Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  It was also fitting, in this last battle of the war, that the First Marine Division, which had launched the long counteroffensive, should be in at the kill. The First had a new commander, Major General Pedro del Valle. He had relieved Major General Rupertus, who went back to the States to die in his bed. Del Valle was a Puerto Rican who had gone through Annapolis and had served with Italy’s Marshal Badoglio as an observer in Ethiopia. Hot-tempered—with dark brows the equal of Admiral Turner’s—he was quick-witted as well, an artillerist whose guns had saved the First at Guadalcanal so that the hard-noses could go on to fight at New Britain and Peleliu.

  There was the Second Marine Division, which had also come a long way from Guadalcanal, had passed through bloody Betio in Tarawa and fought the grinding fight on Saipan. Major General Thomas Watson still led the Second, and he had broken in 8,000 replacements by setting them to mopping-up Japanese stragglers in the Marianas. The Second’s battalions would make the feint off southern Okinawa. They had done it so well at Tinian, they were being asked to do it again; but even so, there were frequent growls about how come the upstart Sixth was going into the assault on the left of the First.

  If the Sixth was new in number, it had a faultless, veteran staff and command under Major General Lemuel Shepherd. It had men such as Brute Krulak, the sawed-off dynamo who had made so much smoke at Choiseul and was now a lieutenant colonel in charge of operations. It had 70 per cent veterans and only two of its battalions had not yet been in battle. The Sixth was “gung ho,” and veterans of other outfits might have been startled to find that the division with a silver Crusader’s sword for its emblem harbored such seemingly passé types as the Glory Kid. He was a brawny red-haired corporal of twenty years and his name was Donald (Rusty) Golar. He had fought with the Twenty-second Regiment on Guam and won a Bronze Star. “I’m a storybook Marine,” Golar said. “I’m lookin’ for glory and I’m lookin’ for Japs.” There were glory-boys from the ranks of collegiate football, too. In the Fourth Regiment commanded by Colonel Alan Shapley, one of the Naval Academy’s finest athletes, there were enough football stars to field two All-American teams. Lieutenant George Murphy of the Twenty-ninth Marines had been captain of the Notre Dame team.

  These were the troops of the Third Corps, with their artillery battalions and engineers, their tanks and Navy corpsmen. In all, there were 85,246 of them, nearly as many as the 88,515 soldiers of the four-division Twenty-fourth Corps, for the three Marine divisions, having anticipated heavy casualties early in the battle, were bringing their replacement battalions to Okinawa with them.

  Yet, there was hardly any talk of casualties as the great convoy flowed up the curve of the world. Most of the conversation was about The Deadly Habu, a snake something like a cobra which Intelligence reported abundant on Okinawa. Intelligence even had pictures of The Deadly Habu, and because it was indeed a venomous-looking reptile, the habu soon joined the immortal Marine menagerie of the goony-birds of Midway, the pissing-possum of Guadalcanal, the New Zealand kiwi, the lunatic-lunged kookaburra of Australia and the indecent snow-snake of Iceland. The men spoke so much of the habu they almost forgot the Japanese, although officers would frequently “hold school” on the importance of their objective to the war effort.

  “From Okinawa,” one lieutenant told his platoon, “we can bomb the Japs anywhere—China, Japan, Formosa…”

  “Yeah,” a sergeant mumbled, “and vice versa.”

  It was true, of course, that the Japanese had 65 airfields on Formosa to the south and 55 on Kyushu to the north, as well as a few dozen scattered throughout the southern Ryukyus, but such discouraging information is not normally disseminated among the troops. More pointed and helpful information came from veterans such as Corporal Al Biscansin of the Sixth Division, who offered this earnest advice to the boots:

  “When you aren’t moving up or firing, keep both ends down! The GI Bill of Rights don’t mean a thing to a dead Marine.”

  The GI Bill rivaled the habu as a topic of conversation, for a surprising number of these young men intended to go to college when the war was over. They even expected that great event to happen soon.

