Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

And it began to measure gains by the yard.

  The Army infantry had come to its own Peleliu or Iwo Jima. It had come to defenses against which enormous massed fires, from sea, land or air, were often hardly more useful than a smokescreen. Bombardments might get them close to such positions, but only ardor could overrun them. Only the impetuous foot-soldier slashing in with his hand weapons and using tanks, explosives and aimed flame can succeed in a war against armed and resolute moles. The naval shell’s flat trajectory, the bomb’s broad parabola, the artillery projectile’s arc, even the loop of the mortar, cannot chase such moles down a tunnel. If they can occasionally collapse the tunnel and the whole position with a direct hit—a rare feat—they have knocked out only one spoke of the wheel. But the wheel still turns, and in the absence of that military miracle—direct hits on call—the man on foot has to go in. With his tanks, if he can.

  In southern Okinawa on that April 19 the soldiers of the Twenty-fourth Corps found it tough to take the tanks along. Up-and-down terrain and Ushijima’s careful preparations had made it so. Not long after the 27th Division moved out on the right, a company of tanks ran into a trap at Kakazu Ridge. Mortar spreads and the fire of machine-gun infiltrators cut them off as they sought to pull out of a pass. Without covering infantry, they were defenseless against antitank guns and hurled satchel-charges. Only eight of 30 tanks came out of the Kakazu action. In one day, the 27th had lost almost a third of its armor.

  It was not so disastrous in the center and on the left, but the attack was nevertheless slow. During twelve days of seesawing battle toward the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line, the front did not advance two miles. In spots it failed to make a mile. The situation called for fresh, veteran troops, and on April 27 Lieutenant General Buckner ordered the First Marine Division to stand by. The next day he put the entire Third Corps of Marines on alert. The First Division would enter the line on the west on May 1, relieving the 27th. The 27th would move north as garrison troops, relieving the Sixth Marine Division, which would also come south. In the meantime, the 77th Division would relieve the battered 96th. By May 7 the line would be divided between two full corps, Twenty-fourth on the left or east, Third on the right. In that order the divisions would be: 7th Infantry, 77th Infantry; First Marine, Sixth Marine.

  On April 30 the men of the First Marine Division stopped harmonizing. They knocked down their shanties and trucked to the south. On May 1 they entered the line. They began patrolling, realigning, marking time until the Sixth came down to take up the slack on their right.

  Two miles southeast of them, in a dimly lighted tunnel underneath Shuri Castle, the fiery Isamu Cho was preparing their annihilation.

  The top commanders of the 32nd Army had come to the tunnel at the summons of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima. They sat on canvas chairs at a rough flat table covered with maps. Around them the stones of the tunnel glistened with sweat. Water from the moat surrounding medieval Shuri Castle seeped through crevices and dripped on the earthen floor. Sometimes the dim light glinted off the glasses worn by all these men or danced on the collar stars of the numerous generals present.

  Isamu Cho, now wearing the double stars of a Japanese lieutenant general, sat near Lieutenant General Ushijima. Cho stared arrogantly into the questioning gaze of Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, the 32nd’s senior staff officer and operations chief. Yahara, outspoken, persuaded by neither the rank nor the rhetoric of Isamu Cho, had raised the single voice of protest against the abortive counterattack of April 12-13. He was alone again in opposing the present plan for a massive counterstroke put forward by Cho and his friend, Lieutenant General Takeo Fujioka, commander of the 62nd Division. Even Lieutenant General Tatsumi Amamiya, no admirer of the boastful Fujioka, supported the plan—for it would put his untested 24th Division into battle at last. Major General Kosuke Wada, who led the 5th Artillery Command, was for it, too. He agreed with the others that the 32nd Army had made an achievement unprecedented in Pacific warfare: it had preserved its main body intact after a month of fighting the Americans. Yahara had said bluntly that this was only because there had been no costly counterattacks, and also because the Americans had not yet hurled their full strength against the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line.

  The argument had raged for days, with much bitterness and acrimony between commanders of the 62nd and 24th Divisions. Concurrently with dissent among the top command had come discontent among the troops. The Emperor’s birthday had passed without the promised issue of sweet-potato brandy. The American attack, though slow, was inexorable. For thirty days these men had arisen every morning to look from the heights of their bastion upon bays and anchorages choked with American ships. The Divine Winds had not blown them away. It was difficult even for Japanese soldiers to believe that the American fleet held the bottom half of the ocean—nor could they fail to complain about being left to fight alone only one day’s sail from the homeland.

  The situation was difficult, and now, on the night of May 2, Mitsuru Ushijima, a general cast in much the same formal mold as his opponent, Simon Bolivar Buckner, had called for final presentations. Then he would say, “I decide.”

