The Pacific island of Esquimaux is only eight square miles. Yet, the battle for it proved to be one of the bloodiest of World War II. It was 70 years ago this week that American forces finally captured Ewima from dug-in Japanese forces after weeks of fighting and thousands of lives lost. Divers finally explored the sealed tunnels beneath Ewima. And what they found is shocking.
For 80 years, US engineers kept those tunnel entrances buried under concrete and explosives with thousands of men still inside. Now the seals are coming off. Recovery teams and respirators are pushing thermal drones through 40-year-old concrete plugs. And the volcanic rock is giving up things it was never supposed to surface.
Mummies preserved by sulfur. A missing American war hero whose camera shot the most famous photo of the 20th century. Letters carved into walls, waiting 80 years to be read. The island is finally talking. The seal that held for 40 years. The recovery technician kneels in the black volcanic sand and runs his gloved hand along the concrete plug.
It has been sitting in this spot since 1985, 40 years. Behind it, somewhere in the dark, is a chamber that no living person has stepped inside. He picks up his drone, a small four-rotor unit with a thermal camera bolted to the front, and waits for the team to drill a hole big enough to feed it through.
The sulfur steam is rising from cracks in the ground all around them. The smell, even through respirators, is unmistakable. Rotten eggs, hot rock, something else underneath that nobody on the team wants to name out loud. This is what tunnel exploration on Ewima looks like in our era. Drones first, humans second, and only if the air reads breathable.
To understand why these seals existed at all, you have to go back to 1944 when General Tatamichi Kurabayashi arrived on the island and gave an order that confused his own staff. Stop digging trenches. Stop building bunkers in the open. Start digging down. >> So, the Japanese general uh Kuribashi decides that uh he is going to dig tunnels.
He’s going to uh make caves or uh make best use of the caves already there. It’s a volcanic island, so there’s natural caves throughout. Uh he’s going to dig more caves. He’s going to have these caves and tunnel complexes interlin with each other. >> Kuribi Bayashi had studied in the United States. He had seen American factories. He understood before any of his officers did that his men could not win a normal beach battle against a country that could build aircraft carriers faster than Japan could sink them.
So he chose darkness instead. His men obeyed even though the work bordered on impossible. The volcanic rock was hot to the touch. Soldiers carved tunnels with hand tools, small shovels, and sometimes their bare hands wrapped in rags. In the deepest chambers, the temperature locked at 100° F.
Day and night, men worked in shifts of just 10 minutes at the lowest levels because any longer and they would collapse. The sulfur burned their throats with every breath. Diary entries describe soldiers feeling the heat through the soles of their boots even after the boots wore through. But they did not stop. By February 1945, when American landing crafts hit the beach, Kuri Bayashi’s men had carved out 11 mi of tunnels under that island.
Not simple shelters, a full underground city. More than 1500 separate rooms, hospitals with operating tables, radio stations, sleeping quarters, storage rooms packed with rice and ammunition. Some passages were so narrow a grown man had to crawl on his belly for hours. Others were tall enough to roll massive artillery guns inside, fire a single shell, and pull the gun back into the rock before American spotters could find it.
The orders Kurabayashi issued were brutal and clear. Take down 10 Americans before you yourself die. Surrender was not on the table. Retreat was not on the table. The Marines on the surface had no idea what they were walking into. One moment, a beach would look empty. The next, fire would pour down from a 100 different directions.
Marines watched friends die without ever seeing a single enemy soldier. The ground itself seemed alive, and the tunnels were designed as a trap. If a Marine squad fought its way inside, the Japanese could collapse the ceiling behind them or pump smoke through hidden vents until the men inside choked. This underground war ground on for 36 straight days.
When the island was finally declared secure, thousands of Japanese defenders were still down there. Some had been killed in the fighting. Many had not. The US military made a hard choice. Rather than send more Marines into a maze that kept eating them, engineers sealed the entrances with bulldozers and explosives, they shut the doors on an underground world and left everything inside exactly where it was, including on a hillside designated 362A, a 38-year-old combat photographer from Minneapolis whose camera had captured an image that would outlive him by 80
years. The men who sealed that particular tunnel did so knowing he was still inside. They had no other option. The Japanese fire from within was too heavy to mount a recovery. So they brought in the explosives and they closed the door. His name went into a file. The file was eventually classified.
And the entrance somewhere on Hill 362A has never been definitively located again. The cavemen and the things that moved in the dark. After the official flag raisings were photographed and the cameras went home, the war on Euima was not actually over. It had just gone underground. The job of finishing what the Marines started fell to a unit called the 147th Infantry Regiment.
