Okinawa (17 page)

Now believing—like all those “Bomber Barons” so detested by Dwight Eisenhower—that his command alone might bring Nippon to her knees, Le May was not happy to be ordered to concentrate on the enemy air bases on Kyushu in support of the Okinawa operation. From April 16 onward the Superforts hammered the
kamikaze
airfields, while their chief—speaking in language customarily garbled by the cigar or pipe clenched between his teeth—appealed to General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Force, for permission to resume strategic bombing. It was not granted, if only because Fleet Admiral Nimitz had been able to convince the Joint Chiefs that the immediate short-range effects of punishing the suicider bases would in the long run prove more valuable than the long-range results of strategic bombing.

So the Superforts continued to strike the Kyushu fields, even though Admiral Ugaki frequently used all the late-model fighters at his disposal in an effort to destroy them. This was not quite possible, for his interceptors had neither the speed nor the firepower necessary to take out a Superfort. Nevertheless, some vicious aerial duels developed high in the skies. One of the most fierce erupted on April 27 when a hundred B-29s attacked Kanoya and five other airfields. There were so many Japanese fighters aloft and buzzing the big bombers that Lieutenant Kenneth Hornbeck later told war correspondents: “The milk run is over—the cream is curdled.” Lieutenant Philip Van Schuyler reported: “They must have made a hundred attacks on the eleven B-29s that I saw, and thirty on our four-plane section.” One crippled Superfort flying out of formation was pounced on by four enemy fighters releasing white phosphorous bombs across its path. By skillful maneuver, the stricken aircraft broke clear. Four fighters fell and one Superfort was lost.

On the following day American gunners using their electronic computing gunsights claimed to have shot down thirty-six Japanese fighters together with thirteen “probables.” Again, a B-29 was lost. Using the tactics of pattern-bombing, the Americans blanketed the Kyushu fields with fragmentation and demolition bombs, cratering runways and taxiways, riddling everything erect and destroying revetments. They also struck at hangars and shops filled with planes under repair while mangling irreplaceable tools. Japanese fighters compelled to land wherever they could on Kyushu became so scattered that Ugaki and Sugahara found it almost impossible to assemble them for concentrated flights intended to clear the Okinawa skies for the following
kamikaze.
Thus, many more suiciders than usual were exposed to the stuttering guns of naval and Marine flyers off the carriers, and more frequently the Marine Corsairs based at Yontan and Kadena.

Nevertheless, Ugaki and Sugahara managed to put together
Kikusui
4, scheduled for two main attacks April 27 and 28, and a preliminary on April 22. Le May’s attacks continued into May, and although a total of 24 Superforts were lost, with 233 damaged, the enemy’s losses in fighters, though never known exactly, were certainly astronomical. Moreover, the Superforts achieved their objective in crippling the aerial fleets of Admiral Ugaki and General Sugahara.

 

 

As often happens, either because of luck, enemy indolence, or favorable weather, the “prelim” was more destructive than the “main bout.” Twenty Navy and forty-six Army
kamikaze
came diving out of a haze concealing them from the gunners on the Hagushi ships. One crashed and sank a landing craft and another capsized the minesweeper
Swallow.
A third struck destroyer
Isherwood
among its depth charges aft, setting off a monster explosion that mangled the tin can’s stern and sent it crawling slowly toward Kerama. Two other destroyers suffered minor damage. There might have been much more destruction at Hagushi but for the Marine pilots at Kadena and Yontan. They reported thirty-six kills, mostly among unskillful young suiciders unable to evade their attacks. Major George Axtell on his first combat mission over the Great Loo Choo became an ace in one flight, shooting down five Vals.

On April 27 and 28 the tireless Ugaki and Sugahara managed to put 100
kamikaze
into the air. Four of them were
baka
bombers. On the first day they struck at dusk with fighter escort, inflicting only minor damage on four near-missed destroyers. But at 8:41 P.M. the hospital ship
Comfort
sailing southwest of Okinawa with a full load of patients on a clear night and during a full moon with the ship lighted according to the Geneva Convention—which by policy and preference the Japanese never observed—was deliberately dive-bombed by a
kamikaze.
The pilot was well aware of the privileged status of his target, having dived at it in a preliminary run, before pulling up and banking to dive again. His plane and bomb crashed through three superstructure decks before exploding in the surgery compartment.

