Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  AS THE TENTH ARMY PURSUED the retreating Japanese down the island, its progress was hindered by continuing rain and muddy roads. Even tanks and tracked vehicles were mired in the brown quagmires, and many had to be abandoned. The supply problem was partly solved by landing supplies on the coasts, and partly by air drops. Samuel Hynes flew dozens of supply runs over “what seemed the ruins of an ancient, peaceful world—tiny fields and old stone walls, deep, narrow lanes lined with gnarled old trees, a heap of stones where a house had been, all very close under our wings, everything clearly visible, even in the rain.”65

  The roads leading south were an open-air morgue, strewn with dead Japanese and Okinawans. American infantrymen were put on clearance details, dragging the corpses off the roads, to clear a way for the trucks and tanks. Thomas McKinney of the 6th Marine Division recalled finding the bodies of wounded Japanese soldiers who had tried to crawl south after their retreating army. “We found, I don’t know, hundreds of them with arms and legs off, laying out there, and it was obvious that they had tried to crawl. The stumps of their legs and all were still bandaged but covered with mud and everything else. They crawled through it. They had tried it. They were bound and determined to go. They died along the way.”66

  The Thirty-Second Army would make its last stand on a line bisecting the Kiyan Peninsula, a tongue of rugged tableland and coral escarpments at the southernmost point of Okinawa. The main line of defense ran through the Yuza-Dake and Yaeju-Dake ridge systems. This final corner of contested territory on Okinawa took in about eleven square miles.

  The retreat from Shuri had been deftly executed. By the time the Americans had discovered the move, it was too late to exploit the opportunity to destroy the retreating columns while they were out in the open. Nevertheless, the Thirty-Second Army was badly weakened, and its retreat to Kiyan was only going to postpone defeat by another two or three weeks, if that. On June 4, after collecting reports from division and regimental commanders, the headquarters staff concluded that the army’s remaining troop strength was approximately 30,000, down from 40,000 two weeks earlier. Some of the most elite veteran units had been lost in rearguard actions on the Shuri line. The largest remaining organized force was the Japanese Twenty-Fourth Division, with 12,000 troops in its ranks. But fighting efficiency was greatly reduced by the loss of heavy weaponry, ammunition, and other supplies.

  On June 6, four American divisions (two army, two marine) launched probing attacks along the principal strong points on the Yaeju-Dake and Yuza-Dake escarpments. Field artillery blasted away coral rock outcroppings to clear lanes for the tanks of the 713th Armored Flamethrower Battalion, which threw jets of fire into the mouths of the natural limestone caves in the area. The Americans made rapid progress on the eastern part of the line, where the terrain was a bit more friendly, capturing a terrain feature called “Hill 95” on the night of June 11. Japanese resistance was scattered, and largely disorganized, but a lot of Americans would give their lives in this last stage of the fight for Okinawa. As the army and marines closed the ring around the enemy’s shrinking perimeter, small Japanese squads launched night infiltration attacks and banzai charges. Snipers on the ridges claimed many victims, and when the Americans advanced quickly over the terrain, their casualties from friendly mortar and artillery fire increased. Worst hit was the “Old Breed,” the 1st Marine Division, which suffered 1,150 casualties in the week from June 11 to June 18.

  More than on any previous Pacific battlefield, the Americans attempted to persuade their enemies to give up the fight. Surrender inducements were aimed both at Japanese troops and at Okinawan civilians. Aircraft dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets into the Japanese lines, including 30,000 leaflets on June 12 alone. The Tenth Army Psychological Warfare Office published a daily Japanese-language newspaper, the Ryukyu Shuho. Loudspeakers were mounted on jeeps, trucks, and patrol boats, and Japanese-American nisei translators issued scripted appeals. Portable battery-powered radios were dropped by parachute, so that U.S. broadcasts could be heard in caves. In comparison to past efforts, the leaflets and the surrender appeals were better written, more intelligible, and more closely tailored to the peculiar cultural sensitivities of the Japanese. All emphasized a few core themes: that military defeat was inevitable, that the Japanese militarist leaders were corrupt and incompetent, and that the Japanese must rally to save their country from total destruction.67 The word “surrender” was carefully avoided; instead, Japanese forces were invited to “come over and join their comrades as the best way out of their hopeless predicament.” The Japanese soldier was told that he had fought valiantly, but now he had “done all he can and that he will be needed when the war is over.”68

