Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Saul David Ltd 2020

Cover image © Getty Images

Cover design by Richard Lioenes

Saul David asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Maps by Martin Brown

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008342487

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008342494

Version: 2020-03-02

Dedication

For Matt

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  List of Illustrations

7 Maps

8  Prologue: Love Day

9  1 ‘Where’s Douglas?’

10  2 Operation Iceberg

11  3 ‘Everybody go home!’

12  4 The Divine Wind

13  5 ‘More concerned with furlough than fighting’

14  6 ‘I’m going simply because I’ve got to – and I hate it’

15  7 ‘I was crying as I did it and she was crying too’

16  8 ‘Tomorrow is our big day’

17  9 ‘It was quite a show’

18  10 ‘There’s always some poor bastard who doesn’t get word’

19  11 ‘The smell of burnt flesh hung about for days’

20  12 ‘War is indeed hell’

21  13 ‘I could see him floating by, face upward’

22  14 ‘Gone? She’s gone?’

23  15 ‘They just knocked the heck out of us’

24  16 ‘I want to marry Shigeko’

25  17 ‘Harry, the president is dead’

26  18 ‘His eyes were rolling in panic’

27  19 ‘Three bullets had ripped into his temple’

28  20 ‘Progress not quite satisfactory’

29  21 ‘All Kaitens prepare for launch!’

30  22 ‘The most terrible weapon’

31  23 ‘Corpsman!’

32  24 Hacksaw Ridge

33  25 ‘We will fight to the last man’

34  26 ‘Doc, this one is worth saving’

35  27 ‘The happy dream is over’

36  28 Sugar Loaf Hill

37  29 ‘Hell’s own cesspool’

38  30 ‘I still hear those cries today’

39  31 ‘The entire enemy line appears to be crumbling’

40  32 ‘It is terrifying to think about’

41  33 ‘There is NO tactical thinking or push’

42  34 ‘I lost damn near all of them’

43  35 ‘You’re just going to have to hang on’

44  36 ‘We were so gullible, so innocent’

45  37 ‘We are down to the final kill’

46  38 ‘I haven’t come up to the front to hide’

47  39 ‘Every man will … fight to the end’

48  40 ‘Suppose it doesn’t go off?’

49  41 ‘What a splendid last moment!’

50  42 ‘All he talked about was you’

51  43 ‘The most terrible thing ever discovered’

52  44 ‘My God, what have we done?’

53  45 ‘We were going to live!’

54  Epilogue: ‘Those dark corners are still there’

55  Picture Section

56  Acknowledgements

57  Notes

58  Bibliography

59  Index

60  Also by Saul David

61  About the Author

62  About the Publisher

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Illustrations

PFC Don Dencker, a good student whose hobby was racing pigeons, during training with the 3/382nd Infantry at Camp Luis Obispo, California. (Courtesy of Ann Dencker)

Private Howard Arendt, from Louisville, Kentucky, with five tent mates from the 3/22nd Marines. (United States Marine Corps Archives: USMCA)

A landing ship firing rockets onto Japanese positions on Okinawa in late March 1945. (Library of Congress)

Marines climb into a landing craft on Love Day, 1 April 1945. (USMCA)

Landing craft and ships off Hagushi beaches on Love Day, 1 April 1945. (Department of Defense)

Private Salvatore Giammanco, a 20-year-old Italian immigrant from Brooklyn, the first ground casualty of the campaign. (USMCA)

Major General Lemuel Shepherd, the commander of the 6th Marine Division, with his staff on Okinawa. (USMCA)

An American intelligence officer questions a Japanese prisoner. (USMCA)

The celebrated war correspondent Ernie Pyle enjoys a cigarette break with men from the 1/5th Marines on 8 April 1945, a week after the Okinawa landings. (Department of Defense)

The body of Ernie Pyle, lying in a roadside ditch on Ie Shima. (Department of Defense)

Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, commanding the Japanese Thirty-Second Army on Okinawa.

Ushijima and staff plot the battle. (Japanese Cabinet Intelligence Bureau)

A Japanese light tank with two of its dead crewmen in the foreground. (USMCA)

Marines follow two M4 Sherman tanks into action. (USMCA)

American troops use a flamethrower to flush out Japanese snipers on a beach. (USMCA)

US Marines assaulting a former Japanese barracks at Shuri in late May 1945. (Department of Defense)

Soldier firing a .30 calibre Browning automatic rifle (BAR) on 2 May 1945. (USMCA)

A rifleman looks for a target, while his officer talks into his battery-operated walkie-talkie. (USMCA)

Standing atop the Maeda escarpment (‘Hacksaw Ridge’), PFC Desmond Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist from Lynchburg, West Virginia. (Department of Defense)

Colonel Francis Fenton kneels beside the body of his son PFC Mike Fenton, a 19-year-old scout/sniper in 1/5th Marines who was killed in the fierce fighting for the Awacha Pocket on 7 May 1945. (Department of Defense)

Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa, the pilot of one of two kamikaze planes that struck the aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill on 11 May 1945.

Smoke and flames pour from the USS Bunker Hill after the kamikaze attacks. (Department of Defense)

Sugar Loaf Hill, near Naha. (Department of Defense)

American soldiers collecting supplies dropped by air during the fierce fighting for Shuri Castle in late May 1945. (USMCA)

Japanese schoolgirls wave cherry blossoms to bid a kamikaze pilot farewell as he leaves on his suicide mission from Chiran air base, Kyushu, on 12 April 1945. (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

US Marines evacuate a wounded colleague. (USMCA)

Two soldiers cover a Japanese sniper hidden in a wrecked church. (USMCA)

Major Bruce Porter DFC, the commander of 542 (N) Squadron. (USMCA)

A US Marine removes grenades from the corpse of a female Japanese soldier killed in the fighting. (Courtesy Himeyuri Peace Museum)

Miyo Takaesu, one of the 118 student nurses of the Himeyuri Corps – recruited from schoolgirls between the ages of 15 and 19 – who perished in the battle for Okinawa. (Courtesy Himeyuri Peace Museum)

Lieutenant General Simon Buckner, with Colonel Clarence ‘Bull’ Wallace and Major Bill Chamberlin of the 8th Marines. (Department of Defense)

Men of the 6th Marine Division raise the Stars and Stripes to signal the end of organised Japanese resistance as they reach the sea at the end of the Kiyan Peninsula on 21 June 1945. (USMCA)

Japanese soldiers surrendering to US forces during mopping-up operations in late June 1945. (Department of Defense)

An aerial view of the ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb exploding over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. (Library of Congress)

Maps

World War II in the Pacific

The Battle of Okinawa, 1 April–22 June 1945

The Plan of Attack

The Battle for the Motobu Peninsula, 9–20 April 1945

The Main Battlefield, April–May 1945

Sugar Loaf Hill, 13–15 May 1945

End of Organised Resistance in the Kiyan Peninsula, 18–21 June 1945

Prologue: Love Day

The USS Eldorado slowed as it approached the west coast of Okinawa in the pre-dawn darkness. ‘Ahead’, noted a US Marine Corps colonel, ‘could be seen the muzzle flashes of naval guns, arcing trajectories of red-hot projectiles, the glow of fires on a distant blur of shoreline. Above the hum of our ship’s circulating blowers could be faintly heard the roll and reverberation of man-made thunder as our supporting battleships, cruisers, destroyers and rocket gunboats increased the tempo of their shore bombardment.’1

Designed as a floating command post, the Eldorado was packed with advanced communications equipment that left space for only two five-inch anti-aircraft guns. Yet she contained a highly valuable human cargo: Vice Admiral Richmond K. (‘Kelly’) Turner, USN, the straight-talking 60-year-old commander of the huge amphibious armada of 1,300 ships and 183,000 combat troops that was converging on Okinawa, the most southerly of Japan’s forty-seven prefectures; and ground-force commander Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr, 58, the snowy-haired son of the famous Confederate general. It was 1 April 1945, or Love Day,* the code name for the assault, and an auspicious date for Buckner as it was, he noted in his diary, ‘Easter Sunday, my father’s birthday and the day of my first battle.’ He added: ‘I hope I shall be able to look back upon it with the same degree of enthusiasm with which I anticipate it.’2

Eager for the fray, Buckner had risen from his cramped quarters at 4:30 a.m. and, after a quick breakfast of ‘hot cakes’, joined Admiral Turner on the bridge where at 5:30 a.m. precisely they observed through binoculars the opening of the pre-landing bombardment of the target beaches at Hagushi, a third of the way up the seventy-mile-long island, by the fire support force of ten battleships, nine cruisers, twenty-three destroyers, and 177 gunboats. Over the next three hours these vessels fired 44,825 rounds of five-inch or larger shells, 33,000 rockets and 22,500 mortar shells, ‘the heaviest concentration of naval gunfire ever to support a landing of troops’.3

Shortly before 6:00 a.m., as the gunfire continued, the day dawned bright and clear, with excellent visibility of up to ten miles and only a few scattered patches of mist. A moderate breeze rippled the calm sea, and there was no surf on the target beaches. The weather, as anticipated, was perfect for an invasion. ‘The golden sunrise’, wrote a delighted Buckner, ‘was not for Japan.’4

At 7:45 a.m. the bombardment lifted long enough for carrier planes to strafe the beaches with bombs and napalm. ‘Smoke and dust rose up from the shore, thousands of feet high,’ recorded the celebrated war correspondent Ernie Pyle as he watched the spectacle from the command ship of the 5th Marines, ‘until finally the land was completely veiled. Bombs and strafing machine guns and roaring engines mingled with the crash of naval bombardment and seemed to drown out all existence. The ghastly concussion set up vibrations in the air – a sort of flutter – which pained and pounded the ears as though with invisible drumsticks. During all this time the waves of assault craft were forming up behind us.’5

At 8:20 a.m. – ten minutes before H-hour – pennants were hauled down from the control craft and the first wave of amphibious tanks, covering an almost unbroken eight-mile line, began to move towards the shore, a distance of 4,000 yards, at a speed of four knots. They were preceded by gunboats firing enough rockets, mortars and 40 mm guns to saturate each prearranged hundred-yard target square for up to 1,000 yards inland with at least twenty-five rounds. ‘The crescendo of the bombardment’, noted Buckner on the Eldorado, ‘culminating in the rocket discharge was a magnificent spectacle.’6

Following a minute behind the tanks was the first wave of assault troops in amphibian tracked vehicles (or ‘amtracs’), likened by Ernie Pyle to ‘big trucks’ on ‘tractor treads, built cup-like’ that propel them through water and the ‘moment it touches bottom it crawls along like a tractor.’ More followed at ten-minute intervals, with Wave 6 scheduled to leave before Wave 1 hit the beach. Pyle watched them go with a ‘miserable and awful weight’ on his heart. ‘There’s nothing whatever romantic’, he reported, ‘in knowing that an hour from now you might be dead.’7

The advanced elements of four infantry divisions – a total of 12,000 men – were now heading for the shore, fearful of what awaited them. The most experienced was the 1st Marine Division which, in August 1942, had become the first US infantry formation to see action when it invaded Japanese-held Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. That bloody campaign had lasted five long months before Japanese resistance was finally broken by the Marines. In 1944 they saw more tough fighting at Cape Gloucester and Peleliu, particularly the latter where the fanatical Japanese defence had cost the division almost 6,500 casualties.8

The ’Canal veterans had since rotated home, replaced by 8,000 raw recruits. But many of the rest remembered the storm of fire that had met them on the beaches of Peleliu and, quite understandably, feared a repeat. Among them was 29-year-old First Lieutenant Bill Looney, a graduate in economics from Chicago’s Roman Catholic Loyola University who had fought and only narrowly survived the last two campaigns as a platoon commander with Charlie Company, 1/5th Marines. Now second in command as the company XO (or executive officer), he and his men had departed their base camp in the Russell Islands a fortnight earlier, aboard a flat-bottomed ‘landing ship, tank’ (LST) that had bunks for 217 men, expecting their target to be the island of Formosa. But after a six-day stop at Ulithi atoll in the Western Caroline Islands – where they were met by the ‘awesome, frightening’ sight of a ‘totally gutted’ and ‘listing’ aircraft carrier, the USS Franklin, which had been bombed by a single Japanese aircraft on 19 March† – they finally learned the truth en route to Okinawa.

