The Twilight Warriors (48 page)

In the crew spaces there was jubilation. Going home, even for the brief time it would take to repair the ship, was an unexpected gift. For the Tail End Charlies in Boys’ Town, the news had a bittersweet flavor. The Battle of Okinawa wasn’t over, but the end was in sight. They were going to miss the finale of the show they had started.

Or maybe not. Rumors were flying like missiles around the ship. The normal time for an air group to be deployed in a combat zone was six months. If a carrier was taken off the line, her air group was usually off-loaded to await another carrier headed back to the war. The time you spent waiting for the next carrier didn’t count.

To the Tail End Charlies it meant they might have to hang around in the Pacific for months before they went back aboard a carrier. They might even miss the rest of the war.

33
COUNTEROFFENSIVE

YONTAN AIRFIELD, OKINAWA
APRIL 22, 1945

S
tepping onto the tarmac at Yontan, Adm. Chester Nimitz surveyed the scene around him. Yontan still had the look of a base under siege. The place was covered with tents, sandbagged trenches, and fortified sentry posts. Marine Corps Corsairs were dispersed all over the field to make them less vulnerable to the nightly air attacks and artillery shellings.

But the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet hadn’t come to Okinawa to inspect the facilities. He was there on urgent business. Normally a patient and even-tempered commander, Nimitz had lost his patience.

The Navy’s ship losses at Okinawa had become unacceptable. Between April 1 and April 22, sixty vessels had been sunk or nearly destroyed by Japanese warplanes. More than eleven hundred Navy men had been killed and twice as many wounded.

In Nimitz’s view, there was one overwhelming reason for these losses: the battle for Okinawa was dragging on too long. As long as the Tenth Army was bogged down on the island, the kamikazes would continue to savage Nimitz’s ships offshore.

Waiting on the ramp to meet the admiral was the white-haired, fit-looking commander of the Tenth Army, Lt. Gen. Simon Buckner. Nimitz had brought with him an entourage: Fifth Fleet commander Adm. Raymond Spruance, Lt. Gen. Alexander Vandergrift, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and Nimitz’s chief of staff, Vice Adm. Forrest Sherman.

The meeting started off amicably enough. Buckner took his guests on a tour of the captured sectors of Okinawa. The mood was still jovial and relaxed when Nimitz presented Buckner with a
bottle of liquor, remembering his traditional toast, “May you walk in the ashes of Tokyo.” Buckner joked that he would keep the bottle in reserve until Okinawa had been secured.

Then they sat down in Buckner’s headquarters, and the mood changed. Nimitz got right to the point. It was time to break the impasse, he told Buckner. If it took another amphibious landing behind the Japanese lines, then Buckner should do it. Whatever it took, he
had
to speed up the advance.

It was a tense moment. That a Navy admiral had overall command of a land campaign had always been a sensitive issue with Army brass. Bristling, Buckner informed Nimitz that the ground assault was the Army’s job. He would take care of it.

Nimitz’s eyes flashed, and his temper rose to the surface. “I’m losing a ship and a half a day,” he snapped. “
If this line isn’t moving within five days, we’ll get someone here to move it so we can all get out from under these damn air attacks.”

Buckner held his ground. What this son of a Confederate general might have lacked in imagination, he made up for in stubbornness. Supporting another front, in his opinion, didn’t make sense. He’d already lost two ammunition ships at Kerama Retto. Opening another front would overstretch his supply system.

Vandergrift, the Marine commandant, sided with Nimitz. He told Buckner he ought to “play the amphib card.” Vandergrift’s 2nd Marine Division, which had played a diversionary role in the initial landings, was now on Saipan and available. They could make a landing on the southeast coast of Okinawa, just north of Minatoga, turn the Japanese right flank, and end the stalemate.

Even Buckner’s division commanders, including his favorite, Maj. Gen. Andrew Bruce, were on record as favoring an amphibious end run. Bruce himself had executed such a move behind Japanese lines during the Leyte invasion with brilliant success. Here was the perfect opportunity to do it again.

Buckner wasn’t having any of it. If he erred, it was damned well going be on the side of caution. The proposed landing beaches
were directly beneath a set of treacherous steep cliffs. Buckner thought the landings could turn into “
another Anzio [the disastrous 1944 landing in Italy] but worse.”

The argument, like the battle itself, dragged to a stalemate. Buckner would not be swayed. As long as he was in command, he intended to continue the classic frontal assault. In the long run, he insisted, it would save lives.

Spruance, for one, didn’t think so. “I doubt if the Army’s slow, methodical method of fighting really saves any lives in the long run,” Spruance wrote to a friend. “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.”

Nothing had been resolved. At the end of the historic meeting, it was Nimitz who backed down. The last thing Nimitz wanted at Okinawa was another Army-Navy brawl over a fired general.

The next day they were again standing on the ramp at Yontan. Nimitz shook hands with Buckner and climbed back aboard his plane. Buckner was still in command of the Tenth Army. He would continue to run the campaign his way. No surprises, no amphibious landing, no flanking maneuvers. Everyone expected that the battle would drag on.

And then that night, the enemy did something no one expected.

I
t began soon after dusk. An intense artillery barrage, more than a thousand rounds, poured down on the front-line American units. Directly behind the bombardment, almost as if summoned by the Japanese, came a dense fog that enshrouded the entire battle zone. Beneath the fog and the artillery cover, the Japanese defenders slipped away in the darkness, withdrawing to the second defense line on the Urasoe-Mura escarpment.

At first, the American troops on the front line didn’t believe it. It had to be another Japanese deception. The pockmarked ground
for which they had fought so bitterly was unoccupied. After days of sacrifice and failure the first Japanese line of defense, including the bloody Kakazu Ridge, was theirs for the taking.

