Islands of the Damned (21 page)

While we were in port at Ulithi a telegram came for me, from Jewett, Texas.

My younger brother, Joseph Delton Burgin, had joined the Army the year before and after basic training had been sent to France. Before he enlisted, J.D. had written to me asking about the Marine Corps. I had written back to discourage him. I thought he might have an easier time of it than I did if he joined the Navy. But I guess we were all in harm’s way, whether we were in the Marines or the Army or Navy.

Typical of J.D., he made up his own mind.

He was almost four years younger than me, always quiet, not a hell-raiser. But he would not be pushed around. When someone got in his face, you’d see those black eyes snapping in anger. When he was starting first grade, Momma made him a pair of overalls out of uncolored denim from cotton sacks. She had dyed them blue, so they looked like regular overalls. One morning she saw him sitting out on the porch cutting something with a pair of scissors.

“What are you doing out there, J.D.?”

“These overalls are hot, Momma. I’m cutting holes in them.”

She chased him all the way across the yard and under the fence, where he got hung up on the barbed wire.

J.D. and I used to go fishing together, and possum hunting at night with the dogs and a .410 shotgun. He was with me when I shot my first deer.

According to the telegram, J.D. had been killed by German artillery in Alsace-Lorraine. An Army officer wrote my folks that it had been sudden. J.D. hadn’t felt a thing.

Nights on the deck of the
McCracken
were cool and pleasant as we sailed north from Ulithi. We could almost forget we were getting closer to Japan. But a briefing from K Company’s officers sobered us right up. Okinawa would be the bloodiest campaign of the war, they warned us. We could expect 80 to 85 percent casualties.

Going in we would face heavy fire from a large Jap gun on the beach. Enemy paratroopers might drop in behind us, and there would probably be a banzai attack during our first night ashore. We were also facing a new tactic. Starting in October of 1944, Japanese pilots had been deliberately crashing their planes into American warships in a kind of aerial banzai attack.

The convoy that left Ulithi March 27 was the largest ever assembled in the Pacific. We had almost 1,300 ships of all kinds and more than 180,000 men from five Army divisions—the Seventy-seventh, Ninety-sixth, Twenty-seventh, Seventh and Eighty-first—and the First, Second and Sixth Marine divisions. We were facing at least 100,000 Jap troops who, we knew, would fight to the last man. Their back was to the wall.

The old bivouac rumor about the Marines being absorbed into the U.S. Army almost came true, in a way. The entire invasion force, called the Tenth Army, was under the command of Army Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner.

Because the Fifth Marines’ Third Battalion had been in the first wave at Peleliu, we were to be spared that distinction at Okinawa. We’d be held offshore in regimental reserve.

It had now been sixteen months and a couple days since Florence and I sat on that park bench in Melbourne kissing and saying our good-byes. I was no closer to returning for her as I’d promised, no closer to settling down in our little house together. In fact each island where I’d fought took me farther from her. How long would I be on Okinawa? And then where? Japan? We knew as we were getting closer that the enemy was getting weaker and more desperate. Standing there at nights on the deck of the
McCracken
, I just couldn’t see any end to it.

We awoke once again to the smell of steak and eggs from the galley. Sunrise was still two and a half hours away, but crews aboard the
McCracken
were already at their battle stations. Jap planes did not wait for the light of dawn before starting their bomb runs and kamikaze attacks. We’d been warned the night before to get plenty of rest because April 1 was going to be a long, hard day. I had slept pretty good, but I’d been through this twice before, three times if you count Ngesebus. Losing sleep did not make any landing easier.

It was Easter Sunday. And it was April Fools’ Day. After the usual clatter and commotion of getting everybody up and collecting our gear, we assembled for a chapel service. I don’t remember any of the details or what was said to us. But I’m sure many of us prayed very sincerely that morning. We stood in line for the mess hall, stood in line for the heads, and by twos and threes climbed to the deck.

The temperature was in the mid-seventies. It was going to be the kind of balmy, clear morning that back home would have sent me out into the woods with the dog and my hunting rifle. J.D. would probably have come along. The ship faced east and as the horizon got brighter, we could make out a long, low landmass silhouetted a few miles away with an umbrella of smoke hanging over it. We could hear the hum of airplanes getting closer and the bark of ack-ack guns from other ships. For several days we had watched as streams of plump B-24s droned high above, paying an advance call on Okinawa, but this time the approaching planes weren’t ours.

“All troops below!” some sailor yelled. “No troops on deck! Captain’s orders. Jap planes coming! We don’t want Marines killed on our deck. Everybody get below.”

Did the Navy think we’d never been under fire before? Swabbies were always hassling Marines. You’d find a shady cubbyhole to snooze and the first thing you knew some swabbie would come along with a hose to wash down the deck. We figured this was more of the same.

The
McCracken
’s 40mm antiaircraft guns started bellowing. Over our heads the silhouettes of planes came snarling over, swooping and darting like barn swallows. Flashes popped among them, and inky blots of smoke drifted away.

We were herded through a hatch and a sailor slammed it shut. The space we found ourselves in was dark and crowded. We were wearing full packs, and there was no ventilation. Before long we were hot as blazes. We could hear the racket above our heads and none of us wanted to be caught like pigs in a pen if a Jap plane or bomb came crashing through the deck. We started yelling for someone to let us out. Finally a bunch of us took matters into our own hands and battered the hatch open and we all came swarming out, the battle going full blast around us.

