War Stories II (70 page)

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Authors: Oliver L. North

BOOK: War Stories II
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On the island of Okinawa, that's exactly what the U.S. soldiers and Marines did, in a gut-wrenching final showdown with the Japanese forces that spring of 1945. This would become Japan's brutal “last stand” against the American forces.
The Americans had fought World War II on two fronts on opposite sides of the globe. Both Germany and Japan had refused to give in, and the casualties of bloody battles in both theaters mounted. The number of American military dead or wounded had risen to more than a million. Yet the American fighting men still pushed on. Because the U.S. Armed Forces were waging a two-front war, they desperately needed matériel and reinforcements in order to keep going.
Yet although things were tough for the Americans, they were worse for the Japanese. The Imperial Army was getting even more desperate than they had been at Iwo Jima. They knew that if they failed to push the Americans back into the sea at Okinawa, the next place they would be fighting them would be on the beaches of Japan.
All across the Pacific, Emperor Hirohito's time was running out. Fighting the Americans and their allies over the past three years had taken a huge toll on the Imperial Army, Navy, and air forces. They were out of nearly everything—fuel, ships, aircraft, munitions—and each day they were running lower and lower on their most essential war component: the Japanese fighting man.
The American public got behind their men in uniform, now numbering sixteen million troops fighting Hitler and Tojo (including a smaller
number of noncombatant women in the WACs, WAVEs, and WAFs). The tide of war in Europe had turned in the spring of 1945, when the Allies had Hitler on the defensive, but the war wasn't over in that theater just yet. The Joint Chiefs had planned for an all-out offensive against Nazi aggression to end the war in Europe in weeks rather than months.
If Germany could be forced to surrender, taking Okinawa could force an unconditional surrender from the Japanese as well. Okinawa's proximity to Japan's main islands was strategically critical to the Allied invasion plan, so the Joint Chiefs were willing to risk huge casualties in order to capture it.
A year earlier, the Joint Chiefs had considered Iwo Jima and Okinawa as targets for a final takeover—especially Okinawa. Not just because the tiny island was within striking distance of the Home Islands of Japan by American B-24s and B-25s, but also because of the psychological value of capturing a piece of real estate that for 5,000 years had never known any other ruler but Japan. With the acquisition of these two islands, the military planners in Washington felt they could move the war in the Pacific to a quicker end.
Capturing Okinawa would set the stage for the invasion of Japan. Owning Iwo Jima would help too, but it was more than 750 miles from the Japanese mainland. Okinawa was closer and would give the Americans a decided edge. Control of these islands cut Japan off from her crucial refueling supplies and repair stations and made them available to American ships instead.
America's strategy of “island-hopping” had created stepping-stones for its forces to jump from island to island, each step bringing them closer to Japan. Okinawa was the final hop. At Okinawa, the Marines, Army, Navy, and U.S. Army and Navy air forces all united in a final battle that prepared them for the invasion of mainland Japan.
Americans saw Joe Rosenthal's Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of the flag raising on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi in their newspapers and in movie newsreels. They were cheered by the fact that the Marines had taken Iwo Jima and secured its airfields, giving the United States yet another strategic air base close to the mainland of Japan.
Okinawa was much larger—more than sixty miles long—and hilly, honeycombed with caves, tunnels, and tombs. It was arguably going to be even more costly to take than Iwo Jima.
General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., the son of a Confederate general, was selected to lead the invasion. He led the massive 10th Amphibious Force. Admiral Ray Spruance and Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher headed up Task Force 58 and Admiral Kelly Turner led Task Force 51 naval forces. The British Royal Navy's Vice Admiral Sir Bernard Rawlings was assigned to the 5th Fleet and led Task Force 57—a British fleet of four carriers, two battleships, five cruisers, and fifteen destroyers. Marine Major General Roy Geiger would lead the invasion force with three Marine divisions and four Army divisions.
General Buckner's nemesis, Lt. General Mitsuru Ushijima, a senior member of the Imperial Headquarters, led the 32nd Imperial Army—probably one of the most effective combat teams ever assembled, consisting of more than 100,000 troops.
During March 1945, the U.S. Navy began air and sea attacks against Okinawa with such ferocity that the Japanese called it a “typhoon of steel.” Six days before the planned invasion, the Navy increased its shelling intensity, pounding the island with more munitions than the 20,000 shells that they'd dumped on Iwo Jima. This time they also pumped tens of thousands of rounds onto the sites where naval recon photos showed evidence of Japanese emplacements. But the weeklong bombardment did little damage to the dug-in Japanese.
