With the Old Breed (47 page)

I felt compassion for the officer. I'd been in the same forlorn frame of mind more than once, when horror piled on horror seemed too much to bear. The officer also carried a heavy responsibility, which I didn't have.

As I walked past, the officer blurted out in desperation, “What's the matter with those guys up on the ridge? Why the hell don't they move out faster and get this thing over with?”

Compassion aside, my own emotional and physical state was far from good by then. Completely forgetting my lowly rank, I walked right into the CP and said to the officer, “I'll tell you what's the matter with those guys on the ridge. They're gettin’ shot right and left, and they can't move any faster!”

He looked up with a dazed expression. Boyes turned around, probably expecting to see the battalion or regimental commander. When he saw me instead, he looked surprised. Then he glared at me the way he did the time I had too much to say to Shadow back on Half Moon. Coming quickly to my senses and remembering that a private's advice to first lieutenants and gunny sergeants wasn't considered standard operating procedure in the Marine Corps, I backed away quietly and got out of there.

Toward afternoon, several of us were resting among some rocks near the crest of the ridge. We had been passing ammo and water up to some men just below the crest. A Japanese machine gun still covered the crest there, and no one dared
raise his head. Bullets snapped over the crest and ricochets whined off into the air after striking rocks. The man next to me was a rifleman and a fine Peleliu veteran whom I knew well. He had become unusually quiet and moody during the past hour, but I just assumed he was as tired and as weary with fear and fatigue as I was. Suddenly he began babbling incoherently, grabbed his rifle, and shouted, “Those slant-eyed yellow bastards, they've killed enougha my buddies. I'm goin’ after 'em.” He jumped up and started for the crest of the ridge.

“Stop!” I yelled and grabbed at his trouser leg. He pulled away.

A sergeant next to him yelled, “Stop, you fool!” The sergeant also grabbed for the frantic man's legs, but his hands slipped. He managed to clutch the toe of one boondocker, however, and gave a jerk. That threw the man off balance, and he sprawled on his back, sobbing like a baby. The front of his trousers was darkened where he had urinated when he lost control of himself. The sergeant and I tried to calm him but also made sure he couldn't get back onto his feet. “Take it easy, Cobber. We'll get you outa here,” the NCO said.

We called a corpsman who took the sobbing, trembling man out of the meat grinder to an aid station.

“He's a damn good Marine, Sledgehammer. I'll lower the boom on anybody says he ain't. But he's just had all he can take. That's it. He's just had all he can take.”

The sergeant's voice trailed away sadly. We had just seen a brave man crack up completely and lose all control of himself, even to the point of losing his desire to live.

“If you hadn't grabbed his foot and jerked him down before he got to the crest, he'd be dead now, for sure,” I said.

“Yeah, the poor guy woulda gotten hit by that goddamn machine gun; no doubt about it,” the sergeant said.

By the end of the day, Company K reached the eastern end of Kunishi Ridge and established contact with army units that had gained the high ground on Yuza-Dake and Yaeju-Dake. Mail came up to us along with rations, water, and ammo. Among my letters was one from a Mobile acquaintance of many years. He had joined the Marine Corps and was a member
of some rear-echelon unit of service troops stationed on northern Okinawa. He insisted that I write him immediately about the location of my unit. He wrote that when he found out where I was, he would visit me at once. I read his words to some of my buddies, and they got a good laugh out of it.

“Don't that guy know there's a war on? What the hell does he think the First Marine Division is doin’ down here anyway?”

Someone else suggested I insist not only that he come to see me at once, but that he stay and be my replacement if he wanted to be a true friend. I never answered the letter.

A small patrol from the 7th Marines came by, and we talked with an old buddy. He said his regiment had been in terrible fighting for the several days it had been on Kunishi Ridge. Then we sat silently, ruefully watching a group of Marines far over to the right get shelled by large-caliber Japanese artillery. Word came along the line about the death earlier in the day of the U.S. Tenth commander, General Buckner.
*

Not long after we were relieved on Kunishi Ridge (in the afternoon of 18 June), I asked Gy. Sgt. Hank Boyes how many men we had lost fighting on Yuza-Dake and Kunishi. He told me Company K had lost forty-nine enlisted men and one officer, half of our number of the previous day. Almost all the newly arrived replacements were among the casualties. Now the company consisted of a mere remnant, twenty-one percent of its normal strength of two hundred and thirty-five men. We had been attached to ⅖ for only twenty-two hours and had been on Kunishi Ridge for less time than that.