  Isamu Cho arose. It was true, he said, that the Americans had not thrown in all their strength. But they were doing so now. There was a new Marine division in the line, the First, the hated butchers of Guadalcanal. The moment to destroy this fresh power was opportune. Strike them now and annihilate them before the Americans can grind down to the main line. Careful, full-scale counterattack, not the foolish splendor of the banzai, would do it. There must be help from the kamikaze, then massed artillery fire with the troops attacking all along the line. The fresh 24th would be hurled at the center, would open a hole through which the 44th Brigade would pour in a thrust to the west coast. Then the 44th would wheel south and the First Marine Division would be isolated, then annihilated. Twenty-fourth Corps would be rolled up. There should also be counterlandings on both flanks. The 26th Shipping Engineer Regiment would embark from Naha in barges, small boats and native canoes to strike the rear of the Marine division. Later, the youths of the 26th, 28th and 29th Sea Raiding Squadrons would cross the reef and wade ashore to help the engineers. A similar counterlanding would strike the rear of the 7th Infantry Division on the east. It was a good plan, detailed, realistic. Even Colonel Yahara could agree that Cho’s tactics were excellent. It was his strategy that was bad.

  “To take the offensive with inferior forces against absolutely superior enemy forces is reckless and will only lead to certain defeat,” Yahara said. “We must continue the current operation, calmly recognizing its final destiny—for annihilation is inevitable no matter what is done—and maintain to the bitter end the principle of a strategic holding action. If we should fail, the period of maintaining a strategic holding action, as well as the holding action for the decisive battle for the homeland, will be shortened. Moreover, our forces will inflict but small losses on the enemy, while on the other hand, scores of thousands of our troops will have been sacrificed in vain as victims of the offensive.”

  Yahara sat down.

  It was now up to Ushijima.

  He nodded to Cho.

  The attack would begin at dawn on May 4. Before that, the flank counterlandings would be launched. Before them the artillery would commence, and before everything would come the kamikaze.

  The Japanese aerial assaults began at six o’clock on the night of May 3. Once again, the bombers sought to get at the rich pickings in the Hagushi Anchorage, but 36 of them were shot down and the rest forced to unload at high altitude, with little damage. Only the suicide-diving kamikaze broke through. They sank destroyer Little and an LSM, while damaging two mine-layers and an LCS. After midnight, 60 bombers struck Tenth Army rear areas, coming in scattering “window” or streamers of metal foil to cloud radar screens with blips of nonexistent aircraft. Terrible antiaircraft fire rose in crisscrossing streams of light, as though a million narrow-beamed searchlights were aimed into the night, and the bombers dropped their loads aimles
sly—though some of them landed in a Marine evacuation hospital.

  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 waddling out to sea and coming in again to grind the Japs to pieces between two fires. Some 500 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 7th Division’s Reconnaissance Troop joined the sailors to complete the destruction of 400 men.

  At dawn, the main attack began.

  It went straight to the doom which Colonel Yahara had predicted. Wave after wave of the 24th 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 7th and 77th Divisions held firm—while American warships, 16 battalions of division artillery and 12 battalions of heavier corps artillery plus 134 airplanes, smothered the enemy in a wrathful blanket of steel and explosive. Ships as big as the 14-inch-gunned New York and Colorado, as small as gunboats with 20-millimeter 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 or “foolish” bombs, those piloted, rocket-fired suicide missiles flown to the target area beneath the bellies of twin-engined bombers. When a baka’s pilot had sighted his victim, he was released from his mother plane with a swooshing of rockets. The bakas were well named. Clumsy, with low fuel capacity and piloted by ill-trained suiciders, they seldom hit anything. This May 4 one of the bakas hit the light mine-layer Shea and set it temporarily on fire. But the kamikaze sank two more destroyers, Luce and Morrison, as well as two LSM’s, 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 very material power for which Mitsuru Ushijima had shown such great respect. Much of the Japanese assault died a’borning. Sometimes the Japanese closed, but rarely. There were seesaw battles up and down some of the ridges held by the 77th, but they ended with the soldiers either in command of their previous position or holding new ground farther inside the Japanese territory. One battalion of the Japanese 24th Division got behind the 77th on the left, but it was annihilated by a reserve battalion of the 7th Division in a three-day fight. Otherwise the 24th Division never punched that hole through which the 44th Brigade was to race and isolate the First Marine Division.

  And the First began attacking on the morning of May 4. Even as the soldiers on their left bore the brunt of Cho’s big sally, these Marines were battling toward the key bastion of Shuri to the southeast. They scored gains of up to 400 yards. 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 62nd Division which had not joined the counterassault. By the night of May 5 the Marines had picked up another 300 yards, and by that night also Lieutenant General Isamu Cho’s massive stroke had been completely shattered. Those two days of fighting had cost the Japanese 6,227 dead. The 7th and 77th 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. Next day the First gained another 300 yards, and added a fourth Medal of Honor winner to its rolls since coming into the line on May 1. Corporal John Fardy had smothered a grenade with his life, as had Pfc. William Foster on May 1 and Sergeant Elbert Kinser on the fourth. 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 that night had come against Ushijima’s main line, as had the soldiers 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 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 counterattack.

