D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  It was the bloodiest campaign of the Pacific war. Total American combat casualties were 12,510 killed or missing in action (4,675 Army, 2,928 Marines, and 4,907 Navy)—almost twice that of Iwo Jima—36,613 wounded, and a slightly lower number of nonbattle casualties, including pychiatric cases, accidents, and illnesses. In all, American losses were nearly 73,000, only slightly less than the number of trained defenders they fought. The American Army counted 107,559 enemy dead, but thousands of others were sealed in caves, never to become statistics. On Okinawa, the Japanese lost more men than the American armed forces—Marines, Army, Navy, and Coast Guard—lost in the entire Pacific war.63 And more people—combatants and noncombatants—died than were killed in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.64

  The butcher’s bill would have been higher, and the battle longer and more difficult, had it not been for the logistics miracle pulled off by the U.S. Navy. Seriously wounded men—over 150 of them a day—were evacuated by air and sea to Guam. This translated into a mortality rate among the wounded that was half that of other Pacific battles, roughly 2.8 percent, the rate of the European theater. Medical personnel on the island had available to them whole blood that was donated in the United States, flown to the West Coast under refrigeration, shipped to Guam in thirty-six hours, and transshipped from there to Okinawa. In all, the Tenth Army used more than 15,000 gallons of whole blood. Unless a man was very badly hit, his chances of survival were excellent.

  The Japanese, by contrast, had to treat their wounded on the firing line or in dark, stinking hospital caves, where drugs were perilously scarce, medical supplies medieval, and infection from dirt and vermin rampant. And those that died were denied a proper burial because of unrelenting American artillery fire. The enemy dead were either left on the battlefield, stacked in caves, or placed in shallow holes.

  Excellent logistics also allowed American soldiers and sailors to prevail in a battle far from their main bases, 6,200 miles from San Francisco and 4,000 miles from Pearl Harbor. Fuel, bombs, and ammunition were shuttled into the area from Ulithi and the Marianas, two great fleet tankers sailing from Guam every day. And supply ships brought in the myriad items required for the invasion force to absorb and deliver tremendous punishment without a serious drop-off in morale: 2.7 million packs of cigarettes, 1.2 million candy bars, over 24 million pieces of mail, and more critically 854 replacement planes and 207 replacement pilots, an effort alone that required four escort carriers shuttling weekly from Ulithi and Guam and seventeen more steaming to and from the American West Coast and the Marianas.65

  Okinawa was the only major battle in the Pacific in which the commanding officers of both sides died. Ushijima committed suicide, and Buckner was killed by enemy artillery fire near the end of the fight. A sizable number of prisoners were captured, 7,401. Although about half of them were conscripted Okinawans, this was evidence, perhaps, of growing disillusionment among recent conscripts in the Japanese army. Even so, far greater numbers committed suicide or fought on when death was a certainty. Their disregard for death rested, not in hope, but in the despairing conviction that, with defeat inevitable, their lives must be sacrificed to protect family, homeland, and Emperor.66*

  Few American soldiers who participated in the death struggle on Okinawa believed that the Japanese army could be beaten short of utter annihilation. Reporters who covered the action agreed. “People out here attach more importance to the Kamikaze method of attack as an illustration of the Japanese state of mind than as a weapon of destruction,” wrote New York Times correspondent W. H. Lawrence. “Considered carefully, the fact that literally thousands of men, many of them young and in their prime, will go out alone on missions of certain death to achieve results that even at best would not be commensurate with the sacrifice, is certainly not one calculated to breed optimism.”

  The brutal eighty-two day campaign had convinced the soldiers and Marines that Lawrence interviewed that the war with Japan “may well last for years, instead of months, as some optimists hope,” and that it could be won only “by ground action. Large-scale bombing and fleet action unquestionably will reduce the enemy’s power of resistance, they believe, but when his soldiers and sailors hole up in caves, as they did on this island, they can be flushed out and killed only by foot soldiers supported by tanks and flamethrowers.”

  Nor did the American fighting men who won our greatest victory in the Pacific see any strong evidence of the Japanese soldier losing his will to resist. “The record number of prisoners taken in the final days of this campaign can be considered only a minor gain for our psychological warfare efforts when it is measured against the unabated fanaticism with which the enemy fought,” wrote Lawrence. Considering this, “hope for quick victory dims.

