Okinawa

by Robert Leckie

  An hour later Marine amtanks guarding Machinato Airfield on the west coast fired at voices on the beach. American cruisers, destroyers, and gunboats on “flycatcher” patrol shot at squat Japanese barges sliding darkly upcoast from Naha. The barges lost their way. Instead of landing far enough north to take the Marines in their rear, they veered inshore and blundered into the outposts of B Company, First Marines.

  The Japanese sent up a screeching and gobbling of battle cries and the surprised Marines sprang to their guns. All up and down the sea wall the battle raged, with Marine amtracks moving out to sea and coming in again to grind the Japs to pieces between two fires. Some five hundred Japanese died in this futile west-flank landing.

  The east-flank landings came to the same annihilating end. Navy patrol boats sighted the Japanese craft. They fired at them and turned night into day with star-shells. Soldiers of the Seventh Division’s Reconnaissance Troops joined the sailors to complete the destruction of four hundred men.

  At dawn, the main attack began.

  It went straight to the doom that Colonel Yahara had predicted. Wave after wave of the Twenty-fourth Division’s men shuffled forward to death in that gray dawn, moving among their own artillery shells, taking this risk in hopes of getting in on the Americans. But the soldiers of the Seventh and Seventy-seventh Divisions held firm—while American warships, sixteen battalions of division artillery, and twelve battalions of heavier corps artillery, plus 134 airplanes, smothered the enemy in a wrathful blanket of steel and explosive. Ships as big as the fourteen-inch-gunned New York and Colorado, as small as gunboats with 20 mm cannons, ranged up and down the east coast firing at the Japanese on call.

  Across the island, the kamikaze dove again on ships in the Hagushi Anchorage, again falling on the luckless small vessels of the radar picket screen. With them were the baka bombs. This May 4 one of the baka hit the light mine-layer Shea and set it temporarily on fire. The kamikaze also sank two more destroyers, Luce and Morrison, as well as two LSMs, while damaging the carrier Sangamon, the cruiser Birmingham, another pair of destroyers, a minesweeper, and an LCS. Again, they failed to get at the cargo and transport ships. And they lost 95 planes.

  Ashore, Isamu Cho’s massive counterthrust was being broken by that material power for which Mitsuru Ushijima had shown such profound respect. Much of the Japanese assault died aborning. Sometimes the Japanese closed, but rarely. There were seesaw battles up and down some of the ridges held by the Seventy-seventh, but they ended with the GIs either in command of their previous position or holding new ground farther inside the Japanese territory. One battalion of the Japanese Twenty-fourth Division got behind the Seventy-seventh on the left, but it was annihilated by a reserve battalion of the Seventh Division in a three-day fight. Otherwise the Twenty-fourth Division never punched that hole through which the Forty-fourth Brigade was to race and isolate the First Marine Division.

  And the First began attacking on the morning of May 4. Even as the GIs on their left bore the brunt of Cho’s big sally, these Marines were battling southeast toward the key bastion of Shuri. They scored gains of up to four hundred yards. The next day they attacked again, once more pushing the Japanese back—even though their advance was made more costly by the fact that they were up against rested battalions of the Japanese Sixty-second Division. By the night of May 5 the Marines had picked up another three hundred yards. By that time Lieutenant General Isamu Cho’s massive stroke had been completely shattered. Those two days of fighting had cost the Japanese 6,227 dead. The Seventh and Seventy-seventh Divisions had lost 714 men killed or wounded while holding the line, the First Marine Division had taken losses of 649 men in the more costly business of attack. The next day the First gained another three hundred yards, and added a fourth Medal of Honor winner to its rolls since coming into the line on May 1. That day Corporal John Fardy smothered a grenade with his life, as had Pfc. William Foster. Sergeant Elbert Kinser did it on May 4. Two days before that, Corpsman Robert Bush had risked his life to give plasma to a wounded officer, driving off a Japanese rush with pistol and carbine, killing six of the enemy and refusing evacuation though badly wounded.

