D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  But the battered, burning can still had fight in her. Incredulously the men of the Newcomb, crouched on her stern, struggling in the water, lying wounded on the deck, heard their ship’s forward batteries firing. There was no power, but the gunners were firing anyway—by hand.

  The gunnery officer stood at his station shouting the range data to the men in the forward five-inch turrets. In the No. 2 turret Arthur McGuire of St. Louis, Mo., rammed shells with broken, bleeding fingers…. The Jap had the Newcomb’s bridge in his sights…. But the burst from McGuire’s gun caught him and blew him sideways. The hurtling plane missed the bridge by a scant eight feet, skidded across the Newcomb’s deck and plowed into the other destroyer.

  With a gaping hole in the afterdeck and the portside a tangled web of broken lines and wildly sprouting fire hoses, the Leutze drifted slowly away.

  Without water to fight the fire still raging amidships, the Newcomb was doomed. But the destroyer’s crew contained some obstinate people. Donald Keeler of Danbury, Conn., was one of them…. When it became evident that all the power was gone he joined the crowd on the stern just in time to hear that the after ammo-handling rooms were burning and the magazines were expected to go any minute.

  Keeler elected to fight the fire. His only hope lay in a “handy-billy,” a small, portable pump powered by a gasoline engine….

  Groping around in the blistering heat, Keeler found the handy-billy. Carefully he wound the rope around the flywheel, held his breath and yanked. The engine kicked over and kept going. Now Keeler had water. He and [three other sailors]…got the fire under control. Then they dragged the pump forward.

  The No. 3 handling room was a roaring furnace. Steel dripped like solder from overhead…. Flames shot from the ammo hoists like the blast of a huge blow torch. It looked hopeless, but Keeler shoved the hose in the doorway. No sooner had he done so than a wave came over the side and doused the pump. The chattering handy-billy spluttered and died. Keeler rushed back to the pump. Again he wound the rope around the flywheel, gritted his teeth and yanked. “I think I even prayed that second time,” he said. “But the damn thing popped right off, something it wouldn’t do again in a million years.”

  The men went back into the handling room. They kept the hose in there, taking turns. The magazines didn’t blow up.

  Up forward sailors were trying to fight the fire with hand extinguishers. A withering blast of heat drove them back. Their life jackets were smoking; their clothing was afire. The Newcomb’s doctor, Lt. John McNeil of Boston, Mass. …found one of the crew battling the flames with hair ablaze, half blind from the blood dripping from the sharpnel wounds in his face and forehead. With difficulty [he and another man]…dragged him off to the emergency dressing station in the wardroom. Many of the pharmacist’s mates were out of action. Men with only first-aid training helped McNeil mix blood plasma for the burn cases.

  Early Sayre of Roseville, Oh., was trapped on the stern unable to get his casualties forward. He was working on a fracture when someone tugged on his sleeve. “Blue Eyes has been hit bad. Looks like he’s bleeding to death.”

  Blue Eyes was the youngest member of the crew. He had come aboard claiming eighteen years, but the men had taken one look at him and decided he must have lied to get in. Now he lay on the deck, blood spurting from a vein in his neck. Sayre had no instruments. He knelt down beside Blue Eyes and stopped the flow of blood with his fingers. He stayed there while the second plane came in and hit the other destroyer twenty feet away. He stayed there for almost an hour longer until they could come and take Blue Eyes away and operate on him and save his life. But Early Sayre had saved it already.

  The rest of the Japs had been driven off. It was beginning to get dark when a ray of hope came to the exhausted men of the Newcomb. Keeler’s volunteer fire department seemed to be holding the fires. Perhaps now they could save their ship. But the wave that had stopped the handy-billy was followed by another and another.

  The Newcomb was sinking. The weight of the water that the hoses had poured into her after compartments was dragging her down. The rising water moved steadily forward. It reached the after bulkhead of the forward engine room. If it broke through, the Newcomb was done for. And the bulkhead already was leaking….

  In the forward engine room the damage-control party shored up the bulging bulkhead [and]…the Newcomb stopped sinking.

