D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  TERRY LAY A FEW YARDS AWAY. I adjusted my camera, judged the footage and waited. I wanted to show Terry under close mortar hits, it was part of his day. The trouble with taking photographs when the air is full of lead is that you have to stand up when anyone with any sense is lying down and trying to disappear right into the earth. I got to my feet….

  The next thing I remember was a spiral ringing in my ears and I knew I was regaining consciousness. I knew I had been hit but I did not hurt. I felt warm and cozy. I heard the cry, “Medic, medic over here, the photographer.” I had a surge of happiness: I could hear…. I rolled over on my left elbow and warm blood came gushing from my mouth and face, but I could see. Another surge of happiness…. But then I saw [that] the index finger [of my left hand] was hanging by a cord….

  EXHAUSTED SOLDIERS ON THE SHURI LINE (SC).

  I could not swallow and I choked as I breathed. The blood gurgled in my throat at each breath. I had a moment of fright, overwhelming fright. I could not breathe….

  Then consciousness again: the face was Terry’s and the voice was Terry’s….

  “Take it easy, Smitty.” He was holding my smashed hand…. Then I realized I couldn’t talk. I just gurgled. But Terry understood.

  With Terry’s help, Smith made it to the road, where he was placed into a supply jeep. He was losing a lot of blood. “‘Move fast through the villages,’ I heard some one say. ‘Artillery.’ I prayed, ‘Oh please God, no more artillery.’”50

  Smith was evacuated to a hospital on Guam and underwent several surgeries before he was able to use a camera again. He wrote the text for his story of Terry Moore from a hospital bed, and it appeared with his photographs in Life. Not shown in the picture story was the badly blurred photograph of the explosion that nearly killed him. Smith took it less than a second before he was hit. He left it out because it had nothing to do with Terry.

  While Raymond Sawyer and the 6th Marine Division were still assaulting Sugar Loaf Hill, Eugene Sledge’s Company K moved onto a barren, muddy ridge called Half Moon Hill, a key supporting position for Sugar Loaf Hill, just to the right (west) of them. They had relieved a company of 6th Marine Division that had taken morale-depleting casualties. “They could not remove their dead because of the thousands of Jap shells unleashed on the area,” Sledge writes. “The day we moved onto Half Moon, torrential rains began and did not slacken for ten days. Tanks bogged down and all our attacks had to stop, so we occupied the Hill amid death and heavy shellfire. Almost every shell hole in the area had a dead Marine in it, and they were all infested with maggots. The rain washed the maggots off the dead and into our foxholes….

  “The Japs were attacking every night, and we were killing them in our lines every night. In the Pacific, decay is rapid. We threw mud on the dead bodies with our entrenching tools to hold down the swarms of big flies and maggots. The next day … a few shells came in and blew the corpses apart. There were body parts lying all over the place; we called it ‘Maggot Ridge.’ If we went down the ridge and slipped and fell, we slid all the way to the bottom. When we came to our feet, the maggots were falling out of our dungaree pockets, our cartridge belts and everything else.” And “many of us who fell,” Sledge says, “were covered with our own vomit.”

  A MARINE RIFLEMAN SIGNALS HIS COMPANIONS TO HOLD THEIR FIRE AS A JAPANESE SOLDIER EMERGES FROM A CAVE (NA).

  With rain pouring down on them, with mud caked in their throats, with decaying bodies all around them, with flies swarming in their food, with the landscape butchered beyond belief, and with amoebic dysentery breaking out among the company, “[we] believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.” Beginning on Okinawa, and continuing for the next twenty years, Sledge was afflicted by terrifying nightmares.

