Okinawa (19 page)

Meanwhile, with the Minatoga opportunity rejected as un-feasible, General Buckner still had to face the growing and open disenchantment of Admirals Spruance and Turner with the slow progress of Tenth Army on land. Turner had repeatedly urged on Buckner the necessity for a quick conquest to relieve the terrible pressure of the
kikusui
on the concentration of American ships off Okinawa. For such a huge body of vessels to remain so long as plainly visible targets of a suicidal enemy was indeed unprecedented in military history. This, of course, was not entirely the fault of General Buckner but rather enemy policy—in a sense—to “bleed all over” the Americans and thus drown them in Japanese blood. Again, this was small comfort to either Spruance or Turner. Buckner’s reply to the Expeditionary Force commander was that he was moving slowly in an effort to “save lives.” To Admiral Spruance this was not a convincing argument, for he wrote: “I doubt if the Army’s slow, methodical method of fighting really saves any lives in the long run. It merely spreads the casualties over a longer period. The longer period greatly increases the naval casualties when Jap air attacks on ships is a continuing factor... There are times when I get impatient for some of Holland (‘Howlin’ Mad’) Smith’s drive.”

Spruance was right: lives are definitely not “saved” by a carefully slow assault, they are merely spread out in time, but in the end the number of casualties is the same or almost so. If an assaulting unit comes to, say, an enemy .47 antitank position protected by machine guns, thus making it impossible for supporting tanks to advance, and decides to call for artillery to knock it out before attacking, in the subsequent assault it will almost certainly discover that shells simply cannot pulverize strong and clever defenses. Foot soldiers will still have to go in there with hand weapons, with flamethrowers, grenades, and satchel charges, and the time lost waiting for artillery to destroy the position will have been wasted. And their casualties will be the same as if they had attacked instantly.

Even General Buckner himself on May 1 had acknowledged at a press conference that Okinawa would fall only to tactics he described as “corkscrew and blowtorch”: the corkscrew being explosives and the blowtorch flamethrowers and napalm. But all of these have to be
aimed!
Aimed close up. Visible. They cannot be fired from a mile or more to the rear in an arc, which would be like skipping stones on water. Because every defensive position has a mouth or aperture through which its weapon can be fired, bullets, grenades, satchel charges, or flame have to be hurled, thrown, or squirted through these openings. Again, close up. Even napalm will skid, and because it is always dropped from an airplane, it has about as much chance to enter a foot-by-foot or even a two feet-by-two feet opening as has a camel “to pass through the eye of a needle.”

Go ahead, ask the question, “What’s the difference—slow or speedy—if the results are the same?” The answer is that the time lost will extend the exposure of a supporting fleet such as Spruance’s to the assaults of the
kikusui
, and also delay the departure of such naval forces to participate in another amphibious invasion elsewhere or release the fast carriers to strike homeland Japan. Finally, slow, careful land assaults could delay the entire Pacific timetable to the great pleasure of the enemy, for the one thing Japan could not afford to waste in the spring of 1945 was time.

Spruance and Turner could not forget what had happened to the escort carrier
Liscome Bay
at Makin, when sixty-five hundred GIs moving slowly took a week to conquer a weak position in an operation that should have been finished in hours. Ordinarily,
Liscome Bay
would have been long gone from the impact area, but the ship was sunk on the last day by an enemy submarine, with extensive loss of life. Similarly, because of slow progress on Okinawa, ships and many seamen and seagoing Marines were being lost daily on the Hagushi Anchorage.

The admirals were also anguished by and ever mindful of the ordeal of their men, these unsung heroes, aboard those exposed ships, especially those of the Radar Picket Line scourged by hundreds of
kamikaze
and
baka.
Men were horribly burned. They were blown into the ocean, either to drown or pass agonizing hours awaiting rescue and the ministrations of medical corpsmen. Those who survived the suiciders’ screaming dives went for days on end without sleep, their nerves exposed and quivering like wires stripped of insulation. Lying wide-eyed on their bunks, they waited to hear the dreaded telltale click and static of the ship’s bullhorns being activated—like a starter’s gun sending them leaping erect and running so that they were already in motion when the shrill, strident notes of “General Quarters” burst in their ears.