Earlier that morning, after a ‘great breakfast’ of steak and eggs, they had watched a battleship shoot down a Japanese kamikaze‡ plane after ‘every other ship in the harbor’ had tried and failed. It was as though the battleship had waited ‘to see if the amateurs could handle it’. The excitement over, Looney and his men were ordered into the amtracs that were crammed into the LST’s hold where the stench of gasoline and the noise of the engines was almost overpowering. Finally the bow doors opened and, one by one, the amtracs splashed into the water as ‘Good luck Marines’ sounded on the ship’s loudspeaker. Looney was half expecting his amtrac to ‘go directly under’, but it stayed afloat and moved slowly towards land.

It was, he remembered, ‘a nervous and quiet group’ crammed into his amtrac, ‘all with the same questions and anxieties going through their minds: are they waiting for us at the shore? How will we get up those sand dunes? Will it be as bad as Peleliu? Will I make it again?’9

Similar thoughts were occurring to Corporal Jim Johnston, a high-school valedictorian who in 1942 had quit the University of Nebraska–Lincoln to join the Marines because he thought it was ‘the honorable thing to do’. Though only 22, Johnston was acting commander of a section of machine-gunners in Easy Company, 2/5th Marines, and felt keenly the weight of responsibility on his shoulders to get his men through the campaign safely. ‘Everyone who had been in front of me in my unit was dead or gone,’ he noted. ‘There was no one to lean on for help. Wherever I looked, someone was looking back at me.’

Their briefing on what to expect had left Johnston extremely pessimistic. Protecting most of the shoreline his company was assaulting was a high sea wall, save for a gap of forty yards with flat land beyond that was covered by machine gun-emplacements. ‘This is our objective,’ he wrote. ‘We must try to secure the flat ground so the tanks and supplies can be landed there. All the defenses the enemy can muster – artillery, mortars, and machine guns – will concentrate their fire on that strategic forty yards. How in the world can a man live through such a place?’ So brutally frank had his officers been that everyone expected Easy Company ‘to be literally destroyed’.10

Up ahead the gunboats turned aside as they reached the shallow coral reef that fringes Okinawa’s western beaches, allowing the amphibious tanks and tracked vehicles to pass through them and proceed unescorted over the reef, the tanks firing their 75 mm howitzers at any pillboxes and strongpoints they could identify. As the tanks neared the shore, the naval bombardment lifted to targets further inland, ‘obscuring the ridges with smoke, blinding the Jap observation posts’, while scores of carrier planes swooped low over the landing beaches to saturate them with machine-gun fire.

The amphibious tanks landed first, followed soon after by the tracked vehicles. As they covered the last few yards to the shore, Johnston remembered the sight of dead Marines in the water and on the beach at Peleliu, and ‘wondered what we would look like to the waves that would come behind us’.11 To Looney, however, the absence of ‘hostile fire’ and ‘no burning amtracs’ was ‘a very good sign’. Carrying long collapsible ladders to scale the steep sand dunes, they piled out of the amtrac and headed for the dunes. ‘Still no action,’ he recorded. ‘It is a walk-on. How great.’12

Johnston approached a pillbox on Yellow 1 Beach, anticipating ‘the impact of bullets ripping into my body’, but there was ‘no fire’. The pillbox was empty. So he and his men moved inland and, within an hour, the beachhead ‘was several hundred yards deep and growing by the minute’. They felt ‘jubilant, absolutely overjoyed’, as if they ‘had been granted a pardon from the death sentence’. But for many it was ‘only a reprieve’.13

Ernie Pyle was still on the 5th Marines’ command ship when word came back by radio that ‘waves 1 and 2 were ashore without much opposition and there were no mines on beaches’. Peering through binoculars, he could see ‘tanks moving across the fields and the men of the second wave walking inland, standing upright’. There was the odd splash in the water near the beach from desultory small-arms and mortar fire, but no sign of ‘any real fire coming from the shore’. It was indicative rather than definitive, yet he felt the weight of dread begin to lift. ‘I found myself talking more easily with the sailors,’ he wrote, ‘and somehow the feeling gradually took hold that we were to be spared.’14

From the deck of the Eldorado it was ‘difficult to see exactly what was happening on the beaches’, noted the Marine colonel, ‘but to our amazement there appeared to be little resistance; our troops reported back that they were crossing the thin strips of coral sand “standing up”. For reasons of their own the Japanese had elected not to defend the beaches.’ He added: ‘Wave after wave of our landing craft hit the beaches, unloaded, and pulled away to their mother ship for subsequent loads. Our troops, Army and Marine, were carried forward by sheer momentum to the high ground of the ventral ridge of the island, where they paused to consolidate and reassess the situation. Behind them the tremendous build-up and congestion on the beaches continued, unhampered by enemy action. It had not been this easy on Peleliu or Iwo Jima.’15

Perhaps the only US serviceman to feel ‘somewhat concerned about the lack of opposition on Okinawa’ that morning was Lieutenant General Buckner. His Marine deputy chief of staff, Brigadier General Oliver P. Smith, put this down to Buckner’s bad experience at Kiska in the Aleutians in August 1943 ‘when Army troops had landed and to their embarrassment … found no Japanese’. Buckner, according to Smith, ‘did not want to be involved in another Kiska’.16

Certainly Buckner was eager to fight, a pugnacity heightened by his lack of combat experience and the fact that in the months leading up to the campaign, he had been fed a steady diet of Japanese horror stories that included photographs of US soldiers who had been ‘butchered and eaten by Japs’.17 Intelligence reports had estimated at least 65,000 Japanese defenders on Okinawa. So where were they? ‘Opposition was light,’ Buckner wrote to his wife that evening, ‘the Japs evidently expected us to land elsewhere in the island … I consider the day highly successful. We have nearly 60,000 troops ashore and will land more tomorrow.’18

Buckner was convinced that the simultaneous feinted landing by the 2nd Marine Division on the south-east coast of Okinawa had fooled the Japanese into concentrating their troops in the wrong place. That was far from the case. Coolly watching the landings through binoculars from an observation platform in Shuri Castle, twelve miles to the south, stood the Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, and his senior officers. ‘Tall and heavy-set’ with ‘ruddy cheeks and a benign countenance’, the 57-year-old Ushijima had replaced the ailing General Watanabe as commander of the Thirty-Second Army on Okinawa the previous August. He had some field experience as a brigade and divisional commander in China and Burma; but since 1941 had occupied administrative posts in Japan, first as commandant of the army’s Non-commissioned Officers Academy, and then the more prestigious Imperial Japanese Army Academy. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was less hands-on than the fire-eating Watanabe, preferring to leave ‘all operational details to his subordinates’, while still taking overall responsibility. ‘In this respect,’ noted a subordinate, ‘he was faithful to long-standing Japanese military tradition, going back to the great Takamori Saigo, one of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration of 1868.’19

The ‘short, stout officer’ standing nearest to Ushijima on the viewing platform, ‘legs set defiantly apart’, was his right-hand man and chief of staff, Major General Isamu Chō, an ultranationalist who had been active in the 1930s in the ‘young officers’ military clique that was pushing for Japan’s territorial expansion. Implicated in the massacre of at least 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war at Nanjing in the winter of 1937–8, and briefly arrested for his part in a coup d’état against the civilian government, the 50-year-old Chō was a ruthless and aggressive military strategist who thought attack the best form of defence. If it had been his decision, the Japanese troops on Okinawa would have fought the invading Americans on the beaches. Instead, Ushijima took the advice of his talented operations chief, Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, 42, who was convinced the only way to defend Okinawa, given the inevitable imbalance in troop numbers and firepower, was to leave the beaches uncontested and instead concentrate Japanese strength in the south of the island.20

The plans recently put forward by Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) in Tokyo decreed that the battle for Okinawa would be won on the sea and in the air, and that the troops on the island would merely be needed ‘to mop up enemy remnants after they landed’. Yahara knew this was nonsense and planned accordingly. Born to a modest family of farmers in the sparsely populated south-west of Honshu Island, the bespectacled Yahara had used brains and determination to advance his army career, passing out first from the War College. He had served as a regimental officer, worked undercover in South East Asia and, more recently, taught at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in Tokyo under Ushijima. But it was his two years as an exchange officer in the United States, including six months with the 8th Infantry, that would serve him best on Okinawa as they gave him an insight into the American military mind.21

Arriving in March 1944, Yahara considered Okinawa an obvious future target for US forces as they advanced closer to Japan’s home islands, 400 miles to the north, and argued for a significant troop build-up. ‘I felt it was crucial’, he recalled, ‘that we select those islands where we could expect the enemy to attack, place decisive troop strength there, and make adequate combat preparations while we still had the chance.’ He eventually got his way, and various formations were rushed to Okinawa until, by the late summer of 1944, the garrison had swelled to 105,000 men, backed by a further 20,000 half-trained Okinawan ‘Boeitai’ (Home Guard).22

At this point, Yahara’s strategy was to ‘move in the direction of any enemy landings, launch an offensive, and destroy the enemy near the coast’. But when IGHQ decided in November 1944 to move the Thirty-Second Army’s best formation, the 25,000-strong 9th Division, to the Philippines, via Formosa, Yahara changed tack. Now with, he believed, too few troops to prevent a major landing, he concentrated the vast bulk of his forces in the southern third of the island, ‘behind several heavily fortified lines north of army headquarters at Shuri Castle’. Well protected in tunnels and caves, they could withstand any amount of enemy bombs and gunfire. Or as Yahara put it: ‘Against steel, the product of American industry, we would pit our earthen fortifications, the product of the sweat of our troops and the Okinawan people.’23

The change was controversial as it ran counter to the Imperial Japanese Army’s operational doctrine of seeking out a ‘decisive battle’ rather than a ‘war of attrition’. But Ushijima gave his approval, and for the next five months soldiers and civilians toiled night and day to prepare a defensive system across the narrow waist of southern Okinawa where, forward of Ushijima’s HQ on Mount Shuri, ‘several jagged lines of ridges and rocky escarpments’ were turned into ‘formidable nests of interlocking pillboxes and firing positions’. All were ‘connected by a network of caves and passageways inside the hills’ that allowed the defenders to move safely to the point of attack.24

With their defensive preparations complete, Ushijima and his officers were ‘full of confidence’ as they watched the ‘enemy’s frantic deployment’ on the Hagushi beaches on 1 April. Some joked; a few lit cigarettes. All were ‘tense with the warrior’s inner excitement at the thrill of preparing to cross swords with a mighty enemy’.

Yahara marvelled at the sheer scale of the enemy bombardment as ‘smoke and debris from the explosions’ rose into sky. The enemy planes looked to him like ‘hundreds of oversized beans’ as they emerged from the smoke to carry out their bombing operations. Then, finally, American soldiers emerged ‘from the thousand-odd landing craft, thrusting onto the shore’. He wrote later: ‘It is as if the sea itself were advancing with a great roar.’

He chuckled as he tried to put himself into the minds of the enemy commander and his staff. ‘Advancing with such ease,’ wrote Yahara, ‘they must be thinking gleefully that they have passed through a breach in the Japanese defenses. They will be wrong … It is amusing to watch the American army so desperately intent in its attack on an almost undefended coast, like a blind man who has lost his cane, groping on hands and knees to cross a ditch.’

Yet, at the same time, Yahara felt ‘a gnawing sense of unease’. The IGHQ plan was for the air force to play the lead role in ‘warding off the enemy attack’. It had been ‘publicly stated that the best opportunity to destroy the enemy would be while he was still in his ships, before the troops had a chance to land’. For the last week, Japanese aircraft had attacked the ‘enemy fleet under cover of darkness, by moonlight and at dawn’. So why now, asked Yahara, ‘with enemy landing craft swarming around the [Hagushi] beaches, do they not overcome all obstacles, take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime chance, and make an all-out concerted attack?’25

In fact, according to the diary of Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, the man tasked with the air defence of Okinawa, a full-scale attack on the approaching US 5th Fleet was ordered on 31 March. But only a few kamikaze got through the American anti-aircraft and fighter screen the following day. One flew into the superstructure of the battleship USS West Virginia and its bomb penetrated to the second deck. Fortunately it was a dud, or the casualties of four dead and twenty-three wounded would have been much heavier. Other kamikaze struck a transport, USS Hinsdale, and two LSTs carrying men of the 2nd Marine Division as they feigned a landing off the south-east coast of Okinawa.26

Second Lieutenant Otha L. Grisham, 21, from San Marcos, Texas, was eating breakfast in the officers’ wardroom of LST 724 when he heard the sound of a plane and the ship’s anti-aircraft gunners opening fire. Told to ‘stay put’ and ‘not get in the way’, he continued with his meal. ‘Suddenly,’ recalled Grisham, ‘the ship absorbed a rattling crash, but there was no explosion. It was at midship on the port side, and we rushed to the outside passageway. There sat part of a Jap airplane engine, complete with body parts from the pilot. Our ship’s gunners had shot him down before he could do serious damage to his target.’