  On Okinawa, the dream was always the same. “The dead got up slowly out of their waterlogged craters … and with stooped shoulders and dragging feet, wandered around aimlessly, their lips moving as though trying to tell me something. I struggled to hear what they were saying. They seemed agonized by pain and despair. I felt they were asking me for help. The most horrible thing was that I felt unable to aid them.”51

  Adding to the men’s torment was their complete ignorance of how the battle was going elsewhere, not just in this gully or on that ridge—and their feeling, as more and more of their friends died, that death had become “a kind of epidemic.” As the divisions were bled down, veteran Marines like William Manchester started to see, to their despair, dozens of seventeen year-old boys, fresh out of boot camp. If he were to die, Manchester wanted to die among raggedy ass Marines like himself, not these anxious-looking kids who had barely begun to shave.52

  “What kept you going,” Sledge says, “was the fact that you felt like you had to live up to the demands of your unit and the buddies that were depending on you.”53

  Manchester believes it was all that and more. “To fight World War II you had to have been tempered and strengthened in the 1930s Depression by a struggle for survival—in 1940 two out of every five draftees had been rejected, most of them victims of malnutrition. And you had to know that your whole generation, unlike the Vietnam generation, was in this together, that no strings were being pulled for anybody; the four Roosevelt brothers were in uniform, and the sons of both Harry Hopkins, FDR’s closest advisor, and [Senator] Leverett Saltonstall…. served in the Marine Corps as enlisted men and were killed in action….

  “You also needed nationalism, the absolute conviction that the United States was the envy of all other nations.” And you needed to believe in certain core values. “Debt was ignoble. Courage was a virtue. Mothers were beloved, fathers obeyed. Marriage was a sacrament. Divorce was disgraceful…. [And] you assumed that if you came through this ordeal you would age with dignity, respected as well as adored by your children….

  “All this led you into battle, and sustained you as you fought, and comforted you if you fell, and, if it came to that, justified your death to all who loved you as you had loved them.

  “Later the rules would change. But we didn’t know that then. We didn’t know.”54

  As the 6th Marines continued to hurl themselves against Sugar Loaf Hill, a reporter from Time described one of their assaults: “There were fifty Marines on top of Sugar Loaf Hill. They had been ordered to hold the position all night, at any cost. By dawn, forty-six of them had been killed or wounded. Then, into the foxhole where the remaining four huddled, the Japs dropped a white phosphorus shell, burning three men to death. The last survivor crawled to an aid station.”55

  The Marines tried every tactic, every weapon they had, but the courageous enemy seemed to get even stronger. The Americans could tell by their morning examinations of the Japanese dead that the enemy wasn’t ready to give up. The corpses looked healthy and well fed, the uniforms almost brand-new.

  On May 8, the troops on the Shuri Line learned that Hitler had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker and that Germany had surrendered. “No one cared much,” admits Sledge. “We were resigned only to the fact that the Japanese would fight to total extinction on Okinawa…. Nazi Germany might as well have been on the moon.”56

  By sundown on May 17, the 6th Marine Division had almost given up hope of taking Sugar Loaf Hill. They were worn down and nearly out of ammunition. But they stayed and prevailed. Elements of the Tenth Army, including Sledge’s unit, had taken the hills that flanked Sugar Loaf, threatening to envelop Ushijima, and the next morning Manchester’s 29th Marines, with new tanks, captured the summit and held it. After smashing through the Shuri Line, the Americans pursued the Japanese army as it retreated to a strong line of ridges on the southern end of the island.

  In fifteen days of fighting on the Shuri Line the Japanese had lost nearly 50,000 soldiers. The Marines lost almost 3,000 men, killed or seriously wounded, roughly the same as at Tarawa. The Army took even greater casualties during the same period. As historian George Feifer writes in Tennozan, his searing account of the Battle of Okinawa, “Gaining control of the ‘
pimple of a hill’ … [was] by some measures the hardest single battle in the Pacific War and hardest for Americans anywhere in World Warll.”57

  While Sledge’s 1st Marine Division fought the rear guard that had been left on Shuri Heights, Raymond Sawyer’s regiment marched south on May 22 to join other units of the 6th Marine Division m the capture of Naha. On the morning of June 5, while engaged in a firefight near the city, Sawyer was knocked unconscious by the blast of a 60mm mortar shell. He woke up in a cave that had been set up for emergency surgery and learned he had shrapnel wounds all over his body. A surgeon from his hometown of Woburn, Massachusetts, sewed up his abdomen and sent him to a hospital plane, to be flown to Guam for additional surgery. On June 25, 1945. in a brief ceremony at the fleet hospital on Guam, Admiral Nimitz presented him with the Navy Cross for heroism on Sugar Loaf Hill.