  There would be more Medals of Honor won in the days to come. The First Division by May 5 had come against Ushijima’s main line, as had the GIs on their left. In front of the First was the western half of the Shuri bastion. To their right was Naha, and this would be assigned to the Sixth Marine Division the next day. In the sector of both these Marine divisions were systems of interlocking fortified ridges such as those encountered on Iwo Jima. Nor would the way be made easy here by further counter-attack.

  A change had taken place at Shuri Castle. In tears, Lieutenant General Ushijima had promised Colonel Yahara that from now on he would listen to no one but him. The Ushijima-Cho relationship had ended in the recrimination of a red and useless defeat. Isamu Cho argued no longer. He became silent and stoical, convinced now that only time stood between the Thirty-second Army and ultimate destruction.

  Minatoga: A Missed Opportunity

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  One of the still-unexplained puzzlers of the Battle for Okinawa is why Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner allowed two veteran Marine divisions to stand idle in the north—the First for a month, the Sixth for nearly two weeks—instead of using them to relieve one or two Army infantry divisions badly battered in his three-division assault on the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line. The answer, unpleasant though this speculation may be, seems to be that Buckner wanted the Army infantry to have the honor of crushing the Japanese Thirty-second Army.

  There is nothing especially biased or prejudiced in such an attitude, and it is actually much more common among commanders of rival services than is generally understood. A similar decision by a Marine general occurred when Major General William Rupertus, commanding the First Marine Division at Peleliu, hesitated much too long before relieving his crippled First Regiment with a regiment from the Eighty-first Infantry Division. He did it only after ordered to do so by Major General Roy Geiger, who was commander of the Third Marine Amphibious Corps. But Buckner’s reluctance was somewhat more surprising in that the First Marine Division was probably the most experienced fighting formation in the American Armed Forces; 70 percent of the Sixth—though new to battle as a unit—was composed of veterans from other divisions in other campaigns.

  It was not until April 28 that Buckner decided to put fresh troops into his renewed down-island offensive. The Seventh would remain in place on the left, and the Ninety-sixth would be relieved by the Seventy-seventh. The First Marine Division would relieve the Twenty-seventh Infantry Division on the Seventy-seventh’s right with the Sixth Marine Division holding the western flank. Thus the line, Seventh, Seventy-seventh, First, Sixth: Twenty-fourth Corps, Third Corps.

  Almost simultaneously with this realignment there arose a dispute over a proposal made by Major General Andrew Bruce of the Seventy-seventh. Just before Cho’s counter-attack, Bruce had suggested that his division envelop Ushijima’s rear by storming the Minatoga Beaches below him. On Leyte, Bruce’s Seventy-seventh had made a strikingly successful landing behind the Japanese line at Ormoc—where “the 77th rolled a pair of sevens”—and he was confident he could do the same on Okinawa. Once ashore, his division could either move inland to take Iwa, a road and communications center on the island’s southern tip, or push north to join the Seventh near Yonabaru.

  Buckner gave no serious consideration to the suggestion after his supply officer, Brigadier General David Blakelock, reported that though he could supply food for the operation, Tenth Army had not enough ammunition to spare for it. On the last count, Blakelock’s analysis was correct; for even Tenth Army’s splendid service of supply had not yet been able to compensate for the loss of those two ammunition ships on April 6. Buckner was also aware that Tenth Army planners had rejected the Minatoga Beaches before L-day: the reefs were too dangerous, the beaches inadequate, and the area exposed to strong enemy counter-attack. Beach outlets a
lso were commanded by a plateau, and Bruce’s landing would be too far south to receive support from Hodge’s corps in the north and was also out of range of his artillery.

  These were indeed daunting considerations, although hardly more formidable than the drying reef and seawall at Tarawa or even the reefs and seawall at Hagushi. Other division chiefs besides Bruce supported his proposal, although not necessarily to be executed by his division. Major General Pedro del Valle of the First Marine Division believed a Minatoga landing was advisable, although it should be made by the more experienced Second Marine Division, still in Third Corps reserve. Major General Lemuel Shepherd of the Sixth said later he had suggested use of the Second several times to Buckner, pointing out that the logistics argument did not apply to this formation because it had enough beans and bullets of its own to sustain a thirty-day assault. A landing by the Second, he wrote later, “would have seriously threatened Ushijima’s rear and required him to withdraw troops from the Shuri battle or employ his limited reserve to contain the landing.”

