Okinawa

by Robert Leckie

  “I cannot bear having just a cup of rice for a meal with no side dishes at all,” a soldier wrote. “Our health will be ruined.”

  The lament was raised frequently elsewhere, and Ushijima took account of it by urging his men to “display a more firm and resolute spirit, hold to the belief of positive victory, and always remember the spirit of martyrdom and of dying for the good of the country.”

  By way of consolation, the general issued each man a pint and a half of sweet-potato brandy, proclaimed a temporary amnesty for drunkards, and promised another issue on April 29, 1945, when the Emperor Hirohito would become forty-four years old.

  Cho came back from his visit to Tokyo in late January. He reported that Ushijima’s defense plans dovetailed with Imperial Headquarters strategy and that he had been able to dispel some doubts about the decision not to defend the Hagushi Beaches. Cho was also elated by a secret report he had seen concerning the kamikaze. The attacks by twenty-six of Admiral Ugaki’s six-plane units had brought about instantaneous sinking of one American battleship, six carriers, and thirty-four cruisers. Even the clearheaded Cho had been blown overboard by the Divine Wind. He got out an inspirational message for the Thirty-second Army’s top commanders. It said: The brave ruddy-faced warriors with white silken scarves tied about their heads, at peace in their favorite planes, dash out spiritedly to the attack. The skies are slowly brightening.

  But the skies were rather darkening with the airplanes of the American Fast Carrier Forces, which began striking the Great Loo Choo late that month. After the raid of January 22, a Japanese soldier wrote in his diary:While some of the planes fly overhead and strafe, the big bastards fly over the airfield and drop bombs. The ferocity of the bombing is terrific. It really makes me furious. It is past three o’clock and the raid is still on. At six the last two planes brought the raid to a close. What the hell kind of bastards are they? Bomb from six to six!

  They were “hard-nosed bastards,” these Americans, and there were more and bigger ones coming—toward both the Ryukyus and Japan, both by air and by sea. Naha was being pounded to rubble and the wolf packs of the American submarine service were littering the floor of the China Sea with sunken cargo vessels and drowned soldiers.

  The most shocking loss of all occurred on June 29, 1944, when the U.S. submarine Sturgeon under Lieutenant Commander C. L. Murphy sent four torpedoes flashing into the side of the troop transport Toyama Maru, sending her to the bottom along with fifty-six hundred soldiers and most of her officers and crew.

  Such reports helped to discourage the troops of the Thirty-second Army, and one private wrote in his diary: “The enemy is brazenly planning to destroy completely every last ship, cut our supply lines and attack us.”

  He was absolutely correct, and “the enemy” by then was also hurling neutralizing thunderbolts at the homeland.

  Throughout February and March, while the Marines were conquering Iwo Jima, land- and carrier-based planes struck again and again at the Great Loo Choo. Superforts began to rage all over the Ryukyus. Okinawa was effectively cut off from Kyushu in the north, Formosa in the south. On March 1, while the Fast Carrier Forces were returning to Ulithi from their third strike at Japan, there were so many planes strafing, bombing, and rocketing Okinawa that pilots had to get in line for a crack at a target. Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima was impressed.

  “You cannot regard the enemy as on a par with you,” he told his men. “You must realize that material power usually overcomes spiritual power in the present war. The enemy is clearly our superior in machines. Do not depend on your spirits overcoming this enemy. Devise combat method [sic] based on mathematical precision—then think about displaying your spiritual power.”

  Ushijima’s order was perhaps the most honest issued by a Japanese commander throughout the war. It was Bushido revised, turned upside down and inside out—but the revision had been made too late.

  First Blood for America

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In early October 1944—little more than a week after the crucial San Francisco conference—Fleet Admiral Bull Halsey’s monster Task Force Thirty-eight was speeding blacked-out through the Pacific night, bound northwestward for the opening salvos of the Okinawa campaign. When dawn broke it revealed a splendid and thrilling spectacle: seventeen aircraft carriers carrying one thousand aircraft, six fast battleships, fourteen cruisers, and fifty-eight destroyers together with the subsidiary ships such as oilers and tenders plunging through a white-capped gray sea almost at flank speed, some of them with “a bone in their teeth”—white bow waves curving away from either side of their prows—a huge and terrifying force to any Japanese unfortunate enough to witness their approach. Actually, Halsey’s fleet alone was more powerful than the entire battle force deployed by Admiral Nimitz at Midway on June 6, 1942, to defeat Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet, thus restoring carrier power in the Pacific to par with five apiece and—more important—turning the tide of naval battle against Japan.