The men in that unit picked up a nickname that stuck for the rest of their lives, the cavemen. They walked into pitch black tunnels armed with nothing more than flashlights and 45 caliber pistols. No backup, no air support, just a beam of light, a sidearm, and the sound of their own breathing. They never knew what was around the next bend.
Sometimes a Japanese soldier so thin and starved that he looked dead already, raising a rifle anyway. The holdouts had been living off rain water dripping from the ceiling and whatever scraps they could scavenge. They were weak. They were also still incredibly dangerous. They rigged grenades to fishing lines so thin you could barely see it.
One wrong step and the whole tunnel section would collapse on top of you. The air down there was so thin that matches refused to light. Flashlights faded after a few minutes because the sulfur ate the batteries. Stop and consider that for a second. You are crawling on your stomach through a passage 1 mile under a volcano and your only light source is dying in your hand.
A veteran of the 147th Infantry from Akran, Ohio, who returned home and rarely spoke about the war, described the work to a regional oral history project decades later. “You went in slow,” he said. “You held your pistol in one hand and your light in the other, and you tried not to think about how much rock was over your head.
You listened. You always listened because the worst sound was no sound at all. That meant someone in the dark had heard you first and was holding their breath. The smell down there was something the survivors never forgot. A blend of human sweat, rotting rice, the constant chemical sting of sulfur, and something sweeter that nobody on the team wanted to identify.
Several Americans came out of those tunnels and never spoke about it again. Some did not come out at all. the 147th lost men in passages they were never able to map, including in the regiment’s afteraction reports, several who went in following a lead on a missing combat photographer and came back without him. Now, here is where the story takes a turn most people never hear about.
Even after Japan officially surrendered in September 1945, the tunnels were still occupied. Some Japanese soldiers refused to believe the war was over. They were convinced the radio broadcasts announcing surrender were a clever American trick. So they kept hiding. They kept scavenging. They kept waiting for orders that would never come. Sit with that image.
The world rebuilds. Cities go up in Tokyo. Children are born and grow into toddlers. And under the black sand of a Pacific island, two men are still living in a hole. Still believing the emperor needs them to fight. The last two confirmed holdouts on Ewima did not surrender until 1949. Four full years after the war ended, when they finally crawled out into the sunlight, their hair had grown wild down their backs.
Their skin had turned leathery from the chemical air, and they looked like ghosts who had wandered out of their own funeral. They had no idea Hiroshima had happened. No idea the war was lost. Hold on that. Two men in a hole for 4 years after their war ended. If you want to keep going down this rabbit hole with us, and the rabbit hole is about to get much darker, hit subscribe and ring the bell.
We dig into stories the textbooks skip. The kind of forgotten chambers where the dead are still waiting for someone to come find them. The men we are about to talk about have been waiting 80 years. Now, back to it. Because if it took 4 years to find those last two holdouts, the obvious question hangs in the air.
How many others stayed down there forever? time capsules under the ash. By the 1980s, four decades had passed since the seals were welded shut. The men who had fought on Ewokoima were old now. The mothers of the missing were even older. So, the Japanese government working through the Japan Association for Recovery and Repatriation of War Casualties, the organization in Tokyo that has handled this kind of work since 1953, partnered with the US military to begin systematic recovery operations.
They brought in specialized teams, engineers, forensic experts, divers trained to navigate flooded passages, explorers willing to crawl through gaps the size of a coffin. They started cutting through the concrete and rock seals one chamber at a time. And what they found inside changed the way historians think about the battle forever.
Because the volcanic air on Euima is dry, hot, and full of preserving chemicals. Those sealed tunnels did not just contain bones. They contained mummies, real ones. Soldiers were found still sitting at their desks, pen in hand. Others were lying in their bunks as if they had simply gone to sleep and never woken up. Their skin had darkened into a leathery brown shell.
Their uniforms were faded, but still recognizable. Some still had their glasses on. One was discovered with a half-finish cup of tea, the porcelain unbroken. The dust around it untouched for 40 years. In one chamber, a forensic specialist working with the Japan Association for Recovery and Repatriation found a small leather wallet tucked inside a soldier’s breast pocket.
Inside the wallet was a black and white photograph of a young woman holding a baby. The photograph had been protected from the air for 40 years, so the faces were still clear. No name, no date, just a young Japanese family someone had been carrying close to his heart when the lights went out for the last time.
That photograph eventually made it home after a year of research through prefectural records. The woman in it was identified as a resident of a small town outside Osaka. She was 68 years old when the call came. She had spent her entire life wondering what had happened to her husband. She got her answer that afternoon.
But the chamber that left the recovery teams quiet for hours was the one beneath Mount Suriachi. When explorers cracked into it, their flashlights swept across dozens of bodies arranged in a way that told an entire story without saying a word. The men were sitting in a circle, empty sack bottles around them, open medical kits, some still held bandages in their fingers mid-motion, frozen in the act of helping a wounded comrade.