The other two vessels were not so lucky. Looking back, Grisham could see LST 884 and the USS Hinsdale burning. As both vessels contained men from the same two Marine units on LST 724, Grisham and his colleagues ‘lobbied for slowing (or stopping) to assist our buddies’. But the ship’s captain refused, and they watched helplessly as survivors jumped overboard to avoid the flames. Their rescue would take many hours and, in total, more lives were lost in these attacks – forty-one – than in the landings proper. ‘Who said it was “safer”’, commented Grisham, ‘to be in Reserve?’27

The amphibious operation to capture Okinawa – code-named Iceberg – was the largest of the Pacific War and the greatest air–land–sea battle in history. Admittedly fewer troops (60,000) were landed on L-Day than had, for example, been put ashore on D-Day in Sicily in 1943 (180,000) and Normandy in 1944 (100,000).28 But the overall scale of Iceberg was arguably greater than both because of the number of naval assets involved, and the distances they had to cover. ‘This is,’ wrote one awestruck participant,

the largest open-seas armada in history. Seven divisions and the whole Pacific Fleet. 1,457 ships and half a million men. Think about this. All those ships and men have to arrive together at the right time and place thousands of miles from the USA. Remarkable logistics. The seven divisions all come from different places and all are on ships. An awesome sight. Then there were the warships: [aircraft] carriers, battleships, cruisers and lots of destroyers. There were also some forty submarines that had been in the operation and had transported the underwater personnel who had worked on the barriers [at the beaches]. I am sure the public did not realise the size of the Okinawa operation. In some ways it was bigger than D-Day.29

Either way it was an astonishing logistical feat. For the assault echelon alone, more than 183,000 troops and 747,000 tons of cargo were loaded onto 430 assault transports and landing ships at eleven different ports, from Seattle to Leyte in the Philippines. The closest Pacific base to Okinawa was at Ulithi, five days’ sailing at ten knots. Yet the bulk of the resupply would come from the West Coast of the United States, a distance of 6,250 nautical miles, or twenty-six days’ sailing.30

Most of the 540,000 Allied servicemen – navy, air and army – who fought in the campaign were American. They included the naval personnel of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance’s US 5th Fleet, the most powerful in history with more than twenty fast aircraft carriers, ten battleships and 1,200 aircraft. Yet a small but significant portion of the 5th Fleet’s sea and air assets were British and Commonwealth in the form of Task Force 57 – otherwise known as the British Pacific Fleet – which comprised two battleships, four fleet carriers, five cruisers (one from New Zealand), eleven destroyers (two from Australia) and 220 aircraft. It was the Royal Navy’s most formidable strike force of the war.31

The campaign would last for eighty-three blood-soaked days as the fighting plumbed depths of savagery that was as bad as anything perpetrated by the Germans and Russians on the Eastern Front. It is a brutal, heart-rending story – made a little more bearable by the many instances of extraordinary heroism and self-sacrifice on both sides – and one best told from multiple perspectives: from the cramped cockpit of a kamikaze plane, the claustrophobic gun turret of a warship under attack, and a half-submerged foxhole amidst the squalor and battle detritus on Sugar Loaf Hill. The narrative shifts from the lofty perch of generals and presidents, to the more humble experience of ordinary servicemen, their families and the Okinawan civilians who were caught so tragically between the warring parties. But first we must go back to the beginning: to 26 July 1944, when the US president met his senior Pacific commanders in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to decide on the best strategy to defeat Japan.

* The day of landing was designated ‘Love Day’ to avoid confusion with Iwo Jima’s ‘Dog Day’.

† Despite being hit by two 550-pound bombs, which caused catastrophic damage and killed and wounded almost half its crew of 2,600 men, the 872-foot Essex-class carrier was towed back to Brooklyn Navy Yard, via Ulithi and the Panama Canal, where she was repaired.

‡ Literally ‘divine wind’, a form of suicide attack in which the pilot used his plane as a flying bomb. The first successful attack was in October 1942 when a crippled Japanese torpedo bomber deliberately flew into the destroyer USS Smith, killing twenty-eight and wounding twenty-three. But it was not until autumn 1944 that the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Special Attack Corps was formed in the Philippines. During the Okinawa campaign, kamikaze would launch more than 2,000 sorties.

1

‘Where’s Douglas?’

The heavy cruiser USS Baltimore was greeted by an immense crowd of cheering Hawaiians as it docked at Pearl Harbor at 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday 26 July 1944. It was carrying President Franklin D. Roosevelt who, despite a recent illness and the start of what would be his third successful re-election campaign, had come to the headquarters of the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet with just a handful of close advisors to discuss future strategy.1

The first man to greet the wheelchair-bound president* was Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, 59, the Texan-born commander of US forces in the Pacific Ocean Area whose quiet but determined leadership had avenged early American setbacks with a string of victories at sea and on land. Striding up the gangplank at the head of a group of senior officers, Nimitz shook Roosevelt warmly by the hand. The president’s response: ‘Where’s Douglas?’

He was referring to 64-year-old General Douglas MacArthur, the colourful and opinionated Supreme Allied Commander in the South-west Pacific Area (SWPA) who had been controversially awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor – the US military’s highest award for valour – ‘for conspicuous leadership’ during the failed campaign to defend the Philippines from Japanese attack in early 1942. Some had even accused MacArthur of abandoning his command by leaving the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay before it fell in May with the loss of 11,000 US and Filipino troops. In truth, Roosevelt had ordered MacArthur to leave and, ever since, the general had worked tirelessly to redeem his reputation. Having secured Australia, he went on the offensive, capturing vast swathes of territory in New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands. His aim in coming to Hawaii was to convince the president that the Philippines – a country he had vowed to liberate – should be the next major objective.

Arriving by plane, MacArthur realised he was late and urged the police motorcyclists escorting his open-topped car to get him to the docks as quickly as possible. They arrived, sirens screaming, as the presidential party was disembarking. ‘Hello Doug,’ said Roosevelt. ‘What are you doing with that leather jacket on? It’s darn hot today.’

‘Well,’ MacArthur replied, ‘I’ve just landed from Australia. It’s pretty cold there.’2

In the strategy sessions that followed in a big room filled with maps of the Pacific, Nimitz spoke first. His plan – initiated by his boss Admiral Ernest J. King, the commander-in-chief, US Fleet and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – was to bypass the Philippines by launching the next major offensive against Formosa and then the Japanese home islands. Indeed this option was also the preference of the other Joint Chiefs – generals of the army George C. Marshall (US Army) and Henry H. (‘Hap’) Arnold (US Army Air Force) – who both felt it offered the quickest route to defeat Japan. Nimitz, as it happened, was not convinced the plan would work, and preferred to take the Western Caroline Islands first, before invading the central Philippines and Iwo Jima. But loyal to a fault, he argued for his superior’s plan as if it were his own.

MacArthur responded with a masterly presentation, delivered without notes, arguing that the main Philippine island of Luzon was more important than Formosa because with it went control of the South China Sea and Japan’s sea communications to its southern possessions. Whereas bypassing Luzon would expose US forces on Formosa and elsewhere to devastating attacks from Japanese bombers stationed there. Nimitz agreed with this point and, when questioned by Roosevelt, said he could support either operation. So a compromise was agreed: the Philippines would be recovered with the forces available in the western Pacific and Formosa could wait. MacArthur was delighted. The president, he wrote, had remained ‘entirely neutral’ while Nimitz had shown a ‘fine sense of fair play’.3

During his trip the president was invited to lunch at Nimitz’s official residence at Makalapa Hill. But as the house, in the opinion of the secret service, was not up to scratch, a US Naval Construction Battalion of 500 ‘Seabees’ was sent to repaint it, refurbish the bathrooms and even build a new road behind the house so that Roosevelt could be moved from the car to his wheelchair in private. None of the many generals and flag officers also in attendance – one counted 136 stars on the collars of the guests – were any the wiser as they sat down to martini cocktails and a main course of mahimahi, a delicious local fish.4

Given the seat of honour on Roosevelt’s right was Lieutenant General Simon B. Buckner, recently appointed commander of the US Tenth Army, the formation slated to carry out the invasion of Formosa. The president, noted Buckner in his diary, ‘talked cheerfully & made everyone feel relaxed & at home’. He also ‘looked well but his hand shook a little when he raised his cocktail glass’.5> MacArthur, already back in Australia, was far more pessimistic about the president’s health. ‘He is just a shell of the man I knew,’ he told his wife Jean. ‘In six months he will be in his grave.’6

The practical effect of Roosevelt’s visit to Pearl Harbor was to leave the army and navy pursuing joint but separate strategies: MacArthur would continue his advance up through the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies; while Nimitz edged closer to Formosa via the central Pacific, the first step being the capture of Peleliu in the Palau Islands which was finally secured in late November 1944 by the 1st Marine Division and, latterly, the army’s 81st Division, after a vicious two-month campaign that was made immeasurably harder by the formidable Japanese defensive system of caves and underground tunnels.†

By then, much had changed. From 11 to 16 September 1944, Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill and their combined chiefs of staff met at Quebec for the Octagon Conference where they agreed, among other things, that Britain would become a full partner in the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany. Churchill’s preference was for an advance across the Bay of Bengal and an operation to recover Singapore and the Malay Peninsula, lost in such ignominious circumstances in early 1942. Roosevelt disagreed. The Americans, he said, had been very successful at ‘island-hopping’ in the Pacific, and bypassing strong Japanese garrisons like Singapore which could be mopped up later. But he was prepared to accept Churchill’s offer of naval support in the central Pacific, overruling Admiral King’s unwillingness to share victory ‘with an eleventh-hour entry’.7

Happy with this concession, Churchill and his chiefs of staff let the Americans decide the optimum route of advance in the Pacific. On 15 September, with the Octagon Conference still in progress, the Joint Chiefs authorised MacArthur to bring forward his operation to capture the Philippine island of Leyte from 20 December to 20 October. But there was still an assumption that Nimitz would launch Operation Causeway – the invasion of Formosa – once the Philippines were secured. That, however, was about to change.

On 16 September, sensing an opportunity to ditch the Formosa operation in favour of a move directly north from the Philippines to the Ryukyu and Bonin islands, and from there to Japan, Nimitz asked his senior army commanders for their opinion. Lieutenant General Robert C. Richardson Jr, commanding US Army Forces in the Pacific Ocean Area, was firmly in agreement. Regarding the occupation of Formosa as a costly diversion, he argued instead for a dual advance along the Luzon–Ryukyus and Marianas–Bonins axes. This would allow MacArthur to seize the island of Luzon after Leyte, and provide air and naval bases in the Philippines to block enemy shipping lanes and neutralise Formosa. But only the next step – possession of the Ryukyu chain of islands, extending 700 miles south of the Japanese home islands, and the Bonins further to the east – would enable extensive air operations against the main islands of Kyushu and Honshu. These, in turn, would prepare the ground for amphibious landings.

Richardson was backed up by Lieutenant General Millard F. Harmon, commanding US Army Air Forces, who pointed out that the acquisition of air bases could be achieved with far less cost in men and materiel in the Ryukus than in Formosa. The final nail in Causeway’s coffin was provided by Lieutenant General Buckner who pointed out that his Tenth Army lacked the supporting and service troops for such a large-scale operation.8

Nimitz repeated these arguments to Admiral King when they met in San Francisco on 29 September. The alternative to Causeway, said Nimitz, was to keep pressure on the Japanese by taking, in turn, Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Formosa, meanwhile, could be kept in check by a series of air strikes from carriers. Why Iwo Jima? asked King. Because, explained Nimitz, it would allow fighter protection for the huge B-29 bombing raids on the Japanese home islands that were planned for 1945.9

Convinced by Nimitz, King proposed to his fellow Joint Chiefs on 2 October that, because of insufficient resources in the Pacific Ocean Area and the unwillingness of the War Department to make additional resources available until after the defeat of Germany, operations against Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa should precede the seizure of Formosa. They concurred and, a day later, Nimitz was ordered by the Joint Chiefs to ‘occupy one or more positions’ in the Ryukyu Islands, beginning on 1 March 1945. The purpose was to establish bases from which to attack ‘the main islands of Japan and their sea approaches’ with air and naval forces; support further operations in regions bordering the East China Sea; and sever air and sea communications between Japan’s home islands and its possessions to the south and west. But the first step was to ‘capture, occupy, defend and develop Okinawa Island’.10

* In 1921, at the age of 39, Roosevelt contracted polio, lost the use of both legs and had been partially confined to a wheelchair ever since. In public he used leg braces to give the appearance of mobility.

