Okinawa (23 page)

Thus, when Admiral Mitscher on his flag bridge stared quizzically at the hole left in the flight deck by Kai’s Zero, he was not dismayed. Instead, he removed the long-visored baseball cap he always wore, scratched his bald head and said: “Tell my task group commanders that if the Japanese keep this up, they’re going to grow hair on my head yet.” Marc Mitscher also would cherish a calling card found on the intact corpse of the heroic young Lieutenant Tomai Kai who had come so close to sinking the admiral’s flagship.

 

Following the failure of the Floating Chrysanthemum operation that included the airborne attack on Yontan-Kadena and Lieutenant Kai’s crash dive on
Enterprise,
the Fifth Air Fleet was so short of planes and pilots that it pressed into service twenty Shirigaku twin-engine trainers. These awkward aircraft, certainly no match for the swift and sturdy American fighters, comprised most of the aircraft deployed in
Kikusui
7 on May 24. No decision could have been more indicative of the desperation of Ugaki and Sugahara. They would not only lose the invaluable pilots and crew-trainers of the Shirigaku, but have few instructors remaining to teach the low-quality recruits being dragooned in the north and sent to Kyushu. And they did lose them, as the Marine Corsairs roved among them with stuttering guns. Nevertheless,
Kikusui
7 did hole the destroyer
Stormes,
while damaging the destroyer-transports
Bates
and
Barry
so badly that
Bates
sank and
Barry
was converted to a
kamikaze
decoy.

But the Divine Winds were back on May 27-28 for Floating Chrysanthemum 8, a novelty in that on the twenty-seventh some eighty-five Army and Navy aircraft attacked at night. Here was a demonstration of how inept aircraft designed for daytime combat can be fighting in darkness. Picket destroyers
Anthony
and
Braine
firing on radar quickly took out an indefinite number of invisible assailants, identified only by gasoline fires on black water. Wisely, the others waited until dawn to renew the assault, slightly damaging
Anthony
and mangling
Braine
to kill about a hundred American seamen and wounding about the same number.

The next day in clearing weather the
kikusui
were back, this time swooping again on their favorite target: the ships of Radar Picket Station 15. Destroyers
Drexler
and
Lowry
were hit and staggered, but above them Marine Corsairs were plucking petals from the Chrysanthemums. Lieutenants R. F. Bourne and J. B. Seaman each downed a red-balled enemy, while Seaman exploded a third. As both pilots joined to attack a fourth, peeling the enemy’s metal hide, its pilot maintained control and plunged into
Drexler
with an impact that sent flames shooting hundreds of feet high. Within a minute
Drexler
rolled over and sank, taking 158 men down with her.

Reports of this disaster made eyelids flutter in Washington. Had the enemy perfected a new and fearful explosive? The answer came from a board of inquiry that preferred to believe—and probably correctly—that a heavy bomb striking a ship’s magazine could easily produce such a violent fireball.

After May 28, Admiral Ugaki fully intended to continue his
kikusui
attacks, still believing that Admiral Spruance now commanded a ghost fleet of floating wrecks and derelicts. But then bad weather and the Army’s disenchantment with the Floating Chrysanthemums—the generals had always believed that Japanese air power should be husbanded for homeland defense—interfered with his plans. To his dismay General Sugahara and his Sixth Air Army were removed from Navy control. He still had the cooperation of the Army’s Third Air Division, however, and planned to resume what can only be described as his Graveyard Operation with
Kikusui
9 on June 3.

Before then American airpower received a powerful reinforcement—in the arrival of a squadron of Army P-47 Thunderbolts. Here was a fighter unrivaled for its speed, armament, armor, and climbing power. On May 28 a flight of eight Thunderbolts under Captain John Vogt jumped twenty-eight Zeros forming in a Lufbery circle—a defensive aerial tactic perhaps copied from a ring of show horses moving tail to nose. Thus, each Zero was to protect the tail of the plane ahead. Because the Zero with its light armament and thin armor was fast and maneuverable, these pilots probably thought they were safe from attack, but the Thunderbolts climbing at full throttle moved high above their quarry at twenty-eight thousand feet—and then came screaming down in a dive that sent six of the enemy flaming into the sea along with two “probables.” Captain Vogt claimed to have accounted for five of them.

