Storm Landings

by Joseph H. Alexander

  Maj. Gen. Thomas E. Bourke, who had commanded Julian Smith’s artillery at Tarawa, now commanded the 5th Marine Division. Not knowing what tactical missions to expect in his capacity as corps reserve, Bourke organized nine separate battalion landing teams, each configured for limited independent operations. His division, extremely glad to be back in their familiar camp on the friendly island of Hawaii, integrated thousands of replacements and began applying the combat lessons they had learned at such a cost on the slopes of Suribachi and along the entire western coast of Sulfur Island. All three divisions resumed amphibious refresher training, pointing toward full-scale rehearsals with the V Amphibious Force, scheduled for August in the Marianas.

  Marine Corps aviation figured to play a major role in Olympic. Three of the four air wings in the Pacific would participate: 1st MAW from captured airfields in southern Kyūshū, 2d MAW from Okinawa fields, 3d MAW distributed among eight carrier groups on CVEs. Earlier, Admiral Nimitz transferred two of these escort carriers, Block Island and Gilbert Islands, with their Marine squadrons, from the Okinawa campaign to the Dutch East Indies. There, beginning 1 July 1945, the Marine pilots provided close air support to the Australian 7th Division during their landing on Balikpapan on the east coast of Borneo.* Significantly, on that same date, Marine Corsairs from the Tenth Army’s Tactical Air Force on Okinawa escorted Army Air Forces B-25s on the first medium bomber attack on the Japanese homeland since the Doolittle Raid of April 1942. These experiences, combined with an exceptional record of close air support to Army units in the Philippines, brought Marine aviation close to its potential as a unique expeditionary combat element.

  American air strikes in fact had become too effective in one critical area. Intelligence staffs serving both MacArthur and Nimitz had come to rely increasingly on their ability to decipher Japanese coded messages by the ULTRA system, as well as a growing proficiency in radio traffic analysis. The Joint Chiefs had to remind the theater commanders not to target Japanese radio stations and communications centers for bombing missions lest the volume of radio traffic be inadvertently diminished beyond use.

  The theater commanders may have pooh-poohed these strictures, but the truth was, ULTRA intercepts had become more and more critical as an indication of Japanese strength on Kyūshū—as well as a barometer of that nation’s will to keep on fighting indefinitely.

  If the Americans could somehow have mustered the forces to attack Kyūshū immediately following Okinawa, the island might have been taken at a bargain-rate level of casualties. Only three to four divisions patrolled the entire fifteen-thousand-square-mile landmass; minimal fortifications existed. Unfortunately, an offensive of this scale was beyond the grasp of either MacArthur or Nimitz at the time. The Fifth Fleet had taken an awful pounding from Japanese kamikazes at Okinawa; the typhoon season was in full swing; and the shot-up divisions from Iwo Jima and Luzon needed time to recover and reorganize.

  The Japanese meanwhile were not blind to the likely next strategic moves of their relentless opponents. By now, IGHQ had become keenly aware of the Americans’ propensity for going after existing ports and airfields, particularly those within the protective range of land-based air support. Kyūshū would be the obvious next target, and the south of Kyūshū—fully in range of tactical aircraft from both Okinawa and Iwo Jima—offered every feature the Americans would need to stage the enormous forces and supplies required to launch the final assault on the main island of Honshū. In a masterpiece of intelligence interpretation and analysis, IGHQ predicted the theater, forces, mission, timing, and likely landing beaches for Operation Olympic. So effective was the Japanese anticipation and precise buildup that MacArthur’s staff began to suspect that enemy spies had infiltrated their very headquarters.

  American commanders were also astounded at the speed with which IGHQ could conscript, organize, train, equip, and deploy new combat units for service in southern Kyūshū. Nor were these inconsequential forces. Indeed, IGHQ mobilized and deployed at least eight brand-new infantry divisions and several independent mixed brigades to Kyūshū within a matter of weeks. That all of this was accomplished under the smothering intrusion of American air and sea superiority is all the more remarkable. These were by no means first-rate troops, but Japanese field commanders had always been proficient in motivating and training raw levees into decent fighters in an implausibly short time.

