The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  Okinawa was Laird’s fifth beachhead. Repetition did not make it easier.

  Determined to fight on their own terms, the Japanese allowed the massive Allied force—180,000 men, plus 40 aircraft carriers and 18 battleships—to land largely unmolested on Okinawa beaches. (An overwhelming Allied flotilla of 1,500 naval vessels and 350,000 men bobbed offshore.) The Japanese waited patiently. They were holed up in a confounding network of tunnels, pillboxes, and limestone caves, scattered through the dense jungle and the island’s 1,600-foot highlands. The Allied force was led by Lieutenant General Simon Buckner, who had directed the Alaskan Defense Command.

  Laird and the Americans landed on April 1, which was both Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day. For the first three days, he faced only light fighting. On April 4, however, he had advanced about halfway up the island from the western shore when he and his buddy from Fort Ord in California, Sergeant Harold Gellein, approached a fortified line of Japanese defense. Laird stood on one side of a knoll and Gellein stood twelve feet away on the other side. With no warning the air exploded with a wild mix of bullets and mortars. Laird and Gellein both hit the ground, but Gellein did not get up. When the shooting subsided, Laird checked on his friend. He had been ripped apart by a chunk of shrapnel. He didn’t survive long enough for last words.

  Laird was overcome with grief. His friend was one of the few in his unit roughly the same age. Laird admired him for his smarts. Just before his Army induction, Gellein graduated from the University of Idaho. The two men had fought side by side on Attu, Kiska, Kwajalein, Leyte, and now Okinawa. Gellein had never met his two-year-old son, who lived with his wife, Hildreth, in Weiser, Idaho. Laird could not stop thinking about Gellein’s widow and child. He also could not help but wonder what would have happened if Laird had been two steps closer to his Army buddy.

  His friend’s death was terrible, but it could have been even worse. Gellein’s body was recovered. As days and weeks of battle rocked Okinawa, bullets and bombardments became so intense that it became impossible to retrieve fallen colleagues. Hundreds of bodies piled up in the thick tropical air cut daily by drenching rains. Allies and Japanese remained confined to the same foxholes for days, and relied on ammo boxes for latrines. Okinawa reeked of fecund death and sewage. Laird learned to breathe through his mouth. Years later, survivors would still gag when asked about the battlefield smell of Okinawa.

  With relentless shelling and so many bodies decomposing in the tropical heat for so long, the Allies suffered unprecedented battle fatigue and mental damage. More than 26,000 American troops had to be pulled from the front lines in Okinawa as psychiatric casualties.

  Horrific tactics by the Japanese caused many of the mental breakdowns. Before the Allies landed, the Japanese Army ordered 1,700 Okinawan teenagers, age fourteen to seventeen, into battle as the Blood and Iron Student Corps. Hundreds were forced into suicide attacks. U.S. servicemen had to shoot children or be blown up by them.

  Offshore the Japanese embraced even more suicide attacks. Dozens of sixteen-foot speedboats were crammed with 600 pounds of explosives and rammed by individual Japanese sailors into American ships; several shinyo, or suicide boats, succeeded because the boats were deliberately constructed of wood to evade detection by radar. At least three American ships were sunk by shinyo.

  The hellfire from the sky was even worse. From April through June, nearly 2,000 kamikaze pilots ended their own lives trying to crash into Allied ships. On April 6 alone, more than 300 Japanese planes set off on a one-way trip for the United States Fifth Fleet off Okinawa. John Chapman was a gunner on the stern of the USS Newcomb when four dozen kamikaze planes approached. “Well, it was a scary situation, because you knew that they were going to dive on you,” Chapman said. “You could be firing on the aircraft, and they’d come right on, just keep coming right on through that. And you’d see pieces flying over the planes and everything else, and they’d just keep right on a-coming.” His ship shot down four planes but five other kamikazes plowed into the 376-foot destroyer. Ninety-one sailors were killed or wounded on the Newcomb. The surviving crew managed to keep the ship afloat, and she was towed twenty miles to another harbor for repairs under more gunfire.