  THE STEEPLE OF A CATHOLIC CHURCH BELOW SHURI CASTLE PROVIDED A SNIPER’S NEST FOR THE JAPANESE (USMC).

  Back on Okinawa, on June 2, William Manchester suffered a superficial gunshot wound, the million-dollar wound that was the dream of almost every fighting man. He was out of the war, temporarily, in a well-run field hospital, eating hot food on clean plates and listening to Jack Benny on the radio. But when he learned that his 6th Marine Division was going to bypass Naha and make an amphibious landing behind Japanese lines he went AWOL, and made the successful landing with them. Early the next morning, he was standing around with some friends when he heard a familiar shriek. Seconds later, an eight-inch shell landed yards away from them. One of his buddies disintegrated, flesh, bones, and blood flying everywhere. When Manchester woke up on the ground he was blind (temporarily) and deaf (with both eardrums ruptured) and his body was punctured by shards of shrapnel and pieces of his dead friend’s bones. He was left for dead, but a corpsman found him, gave him two shots of morphine, and arranged for his evacuation to Saipan.

  Pursuing the enemy south of the Shuri Line, the Tenth Army was forced to do a lot of “cave flushing.” Working in small teams, sometimes with tanks equipped with long-range flamethowers, infantrymen would call into a cave, often with bullhorns, demanding that the occupants come out with their hands high. If the occupants refused, the cave blowers dropped fifty-five-gallon drums of napalm into the mouth of the cave, ignited them with phosphorus grenades, and mowed down every enemy soldier who tried to escape. To avoid death by fire and suffocation, some Japanese sol diers crawled into the deepest reaches of caves and pressed live grenades to their bellies. Civilians hid with soldiers in these caves and uncounted thousands of them were buried alive.

  If the Japanese soldiers agreed to corne out with their hands up, they were sometimes shot anyway. Americans did not trust their intentions. A surviving Japanese officer recalls that “when Americans urged Japanese soldiers to come out of their caves, they would put hand grenades under their armpits. Outside, they’d get as close as possible to the Americans, throw the grenades and try to fly back into the caves.”

  Some enemy soldiers put on Okinawan kimonos and hid grenades or small demolition charges under them. This caused innocent citizens to be killed by nervous American soldiers who shot anyone who moved suspiciously. One devoutly religious Marine found it “pretty hard at first” to accept that “our people were shooting human beings who weren’t necessarily military. But after I saw what their people—including civilians—did with their hands up, I worried about us, not them. I wanted to leave Okinawa alive!”

  To the Japanese and Okinawans, the flamethrower was the most terrifying weapon in the American arsenal. But the men carrying them were as frightened of the enemy as the enemy was of them. A flamethrower man had ninety-five pounds of lethal firepower strapped to his back. One bullet in the tank meant instant incineration. And because of the weight of the tank, he could not crawl or lie flat if fired upon; nor did he carry a rifle. “You couldn’t see them in [their hiding places], but they could see you—a perfect bull’s eve without a rifle,” recalls Evan Regal, a farm boy from upstate New York. “Every time I had to walk up to a hole, I was scared out of my mind because I was a sitting duck.” Casualties among flamethrowers were far higher than for riflemen. “I stepped over hit flamethrowers like logs.” said one infantryman.

  A DEMOLITION SQUAD PREPARES TO BLOW UP A JAPANESE CAVE (SC).

  Regal describes a typical cave flushing operation: “You pulled the triggers—there were two—just as soon as you thought your flame could reach them. In it went and all hell’d break loose. You heard the shuffling and the screaming and almost always some would come running, their hair and clothes on fire, for the riflemen to pick them off…. Napalm stuck to their skin like jelly glue even when they ran out, and we used napalm most of the time on Okinawa….