They had not died fighting. They had died together on their own terms when they realized rescue was never coming. And the walls, the walls were the part that broke people. Every flat surface was covered in writing. Final messages scratched into the soft volcanic rock with knife tips and rifle butts.
letters home, apologies to mothers, promises to wives. A few were almost cheerful, talking about how the heat was unbearable, but the men were proud. Others were heartbreakingly small. One read simply that the writer hoped his son would grow up to be taller than him. None of those letters were ever mailed. They had been waiting 80 years for someone to read them.
That moment turned cold military history into something else entirely. A human tragedy written by the men who were inside it. But the recovery work was never safe. Decades of heat and steam had rotted the wooden supports the original engineers had used. Many passages were partially collapsed, forcing explorers to crawl through gaps barely wide enough for a single person.
And then there was the ammunition. Crates of artillery shells, stacks of grenades, boxes of mortar rounds. The chemicals inside become more sensitive over time, not less. A bump from a backpack could trigger a blast that would collapse half a tunnel. The team started using small drones with thermal cameras, remote viewing scopes, robots on treads, anything to peek inside a chamber before a human stepped in.
And even with all that technology, the men working those tunnels say the dread never went away. There was a constant feeling, they told reporters, that the island itself did not want its secrets revealed. Several sections were photographed, documented, and then resealed. Not because they were empty, because they were too dangerous to enter at all.
And in one of those resealed chambers somewhere on the slope of Hill 362A, a cold case from March 1945, has refused to close. The man who filmed the flag and then vanished. Almost everyone reading this has seen William Ganow’s work without knowing his name. The famous color footage of the second flag raising on Mount Suribachi.
Five Marines and a Navy corman pushing that pole into the volcanic rock. The cloth catching the wind. The moment that became the most reproduced image in 20th century American history. That was him. Janost was a Marine sergeant and combat cinematographer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. On February 23rd, 1945, he was standing about 3 feet to the right of the still photographer Joe Rosenthal when both of their cameras captured that moment within seconds of each other.
>> So, it says on February 23rd, 1945, the fifth day of the battle, >> the granite walls and the names etched in them. >> The first American flag was raised on Japanese soil. >> They’re described as ordinary men >> and they’re putting up the first small flag on the top of Mount Sarabachi. Rosenthal’s still photograph won the Pulitzer Prize.
Janow’s footage ran on every news reel in America. >> Navy Secretary Forestto back from EO announces that it has cost 2,50 American lives in 15 days. But in the battle that still rages, a victory in proportion to the cost will be won. 9 days later on March 4th, Ganow volunteered to help a squad clear a tunnel network on Hill 362A. He was not required to be there.
As a combat photographer, he could have stayed near the command post, but he had been doing tunnel light duty for days, holding his flashlight up so the riflemen behind him had a target reference. That afternoon, he stepped into the entrance, clicked on his light, and walked into the dark. The Japanese defenders inside opened fire from a position the squad had not detected.
What happened next is documented in the afteraction reports of the Marines who were with him. Janost went down hard somewhere in the first 30 ft of the passage. The squad tried to recover him. They could not. The fire was too heavy. The tunnel was too narrow to maneuver. With darkness falling and Japanese reinforcements moving through deeper passages, the squad pulled back.
Combat engineers were called in. They sealed the entrance with explosives to neutralize the position. Stop and process what that means. The man who held the camera that captured one of the most iconic images in American history. The image that sold war bonds ended up on postage stamps became the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington.
That man is not buried at Arlington. He is not buried anywhere. He is somewhere under that black sand in a tunnel that was sealed by his own side because they could not get him out. For 80 years, his family has been searching for him. The US Defense POW/MIA accounting agency, the federal organization headquartered in Hawaii, responsible for locating American service members missing from past conflicts, has formally listed Janow as a recovery priority on Euima.
Their teams have used ground penetrating radar across Hill 362A. They have sent in drones. They have followed tunnel branches that twist into pitch black for hundreds of feet. They have located several caves that match the descriptions left by the Marines who were with him that afternoon. They have never found him.
A small bronze plaque was installed near the suspected tunnel site in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of his disappearance. It is the only marker he has, the only headstone, a piece of metal on the side of a hill hovering above whatever is left of a man who made the most famous American war image of the 20th century possible.
And his story, as heavy as it is, is not unique. The Japan Association for Recovery and Repatriation of War Casualties continues to send teams to Ewima every single year. So far, they have brought home roughly 10,000 sets of remains. There are still more than 12,000 Japanese soldiers missing.
