Okinawa

by Robert Leckie

  As ship’s fuel and water officer, Cary was familiar with the maze of passageways and compartments belowdecks, and he relied upon this knowledge to grope his way to locate the trapped bluejackets and lead them topside to safety—a daring feat for which he received a Medal of Honor.

  That highest military award in the gift of the United States also went to Chaplain Joseph O‘Callahan. To Commander Stephen Jurka, Franklin’s navigator, Father O’Callahan was “a soul-stirring sight. He seemed to be everywhere, giving Extreme Unction to the dead and dying, urging the men on and himself handling hoses, jettisoning ammunition and doing everything he could to save the ship.” He seemed as composed as his Master moving through the smoke with the cross on his helmet shining like a beacon, “his head bowed slightly as if in meditation or prayer.” Marveling at his serenity, Captain Gehres said: “I never saw a man so completely disregard the danger of being killed ...”

  Perhaps the most awesome feat of seamanship during Franklin’s entire ordeal came from Captain Hal Fitz of the Santa Fe, who daringly slammed into the carrier’s side, remaining there to fight fires and take off wounded as well as able sailors. In spite of continuing explosions like strings of giant firecrackers, Fitz doggedly held Santa Fe fast, his own hoses joining Franklin’s in dousing flames, meanwhile taking aboard eight hundred of the carrier’s seamen.

  By noon the fires were dying down and the explosions less frequent and dangerous. But Franklin was still dead in the water, her black gangs having been driven from the engine rooms by intense heat. Commandeering a pickup force of messmen, Commander Taylor successfully seized a towline from the heavy cruiser Pittsburgh and began a crawling withdrawal from Japanese waters at a limping speed of six knots. That night a special detail equipped with breathing apparatus reduced Franklin’s dangerous list of thirty degrees while a party of daring volunteers braved smoke and heat to enter a boiler room and relight a pair of boilers. Franklin began to move under its own power.

  The next day, with six boilers operating, the carrier dropped the Pittsburgh tow and went cleaving through the waves at a spanking fifteen knots. But then, in early afternoon, hearts breathing free at last constricted in fear again when another bold Judy bomber came gliding out of the sun. Without power to operate the flattop’s plentiful AA guns, Franklin appeared helpless—until another crew of volunteers wrestled a heavy quadruple 40 mm gun mount around and fired it so accurately that the Judy was forced to nose upward at its release point, and its bombs—almost grazing the carrier—exploded harmlessly in the sea about two hundred feet from the ship.

  Soon Franklin was out of the impact area. Captain Gehres now took stock of his human losses. He was shocked to find that 724 of his men had been killed and another 1,428 either wounded or unavailable and presumed to be aboard the five destroyers and two cruisers assigned to rescue duty. But there were still 103 of ficers and 603 enlisted men present able to sail the ship, although many of them were still in shock. Rather than have many more succumb to the paralysis of combat fatigue, Gehres wisely instituted a program of punishing and distracting work: burying their fallen comrades at sea, clearing the decks of wreckage, and scouring blackened compartments. By the time Franklin reached Pearl Harbor, those who saw her decks looking like “a shredded wheat biscuit” were amazed that she had survived the four-thousand-mile voyage back to base; and when her anchors went clattering down the hawse pipes off New York’s Brooklyn Navy Yard she looked “almost presentable.” In truth, because of her gallant skipper and crew, Franklin was by far the most shattered carrier on either side to survive its ordeal.

  With Wasp and Franklin out of action, Admiral Spruance at once reduced his striking strength to three groups, distributing his remaining vessels among them, after which—with a few farewell sweeps over still-numbed and battered Kyushu—he retired far out to sea to refuel. Spruance’s flyers claimed a total of five hundred enemy planes destroyed, three hundred shot down in air battles: an estimate that seems exaggerated. Still, they had certainly decimated Admiral Ugaki’s Ten-Go force, leaving him with about thirty-six hundred of his original command of four thousand planes. Worse were his losses in skilled pilots. And he had not, as he had judged from his aviators’ wildly optimistic reports of enemy ships sunk, in any way delayed the invasion of Okinawa.