  At Okinawa, kamikazes killed 5,000 Allied sailors and wounded another 5,000. The suicide attacks sank thirty ships and damaged 400.

  On shore the battle was even bloodier. Increasingly desperate, the Japanese began to suspect many Okinawans of spying. When natives were heard conversing in a local dialect that the Japanese could not understand, they shot them. A thousand Okinawans were executed for speaking their own language.

  Many more natives were either forced or coerced to kill themselves. Okinawans described hundreds of cases of family members and natives being handed grenades and forced to hold them against their chests for detonation.

  Sumie Oshiro gathered with her friends in a tight circle, pulled the pin on a grenade, and waited for it to explode. It didn’t. Like the Americans on Attu, she could not figure out how to detonate a Japanese grenade. She was rescued by American soldiers before it could go off.

  Japanese soldiers also spread rumors of Americans binding the hands and feet of civilians to run over them with tanks. As a result, when American soldiers approached, many Okinawan citizens panicked and killed themselves to avoid capture. On the nearby island of Geruma, where 58 of 130 residents committed suicide, Takejiro Nakamura was hiding in a cave with his mother and sister when the Americans approached. “Kill me now, hurry,” his twenty-year-old sister told his mother, who tightened a rope around the neck until her daughter was dead. Takejiro tried self-suffocation but failed. “It’s really tough to kill yourself,” he later told The New York Times. When American soldiers found Takejiro and his mother alive in the cave, they gave them candy and cigarettes.

  His mother lived into her eighties. She and her son would talk later about the war, but she never uttered a word about killing her daughter.

  As days turned to weeks and then to months on Okinawa, frustration and despair mounted. The Japanese used hundreds of civilians as human shields. The Americans claimed they had a difficult time telling civilians from enemy soldiers, and many were shot. Okinawans reported many cases of American troops firing indiscriminately on their houses.

  Laird had taken cover near dusk in a cave when he became convinced that an enemy soldier was sneaking up. He opened fire, but saw nothing fall. He waited. No movement. He organized a squad and they filed out slowly in diminishing light. They found that Laird had obliterated a tree stump.

  The next night Laird was standing watch when someone with a knapsack walked swiftly along a dirt road. “Stop!” Laird called, but the person said nothing and picked up the pace. Laird released the safety on his .45 caliber autoloader and aimed.

  Then he hesitated. What if that knapsack wasn’t filled with grenades? What if that person wasn’t a Japanese soldier? “Stop!” he called again, to no effect. He could see that it wasn’t a soldier. It was a woman.

  He still panicked. Was she a suicide bomber? He had put other soldiers at risk. He had let an Okinawan woman laden with explosives pass through his watch. He quickly phoned his battalion headquarters and warned of the bomber moving up the road.

  A few minutes later, before she could detonate her bomb, other American soldiers jumped from both sides of the road and pounced on the woman. They pinned back her arms and wrestled her to the ground. They grabbed the backpack.

  Inside was a baby. The bomber Laird had called in turned out to be a mother with a baby in a backpack.

  In the night air the mother screamed. The baby bawled.

  Laird broke out in cold sweat. He had come within a millimeter’s squeeze on a trigger of killing mother and child. He could not bear it. That night he was so afraid of nightmares that he did not let himself fall asleep. He did not think of falling back from the front for a rest. Strong men, he believed, fought on. He had seen men collapsed in a shivering mess from horrors they had seen, and men who had
shot themselves in the foot or hand to escape duty. He could not allow himself to be seen as someone who admitted weakness, especially when so many others had fallen.

  When headquarters sent reinforcements, Laird was grateful. His men were spent. Two soldiers, however, were green. Laird was wary of newcomers with little experience, but figured they were better than shell-shocked veterans. The new soldiers were friends. One was blond and 200 pounds; the other had dark hair and weighed about 165. Both looked strong, and Laird hoped they could hump more than their share of gear. Laird told them which soldiers to replace and where they were positioned, and then he sent them off with a word of caution: Stay in single file on the trail.