From 11 to 18 June the fierce battle for the Kunishi–Yuza-Yaeju escarpment cost the 1st Marine Division 1,150 casualties. The fight marked the end of organized Japanese resistance on Okinawa.

The battle for the Kunishi escarpment was unforgettable. It reminded many of us of Peleliu's ridges, and we still weren't used to the fact that night attacks by Marines had played a significant role in capturing the difficult objective. Among my friends in the ranks, the biggest surprise was the poor state of readiness and training of our newest Marine replacements, as compared to the more efficient replacements who had come into the company earlier in the campaign (they had received some combat training in the rear areas before joining us). But most of the new men who joined us just before Kunishi Ridge had come straight from the States. Some of them told us they had had only a few weeks training or less after boot camp.

It's no wonder they were so confused and ineffective when first exposed to intense enemy fire. When we had to evacuate a casualty under fire, some of the new men were reluctant to take the chances necessary to save the wounded Marine. This reticence infuriated the veterans, who made such threats against them that the new men finally did their share. They were motivated by greater fear of the veteran Marines than of the Japanese. This isn't to reflect on their bravery; they simply weren't trained and conditioned properly to cope with the shock, violence, and hellish conditions into which they were thrown. The rank and file, usually sympathetic toward new
replacements, simply referred to them “as fouled up as Hogan's goat,” or some other more profound but profane description.

With a feeling of intense relief, we came down off Kunishi Ridge late in the day of 18 June. After rejoining the other companies of ⅗, we moved in column on a road cut through the ridge. As we wound south, we talked with men of the 8th Marines who were moving along the road with us. We were glad to see a veteran Marine regiment come in to spearhead the final push south. We were exhausted.

The veterans in our ranks scrutinized the men of the 8th Marines with that hard professional stare of old salts sizing up another outfit. Everything we saw brought forth remarks of approval: they looked squared away, and many of them were combat veterans themselves.
*

I talked to a 60mm mortarman who was carrying almost an entire cloverleaf of HE shells on a backpack rig. Asking why he was so overloaded, I was told his battalion commander wanted the mortarmen to try the arrangement because they could carry more ammo than in a regular ammo bag. I hoped fervently that none of our officers saw that rig.

I also saw a machine-gun squad with “Nip Nemesis” stenciled neatly on the water jacket of their .30-caliber heavy machine gun. They were a sharp-looking crew.

We passed a large muddy area in the road cut. In it lay the body of a dead Japanese soldier in full uniform and equipment. It was a bizarre sight. He had been mashed down into the mud by tank treads and looked like a giant squashed insect.

Our column moved down into a valley at five-pace intervals, one file on each side of the road. An amtrac came clattering slowly along, headed toward the front farther south. It passed me as I was daydreaming about the delightful possibility that we might not get shelled or shot at anymore. But
my reverie was terminated rudely and abruptly by
whiz… bang! whiz… bang!

“Disperse!” someone yelled. We scattered like a covey of quail. About ten of us jumped into a shallow ditch. The first enemy antitank shell had passed over the top of the amtrac and exploded in a field beyond. But the second shell scored a direct hit on the left side of the amtrac. The machine jolted to a stop and began smoking. We peeped out of the ditch as the driver tried to start the engine. His crewman peered back into the cargo compartment to assess the damage. Two more shells slammed into the side of the disabled amtrac. The two Marines in the cab jumped out, ran over, and flopped down, panting, into the ditch near us.

“What kinda cargo is in there?” I asked.

“We got a full unit of fire for a rifle company—‘thirty’ ball, grenades, mortar ammo—the works. Boy, she is gonna blow like hell when that fire gets to that ammo. The gas tanks are hit so bad there's no way to put it out.” The driver crawled off along the ditch to find a radioman to report that his load of ammo couldn't get through to the front.