  “Home alive in ‘45,” they said, a happy revision of Guadalcanal’s gloomy estimate of “The Golden Gate in ‘48.” They sang “Goodbye, Mama, I’m off to Okinawa,” and joked about the latest dreadful estimates of American disaster broadcast by Radio Tokyo.

  The Japanese had already made the mistake of believing that the five American carriers damaged by kamikaze during the March 18-19 strikes against Japan would prevent early invasion of Okinawa. Because of this, the kaynikaze were caught unprepared when the Kerama Retto landings began. Only Ushijima’s handful of planes on Okinawa and scattered suicide units from Japan were able to intervene, and though they did extensive damage, it was nothing like the broadcast reports. On March 28 the Marines heard Radio Tokyo announce the sinking of a battleship, six cruisers, seven destroyers and one minesweeper, and then the voice of an American-educated announcer simpering:

  “This is the Zero Hour, boys. It is broadcast for all you American fighting men in the Pacific, particularly those standing off the shores of Okinawa… because many of you will never hear another program…. Here’s a good number, ”Going Home“… it’s nice work if you can get it…. You boys off Okinawa listen and enjoy it while you can, because when you’re dead you’re a long time dead…. Let’s have a little juke-box music for the boys and make it hot.… The boys are going to catch hell soon, and they might as well get used to the heat….” Then, having described the varieties of death instantly impending for “the boys off Okinawa,” the voice concluded: “Don’t fail to tune in again tomorrow night.”

  Two days later the voice was somber. “Ten American battleships, six cruisers, ten destroyers, and two transports have been sunk. The American people did not want this war, but the authorities told them it would take only a short while and would result in a higher standard of living. But the life of the average American citizen is becoming harder and harder and the war is far from won….”

  Two more days and Radio Tokyo had lost its audience: “The boys off Okinawa” had gone ashore.

  That was on April 1—Easter Sunday, April Fool’s Day, or L-Day as it was called officially. The L stood for Landing, but the Marines who hit the Hagushi Beaches with hardly a hand raised to oppose them had another name for it.

  They called it Love-Day.

  11

  The Bimbo Butai had broken and fled at almost the first salvo of American guns. The airfields at Yontan and Kadena were left intact, and there were only a few mortars and a handful of riflemen to oppose the hordes of Americans circling offshore beneath overcast skies.

  They came in.

  On the northern beaches the Marines had anticipated another Tarawa in the reefs barring their passage, in the three-foot sea wall just back of the beaches. But high water bore them over the reefs and they had merely to clamber up the sea wall to get past it.

  Only the inevitable confusion of putting 50,000 fighting troops ashore on a beachhead eight miles long hindered the invasion of Okinawa. All along the line the incredible landing was going forward with unbelievable speed.

  By midmorning the Sixth Marine Division had reached Yontan Airfield and was moving across it, while the First Marine Division on the 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 threw off the hated Japanese uniform and melted out of sight among their own people. Many true Japanese soldiers who were scattered throughout the landing area also put on dirty blue Okinawan kimonos and turned guerrilla, but there were not enough of these sniping irregulars to do more than badger the advancing Marines. They brushed past them, exulting in the pacific bliss of Love-Day.

  A half-hour after the first of the Sixth Division’s riflemen had swept inland, the Division’s tanks were ashore. They rolled over beaches blessedly free of mines, while behind them came the bulldoze
rs to cut passage through the terraces. American mechanical energy was everywhere moving and shaking, transforming the beachhead, while up front the Marines were succumbing to the Great Loo Choo’s pastoral charm. They were rounding up the shaggy little Okinawan ponies found ambling along narrow dirt roads.

  “Ya-hoo! I’m Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines!”

  It could have seemed an April Fool’s Day joke, even though here and there a Marine was being shot. In the battalion aid stations along the beaches, the doctors looked almost frustrated.