Men in the boiler rooms worked in intense heat. The superheaters, built to give the quick pressure needed for sudden highspeed maneuvering under aerial attack, were often kept running three or four days at a time, though they had been made for intermittent use. But it had to be that way, for war off Okinawa was war at a moment’s notice. Very little time separated that moment when radar screens became clouded with pips of approaching “bogies” and the shrieking suiciders came plunging to the attack. An attempt to give the crews more warning of enemy approach had to be abandoned, one war correspondent reported: “The strain of waiting, the anticipated terror, made vivid from past experience, sent some men into hysteria, insanity, breakdown.”

Similar reports reaching Admiral Nimitz led him to request from MacArthur the return of most of the ships of the Seventh Fleet he had so generously loaned the Southwest Pacific chief at the start of the Leyte campaign. He wanted to relieve some of Spruance’s ships. But MacArthur had already protected himself against compliance with this agreed-upon condition by deliberately committing these vessels—as well as the Eleventh Air Force and the Eighth Army—to a useless campaign in the southern Philippines in order to prevent their scheduled transfer to Nimitz. Such tactics, of course, were nothing new in World War II. During the Battle of the Bulge General George Patton deliberately committed his beloved Fourth Armored Division to an unnecessary battle to prevent its being taken from him by General Omar Bradley, who had already commandeered his Tenth Armored Division. But MacArthur’s move was the soul of ingratitude for Nimitz’s generosity. And it was compounded by the general’s return to his old, discredited theme of “minimal losses” by comparing the ease and low casualties of his southern Philippine campaign—again against mud-and-logs and fragmented troops—to Tenth Army’s higher losses moving through steel-concrete-and-coral defenses manned by soldiers determined to fight to the death. Because of this typical MacArthurian selfishness, the scourging of the Fifth Fleet continued.

In fairness to Buckner, the defensive complex into which he was plunging straight ahead could not be reduced in any other way than corkscrew and blowtorch. But the attack could have been more impetuous and spirited, less dependent on what General William Westmoreland in Vietnam a generation later excoriated as “the firebase psychosis”: i.e., a tendency to stop at every obstacle and call for artillery. But it also must not be forgotten that Buckner summarily rejected the one opportunity for maneuver on Okinawa: the envelopment of Ushijima’s rear by a landing at Minatoga.
Why,
will never be known, for this able, considerate, and dedicated soldier did not live long enough to write his memoirs or at least an explanation of his position.

But was the straight-ahead, annihilating attack the only solution to the destruction of Ushijima’s remaining sixty thousand men? Tenth Army had already secured and improved all the air and port facilities on Okinawa. For the Japanese, there was no way out, around, under, over, or through. Did no one suggest cutting off the enemy to let him starve? Why not emulate Nimitz’s “island-hopping” strategy in the Pacific, leaving enemy garrisons to “wither on the vine” by seizing the biggest and most useful islands while neutralizing those lying in between by aerial bombing. The Japanese could have been whittled and demoralized by constant aerial, land, and sea bombardment—even goaded into those desperation, back-breaking Banzai attacks so attractive to the
Samurai
character. Doubtless, they would not remain completely contained but would sally forth in typical night forays aimed at spreading terror and destruction. But this could have only minor success. It could never have inflicted casualties among the Americans comparable to what they suffered in Buckner’s final straight-ahead assault.

Nevertheless, perhaps because of the importunate appeals of Spruance and Turner—who, after all, were his superior officers —General Buckner did quickly schedule another grand offensive for May 11. The Ninety-sixth Division back on line would be on the eastern (or left) flank, the Seventy-seventh on its right; next, First Marine Division, and then the Sixth on the right, or western, flank. General Hodge would command his Twenty-fourth Corps troops on the left and would be the tactical commander of the entire front, with Geiger leading the Third Corps Marines. It was typical of Geiger, whose courtesy matched Buckner’s, that he did not protest the selection of Hodge as tactical chief, even though he was his senior and about to receive his third star.

This offensive was to be a continuation of the others with the same tactics, including the capable General Bruce’s innovation of concentrating on a limited objective from which fire could be brought to bear on the enemy’s reverse slope. Just before the jump-off date, however, the Great Loo Choo’s gray, growling, and moisture-laden sky became the Lord of the Battlefield.

