The assault elements of the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions – the largest force ever committed to a single battle in the Marine Corps’ history – landed on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945. Thirty-five days and 24,053 (combined Navy and Marine Corps) casualties later, the island was declared secure.

Iwo Jima was the last stop before Okinawa in the Pacific island-hopping campaign. The island’s close flying distance to mainland Japan made it an ideal strategic location from which to launch American aircraft.

The attack was preceded by the largest naval barrage in history, up to that point, by the U.S. Navy. Prior to that, 10 weeks of bombardment of the island were intended as a softening blow to make the landing easier for the Marines.

However, more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers, under the command of Imperial Japanese Army Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, waylaid the landing force in an intricate network of underground bunkers and tunnels.

These defenders allowed the first wave of attack to land on the island unopposed. Many of the landing troops presumed most of the Japanese were dead due to the thousands of pounds of bombs that had already been dropped on the island. But Kuribayashi then ordered his army to open deadly artillery and machine gun fire on the beach as the rest of the invaders landed.

The Marines who landed on Iwo Jima came from various backgrounds, from reserve troops to combat-hardened veterans of previous battles.

Frank Matthews, a Fredericksburg resident and now docent at the National Museum of the Marine Corps, found himself in the former category the night after D-Day. An 18-year-old private first class, Matthews landed on Iwo Jima with 2nd Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division.

‘‘I had joined the division three days after Christmas in 1944,” recalled Matthews. ‘‘The 24th Marines had been shot up pretty bad at Saipan. And there I was, a private first class, joining all these combat vets.”

Matthews’ regiment was to relieve the 25th Marines the night after D-Day. What his unit encountered after landing on the island was intense fighting in close quarters.

‘‘We had to fight all night with [the Japanese],” he said. ‘‘We had really bad losses.”

Another battalion in Matthews’ regiment suffered roughly 700 losses the first day of fighting alone, he said.

Iwo Jima’s geographic makeup did not make invasion a welcome prospect. Its topographical layout was rugged and an American officer likened the shape of the island to a pork chop. Footing was difficult in the volcanic sand on the beach where Marines landed.

‘‘Volcanic sand is very difficult to walk through,” said Matthews. ‘‘It was more like we waded through the stuff.”

The Japanese were as committed to defending the island as the Marine Corps was to taking it. Kuribayashi, certain that American victory was inevitable, wrote his wife six months before the battle started, ‘‘The Americans will surely invade this Iwo Jima ... do not look for my return.”

The Marines advanced slowly inland in the first days of the battle. Under a constant barrage of enemy fire, they struggled with casualties as they strove to capture their objective: two Japanese airfields and one that was under construction.

The tenacity with which the Marines fought led Navy Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, to remark, ‘‘Among the men who fought on Iwo Jima, uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

Nimitz’s statement is substantiated by a score of notable Marines who served with distinction during the battle, including Gunnery Sgt. John Basilone and Lt. Col. Robert E. Galer. His comment is further manifested in the fact that 23 Marines received the Medal of Honor for their actions in the battle for Iwo Jima.

At the end of the second week of the battle, the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions were stretched thin. The force had already suffered 13,000 casualties. This was 10 days after the famous flag raising captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal.

‘‘I remember mostly the drudgery of the whole thing,” said Matthews. ‘‘Everyday it was the same thing.”

Matthews was assigned to a 40-man combat patrol the second day of the battle. His patrol’s job was to recover areas on the beach infiltrated by the Japanese via their network of underground tunnels. This was Matthews’ version of Iwo Jima.

‘‘If they made a movie of me the first day, they could have used it for every day for the rest of the battle,” he said.

Matthews’ duties of recovering ‘‘piles of rock” (as he described the island’s terrain) from the Japanese for the remainder of the battle became a deadly monotony. The tunnel system the enemy spent months building before the battle ensued gave them access to every part of the island, including the beach the Marines assaulted. The Japanese had the ability to launch attacks from parts of the beach that had already been taken, or so the Marines thought.

Iwo Jima dispelled the myth that the Japanese were poor marksmen. Marines who believed the stereotype that their adversaries were nearsighted and, therefore, bad shots got a rude awakening when their enemy proved more efficient in close-quarters combat than thought.

‘‘Poor marksmen,” said a company commander with 1st Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment, after his men experienced firsthand the prowess of the Japanese rifleman. ‘‘The Japs we faced all fired ‘Expert.’”

As the battle waned, close, hand-to-hand combat took the place of conventional weapons as the entrenched Japanese resorted to the banzai method of attack, suicidal ambushes where they ran into groups of Marines – final acts of desperation that usually resulted in death. Eventually the Japanese turned to ritual suicide, known as ‘‘seppuku,” when they realized that defeat was likely.

When it was over on March 26, 1945, Iwo Jima had claimed its place as the bloodiest battle in the Marine Corps’ history. It was a unique battle in that American casualties exceeded Japanese casualties by several thousand. Of the infantry battalion commanders who landed on Iwo Jima on D-Day, only seven remained unwounded and still retained command at the battle’s end.

However costly the human toll of victory at Iwo Jima, its strategic importance was undeniable in the evolution of the island-hopping campaign. It was the first time American troops advanced within 1,000 miles of the Japanese mainland, and it produced a psychological effect in the mind of the enemy, because Iwo Jima was considered to be the doorstep of Imperial Japan.

One general offered his own final analysis of the battle: ‘‘Victory was never in doubt. Its cost was. What was in doubt, in all our minds, was whether there would be any of us left to dedicate our cemetery at the end, or whether the last would die knocking out the last Japanese gunner.”

Editor’s note: Information from ‘‘Closing In: Marines in the Seizure of Iwo Jima,” by retired Col. Joseph H. Alexander, was used in this article.