On the south point of this is a high barren hill, which evidently presented a volcanic crater. “On the 14th, they discovered an island, about five miles long, lying in lat. As reported in the December 1786 supplement to The New London Magazine : In 1779, the island was charted as Sulphur Island, the literal translation of its official name, during Captain James Cook's third surveying voyage. At that time Iwo Jima and other nearby islands represented boundaries between the Spanish and Portuguese Empires within the far East as the demarcation line of the Treaty of Zaragoza crossed the area. The first European to arrive at Iwo Jima was Spanish sailor Bernardo de la Torre who named it Sufre Island, after the old Spanish term for sulphur ( azufre in modern Spanish). The US military occupied Iwo Jima until 1968, when it was returned to Japan. The island became globally recognized when Joe Rosenthal, of the Associated Press, published his photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, taken on Mount Suribachi. This engagement saw some of the fiercest fighting of the Pacific War, with each side suffering over 20,000 casualties in the battle. The island was the location of the Battle of Iwo Jima between February 1945 and March 1945.

Since July 1944, when all the civilians were forcibly evacuated, the island has had a military-only population. The highest point of Iwo Jima is Mount Suribachi at 169 m (554 ft) high.Īlthough 1,200 kilometres (750 mi 650 nmi) south of the metropolis of Tokyo on the mainland, this island of 21 km 2 (8 square miles) is administered as part of the Ogasawara Subprefecture of Tokyo. Together with other islands, they form the Ogasawara Archipelago. '' sulfur island''), is one of the Japanese Volcano Islands and lies south of the Bonin Islands. No native population (military personnel only)

Battlefield 1943 iwo jima