  Now the blinkers flashed in the darkness. Other destroyers were coming alongside. Over their rails came men with fire hoses and pump lines, doctors and pharmacist’s mates with plasma and bandages. Tugs were on the way. The fight was over.

  The Newcomb’s men had answered the question: Just how much punishment can a destroyer take?36

  Both destroyers had to be scrapped. Forty-seven men were killed or missing, and many of the wounded were grotesquely burned. After receiving treatment, some of them “looked like mummies under their bandages, breathing through a tube and being fed intravenously while their bodies healed.”37

  An American aircraft carrier was the dream target of every suicide pilot. On May 11, Admiral Mitscher’s flagship, Bunker Hill, her deck crowded with planes waiting to take off, their tanks filled with highly volatile aviation gas, their guns loaded with ammunition, was hit almost simultaneously by two kamikazes. The horribly crippled ship lost 396 men and was put out of commission after fifty-nine consecutive days at sea. Reporter Phelps Adams was nearby, on the bridge of the carrier Enterprise, when enemy planes came tearing out of the low-hanging clouds:

  BEFORE GENERAL QUARTERS COULD BE SOUNDED on this ship, and before half a dozen shots could be fired by the Bunker Hill, the first kamikaze had dropped his 550-pound bomb and plunged squarely into the midst of the thirty four waiting planes in a shower of burning gasoline.

  The bomb, fitted with a delayed action fuse, pierced the flight deck at a sharp angle, passed out through the side of the hull and exploded in mid-air before striking the water. The plane—a single-engine Jap fighter—knocked the parked aircraft about like ten-pins, sent a huge column of flame and smoke belching upwards and then skidded crazily over the side.

  Some of the pilots were blown overboard, and many managed to scramble to safety; but before a move could be made to fight the flames another kamikaze came whining out of the clouds, straight into the deadly anti-aircraft guns of the ship. This plane was a Jap dive bomber…. A five-inch shell that should have blown him out of the sky, set him afire and riddled his plane with metal, but still he came. Passing over the stern of the ship, he dropped his bomb with excellent aim right in the middle of the blazing planes. Then he flipped over and torched through the flight deck at the base of the island [the ship’s central command tower….

  BUNKER HILL HIT BY TWO KAMIKAZES WITHIN THIRTY SECONDS (NA).

  The entire rear end of the ship was burning with uncontrollable fury. It looked very much like the newsreel shots of a blazing oil well, only worse—for this fire was feeding on highly refined gasoline and live ammunition….

  The carrier itself had begun to develop a pronounced list, and as each new stream of water was poured into her the angle increased more dangerously. Crippled as she was, however, she ploughed ahead at top speed and the wind that swept her decks blew the flame and smoke astern over the fantail and prevented the blaze from spreading forward on the flight deck and through the island structure. Trapped on the fantail, men faced the flames and fought grimly on, with only the ocean behind them, and with no way of knowing how much of the ship remained on the other side of that fiery wall.

  Then, somehow, other men managed to break out the huge openings in the side of the hangar dock, and I got my first glimpse of the interior of the ship. That, I think, was the most horrible sight of all. The entire hangar deck was a raging blast furnace, white hot throughout its length….

  Up on the bridge, Capt. George A. Seitz, the skipper, was growing increas ingly concerned about the dangerous list his ship had developed, and resolved to take a gambling chance. Throwing the Bunker Hill
into a 70-degree turn, he heeled her cautiously over onto the opposite beam so that tons of water which had accumulated on one side were suddenly swept across the decks and overboard on the other. By great good fortune this wall of water carried the heart of the hangar deck fire with it.

  That was the turning point…. After nearly three hours of almost hopeless fighting…the battle was won and the ship was saved….

  Late today Admiral Mitscher and sixty or more members of his staff came aboard us to make this carrier his new flagship. He was unhurt—not even singed by the flames….

  As he was hauled aboard in a breeches buoy across the churning water that separated us from the speedy destroyer that had brought him alongside, he looked tired and old and just plain mad. His deeply lined face was more than weather beaten—it looked like an example of erosion in the dust-bowl country—but his eyes flashed fire and vengeance.38

  After the fire was put out, the flight deck of Bunker Hill looked like “the crater of a volcano.” That night corpsmen prepared 396 bodies for burial at sea.