  These appeals were more effective than at any prior phase of the Pacific War. In the last stages of the fight on the Kiyan Peninsula, thousands of Japanese soldiers emerged from the caves with their hands held above their heads. Most remarkably—and scandalously, in the traditional Japanese view—entire units surrendered while under the organized command of their own officers. The process tended to snowball—as more Japanese crossed into the American lines, more were willing to follow their example. Many brave American nisei—including men whose parents, siblings, wives, and children had been interned in camps at home—volunteered to descend alone into caves, where they engaged enemy soldiers in face-to-face negotiations. Some captured Japanese were even willing to assist in inducing their former comrades to surrender, by returning to the caves or bunkers where they knew them to be hiding. In all, some 11,000 prisoners of war were taken on Okinawa, including more than 7,000 regular Japanese soldiers. The prisoner of war enclosures grew steadily to accommodate this influx. An American lieutenant marveled that “one needed a jeep to go from one end of a POW stockade to another.”69

  Tens of thousands of Okinawan civilians had retreated south with the Japanese army, terrified by an enemy they had been taught to regard as demonic. There were perhaps 100,000 civilians in the southern part of the island, near the zone of combat—more than three civilians for each Japanese soldier on the battlefield. Never before, except perhaps in the battle for Manila, had a major Pacific War battlefield been so crowded with civilians. The Japanese army often evicted civilians from the caves, turning them out into the open to be exposed to artillery barrages. They took their food; they forced Okinawan mothers with crying infants to leave the caves, or to kill their own children, or they killed the infants themselves. Men, women, and children died in artillery strikes, naval bombardments, aerial bombing, the crossfire of machine guns, flamethrowers, and other infantry field weapons. By prior order of the Japanese army, any civilian caught speaking a language other than Japanese could be executed as a spy. But many older Okinawans did not know Japanese, and paid the price for it. An Okinawan remarked that the Japanese army treated the civilians as sacrificial pawns—“like go pieces, in a game of go.”70

  As the U.S. forces pressed south, they encountered long columns of refugees coming the other way—pathetic cavalcades of desperate, starving, filthy people, women with children strapped to their backs, bundles of clothing or other possessions on their shoulders. Many chewed stalks of sugarcane. Some were wounded, crawling on their hands and knees. Kikuko Miyagi, a sixteen-year-old Okinawan student, recalled the awful scenes: “Tens of thousands of people moving like ants. Civilians. Grandfathers, grandmothers, mothers with children on their backs, scurrying along, covered in mud. When children were injured, they were left along the roadside. Just thrown away. Those children could tell we were students. They’d call out, ‘Nei, nei!’ and try to cling to us. That’s Okinawan dialect for ‘Older Sister!’ It was so pitiable. I still hear those cries today.”71

  Many Okinawan civilians were shot as they approached American military positions. American sentries had orders to shoot them all, especially at night, when it was difficult to distinguish military personnel from civilians. Flares and starshells lit up the crowds coming north, toward the American lines. In a few cases, Japanese a
rmy forces had even pushed the Okinawan civilians in front of them, forcing them to advance as a kind of human shield. In order to prevent needless deaths, leaflets were distributed widely over the islands, with drawings and notices in simple Japanese and Okinawan: “Keep away from aircraft! Keep away from the roads! Don’t go near ammunition dumps! Keep away from military positions! Even if, by accident, you overlook any of the warnings set forth above, you may meet with a sad fate.”72 Norris Buchter, with the 6th Marine Division, recalled that many Japanese soldiers dressed like civilians, some even trying to disguise themselves as women, to slip through the lines by hiding among the civilian population. “Unfortunately, then, we had to shoot them. That’s when a lot of the poor Okinawans got killed. They were victims of war. We felt bad about having to do it, but we were protecting our own life.”73 John Garcia, a private in the 7th Infantry Division, shot a dark figure as it approached across a field at night. At dawn, he went forward and found “a woman there and a baby tied to her back. The bullet had gone through her and out the baby’s back. That still bothers me, that hounds me. I still feel I committed murder. You see a figure in the dark, it’s stooped over. You don’t know if it’s a soldier or a civilian.”74 But Charles Miller, with the 6th Marine Division, said that many of his fellow marines shot Okinawan civilians more or less indiscriminately. “Guys would say, ‘There goes a slant-eyed chink, pow, pow. . . . There goes a slant-eyed pig, pow, pow.’ We were not the most charming people in the world.”75