Floating Chrysanthemum 9 did take to the skies on June 3, supposedly with about 101 aircraft. But this seems unlikely. The naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison gives only fifty. Whatever their number it was sharply reduced by the Yontan-Kadena Marine Corsairs, succeeding only in holing a minelayer. The next day the
kamikaze
dove again, but in almost negligible strength. Once again the unfortunate
Anthony
was their target. To the crew’s unbelieving eyes a suicider barely nicked by gunfire actually
bailed out!
This most unwarlike tactic, however, availed him nothing: his parachute streamed after him unopened to mark his plunge into the briny. Another plane dived at
Anthony
but her 40 mm gunners shot it down.

Kikusui
9 suggested that attrition of the Fifth Air Fleet—raids from Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Guam, and the fast carriers—was almost complete. Admiral Ugaki, who had started in April with a fleet of more than 4,000 aircraft, was now in June down to about 1,270, of which only 570 were serviceable—and these marked for conventional duty. Only a handful of
kamikaze
remained. Nevertheless this relentless—not to say merciless—air admiral prepared Floating Chrysanthemum 10. With Okinawa already doomed, it was scheduled for June 21-22.

Supposedly fifty-eight to forty-five
kamikaze
had been collected, escorted by an unknown number of fighters. Also aboard were six
baka
bombs, Ugaki’s masterpiece. How many of them “aborted” and returned to base is not known; but by late June “abortion” was becoming nearly as popular as divine death had been. This last attack of the deadly Floating Chrysanthemums produced only a few near misses while one faithful suicider set the seaplane tender
Curtis
afire and another struck at
Barry
—the previously damaged destroyer-escort converted to decoy duty— as it was being towed to its station by LSM-50—sinking both ships. Meanwhile the
baka
brigade was a complete fizzle: two failed to release from their mother planes and were returned to Kyushu while the other four were either lost when their mother planes were shot down or harmed nothing but a few dozen fishes. Thus the inglorious end of the
kikusui
that were to save Japan.

Japan’s third Divine Wind had spent itself on the sturdy ships and stout hearts of the United States Naval Service.

It was the month of June, the month of Ushijima’s last stand.

Lieutenant General Buckner had redisposed his Tenth Army for the final heave of the war. On the west, or right, flank the Marines’ sector had been narrowed. The Sixth Marine Division was going to make a shore-to-shore amphibious assault on the Oroku Peninsula in the southwest, and the First Marine Division had not the strength to cover the entire Third Corps front.

The Third Corps, in fact, was depleted. With the Second Marine Division sent back to Saipan—rather than kept afloat as a
kamikaze
target—Major General Geiger had not been able to rest either the First or the Sixth. He had no reserve, and the divisions themselves had tried to maintain battle efficiency by resting one regiment while the other two attacked. But it could not always be done. So the Third Corps needed troops, and soon the Eighth Regiment of the Second Marine Division would be brought into Okinawa to furnish them. But this was not until after the Eighth had finished capturing islands to the west of Okinawa to give Admiral Turner long-range radar and fighter-director stations.

The Twenty-fourth Corps was in better shape. Major General Hodge had three divisions—exclusive of the Twenty-seventh on garrison in the north—and had been able to rest one while the other two were attacking. Only infrequently, as in the final days before Shuri, were all three in the line. But from June 4 onward the Twenty-fourth Corps was grinding down on the Yaeju-Yuza Peaks where most of the Thirty-second Army’s remnants had holed up. Even General Ushijima was here, conducting the last stand from his headquarters cave just above the ocean.

June 5 was a sad day for General Hodge, for on that date his favorite regimental commander—Colonel Eddy May—fell dead with an enemy machine gunner’s bullet through his heart. Hodge had called May “the finest soldier I have ever known,” and though he was indeed “a hard ’un,” the courageous calm with which he would stand exposed to enemy fire while studying Japanese positions was legendary. Two weeks later the Ninety-sixth Division lost another brave leader: Brigadier General Claudius Easley, assistant division commander. As usual this brave little gamecock was up front scouting the enemy, and just as he pointed out an enemy machine gun, a burst from that very weapon pierced his brain.