  Reorganizing to deal with the Allied threat to the homeland, IGHQ created the Second General Army under Field Marshall Shunroku Hata, who established his headquarters in Hiroshima. Hata coordinated two area armies, one in the Osaka area of Honshū, the other, larger, in Kyūshū. This became the Sixteenth Area Army, commanded by Lt. Gen. Isamu Yokoyama, a fifty-six-year-old infantry officer who had distinguished himself in China the previous two years. Yokoyama established his headquarters in Fukuoka on northern Kyūshū, but his attention remained focused southward.

  Imperial General Headquarters also redeployed two veteran divisions (the 25th and 57th) from the Kwantung Army to Kyūshū. Yokoyama welcomed these seasoned units, but he also realized no more could be spared. Japanese forces guarding the Manchurian border now faced their most critical threat of the past seven years in the alarming buildup of the Soviet Red Banner Army. The steady draw-down of veteran units of the Kwantung Army to reinforce Pacific islands since the fall of Saipan had taken a toll on the once-formidable force in Manchuria. Yokoyama used his experienced veterans to help train and motivate the hundreds of thousands of conscripts. The new soldiers soon found themselves undergoing the same exhausting routine of their predecessors in Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Peleliu, and Tarawa: training all day, digging fortifications half the night.

  General MacArthur’s ULTRA cryptologists could hardly believe their translations. Every week, it seemed, a new Japanese division or brigade materialized on Kyūshū. The Sixth Air Army under Lt. Gen. Michio Sugawara became operational in Fukuoka. An amphibious brigade arrived from the Kuriles. In swift succession, cryptologists identified three field armies, two of them—the 57th and the 40th—in the field in the south.* Between April and August the number of infantry divisions on Kyūshū increased from four to fourteen. American analysts located at least eight divisions in the south; the two Manchukuoan divisions, retained under Yokoyama’s direct control, seemed poised to deploy in either direction. On 6 August, the same day the first atom bomb fell on Japan, MacArthur’s intelligence analysts reported over six hundred thousand Japanese troops on Kyūshū, mostly in the south. Even assuming a leveling off in Japanese mobilization, the U.S. Sixth Army would have been forced to land with nowhere near the three-to-one superiority in numbers over the defenders. There would be near parity between the antagonists.

  Numbers themselves fail to tell the story. The Japanese on Kyūshū may have been imbued with the warrior spirit, but their arms and equipment would have been significantly deficient in the projected battle. The American blockade and bombing program had seriously crippled Japanese production and distribution of war materials. Fuel—a luxury for both Army and Navy as early as 1943—became extremely rare by mid-1945. Experiments with pine root fuel alternatives failed to solve the crisis. Yokoyama could expect precious little fuel for his trucks to distribute the required calibers and levels of ammo for his uneven assortment of field guns, rockets, and mortars.

  Other logistical constraints became evident. Documents captured on Okinawa revealed Japanese intentions of constructing “deliberate field fortifications” in the homeland of stronger proportions than employed in the outer islands, specifying walls and ceilings up to “3.5 meters thick for machine gun pillboxes and rapid-fire gun casemates.” But Kyūshū was nearly devoid of concrete and steel reinforcing rods—once again it would be sturdy men with picks and shovels carving out another Fukkaku defensive network.

  Interestingly, the Japanese had war-gamed the “hypothetical defense of Kyūshū” as early as January 1944. At that point, just after Tarawa and before the Marshalls campaign, the IGHQ defensive policy
remained perimeter-oriented: “destroy the enemy at the water’s edge....Deliver swift, decisive counterattacks on land and sea.... Use amphibious forces and airborne raiding forces to conduct counterlanding combat operations.”

  Japanese message traffic in the spring of 1945 reflected the desperation with which IGHQ tried to produce a viable defense against the American amphibious juggernaut. Defending their island fortresses in the Central Pacific at the water’s edge had failed under the terrible pounding of naval gunfire. Conceding the landings and reverting to positional attrition warfare in the Schoutens, Palaus, Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa had prolonged the campaigns and inflicted high casualties on the invaders—but still failed. From April through June, IGHQ released tactical guidance that placed maximum emphasis on the use of special attack forces (suicide units) and seemed to revert to the original perimeter defense policies. Defending the sacred homeland required extraordinary measures. A new field manual issued in early June contained this exhortation: “We should be determined to destroy the enemy landing forces at the water’s edge by conducting an all-out decisive battle there using suicide attacks against the enemy.”