  There was a lull in the shelling and the new men became distracted. The smaller soldier wandered a couple feet of the trail and set off a landmine. He and his buddy were blown to pieces. They had lasted just hours in the field. Laird either could not or would not remember their names—it hurt too much.

  After their experience on Attu, Laird and other soldiers from the 7th Division kept waiting for the enemy banzai attack. The Japanese, however, changed tactics. The Okinawa commander, General Mitsuru Ushijima, decided that his best shot was to withdraw troops facing imminent defeat instead of sacrificing them with banzai charges. By pulling back soldiers, Ushijima wanted to prolong the battle on Okinawa as long as possible to give his superiors more time to prepare for the imminent Allied invasion of the Japanese homeland. Surrounded by a massive enemy force, Ushijima did everything he could to make a war of attrition as costly as possible.

  By the beginning of May, there were hundreds of bodies at the base of every hill. In the confusing maze of fortified underground tunnels and bunkers, the Japanese furiously defended every inch, then set booby traps before they fled. The Americans found that guns weren’t enough to win battles in underground tunnels, forcing them to resort to explosives and flamethrowers. Some tunnels were cleared only after Americans poured hot oil into them to scald the enemy to death. Maggots became a part of everyday life.

  While reporting on the Battle of Okinawa, beloved war correspondent Ernie Pyle was riding in a jeep with a commander on the nearby isle of Iejima when sniper fire broke out. Pyle was struck in the temple and died instantly.

  Laird thought Okinawa couldn’t get worse, but it did. Two men from his outfit were killed when their jeep ran over a landmine. He encountered dozens of Okinawans, women and children, who were walking skeletons dying of starvation. Another civilian blew herself up with a grenade as he approached.

  Finally his unit was pulled back off the lines for a rest near Ginoza in the northern end of the island. His mind was as exhausted as his body. Even miles from the battle, he still smelled death.

  His company was watching a movie when there was an interruption: Laird’s name was called over the public address system. He was ordered to report immediately to battalion headquarters.

  What had he done wrong? Did he forget some assignment? Was there bad news from home?

  It was May 17, 1945, and Laird was being sent home.

  Troops had talked for months about an Army point system that allowed soldiers to accumulate enough credit to leave the war. Under the Advanced Service Rating system, soldiers earned one point for every month of service; one point for every month in service overseas; five points for every combat award and theater stars worn on campaign ribbons; and twelve points for every child at home under the age of eighteen. Laird had earned more than the magic number, which was 85 points. As far as he knew, he was in the first group of thirty servicemen in the 7th Infantry Division to be released from the war under the point system.

  He turned in his guns and gear and boarded a C-54 airplane.

  He was done with war.

  He was going home.

  The Battle of Okinawa raged on for weeks after Laird left the island. On June 18, General Buckner was inspecting American troops at a forward observation post when a Japanese artillery shell blasted into a rock outcropping and splintered shards of coral. Buckner was struck in the chest. He was rushed away on a stretcher to a field aid station, where he died on the operating table. The former Alaska commander who oversaw the Battle of Attu, Buckner was the highest-ranking United States military officer killed by enemy fire in World War II.

  The next day, June 19, Japanese General Mitsuru Ushijima realized all hope was lost. He ordered his remaining troops to convert to guerrilla warfare. “With a burning desire to destroy the arrogant enemy, the men in my command have fought the invaders for almost three months,” Ushijima wrote in a farewell letter. “We have failed to crush the enemy, despite our death-defying resistance, and now we are doomed.”

  Ushijima’s colonel asked to commit suicide to prevent capture by the Americans, but Ushijima refused: “If you die, there will be no one left who knows the truth about the battle of Okinawa,” Ushijima told him. “Bear the temporary shame but endure it. This is an order from your Army commander.”

  The colonel said he followed Ushijima and his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Isamu Cho, into a cave, where the two top commanders exchanged poems. Ushijima wrote, “We spend arrows and bullets to stain heaven and earth, defending our homeland forever.” Cho’s poem concluded, “We have used up our withered lives. But our souls race to heaven.” Each man plunged a ceremonial dagger into his belly, and a captain with a razor-sharp sword sliced off the head of Ushijima first, then Cho, under the seppuku suicide ritual.