  “There are too many crosses in the seven Division cemeteries on Okinawa for anyone to say that disposing of the Japanese is a one-handed job, requiring only a 50 percent home-front effort, now that Germany is out of the war.”67

  In early July rumors started to run through the ranks that the troops on Okinawa would hit Japan next. As Sledge said, “No one wanted to talk about that.”68

  *The Normandy armada included 110 big-gunned warships—six battleships, twenty-three cruisers, and eighty-one destroyers.

  No precise figures are available for the number of Allied fighting men that landed in Normandy on the first day of the invasion. Stephen E. Ambrose sets the figure at 175,000, while a number of other historians put it at somewhere near 153,000, which I think is about right. These figures include the 23,000 troops landed by parachute or glider.

  While the size of the ground forces available on the opening day of the Normandy and Okinawa operations was roughly equivalent, the buildup in Normandy dwarfed that at Okinawa, where the Americans fought essentially with what they brought with them on April 1. By contrast, after a week, some 430,000 men had been brought across the English Channel to the French coast. After a month, the number had grown to over a million. This makes Overlord indisputably the largest amphibious invasion in history.2

  *These high figures are probably the result of the double counting of kills by pilots and gunners. The true figure is probably closer to 3,000 combat losses.

  *In an astute study of MacArthur’s psychological warfare campaign in the Southwest Pacific. You Can’t Fight Tanks with Bayonets: Psychological Warfare Against the Japanese Army in the Southwest Pacific (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), Allison B. Gilmore argues that the morale of Japanese soldiers fighting MacArthur began to drop once they perceived Japan’s military situation deteriorating fatally. But as historian Richard B. Frank argues, “translating depressed morale into a greater rate of battlefield surrenders, much less a national surrender … is another matter.” Gilmore reports that 7,297 Japanese were captured on Luzon. But the Japanese had 287,000 troops there. “This makes the rate of battlefield surrenders just 2.5 percent,” Frank writes, “which is virtually indistinguishable from the 1 to 3 percent rates in the ferocious battles elsewhere.” Frank, Downfall, 71-72.

  The Setting Sun

  BURMA

  When American troops invaded Okinawa in April 1944, the Japanese army in China was bogged down in the greatest guerilla war of the century, carrying out well-organized “annihilation campaigns” against guerrillas and their village supporters, extermination operations that killed over two and a half million noncombatants. Only if killing was winning did they hold the upper hand. In every other Asian theater the Imperial Army had either been defeated or backed up on its heels. “The Japs in this area are on the run,” Marvin Kastenbaum, an American GI, wrote his family from Namhpakka, Burma, “and where I was sitting yesterday. I could see the famous Burma Road.”1

  The turning point in Burma had come in August 1945. At the Quebec Conference, Roosevelt and Churchill decided that the time was propitious for a counteroffensive against Chinese-held Burma. Lord Louis Mountbatten was named supreme commander in Southeast Asia and Vinegar Joe Stilwell, who had led a h
eroic retreat from Burma in the spring of 1942, was given command of Chinese and American ground forces. With the Japanese controlling the Burma Road, Stilwell’s most urgent task was to reopen a supply line to China. He had already established an air transport system over the Hump to supply Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist Army from India. By the end of 1943, the American “Humpsters,” flying underpowered cargo planes through some of the most wretched weather in the world, were delivering more supplies to China than had ever gone over the Burma Road.

  This allowed the Chinese to tie down over a million Japanese troops that could have been deployed in the Pacific against MacArthur and Nimitz. “Strong winds, with speeds sometimes exceeding one hundred miles per hour, created mountain waves and vertical sheers that could overturn an aircraft, send it rocketing upward for thousands of feet or plunge it downward into the mountains. According to the season, thunderstorms, torrential rains, hail, sleet, snow, and severe icing held sway,” recalls an American flier. “Bring me men to match my weather,” was the Humpster’s motto. If pilots survived hits by Japanese Zeros they parachuted into unfathomable jungle, a fifteen-minute fall from 17,000 feet. Those not picked up by rescue teams, among them the American reporter Eric Sevareid, walked out of “tiger country” with the help of upcountry headhunted.2

  THE HEAD OF A JAPANESE SOLDIER HANGS FROM A TREE ALONG THE BURMA ROAD TO LASHIO IN NORTHERN BURMA, FEBRUARY 1945 (NA).

