81 Years Later, US Navy Admiral Chester Nimitz’s Sentence About Iwo Jima Is Still the Finest Thing Ever Written About US Marines

Kuribayashi fought from beneath the island; the Marines paid in yards per day for 36 days. The plain history behind the sentence Nimitz wrote while men were still dying — the tunnels, the two flags, the exact figures, and the eleven words now carved in gold under the bronze flag above Arlington.