Comfort
did not sink, nor was there any panic. By a miracle of exemplary calm and the efforts of fire-fighting and repair crews, and despite casualties of thirty killed and thirty-three wounded—some of these either sick or wounded patients—the hospital ship was able to remain seaworthy while the repair crews dealt successfully with fire and flooding. Captain Adin Tooker took all precautions—swinging out undamaged lifeboats on weather decks and deliberately darkening his ship against the possible onslaught of another predatory
kamikaze
—and was thus able to make Guam in safety five days later.

The next day the B-29s—in vengeance it is to be hoped—scorched and scourged enemy fighters on Kyushu, leaving few escorts for the thirty-three suiciders bound for Task Group 58.4, one of two fast carrier groups still off Okinawa. Finding the Americans, two Zero suiciders dove out of the sun on destroyers
Haggard
and
Uhlmann.
By bad luck a 40 mm shell from
Uhlmann
hit
Haggard’
s main gun computer, leaving its five-inchers useless. Fortunately, both Zeros missed, but then another
kamikaze
crashed
Haggard
’s starboard side, detonating a 550-pound bomb against her forward engine. A second suicider missed
Haggard
by ten feet, but then as
Hazelwood
came to her assistance, a third scored a direct hit on her main deck that killed Commander Volckert Douw and forty-five officers and men.
Hazelwood
remained afloat but
Haggard
had to be towed to the Keramas.

Upon its arrival,
Haggard
’s skipper Lieutenant Commander Victor Soballe and all other hands on deck gaped in amazement and dismay at what they beheld in the anchorage. If not exactly a “graveyard of ships,” it was at least a hospital emergency room stuffed with every category of floating cripple. Destroyers and all types of smaller ships—minesweepers, tenders, destroyer-escorts, LSMs, LCTs—in every stage of wreckage or disrepair were everywhere. Some had lost their masts, the smokestacks of others were either crumpled or missing, twisted guns hung over gunwales like broken teeth or were pointed uselessly upward, superstructures were caved in while in the sides of dozens of other vessels were gaping, jagged black holes—some of them covered by makeshift cofferdams looking like blisters—while missing bows were sometimes similarly protected against flooding or else had been jammed up against sagging bridges like steel accordions.

Commander Soballe’s heart sank when he saw how many damaged vessels were in line for repairs ahead of his own. It could be weeks or more, and then, by the time
Haggard
would be ready to enter the floating dry dock, it might be discovered that she could not stand the flooding of just one more compartment and thus could not be repaired at all. So Soballe ordered his crew to turn to: to improvise and scrounge and cannibalize and invent and “borrow” (that universal service euphemism for pilferage or “pinching”) whatever they needed but could not obtain by requisition. This required not only skill-fingered sailors but light-fingered ones. There were enough of the first kind among
Haggard
’s welders, electricians, steamfitters, carpenters, and the other technical “mates” needed to run a modern warship, and a superabundance of the second kind among bos’n’s mates and ordinary deckhands. The light-fingered details scrounged or borrowed enough scraps and pieces of lumber and other materials needed to patch a hole twenty by eighteen feet where the suicider had crashed. Another hole through which seawater had flowed to flood engine and boiler rooms was plugged when Soballe and others put on diving equipment to cover it with a seven-ton temporary patch, after which the rooms were pumped out. Meanwhile, the black gang ingeniously rebuilt an after boiler from fragments of a wrecked one, using whatever scraps that would fit to repair steam lines to the engines. So resurrected, lighting off one boiler, the crew got their beloved ship under way, and in four months sailed her halfway around the world to the Norfolk Navy Yard.

On April 29, Emperor Hirohito’s birthday and the most important holiday in Japan, Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima summoned his top commanders to his headquarters in a tunnel underneath Shuri Castle. For days they had been privately arguing over Isamu Cho’s proposal for a massive counter-stroke against the Americans. Now Ushijima wished them to discuss whether or not his strategy for defending Okinawa should be changed. Some historians say Ushijima was not present, others insist that he was. It does not seem likely, however, that the Thirty-second Army commander—even though it was not his custom to attend staff discussions—would ignore such a momentous meeting called by himself.

