D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  The American command expected the fiercest land resistance in the southern part of the island, where “we know there are caves by the thousands, and pillboxes, bunkers, and trenches…,” the intelligence officer on the Panamint pointed out, “Okinawa will be the first heavily inhabited enemy island we have invaded. The population is about 450,000, and we have no reason to believe they are any different people from the mainland Japanese. We expect resistance to be most fanatical.”11

  The Japanese garrison would fight with suicidal defiance, but most of the civilian population would try to stay out of harm’s way. Japan had not officially claimed the island until 1879, and the Okinawans, who were not ethnically Japanese, were treated as second-class citizens of the empire. It. was difficult for them to see this war as theirs. Still, fed by Japanese propaganda, they lived in mortal terror of the American devils, who, they leared, would torture, rape, and kill them in great numbers. “We spent the last week of March like criminals on death row,” recalled an Okinawan conscripted into the defense force. “The instrument of execution was there…all ready for us…. It was the American fleet instead of an ax or noose.”12

  As Sherrod and forty or so other correspondents boarded landing ships the next day, Coast Guard Commander Jack Dempsey, the former heavyweight champion of the world, was there to see them off. “Keep your head down,” someone shouted at Ernie Pyle, who would land with the Old Breed. “Listen, you bastards,” Pyle shot back at the reporters standing near him. “I’ll take a drink over every one of your graves.” Then he swung around, put up his fists, and asked the champ if he wanted to go a few rounds.13

  The landing was one of the most pleasant surprises of the war.

  John Lardner was assigned to the 4th Marine Regiment, Marine Raiders with a record of reckless bravery going back to Guadalcanal. “These boys of mine are very good, and they love to kill Japs,” Colonel Alan Shapley, their leader, told Lardner. “This will be a very tough show, but the boys are full of shooting.” On L-Day, “these boys full of shooting rode into the beaches in the amtracks, erect and fierce as always in their white war paint and steeled against the withering fire they had been promised for weeks.”14 Hitting the sand, they met an empty landscape with not a Japanese in sight. Hardly pausing, they tore ahead for their L-plus-three (fourth day) objective, Yontan Airfield.

  “We were in a Higgins boat,” Eugene Sledge recalls L-Day, “and when an amtrac came to pick us up and take us into the beach the driver told us he had just taken some troops ashore and there was no opposition, nobody was fired at. We couldn’t be lieve it. It was the first good news we had heard during the war and everybody started singing ’Little Brown Jug,’ and we sang it all the way into the beach. When the tailgate went down we just walked out, formed up, and moved inland to cut the island in half.”

  Another surprise was Okinawa itself. “We had been warned about terrible terrain, jungle rot, and an infestation of the world’s deadliest snakes,” says Sledge. “But the island was pastoral and handsomely terraced, like a postcard picture of an Oriental landscape, and hardly anyone ran into the habu snakes whose bites were supposed to be fatal. The island looked like a patchwork quilt, with little farms and fields and rice paddies, all surrounded by low stone walls. The weather was cool, about sixty-five degrees, and there was the wonderful smell of pines, which reminded me of home. It was such a beautiful island; you really could not believe that there was going to be a battle there.”15

  As they moved inland over the next few days, Sledge found the Okinawans friendly and easy to like, but Pyle, a notorious cultural chauvinist, described them as “filthy,” “rather stupid,” and “pitiful” in their poverty.16

  From a mountaintop, a Japanese officer watched 60,000 American troops splash ashore and seize two important airfields. Where were the clouds of suicide fliers his leaders had told him would be sent to flame the barbarians’ invasion fleet? Japanese air commanders had spotted the approach of the American armada but were unable to mount serious opposition that day from bases on Formosa and Kyushu that had been badly damaged by Spruance’s carrier planes and LeMay’s B-29s. And bases on nearby islands for hundreds of enemy suicide boats—light motor craft with 300-kilogram charges in their bows—had been reduced to dust by Navy Hellcats and Army assault units. “As I observed the landing operations, I was convinced this was a complete defeat,” the Japanese officer recalled. “The soldiers felt the same way. But we thought it was our destiny to share the fate of the island, and so held on to our pride.”17