  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 stoic.

  From now on, said General Cho, only time stood between the 32nd Army and ultimate destruction.

  15

  Time, yes—time for 60,000 men of the 32nd Army to set a high price on their ultimate destruction, for the kamikaze to strike and stagger an American fleet as none had been shaken before, for the Great Loo Choo to pour out some 15 inches of water during seventeen days of storm and torrential rain, for the Japanese to attempt airborne raids on the airfields, and for the month of May to become a mad compound of mud, misery and death.

  Even as General Geiger’s Third Corps took over the western half of the Tenth Army’s front, the rains came rushing down with an intensity reminiscent of New Britain. By late afternoon of May 7 they had begun to make that mud which was nowhere to be matched, which was to become a factor in the down-island attack.

  Okinawa mud was everywhere, in the ears, under the nails, inside leggings or squeezed coarse and cold between the toes. It got into a man’s weapon, it was in his food and sometimes he could feel it grinding like emery grains between his teeth. Whatever was slotted, pierced, open or empty received this mud. Wounds also. Men prayed not to get hit while rain fell and made mud. It embarrassed the bulldozer and made pick-and-shovel men of those haughty tank Marines. Some days it denied the Americans the use of roads altogether, and Marines attacking Shuri only a few miles from base had to be supplied by air-drop. Some days it was hardly possible to walk in it. Two strides and a man’s shoes were coated, two more and they seemed as though encased in lead, another two and it was easier to slip out of the shoes and walk barefooted. Engineers around the airfield threw their shoes away, working with sacking drawn over bare feet and tied around the knees.

  It was this mud which bogged down the entire Tenth Army on the eighth of May, the day on which smeared and dripping soldiers and Marines received the splendid news that Germany had surrendered.

  “So what?” they snorted.

  The death of Hitler and the fall of the Third Reich had as much meaning to them as the pardon of one condemned man might have to another still under sentence. General Ushijima and the Japanese 32nd Army were their only concern, and at that very moment Ushijima was taking advantage of the rain to strengthen his flanks while his men were reminding the Americans of reality by striking them with deliberate artillery shots fired from carefully husbanded guns and shells. Ushijima reinforced his strong-points over a 40-foot-wide concrete highway running east-west behind his barrier line. He settled down to that grim war of attrition urged on him by Colonel Yahara, and because of this, as well as the rain, the attack to the south moved slowly on the following day, May 9.

  As it did, the kamikaze’s scourging of the invasion fleet rose to almost that pitch of destruction predicted for it by the Japanese High Command. Nowh
ere was the ordeal more terrible and sustained than among those small ships of the radar picket line.

  Here, perhaps mistaking destroyers for battleships and minesweepers for cruisers, the kamikaze and the baka struck in massed hundreds. Men were horribly burned. They were blown into the ocean, either to drown or pass agonizing hours awaiting rescue and the ministrations of a corpsman. Those who survived the suiciders’ screaming dives went for days on end without sleep, their nerves exposed and quivering like wires stripped of insulation. Men in the boiler rooms worked in fierce heat. The superheaters built to give quick pressure needed for sudden high-speed maneuvering under aerial attack were often kept running three or four days at a time, though they had been made for intermittent use. It had to be that way, for the war off Okinawa was war at a moment’s notice. Very little time separated that moment when radar screens clouded with pips and the next when the kamikaze came plunging through the ack-ack.

  Following them down were those Marine Corsair pilots who had come to Okinawa to fly close-up support but had been called to the rescue of the radar picket line instead. Even with ammunition expended, they rode the suiciders down, forcing them away from their targets and into the water—even going after them with their propellers, as Lieutenant Robert Klingman did in the battle of the frozen machine guns.

  That was the dogfight fought at over 40,000 feet among a Japanese two-seater Nick fighter and two Corsairs piloted by Klingman and Captain Kenneth Reusser. On combat air patrol over Ie Shima on May 10 they spotted the vapor trail of the Japanese at 25,000 feet. They chased him, climbing steadily from 10,000 altitude until, after a pursuit of 185 miles, firing off most of their ammunition to lighten their load, they caught up with the Nick at 38,000 feet.

  They closed.

  Reusser shot up all his ammunition in damaging the Japanese’s left wing and left engine. Klingman bored in to within 50 feet and pressed his gun button. His guns were frozen. He drove in, his propellers whirling. They chopped up the rudder and left it dangling. In the Nick’s rear cockpit the gunner was banging his fists on his own frozen guns. The Corsair’s big propellers chewed on. Klingman turned and came back for another pass. He cut off the rudder and loosened the right stabilizer. He was running out of gas. He decided he didn’t have enough to make Okinawa anyway, and turned for a third pass. He cut off the Nick’s stabilizer. The plane went into a spin and at 15,000 feet it lost both wings and plunged into the East China Sea.