  At the same time, many American marines and soldiers took significant personal risks to save civilians. Lieutenant Lewis Thomas, an officer in the navy medical corps, was posted near the town of Nago, in northern Okinawa. The medical facility was guarded by a company of marines. A tripwire had been set up across the road. One dark night, flares revealed a large crowd of civilians coming up the road. A marine sentry radioed: “Hold your fire. Civilians.” Then he climbed over his bank of sandbags and ran forward, into the darkness. A few minutes later he returned, escorting a group of old men, women, and children. “I don’t suppose anyone recorded this act, but if we had had the authority, we would have voted him a gold medal,” recalled Lieutenant Thomas. “As it was, we clapped our hands and cheered and told him he was a great Marine.”76

  The final Thirty-Second Army command cave was so crowded with soldiers and civilian refugees that not even General Ushijima had a private space to himself. The staff officers were obliged to sleep in shifts in the few bunks that remained, or they stretched out on the ground in dirty passageways. The interior cavities of the limestone caves were fetid and damp. Water dripped from stalactites. The soldiers in the caves included hundreds of stragglers who had become detached from their units. Many were catatonic, staring blankly, wandering aimlessly through the caves, speaking only in monosyllables. U.S. aircraft dropped napalm bombs along the ridge overhead, and personnel in the upper portions of the cave system succumbed to fire or smoke inhalation. Patrol boats off the coast continued to fire constantly into the mouths of the caves, until they started coming down, slab by slab. One Japanese recalled, “When the big bombs and shells exploded on the Mabuni cliff, our entire cave shook as in a great earthquake.”77

  General Ushijima spent his last days alone, at a small desk, reading books and writing letters of commendation by candlelight. He sometimes fanned himself with a handheld paper fan. General Cho, in a cave next door, smoked a large pipe and read books. On Monday, June 18, General Ushijima sent a last message to all commands. He thanked his “beloved soldiers” for having done their duty. From that point on, all were to obey their local commanding officer’s orders. General Cho added a postscript instructing, “Do not suffer the shame of being taken prisoner. You will live for eternity.”78 Remaining stragglers were told to attempt to exfiltrate the American lines and to get to the northern part of the island, where small detachments of the Japanese army remained in the hills, and to wage a guerilla war.

  The commanders could hear the surrender appeals, transmitted through loudspeakers on patrol boats offshore, urging the Okinawan civilians to surrender. Some of the die-hard officers dismissed these appeals, saying, “Americans always talk nonsense.”79 But many civilians and even servicemen could be seen swimming out to the boats off the coast. On June 18, the staff received a surrender appeal from General Buckner, addressed directly to General Ushijima: “The forces under your command have fought bravely and well, and your infantry tactics have merited the respect of your opponents. . . . Like myself, you are an infantry general long schooled and practiced in infantry warfare. . . . I believe, therefore, that you understand as clearly as I, that the destruction of all Japanese resistance on the island is merely a matter of days.”80 The message evoked hearty laughter. Ushijima remarked wryly: “The enemy has made me an expert on infantry warfare.”81

  Three days later, Ushijima radioed a farewell message to Tokyo. Then he invited his staff to a final banquet. The last remaining bottles of sake and liquor were opened, and the men drank a round of valedictory toasts. Then Ushijima and Cho left the cave and sat on a narrow ledge overlooking the East China Sea. Ushijima was dressed in a full-dress uniform, General Cho in a white kimono. At 4:10 a.m. on June 22, they plunged daggers into their midsections, and were immediately beheaded by subordinate officers wielding samurai swords.

  According to Masahide Ota, the Americans subsequently found the grave of General Ushijima. Ota found an American knife struck into the grave marker, and read rude messages scrawled in English.82

  Some 15,000 Japanese troops remained in the caves along the southern coast, and it would take some time to root them all out. Small unit fighting would continue through July, but organized resistance was essentially finished, and there was no longer a “front line” on Okinawa. Caves were systematically scoured with flamethrowers and sealed off with demolitions; thousands of Japanese troops and civilians were entombed. During the last eight days of the battle, after the collapse of organized resistance, an estimated 8,975 Japanese soldiers were killed, and thousands of Japanese prisoners were taken. Many others took their own lives.