† Only a handful of the 10,700 Japanese defenders laid down their arms; the rest fought to the death. US casualties were 1,800 killed and 7,000 wounded.

2

Operation Iceberg

‘Directive received deferring our project,’ noted Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr in his diary on 4 October 1944. He added: ‘Took physical exam. Blood pressure 120/76. Dr said he could find nothing wrong except danger from Japs.’1

The forced humour masked Buckner’s understandable nervousness about what lay ahead: not only his first test as a field commander, but in a battle of any kind. It may not have helped that he was the son of a famous Confederate general – named after the Venezuelan soldier and statesman Simón Bolívar, then at the height of his fame as the ‘Liberator’ of South America – who, after a shaky start, won laurels at the battles of Perryville and Chickamauga. He became, as it happened, both the first Confederate commander to surrender an army, and also the last. He was 63 when his son Simon Bolivar Jr was born in Munfordville, Kentucky in 1886. A year later, standing as a Democrat, Buckner Sr became the state’s thirtieth governor.

Though he later failed as the vice-presidential nominee of the ‘Gold Democrats’ in 1896, the elder Buckner was a hard act to follow. His young son made a start by graduating from the US Army’s military academy at West Point in 1908. But thereafter his career was largely uneventful as he completed two tours of the Philippines, saw no combat in the First World War and spent much of the interwar period as a student or instructor at various military schools, including a final spell as commandant of cadets at West Point. In the latter appointment he was remembered as a martinet, a stern disciplinarian who allowed his cadets few luxuries. ‘Buckner forgets,’ commented one aspiring officer’s parent, ‘cadets are born not quarried.’2

Lacking field experience, Buckner clung to US Army doctrine that artillery played the decisive role in combat. Infantry were needed to find and hold the enemy; but only artillery could destroy it. After war came a second time in December 1941, he was eager to put this theory into practice. But by then he was commanding the army’s Alaska Defense Command, a relative backwater that saw only limited action. In 1943, for example, when amphibious landings recovered the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska from the Japanese, both operations had been navy-led. A frustrated Buckner clashed repeatedly with both the naval commander for the northern Pacific and the civilian authorities in Alaska, the latter objecting to his illegal hunting of walruses.3

Salvation came in the summer of 1944 when Buckner was appointed commander of the new US Tenth Army in Hawaii, a joint army–Marines formation that was intended for the invasion of Formosa. Worried about resupply, he was relieved when the objective was switched from Formosa to the smaller Okinawa; but that still required a completely new plan of assault. Fortunately Buckner had an excellent staff to take care of that, led by Brigadier General E. D. Post who had served with him since West Point. Their relationship, noted a colleague, was ‘very close, almost that of father and son’. It helped that Post had a ‘pleasing personality and a very even temper’, and was a man ‘it would have been hard not to get along with’.4

Under Post were two deputy chiefs of staff: one for the US Army, Brigadier General Lawrence E. Schick; and one for the US Navy/Marines, Brigadier General Oliver P. Smith. Like Post, Schick had served with Buckner in Alaska, and was one of Buck’s boys. Smith was an outsider, joining the Tenth Army’s staff on Hawaii only in early November 1944 after combat stints with the 1st Marine Division on Cape Gloucester (as colonel of the 5th Marines) and Peleliu (assistant division commander). The new job was not one he was looking forward to. ‘It is hard to come back from an operation,’ he wrote, ‘and start over again the whole tedious process of training for a new operation. What is needed is new blood.’5

Smith had grown up in northern California where he attended the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the wartime Marine Corps as a second lieutenant in 1917. He later matriculated from the École supérieure de guerre in France, the first Marine to do so, and returned to teach at the Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, Virginia, where he was known as ‘the Professor’ and an expert in amphibious warfare. Intelligent, easy going and with valuable combat experience, he was the perfect choice as Buckner’s Marine deputy chief of staff. Not least because army–Marine relations were then at a low ebb, following the sacking of Major General Ralph Smith as commander of the US Army’s 27th Division by his Marine superior, Lieutenant General Holland M. ‘Howlin’ Mad’ Smith – the so-called Smith vs Smith controversy – during the Saipan campaign in July 1944. Already ill disposed to the 27th Division for a perceived lack of aggression in a previous battle, Holland Smith accused its men of failing to attack on time and costing Marine lives. Ralph Smith was relieved of his command and ordered off the island, a humiliation that his senior army colleagues – including US Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall – found hard to forgive.

The bad blood probably cost the abrasive Holland Smith the command of the Tenth Army. ‘I found out later,’ wrote Oliver Smith, ‘that both Admiral Spruance and Admiral Turner had recommended that General Holland Smith be given the Okinawa job, but they were overruled by Admiral Nimitz.’6 It was handed instead to the untried Buckner who, in a second snub to Holland Smith, was put in charge of the all-army board of inquiry into Ralph Smith’s sacking. The board eventually – and predictably – ruled in favour of the dismissed officer, though he would never command troops in action again. ‘Saw Holland Smith at Adm[iral] Nimitz’s conference,’ noted Buckner in late August 1944, ‘and he greeted me without much enthusiasm. (He has probably seen my board report to the effect that Ralph Smith’s relief from command was not justified.)’7

It was into this potentially poisonous atmosphere on Hawaii that Oliver Smith arrived on 7 November. Fortunately Admiral Nimitz had helped to clear the air a month earlier by sounding out Buckner on his attitude to the Smith vs Smith controversy. ‘Finding’, wrote Buckner, ‘that I deplored the whole matter and harbored no inter-service ill feeling’, Nimitz ‘announced that I would command the “new joint project”.’8

Smith’s early impressions of his new boss, after they met at army headquarters in Schofield Barracks on 8 November, were mostly positive. ‘He was’, noted Smith, ‘in excellent physical condition: ruddy, heavy-set, but with considerable spring in his step. He had snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes: the eyes were almost hard.’ Though he had ‘surprisingly little troop duty’ and ‘limited’ experience in amphibious operations, he did not lack for ‘character’ and Smith had ‘no reason to feel he would not continue to operate well in a joint undertaking [with the navy]’. While Buckner’s ‘methods and judgements were somewhat inflexible’, wrote Smith, ‘you always knew where you stood’.

It helped that Smith thought highly of Buckner’s right-hand men, Post and Schick, describing the latter – ‘a small, wiry man, quick of speech and action’ – as the ‘finest staff officer with whom I have ever had the pleasure of serving’. But not every aspect of life at Schofield Barracks, sited on a picturesque red-soiled plateau 900 feet above sea level, was to Smith’s liking. He particularly resented Buckner’s ‘fetish’ for ‘physical conditioning’, and his insistence that all his staff officers, many of whom were over fifty, took part. ‘For the older officers,’ noted Smith, ‘the program resulted in broken collarbones, broken arms, sprained ankles and charley horses [cramps in the leg muscles]. Included in the required conditioning were the running of the Combat Course (for which Lieutenant General Buckner held the record), firing all infantry hand and shoulder weapons, soft ball and conditioning hikes.’ One of the latter was eight and a half miles in length, with a climb and descent of 2,000 feet. Recently back from Peleliu, Smith gave it a miss. ‘What I needed was food and relaxation.’

Yet there were limits to even that, and the vibrant social life at Schofield Barracks was not, in Smith’s opinion, ‘an appropriate one for troops preparing for combat’. He added: ‘It is true there were no families present, but there were dances every Wednesday and Saturday evening which were not stag affairs; there were plenty of WACs [Women’s Army Corps], nurses and Red Cross workers. There were dinner parties, beach parties and cocktail parties. At some … the women wore evening gowns. You had the feeling you were half in the war and half out of it.’9

Buckner’s diary backs up Smith’s concern. Hardly a day goes by without him mentioning his attendance at a dinner party or dance, usually in the company of an attractive young woman. One name keeps cropping up: ‘Missy’ Keleher, the wife of a naval officer on duty in the Pacific. A typical entry (for 21 November) reads: ‘Took Missy Keleher … to dinner at Chinese restaurant. Missy wangled a photo of myself and asked me to autograph it with an appropriate message. I did. “To Missy with misgivings.”’

On another occasion, not long before he departed Hawaii for the theatre of war, Buckner took Missy to a dinner and dance at the Wheeler Field Officers’ Club, and then for a nightcap at a fellow officer’s quarters. It was 2:00 a.m. by the time he got home. ‘Moral: Don’t take girls to parties who live too far away if you want any sleep.’ Undoubtedly flattered by Missy’s attention, Buckner’s behaviour towards her might have been, as far as we know, entirely honourable. But the number of evenings he spent in her and other women’s company – often for tête-à-tête dinners – would surely not have gone down well with Adele Buckner, his wife of almost thirty years, and the mother of their three children, if she had known.10

When not carousing, Buckner and his staff were busy planning for Operation Iceberg, the assault on Okinawa. Their first priority was to gather all the geographical, meteorological and demographic information they could find on the island and its people from captured documents and prisoners of war, former residents and old Japanese publications. The bulk of their data came from aerial photographs which, taken by planes 1,200 miles from their bases, were frustratingly small-scale or incomplete. Yet the basic facts they revealed were not in dispute. Okinawa is the largest island in the Ryukyus, a chain that stretches almost 800 miles in a long arc from Kyushu to Formosa, and forms a boundary between the East China Sea and the Pacific. Of these 140 islands, only thirty were inhabited in 1945. The climate is subtropical, with temperatures ranging from 60 degrees Fahrenheit to 85 degrees, heavy rainfall, high humidity and violent typhoons between May and November.

Situated roughly in the centre of the Ryukyus, Okinawa is seventy miles long and from two to eighteen miles wide, running north to south, and covering a distance of 485 square miles. Composed of porous coral rock, it is fringed with reefs, close to shore and rarely more than a mile wide on the western side, but much wider on the eastern side, where the coast is more sheltered.

When Commodore Perry’s black ships first sailed into Naha Port on the west of the island in 1853, Okinawa was a semi-independent country that paid tribute to both China and Japan. Ryukyuan kings had ruled the surrounding islands from their capital at Shuri Castle, to the east of Naha, since the early fifteenth century. But after the entire Ryukyu archipelago was annexed by Japan in 1879, and the monarchy abolished, the Okinawan people became fully integrated into the Japanese governmental, economic and cultural structure. With a similar racial heritage to the Japanese, and resembling them in looks and physique, the Okinawan stock and culture have also been heavily influenced by the Chinese. In 1945 they spoke Luchan, not Japanese, and their predominant religion was an animistic cult that worshipped fire and the hearth, and venerated ancestors.

Most of the 435,000 inhabitants were poor – subsisting on small-scale agriculture and fishing – and much of the useable land in the bottom third of the island was cut into small fields and planted with sugar cane, sweet potatoes, rice and soy beans. This was because northern Okinawa, the two-thirds of the island above the Ishikawa Isthmus, is rugged and mountainous, with a central spine of 1,000 feet or more running the length of the region. Descending from both sides of this ridge are terraces dissected by ravines and watercourses, and ending at the coast in steep cliffs. A similar terrain is found on the Motobu Peninsula, jutting out to the west, where two mountain tracts are separated by a central valley. Covering the whole of this northern area in 1945 were pine forests and dense undergrowth, with only a few poor roads clinging to the western coast.

South of Ishikawa, on the other hand, is a more benign landscape of rolling hills, ravines and escarpments. It contained three-quarters of the population, four airfields and the large towns of Naha, Shuri, Itoman and Yonabaru. Generally aligned east to west, the hills provided a series of natural lines of defence. There were more roads in the south, but mostly country lanes unsuitable for motorised traffic. Drainage was poor, and heavy rains would quickly turn the deep, claylike mud into a quagmire.

The obvious place for a landing was the 9,000-yard stretch of the western coastline, a little south of Ishikawa, known as the Hagushi beaches. Divided by the Bishi River, the beaches ranged from a hundred to 900 yards in length and from ten to forty-five yards in width at low tide. Composed of coral sand, they mostly had at least one exit road and were flanked by a low coastal plain which was dominated by rolling hills. The plain was also the site of two of the island’s four main airfields: Yontan, north of the Bishi, and Kadena to the south.