  Three days after Mitscher transferred his flag to Enterprise, a kamikaze smashed into it and it was lost for the remainder of the war. The admiral had to transfer his flag to the Randolph. Having had two flagships shot from under him in four days, Mitscher said, “Any more of this and there will be hair growing on this old bald head.”

  The hospital ship Comfort, its lights ablaze and its deck marked with a huge Red Cross, was severely crippled. Three British carriers were also hit, but suffered little damage because they had steel decks. The American carriers were fitted out with light wooden decks to give them added speed and maneuverability. “When a kamikaze hits a U.S. carrier, it’s six months’ repair in Pearl,” said an American officer. “In a Limey carrier, it’s ‘Sweepers, man your brooms.’”39

  Admiral Mitscher told reporters that the kamikazes “don’t worry us very much.” But Robert Sherrod “knew the sailors were worried, and so was I.”40

  The Japanese flew 1,900 kamikaze sorties against the Okinawa fleet, in addition to the 5,000 to 6,000 sorties by conventional aircraft. In these raids, both massive and intermittent, and in attacks on their bases, they lost an astounding 7,830 planes, by official American estimates.* But they sank thirty-six American ships and damaged 368 others, including thirteen carriers, ten battleships, and five cruisers. The 9,731 officers and men killed or wounded at Okinawa—over 4,900 of them killed—represented one seventh of the Navy’s total casualties in World War II. The Navy suppressed these horrifying casualty figures for a month after the conclusion of the battle.41

  “When the kamikazes started to come in the rule was never fire until one of them came directly at you. Don’t provoke the guy,” recalled Mort Zimmerman.

  THEY WOULD COME IN AT YOU in such numbers and so low that you could see the expressions on the faces of the pilots from the deck of the ship. Some destroyer crews would lower their guns into the water and throw up these huge walls of water, and when some of the older planes hit them they would just disintegrate.

  It was awful to see the guys who got burnt in the fires these planes set off. They looked like charcoal logs.

  I saw a destroyer escort that was on picket duty come into harbor and it was so beat up that the highest-rated man on the ship was a chief. Water was pouring out of the hull, everything above deck was charred and shattered, and from bow to stern I counted ninety bunk bottoms, dead guys wrapped in bunk bottoms. And I wondered how many other guys had gone over the sides. You could not believe what this ship looked like. Later they beached it and put up a sign that said, essentially. “Look at this thing, This is what you are fighting against.”

  Close to shore, we also encountered Japanese suicide swimmers. They would swim out in the morning, under the fog, dive beneath a ship, and blow it and themselves up. So every morning, beginning at daybreak, we would put out watches and fire on anything that moved in the water. I was a bad shot, so I used a Thompson submachine gun. Anything I saw I sprayed.

  Waiting for a kamikaze raid was sometimes worse on your nerves than the actual raid. Because once those sons-of-bitches started coming in there was no time to worry or think. Then it was a game of survival, and almost all your instincts were on high alert.42

  DEAD SAILORS WRAPPED IN CANVAS BUNK BOTTOMS (NA).

  Radar and radio communications allowed the navy time to prepare for the larger kamikaze, attacks and to alert the crews. “But this practice had to he stopped.” said reporter Hanson Raldwin. “The strain of waiting, the anticipated terror, made vivid from past experience, sends some men into hysteria, insanity, breakdown.”43 Ad miral Halsey would later write that the kamikaze was “the only weapon I feared in the war.”44 Yet even on the biggest kamikaze raid of the war, on April 6-7, the Amer icans had more ships in the water than the Japanese had planes in the air.

  A picture released by the Navy after the Rattle of Okinawa tells the larger story. It is called The Fleet That Came to Stay.

