Okinawa

by Robert Leckie

  Spruance’s Fifth Fleet, besides the striking power of his TF 58 and the flying buffer of the British carrier force, also included ninety minesweepers of all types ready to clear Okinawan waters of the primitive contact mines planted by the enemy. There were also the brave SEALS, as they are now called, of the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams, charged with detonating the enemy’s underwater explosives and pointed stakes; the big bombers of the Twentieth Air Force, and the Tenth Army’s own Tactical Air Force made up mostly of Marine pilots and commanded by a Marine, Major General Francis Mulcahy.

  Here, off those eight miles of Hagushi Beaches, the heaviest weight of metal ever hurled from sea to shore was clearing the way for the assault troops—and yet, it was never needed. For all their thunder and flash, their geysering flame and smoke like so many erupting volcanos, the bombardment was falling harmlessly among beaches, hills, and valleys long ago abandoned by General Ushijima.

  Even Ushijima and his staff standing atop Shuri Castle and studying the scene through binoculars were deeply impressed. One of these officers later wrote in his diary that the flash and crash of this incredible bombardment was “a scene of unsurpassed grandeur.” They were also glad that Ushijima had accepted Yahara’s advice not to defend the Hagushi Beaches. From what they saw they could imagine the carnage among their troops if he had adhered to the old, discredited doctrine of “destruction at the water’s edge.”

  Yet for all its negligible effects, the titanic sea bombardment would serve one major psychological purpose: it would encourage the assault troops. Boated in their amphibious tractors—“amtracks” —in the bellies of their LSTs—“Landing Ship, Tanks,” which they derisively called “Large Stationary Targets”—these men had been swallowing the smoke of their roaring vehicles for hours. Lined up on the tank deck two abreast, nose to rear, it was as though they were in a traffic jam, or sailing to battle in the Lincoln Tunnel. All—even the veterans—were tense and fearful, for they had been told that Okinawa would not be easy. Among some of the Marines it was more than anxiety that tied their stomachs in knots. They had breakfasted on “styke ’n’ aiggs,” a tradition they had picked up in Australia and New Zealand, and were having difficulty holding it down. Some ship’s doctors hoped that they would all let it go over the side, once they were seaborne. “Steak and eggs!” one dismayed surgeon had cried. “A nice lot of guts that’ll be to sew up—full of steak!”

  Ernie Pyle smiled when he heard that complaint. Pyle had left the European Theater, in which the Axis had been driven to its knees, to travel with the Marines in the Pacific; and he was aboard one of those numerous LSTs when their big bow doors yawned open and the amtracks—roaring louder as the coxswains accelerated—began waddling down the tank decks to go plunging into the East China Sea. They could see ahead of them the white-capped gray water beneath a mackerel sky, and they could almost feel the impact of that monster howling seemingly encasing their heads in a great brass bowl on which some insane giant was hammering. Until that moment, the bombardment had been merely a steady rumbling noise outside. But now it was a bellowing, clanging clamor like Shakespeare’s “iron tongue of midnight.” None of these men of the assault troops were dismayed to hear this martial symphony overhead—big guns booming like kettle-drums, shells speeding shoreward with the woodwinds’ howl and the shriek of violins, the snare-drum rattle of machine guns together with a brass section of braying ack-ack, and beneath it all in counterpoint keeping the beat, the cough and hum of mortars like strummed cellos and bass viols. Rather, the GIs and Marines were delighted by the sound and the fury so suggestive of their enemy’s destruction, and many of them grinned as they raised their helmeted heads above the gunwales or lifted their hands on high with the thumb and forefinger joined in the gesture of perfection.

  Ernie Pyle, though exulting in his first experience of an amphibious invasion, was nonetheless a bit shaken by the bombardment, which he thought actually “set up vibrations in the air—a sort of nutter—which pained and pounded the ears as though with invisible drumsticks ...” Even Kelly Turner—like all “Bomber Barons” or “Admirals of Artillery”—thought that the bombardment would end all opposition, reporting to Nimitz: “I may be crazy, but it looks like the Japanese have quit the war, at least in this sector.” Back came the counter-message: “Delete all after ‘crazy.’ ”

  Nimitz would be proved a truer prophet, of course, but on Love Day Turner looked like a better bet. Off the beaches four thousand yards distant the control boats were organizing the attack waves. Perhaps eight hundred amtracks loaded with GIs and Marines were sent speeding beachward in from five to seven lines, each with bow waves curling away from their prows, their churning propellers leaving frothy white wakes trailing behind like tails a thousand yards long. Crawling steadily ahead of them were the amphibious tanks.