  By 10:00 A.M. Shipley’s Rangers had a crap game in progress at undefended Yonton Airfield. Hearing a loud noise, the men looked up and saw an unsuspecting Japanese fighter plane about to make a landing. Seconds after he taxied to a stop his plane was riddled with holes. He jumped out of the cockpit with his revolver drawn and was instantly cut down. “I’m sorry the boys were so damn impulsive,” Shipley told Lardner. “He would have been a good prisoner.”18

  “Where is the enemy?” every American wondered those first days on Okinawa. Had the Japanese played an elaborate April Fool’s joke on them? “I may be crazy but it looks like the Japanese have quit the war, at least in this sector,” Richmond Kelly Turner radioed to Admiral Nimitz. Nimitz replied: “Delete all after ‘crazy.’”19

  While the Old Breed cleaned out pockets of resistance at the center of the island and two Army divisions moved south against the first line of Japanese defenses, Manchester and the 6th Marine Division drove north into the steep, densely wooded hills and ravines of Motobu Peninsula. “There was no role here for mechanized tactics; tanks were useful only for warming your hands in their exhaust fumes,” Manchester described the six-day-long battle for Motobu Peninsula; “This was more like French and Indian warfare.”20 In hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets and knives, the Marines captured Motobu Peninsula and then subdued the rest of the thinly populated northern part of Okinawa.

  While fighting in the north, the Marines learned of the death of Franklin Roosevelt. He was the only President the younger men had ever known, but most of the talk was about his successor. “Who the hell is Harry Truman?” one soldier spoke for thousands like him who felt their fates were suddenly in his hands.21

  Six days later, on April 18, Ernie Pyle was killed on the small island of le Shima, four miles off Motobu Peninsula. He was accompanying the 77th Army Division on an amphibious operation to take the island’s airfield when a jeep he was riding in was hit by a burst of machine gun fire. Pyle fell unhurt into a roadside ditch. There was another burst and a bullet pierced his helmet and entered his left temple. He died instantly. When his body was recovered, his hands still clutched the ragged knit cap he carried at all times.

  When Pyle had been assigned to the 6th Marine Division, many of the men did not recognize the small, frail, balding man with the stubby white whiskers and the frayed woolen cap. But when they learned who he was, they invariably asked him what he thought of the Pacific war. Pyle would smile wearily and say, “Oh, it’s the same old stuff all over again. I am awful tired of it.”22

  The last time Sherrod saw him was April 9, when they were in a room aboard the Panamint, writing dispatches on typewriters provided by the Navy. Sherrod told him he was heading home in a few days, and Pyle said he was going back, too, in a month or so. “I’m getting too old to stay in combat with these kids. I think I’ll stay back around the airfields with the Seabees and the engineers in the meantime and write some stories about them.” He had made his last landing, he said. Nine days later, Sherrod was in Hawaii when he heard that Pyle had been killed. “I never learned which doughboy of the Seventyseventh Division persuaded Ernie to change his mind and go on the le Shirna invasion…. But Ernie rarely refused a request from a doughboy.”23

  ERNIE PYLE ON OKINAWA (NA).

  After northern Okinawa was secured on April 20, the victorious 6th Marine Division “expected a respite, hot chow, and a few days in the sack. We didn’t get any of them,” says Manchester. They had been hearin
g “ominous rumors of stiffening resistance in the south. GIs were encountering unprecedented concentrations of Japanese artillery fire. Progress was being measured in yards, then feet…. It was Peleliu and Iwo all over again, but to the nth degree.” The Japanese strategy was now revealed. “Looking back, I can’t imagine how we could have been so ignorant,” says Lieutenant General Victor “Brute” Krulak, operations officer for the 6th Marine Division.

  General Ushijima had played a cruel April Fool’s joke on the Americans. Abandoning the beaches and most of the north, he concentrated his forces along three menacing defensive lines in the south, the strongest of them the Shuri Line, which Manchester called “the war’s great Gethsemane.” He used every hill and ravine as his ally, hiding his troops and artillery—the most powerful artillery the Japanese had available in the Pacific war—in a sixty-mile network of caves and tunnels, subterranean defenses far deeper and more extensive than those on Iwo Jima. He had already lured Army units into his trap and was butchering them. Now the Marines were rushed south to reinforce them. Wedged together on a terrain-constricted battlefield, Marines and Army infantry and a determined enemy would wage one of the most terrible struggles in the history of organized warfare.