T
he withdrawal, in fact, had gone exactly according to the plan proposed by Colonel Yahara and approved by General Ushijima. Despite their success at holding off the American assault, the Japanese had lost ground over the past few days on Skyline Ridge, Nishibaru Ridge, and the Tanabaru escarpment. Rather than stand their ground and be annihilated, the Japanese had executed a strategic withdrawal so they could continue fighting.

Still, the fire-eaters on Ushijima’s staff, led by General Cho, were belligerent. That night in the headquarters under Shuri Castle, the same old debate raged on about defensive versus offensive tactics. Cho continued urging a counterattack, throwing the Americans back to the beach. As usual, Ushijima listened, nodding respectfully, letting all his officers weigh in. He wasn’t inclined to change the strategy, at least not after the failed night attack of April 12. For now, he was sticking with Yahara’s campaign of slow, measured attrition.

Yahara, for his part, had reason to be pleased. His strategy was working. Already the 32nd Army had held out longer and with greater success than in any other Pacific island campaign. From their fallback line on Urasoe-Mura escarpment General Ushijima would continue Yahara’s carefully constructed holding strategy.

Then came the night of April 29. It was the emperor’s birthday, and General Ushijima convened his staff officers in the underground headquarters. Fueled by larger-than-usual quantities of sake, General Cho was in his most strident bushido-obsessed voice. By now the divide between the conservatives, led by Colonel Yahara, and the fire-eaters, championed by Cho, had widened to a chasm.

Cho was again demanding a counteroffensive. It was a matter of honor, he insisted. The 32nd Army should be revered in history
as an army of warriors, not failed defenders. By the next night, April 30, a majority of Ushijima’s staff officers were recommending that he launch an all-out counteroffensive against the American line.

To American officers—and to those of most other countries—it would seem a peculiar command style, a general taking a vote of his subordinates before making a crucial decision. It was not uncommon in the Imperial Japanese Army, and it was General Ushijima’s style. Without further deliberation, Ushijima signed the order. The counteroffensive would launch on May 4. It would be coordinated with
kikusui
No. 5, another massed
tokko
attack on the American fleet.

Col. Hiromichi Yahara had again been outvoted and overruled. Dismayed, he watched his carefully constructed strategy for a holding action come apart. Yahara was a loyal soldier. He hoped that Cho’s counteroffensive would work. In his secret heart he knew that it was doomed.

L
ike most Japanese battle plans, Cho’s counteroffensive was ambitious and overly complicated. It envisioned the 24th Division seizing the eastern flank of the Maeda escarpment, taking control of the center of the line. Two engineering/shipping regiments were to make amphibious landings behind the American lines on both the east and west coasts.

The 44th Brigade would cut off the two U.S. Marine divisions holding the western end of the line. Two Japanese regiments would dislodge the U.S. 7th Division from its positions on Conical Hill on the eastern flank while the 44th and 62nd Divisions wiped out the trapped U.S. Marine units. Tanks and heavy artillery would concentrate on the critical Maeda escarpment, where the breakthrough would take place.

The counteroffensive began in the rainy predawn darkness of May 4. The flash and thunder of the massive artillery barrage
reflected from the low overcast. For half an hour more than twelve thousand rounds of artillery exploded on the American lines.

Then the Japanese assault troops moved out, making their way across the mud-slickened no-man’s-land to the American lines.

They were moving too slowly. As the first rays of sunlight illuminated the battlefield, not all the units of the 24th Division had reached their jumping-off point. Caught in the open, they became targets for U.S. artillery and mortars. The advancing Japanese infantrymen ran into a wall of machine gun and mortar fire from the entrenched Americans.

Instead of a coordinated frontal assault against the U.S. lines, the counteroffensive quickly turned into a tableau of disconnected firefights, with Japanese infantry units being cut off and decimated one after the other. The attempt by the engineering/shipping regiments to make amphibious landings behind the lines was intercepted, and a thousand troops were mowed down.

The 27th Tank Regiment—the only Japanese armor to be employed offensively at Okinawa—ran into trouble before most had neared their objective on Maeda hill. Only two tanks managed to reach the American perimeter, and both were destroyed by a single American soldier, Private 1st Class James Poore, who took each out with a round from his bazooka.

General Ushijima was appalled. From his vantage point at Shuri Castle, he watched the attack on the Maeda escarpment falter. The counteroffensive was turning into an even greater disaster than the failed night assault of April 12.

But neither Ushijima nor Cho was willing to concede failure. The battle raged on for the rest of the day, with Japanese troops closing in on a sector held by the U.S. 306th Infantry Regiment. After hours of combat, the Japanese were finally beaten back with heavy losses.

The only notable Japanese success was by the 1st Battalion of the 24th Division, led by a resourceful army captain named Koichi
Ito. Concluding that a daylight attack was suicidal, Koichi came up with his own plan. After nightfall his battalion infiltrated the American lines, penetrating half a mile and seizing a stronghold on the Tanabaru escarpment.

Then they were stuck. Surrounded by the enemy and cut off from the rest of the division, which was stalled back at the main line, Ito and his men dug in. They held their perimeter all day and into the night against vigorous American attacks while they waited for the 24th Division to make a breakthrough.

The breakthrough never came. Despite the agonizing lack of progress, the Japanese counteroffensive continued into another rainy day, May 5.

By late afternoon, General Ushijima had seen enough. He gave the order for all units to withdraw, ignoring for a change the protests of his junior staff officers. Under cover of darkness, the surviving Japanese troops crept back through the mud and smoldering remains of tanks to their lines.

Not until the next night, May 6, did Captain Ito’s battalion, still holding out behind the American lines, manage to exfiltrate with 230 surviving troops back through the enemy positions to their own lines.