  Abruptly, as though switched off, the beach bombardment ceased—and the GIs and Marines in the amtracks glanced skyward nervously, wonderingly. Actually the sea cannonade had been lifted only to strike enemy installations farther inland, and during the respite two flights of sixty-four carrier planes apiece came roaring over the beaches to strafe them with machine-gun fire—making the men in the amtracks lift their hands in approval once again. Usually the strafing planes raised only dust, but sometimes a Japanese fuel storage tank would be hit, and plumes of flame and clouds of smoke swirled skyward to enter drifting white clouds and suffuse them pink and black. Once the aircraft departed, the bombardment ships resumed their cannonade: this time firing every gun they mounted, even 40 mm AA spitting out red tracers flashing low across the water to explode just inland of the beach. Even so, all this also had not been needed—but woe to the commander who would have ordered anything else. Marines who had landed at Iwo Jima were still bitter over the less than adequate three-day preparation there, for when they came ashore they were instantly struck by hundreds of enemy positions that had been left intact. Three more days of steel and fire, they insisted, could not have failed to knock out all remaining obstacles on that tiny two-by-four island; and there would have been far fewer casualties than those twenty-two thousand dead and wounded United States Marines. That was why Okinawa got six days, with ships firing no less than seven thousand shells in every caliber from sixteen inches to 40 mm, plus the aerial onslaught. During the beach bombardment preceding H-Hour alone, the fleet fired 44,825 rounds of five- to sixteen-inch shells, 33,000 rockets, and 22,500 mortar shells. Seventy miles east of Okinawa Task Force Fifty-eight was deployed to furnish air support and to intercept air attacks from Kyushu, while support carriers were protecting troop carriers still arriving with second- and third-echelon troops. Earlier, carrier fighter-bombers had bathed the beaches in flaming tanks of napalm.

  Thus, whether needed or not, this terrible weight of metal had made it certain that when the American spearheads climbed the reef to assault the beaches, not an enemy hand was raised to stop them.

  Within the first hour no less than sixteen thousand troops had come ashore—an incredible achievement. With the beachhead secure, the remaining combat troops streamed onto Okinawa. They were followed by waves of tanks, some of them amphibious, some carried ashore by flotation devices, others ferried to the beaches by LSMs. Then came ammunition and supplies. Well before noon of April 1, 1945, the Hagushi Beaches were safely in American hands.

  Down to the south off the Minatoga Beaches, meanwhile, the troops of Major General Watson’s Second Marine Division also came roaring shoreward in a masterful feint that not only drew off some of Ushijima’s defenders but actually—and unintentionally—brought upon their heads the wrath of the first kamikaze to strike the invaders. They damaged a transport and an LST, killing and wounding sixteen Americans. But the amtracks still churned beachward until, as the fourth wave crossed the line of departure at 8:30 A.M., with remarkable precision all the landing craft reversed course to return to their ships. Next day the demonstration was repeated, and General Ushijima reported that “an enemy landing attempt
on the eastern coast of Okinawa on Sunday morning was completely foiled, with heavy losses to the enemy.”

  Inland on Hagushi the Bimbo Butai had broken and fled at the first belch of American guns, leaving the vital Yontan and Kadena Airfields deserted and unprotected. By mid-morning the Sixth Marine Division on the left flank of General Buckner’s four-division front had reached Yontan and was moving across it while the First Marine Division on its right struck out rapidly for Nakagusuku Bay on the east coast, chopping up the remnants of the demoralized Bimbo Butai. Many of these reluctant soldiers, on both the Third Corps’s front to the left and Twenty-fourth Corps’s on the right, threw off the hated Japanese uniform and melted out of sight among their own people. Some true Japanese soldiers also shed their uniforms, not to desert but to don blue Okinawan kimonos to conduct guerrilla warfare from the wild northern hills. So there were few enemy indeed to contest the cross-island rush of the Tenth Army spearheads. Behind the riflemen, tanks had already rolled across beaches blessedly free of mines, while behind them came the bulldozers to cut passage through the terraces. Soon every manner of transport vehicle—wheeled or tracked—was depositing supplies on those rapidly growing inland mountains of cases, crates, and barrels. Everywhere the engineers and pioneers of all the assault divisions were moving and shaking and transforming Okinawa with customary Yankee energy and ingenuity. Only the Battalion Aid Stations so rapidly organized on the beaches were quiet and inactive. Bottles of blood plasma or whole blood swung upside down and unused on their tall fork-like stands, while doctors and medics squatted on their heels or sat perched on water cans, smoking and staring wonderingly at empty operating tables like so many embarrassed supernumeraries.