Ushijima’s chiefs sat on canvas camp chairs at a rough flat table covered with maps. Around them the stones of the tunnel glistened with sweat. Water from the moat surrounding medieval Shuri seeped through crevices in the wall or dripped incessantly on the floor of beaten earth. Dim light glinted weakly off the glasses worn by most of the officers in attendance or winked on the stars of the numerous generals present.

Isamu Cho sat close to Ushijima, staring arrogantly into the questioning gaze of his arch rival, Colonel Hiromichi Yahara. Just as he had predicted the debacle of General Cho’s abortive counter-attack of April 12-13, the rigidly rational Yahara was now prepared to oppose what he knew would be a plan for an even greater and more disastrous counter-stroke. By his patrician bearing he made it clear that he could not be bullied by either the rank or the fiery rhetoric of the burly general now rising to address the meeting.

Cho began with an incredible untruth: that the Japanese soldier—in the main from four to six inches shorter than his American enemies and from thirty to fifty pounds lighter—was a superb hand-to-hand fighter who could easily overpower the soft, effete American devils. A general clearing of throats and grunts of approval followed this absurd remark, either born of the School of the Rosy Report or emanating from the
sake
bottles being passed freely around. Very quickly most of the commanders present supported Cho’s plan: Lieutenant General Takeo Fujioka, commander of the Sixty-second Division, and also the plan’s coauthor; Lieutenant General Tatsumi Amamiya, swallowing his detestation of the boastful Fujioka in his eagerness to lead his untested Twenty-fourth Division into battle at last; and Major General Kosuke Wada, chief of the Fifth Artillery Command. Wada agreed with the others that the Thirty-second Army had made an achievement unprecedented in Pacific warfare: it had preserved its main body intact after a month of fighting.

This, Yahara bluntly interjected, happened only because the Americans had not yet hurled their full strength against the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line. But now that the outer defenses had fallen, because of the April 12-13 fiasco, the American commander was strengthening his assault forces, according to intelligence reports. An even bigger disaster would ensue if Cho’s massive counter-offensive were approved, he warned. And to speak of the valor of the troops was foolish, because even now, since there had been no issue of sweet-potato brandy on the emperor’s birthday, the men were discontented. For thirty days these gallant men had risen every morning to look down upon a Hagushi Anchorage still choked with enemy ships. The Divine Winds had not blown them away. It was difficult for even Japanese soldiers to believe that the Navy would come to their rescue—nor could they be blamed for complaining about being asked to fight alone one day’s sail from the homeland.

It was true, Isamu Cho replied slowly, that the Americans had not thrown in all their strength. But they were doing so now. There was a new Marine division in the enemy’s assault line, the First, the hated butchers of Guadalcanal. Another—the Sixth—was due to join them. This was the moment to destroy the Americans’ fresh power. But, Cho continued, the Thirty-second Army had also been reinforced. Had not our chief General Ushijima in his wisdom concluded that the enemy was not interested in storming the Minatoga Beaches, and so had ordered our comrades of the Twenty-fourth Division and Forty-fourth Brigade to join us here? Now it is
we
who are at full strength. Let us strike the enemy immediately and annihilate them before they can grind down to our main line.

Careful, full-scale counter-attack, not the foolish glory of the Banzai, would crush the Americans. There must be help from the
kamikaze,
then massed artillery fire with the troops attacking all along the line. The fresh Twenty-fourth Division would be hurled at the center and open a hole through which the Forty-fourth Brigade would pour in a thrust to the west coast. The Forty-fourth would then wheel south and the First Marine Division would be isolated and annihilated. The American Twenty-fourth Corps would be rolled up. There should also be counter-landings on both flanks. The Twenty-sixth Shipping Engineer Regiment would embark from Naha in barges, small boats, and native canoes to strike the rear of the Marine division. Later, the youths of the Twenty-sixth, Twenty-eighth, and Twenty-ninth Sea Raiding Squadrons would cross the reef and wade ashore to help the engineers. A similar counter-landing would strike the rear of the Seventh Infantry Division on the east.