  Late in 1943, American engineers and 15,000 American troops—60 percent of them African-Americans—began building a new road to connect Ledo, Assam, in eastern India, with that part of the Burma Road still in enemy hands. But first the Japanese had to be cleared from northern Burma. British Major General Orde Wingate and his raiders, called Chindits, after the statues of dragons that guard Burmese temples, had already begun this operation, crossing from India through Japanese lines and wrecking airfields, blowing up bridges, and dynamiting railways. Wingate’s Chindits were second-line troops—nearly all of them married men from the north of England, aged twenty-eight to thirty-five. Wingate told them they had to imitate Tarzan. “For six sweltering months in the Indian jungles he trained them in river crossing, infiltration tactics and long forced marches with heavy packs, until they were the toughest of shock troops,” wrote Charles Rolo, a war correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. On returning from the raid one private remarked: “The whole job was a piece of cake compared to the training.”

  The Chindits lived on rice, vultures, jungle roots, and grass soup, and kept in touch with one another by carrier pigeons, birdcalls, and messenger dogs. Elephants carried their mortars and folding boats; carts drawn by oxen were stacked high with machine guns and boxes of grenades. Supplies were dropped in by air. Looking like some desert prophet with his long beard and a blanket draped over his shoulders, Wingate drove his raiders mercilessly, reminding them that their security lay in speed.3

  Wingate’s raiders and their American prototype, Merrill’s Marauders, organized by Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill, harried the enemy in northern Burma while Stilwell fought down from China to protect the construction of the Ledo—later named the Stilwell—Road. Meanwhile, the Japanese went on the offensive in March 1944, attacking across the Indian border at Imphal, the main base of Lieutenant General William Slim’s Fourteenth Imperial Army. They ran into unexpectedly strong resistance, and the British were soon counterattacking, aided by vengeful Burmese hill men. The miserably supplied Japanese invasion army was destroyed and a starving remnant limped back into Burma. Fifty thousand of the 80,000 elite troops that had begun the confident push into India died. British losses were equally appalling. But in 1944 the Japanese were in full retreat down the road they had come up in 1942, the road to Mandalay, to Rangoon, and to Tokyo.

  In the closing months of 1944, Stilwell’s army, now commanded by Major General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who replaced Stilwell as Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff, cleared the way for the opening of the Stilwell Road. This epochal engineering achievement rose as high as 4,500 feet through the Patkai Mountains and passed through untouched wilderness. “The work was done principally by black combat engineers,” recalls one of the African-American truck drivers on the Ledo Road. “I take my hat off to those guys, talk about cliff-hangers, and in bulldozers, no less. They took the turns out of the road and made curves.”4

  On January 28, 1945, the first convoy, consisting of fifty African-American and fifty Chinese drivers, drove over the Hump and crossed into China.

  Over the next four months the Allies launched a coordinated offensive. Three armies converged on the Japanese in Burma: the American-trained Chinese from the north, General Slim’s Fourteenth Imperial Army from the center, and three divisions of Indian and African troops from the south. Before these overwhelming forces Mandalay fell on March 20 and Rangoon on May 3. After liberating Burma and inflicting over 500,000 casualties on the Japanese army, General Slim began planning the liberation of Malaya and Singapore, an enormous operation that the end of the war would thankfully make unnecessary.