  “You have utterly no compassion for their screams because you’ve seen so many of your own cut down and you know it can be you the next second; if you give them the slightest, chance, they’ll put a bullet between your eyes…. All you care about the Japs is that they fry fast.”58

  For civilians, the battle south of the Shuri Line was a wholesale slaughter. Up to 100,000 noncombatants died in the month of June. As the Japanese troops retreated, the terrified civilian population went with them, filling the roads and villages with an almost indistinguishable mixture of combatants and noncombatants. So they were killed in nearly equal numbers, “grandfathers, grandmothers, mothers with children on their backs, scurrying along, covered in mud,” in the words of one refugee.59

  Those not killed by random American fire died of disease, starvation, and a score of other war-related causes, including suicide. As at Marpi Point, many jumped from high cliffs into the shallow surf. The Navy tried to stop them, and tried to rescue those who were pinned to the bottom of the cliffs, terror-stricken at the sight of the American naval guns glaring at them. “Those who can swim, swim out!” Navy translators in a rescue boat shouted to a group of Okinawans standing in the breakers. “Those who can’t swim, walk toward Minatogawa! Walk by day. Don’t travel by night. We have food! We will rescue you!”

  A FLAMETHROWER ATTACKS A HIDDEN ENEMY POSITION (SC).

  “They actually did!” recalls Miyagi Kikuko, a sixteen-year-old member of an Okinawan student defense group who was trapped with her friends in the churning surf. “They took care of Okinawans really well, according to international law, hut we only learned that later. We thought we were hearing the voices of demons. From the time we’d been children we’d only been educated to hate them. They would strip the girls naked and do with them whatever they wanted, then run over them with tanks. We really believed that…. So what we had been taught [by the Japanese] robbed us of life…. Had we known the truth, all of us would have survived…. Anyway, we didn’t answer that voice.”

  The next day three of Miyagi Kikuko’s friends were killed by random American fire and ten classmates gathered in a cliffside cave and pulled the pin of a hand grenade they had been carrying. “When the firing stopped I … stepped out over the corpses,” she recalls. “The automatic rifles of four or five American soldiers were aimed right at me. My grenade was taken away. I had held it to the last minute.”

  Miyagi Kikuko was fed and taken to a camp in the north, where she was reunited with her mother and father. “Mother, barefoot, ran out of a tent in the ramp and hugged me to her. ‘You lived, you lived!’”60

  In the Battle of Okinawa at least a third of the island’s population of almost 490,000 died, and nearly every town and burial tomb was turned into smoking rubble. Few people suffered as greatly in modern warfare as the Okinawans. Their losses in property and lives show how horrible an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have been for civilians, whether they resisted or not. In early June, Eugene Sledge’s 1st Marine Division was sent south to assault the western anchor of the enemy’s final defensive line at Kunishi Ridge, a sheer coral cliff laced with caves and gun emplacements. As Sledge approached Kunishi “its crest looked so like Bloody Nose [Ridge] that my knees nearly buckled. I felt as though I wer
e on Peleliu and had it all to go through again.” The week-long battle for Kunishi finished off the Japanese on Okinawa, and on June 20 Sledge’s battalion was one of the first American units to reach the southern tip of the island. They stood on a hill overlooking the sea and felt a surge of accomplishment. “This was different from Peleliu. We could see its meaning.”61

  The next morning, Sledge went with his company’s corpsman to assist some Marines who had been attacked by two Japanese officers wielding samurai sabers. One of the officers lay dead on the ground when Sledge arrived at the scene. “Nothing remained of his head from the nose up—just a mass of crushed skull, brains, and bloody pulp. A grimy Marine with a dazed expression stood over the Japanese. With a foot planted firmly on the ground on each side of the enemy officer’s body, the Marine held his rifle by the forestock with both hands and slowly and mechanically moved it up and down like a plunger.” Sledge winced each time it struck the “gory mass” that had been the man’s face. Then he and a friend took the sick, war shattered Marine by the arms and led him away. He went unresisting, almost like a “sleep walker.” Sledge helped the corpsman drag the broken body of the enemy officer to a gun position and roll it down a hill.

  On June 21, 1945, the Tenth Army declared the island secured, after eighty-two days of fighting. What followed for Sledge and Company K was worse, they thought, than the battle. They were ordered to clean out diehard Japanese defenders and to bury the enemy dead in their area. “It was,” Sledge says, “the ultimate indignity,” digging graves for the men who had been trying to kill them for the last seven weeks.62

  When they were finally sent back up north Sledge began to look for old friends. He didn’t find many. Only twenty-six Peleliu veterans who had landed with the company survived the fight.