  With American ground forces bogged down in a close-quarter slaughter, the Japanese unleashed a new weapon on the enemy fleet—not individual kamikaze attacks, but massed suicide raids of up to 300 planes. These were called Kikusui, or “floating chrysanthemums.” “Ultimately they failed,” Manchester writes, “but anyone who saw a bluejacket who had been burned by them, writhing in agony under his bandages, never again slandered the sailors who stayed on ships while the infantrymen hit the beach.”24

  TREASURES OF THE NATION

  By the late spring of 1945, Japan’s situation was so grave, with Iwo lost and the Americans on Okinawa, that its military rulers turned to a desperate scheme, codenamed Ten-Go, to protect the most vulnerable points of its rapidly deteriorating defense perimeter. Almost 5,000 aircraft based on Formosa and the home islands were assigned to one-way missions against the American fleet. As Japan-based reporter Robert Guillain noted, the military leaders committed “the nation’s total air power to an all-out battle. It was not even a question of winning or dying, but of dying in any case and winning if possible.”25 It was state-sanctioned and-encouraged suicide.26

  Most of the planes were reliable but outmoded Zeros; however the Japanese did use the Baka bomb that the B-29 crews confronted in the skies over Japanese cities. At Okinawa it was employed against ships. Piloted by one man and launched like a glider from the underside of a two-engine bomber, it contained in its nose a ton of TNT. It was powered by three rockets and could dive on a vessel at a speed of up to 550 miles per hour, making it almost impossible to hit once it was launched. “The small size and tremendous speed of Baka made it the worst threat to our ships that had yet appeared, almost equivalent to the guided missiles that the Germans were shooting at London,” wrote Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison.27 But before it was launched, the Baka bomb’s weight slowed down the mother ship and impeded its maneuverability, making it an easy target for American interceptors.

  A KAMIKAZE HEADED FOR THE BATTLESHIP MlSSOURI. THE PLANE BOUNCED OFF A GUN MOUNT AND CAUSED ONLY MINOR DAMAGE TO THE SHIP (NA).

  Most of the kamikaze raids at Okinawa were made in daylight by waves of planes that attacked continuously, inflicting more casualties in ships and personnel than in any previous battle fought by the American Navy. “It is absolutely out of the question for you to return alive,” the suicide pilots were told. “Your mission involves certain death…. Choose a death which brings about the maximum result.”28

  The suicide pilots, called “treasures of the nation,” were abysmally trained, but they were a cross section of the country’s educated elite. Most of them were college students in the humanities who had recently been called into service. These “herogods of the air” were not the mindless fanatics, hopped up on saki, that many American sailors believed them to be. With few exceptions, they flew to certain death for what they considered unselfish causes—patriotism, family honor, and unflagging loyalty to the Emperor. They were willing to die to protect loved ones back home from an unimaginably destructive American invasion. If Iwo Jima gave Americans concern about the costs of an invasion of Japan, Curtis LeMay’s fire raids on the cities of the empire revealed to the Japanese people the terrible power of an avenging enemy that could only be stopped, they believed, by the most desperate measures.

  Here are parts of two typical letters written by young suicide pilots:

  My dear parents,

  The Japanese way of life is indeed beautiful and I am proud of it, as I am of Japanese history and mythology, which reflect the purity of our ancestors and their belief in the past…. And the living embodiment of all wonderful things from our past is the Imperial Family, which is also the crystallization of the splendor and beauty of Japan and its people. It is an honor to be able to give my life in defense of these beautiful and lofty things.29

  Please do not grieve for me, mother. It will be glorious to die in action. I am grateful to be able to die in a battle to determine the destiny of our country.30

  On April 6 and 7, 355 kamikazes, along with 345 conventional dive bombers and torpedo planes, flew from hastily repaired airfields and hit the great fleet assembled in the waters off Okinawa, in what was the first and largest of ten massive attacks. On that same day, American submarines spotted an enemy naval force coming out of the protection of the Inland Sea and heading for Okinawa. The flagship was Yamato, the biggest battleship afloat, escorted by a light cruiser and eight of Japan’s latest and largest destroyers. The sleekly proportioned dreadnought, bearing the ancient name of Japan, was on a suicide mission, carrying only enough fuel, by same accounts, to get to Okinawa. After inflicting maximum damage on the enemy’s amphibious force, she was to beach herself and use her enormous guns as artillery support for the armies on Okinawa.

