Uncommon Valor Unboxing

When the Marines hit Iwo Jima on 19 February 1945, they weren’t fighting for scenery. The island is about eight square miles of volcanic rock and black ash. A dead volcano sits at one end. What it had was airfields, halfway between the B-29 bases in the Marianas and Tokyo. For five weeks, three Marine divisions ground across it. Most of the enemy was underground.

Critical Hit’s Uncommon Valor puts the bloodiest part of that fight on the table, the battle for the airfield in the middle of the island.

The Battle for Iwo Jima

The island mattered for the air war. Fighters based there could escort the B-29s all the way to Japan. Crippled bombers could land there instead of ditching at sea. More than 2,000 B-29s did exactly that before the war ended.

General Tadamichi Kuribayashi knew the Americans were coming. He didn’t try to stop them on the beaches. His roughly 21,000 men spent months digging tunnels, caves and bunkers, mostly in the rugged north. Their orders were to hold fire, let the Marines come in, and make every yard cost. Three days of naval bombardment barely touched them.

The 4th and 5th Marine Divisions landed on the southeast beaches on D-Day. Soft volcanic ash swallowed boots and bogged down vehicles. Then the hidden guns opened up. By nightfall, the 28th Marines had cut across the neck below Mount Suribachi. The corps had taken about 2,400 casualties. Airfield No. 1 fell the next day.

On 23 February, Marines raised the flag on top of Suribachi. Joe Rosenthal’s photo of it became the most famous image of the war.

That flag didn’t end anything. Next, the 3rd Marine Division came ashore and took the center, with the 4th on the right and the 5th on the left. For the 3rd, the center meant Airfield No. 2. On the right, the 4th Division fed regiment after regiment into the Meat Grinder. That’s Hill 382, Turkey Knob and the Amphitheater.

Motoyama village fell on 28 February. On 9 March, a 3rd Division patrol reached the north shore. It sent back a canteen of seawater to prove it.

The island was declared secure on 16 March, but nobody told the Japanese. The last pockets held out near Kitano Point. On 26 March, a few hundred survivors made one final attack on the camps beside Airfield No. 2.

It cost nearly 7,000 American lives, and more than 26,000 casualties in all. Of the 21,000 defenders, only a few hundred were captured. It was the only big Marine battle of the Pacific where American casualties outnumbered Japanese. Twenty-seven Medals of Honor came out of it, more than any other single battle of the war.

Here’s the whole thing on the map below. The front lines come from the Marine Corps’ own history, and the letters match the chronology beside it.

Central Field

Motoyama Airfield No. 2, later called Central Field, sat right in the middle of the island. Whoever held it held observation over most of Iwo, plus the roads and room to expand air operations. The Japanese built it as an X of crossing runways, one about 5,225 feet long and the other about 4,425 feet.

Kuribayashi’s main defense line ran right across it. Pillboxes, bunkers and blockhouses were tied into the broken ground. The plan was to take the southern airfields fast, so the price paid up front bought something later.

While the fight for Airfield No. 2 raged, Seabees and engineers crawled up the runway of Airfield No. 1 on their hands and knees. They were probing for mines under fire. The first crippled B-29 landed there on 4 March, with the fighting still a couple of miles away.

Getting It

Critical Hit released Uncommon Valor in January 1999. It was the first of a planned three-module series on Iwo Jima, and it covers the fighting from 19 February to 8 March. Darrell Andersen designed all eight scenarios.

Contents

• Rules and charts
• 8 scenarios
• 22″ x 35″ one-piece map
• 1 campaign game, for Platoon Leader 2.5

A Giant Blasted Pit

The map isn’t pretty, and it’s not trying to be. Iwo Jima wasn’t green, and it wasn’t gentle. What you get is broken volcanic ground, with crags, shell holes, cliffs and open ground that kills movement. Part of Airfield No. 2 cuts through the rock and ash. Gullies and roads break up the lines of advance, and a few slopes show up just to make fire and movement harder. The island, and the map, is like a giant blasted pit.

The later version of the map uses standard ASL colors, with Level 0 in the usual green and the hills going into browns.

Eight Fights for the Airfield

Every scenario is an assault on fortifications. Pillboxes show up again and again. Wire, caves, trenches, foxholes and mines, the exceptions in most scenarios, are the rule here. The fights are short, violent and on the clock, and several run six or seven turns. Titles like Into the Breech Once More and Devil’s Den tell you what you’re in for. Fortified ground has to be cracked without getting shredded in the attempt.

Most of the scenarios bring OBA, naval OBA or air support, and one even has a ship graphic for its naval guns. So be ready to dive deep into the rulebook. Six scenarios are fought on the module map, between Airfield No. 2 and Hill 382. The other two use MMP boards. Unfinished Business goes back to the neck below Suribachi on D-Day, and Close Quarters Carnage is the night infiltration near Higashi on 8 March. The map’s numbers match the table under it.

Flesh Against Concrete

The special rules are there, tucked into the scenario materials, including campaign game rules printed on a scenario card. They aren’t long. The core rules are the real challenge, with cave complexes, bunkers, wire, mines and heavy assault tactics all at once.

The campaign game, Flesh Against Concrete, uses Platoon Leader 2.5 and the whole map. It’s a long chain of twenty firefights, with initial orders of battle and refit groups for both sides. Each firefight can run past ten turns, so it can get enormous if you play it all the way through. It’s a true grind, just like the real thing.

Where to Buy

This edition is long out of print. You might be able to find the newer version, which I believe is called Iwo Jima: Motoyama Airfield #2.

Debriefing

Uncommon Valor isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s built for players who want to tackle the harder parts of the rulebook, and who want exactly what the real ground offered, a punishing assault on dug-in defenders.

It’s for experienced players only. Bring flamethrowers, bring demo charges, and bring patience. Kuribayashi’s men aren’t leaving those caves on their own.

Academy Out!

GET TO THE CHOPPA…!!!

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