American estimates of enemy troop strength on Okinawa grew slightly from 48,600 in October 1944 to 65,000 in March 1945. They correctly identified the main infantry formations – the 24th and 62nd Divisions, and the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade – as well as a regiment of tanks and large numbers of heavy artillery pieces and anti-tank guns. These forces were grouped, according to aerial photos, in at least three main areas of defence: Naha, the Hagushi beaches and the Yonabaru–Nakagusuku Bay area on the lower east coast. It was assumed, in the event of the landings being successful, that the main line of enemy resistance would be across the narrow waist of land south of Hagushi.11

Operation Iceberg’s initial landing plan – known as Plan Fox – was to disembark troops at Hagushi on the west coast where, as Oliver Smith explained, ‘a very limited advance would put in our hands the Yontan and Kadena airfields’. The plan included the capture of the island of Keise Shima, just off the west coast of Okinawa, prior to Love Day to allow the citing of heavy artillery to support the main landings. Eight infantry divisions* were assigned to the operation: the XXIV Corps of the US Army (7th, 27th and 96th Divisions); the III Amphibious Corps of the US Marine Corps (1st, 2nd and 6th Marine Divisions); and two extra US Army divisions, the 77th and 81st, in floating reserve. When support units were added, this brought the landing-force strength up to 183,000. Buckner wanted an additional 70,000 service troops. He was refused on the grounds that the troops were not available and, even if they had been, both the shipping and beach capacity were inadequate.12

On 1 November 1944, Plan Fox and an ‘alternate plan’ to land on the south-east coast of Okinawa were presented to Vice Admiral Kelly Turner, commanding the amphibious task force and Buckner’s immediate superior. Described by one colleague as ‘pig-headed and determined’, Turner was a talented naval officer but not easy to get along with. Born in Portland, Oregon in 1885, the son of a rancher and sometime printer, he had graduated fifth from the US Naval Academy class of 1908. His varied postings since then included battleships in the First World War, naval aviation in the 1920s and the War Plans Division from 1940 to December 1941, where, as director, he said it was ‘probable’ Japan’s next act of aggression would lead to war with the United States (the statement was appropriated by President Roosevelt who substituted ‘possible’ for ‘probable’). Turner then blotted his copybook by failing to pass on to Admiral Kimmel, the naval commander at Pearl Harbor, intercepted Japanese communications that pointed strongly to an imminent attack on the Pacific Fleet’s base at Pearl Harbor. Kimmel later claimed that had he known, he would have maintained a much higher level of alert and the fleet would not have been taken by surprise† on 7 December 1941.13

Since then, Turner had led a string of successful amphibious assaults in the Pacific, including Guadalcanal, the Russell Islands, Tarawa and Makin, the Marshall Islands, Tinian, Guam and Saipan, and was Nimitz’s first choice to do the same for Okinawa. A ferocious worker who would not suffer fools gladly, Turner was known to chew out his subordinates. Which is why, when Buckner’s staff told him on 1 November 1944 they had no confidence in the alternative plan, and were presenting it only because they thought there should be one, he loudly disagreed. From the navy’s perspective the alternative was preferable because the approach was through open sea, whereas Plan Fox meant sailing through the Kerama Islands just west of Okinawa. Even with these islands in our hands, said Turner, the navigational aspects of the approach would be more difficult, and the weather conditions harder to predict. He therefore requested a reconsideration of the east coast landing and a possible feint at Hagushi. Despite Turner’s request, wrote Oliver Smith, ‘the Plan Fox Estimate was distributed to all hands on November 5th’.14

Love Day was delayed twice during the next month: from 1 March to 15 March, and then to 1 April, the final date. This was partly down to weather concerns, and partly the availability of shipping. Admiral Turner, meanwhile, came round to Plan Fox after he requested an in-depth study that described the Hagushi beaches as the ‘best’ in Southern Okinawa ‘for the purpose’. His proviso was that, in addition to Keise Shima, the Kerama Islands were also seized seven or eight days prior to Love Day ‘to provide a much needed protected anchorage where supporting ships could be refueled and rearmed and thus assure uninterrupted support of the landing’.15 This, of course, meant the allocation of part of an infantry division, the 77th, to take the Keramas, a diversion of resources that Buckner opposed, but could do nothing about. Turner ‘scattered too much’, he noted in his diary. ‘I prefer greater concentration on the main objective.’16

For the assault phase of the operation, Buckner would be known as Commanding General, Expeditionary Troops, or CTF 56. His immediate superior was Vice Admiral Turner, commanding Joint Expeditionary Force 51, who in turn reported to Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, commanding the US 5th Fleet (CTF 50), the victor of two of the most significant naval battles of the war, Midway and the Philippine Sea, whose calmness in moments of crisis had earned him the nickname ‘Electric Brain’. A small, trim man of simple tastes – he liked classical music and hot chocolate in the morning – Spruance was surprisingly modest, putting his success down ‘largely to the fact that I am a good judge of men. I am lazy, and have never done things myself that I could get someone to do for me.’17

With the chain of command settled, and his assault plans well in hand, Buckner saw in the New Year of 1945 in characteristic fashion by accompanying a young woman to a party given by her aunt, an artist who lived in a house on the valley road ‘built over a pool with a 10-ft waterfall’. The quality of the paintings on display was, according to Buckner, mixed: ‘Many good and some bad.’18

His deputy Oliver Smith had more serious concerns. First, how not to alienate Buckner over the issue of who would present the Legion of Merit that Smith had been awarded for outstanding service at Peleliu. As the award had been forwarded via the Tenth Army, Buckner would normally have done the presentation. But Smith thought it more appropriate to receive it from General Holland Smith, Buckner’s hated rival, because he had signed the citation. Luckily Brigadier General Schick agreed with Smith, and the medal was duly awarded by the Marine general at the Fleet Marine Force HQ on 1 January.19

It was also around now that Smith became aware of a seemingly minor decision of Buckner’s that would have, in time, the gravest consequences: his plan for all Tenth Army general officers to wear a metal star on their combat helmets. Smith heard about it from Major Frank Hubbard, Buckner’s recently appointed aide, who came to take his order. ‘I told him’, wrote Smith, ‘that in the type of warfare encountered in the Pacific, it had been found advisable for generals to hide their identity if they valued their skins … There were always hidden Japanese snipers to fire on persons carrying field glasses or other equipment identifying them as officers.’

According to Smith, a ‘compromise was finally reached by which the helmet was untouched, but small white stars were painted on the liner; this on the theory that the helmet without the liner would be worn only in the rear areas’. That may have been true for Buckner’s subordinates; but the general himself would insist on going through the campaign wearing a liner-less helmet with three distinctive metal stars.20

* Both army and Marine divisions were based on a triangular structure of three infantry regiments, nine battalions (three per regiment), twenty-seven companies (three per battalion), eighty-one platoons (three per company) and 243 squads (three per platoon). They also included support units of artillery, engineers, armour, pioneers and service troops. Marine divisions numbered around 26,000 men; army divisions about 2,000 men fewer.

† The aerial attack by carrier-borne Japanese planes sank four US Navy battleships and badly damaged another three; fortunately the US Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carriers were not at Pearl Harbor and escaped. A day later, shortly before America declared war on Japan, President Roosevelt condemned the unprovoked attack in Congress as ‘a day that will live in infamy’.

3

‘Everybody go home!’

10 October 1944 was ‘a beautiful day with soft rays of sunshine’, remembered 13-year-old Yoshiko Sakumoto. ‘I never dreamed that such a bucolic town as Naha would be raided from the air without warning.’ She was on her way to school with her brother, and had just reached Tomari Bridge, when she saw about twenty people, including several Japanese soldiers, looking towards Naha Port. They were watching three or four low-flying planes approach the port and drop some black objects. ‘With booming explosions,’ wrote Yoshiko, ‘black smoke and flames soared high into the sky. Then gasoline tanks at Naha Port blew up one after the other.’

Thinking it must be an air-raid exercise, some of the bystanders seemed confused. ‘It’s unthinkable’, said one, ‘to practise with real bombs.’ But the soldiers knew the truth. ‘Everybody go home!’ they yelled. Yoshiko did as she was told, pulling her brother along with her.

Born in a modest house in Naha’s port area of Tomari, the daughter of a shipbuilder and a maker of panama hats, Yoshiko Sakumoto had experienced a typical Okinawan childhood: celebrating the many festivals with sweet dumplings, playing with bouncy rubber balls decorated with painted flowers, and having her hands tattooed at the age of eight, as local custom decreed. But by then she had experienced the grief of losing two siblings: a younger sister to encephalitis, and a brother who drowned in the sea.

The gloom was lifted five years later by the birth of another brother, Kōkichi, making three children in all. ‘I was 11,’ wrote Yoshiko, ‘and my younger brother, Kōzen, was 6. With the youngest boy, Kōkichi, we three grew rapidly and stayed healthy.’ Their diet included rice, sweet potatoes, fresh fish, vegetables, seaweed, and, for special occasions, fish cakes, meat and eggs. ‘Our eating habits were simple, but everybody had enough to eat … Neighbours were thoughtful, warm, generous and forgiving. The island was small, but the islanders’ hearts were many times bigger.’

Even before the war began, Japanese culture was making inroads into Okinawan life. Expected to speak Japanese at school, children were forced to wear punishment placards if they slipped into local dialect. Yoshiko’s mother and neighbours tried to hold back the tide by wearing traditional Ryukyuan kimonos and conversing in Okinawan. But her children could not help being caught up in the excitement of Japan’s military victories. On hearing of the Japanese navy’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Yoshiko felt ‘very proud’ and ‘admired the brave Japanese soldiers’. Until that point, she noted, ‘Japan had never experienced defeat and we had a feeling of superiority … People were intoxicated as if at a festival.’ By the start of 1942 she was ‘burning with patriotism’ and pledged she would do her ‘utmost for the nation’.

But as the tide of war turned against Japan in May 1942, with defeat at the naval battle of Midway (the first of many at American hands), and rationing was introduced, her ardour began to cool. By the summer of 1944, with the war creeping ever closer, Okinawan housewives had been herded into ‘Japanese Imperial Women’s Defense Associations’, and everyone, bar young children and the elderly, was put to work constructing tunnels and fortifications. As a middle-school student, Yoshiko was sent to build air-raid shelters and artillery emplacements at nearby Oroku and Urasoe. ‘Soldiers dug with picks’, she wrote, ‘and put the dirt into small baskets. The first girl in a line handed each basket to the next girl, and then to the next.’ It was back-breaking work, and the girls’ soft hands quickly ‘became as coarse as those of construction workers’. When the soldiers signalled a break, they sat under pine trees and ‘licked small pieces of seaweed and cubed black sugar’.1

To reduce the size of the population on Okinawa, and therefore its pressure on ‘precious foodstuffs’, civilians were encouraged to evacuate to the home islands. More than 80,000 were moved to Kyushu, mostly in 1944, on ‘munitions vessels that were otherwise returning to Japan empty’. The evacuees included Tsuru Uezato, the 18-year-old daughter of a family who lived near the Sakumotos, and who was like a sister to Yoshiko. Two days before her departure, Tsuru asked Yoshiko to spend the afternoon with her. As they lay side by side on a futon, talking, Yoshiko thought she saw a figure appear in the doorway, with water dripping from her hair. ‘I was so scared,’ she wrote, ‘I thought I would faint, and I screamed … They looked under the floor and behind the back door, but found no one.’

Two days later, on 21 August 1944, Tsuru boarded the Tsushima Maru for her new life working in a parachute factory on the mainland. She never arrived. The ship was torpedoed en route by the US Navy submarine Bowfin and sank with the loss of more than 1,500 lives. The dead included Tsuru and 765 of the 834 Okinawan schoolchildren on board. One of the survivors, 13-year-old Tsuneko Miyagi, was on deck when three torpedoes struck at 10:00 p.m. on the 22nd and was blown overboard by the explosion. She counted twenty-five people clinging to debris near her. But as the hours passed, many gave up and slipped under the water. She might have done the same had a soldier not slapped her. ‘Don’t sleep,’ he told her. ‘If you sleep you die.’ For four days Tsuneko struggled to survive, fighting off sharks and rescuing a 4-year-old boy she discovered floating beside her. Finally she and the boy were rescued by Japanese patrol boats and taken to the mainland. ‘I was angry,’ she said. ‘Angry. I wanted to kill ten American soldiers for what they did.’2

Yoshiko felt much the same as she watched American bombs rain down on Naha six weeks later. She arrived home to find her mother emptying the house of furniture and clothes; her father had been sent to the Ryukyuan island of Miyako to build ships, and Yoshiko had ‘never felt so helpless’ in his absence. Gathering up her younger brothers and as many valuables as they could carry, they headed for a nearby cave that had been designated as an evacuation shelter. Once Yoshiko and her brothers were safely inside, their mother returned twice to their house to collect food and even the family shrine.