  Up front the attacking Americans were slowly letting out their breath. A soldier of the Seventh Division standing on a hill south of the Bishi River spoke for all of them when he said: “I’ve already lived longer than I thought I would.” On his left the Marines were also submitting to the Great Loo Choo’s pastoral charm, one of them feeding a box of K rations to a goat, which quickly gulped it down—cardboard and all—while others rounded up the shaggy little Okinawan ponies and vaulted aboard with shouts of glee.

  “Ya-hoo!” one of them yelled. “I’m Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines!”

  Out among the forest of masts in the Hagushi Anchorage Colonel Cecil Nist, General Hodge’s intelligence officer, could hardly believe the radio reports from the beaches. The troops had found what the aerial photographs suggested: formidable but empty enemy positions, and now the suspicion that had replaced apprehension was gone, to be supplanted by relief. Major General Shepherd moved his Sixth Marine Division headquarters ashore with the remark: “There was a lot of glory on Iwo, but I’ll take it this way.”

  Shepherd and his staff sailed past the new LST-hospitals riding lonely and unattended at anchor, with not even a single enemy aircraft threatening to plant the customary bomb in the center of that big red cross. On one of them assigned to the First Marine Division, the ship’s surgeon was impatient. From the moment the amtracks rolled into the sea, his medical corpsmen had been at work transforming a ship-of-war into one of mercy. Litter left behind by the Marines was heaved over the side, the tank deck was hosed down and rows of cots set up inside it. Up forward the bow doors remained open and outside them a company of Seabees rigged a pontoon-pier for casualty boats. All was accomplished within two hours, and the ship’s surgeon—a small, thorough, fussy man, obviously a perfectionist—strode out onto the pier, satisfied. He stood there, watching the columns of attacking Marines vanishing behind the seawall. But there was no bloody return traffic. Puzzled, he turned anxiously to a corpsman.

  “No boats, no wounded?”

  “Nothing yet, sir.”

  The surgeon shrugged, almost ruefully, and went back inside his LST. In a moment he had hastened outside again, having heard the sound of a boat’s engine. A Marine was clambering out of it onto the pier.

  “What’s wrong with you, son?”

  The Marine held up a hand spouting blood from one of his fingers.

  “One of my buddies let one go and shot the top of my finger off.”

  The surgeon peered at it, turning to a corpsman to order it dressed.

  “What’s happening in there, son?”

  “Don’t ask me, Doc. All I know is everybody’s goin’ in standin’ up.”

  The surgeon sighed. He glanced shoreward again, turning to go inside for lunch. Coming back to the pier, he still saw no return traffic. Calling to his solitary patient, he said: “C’mon, son, let’s go make you a new finger. We’ve got plenty of time to do it in.”6

  That was Love Day on Okinawa, a most fortuitous eight hours of daylight during which the Tenth Army captured two airfields and a beachhead eight miles wide and three to four miles deep—all at a cost of 28 killed, 27 missing, and 104 wounded. Many of these were among the ranks of the Second Marine Division, supposedly having drawn the “soft” assignment of feinting at the Minatoga Beaches. Down there another suicider put three holes in destroyer Hinsdale, and the stricken ship had to be towed to Kerama by tugs, the first invasion ship to achieve that dubious distinction. The next day when the Second’s Marines made another demonstration, returning to their ships as planned, General Ushijima fired off an exultant report to Imperial General Headquarters claiming to have forced the enemy to withdraw “after being mowed down one after another.”