  In three months, more than eight million rounds of artillery and mortar had been fired, the equivalent of nearly one shell per second. Okinawa was the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. More than 14,000 Allied troops were killed, including 12,500 Americans, and another 50,000 were wounded, with an additional 26,000 psychological casualties. Estimates of the Japanese dead ranged from 77,000 to 110,000. Another 10,000 were captured as prisoners of war, the first time large numbers of Japanese soldiers had surrendered instead of fighting to the death.

  The biggest single loss, however, were the civilians of Okinawa. An estimated 100,000 noncombatants died either by war or suicide, forced and coerced. That was one of every three residents of Okinawa. After the shooting ceased on June 23, Okinawan women reported frequent rapes by American soldiers.

  Many historians believe it was the sheer savagery and brutality of Okinawa that dissuaded the United States from launching an American ground invasion of mainland Japan. If 100,000 Japanese troops could render such atrocity and heartbreak on an outlying island, what kind of death and destruction could result from as many as two million troops defending their homeland? The atrocities of Okinawa would fester as a frightening caution to civilized society.

  PART FOUR

  PEACE

  19

  * * *

  Joy and Laura

  By now, Taeko Tatsuguchi was used to hardship. The government rationed all the basics—food, shoes, medicine, bandages, sewing needles, nails, cooking oil. Clothes were extremely difficult to come by; textile production for anyone except the military was all but halted in 1941. Like many mothers, though, she was able to make do. Through friends from her church she could swap booties as daughters outgrew theirs. Her clothes could be cut down and refashioned into children’s clothes, which could then be either swapped or converted into diapers, depending on which need was more pressing at the time. As food shortages increased, so, too, did the popularity of a street black market. Everyone wanted rice, but it was in short supply. Taeko was lucky to have developed a taste for different food when she lived with her husband in the United States. She was surviving.

  And then came the telegram. Before that notification from the Imperial Army she did not have many material goods, but she did have hope. One piece of paper changed that.

  She dreamed of reuniting with her parents in Hawaii, but war meant she could not send them a letter, much less visit.

  Tokyo did not seem safe. Like her husband, Taeko had seen the might of the United States, and she feared it soon would be trained on
the capital city of Japan. She could not afford her current apartment, and she could not find enough food for herself and two daughters.

  She left Tokyo with the girls and moved seventy miles north to Ibaraki Prefecture, where an uncle offered them a wooden shed to live in. It was one room, with no indoor plumbing, but they had a garden with vegetables and wood to burn for cooking. Misako remembered two main things about living in Ibaraki. The first was her mother, thin and sullen, claiming she wasn’t hungry as she watched her daughters eat. The second thing Misako remembered was that the shed’s earthen floor was covered with tatami, the traditional rice straw mat. Misako would fall asleep listening to a massive infestation of lice jumping up and down on the straw mat.

  Taeko was disgusted by all the lice, which she worked mightily to eradicate, but she was grateful to be out of Tokyo. On March 10, 1945, just after the Battle of Kwajalein but before the invasion of Okinawa, the United States sent a squadron of 334 B-29 bombers on a night raid of Tokyo. It turned out to be the most destructive bombing raid in history.

  In a city where most homes were constructed of wood and paper, the United States dropped 1,165 tons of explosives that were mostly filled with napalm and gelled gasoline. The main targets were the densely populated Chuo and Koto neighborhoods near the Tokyo docks. Flames were whipped into a frenzy by prevailing 20 mph winds, and the resulting firestorm was so powerful and intense that it sucked in at least one American bomber.

  The Tokyo firebombing killed 100,000 people, almost all civilians, injured 40,000, and left one million people homeless. About fifteen square miles of Tokyo were destroyed. Historians say more people were killed in a single day by the Tokyo firebombing than by the Dresden firebombing—or the atomic bombs dropped later on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.