  Army historians of Okinawa in their book on the campaign were agreed that Minatoga would have produced logistical difficulties and might have failed, but only if it were attempted before the end of April. If made after May 5—the date that Cho’s abortive counter-strike was shattered—it could not have been opposed by more than two or three thousand men. Colonel John Guerard, Tenth Army operations officer, had learned by late April of Ushijima’s order for the Japanese Twenty-fourth Division and Forty-fourth Brigade to move north into Shuri, where they joined Cho’s assault. This left Minatoga lightly defended, and Guerard, who had originally opposed a landing there, now strongly recommended it. So did General Hodge, who went to Tenth Army headquarters to urge Buckner to envelop the enemy there. But the Tenth Army commander did not agree, again basing his rejection on the logistics argument even though he now knew that the Second Marine Division could operate for a month on its own supplies.

  Buckner’s decision became highly controversial in the stateside press even before the Okinawa campaign had ended. Such influential newspapers as the Washington Star and the New York Herald-Tribune, probably at the urging of Admiral King, flatly stated that the secondary landing should have been made. Some historians in defense of Buckner have suggested that if the Tenth Army commander had even suspected that the Okinawa fighting would continue through May, and then for almost another agonizing month in June, he might have preferred to risk a quick end to it by landing in Ushijima’s rear. This is a specious argument, the purest conjecture apparently based upon nothing more substantial than a desire to exonerate the Tenth Army commander for having failed to take what can only be described as a gamble with little risk. All the odds after May 5 were in Buckner’s favor: an inferior foe defending against his own superiority in the number and quality of his troops, as well as in supply and in control of the air above and sea surrounding Okinawa.

  Caught between four American divisions to his front, with another in reserve and a garrison division also available behind them; and in his rear a seventh veteran division; pounded from land, sea, and sky; hopelessly isolated and cut off from reinforcement or supplies, with the kikusui attacks of no help on land, Ushijima’s Thirty-second Army could either be starved into submission or—if surrender was still so unthinkable to Samurai such as Ushijima, Cho, and Yahara—compelled to make a final “glorious” sally that would be broken in blood ending in mass suicide.

  Meanwhile, with the Minatoga opportunity rejected as un-feasible, General Buckner still had to face the growing and open disenchantment of Admirals Spruance and Turner with the slow progress of Tenth Army on land. Turner had repeatedly urged on Buckner the necessity for a quick conquest to relieve the terrible pressure of the kikusui on the concentration of American ships off Okinawa. For such a huge body of vessels to remain so long as plainly visible targets of a suicidal enemy was indeed unprecedented in military history. This, of course, was not entirely the fault of General Buckner but rather enemy policy—in a sense—to “bleed all over” the Americans and thus drown them in Japanese blood. Again, this was small comfort to either Spruance or Turner. Buckner’s reply to the Expeditionary Force commander was that he was moving slowly in an effort to “save lives.” To Admiral Spruance this was not a convincing argument, for he wrote: “I doubt if the Army’s slow, methodical method of fighting really saves any lives in the long run. It merely spreads the casualties over a longer period. The longer period greatly increases the naval casualties when Jap air attacks on ships is a continuing factor... There are times when I get impatient for some of Holland (‘Howlin’ Mad’) Smith’s drive.”

  Spruance was right: lives are definitely not “saved” by a carefully slow assault, they are merely spread out in time, but in the end the number of casualties is the same or almost so. If an assaulting unit comes to, say, an enemy .47 antitank position protected by machine guns, thus making it impossible for supporting tanks to advance, and decides to call for artillery to knock it out before attacking, in the subsequent assault it will almost certainly discover that shells simply cannot pulverize strong and clever defenses. Foot soldiers will still have to go in there with hand weapons, with flamethrowers, grenades, and satchel charges, and the time lost waiting for artillery to destroy the position will have been wasted. And their casualties will be the same as if they had attacked instantly.

