With the Old Breed (43 page)

Apparently the enemy had withdrawn guns and troops from Shuri to the extent that their shelling of our area had all but stopped. A miserable drizzling rain commenced again. Almost out on my feet with fatigue, I decided to take advantage
of the quiet. I unfolded an unused stretcher, set it on some boards, lay down on my back, and covered my head and body with my poncho. It was the first time in two months— since leaving my canvas rack aboard ship on 1 April (D day)—that I had been able to lie down on anything but hard ground or mud. The canvas stretcher felt like a deluxe bed, and my poncho shielded all but my mud-caked boondockers and ankles from the rain. For the first time in about ten days I fell into a deep sleep.

How long I slept I don't know, but after a while I became aware of being lifted upward. At first I thought I was dreaming, but then I awoke fully and realized someone had picked up the stretcher. Throwing the poncho away from me, I sprang off the stretcher, spun around, and saw two clean, neatly shaven Marines looking at me in utter astonishment.

Several of my grimy buddies squatting on their muddy helmets nearby began to laugh. The two strangers were graves registration men. They had picked up the stretcher thinking I was just another poncho-covered corpse. It never occurred to them that, instead, I was just a weary Marine trying to catch a nap on a comfortable stretcher who had covered himself to keep off the rain. They grinned when they realized what had happened. I accused my buddies of telling the two men to pick up my stretcher, but they only laughed and asked why my nap had ended so abruptly. I was left with an eerie feeling from the incident, but my buddies enjoyed the joke thoroughly.

Dawn broke clearly without rain on 28 May, and we prepared to attack later in the morning. About 1015 we attacked southward against long-range mortar and machine-gun fire. We were elated that the opposition was so light and that the sun was shining. We actually advanced several hundred yards that day, quite an accomplishment in that sector.

Moving through the mud was still difficult, but we were all glad to get out of the stinking, half-flooded garbage pit around the Half Moon. That night we learned that we would continue the attack the next day by moving directly against the Shuri Ridge.

About midmorning on 29 May, ⅗ attacked the Shuri with
Company L in the lead and Companies K and I following closely. Earlier in the morning Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had attacked eastward into the rains of Shuri Castle and had raised the Confederate flag. When we learned that the flag of the Confederacy had been hoisted over the very heart and soul of Japanese resistance, all of us Southerners cheered loudly. The Yankees among us grumbled, and the Westerners didn't know what to do. Later we learned that the Stars and Stripes that had flown over Guadalcanal were raised over Shuri Castle, a fitting tribute to the men of the 1st Marine Division who had the honor of being first into the Japanese citadel.
*

We all were filled with a sense of accomplishment that night as we dug in somewhere around Shuri Castle. We in the ranks were well aware of its strategic importance to the progress of the campaign.

Although the whole place was in ruins, we could still see that the area around Shuri Castle had been impressive and picturesque before its destruction by the incessant U.S. bombardment. Shuri Castle itself was a mess, and I couldn't tell much about its former appearance. It had been an ancient stone building surrounded by a moat and what appeared to have been terraces and gardens. As we picked our way through the rubble, I looked at the terraced stonework and shattered blackened tree stumps. I thought it must have been a pretty place once.

We dug in that night with the knowledge that even though we were at last in Shuri Castle, there were strongly entrenched Japanese still north of us in Wana Draw, east of us, and south of us. The lines were terribly confused to many of us in the ranks, and we assumed that the enemy could come at
us from almost any direction. But they remained quiet during the night, except for the usual raiders.

We attacked again the next day, and got shelled badly. I was totally confused as to where we were for several days and can't clarify it now in my mind even after careful study of the notes and references at my disposal.

At dusk on one of those last few days of May, we moved onto a muddy, slippery ridge and were told to dig in along the crest. One of the three 60mm mortar squads was to set up its gun down behind the ridge, but my squad and the remaining squad were ordered to dig in along the ridge crest and to function as riflemen during the night. The weather turned bad again, and it started raining.

Mac, our mortar section leader, was nowhere to be seen. But Duke, who had been our section leader on Peleliu and who was by then leading the battalion's 81mm mortar platoon, came up to take charge. He ordered an NCO to have us dig two-man foxholes five yards apart along the crest of the ridge. My buddy went off down the ridge to draw ammo and chow while I prepared to dig.

The ridge was about a hundred feet high, quite steep, and we were on a narrow crest. Several discarded Japanese packs, helmets, and other gear lay scattered along the crest. From the looks of the muddy soil, the place had been shelled heavily for a long time. The ridge was a putrid place. Our artillery must have killed Japanese there earlier, because the air was foul with the odor of rotting flesh. It was just like being back at Half Moon Hill. Off toward our front, to the south, I had only a dim view through the gathering gloom and curtain of rain of the muddy valley below.

The men digging in on both sides of me cursed the stench and the mud. I began moving the heavy, sticky clay mud with my entrenching shovel to shape out the extent of the foxhole before digging deeper. Each shovelful had to be knocked off the spade, because it stuck like glue. I was thoroughly exhausted and thought my strength wouldn't last from one sticky shovelful to the next.