  Out on the command ships among the forests of masts and fluttering signal flags, steady reports of bloodless advance had produced an atmosphere first of disbelief, then relief, then wary suspicion. At noon, Major General Shepherd moved his Sixth Division Headquarters ashore with the smiling remark:

  “There was a lot of glory on Iwo, but I’ll take it this way.” Shepherd’s staff sailed shoreward past hospital ships lying lonely and unattended by an invasion’s customary swarming of casualty boats. In one of the new LST-hospitals assigned to the First Marine Division, the ship’s surgeon was impatient. Since the moment the assault amtracks had rolled down the ramp, sailors had been at work transforming the ship. All the litter left behind by the Marines was heaved over the side. The tank deck was hosed down. Rows of cots were set up inside it. Outside the big yawning bow doors a company of Seabees rigged a pontoon-pier for casualty boats. All was accomplished in less than two hours. The surgeon strode out on the pier. He could see columns of Marines vanishing behind the sea wall. But there was no return traffic. He turned anxiously to a corpsman.

  “No boats, no wounded?”

  “Nothing yet, sir.”

  The surgeon shrugged and went back inside the LST. In a moment he was outside again, for he had heard a motor.

  A Marine was stepping onto the pier from a casualty boat. “What’s wrong with you, son?”

  The Marine held up a spouting finger stump.

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

  The surgeon peered at it, ordered 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, turned and went back inside the ship to eat lunch. He came out. Still no return traffic. He called to his solitary patient, “C’mon, son, let’s go make you a new finger. We’ve got plenty of time to do it in.”

  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 long and three to four miles deep—all at a cost of 28 killed, 27 missing and 104 wounded. Only a few of the dead or missing was from either of the assaulting Marine divisions—but 16 of them were from that Second Marine Division which had drawn the soft assignment of making the feint off southern Okinawa.

  Down there a kamikaze crash-dived LST 884 with 300 Marines aboard her. The ship burst into flames. Ammunition began to explode. The LST had to be abandoned temporarily. Eight Marines were killed, eight were missing and 37 were wounded. Another kamikaze put three holes in destroyer Hinsdale and the stricken ship had to be towed away by fleet tugs. The departure may have prompted General Ushijima’s report of having forced the enemy to withdraw “after being mowed down one after another.”

  Up north, though, there were 50,000 of the enemy on Okinawa. Objectives which were expected to require three or more days and many lives were firmly in American hands. At Yontan Airfield that dusk of April 1, there were bulldozers clearing away wrecked planes and General Ushijima’s clever dummies of sticks and stones. Already an airplane was touching down. But it had a red ball on its fuselage. It came in as bulldozers stopped and men hopped quickly to the ground. Marines heating their rations stood erect and walked quietly toward the landing strip. The Zero swung seaward and turned back to a smooth landing.

  The pilot wriggled out of his parachute pack. He climbed down. He walked toward the 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 one,” a Marine said, shaking his head ruefully—“ there’s always one poor bastard who doesn’t get the word.”

  12

  It was the morning of April 2. The Marines were awake, stamping chilled feet, amazed to see their breath making vapor puffs while they drew their newly issued wool-and-gabardine field jackets tighter around them. It was something less than 50 degrees, it would not go above 60, but it was nippy enough to chill the thinned blood of men with years in the tropics behind them.

  They moved out rapidly along the narrow roads, passing through peaceful fields sprinkled with little thatched farm-houses, each sheltering behind stone walls or bamboo wind-breaks. They gathered momentum, the Sixth Division striking swiftly for Zampa Cape in the north to seize the site for Admiral Turner’s badly needed radar station, the First speeding east across island for Nakagusuku Bay.

  “Off and on!” the sergeants shouted. “Let’s keep moving!”

  “You there—whattaya keep looking behind yuh for?”

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

  It was a common sensation, as Love-Day turned into Honeymoon Week at Okinawa. Only the Sixth Division was running into any kind of opposition, and this in ambushes or isolated attacks on scattered strong-points—battles real enough to the few men who died or were wounded in them, but not in large enough volume to deter the Sixth’s swift advance.