A Naval officer appeared on the deck above and behind us. “All Marines, return to quarters!” he barked. “That’s an order! Do it now!”

“Sir, we’re about to hit that beach. We’d just as soon take our chances out here.”

He turned and strode away. While we milled around waiting for what might happen next, a couple of our own officers showed up and ordered us to stand by for loading. We formed up at the railing four abreast and waited for the signal to turn and scramble down the cargo nets. Climbing those things you try to make haste carefully. You hope the guy above you doesn’t step on your hands or face, and you try to not step on the hands or the face of the guy below you.

When the amtrac was full, I called out, “Shove off, Coxswain. You’re loaded.” We nosed away from the ship and joined the line of other amtracs headed out to the assembly point just outside the reef until the signal came to form up and go in.

While we waited we watched the air show. A Jap plane nosed over and fell toward the sea, twisting and trailing a long spiral plume of smoke until it smacked the water. Another burst into flame and disappeared behind the hulk of the
McCracken.
Hellcats went weaving through the smoke and din, and we held our breath hoping the gunners on those ships knew their planes and aimed accurately. A lot of shipboard gunners, we knew, were our guys, Marines.

The Navy’s big guns and rocket-launching LSMs were still working over the beach and beyond, planting long, even rows of explosions along the shore. Thunder swept across the waves and beat against our faces. Amtracs and Higgins boats headed this way and that. Many had already left troops on the beach and were headed out for another load or for supplies. The Fifth Marines’ First and Second battalions were already landing on Blue Beach to our left. Our battalion was to have been held back in regimental reserve. But obviously they were sending us in along with everyone else to anchor the left flank on Yellow Beach. To the south a muddy river, the Bishi Gawa, separated us from Purple Beach, where the Army’s regiments were coming in.

When the flag dropped we formed a wide line and started across the reef. Ships were pumping out clouds of white smoke, screening our approach. A few gray spikes erupted in the water in the distance. But so far we hadn’t seen any of the burning amtracs that had made the trip into Peleliu such a nightmare. The Navy bombardment had ceased. In the quiet we could hear the rumble of amtrac engines all around us. Little by little Okinawa appeared through the haze and smoke. From my perch on the gunwale, I could make out ground sloping up from the beach and a patchwork of fields separated by rows of pine trees. Except for columns of rising smoke here and there it looked like nice farm country, a little like the countryside around Melbourne.

“Hey, we’re not taking any fire!” somebody noticed.

“Yeah. You’re right. Where are the Japs?”

Somebody yelled from the boat on our right, “We’re going in unopposed.” We passed the word to the boat on our left, and the news traveled all along the line, boat to boat. “Unopposed landing!”

“I don’t believe this!” somebody else yelled.

No bodies floated in the water. No snipers’ bullets whined over our heads. Just the steady beat of the amtrac’s diesel and the churn of water against the hull.

They hadn’t held our company in reserve because the whole landing was running so smoothly. They didn’t figure they’d need us later on.

In our relief, somebody started singing “Little Brown Jug.” We all joined in.

It had been one of Hillbilly’s favorites.

Still, I was thinking, This can’t go on. Something’s got to go wrong here.

Nothing did. We motored on in. As we got close to the shore, we looked for the seawall that we’d spent all that time preparing to climb. There was a broken line of stones with gaps, like somebody’s bad teeth, but no wall. If there had been one to begin with, the Navy’s guns had punched it out. Farther in we could see the blackened hulk of a big artillery piece that had once pointed seaward. Our amtrac crawled out of the surf and through a gap between the stones. Then it stopped. The back gate slammed down and we piled out, ducking low out of habit. No shots came our way. It was more like one of our maneuvers than any battle we’d been through. We formed a line and began advancing across the beach. We heard occasional fire far to the left or right. But we were on our feet, moving calmly. There were plenty of shell holes to dive into if we had needed them. But we didn’t. We’d walked ashore like we were strolling down the driveway to pick up the mail.

There was some action elsewhere along the lines. In the afternoon a sniper shot Colonel John Gustafson in the arm just as he stepped off an amtrac. He turned around and calmly walked back aboard and was taken out to the ship for treatment.

Marines still argue: Which was worse, Peleliu or Okinawa? I vote Peleliu, but others who went through both will tell you that Okinawa was worse, an opinion they base on the amount of artillery the Japs threw at us. After the first two or three days on Peleliu, we didn’t get much of that—we’d knocked out most of their heavy guns. But on Okinawa, once it started, it just kept coming at us right up to the last days.

The Japs had learned from Peleliu. When we finally cornered them on Okinawa, once again they were holed up in caves and tunnels. We had to pry them out one by one, as we had on Peleliu. Lieutenant General Buckner called it a “blowtorch and corkscrew campaign.” They were fighting on home ground. Okinawa is in the center of the seven-hundred-mile chain of islands stretching from Formosa to Kyushu, the Ryukyus. The Japs considered the whole chain part of their home islands, just like we might think of the Florida Keys. On Okinawa we faced everything we had faced on other islands all over again. Rain, mud, malaria, flies, bodies crawling with maggots. And we were tired. Before it was over, the fight for Okinawa would seem to stretch out to forever, with no end in sight.