The tunnels under that island are still, in a very real sense, a mass graveyard. Every time someone proposes a new construction project on Ewima, work has to stop and recovery teams have to be called in because every time they dig, they find a new branch of the tunnel system that was never on any of the original maps.
Some of these new chambers go deeper than expected. The more they explore, the more they realize the original 11mi estimate may have been very wrong. What were the deepest tunnels actually for? Why were some of them dug so far down they almost touched the volcano’s heat zone? Those questions have answers most people have never heard.
The theories beneath the black sand. This is where the story moves into territory historians actively argue about and where the official record stops giving easy answers. The first theory is the secret weapons one. A handful of researchers, most notably the Japanese investigative journalist Hal Gold, who spent decades documenting Japan’s wartime biological weapons program known as Unit 731, raised the question in his published work of whether Ewima’s deepest tunnels were ever used as a fallback site for sensitive research. His logic was
straightforward. Tokyo was being firebombed daily by 1945. Mainland Japan was no longer safe for sensitive programs. An island fortress dug into volcanic rock with no civilian population and no air access would have been an ideal place to hide a research facility. Gold did not claim proof. He raised the question.
Most mainstream Japanese historians, including specialists at the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo, push back, arguing that the tunnel’s construction timeline does not support large-scale weapons research and that no physical evidence of laboratory equipment has surfaced in any recovered chamber. Then there is the treasure theory.
Anyone who has spent time in Pacific war history has heard of Yamashita’s gold. The legend is that the Japanese army, as they retreated across Asia, stole massive amounts of gold, jewels, and art from every country they occupied, then hid all of it on various islands across the Pacific to keep it out of Allied hands.
The most public proponent of the theory is the American writer Sterling Seagrave, whose book on the subject argued that Ewima was one of several possible cash sites because of its tunnel volume and seal status. Most academic historians, including specialists at the United States Army Center of Military History in Washington, dismiss the Yamashida’s gold theory entirely as unsupported by archival evidence.
But the rumors persist for one obvious reason. The tunnel network is so vast, so deep, and so heavily sealed that if you wanted to hide something forever, this would be the place to do it. And then there are the theories about the United States itself. A small group of researchers, including academics affiliated with various Pacific War historical societies, have argued in conference papers that certain tunnels were sealed not because they were dangerous, but because they contain things the US government did not want documented. The
argument points to the way some defenders died. Flamethrowers and white phosphorus did horrifying things to bodies and to inconsistencies between the official maps of which tunnels were cleared versus which were sealed without entry. Defense Department historians have responded in published rebuttals that the seals were operational decisions made under combat conditions, not coverups.
Most serious historians push back hard on all of these theories. They say the truth is simpler and somehow worse. The horror was the war itself. The tunnels are not hiding gold or biological weapons. They are a monument to what humans will do when surrender is forbidden and rescue is impossible. The reality of thousands of men slowly turning into mummies in a sulfur-filled labyrinth is plenty terrifying on its own.
Look at the island today and you would never guess any of this. Grass is creeping back over the black sand. The volcanic steam still rises lazily from the ground. Birds have returned. From a distance, it looks almost peaceful. But underneath, the 11 mi of tunnels are still there, still sealed in places, still waiting in others, still holding the bones, the letters, and whatever else has been preserved by that strange volcanic air.
The Japan Association for Recovery and Repatriation of War Casualties has stated on the record that they will not stop searching until every soldier is found and brought home. That is a promise that may take another century to keep. Think about the woman outside Osaka, 68 years old, sitting at a kitchen table when the call came, holding a photograph of herself as a girl that her husband had been carrying when he died. She had married him.
She had buried his absence for 40 years. She had assumed she would go to her own grave, never knowing where his body was. And then a forensic specialist on a black volcanic island a thousand miles from her front door found a wallet and started making phone calls. One photograph, one identification, one door closed after a lifetime of it standing open.
That is what these recovery operations actually mean, not statistics. One woman, one wallet, one afternoon when a phone rang and 40 years of silence finally broke. History is not a closed book on Euima. It is still being written. one chamber at a time by people willing to crawl into the dark with a flashlight and a hope that the ceiling will hold.
Somewhere on Hill 362A, William Ginow is still waiting for his afternoon. So the question for you is this. Some experts argue that certain tunnels under Euoima should be left sealed forever, that some history is too painful to disturb. Others say every soldier deserves to come home, no matter how dangerous the recovery.
Where do you stand? Drop your answer in the comments below because we read them and the best ones shape the next deep dive. If this story stayed with you, you are going to want to see what we found about the underwater wreckage discovered off the coast of Bermuda last year. The artifacts pulled from that wreck have already rewritten one part of World War II history, and the mystery is still unfolding.
That video is up next on the screen. Hit subscribe, ring the bell, and we will see you in the dark.