On the same day that Easley was killed the final Medal of Honor was won on Okinawa. Technical Sergeant John Meagher of the Seventy-seventh’s 305th Infantry was mounted on a tank directing its fire when a Japanese soldier wielding a satchel charge rushed at him. Dropping to the ground, Meagher bayoneted his assailant, then ran back to his Sherman to fire a machine gun at a pair of Japanese machine guns. Emptying his gun’s belt, Meagher seized his thirty-five-pound weapon as though it were a baseball bat to club the remaining enemy gunners to death.

Casualties in the Ninety-sixth had been far from light as the division ground south on the honeycomb of caves and fortified peaks that was the Yaeju-Yuza. Its rifle battalions were so reduced in strength that General Hodge, to maintain the division’s momentum, transferred the Seventy-seventh’s 305th Infantry to the Ninety-sixth.

When the GIs of the Twenty-fourth Corps began to penetrate the enemy cave strongholds, many of them were sickened with what they found. The caves were full of men and misery. There were many sick and dying. Some caves had become reeking pest-holes. As many as forty men lay in some of these hillside warrens. At times a doctor or a corpsman came around to ask how they felt. They could do little more. They had no supplies. Men died from wounds not considered serious. Filth accumulated. The rain drummed outside, water streamed into the caves, and the wounded nearly drowned. The smell was so overpowering that men could hardly breathe.

Still Ushijima was determined to fight on. He shared the fanaticism of those Army diehards who were even then, in that month of June, attempting to wreck the peace party that the new premier, Baron Kantaro Suzuki, was forming with the secret encouragement of Emperor Hirohito. Tokyo had been savaged twice more, on May 23 and 25, and the emperor was now genuinely dismayed by the slaughter among his people.

But General Ushijima and General Cho, resuming their old relationship, were capable of no such dismay. The fight was to be to the finish, and on June 4 the Tenth Army shuddered and drove forward.

On that date the Sixth Marine Division’s spearheads shoved off from Naha to make the last Marine amphibious assault of World War II. Again the amtracks, wallowing in the sea waves, the naval gunfire thundering overhead, the shores of the objective winking and spouting smoke—and in they went to conquer three-by-two Oroku Peninsula in a whirling ten-day battle. Again beaches, coral pinnacles, caves, hills, tunnel systems, 5,000 last-ditch Japanese to be killed, an admiral to be driven to suicide, and again death and wounds for Marines—1,608 of them. Oroku was the Pacific War in microcosm—even in its Medals of Honor: Private Robert McTureous attacking machine guns firing on stretcher-bearers and losing his life to save his buddies; Corpsman Fred Lester continuing to treat wounded Marines while dying of his own wounds. But Oroku ended in a rout after Admiral Ota committed
hara-kiri.
On June 13 the Japanese threw down their arms and fled toward the mainland in the southeast. They could not escape. The First Marine Division had driven past the base of the peninsula and sealed it off. The Japanese began surrendering.

Beneath Oroku, the First had broken through to the south coast. Okinawa had been sliced down the middle, but more important to those weary, hungry Marines who did it was the sea outlet to which amtracks could now bring supplies. The men had been a week on reduced rations, slogging through the mud that made supply nearly impossible.

On the eastern flank the Seventh and Ninety-sixth Infantry Divisions were also nearing the southern coast. Lieutenant General Buckner had already made a surrender appeal to Ushijima. He had had a letter dropped behind the lines. It said:

The letter was dropped on June 10. It reached Ushijima and Cho on June 17. They thought it hilarious. How could a
Samurai
surrender? A
Samurai
can only kill himself.

Ushijima and Cho had already resigned themselves to
hara-kiri
by that seventeenth of June, for by then all was over. On the west flank the First Marine Division was battling through Kunishi Ridge while the Sixth had again come into line on the right and was racing for Ara Point, the southernmost tip of Okinawa. In the east, the Ninety-sixth Division was finishing off resistance in the Yaeju-Yuza Peaks, and the Seventh Division’s soldiers were closing in on the Thirty-second Army’s very headquarters.