  The First Division was having a picnic. Major General Del Valle called a press conference in the afternoon and told the newsmen: “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 Division’s casualties totaled three dead and 18 wounded. Next day, the Division’s jubilant Marines were standing on the eastern sea wall overlooking the bay and the Pacific Ocean. They had severed the island. That same day, scouting parties turned sharply right and swept out onto the narrow finger of the Ketchin Peninsula, traversing it without opposition. With the Tenth Army lifting all restrictions, the First Division rapidly secured all the east coast between Yontan and the Ishikawa Isthmus, that narrow neck of about two and a half miles which lay two-fifths of the way up Okinawa’s 60-mile length. In four days, the First had taken territory expected to require three weeks of heavy fighting.

  Above these Marines, the Sixth Division was sealing off the base of the isthmus preparatory to its drive north. The First would clean up behind the Sixth, and also attend to the problem of the Okinawan refugees now clogging the roads.

  There were so many of them: women with babies at their breasts; children without parents; grizzle-bearded ancients hobbling along with bent backs, leaning on staffs and carrying pitiful small bundles representing all that the war had left them, that terrible war which had also robbed them of the authority of their beards and had exposed them to Japanese mockery and American pity; and the old white-haired women who could not walk, who merely squatted in the road, shriveled, frail, hardly bigger than monkeys, waiting to be carried, waiting for the kind Marine who might stop and stick a lighted cigarette between their toothless gums.

  They were a docile people, and now they were terrified because the Japanese had told them the Americans would torture them. They were frightened also because they knew that among them were Japanese soldiers disguised as civilians. But their fear vanished with gentle treatment, with the policy of carefully searching all males between fifteen and forty-five—to discover many a knife or cartridge belt beneath a smock—and of placing all of these within prisoner-of-war camps. Soon the Okinawans were speaking openly of their hatred for the Japanese, their loathing for the Reig
n of Radiant Peace.

  “Nippon ga maketa,” they said. “Japan is finished.”

  But Nippon was neither maketa nor zemmetsu. Nippon had at last recovered from the American carrier strikes at the homeland and was about to hurl her thunderbolts with characteristic suicidal fervor. On April 6 hundreds of kamikaze came roaring down from the north, and trailing after them in the spreading white majesty of her mighty bow wave came nothing less than a suicide battleship.

  She was the Yamato, the mightiest warship ever built, the most beautiful battleship afloat and the last capital ship left to Japan.

  Yamato had survived Leyte Gulf where her sister ship, Musashi, had not. Yamato could outshoot anything in the U.S. Navy. She had nine 18.1-inch guns firing a projectile weighing 3,200 pounds a distance of 45,000 yards, compared to the 2,700-pound shell and 42,000-yard range of the American 16-inchers. She displaced 72,809 tons fully laden, and drew 35 feet. She was 863 feet long and 128 in the beam. She could hit 27.5 knots at top speed or cruise 7,200 miles at 16 knots. And she was sortying out of the Inland Sea for Okinawa with only enough fuel in her tanks for a one-way voyage.

  If soldiers and tanks, fliers and airplanes, sailors and boats could be enrolled in the ranks of the suiciders, it was logical that admirals and dreadnoughts should follow. There were three admirals coming with Yamato, and the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers. There might have been more of them and more warships, but Admiral Toyoda could scrape up only 2,500 tons of fuel for the venture. Toyoda also had only 699 planes, half of them kamikaze, to hurl against the Americans in the aerial phase of the attack. He had hoped to have 4,500, but American strikes on the homeland had crippled aircraft production and had also destroyed many planes on the ground.

  Still, Toyoda hoped for great things from the kikusui, or “floating chrysanthemums,” which was the name given to 10 massed kamikaze attacks planned for Okinawa. His hopes for the Surface Special Attack Force led by Vice Admiral Seichi Ito aboard Yamato could not have been other than forlorn. He gave the great ship only two fighter planes for cover.