  Kikuko Miyagi, the sixteen-year-old student, hid in a cave for more than two weeks. On June 17, it was blown up, probably by an American hand grenade. Kikuko was uninjured, but many of her fellow students were mortally wounded:

  I smelled blood. I thought instantly, “They’ve just been hit!” We lived in darkness and sensed everything by smell. From below I heard my classmates’ voices, “I don’t have a leg!” “My hand’s gone!” At my teacher’s urging, I descended into a sea of blood. Nurses, soldiers, students killed instantly or severely injured, among them a friend of mine, Katsuko-san, with a wound in her thigh. “Quick, Teacher, quick,” she was crying. “It hurts!” I was struck dumb. There was no medicine left, and near me a senior student was desperately trying to push her intestines back into her stomach. “I won’t make it,” she whispered, “so please take care of other people first.” Then she stopped breathing.83

  Kikuko and a few other uninjured girls managed to escape the cave. They climbed down a cliff to a rocky beach. They were badly dehydrated, their hair crawling with lice, their fingernails overgrown, their bodies thick with fleas, and their skin covered with filth. They were emaciated to the point of starvation, and their skin itched constantly. She and the other girls promised one another: “If I’m unable to move, or you’re disabled, I’ll give you cyanide.” They kept one hand grenade each, “like a talisman.”84

  On the beaches, they found a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands, including Japanese soldiers and Okinawan civilians. American patrol boats were just offshore, and Japanese-American speakers were issuing surrender appeals through loudspeakers: “Those who can swim, swim out! We’ll save you. Those who can’t swim, walk towards Minatogawa! Walk by day. Don’t travel by night. We have food! We will rescue you!”

  But the girls did not trust the voices. “From the time we’d been children, we’d only been educated to hate them,” said Kikuk
o. “They would strip the girls naked and do with them whatever they wanted, then run over them with tanks. We really believed that. . . . We didn’t answer that voice, but continued our flight. We were simply too terrified of being stripped naked. That’s what a girl fears most, isn’t it?”85 She was shocked to see a Japanese soldier raise his hands and begin wading out into the sea. Another Japanese soldier shot him in the back.

  Four days later, she was captured. She had lost consciousness, and awoke in a daze to find an American soldier poking her with a gun and gesturing for her to stand. She assumed she was about to be killed or assaulted, when to her surprise she saw other civilians being treated by American combat medics. Their wounds were being bandaged and they were being given saline injections. “Until that moment I could think of the Americans only as devils and demons. I was simply frozen. I couldn’t believe what I saw.”86

  AS THEY RETURNED TO THEIR BIVOUAC areas and rest camps around Hagushi Bay, combat-weary American infantrymen scarcely recognized Okinawa. The earthmoving, engineering, and construction teams had reshaped the landscape. The 640-square-mile island was to serve as the primary staging base for the largest amphibious operation in history—the prospective invasion of Kyushu (Operation olympic), scheduled for November 1, 1945. B-24s, B-17s, and army fighters of the Eighth Air Force were already arriving from pacified Europe. At Yontan, near the invasion beach, a 7,000-foot airstrip was in operation by June 17. The roadbuilders would build 1,400 miles of new paved roads, including two four-lane highways running north-south along the length of the island, and several more from coast to coast. To span rivers and to replace destroyed bridges, the engineers used “bailey bridges”—portable, prefabricated steel truss bridges that had been developed by the British. The roads around the major airfields and supply complexes were jammed with traffic of all kinds—trucks, jeeps, trailers, and horse-drawn carts. Soldiers were directing traffic. Near Kadena airfield, the traffic was so heavy that a traffic circle was established at a major intersection. Dozens of bulldozers leveled entire hills and filled in ravines and streambeds. The ports at Okinawa were expanded with jetties, wharves, and dredging barges. By June, they were unloading more cargo per month than the port of New York handled in a typical peacetime month. An official history of the navy’s base-building program offered a compilation of eyepopping statistics: “By the close of 1945, naval facilities on Okinawa covered 20,000 acres, and included 4,180 lineal feet of wharves, 712,000 square feet of general covered storage, 11,778,000 square feet of open storage, 193,000 cubic feet of cold storage, as well as storage for 8,820,000 gallons of aviation gasoline, 30,000 barrels of diesel oil, 50,000 barrels of fuel oil, 13,000 square feet for ammunition. Aviation repair shops covered 324,100 square feet and general repair shops, 91,000 square feet. Hospital space amounted to 338,000 square feet, and quarters 4,755,000 square feet.”87 A Seabee put it more succinctly: “Our development of Okinawa was to be comparable to the total development of Rhode Island from virgin forest land.”88