  Here would lie the principal difference between the assault on Kyūshū and the earlier landings at Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Peleliu—even Iwo Jima. General Yokoyama and his air counterpart, General Sugawara, would stake their defense on massive, coordinated suicide strikes against the amphibious task forces at their point of greatest vulnerability—the approach to the island and launching of the ship-to-shore assault. Tarawa and the others had been savage enough. Iwo Jima’s horrors had been magnified by a single evening’s kamikaze attack that sank an escort carrier and knocked a fleet carrier out of the war. Okinawa had demonstrated how massed suicide strikes could jeopardize an entire amphibious campaign. The Japanese defense of Kyūshū would seek to integrate every possible special attack asset. Of these, there were legion.

  MacArthur’s intelligence staff, making fruitful use of ULTRA decryption intercepts, became well aware of the emphasis the Kyūshū defenders would place on using suicide forces against the invasion force. Foremost of these efforts would be massed kamikaze attacks by as many as 6,000 aircraft against the U.S. fleet. In a significant departure from tactics employed at Okinawa, the kamikaze pilots in the battle for Kyūshū would ignore the carriers and other warships and target exclusively the troop transports in the amphibious task force. These would be attacked in waves of 200 to 300 aircraft every hour as soon as they came within range. The kamikazes would include more of the self-guided Baku bombs. Conventional aircraft would also target the troop transports: the Imperial Navy earmarked some 3,725 “anticonvoy bombers.” The Navy selected other pilots to crash their float planes into American landing craft as they crossed the line of departure. The whole air campaign evolved under the code name Ketsu-Go.

  The Japanese also planned to take advantage of Kyūshū’s irregular shoreline to launch thousands of suicide boats, each mounted with contact depth charges, against the transport anchorage. In addition, the defenders planned to deploy midget submarines and suicide guided torpedoes against the American amphibs. Weighing the entirety of these efforts, the Japanese estimated they could sink 35 percent of the troop ships, greatly disrupting the landing before the first waves ever touched the sacred soil. The deputy chief of the Army General Staff in a top-level conference in June described these integrated suicide operations as “the key to success” in defending the homeland. Other senior officers of both services expressed similar optimism. The Americans, they said, would find Kyūshū much different from far-off Guadalcanal or New Guinea.

  The 50-mm “knee mortar” was more accurately a “grenade discharger,” but Japanese naval infantrymen were extremely adept at dropping rounds into approaching landing craft. As the American amphibious forces began to encounter veteran Imperial Army units closer to Japan itself, they also experienced the unwelcome fire of medium- and large-caliber mortars like the 120-mm and 150-mm shown. They were deadly weapons. (Larry E. Klatt)

  Assessing the likely outcome of this climactic-but-canceled amphibious showdown from the vantage of hindsight provides little to affirm the rosy predictions of the Japanese commanders. The cumulative combat experience of the American invasion force would have constituted an overwhelming tactical advantage over the Japanese defenders, despite their numbers and motivation. By 1945 even the most experienced Manchukuoan division could hardly compare with their U.S. counterparts, the veterans of Biak, Saipan, Iwo Jima, or Leyte. In truth, American GIs and Marines had already taken the measure of some of the best military forces in the Empire.

  Nor did the Japanese defending Kyūshū enjoy any advantages in leadership. Field Marshall Hata and General Yokoyama had credible military experience in China, but neither could compare with MacArthur or Krueger. Nor could Yokoyama’s three field army commanders hope to match the experience of the U.S. corps commanders—Swift, Hall, and Schmidt—arrayed against them. One had been recalled from retirement; the other two had spent the heart of the war in staff or training billets. American amphibious forces had already faced—and defeated—exceptional Japanese commanders like Generals Ushijima and Kuribayashi, Admiral Shibasaki, and Colonel Nakagawa. No Japanese field commander in Kyūshū would have proven half as redoubtable as these fallen leaders of the Japanese garrisons on Okinawa, Iwo, Tarawa, and Peleliu.

  While the 16th Area Army on Kyūshū had plenty of major-caliber guns and rockets with which to pound the invaders, they lacked the brilliance of the artillery commanders who fought and died at Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the Philippines. There comes a point as well when the very proliferation of big guns becomes much more a logistical problem than a tactical advantage. Yokoyama’s fuel shortages and the vulnerability of his limited motor transport assets to enemy air interdiction would have seriously crimped ammo resupply operations after the battle was joined.