Kneeling on the mud, I had dug the hole no more than six or eight inches deep when the odor of rotting flesh got worse.
There was nothing to do but continue to dig, so I closed my mouth and inhaled with short shallow breaths. Another spadeful of soil out of the hole released a mass of wriggling maggots that came welling up as though those beneath were pushing them out. I cursed, and told the NCO as he came by what a mess I was digging into.

“You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart.”

In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket buried in the mud—and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit the breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shovel skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels.

I began choking and gagging as I yelled in desperation, “I can't dig in here! There's a dead Nip here!”

The NCO came over, looked down at my problem and at me, and growled, “You heard him; he said put the holes five yards apart.”

“How the hell can I dig a foxhole through a dead Nip?” I protested.

Just then Duke came along the ridge and said, “What's the matter, Sledgehammer?”

I pointed to the partially exhumed corpse. Duke immediately told the NCO to have me dig in a little to the side away from the rotting remains. I thanked Duke and glared at the NCO. How I managed not to vomit during that vile experience I don't know. Perhaps my senses and nerves had been so dulled by constant foulness for so long that nothing could evoke any other response but to cry out and move back.

I soon had a proper foxhole dug to one side of the site of my first attempt. (A few spades full of mud thrown back into that excavation did little to reduce the horrid odor.) My buddy returned, and we began to square away our gear for the coming light. There was some small-arms fire to our left, but
all was quiet around us. Duke was down at the foot of the ridge behind us with a map in his hand. He called us to come down for a critique and a briefing on the next day's attack.

Glad to leave the stinking foxhole, I got up and carefully started down the slippery ridge. My buddy rose, took one step down the ridge, slipped, and fell. He slid on his belly all the way to the bottom, like a turtle sliding off a log. I reached the bottom to see him stand erect with his arms partially extended and look down at his chest and belt with a mixed expression of horror, revulsion, and disbelief. He was, of course, muddy from the slide. But that was the least of it. White, fat maggots tumbled and rolled off his cartridge belt, pockets, and folds of his dungaree jacket and trousers. I picked up a stick and handed him another. Together we scraped the vile insect larvae off his reeking dungarees.

That Marine was a Gloucester veteran with whom I had often shared a hole on Peleliu and Okinawa. He was as tough and as hard as any man I ever knew. But that slide was almost too much for him. I thought he was going to scream or crack up. Having to wallow in war's putrefaction was almost more than the toughest of us could bear. He shook himself like a wet dog, however, cursed, and threw down the stick when we got him scraped free of maggots.

Duke's group of eight to ten Marines showed their sympathy for my buddy and their appreciation of the vileness of his accident. Muddy, bearded, and red-eyed with fatigue, Duke called our attention to the map, and that helped us focus on other subjects. He showed us where we were and told us some of the plans for the next day's attack, which was supposed to break completely through the Shuri line.

I was so revolted and sickened by what had just happened and so weary that I didn't remember much of what he told us. It is a pity in retrospect, because that briefing was the only time in my combat experience that an officer ever showed a group of privates a map of the battlefield and explained recent events and future attack plans. Usually an NCO simply relayed the word to us. We then followed orders as they were given, rarely knowing what was going on.

We never knew why Duke held the little critique that night, whether he was ordered to do so or not. I suspect he did it on his own. He realized we wanted to know and understand our role in the overall plan.

It was a historic time, and we were participating in events of key importance to the American effort on Okinawa. All eyes were on Shuri. My buddies and I were key participants at a critical juncture in one of the epic land battles of World War II, and we were having our tiny role in that battle explained. Duke asked if there were any questions. A few were asked, which he answered clearly. I maintained my condition of near stupefaction through it all. Then we slowly climbed back up the filthy ridge after he dismissed us.

That night the rain came down in torrents. It was without exaggeration the most terrific deluge I've ever seen. The wind blew fiercely, slashing the rain horizontally across the crest of the ridge and stinging our faces and hands. The star shells burst but gave little illumination because they were snatched away immediately by the unseen hand of the gale. Visibility was limited to about six feet. We couldn't see our buddies in their foxholes on either side of us. What a terrible night to grapple with Japanese infiltrators or a counterattack, I thought to myself all night long.

Considerable machine-gun fire, bursts of rifle fire, and grenade explosions erupted throughout the night a short way down the line to our left. But all was mercifully quiet, albeit tense, in our immediate area. Next morning I realized why we weren't molested by the enemy as the men to our left had been. For a considerable distance to our right and left, the ridge fell away almost perpendicularly to the valley below. The Japanese simply couldn't crawl up the slick surface.

In the latter days of May while the Japanese held on to the center of their line around Shuri, the U.S. Army divisions to the east and the 6th Marine Division to the west (around Naha) finally made progress to the south. Their combined movements threatened to envelop the main Japanese defense forces in the center. Thus the enemy had to withdraw. By dawn on 30 May most of the Japanese Thirty-second Army
had departed the Shuri line, leaving only rear guards to cover their retreat.

In the sixty-one days of fighting on Okinawa after D day, an estimated 62,548 Japanese soldiers had lost their lives and 465 had been captured. American dead numbered 5,309; 23,909 had been wounded; and 346 were missing in action. It wasn't over yet.