  Halsey’s TF 38 was so large that it was spread out into four separate groups, each a task force in itself with a rear admiral in command. The precious carriers, as always, sailed in the center of each group in boxlike formation, with the battleships and cruisers steaming at the quarters, their protective antiaircraft guns raised like spikes fingering the sky. Around each formation sped the circling destroyers, seagoing sheep dogs snapping at the heels of their flocks, but actually screening them and searching, searching, searching for enemy submarines.

  On all ships, surface and air radars rotated unceasingly, feeding information to their Combat Information Centers, each vessel’s nerve center where sailors worked silently in darkened compartments below. On the bridges or in sea cabins immediately adjacent to them stood the ship captains and task group commanders, tense and with furrowed brows anticipating—while dreading—those sudden emergencies that arise swiftly and require instant reaction. Throughout TF 38 hundreds of men perched high on the crow’s nests of masts swept the sea with binoculars, looking for those telltale tips of periscopes cutting through the water, and thus supplementing the electrical impulses of the radar or the pinging of the sonar sniffing out strangers submerged beneath the waves.

  Day after day as the carriers penetrated deeper and deeper into enemy waters, they were turned into the wind to launch planes, either for antisubmarine or defensive fighter patrols. As they were catapulted into the air, the destroyers on pilot-rescue duty churned closer to either side of the flattops. It was the “tin cans’ ” duty to rescue crashed pilots. Aboard these slender long “black-water ships,” always a thrilling sight with their sterns dug into the water and their prows high, sometimes even bouncing on the waves, throwing up huge plumes of white spray, the deck officers kept a worried eye on the carriers’ deck angle. If a flattop in a changing wind turned suddenly to keep it on its bow, the destroyer might ram the carrier. To prevent such disaster, deck officers—usually young and highly responsible sailors—were carefully screened and trained.

  Each carrier had a dual organization, its regular crew that sailed or fought the ship and its air group. The air group maintained and flew the planes: about eighty in the big Essex class twenty-seven-thousand-ton flattops, forty in the smaller Independence class, a carrier with flight decks mounted on a cruiser’s hull. With Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher in tactical command, TF 38’s airplanes—those peerless Curtiss Helldiver dive-bombers and Grumman Avenger torpedo planes, Grumman Hellcat fighter-bombers and fighters—would scourge Okinawa land and sea, especially the enemy island’s three operational airfields as well as the one on little Ie Island off Okinawa’s midwestern shore. All facilities—runways, barracks, warehouses, hangars, AA (antiaircraft) defenses, parked planes—would be blasted. Perhaps just as important, camera planes would take mosaic strip photographs of the island for map-makers back in Hawaii.

  Before dawn of October 10, 1944, while intelligence officers briefed air crews on Okinawa’s defenses, all seventeen of the flattops made re
ady for battle. Elevators brought planes topside to be stationed in rows on teakwood decks awaiting launch or takeoff. Below, armorers armed the planes with bombs, five-inch rockets, twenty-one-inch torpedoes, or belts of .50 caliber machine-gun ammunition. At dawn pilot-rescue destroyers took station. With an ear-piercing swooosh!bow catapults hurled aloft those planes that needed artificial momentum while others roared down the deck to become airborne themselves.

  Between daybreak and dusk the American airmen flew 1,396 sorties over Okinawa, dropping more than five hundred tons of bombs, destroying suicide submarines, flaming enemy fighters, sinking a tender, smaller ships, and the power-driven fishing boats in Naha harbor, while setting that city of sixty-five thousand persons ablaze. In all, ten transports and thirty merchant ships went to the bottom, along with half of the power-driven fishing boats and sixteen smaller warships—a serious loss of Okinawa’s patrol boats and trawlers assigned to supplying the island.