  Even General Buckner himself on May 1 had acknowledged at a press conference that Okinawa would fall only to tactics he described as “corkscrew and blowtorch”: the corkscrew being explosives and the blowtorch flamethrowers and napalm. But all of these have to be aimed! Aimed close up. Visible. They cannot be fired from a mile or more to the rear in an arc, which would be like skipping stones on water. Because every defensive position has a mouth or aperture through which its weapon can be fired, bullets, grenades, satchel charges, or flame have to be hurled, thrown, or squirted through these openings. Again, close up. Even napalm will skid, and because it is always dropped from an airplane, it has about as much chance to enter a foot-by-foot or even a two feet-by-two feet opening as has a camel “to pass through the eye of a needle.”

  Go ahead, ask the question, “What’s the difference—slow or speedy—if the results are the same?” The answer is that the time lost will extend the exposure of a supporting fleet such as Spruance’s to the assaults of the kikusui, and also delay the departure of such naval forces to participate in another amphibious invasion elsewhere or release the fast carriers to strike homeland Japan. Finally, slow, careful land assaults could delay the entire Pacific timetable to the great pleasure of the enemy, for the one thing Japan could not afford to waste in the spring of 1945 was time.

  Spruance and Turner could not forget what had happened to the escort carrier Liscome Bay at Makin, when sixty-five hundred GIs moving slowly took a week to conquer a weak position in an operation that should have been finished in hours. Ordinarily, Liscome Bay would have been long gone from the impact area, but the ship was sunk on the last day by an enemy submarine, with extensive loss of life. Similarly, because of slow progress on Okinawa, ships and many seamen and seagoing Marines were being lost daily on the Hagushi Anchorage.

  The admirals were also anguished by and ever mindful of the ordeal of their men, these unsung heroes, aboard those exposed ships, especially those of the Radar Picket Line scourged by hundreds of kamikaze and baka. Men were horribly burned. They were blown into the ocean, either to drown or pass agonizing hours awaiting rescue and the ministrations of medical corpsmen. Those who survived the suiciders’ screaming dives went for days on end without sleep, their nerves exposed and quivering like wires stripped of insulation. Lying wide-eyed on their bunks, they waited to hear the dreaded telltale click and static of the ship’s bullhorns being activated—like a starter’s gun sending them leaping erect and running so that they were already in motion when the shrill, strident notes of “General Quarters” burst in their ears.

  Men in the boiler rooms worked in
intense heat. The superheaters, built to give the quick pressure needed for sudden highspeed maneuvering under aerial attack, were often kept running three or four days at a time, though they had been made for intermittent use. But it had to be that way, for war off Okinawa was war at a moment’s notice. Very little time separated that moment when radar screens became clouded with pips of approaching “bogies” and the shrieking suiciders came plunging to the attack. An attempt to give the crews more warning of enemy approach had to be abandoned, one war correspondent reported: “The strain of waiting, the anticipated terror, made vivid from past experience, sent some men into hysteria, insanity, breakdown.”

  Similar reports reaching Admiral Nimitz led him to request from MacArthur the return of most of the ships of the Seventh Fleet he had so generously loaned the Southwest Pacific chief at the start of the Leyte campaign. He wanted to relieve some of Spruance’s ships. But MacArthur had already protected himself against compliance with this agreed-upon condition by deliberately committing these vessels—as well as the Eleventh Air Force and the Eighth Army—to a useless campaign in the southern Philippines in order to prevent their scheduled transfer to Nimitz. Such tactics, of course, were nothing new in World War II. During the Battle of the Bulge General George Patton deliberately committed his beloved Fourth Armored Division to an unnecessary battle to prevent its being taken from him by General Omar Bradley, who had already commandeered his Tenth Armored Division. But MacArthur’s move was the soul of ingratitude for Nimitz’s generosity. And it was compounded by the general’s return to his old, discredited theme of “minimal losses” by comparing the ease and low casualties of his southern Philippine campaign—again against mud-and-logs and fragmented troops—to Tenth Army’s higher losses moving through steel-concrete-and-coral defenses manned by soldiers determined to fight to the death. Because of this typical MacArthurian selfishness, the scourging of the Fifth Fleet continued.