Just then a man crawled over next to me and stood upright. I looked up at him in surprise. Every Marine in the area was hugging the deck waiting for the inevitable explosion from the amtrac. The man was clad in clean dungarees with the new sheen still on the cloth, and he displayed the relaxed appearance of a person who could wash up and drink hot coffee at a CP whenever he was in the mood to do so. He carried a portable movie camera with which he began avidly filming the pillow of thick black smoke boiling up from the amtrac. Rifle cartridges began popping in the amtrac as the heat got to them.

“Hey, mate,” I said. “You'd better get down! That thing is gonna blow sky high any minute. It's loaded with ammo!”

The man held his camera steady but stopped filming. He turned and looked down at me with a contemptuous stare of utter disdain and disgust. He didn't demean himself to speak to me as I cringed in the ditch, but turned back to his camera eyepiece and continued filming.

At that moment came a flash accompanied by a loud explosion
and terrific concussion as the amtrac blew up. The concussion knocked the cameraman completely off his feet. He was uninjured but badly shaken and terribly frightened. He peered wide-eyed and cautious over the ditch bank at the twisted amtrac burning on the road.

I leaned over to him and said pleasantly, “I told you so.”

He turned his no longer arrogant face toward me. I grinned at him with the broadest smile I could conjure, “like a mule eatin’ briars through a barbed-wire fence,” as the Texans would say. Speechless, the cameraman turned quickly and crawled off along the ditch toward the rear.

Four or five Marine tanks were parked close together in the valley downhill from us about one hundred yards away. Their heavily armored fronts faced up the valley to our left. The crewmen had been alerted by the first enemy round fired at the amtrac; we saw them swinging their 75s toward our left and closing their turret hatches. Not a moment too soon. The entire Japanese 47mm gun battery opened rapid fire on the tanks. Too bad the movie cameraman had felt the call of duty summon him to the rear after the amtrac exploded, because he missed a dramatic scene. The enemy guns fired with admirable accuracy. Several of their tracerlike armor-piercing shells hit the turrets of the tanks and ricocheted into the air. The tanks returned fire. In a few minutes, the Japanese guns were knocked out or ceased firing, and everything got quiet. The tanks sustained only minor damage. We went back onto the road and moved on south without further incident.

Until the island was secured on 21 June, we made a series of rapid moves southward, stopping only to fight groups of die-hard Japanese in caves, pillboxes, and ruined villages. The fresh 8th Marines pushed south rapidly. “The Eighth Marines goin’ like a bat outa hell,” a man said as news drifted back to us.

We were fortunate in not suffering many casualties in the company. The Japanese were beaten, and the hope uppermost in every weary veteran's mind was that his luck would hold out a little longer, until the end of the battle.

We used loudspeakers, captured Japanese soldiers, and Okinawan civilians to persuade the remaining enemy to surrender.
One sergeant and a Japanese lieutenant who had graduated from an Ivy League college and spoke perfect English gave themselves up in a road cut. Just after they came out and surrendered, a sniper opened fire on us. We eight or ten Marines took cover next to the embankment, but the Japanese officer and NCO stood in the middle of the road with the bullets kicking up dirt all around them. The sniper obviously was trying to kill them because they had surrendered.

We looked at the two Japanese standing calmly, and one of our NCOs said, “Get over here under cover, you dumb bastards.”

The enemy officer grinned affably and spoke to his NCO. They walked calmly over and got down as ordered.

Some Company K men shot the gun crew of a 150mm howitzer emplaced in the mouth of a well-camouflaged cave. The Japanese defended their big artillery piece with their rifles and died to the last man. Farther on we tried to get a group of enemy in a burial vault to surrender, but they refused. Our lieutenant, Mac, jumped in front of the door and shouted in Japanese, “Do not be afraid. Come out. I will not harm you.” Then he fired a complete twenty-round magazine from his submachine gun into the door. We all just shook our heads and moved on. About a half hour later, the five or six Japanese rushed out fighting. Some of our Marines behind us killed them.