  The “Americans”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Never before—and God willing, may it never be so again—had there been an invasion armada the equal of the 1,600 seagoing ships carrying 545,000 American GIs and Marines that streamed across the Pacific in that fateful spring of 1945 bound for the island of Okinawa. In firepower, troops, and tonnage it eclipsed even the more-famous D day in Normandy on June 6, 1944. In that invasion, except for the enormous thirty-to-one preponderance in air power conferred upon him by 12,000 aircraft, General Eisenhower commanded only 150,000 Allied assault troops (compared to Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner’s attacking force of 184,000 GIs and Marines). True, Eisenhower’s supporting craft would eventually number 5,300, but most of these were far from being seaworthy. And the Allied naval forces off the five Normandy landing beaches could not approach the firepower of Admiral Spruance’s Task Force Fifty-eight. Nor was there any comparison in the distances traveled from staging area to battle-ground. Only about 30 miles of English Channel separated southern England from western France, or at most perhaps 400 miles to faraway ports in the United Kingdom, but ships leaving the West Coast ports of embarkation at San Francisco and Seattle sailed 7,355 miles to the target. Yet, in feats of unrivaled seamanship still not generally recognized, the 1,300 ships arriving off the Hagushi Beaches of Okinawa did get there in time for the landings. And there were still 300 left behind in the various anchorages stretching across the western ocean.

  From Seattle and San Francisco no fewer than 3,200 miles had to be traversed before these newest and farthest-away vessels could reach Hawaii, the point from which the stupendous American counter-attack was launched to its last battle 4,155 miles distant. Soon these ships were putting in at the island battlegrounds whose names they bore (Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Tarawa, and the lesser battles of the Gilberts and Marshalls, New Britain, the Admiralties, Buna, and Sidor) to begin the long drive up the New Guinea coast—then staging up through the latest battlegrounds at Peleliu, Leyte, and Saipan-Tinian-Guam. Under the Stars and Stripes they roved boldly and unmenaced across that Pacific Ocean that was now an American lake, for the Philippines were by then subdued; of the mighty Japanese Navy that was to guard the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—Japan’s euphemism for its stolen empire there—only great Yamato, the most powerful warship afloat, had survived the holocaust of disaster of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Of the emperor’s glorious young eagles whose sneak attack on the Day of Infamy had awakened the sleeping American giant, only a few weary veterans remained to join the ragged remnant of Japanese airpower. British warships were also in the invasion fleet, a fast carrier force of twenty-two vessels, for in Europe the gate had been found open at Remagen Bridge, American troops were over the Rhine, and the Old Queen of the Waves was sending help to her erstwhile daughter, now Sovereign of the Seas.

  Fleet Admiral Nimitz was still in overall command in Hawaii as he had been when the Japanese were stopped at Midway, when the long charge began at Guadalcanal. Admiral Raymond Spruance commanded the Fifth Fleet, and there was the saltiest salt still giving orders to the expeditionary force. Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner had brought the Marines to Guadalcanal and now, nearly three years later, still roaming his flagship bridge in an old bathrobe, still a profane perfectionist with beetling brow and abrasive tongue, a matchless planner who would also not scruple to tell the coxswain how to beach his boat, Kelly Turner was bringing the Tenth Army to Okinawa. Many of the officers and men aboard Turner’s ships—especially the Marines—were not ecstatic to have the Old Salt in charge.

  The Leathernecks could not forget his monstrous blunder at Guadalcanal, when he was the Amphibious Force commander at this fi
rst invasion in the long-awaited American counter-offensive. In the night of August 8-9, 1942, the Battle of Savo Island—better known to the sailors and Leathernecks involved as “the Battle of the Four Sitting Ducks”—Turner had lost four cruisers: Astoria, Quincy, Vincennes, and the Australian Canberra, while a fifth, Chicago, had its bow blown off. He lost them because he violated a commander’s basic principle: never act on the premise of what you think the enemy will do but what he has the capacity to do. Thus, he was unprepared for battle when a Japanese task force led by Rear Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, the hero of Pearl Harbor, came tearing down the Slot the day after the Americans landed to surprise Turner in a disaster that might have been a catastrophe. Guadalcanal might have been reconquered by the enemy but for the tenacity of the Marines whom Turner quickly abandoned—and wisely so, his fire support force having been almost annihilated—sailing away with empty transports and some supply ships not even half unloaded, others still deep in the water. And the U.S. Navy did not return to Guadalcanal in force until three months later. But for Turner’s friendship with Nimitz, he might have lost his head just as Admiral Husband Kimmel did at Pearl Harbor. But he did come back again and again—risking his ships in the submarine-infested waters of the Coral Sea, to bring reinforcements and badly needed supplies to Major General Alexander Vandegrift.

