tunnels, extended bunkers, weapons storage facilities, even within urban areas.”
...
The Palestinian death toll from the conflict rose Saturday to more than 330, including about 60 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. An additional 2,200 have been injured. The United Nations estimates that 80 percent of the casualties are civilians, many of them children.

Now that Israeli soldiers are actually dying in the fight and they got a real war going, you have to wonder if at some point, the cost of these continual incursions will seem so worth it.

(Fwiw, plenty of those Marines who fought for Iwo looked back later and calculated, for the price paid in young mens' lives, the real estate simply was not worth it.)
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* This tactic sounds familiar:

In an audacious attack Saturday, Hamas fighters dressed in Israeli army uniforms slipped from central Gaza into Israel through a tunnel and attacked an Israeli army patrol, killing two soldiers and injuring two. The army returned fire, killing one militant and forcing the rest back through the tunnel into the Palestinian territory.
...
The militants’ resilience seemed to upend the narrative provided by Israel of a Hamas severely weakened by the Israeli ground offensive, airstrikes, artillery barrages and the ongoing destruction of its tunnel network.