Also during March, Rear Admiral Alexander Sharp's fleet of 122 mine patrol craft began minesweeping operations. Continuing night and day until the invasion began, Sharp's operation swept 2,500 square miles of ocean. They found and destroyed six enemy minefields and nearly 200 mines. But Sharp's fleet paid a price for their efforts: His ships and men accounted for 15 percent of all U.S. naval casualties during the Okinawa operation.
Nineteen-year-old Seaman Third Class Larry Delewski joined the Navy to do his part. When he was assigned a stateside, landlocked, noncombatant job, he requested sea duty. His request was granted, and Larry saw perhaps more action than he'd bargained for. He was first aboard the destroyer
USS
Laffey
when it was sent to Normandy for the D-Day invasion of France. The
Laffey
was one of just sixteen (out of 300 destroyers built during the war) to receive a Presidential Unit Citation.
When Delewski's destroyer returned from Europe, it was refitted in the Boston Navy Yard and then given orders to head for the Pacific and Okinawa. The Navy was about to lose more ships and men in Okinawa than it had lost at Pearl Harbor.
SEAMAN THIRD CLASS
LAWRENCE DELEWSKI, USN
Aboard USS
Laffey
1 April 1945
1115 Hours Local
I'd been trained in the gunnery school and I never got notification that I'd made third class until we were going through the Panama Canal heading to the Pacific.
On the way over, we practiced with the big guns. The gun would fire, then it recoiled fifteen, eighteen inches with hydraulic brakes to stop it. After the gun fired, the hot shell, about thirty inches long, came out. The “hot shell man” wore asbestos gloves up to his shoulders, and it was his job to clear that shell. Once it cleared, he'd trip the ramming shoe down so the gun could be reloaded. And then the “powder man” would load the powder in. This is a five-inch gun, so the powder for the shell itself was like a great big loaf of bread but it weighed over sixty pounds. Then you put the powder and shell in, hit the ramming shoe, and then hit the lever.
The ramming shoe came forward. The bridge closed and you're ready to fire again. Now everything I've just described took place every three seconds, so it took a lot of teamwork.
We had six five-inch guns and twelve 40 mm guns. We also had ten torpedoes and some depth charges. So we were armed and built to protect all those other ships as well.
I always had a globe and I'd hold it up and I'd say, just look—all you see is water. The Pacific Ocean is big. You can go for days and days and not see anything but water.
It was common knowledge that we were moving progressively north toward Okinawa. And sooner or later, we'd go for the Japanese homeland.
Destroyers like the
Laffey
seemed to always be in short supply so we were switched back and forth from fleet to fleet. Sometimes we'd be operating with the 3rd Fleet, other times with the aircraft carriers, and sometimes with the bombardment groups. And another time, we might be with the ships actually taking part in a landing.
This landing was on Easter Sunday, 1 April, and was fairly uneventful. The
Laffey
was landing reinforcements day and night.
We saw the damage that a single kamikaze could do. We saw people who were burned and mutilated.
On 12 April the
Laffey
took a tremendous beating, and there were four other destroyers knocked out the same day. At the worst of it, we had as many as eighty enemy planes on our radar screens at one time.
They started coming in big numbers and we started taking some hits. This plane hit on the blind side and blew me up onto the deck, maybe fifteen, eighteen feet, but I had no broken bones.
Another plane hit just forward of my gun mount. I saw this thing crash and saw the wing as it hit the back of the gun mount, causing a terrible gasoline fire just inside my gun area. Once we got the fire under control, I reported to the bridge that we were ready to resume firing.
I had shrapnel in my back and in the back of my head, with burns on my back. And the fiery explosion burned the hair off the back of my head.
The communications officer, who's standing there, found an unexploded shell. It was fairly common for these suicide planes to just fly over, rigged with shells, and drop them as bombs. And some hit the
Laffey
and went right through the main deck, through the lower deck. The rivets flew and the sheet steel opened up.
And so everything from the engine room aft was flooded because we had holes in the bottom. Later that day, two seagoing tugs
came alongside. At that point, we must've had somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four inches of water below decks.
We were taken to a beach area where we dropped anchor, and then the next morning some underwater welders put patches on the outside so we could pump out the inside.
We lost six men out of that gun crew of thirteen that day. One was a young man who went to gunnery school with me in Newport, up by the bridge. They took a direct hit up there and he was killed. There was another gunner, Joe Mealy from Brooklyn, and shrapnel went right through him. He was dead in seconds.
We just knew that sooner or later, people on our ship were going to be lost. There was no escape. That's the thing when you're in the Navy: There's no place to hide.
U.S. MARINE ASSAULT FORCE
OKINAWA
1 APRIL 1945
1915 HOURS LOCAL
By 1 April, more than 1,300 Allied ships had carried hundreds of thousands of men across the Pacific to assemble off Okinawa—more than at Normandy in June 1944.
General Ushijima had spent many months turning Okinawa into a fortress. His troops dug elaborate networks of tunnels that connected to and protected his strategically located artillery. He hoped to delay the Americans' ultimate invasion operation—the assault on the mainland of Japan—for as long as possible.

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