  This writer well remembers the Four Sitting Ducks, for our battalion was lost in the jungle that night, and the monster explosions that shook the trees and flames that seemingly set the clouds on fire were not suggestive of good times to come. When we returned to the beach the next day and saw not a single ship on a bay that had been full of masts twenty-four hours earlier, we knew that we were all alone. Worse, our ship, the George F. Elliott—an African slaver if ever there was one—had been sunk on D day by a Zero that crashed her amidships, sending all our supplies—beans, bullets, and barbed wire—down to the bottom, along with our extra clothing and mosquito nets, so that many of us quickly came down with malaria, and the first time I shot a Jap, I had Jap clothing on. We also lived on wormy Japanese rice for the next few months. Worse for me, the portable typewriter that my mother had given me on my sixteenth birthday also sank into Davy Jones’s locker, thus wrecking my naive plan to fight by day and write by night.

  So those Americans sailing toward Okinawa who had been on “the Canal” were not enchanted to have Kelly Turner at the helm again. It was well known that he was a constant thorn in Vandegrift’s flesh, trying to take personal command of the reinforcements he brought to the island, planning to deploy them in tactical traps when actually he had no authority on land arid knew exactly nothing about ground warfare. One infuriated officer wrote: “Turner was a martinet; very, very gifted, but he was stubborn, opinionated, conceited ... thought that he could do anything better than anybody in the world ... By and large naval officers, they were wary of trying to run land operations, but Turner, no; because Turner knew everything!”

  Soldiers who served at New Georgia in the Solomons also were given a sampling of Admiral Turner’s hectoring style when he was playing general—especially Major General Oswald Griswold, commander of the Army Fourteenth Corps. Turner repeatedly usurped Griswold’s authority, divided his staff, and—his critics maintained—prolonged what turned out to be a miserable campaign. Whether or not General Simon Bolivar Buckner was aware of Turner’s tendency to interfere is not known, and it may be that the Tenth Army commander as a newcomer to the Central Pacific was unfamiliar with the amphibious chief’s abrasive personality.

  Buckner was the son of the Confederate general of the same name, so often described by many military historians as “famous.” Actually, Buckner’s father was rather more infamous throughout the Southland, for it was he who had accepted the humiliating terms of unconditional surrender of Fort Donelson offered to him by his fellow West Point cadet U. S. Grant. It was to Grant that this adjective famous really applied, for he did become famous—not only because his capture of Donelson was received in the North with delirium (these were the early dark days of defeat and retreat for the Union) but also because his initials U.S. fitted his feat, and he became known thereafter as “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. Buckner junior—for some inexplicable reason called “the Old Man of the Mountain”—was definitely unlikely to submit to the sort of bluff Grant ran on his father. A big man, ruddy-faced and white-haired, avid for the conditioning of troops, he had served four years in Alaska and the Aleutians, where he had improved the defenses of the North Pacific. He had hoped to lead the invasion of Japan from this region, but the thrust from the Aleutians was never made. Instead it was coming from the Central Pacific, and Buckner had been called to Hawaii to lead it. His command was the Tenth Army, a new number for seven old divisions. These were the Seventh, Twenty-seventh, Seventy-seventh, and Ninety-sixth Infantry Divisions of the U.S. Army Twenty-fourth Corps commanded by Major General John Hodge, and the First, Second, and Sixth Marine Divisions of the Third Amphibious Corps under the silver-haired veteran of Guadalcanal, Major General Roy Geiger.