  The men on board expected to die. When Yamato slipped out of the Inland Sea and headed for Okinawa, the crew had gathered on deck and sang a battle anthem:

  Across the Sea, corpses in the water, Across the mountain, corpses in the field.

  I shall die for the Emperor.

  I shall never look back.31

  Yamato was also an expensive decoy. Sailing without air cover, she could be expected to draw great numbers of Hellcats, Avengers, Corsairs, and Dauntlesses that might otherwise be used against the suicide bombers. Admiral Mitscher summoned nearly 300 planes for the slaughter, and wave after wave of them tore into Yamato until she exploded tremendously and capsized, taking down with her most of the crew, about 3,600 men. The Navy interceptors also sank the escorting cruiser. Yahagi, and four destroyers, while losing only twelve fliers.32

  It was the Imperial Navy’s last great sortie of the war but it helped half of the kamikazes to get through to the American fleet, which had been joined by the Royal Navy’s Pacific Fleet. In one of the fiercest air duels in naval history, the Japanese lost almost 400 planes to American fighters and withering antiaircraft fire, but they inflicted grievous damage, sinking eleven ships, including three destroyers. Altogether, Japan would mount 900 attacks on the fleet, mass raids as well as individual sacrificial sorties, from early April until the middle of June, when it began to run out of both pilots and planes, the remainder being husbanded for the “final battle” in the home islands.

  A ring of early warning radar picket stations was the fleet’s first line of defense. Small destroyers and other light vessels, including minelayers, gunboats, and landing craft, were placed on the outer perimeter. They picked up incoming enemy planes with their radar and vectored circling carrier aircraft to them. It was these smaller ships, heavily armed but thinly plated, that took the brunt of the Japanese air attacks. Rarely was a destroyer on picket duty for more than five hours without being hit by enemy bombers. Admiral Matome Ugaki, commander of Japan’s 5th Air Fleet, ordered his fliers to “get th
e destroyers. Without their radar warning of our approach, we will enjoy great success.”33

  Inside the radar picket were the larger destroyers of the gunfire support screen. They had rapid-firing antiaircraft guns with nasty five-inch shells. Kamikazes flew directly into “as formidable an assembly of gun power as could be found perhaps anywhere in the war,” in the opinion of Rear Admiral M. L. Deyo, commander of the naval force protecting the beachhead. Still, they made a “high percentage of hits,’” says Deyo. “Two hits out of seven [attempts.]”34

  The blows they delivered, while serious, were rarely mortal—not a single aircraft carrier or battleship was sunk in the waters off Okinawa. But a number of destroyers took a fatal beating.

  In the first and largest Kikusui attack, the destroyer Newcomb, part of the gunfire support screen, was assaulted in lightning succession by three kamikazes, two of them scoring direct hits. Then a fourth one smashed into the forward stack, “spraying the entire amidships section…which was a raging conflagration, with a fresh supply of gasoline,” wrote her skipper, Commander I. E. McMillian.35 Lieutenant Leon Grabowsky of the destroyer Leutze risked his ship to try to save Newcomb. Correspondent Evan Wylie describes the heroic efforts of both crews, beginning his story just before a fifth kamikaze missed Newcomb and slammed into Leutze:

  THE MINESWEEPER LINDSEY TOOK TWOKAMIKAZE HITS OFF OKINAWA (USN).

  AT ALMOST COLLISION SPEED, [LEUTZE] SWEPT up alongside the Newcomb. There was a grinding crash…as the two ships came together. The men jumped across and made the ships fast. Fire hoses were snaked across the rails. Powerful streams of water leaped from their nozzles and drove the flames back from the prostrate men. Rescue parties rushed in and dragged them to safety.

  The suicide boys were not through. Another plane was roaring in, headed straight for the Newcomb’s bridge. Looking up, Joseph Piolata of Youngstown, Oh., saw the other destroyer firing right across the Newcomb’s deck. The gunners did their best, but the Newcomb’s superstructure hid the plane from their sights. On both ships the men watched helplessly. This was the kill. The Newcomb could never survive another hit.