  SLAUGHTER ON THE SHURI LINE

  As the kamikazes continued to terrorize the American fleet, Army infantry units, reinforced by the 1st and 6th Marine Divisions, made excruciatingly slow progress against the Shuri Line, which extended across the island, with Naha, Okinawa’s capital, on the west, the commanding heights of Shuri Castle in the center, and the hills around Yonabaru on the east coast. As the battle of brute attrition wore on into May, Admiral Nimitz grew increasingly irritated with General Buckner. Nimitz complained to the general that his methodical method of fighting was causing the Navy to lose “a ship and a half a day.” But even when assault-trained Marines were brought in, the enemy line held, and Buckner, backed unexpectedly by Nimitz, jettisoned a proposal for a risky amphibious landing behind the Shuri Line.

  “We poured a tremendous amount of metal in on those positions,” recalls a Marine commander. “Not only from artillery but from ships at sea. It seemed nothing could possibly be living in that churning mass where the shells were falling and roaring but when we next advanced, Japs would still be there, even madder than they had been before.”45

  As the battle raged, troops and conscript laborers continued work on Colonel Yahara’s interlocking network of deep, heavily fortified caves. From these hidden positions on the faces of hills, cliffs, and sharply pitched ravines the Japanese resorted to “sleeping tactics,” putting heavy artillery and mortar fire on the enemy trapped below them on flat fields and farms, and coming out only at night in small infiltration parties, as they had at Peleliu and Iwo Jima. “Counting both sides, the [Shuri Line represented an extraordinary concentration of 300,000 fighting men and countless terrified civilians, on a battleground that was about as wide as the distance between Capitol Hill in Washington and Arlington National Cemetery,” writes William Manchester. “In the densest combat of World War I, battalion frontage [the width of the front line covered by a battalion] had been approximately eight hundred yards. Here it was less than six hundred yards. The sewage, of course, was appalling. You could smell the front long before you saw it; it was one vast cesspool.” Whim Manchester caught his first glimpse of the front, from a high hill overlooking it, his thoughts flowed back to the photographs his father, a World War I veteran, had shown him as a boy. “This, I thought, is what Verdun and Passchendaele must have looked like. The two great armies, squatting opposite one another in mud and smoke, were locked together in unimaginable agony…. [And] there was nothing green left; artillery had denuded and scarred every inch of ground.”46

  ’Throughout the month of May, the Marines launched attack after bludgeoning attack against the western end of the ten mile-long Shuri Line, while the Army did the same against the eastern side. Much of the battle was fought in driving rain and knee-deep mud. “Our division [the 6th) entered the southern battle lines on May 1,” wrote Raymond Sawyer, who had left home in 1941, at the age of fifteen, to join the Marines, lying about his age to an overeager enlistment sergeant. “1We joined our 1st Marine Division near the bluffs above the
Asa Kawa Hiver on the right flank of the Shuri Line, above Naha. The next forty days would witness the most intense fighting encountered in the South Pacific.”47

  ATTACKING THE SHURI LINE, OKINAWA (SC).

  The toughest obstacle was Sugar Loaf Hill, a mound of coral and volcanic rock, less than 100 feet high, that was the anchor of the Shuri Line. It stood about one mile from General Ushijima’s command center in a tunnel under Shuri Castle and at that time it was the bloodiest battlefield in the world.48 The battle for the hill took place from May 13 to May 17. During those four days Sawyer’s Marines reached the top of Sugar Loaf twelve times but was unable to hold the summit in hand-to-hand combat, despite heavy artillery support.

  The Japanese had more and better artillery on Okinawa than in any previous island campaign, but so did the Americans. The shock and carnage was almost unendurable for the men on both sides. “The ground swayed and shook from concussion as shells erupted all around and steel fragments tore through the air and through men’s bodies,” Eugene Sledge recalled. “When the shells finally stopped we were all shaking. You could not hold your rifle steady.”49 The never-ending artillery fire produced a higher number of neuropsychiatric casualties than in any other Pacific battle. Hundreds of men simply went crazy.

  In was no better for the GIs on the other end of the Shuri Line. Life photographer W. Eugene Smith, a veteran of thirteen Pacific actions and twenty-three bombing missions, was nearly killed by mortar fire while putting together a photo essay on “the working day” of Terry Moore, a foot-slogging Private First Class of the 7th Division. They were on a muddy ridge together when the artillery and mortar fire started coming in on them. “They had us zeroed in and we just lay and took it,” wrote Smith.