  HELL SHIPS AND DOG CAGES

  As Japanese power crumbled in Southeast Asia and the Central Pacific, and as military conscription drained Japan’s industrial workforce, the government began shipping great numbers of prisoners of war to the home islands. There they worked as laborers in shipyards, steel mills, coal mines, and other vital sectors of the economy. These industrial slaves were transported by sea in the steaming overcrowded holds of merchant vessels, where thousands died of starvation, disease, and suffocation. The death toll rose alarmingly in late 1944 when Allied warships and planes gained domination of Japan’s shipping lanes in preparation for the invasion of the Philippines. The Japanese refused to mark the ships that carried its prisoners of war, and these slow-moving, lightly armed vessels were easy prey for Allied submarines and fighter planes. Over the course of the war, approximately 21,000 Allied POWs died at sea, about 19,000 of them killed by friendly fire. By comparison, about 20,000 Marines died in the entire Pacific war.5

  The Arisan Maru, torpedoed by an American submarine, took down with it over twice as many American POWs as died on the Bataan Death March, almost 1,800. No combatants in the war suffered and died more horribly than did the prisoners on these hell ships. And driven insane by their conditions, prisoners sometimes killed one another.

  Sergeant Forrest Knox was one of ninety-nine men from the small town of Janesville, Wisconsin, to be captured by the Japanese after the surrender of Bataan. in September 1944, as MacArthur’s armies prepared to land in the Philippines, Knox was working with an 800-man crew on airfield construction at a camp near Manila. He worked barefoot, in a G-string and straw hat, digging ditches and draining mosquito-infested rice paddies with shovels made out of thin sheet iron. He was losing his eyesight and all feeling m his legs, he had malaria and hookworm, and he weighed barely ninety pounds. He had managed to keep only two things from the Bataan Death March, a toothbrush and a filthy neck towel, which had kept him from dying from heat stroke. As Admiral Halsey’s planes pounded the airfields around Manila, he was moved with prisoners from other camps to Bilibid, a compound in Manila, where he ran into some old buddies from his Janesville National Guard tank unit. They and approximately a thousand other prisoners were to be shipped to Japan in the stinking hold of a rusty freighter called the Haro Maru. It was a place that soon became, in Forrest Knox’s words, “a madhouse.”

  DEATH SHIP POWs (SC).

  THEY PUT 500 OF US IN one hold and 500 in the other…. After the ship was loaded, tugs pulled us away from the dock and moored us to a buoy in the harbor. Tropical sun on a steel deck. Body heat from 500 men packed together. All around men began passing out. They just slid down out of sight, where men stepped or stood on them….

  As a guy goes crazy he starts to scream—not like a woman, more like the howl of a dog…. It must have been 120 or 125 degrees in that hold. The Japs’ favorite trick was to cut off our water. It was bad enough in other places when they did this, but
there, in this oven, when they cut it off, guys started going crazy. People running, people screaming. An American colonel was on deck. There was always some Americans topside who were used to raise and lower the honey buckets and food tubs. The Japs told the colonel to tell us to be quiet. He shouted down, “Be quiet or the Japs will completely cover over the hatch with canvas.” …

  With the temperature we were in, if they’d closed off that little air we got, 1 don’t know how many of us would have been alive by morning. I had picked up the habit of wearing a small sweat towel around my forehead…. The next guy that went by screaming they caught and killed…. He was strangled with my little towel. A guy that had worked in a mental institution in Pennsylvania knew how to do it. Several others were also killed [strangled or beaten to death with canteens]. The crazy ones … howled because they were afraid to die—but now the ground rules changed. If they howled, they died. The screaming stopped…. The Japs didn’t cover the hatch.

  “No one was ever punished for these deaths,” says Private William R. Evans, who was in the hold with Knox, “and the Japs didn’t give a shit.”6

  The last of the death ships to leave the Philippines was the passenger cargo vessel Oryoku Maru. It pulled away from the Manila docks on December 13, carrying 1,619 POWs in her holds, along with over 2,000 Japanese merchant seamen and civilians, who were quartered above deck. All but thirty of the prisoners were Americans.

  “We were jammed in the holds,” recalls Lieutenant Melvin Rosen, a young American artillery officer. “There was no place to lie down; some people couldn’t even sit down, and everybody had diarrhea. The floorboards were full of human waste and vomit, and the stench was unbearable. The temperature was over 100 degrees, and people started going mad that first night, screaming for water and air. Some guys drank their own urine, and it drove them crazy.” Others scraped the sweat off the steel sides of the ship and tried to drink it. “One person near me,” says Private First Class Lee Davis, “cut another person’s throat and was holding the canteen so he could catch the blood.”