  All of these troops, and especially the replacements who fleshed out formations left understrength by battle losses, disease, or accident, hated the Pacific with a fierce, personal venom. Upon arriving in the islands they stood breathless at the rail of their transports, drinking in the beauty of a tropical paradise seen from the sea, especially at sunrise or sunset. But then, when they went ashore—even on a peaceful island—they saw the backside of beauty, a face as hideous as Medusa’s. The first to be so disillusioned by the ambivalent South Seas were the men of the First Marine Division when they came on deck the morning of August 7, 1942, who stood at the rail of their ships studying Guadalcanal. My buddies and I—waiting to follow our machine guns down the cargo nets to the wooden Higgins boats waiting and wallowing in the swells—were enchanted until after we landed. Years later, I remembered that scene:She was beautiful seen from the sea, this slender long island. Her towering central mountains ran down her spine in a graceful east-west keel. The sun seemed to kiss her timber-line, and lay shimmering on open patches of tan grass dappling the green of her forests. Gentle waves washed her beaches white, raising a glitter of sun and water and scoured sand beneath fringing groves of coconut trees leaning languorously seaward with nodding, star-shaped heads.

  She was beautiful, but beneath her loveliness, within the necklace of sand and palm, under the coiffure of her sun-kissed treetops with its tiara of jeweled birds, she was a mass of slops and stinks and pestilence; of scum-crested lagoons and vile swamps inhabited by giant crocodiles; a place of spiders as big as your fist and wasps as long as your finger, of lizards the length of your leg or as brief as your thumb; of ants that bite like fire, of tree-leeches that fall, fasten and suck; of scorpions without the guts to kill themselves, of centipedes whose foul scurrying across human skin leaves a track of inflamed flesh, of snakes that slither and land crabs that scuttle—and of rats and bats and carrion birds and of a myriad of stinging insects. By day, black swarms of flies feed on open cuts and make them ulcerous. By night, mosquitoes come in clouds—bringing malaria, dengue or any one of a dozen filthy exotic fevers. Night or day, the rains come; and when it is the monsoon it comes in torrents, conferring a moist mushrooming life on all that tangled green of vine, fern, creeper and bush, dripping on eternally in the rain forest, nourishing kingly hardwoods so abundantly that they soar more than a hundred feet into the air, rotting them so thoroughly at their base that a rare wind—or perhaps only a man leaning against them—will bring them crashing down.

  And Guadalcanal stank. She was sour with the odor of her own decay, her breath so hot and humid, so sullen and so still, that all those hundreds of thousands of Americans who came to her during the ensuing three years of war cursed and swore to feel the vitality oozing from them in a steady stream of enervating heat.

  The same reaction was felt by Buckner’s troops at the same island—then a huge staging area—and from the same division. Staff Sergeant George McMillan wrote o
f the Marine replacement on Guadalcanal who ran from his tent at dusk and began to pound his fists against a coconut tree. “I hate you, goddamit, I hate you,” the man cried, sobbing, and from another tent came the cry: “Hit it once for me!”

  Almost all the troops of Buckner’s Tenth Army shared this loathing, for they had not enjoyed malaria or monsoons or playing hide-and-seek with crocodiles or scorpions, snakes or poisonous centipedes. Indeed, as late as February 1945, General Hodge’s infantry divisions were still mopping up on Leyte in weather and terrain exactly duplicating Guadalcanal’s. Hodge was dismayed. A veteran and respected infantry commander who had served during the mop-up at Guadalcanal under the famous “Lightning Joe” Collins—a future Army chief of staff—and had again defeated the Japanese on New Georgia and Bougainville in the Solomons, as well as Leyte, Hodge knew that his troops were dearly in need of what is today called “Rest and Rehabilitation”: i.e., a rousing beer-and-girls furlough in Melbourne or Sydney, Australia; Wellington, New Zealand; or even Manila. But he was not able to withdraw them from combat until March 1, with D day at the Great Loo Choo scheduled for April 1—exactly a month away. Yet, like the Marines training on Guadalcanal, when the GIs heard that their next campaign was to be on Okinawa, they were inexplicably reassured—perhaps because that island’s highest temperature of 85 degrees in no way approached the “paradise” reading of 120.