Soon many of the city’s mostly wooden buildings were burning, and the fires were approaching Tomari. Watching awestruck from the mouth of the cave, Yoshiko saw ‘Higa’s Barber Shop near the Tomari Bridge’ go up in flames. ‘After that the fire spread rapidly and the wind blew sparks on to houses along the shore. Once the houses caught fire, they collapsed one by one with a roaring sound. Finally my house started burning. My mother and I watched in tears. All the furniture and other things that had been left inside were lost.’

As the fires raged ‘ever more furiously’, Yoshiko could see residents trying to escape along the shoreline. ‘Long lines of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were running, but many did not survive … The city of Naha was destroyed easily by just a few enemy planes.’3

In fact, the dawn attack on Naha and other targets on Okinawa was one of the heaviest delivered by a US carrier task force to that date in the war. It involved 1,356 strikes, in which 652 rockets and twenty-one torpedoes were fired, and 541 tons of bombs were dropped on airfields, harbour facilities, shipping and other strategic targets. The resultant fires destroyed four-fifths of the city. According to an American report, Japanese losses were twenty-three planes shot down and a further eighty-eight destroyed on the ground; and twenty cargo ships, forty-five smaller vessels, four midget submarines, a destroyer escort, a submarine tender, and a mine sweeper were sunk. Japanese sources added a destroyer and another mine sweeper, 5 million machine-gun rounds and 300,000 sacks of unpolished rice. ‘The enemy’, noted a Japanese soldier, ‘is brazenly planning to destroy every last ship, cut our supply lines and attack us.’4

The bombing of Naha had two immediate consequences for the island’s defenders: the loss of most of the island’s stockpile of gasoline, which meant, in turn, the rationing of motorised transport for the movement of men and supplies; and the decision to relocate General Ushijima’s command post from Tsukazan to a system of caves beneath Shuri Castle which were enlarged and filled with beds, office equipment and communication systems.

But it was the withdrawal of the veteran 9th Infantry Division – the best on the island – from Okinawa to the Philippines in November 1944 that forced General Mitsuru Ushijima, commanding the Japanese Thirty-Second Army, and his chief of operations Colonel Hiromichi Yahara to review both their defence plans and their operational doctrine. Now, with far fewer reliable combat soldiers, Yahara chose to defend only the strategically critical bottom third of the island. He assigned his force as follows: the 24th Division would guard the extreme south, including the towns of Itoman and Minatoga; the 62nd Division was given the vital central isthmus sector where the main line of defences would be sited, and which extended from Naha–Yonabaru to Chatan–Toguchi further north; beyond that, defending the Yontan and Kadena airfields, was the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade (IMB). The only significant force in the north of the island was the Kunigami Detachment of two infantry battalions on the Motobu Peninsula.

The plan at this stage was for the enemy ‘to be contained by a strategic delaying action’, and not openly attacked in a ‘decisive battle’. But Yahara also had to take account of pressure from the IGHQ in Tokyo which wanted a vigorous defence of all the airfields on Okinawa. The theoretical task of the 44th IMB was to protect the Yontan and Kadena airfields for as long as possible in the event of a major American landing at Hagushi, and to counter-attack if the opportunity arose. In reality, Yahara wanted the 44th merely to harass the invaders before falling back on the lines of the 62nd Division to the south.

The role of the 62nd, meanwhile, was to prepare to fight on a line facing north if the Americans landed at Hagushi, and to join the 24th Division if the landing was near Itoman or Minatoga. It was also expected to repel any landings on the beaches near Machinato airfield, north of Naha. The 24th Division would do likewise: defend its sector on the coast and reinforce the 62nd if the direction of attack was from the north. So the plan was clear: the Americans would be attacked immediately if they landed anywhere on the rugged central isthmus or the southern landmass; but an assault any further north, particularly against the open Hagushi plain, would be largely uncontested. Either way, the Americans would ‘eventually come up against the Shuri defences, where the main battle would be fought’.5

In January 1945, Ushijima sent his chief of staff, the bullish Major General Isamu Chō, for a conference at IGHQ in Tokyo to discuss the overall strategy for Okinawa’s defence. Incredibly Japan’s military leadership was still clinging to the belief that suicide weapons alone would be enough to deter a successful invasion. According to Chō’s civilian secretary Akira Shimada,* his boss was told by senior officers at the conference that ‘Thirty-Second Army units were not to fire on [American] shipping in the event of an attempted landing on Okinawa’ because ‘kamikaze suicide planes and similar units’ would alone destroy ‘the greater part of [American] naval forces, without forcing shore batteries to give away their positions by premature firing’.6

Dismissing such talk as wishful thinking, Yahara went on a tour of his units and concluded that they were too thinly spread to repel a concentrated attack. Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) doctrine recommended a defensive front of six miles per division; whereas at Okinawa the Thirty-Second Army’s two and a half divisions were spread over thirty-six miles of front, of which twenty-four miles had to be actively defended. So he shortened the division fronts by withdrawing the 44th IMB from the Hagushi plain to share some of the area that had been covered by the 62nd Division; and by transferring the defence of the Oroku Peninsula, south of Naha, from the 24th Division to a 3,000-strong Naval Base Force under Rear Admiral Minoru Ōta. Now the only force guarding the Yontan and Kadena airfields was a weak regiment of Boeitai (Home Guard).7

‘In the eyes of IGHQ’, noted a study of the Japanese view of the battle, ‘Okinawa was part of a multitheater, technology-intensive strategy in which Thirty-Second Army’s specialised role was to defend the Yontan and Kadena airfields. The Thirty-Second Army staff members’ perceptions were simpler: Thirty-Second Army was about to be attacked and needed defensible positions to survive. The staff members had no confidence that air forces could interdict the Americans … Even so, the staff’s final operational plans amounted to nothing more nor less than denying the enemy the ground, foot by foot.’8

For a brief moment in late January 1945 it looked as if help was on its way. IGHQ messaged that the 84th Infantry Division would be sent to Okinawa as a replacement for the 9th. But later that day the order was rescinded because IGHQ had had second thoughts about denuding Japan’s home islands of troops when they might soon be under attack. To raise spirits, Yahara wrote and disseminated a pamphlet titled ‘The Road to Certain Victory’ in which he argued that defensive fortifications would counteract the Americans’ marked advantage in troop numbers and firepower.

Seemingly convinced, soldiers and civilians carried on with great enthusiasm the work of expanding existing caves, and building a network of tunnels and concrete machine-gun posts. Lacking specialised tunnelling equipment, they used entrenching tools, picks and shovels to hack into the tough coral rock. Once through the outer crust, however, the soil was a soft red clay, and relatively easy to dig into. With no cement or iron to shore up the tunnels, each unit cut wooden beams from pine forests in the mountainous north, and moved them south in native boats called sabenis, often at night to avoid American air raids. By late March, more than sixty miles of underground fortifications and command posts had been constructed, as well as anti-tank minefields and gun emplacements.9

Efforts had also been made from January onwards, recalled Chō’s secretary Shimada,

to mobilise virtually the entire civilian manpower of Okinawa for use as Army auxiliaries. Additional Home Guard levies were made, designed to supplement the earlier conscriptions of the fall of 1944. Almost the entire student body of the Middle Schools, the Vocational Schools and the Shuri Normal School was organised into guerilla units, the most prominent of which was the celebrated Blood-and-Iron-for-the-Emperor Duty Unit (Tekketsu Kinno Tai). The students were trained in infiltration tactics by a Capt[ain] Hirose, an expert on guerilla warfare who had been sent to Thirty-Second Army from Imperial HQ for the express purpose of coordinating the activities of infiltration groups and similar irregular forces.10

Among the 2,000 Okinawan schoolboys, aged 14 to 18, who were recruited into the Blood and Iron Student Corps was Shigetomo Higa, a fourth-grader from Sikiyama in Shuri who attended the Okinawa First Prefectural Middle School. When Shigetomo joined the school in 1941, it was ‘quite free and relaxed’. But with the arrival of Principal Norio Fujino a year later, the atmosphere became more militarist. In 1944, Shigetomo’s five-year programme of study was cut short by a year as part of the Emergency Student Mobilisation Outline: most classes were cancelled and Shigetomo – like his female contemporary Yoshiko Sakumoto – spent most of his time on labour details constructing airfields and gun emplacements.

After the fall of Saipan in the summer of 1944, Shigetomo attended a lecture given by General Watanabe, Ushijima’s predecessor as Thirty-Second Army commander. ‘There is no doubt’, declared a tearful Watanabe, thumping the desk before him, ‘that the enemy will land in Okinawa and, when that happens, every civilian must share the same fate as our soldiers, so I am asking you to be ready to die a glorious death in the name of the emperor.’ Shigetomo was shocked by both the general’s appearance and message. He had always assumed that Japan would win the war. Now, one of the country’s senior generals was admitting that defeat was all but inevitable.

In late February 1945, Shigetomo’s father was conscripted into the Boeitai, and attached to the 24th Division. A month later, on 27 March 1945, Shigetomo graduated from middle school and was recruited into the Blood and Iron Student Corps in an evening ceremony that was held in the garden of his school dormitory. As American shells exploded in the distance, he and his 253 fellow graduates stood in rows, facing their principal Norio Fujino, his teaching staff and two VIP guests, governor of Okinawa Akira Shimada and a colonel from the 5th Artillery Command.

Suddenly, a shell landed with a resounding ‘thump’ close to where they were standing. The instinct of Shigetomo and his colleagues was to run. They were stopped by the booming voice of Lieutenant Yashushi Shinohara, the officer attached to the school. ‘Don’t move!’ yelled Shinohara. ‘Nobody is to move!’

The result, according to Shigetomo, was ‘quite amazing’. All the officials and students were ‘trembling’ but ‘nobody moved a muscle, not even the governor’. Another two or three shells landed ‘almost on top of us’ before the ceremony was over, ‘but not a single soul had moved’. Finally, Shinohara introduced the artillery colonel and said that, henceforth, the boys would come under his command.

The following day they were issued with patched-up military uniforms – each with a floating chrysanthemum badge† on its breast – and told they were part of the Blood and Iron First Middle School Unit. Shigetomo was assigned to No. 2 Platoon. But their lowly status as privates second class was soon confirmed when regular soldiers called them ‘little pricks’ and slapped them for failing to salute their superiors. ‘Just a while ago’, remembered Shigetomo, ‘we were all digging shelters together and the next thing they were looking down on us because of our lower rank.’

Told to pen farewell letters to their parents, Shigetomo wrote:

Dear Mother and Father – You have looked after me for sixteen years but now the time has come for me to leave. Even if you hear that I have been killed in the fighting, please do not feel sad. As your only son, I will be sorry to die without repaying the debt I owe you … I am so grateful to you both and thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you have done for me.

Shigetomo chose not to write the sort of propaganda statements that his superiors expected, and that many of his fellow students produced. One told his parents that he wanted ‘to die a glorious death for my country’, and if they heard of his demise they should ‘smile’. But Shigetomo understood why his comrade did it. ‘We were’, he noted, ‘only sixteen but the militarist education we had received had gone to the depths of our very souls.’11

* Not to be confused with his 43-year-old namesake who was governor of the Okinawa Prefecture. Chō’s secretary was eight years younger.

† This insignia for a Blood and Iron Student unit was later removed.

4

The Divine Wind

‘The late afternoon sun’, recalled Captain Rikihei Inoguchi, ‘was about to sink below the crest line of the mountains to the west of Mabalacat airfield, which formed part of the sprawling Clark Base complex, some fifty miles north-west of Manila. Ground crewmen wearing the work uniform of the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Forces [IJNAF] scurried here and there like ants, hurrying to conceal planes in revetments before dusk and to carry out attack preparations for the following morning.’

It was 19 October 1944, and Inoguchi was sitting in the airfield command post, a tattered old tent, talking with the XO (executive officer) of the IJNAF’s 201st Air Group, Commander Asaichi Tamai. Inoguchi had come from Manila, where he was senior staff officer of the 1st Air Fleet, to discuss with Tamai the 201st’s attack plan for the following day. Two days earlier, a huge US naval force had appeared off Suluan Island, at the mouth of Leyte Gulf, and it was obvious that a large-scale invasion of the Philippines was imminent.* ‘Yet’, noted Inoguchi, ‘the Japanese air forces in the entire Philippines area had fewer than one hundred planes still in operational condition to throw into the breach. What could we do?’