On May 7 the skies of the Great Loo Choo opened with prolonged and torrential rains that reminded First Division Leathernecks of the month-long monsoon they had endured in the New Britain campaign. During seventeen days of intermittent storms, some fifteen inches of rain fell on Okinawa.

Nothing could stand against it; a letter from home in the sodden pocket of a GI or Marine had to be read and re-read and memorized before the ink ran and it fell apart in less than a week; a pair of socks lasted no longer; and a pack of cigarettes became watery and uninflammable unless smoked the same day, or else, along with matches, they were kept dry within a contraceptive inside a helmet liner. Pocketknife blades rusted together, and watches recorded the period of their own decay. Rain made garbage of the food; pencils swelled into useless pulp; fountain pens became clogged with watery ink, and their points burst apart; rifle barrels turned blue with mold and had to be slung upside down to keep the raindrops from fouling their bores. Sometimes bullets in the rifle magazines stuck together, while machine gunners had to go over their belts daily, extracting the bullets and oiling them to prevent their sticking to the cloth loops. Everything lay damp and sodden, squishy and squashy to the touch, exuding a steady and musty reek that was the odor of decaying vegetation.

To the Americans out in the open—unlike their enemies warm, dry, and snug in their underground warrens—there were only three things of value to be found in this gurgling, gushing, rushing, streaming, dripping, drenching downpour that turned Okinawa’s numerous narrow and shallow streams into raging, boiling, white torrents of water: a dry place, hot and solid food, and most of all—most unbelievably important of all!—a hot cup of coffee. At sundown before blackout discipline would be in force, among squads huddling together all over the island, tiny fires were made of the wrappings of cigarette packages and the waxed covers of K rations, and water heated in a canteen cup containing grains of K ration soluble coffee—thus were their bellies fortified against another cold black rainy night.

And the rain on Okinawa made Okinawa mud. It was unique because it was everywhere: in the ears, under the nails, inside leggings, or squeezed coarse and cold between the toes. It got into a man’s weapons, it was in his food, and sometimes he could feel it grinding like emery grains between his teeth. Whatever was slotted, pierced, open, or empty received this mud. Wounds also. Men prayed not to get hit while rain fell and made mud. It embarrassed drivers of bulldozers and made pick-and-shovel coolies of those lordly tank troops. Some days it denied Americans the use of roads altogether, and GIs and Marines on the attack again often had to be supplied by airdrop. Frequently it was hardly possible to walk in it. A few strides and a man’s shoes were coated and heavy with mud. Two more and they seemed as though encased in lead. A third step and it was easier to slip out of them before the mud sucked them off and walk in it bare-footed. Engineers on the airfields actually put their shoes aside and worked in sacking drawn over their feet and tied around the knees.

It was this mud in which the entire Tenth Army lay immobilized on the eighth of May, the day on which smeared and dripping Marines and GIs received the splendid news that Germany had surrendered.

“So what?” they snorted in contempt.

The death of Hitler and the destruction of his Third Reich meant about as much to these embattled Americans as the pardon of one condemned criminal might mean to another still under sentence of death. General Ushijima and the stubborn soldiers of his Thirty-second Army were their only concern, and at that very moment Ushijima was taking advantage of the rain that had stalled his enemy to strengthen his flanks while his artillerists reminded their foe that the air still sang and shrieked with invisible death. Ushijima also reinforced the strongpoints guarding the vital forty-foot-wide east-west highway behind his barrier line, settling down to that grim step-for-step war of attrition urged on him by Colonel Yahara. Because of these defenses—and the incessant rain—the Tenth Army drive southward on May 9 moved even slower.

At the same time, the
kikusui
scourging of the invasion fleet rose to a crescendo of fury. Opposing them were those Marine Corsair pilots from Yontan and Kadena who had come to the Great Loo Choo expecting to fly close-up support of the ground Leathernecks, only to be called to the rescue of the radar picket ships. They rode the suiciders down to unintended destruction away from their target vessels, sometimes even after the American pilots had expended all their ammunition. A few of them attacked the
kamikaze
and
baka
with their whirling propellers, just as Lieutenant Robert Klingman did in the bizarre Battle of the Frozen Guns.