  Perhaps more serious were the attacks on Naha warehouses, where three hundred thousand sacks of rice—enough to feed the Thirty-second Army for a month—were burned, plus the loss of five million rounds of rifle and machine-gun ammunition, ten thousand rounds of light artillery and mortar shells, and four hundred rounds of 47 mm antitank ammunition. The exact number of enemy planes destroyed or damaged was not known. One Japanese general was killed and another wounded, while military deaths totaled two hundred. Among civilians five hundred persons died—a tragic loss, even though unintended. Eventually, however, the Okinawans would understand that the safest place for them during such attacks—which they called “typhoons of steel”—was within Okinawa’s numerous caves, which sheltered them during the real typhoons that scourged the island. Perhaps even more important than the damage dealt to Ushijima’s installations were the thousands of aerial photographs taken, which, with others shot earlier by B-29s flying from China, enabled the American map-makers in Hawaii to produce a fairly accurate 1:24,000-scale map of utmost value to both infantry and artillery.

  Halsey’s losses, meanwhile, were minimal: five pilots and four crewmen carried as missing in action and twenty-one planes lost. Upon the approach of night, Halsey reversed course, speeding southward again to strike Formosa, confident that before Okinawa’s cratered airfields could be repaired and replacement planes flown in, TF 38 could complete its mission without intervention from the Great Loo Choo.

  Kamikaze Strike/ Franklin’s Ordeal

  CHAPTER SIX

  In the middle of March the planning stages for Operation Iceberg came to an end and the preinvasion bombardment intended to soften up Okinawa for the attack began. Now Task Force Fifty-eight under Admiral Spruance sortied from its anchorage at Ulithi for the first phase of destroying enemy airpower based on Kyushu.

  Spruance’s fast carriers could not have appeared at a more difficult time for Admiral Ugaki. Preparations for Ten-Go were not complete, and even if they had been, the Heavenly Operation’s prime targets were to be comparatively defenseless troop transports and supply ships—not those seventeen dreadful American flattops with their thousand airplanes, those half-dozen big battleships, those fourteen cruisers—all of which could fight back. Only the Fifth Air Japanese Fleet was ready for action, and of its eight air groups two were strictly one-way suiciders. Even these heroic kamikaze had been so few hours in the air that they still had difficulty landing their planes. Kyushu’s fifty-five airfields had not yet been made ready for the anticipated raids, although Ugaki’s engineers were tunneling into the hills to shelter pilots, troops, ordnance, and repair facilities, while camouflaging runways and littering abandoned fields with dummies and useless aircraft. Communications were poor—as they usually were among the Japanese—and there were real problems in transmitting orders from Ugaki’s headquarters at Kanoya. Poor mechanical communication inhibited Japanese battle coordination throughout the war, but even worse was the consistent failure to report defeat, perhaps because to do so would require the unfortunate commander to kill himself. Probably the worst instance of this peculiarly Japanese weakness was after the Battle of Midway. Admiral Yamamoto never told the Army he had lost four carriers there; although he informed Premier Hideki Tojo he had been defeated, he never supplied the details. Emperor Hirohito heard nothing. On a much smaller scale, but perhaps even more shocking, was the report to Tokyo Headquarters of the complete annihilation of the two-thousand-man Ichiki Detachment by the Second Battalion, First Marines, on Guadalcanal. All that was revealed was that “the attack of the Ichiki Detachment was not entirely successful.” Japan’s unique ideographic language was another cause of imprecise orders. Finally, the acrimonious debates that could divide staff planners at every level was one more hindrance; such a furor arose at Imperial Headquarters over whether or not to use the Special Attack Forces against Spruance’s approaching fleet.

  One side was against expending the kamikaze against enemy warships when the true purpose of Ten-Go was to destroy as many troop transports and supply ships as possible, while the opposing group argued that a passive defense on Kyushu would expose the island to such destruction from sea and sky that there wouldn’t be any aircraft left to strike TF 58. In the end, Tokyo ordered Ugaki to hit Spruance with what he had.

  He did. From the start of the American attack at 5:45 A.M. on March 18 and throughout the following day Ugaki hurled 193 planes—including 69 kamikaze—at the Americans again attacking in four separate carrier groups. Of these, 161 planes—or 83 percent—were lost, while another 50 planes were damaged on the ground. Even with such staggering losses Admiral Ugaki was gratified, for his pilots—again retrieving victory from defeat with a few strokes of the pen, and for whom all minnows were whales during those two days—had reported hitting five carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and one unidentified ship. But they reported these “losses” with such joyful shouts of victory that Ugaki assumed that they were all sunk, and that Spruance had withdrawn because his fleet was so badly crippled that the Okinawa invasion would be postponed for some time.