Friends since their naval academy days, Inoguchi and Tamai ‘spoke frankly’ of the difficulties confronting the Japanese defenders, but were ‘at a loss to hit upon any plan that might offer a way out of the desperate situation’. As they talked, a black limousine drove up to the command post, flying the yellow pennant of a flag officer. A stocky figure got out, accompanied by a single aide. It was Inoguchi’s new boss Vice Admiral Takijiro Ohnishi who, just two days earlier, had arrived in Manila from Tokyo to take command of the 1st Air Fleet.

The two officers sprang to their feet and offered Ohnishi a chair. He sat down and, for a few minutes, watched silently as ‘the airfield crews worked feverishly in the fading daylight.’ Eventually he turned to the officers and said, ‘I have come here to discuss with you something of great importance. May we go to your headquarters?’

Ohnishi gave them a lift in his limousine back to the dusty town of Mabalacat where the 201st Air Group’s headquarters were located in a cream-coloured house with a green trim that ‘gave a pleasing, homey effect’. Inside, however, most of the regular furniture on the ground floor had been replaced with folding canvas cots for the thirty officer fliers who lived in the building. Scattered throughout were their flight gear, towels, washing kits and personal possessions.

After Vice Admiral Ohnishi had taken a phone call, they gathered in a room on the second floor with another staff officer and two squadron leaders. The only notable absentee was the commander of the 201st, Captain Sakae Yamamoto, who had been called to a meeting with Ohnishi in Manila and, unknowingly, the two cars had passed each other en route. Once all six were seated round a small table, Ohnishi began speaking. ‘As you know,’ he said in a low voice, ‘the war situation is grave. The appearance of strong American forces in the Leyte Gulf has been confirmed. The fate of the empire depends upon the outcome of the Sho operation,† which Imperial Headquarters has activated to hurl back the enemy assault on the Philippines. Vice Admiral Kurita’s 2nd Fleet, containing our main battle strength, will advance to the Leyte area and annihilate the enemy invasion force. The mission of the 1st Air Fleet is to provide land-based air cover for Admiral Kurita’s advance and make sure the enemy air attacks do not prevent him from reaching Leyte Gulf. To do this, we must hit the enemy’s carriers and keep them neutralised for at least one week.’

Inoguchi was at a loss to know how this could be done. Recent American carrier strikes had crippled Japanese air strength in the Philippines, reducing the 201st Air Group’s fighter strength to just thirty operational planes. But sensing that Ohnishi had come to Mabalacat for a reason, he waited for him ‘to provide the answer’. When it came, it caught Inoguchi by complete surprise.

‘In my opinion’, said Ohnishi, ‘there is only one way of ensuring that our meagre strength will be effective to a maximum degree. That is to organise suicide attack units composed of Zero fighters armed with 250-kilogram bombs, with each plane to crash-dive into an enemy carrier.’ He let the words sink in, before adding: ‘What do you think?’

It seemed a shocking suggestion, but not one that floored Inoguchi and his comrades. Instead, he recalled, it ‘struck a spark in each of us’. Such ‘body-crashing’ (tai-atari) tactics were not unique. They had already been used by navy pilots in air-to-air combat against enemy bombers, and there were, Inoguchi knew, ‘many fliers in the combat air units who had urged that the same tactics be employed against the carriers’. They did not welcome death; but found it easier to contemplate in the dark days of late 1944 when, as Inoguchi put it, the ‘chance of coming back alive from any sorties against enemy carriers was very slim, regardless of the attack method employed. If one is bound to die, what is more natural than the desire to die effectively, at maximum cost to the enemy?’

The silence that followed Ohnishi’s words was, therefore, neither ‘consternation nor dread’, but calm contemplation. Commander Tamai spoke first. ‘Yoshioka,’ he asked the staff officer, ‘just how effective would it be for a plane carrying a 250-kilogram bomb to smash bodily into a carrier’s flight deck?’

‘The chances of scoring a hit’, replied Yoshioka, ‘would be much greater than by conventional bombing. It would probably take several days to repair the damage to the flight deck.’

Nodding, Tamai turned to Ohnishi and said: ‘As executive officer I cannot decide a matter of such gravity. I must ask our group commander, Captain Sakae Yamamoto.’

There was, said Ohnishi, no need. ‘I have just spoken on the phone with Captain Yamamoto in Manila. His leg was broken in a plane crash and he is in hospital. He said that I should consider your opinions as his own, and that he would leave everything up to you.’

After a pause, Tamai asked for a few minutes to consider the matter with one of his squadron commanders. When Ohnishi gave his approval, the pair left for Tamai’s room where they discussed the pilots’ likely reaction to the news. Soon they returned and Tamai said: ‘Entrusted by our commander with full responsibility, I share completely the opinions expressed by the admiral. The 201st Air Group will carry out his proposal. May I ask that you leave to us the organisation of our crash dive unit?’

Ohnishi nodded his assent, his face bearing ‘a look of relief coupled with a shadow of sorrow’. He then left to get some rest and the momentous meeting was over.

Tamai’s task now was to consider which pilots to choose for the mission. Most had only completed half of their combat training when they were posted to the Marianas for active duty. They had, since that time, ‘fought continuously, and against terrible odds’. In early August the survivors had been sent to the southern Philippines and incorporated into the 201st Air Group, down to about a third of its original strength. ‘They were now steel-fibred veterans and their morale was high,’ recalled Inoguchi. ‘Commander Tamai, who had inspired them during their training period and had shared the hardships of uphill battles … was as deeply attached to these men as a father to his children.’

After consulting with his squadron commanders, Tamai held a parade of his remaining twenty-three non-commissioned pilots at which he explained Admiral Ohnishi’s proposal. ‘In a frenzy of emotion and joy’, wrote Inoguchi, ‘the arms of every pilot in the assembly went up in a gesture of complete accord.’

Tamai and Inoguchi then chose Lieutenant Yukio Seki, a 23-year-old Naval Academy graduate of the ‘highest character and ability’ to lead the new unit. Originally trained on carrier-based bombers, Seki had been with the 201st for only a month. But in that time he had impressed Tamai with his energy and fervent patriotism. Woken and told that he was being considered for the command of a new suicide unit, Seki paused for a full five seconds, eyes closed and head in hands, before replying: ‘You absolutely must let me do it.’

‘Thank you,’ replied Tamai, tears in his eyes. ‘You’re a bachelor aren’t you?’

‘No, I have a wife, sir.’

It was a shame, but not enough to disqualify Seki. All that remained was to choose a title for the new unit. ‘Since this is a special mission,’ said Inoguchi, ‘we should have a special name. How about Shimpū Unit?’‡

Tamai thought it was an excellent idea. Shimpū was, he knew, another name for kamikaze (or ‘divine wind’), the term used to describe the fierce typhoons that had destroyed the Mongol fleet of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century, thus saving Japan from invasion. ‘That’s good,’ he replied. ‘After all, we have to set a kamikaze in motion with it.’1

Seki, meanwhile, had returned to his quarters to pen farewell letters to Mariko, his wife of five months, and his parents. ‘I am very sorry’, he wrote to her, ‘that I must “scatter” [a reference to the scattering of cherry blossoms, or dying in battle] before I could do much for you. I know that as a spouse of a military man, you are prepared to face such a situation.’

With his parents, he was more candid. ‘At this time the nation is at the crossroads of defeat, and the problem can only be resolved by each individual’s repayment of the Imperial Benevolence.’ He would, therefore, ‘carry out a body-crashing attack on an aircraft carrier’. He added: ‘I am resigned to do this.’

As his deadly mission drew closer, however, Seki seemed to have questioned its rationale. ‘Japan’s future is bleak’, he told a journalist, ‘if it is forced to kill one of its best pilots – myself. I am confident that I can deliver a 500-kilogram bomb on the flight deck of an enemy aircraft carrier and come back alive!’ There was, he knew, no backing out now. But he wanted to explain that – contrary to what he had told his parents – the real reason he was going on the mission was not ‘for the emperor or for the empire’, but rather for his ‘beloved wife’ and because he was ‘ordered to’. He added: ‘Should Japan lose the war, only the gods know what the enemy would do to my dear wife. A man dies for the lady he loves most. That’s glorious.’2

To many of the Allies, steeped in the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the sanctity of life, the apparent willingness of Japanese servicemen like Seki to carry out suicide attacks was profoundly shocking. But then, as scholars of the kamikaze point out, the word suicide in Japanese does not always have the same ‘immoral connotation’ that it has in English. Two versions – jiketsu (self-determination) and jisai (self-judgement) – ‘suggest an honourable or laudable act done in the public interest’. There is, moreover, no ethical or religious taboo regarding suicide in Japan’s traditional religion of Shintoism. Instead, the Japanese samurai warrior code of ‘bushido’ – heavily influenced by Shintoism, as well as Buddhism and even Confucianism – revered self-sacrifice and fighting to the bitter end for emperor and country. To surrender, on the other hand, was seen as dishonourable, hence the contempt the Japanese felt for prisoners of war. Japanese soldiers believed that when they fell on the field of battle they would become kami, or gods, and join the nation’s guardian spirits at the Shinto shrine of Yasukuni in Tokyo. Hence the typical farewell from members of the Shimpū Special Attack Corps: ‘I’ll meet you at the Yasukuni Shrine!’3

The Shimpū Unit’s first mission was on 25 October 1944, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, when Lieutenant Seki led five Mitsubishi Zeros, each carrying a 250-kilogram bomb, against a cluster of US Navy escort carriers. Two planes were shot down by anti-aircraft fire, but the other three got through, damaging two carriers and sinking a third, the USS St Lo, after fires caused the ship’s magazine to explode. It is believed that Seki hit the St Lo. By the end of the following day, further kamikaze attacks had struck a total of seven carriers and forty others ships (sinking five, badly damaging twenty-three and moderately damaging twelve).

On hearing of these first suicide attacks, the 43-year-old Emperor Hirohito, who had ruled Japan since the death of his father in 1926, asked: ‘Was it necessary to go to this extreme?’ But, he added, ‘They have certainly done a good job.’4

These early successes caused an immediate expansion of the kamikaze programme to include all types of planes – fighters, bombers and even training aircraft, many flown by inexperienced pilots – as well as piloted flying bombs (Ōhkas),§ motorboats packed with explosives (Shinyō), and human torpedoes (Kaiten). One of the earliest volunteers for the Kaiten Corps was Naoji Kōzu, a former student at the Tokyo Imperial University who had been conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Navy. Unlike the early members of the Shimpū Unit, he was never told he would be going to a place ‘from which I’d have absolutely no chance to return’. He found out the truth only when he was assigned to Hikari, the Kaiten base in southern Honshu, and saw the craft for himself.

‘The body’, he recalled, ‘was painted flat black. It overwhelmed a man. A small sail and a tiny periscope located at its centre seemed to disturb the harmony of the whole. The rear third was a Type-93 torpedo. A maintenance officer described it to us dispassionately. “The total length is fourteen point five metres. Diameter, one metre. The crew is one man. Explosive charge one point six metric tons. Navigation range seventy-eight thousand metres. Maximum speed thirty knots.”’