  Rather a different situation actually existed on Okinawa, where some fifty thousand Americans had come ashore almost unimpeded within a single day. Objectives expected to require three or more days and take many lives were firmly in American hands by nightfall. At Yontan Airfield there were bulldozers clearing away wrecked enemy planes and General Ushijima’s clever dummies of sticks, stones, and cloth. Already there was an airplane approaching a runway. But it had a big red ball on its fuselage. Its roar as it circled became louder as bulldozers fell silent and Marines hopped to the ground clutching rifles. Others heating their rations with gunpowder fires stood erect and seized theirs, walking quietly toward the landing strip. The Zero swung seaward for a smooth landing.

  The pilot wriggled out of his parachute pack. He climbed down to the tarmac. He walked toward the waiting Marines. He stopped. Between that moment in which he reached for his pistol, and the next when he slumped to the runway, riddled, an expression of indescribable horror had passed over his face.

  “There’s always someone,” a Marine said ruefully—“there’s always one poor bastard who doesn’t get the word.”

  The Marines Overrun the North

  CHAPTER NINE

  On the morning of April 2 American fighting men awoke in amazement to see vapor puffs issuing from their lips, their feet so chilled that they began to stamp them vigorously. The temperature was somewhere around fifty degrees and would not go above sixty, and most of these men with their blood thinned by years in the tropics felt as though they had arisen on the Arctic Circle. Actually, they welcomed a respite from the tropic heat with all its poisonous reptiles and vegetation and diseases, and they were again surprised to draw new issues of wool and gabardine field jackets to warm them—a tribute to the service of supply if there ever was one.

  They moved out rapidly along the narrow roads—the GIs heading south, the Marines marching east and north—passing through peaceful fields plotted and pieced around little thatched farm cabins, each sheltered behind stone walls or bamboo wind-breaks. Leathernecks of the Sixth Division—who now proudly called themselves “the Striking Sixth”—quickly gathered momentum in their approach march to Colonel Udo’s three thousand holding the mountain fastness. Their first objective was Zampa Cape to give Admiral Turner the site for a badly needed radar station to warn of approaching Japanese aircraft, while the First struck east across-island for Nakagusuku Bay, believed to be an excellent anchorage and soon to be called Buckner Bay.

  “Off and on!” the sergeants shouted as the men finished their morning rations. “Get a move on, yo
u mother’s mistakes—an’ keep both ends up!”

  “You there, Drag-Ass, whattaya lookin’ behind you for?”

  “I can’t help it, Sarge—I keep feelin’ somebody’s gonna cold-conk me from behind.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, if anybody does—it’ll be me!”

  This mood of incredulity at the ease of the landing was a common sensation among the Americans as Love Day turned into Honeymoon Week on Okinawa. It was even more pronounced in the north, where only Colonel Udo and his men stood between the Marine divisions and their objectives. For the First, with its memories of fierce battle, the Great Loo Choo was an unbelievable but lovely frolic. In the afternoon General Del Valle called a press conference to tell the correspondents: “I don’t know where the Japs are, and I can’t offer you any good reason why they let us come ashore so easily. We’re pushing on across the island as fast as we can move the men and equipment.” They were, and in two days of “fighting” the First’s casualties totaled three dead and eighteen wounded. On April 3 the division’s jubilant Marines stood on the eastern seawall overlooking the bay and the Pacific Ocean. That same day scouting parties entered the narrow finger of the Katchin Peninsula, traversing it without opposition. Encouraged, General Buckner lifted all restrictions on the rampaging First, and the division rapidly secured all the east coast between Yontan Airfield and the Ishikawa Isthmus, that narrow neck of land about two miles wide lying two-fifths of the way up Okinawa’s slender length. In four days, the First had taken territory expected to require three weeks of savage fighting.

  To the north, the Sixth was running into steadily stiffening opposition, ambushes, and isolated attacks on strong-points—skirmishes real enough to those who fought in them, especially those who died or fell wounded—but not in sufficient strength to slow the Sixth’s rapid advance. After the division had sealed off the northern side of Ishikawa, its men started marching north for Zampa Cape at route-step speed. The First would clean up behind the Sixth, and also attend to the problem of the Okinawan refugees now clogging the roads.