  Actually, TF 58—though shaken—was far from being crippled. Japanese bombers had indeed scored hits, damaging four big carriers: Wasp seriously and Franklin so badly that she was presumed lost. It was at exactly 7:08 A.M. on March 19 that Franklin ’s ordeal began. At that moment a lone Judy3 bomber undetected by radar emerged from a low overcast to drop two 550-pound bombs from only a hundred feet above the flattop’s wooden flight deck. The first missile pierced the deck just ahead of a pair of Helldiver bombers, while the second penetrated aft among a group of twenty-nine fueled and armed Helldivers, Avengers, and Corsairs awaiting their turn to be launched. Zooming up and away from the double explosions’ flame and shock waves, the Judy was unharmed by the fusillade of shells fired at her by the carrier’s AA gunners, but was shot down by Commander E. B. Parker, chief of Franklin’s air group. But its destruction was small compensation for the dreadful damage it had inflicted on the carrier.

  Both bombs exploded in the hangar deck, setting afire twenty-three planes, fueled, armed, and awaiting their turn to be moved by elevator to the flight deck above. Flames and explosives flashing from the stricken planes instantly killed most of a line of about two hundred sailors and airmen waiting to descend to the mess deck below for breakfast. Almost simultaneously a huge and growing cloud of black smoke enveloped Franklin, obscuring her from the sight of surrounding ships.

  On the navigation bridge concussions struck Franklin’s skipper, Captain Leslie Gehres, knocking him sprawling. Jumping erect, he was horrified to see “a sheet of flame come out from under the starboard side of the flight deck” engulfing the starboard batteries and spreading aft. At the same instant, Gehres saw that “a great column of flame and black smoke came out from the forward elevator well.” To clear the smoke and flame from his ship, he ordered Quartermaster V. R. Ryan to steer Franklin to the right. Ryan did, but succeeded in surrounding the entire “island” superstructure—himself and the skipper included—in a cloud of hot, oily smoke i
ssuing from the parked planes burning aft. Realizing that his ship was also stricken in its stern, Gehres ordered Ryan to swing the carrier the other way, meanwhile ordering the still-functioning engine room to increase speed by two-thirds. Almost at once the scorching smoke was blown clear of Franklin.

  Now there ensued a spate of morning-long blasts, mostly from bombs and Tiny Tim twelve-inch rockets stored on deck. The Tiny Tim were especially frightening to men trying to fight the flames, because, as Commander Joe Taylor, the ship’s executive, later described it, “Some screamed by the bridge to starboard, some to port and some straight up the flight deck.” Yet, even in the midst of this death-dealing holocaust, neither Gehres nor Taylor lost their sense of humor. “Joe,” Gehres said when he saw Parker approaching, “I’ll have to say the same thing the admiral told you when you were last bombed: your face is dirty as hell!”

  Grinning, the knot in his stomach quickly coming undone, Parker hurried to the flight deck to organize fire-fighting parties. From there he hastened to the hangar deck to organize the same details. Because foam and CO2 were useless to squelch the inferno raging on Franklin’s decks, a pair of emergency pumps began supplying salt water to the fire hoses now put into play. Meanwhile, hundreds of sailors and airmen trapped by the flames took the only recourse possible to save themselves: they jumped overboard to a man, until there were long strings of heads bobbing on either side of the carrier. While Franklin pulled ahead of the swimmers at a steady eight knots, pilot-rescue destroyers closed her stern to pick up the survivors. Eventually they rescued hundreds.

  Both to Captain Gehres and Rear Admiral R. E. Davison, commander of Task Group 58.2, it was clear that Franklin was badly hurt and might go under. To continue to direct his ships and planes against the enemy, Davison had no other choice but to remove his flag to another ship. But as he prepared to board the light cruiser Santa Fe, which he had ordered to come alongside the blazing Franklin to help fight fires and take off wounded, he was pleased to hear Gehres flatly reject any proposal to abandon ship. Gehres knew that perhaps three hundred of his men were trapped below in a mess compartment beneath the blazing hangar deck. “I had promised these kids I’d get them out,” he explained. Meanwhile, Dr. J. L. Fuelling, a ship’s physician, calmed the trapped sailors by ordering them to sit quietly and not consume oxygen by talking. As they sat terrified—who would not be?—in the stifling heat, the only air reaching them came from a hole in the ship’s side just big enough to pass a baseball through. It is probable that they might have suffocated if not rescued soon, and that succor did come from a brave junior-grade lieutenant named Donald Cary.