  Ironically, at a time when Japanese garrisons were just beginning to demonstrate a proficiency in laying minefields—both along beach approaches and inland—the supply of suitable mines dried up. American UDT teams and combat engineers were preparing for a mammoth mine-clearing effort in Olympic until radio intercepts revealed the Japanese had experienced major shortfalls in producing and distributing these munitions.

  The Japanese would have fought this battle under still another disadvantage. Imperial General Headquarters had failed to resolve the longstanding, acrimonious rivalry between the Army and Navy. Nothing in the captured or intercepted documents indicates any improvement in interservice cooperation—even for defending the motherland.

  In the final analysis, the salient strengths of the 16th Area Army defending Kyūshū included two familiar elements—tenacity and topography—and two enhanced or new elements—great numbers (six times the size of the Okinawa garrison) and a concentrated, integrated Special Attack Force, as embodied by the Ketsu-Go plan.

  By comparison, the U.S. Sixth Army had the leadership, experience, joint service integration, doctrine, command and control, logistic support, and weaponry to assault successfully even this large and daunting objective. The war in Europe was over and won. American factories, shipyards, and proving grounds, operating at full bore around the clock, were pouring new ships, planes, tanks, and guns into the Pacific at a mind-boggling rate. Krueger’s forces would have landed on Kyūshū equipped with new Pershing tanks, improved and more numerous flame tanks, night-optics “snooper-scopes,” and bunker-busting recoilless rifles up to 75mm in size. The familiar “blowtorch and corkscrew” assault tactics would be applied against Kyūshū’s many caves with postgraduate proficiency.

  If there was one factor that would have mitigated against Krueger’s overwhelming combat superiority in 1945, it would have been a cumulative “war-weariness” among the many veterans in his ranks. The survivors of Iwo Jima and Leyte could hardly have viewed their next assignment with anything but resigned fatalism. No man could rightfully expect the gods of war to allow him to endure a second—even
greater—bloodbath unscathed.

  Part of this malaise reflected the fact that only a handful of American combat divisions carried the entire load of the Pacific War for the duration. There simply were not enough Army or Marine divisions available to provide suitable recovery and retraining periods between hellish assault landings. Richard B. Frank’s research indicates the fourteen divisions assigned to the Sixth Army for Olympic had already sustained 74,239 battle casualties (including 17,861 deaths) in the Pacific. Of these, the 2d Marine Division had the lugubrious distinction of having suffered the most: 12,770 battle casualties by mid-1945.

  Typically, the bulk of these casualties occurred in the rifle companies of each division. The ensuing half-century of “limited war” may have inoculated subsequent practitioners of the military art to the real costs of close, unrestricted combat. Two examples from Iwo Jima may prove illuminating. Capt. William T. Ketcham’s Item Company, 3d Battalion, 24th Marines, stormed ashore on D-Day with 133 Marines in its three rifle platoons. Twenty-six days later, when the 4th Marine Division back-loaded its ships, only 9 of these riflemen were still on their feet. Capt. Frank C. Caldwell’s Fox Company, 2d Battalion, 26th Marines, fought the battle for thirty-six consecutive days. Caldwell somehow survived, but he lost all his platoon commanders and 221 men.

  Repeated exposure to such horrors over time led to a marked increase in psychoneurosis cases, or “combat fatigue.” Tarawa’s brief savagery had produced few identifiable cases, but each longer campaign produced its significant share. The 43d Division suffered 2,500 cases of combat fatigue in the jungles of New Georgia; the I Marine Amphibious Corps, 749 at Bougainville; the 4th Marine Division, 414 at Saipan. Iwo Jima cost the V Amphibious Corps more than 2,600 cases, including 99 during the Japanese bombardment on D-Day alone. The protracted hell of Okinawa produced a record 26,221 cases. Dr. Michael F. Keleher, a battalion surgeon in the 25th Marines at Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima, recalled two kinds of combat fatigue: “We all had battle fatigue to a degree; we were numb, fatalistic, exhausted, but some men simply crossed the line, could no longer function in a combat zone. Some would even hallucinate at night, open fire on imaginary enemy troops, exposing our own men. We had to get them out of there.”