Fall 2026 Militaria and Aviation Auction
Lot 227A:
Description
RARE WWII Iwo Jima Cave Bring-Back Japanese Defense Maps. WWII Iwo Jima Cave Bring-Back – 147th Infantry Veteran: 3 Captured Maps & Photo Album. Taken out of a Japanese cave on Iwo Jima by E.V. Trevino of the 147th Infantry and kept together with his handwritten label: E.V. Trevino WAR II MAPS OF "Iwo Jima." The 147th, an Ohio National Guard regiment attached to the Island Command after the Marine landings, spent the spring and summer of 1945 sealing caves, flushing holdouts, and collecting what the garrison had left in the rock. This is that haul.
Three Imperial maps. The prize is a large Japanese chart of the Volcano Islands-Iwo Jima, neighboring islets, soundings and coast-overprinted in red with batteries, caves, trails and unit notes, the kind of working defense sheet a garrison officer folded in the dark. With it, a color general map of the East Asian theater (home islands, Korea, China coast, Formosa, the Philippines) and a southern-islands sheet of the Nansei chain, purple boundary lines still sharp. All three are period Japanese issue, folded as carried, edges worn.
The album is crocodile-grain boards stamped ALBUM and -a graduation keepsake. Inside: class and company groups in winter tunics, shaved heads and name tags; a Shizuoka prefecture association sitting for the camera; a labor battalion posed on raw ground before unfinished barracks, captioned for the Tokyo Number Ten Middle School reporting unit and the Iwasaki Communications Company. Studio portraits of boys in uniform. It is the peacetime and mobilization world the men in those caves had come from.
Maps with fold wear and a few edge tears; album boards sound, prints mounted and captioned. A documented 147th Infantry cave recovery from Iwo Jima-the island’s own charts and a Japanese school-to-war album, brought home by the soldier who pulled them out of the rock.
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