The details aside, Kōzu had only to look at the position of the pilot, in a tiny cockpit in the centre of the Kaiten, to know it was a suicide weapon from which there would be no escape. Overcome with emotion, he could not speak. ‘I felt’, he wrote, ‘that I myself turned into something no longer human.’ There was, he discovered, a way out of the corps: by failing to operate the Kaiten properly during test runs. But he never seriously considered that option because it would have meant someone else taking his place. ‘I couldn’t bear the idea of sacrificing someone else by quitting. I knew if I did, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.’5

By January 1945, the kamikaze (or special attack) units were at the centre of IGHQ plans – codenamed Operation Ten-Go – to defeat the next phase of the American advance in the Pacific, probably against Okinawa. ‘I firmly believed’, said Rear Admiral Sadatoshi Tomioka, chief of operations at the Naval General Staff, ‘that Okinawa alone was the decisive battleground where we would be able to reverse the war situation.’ The navy’s strategy was to deliver such a severe blow to the attacking American forces that it would force them to the negotiating table. But the problem for the IJN – which was expected to do the bulk of the fighting both on the sea and in the air – was that its surface force was down to just a handful of battleships and no aircraft carriers, while its depleted stock of planes and pilots, particularly its special attack units, would need to be replenished before it could carry out a large-scale air operation. That was unlikely to be before May 1945.6

But the navy’s warnings were ignored and on 6 February 1945, IGHQ issued the Ten-Go Air Operations Agreement for the navy and army to provide 2,000 and 1,350 planes respectively – those numbers to include 740 special-attack planes – to hurl against the advancing US fleet. With the die cast, the IJN stepped up its preparations. ‘Although the training could not be completed,’ recalled Commander Yoshimori Terai, the air operations chief on the Naval General Staff, ‘we intended to carry out the operations forcibly by employing special-attack tactics.’7

The navy’s intention was to slow down the American advance on Okinawa by launching a kamikaze attack against the carriers of the US 5th Fleet in their anchorage at Ulithi atoll in the Caroline Islands, the so-called Operation Tan No. 2, on 11 March 1945. But only two of the twenty-four twin-engine bombers, each carrying 800-kilogram bombs, made it as far as Ulithi: one struck the stern of the aircraft carrier USS Randolph, just below the flight deck, killing twenty-seven sailors and wounding 105; the other crashed into a road on the small island of Sorlen, mistaking a signal tower for a ship. As a result of this largely failed mission, noted Commander Terai, the IJN was ‘forced to face the Okinawa operations unprepared’.8

* After preliminary operations against three small islands in Leyte Gulf, the main landings on Leyte by General MacArthur’s forces began on 20 October 1944.

† Operation Sho (or ‘Victory’) was a defensive–offensive plan, formulated after the fall of Saipan, that declared the Americans’ next major target as the ‘theatre of decisive battle’ to which all available forces would be rushed to defeat the enemy. The plan was activated by IGHQ on 18 October. (Inoguchi and Nakajima, The Divine Wind, p. 6n.)

‡ The official name for the new suicide unit was Shimpū Tokubetsu Kōgekitai (Divine Wind Special Attack Units), often shortened to Shimpū Tokkōtai. The alternative word ‘kamikaze’ was only used informally in the Japanese press after the Second World War.

§ The largest Ōhka attack – featuring small single-seated wooden aircraft, laden with almost 4,000 pounds of explosives, and carried to within thirteen miles of the target by a twin-engined bomber – was made against US aircraft carriers on 21 March 1945. All sixteen bombers and their Ōhka missiles were either shot down or lost before they reached their target.

5

‘More concerned with furlough than fighting’

At 8:10 a.m. on Thursday 18 January 1945, a four-engine Douglas C-54 Skymaster transport plane lifted off from Hickam Field, near Pearl Harbor, and set a course for Tarawa atoll in the Gilbert Islands. The plane had been specially adapted to carry VIPs, and was fitted with upholstered seats, a washroom and a small pantry, complete with ‘an electric warmer for heating coffee and food’. It even had an Air Transport Command officer on board to ensure that the four passengers had everything they needed. They were Lieutenant General Simon B. Buckner Jr, and three members of his staff: Brigadier General Oliver P. Smith, Colonel Louis B. Ely (his G-2, or chief of intelligence), and Major Frank Hubbard (his aide).1

Buckner had spent the last few months assembling the troops of his Tenth Army – a total potential force of 375,000, of whom 175,000 were to take part in the assault of Okinawa – on paper; now he wanted to see them in the flesh. So once the final draft of the operation plan had been distributed in mid-January, he was free to ‘visit the major combat units, observe the condition of the troops, and personally discuss the operation plan with the corps commanders’.

After an eleven-hour flight from Pearl Harbor – during which they crossed the date line – Buckner and his party reached Tarawa, the site of a vicious seventy-two-hour battle in November 1943 that had cost the US 2nd Marine Division more than 3,000 casualties; of the 4,800 Japanese and Korean defenders, only 136 surrendered (including just one Japanese officer and sixteen men). The plan was to stay the night in Tarawa before continuing on to Espiritu Santo the following day. But as they had got in early enough, they went on a tour of the island and found ‘evidences of the bitter battle which took place there, in the form of ruined Japanese bunkers and blockhouses and a scattering of abandoned amphibious tracked vehicles and tanks. And, of course, the cemeteries were still there.’2

Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, the first proper stop on the tour, was reached during the afternoon of Saturday the 20th. They were met by Major General George W. Griner Jr, commanding the 27th Infantry Division, the formation that had performed so poorly on Saipan. Buckner and his staff knew all too well the controversy concerning the 27th Division – particularly the Smith vs Smith imbroglio – and were hopeful that Griner had put matters right. But it did not seem that way when Oliver Smith heard from Griner’s artillery chief, Brigadier General Ferrin, that the division ‘was beaten down and did not know whether or not it wanted to fight’. Griner and his senior officers were doing their best to rectify this – to ‘instil in the men a desire to prove that the division was really a good division’ – but the jury was still out.3

Next day, during his tour of inspection, Buckner spent time asking individual soldiers who ‘look well’ what they ‘wanted to do most’. He was hoping to hear they were thirsting for combat. But most were more concerned, as Buckner put it in his diary, ‘with furlough than fighting’. The island was very hot and the men seemed to spend their time swimming, fishing and sailing; the only evidence of training that Smith saw was ‘a rifle range’. The net result of the visit was to ‘lessen’ Buckner’s confidence in the 27th. ‘He did not say this,’ noted Smith, ‘but I could feel it. I know I was not impressed with this division and this was not simply because it was an Army division. The difference between the 27th and the other Army divisions we saw later was very apparent.’4

The first point of comparison was during the next stop at New Caledonia, ‘a very rugged and beautiful island’ where the 81st Infantry Division, part of Buckner’s floating reserve, was stationed. Smith thought the division’s training area – located on rolling hills overlooking the sea – the best he had seen in the Pacific. ‘I had’, he remembered, ‘served with a part of the 81st Division (321st RCT) on Peleliu, and at that time did not consider the troops to be of the first order, but after seeing the 27th they looked very good.’5

A couple of days later they arrived in Guadalcanal where Major General Roy S. Geiger, commanding the III Amphibious Corps (or III Phibcorps), had his headquarters. Born in Florida in 1885 – and therefore a year senior to Buckner – Geiger would celebrate his 60th birthday during the visit. Unusually he had earned a law degree before enlisting in the US Marine Corps as a private at the age of 22. During the First World War, by then an officer, Geiger was just the fifth Marine Corps aviator, leading bombing raids for which he was awarded the Navy Cross. The bulk of his service since then – apart from attending courses at the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, and the US Army War College – had been in Marine aviation. During the early part of the Guadalcanal campaign, for example, he had led the legendary Cactus Air Force, earning a Gold Star in lieu of a second Navy Cross. In 1943 he commanded I Amphibious Corps at Bougainville, and a year later led III Amphibious Corps in the Guam and Palau islands campaigns. His capable leadership had earned him the equivalent of three Distinguished Service Medals.

Geiger enjoyed, therefore, a deserved reputation as an unflappable commander who could be relied on in a crisis. Buckner certainly had a high opinion of him and, shortly after this tour of inspection, tried to get Nimitz to nominate the Marine general as his successor if he was a casualty. The letter was sent via General Richardson, Buckner’s immediate superior, who returned it with a note stating that only the War Department had the authority to make such a decision and that, henceforth, ‘no member of the Tenth Army staff’ would even mention it to Nimitz. Buckner ‘was considerably put out, but let the matter rest, with the idea of making the designation after landing on Okinawa, over which General Richardson had no control’.6

Buckner’s first inspection was of units of the 6th Marine Division under Major General Lemuel C. Shepherd, who had fought with the 5th Marines at Belleau Wood in 1918, receiving two wounds and three gallantry medals (including the Navy Cross and the French Croix de Guerre). More recently he had served as the 1st Marine Division’s assistant commander at Cape Gloucester, and led the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade – the formation out of which the 6th Division grew – at Guam.

For Buckner’s visit, Shepherd had provided a guard of honour in full combat equipment: utility clothing, combat packs and helmets with covers. ‘They looked very well’, noted Oliver Smith, ‘and very businesslike.’ Buckner then inspected some of the 29th Marines’ quarters and watched the 4th Marines demonstrate a firing problem. ‘It involved’, recalled Smith, ‘the attack of a hill, using all infantry weapons: tanks, mortars, machine guns, flamethrowers, grenades, demolition charges, rifles and carbines. No punches were pulled and no blank ammunition was used. It was a very impressive demonstration of the [regiment’s] state of training … The men knew what they were about.’7

They then moved up the beach to observe the gunners of the 15th Marines (Artillery) firing their 155 mm howitzers directly at the mouth of a cave, a technique developed on Peleliu to soften up defenders of fixed positions before the infantry moved in. Buckner – who had received a traditional training in artillery techniques at Leavenworth and the Army War College – was expecting the Marine gunners to bracket the cave mouth before getting on target. When they instead ‘crept’ rounds towards the cave, he accused them of being ‘slow in getting on target in direct anti-cave fire’. This irritated Smith who felt that Buckner, with no practical experience of either direct or indirect artillery fire, should have held his tongue. ‘I explained to him the value of direct fire as demonstrated at Peleliu,’ wrote Smith, ‘but I do not know whether or not I convinced him.’8

After lunch they witnessed a rifle platoon from the 29th Marines assault three caves with live ammunition. First they fired machine guns and rifles to cover the approach, then a bazooka and a white phosphorus grenade, and finally a flamethrower followed by a demolition charge. ‘It was’, thought Smith, ‘a very realistic demonstration and gave the men a very accurate idea of what they would be up against in the actual reduction of cave positions.’ Buckner and his staff, he believed, ‘were thoroughly impressed’.

That was only partially true, as Buckner’s diary entry makes clear. ‘29th Regiment’, he noted, ‘had sloppy q[uarte]rs & apparently poor discipline but splendid weapon teamwork.’ The battalion exercise by the 4th Marines, on the other hand, ‘got out of hand’ as tanks and men ‘exposed themselves instead of using cover’.9

Next day, Buckner moved on to the veteran 1st Marine Division, commanded by Major General Pedro Del Valle, the son of the former Spanish governor of Puerto Rico, who had become a US citizen only in 1917.* A Marine artilleryman, Del Valle had commanded the 11th Marines at Guadalcanal and the III Phibcorps artillery at Guam, before taking over the 1st Marine Division from Major General William H. Rupertus after Peleliu. Stationed on Pavavu in the Russell Islands, Del Valle regularly brought his rifle regiments – the 1st, 5th and 7th Marines – over to Guadalcanal where there was more room to train. Buckner watched one of them conduct an exercise with artillery and tanks, and again thought the latter were ‘too much exposed’.10

The tour continued on to the Philippine island of Leyte, via the island of Biak (off the northern coast of New Guinea), where they were met by the commander of XXIV Corps, Major General John R. Hodge, a former teacher at Mississippi State whose men were still reducing the final pockets of Japanese resistance. As they travelled the island, meeting the commanders and men of the 7th (‘Hourglass’), 77th (‘Statue of Liberty’) and 96th (‘Deadeye’) Infantry Divisions, Oliver Smith noted the lack of evidence of ‘bitter fighting’. He wrote: ‘I saw no caves or pillboxes and no pockmarked terrain. There were burned or destroyed villages, but most of the buildings were of wooden construction and were not suitable for a stubborn defense.’ Of more concern, however, was the state of Hodge’s men. ‘They were excellent divisions,’ noted Smith. ‘However they had been in action on Leyte for three months and two … were still engaged in active operations. The divisions were understrength and adequate replacements were not in sight. There was considerable dysentery and skin infection. Living conditions were very bad.’11

Buckner worried in his diary that the men of XXIV Corps would get ‘no real rest’ before the Okinawa campaign, and had equipment ‘badly in need of repair’. He considered them ‘good fighters’ and had ‘great confidence in both my corps’. But he was relieved when the staff of MacArthur’s South-west Pacific Command assured him on 29 January that their first priority ‘above everything else’ was to get XXIV Corps ready for the next campaign.12

One of the low points of the tour was when Buckner was shown pictures by Hodge of the remains of US soldiers who had been ‘butchered and eaten by Japs’. Human flesh, said Hodge, had been found in Japanese officers’ ‘mess pans’. He also had pictures of Filipino men, women and children who had been ‘machine-gunned to death’ in a church. Buckner was disgusted.13

On 1 February, they flew on to Guam in the Marianas and, the following day, held a conference with Admiral Nimitz in his new headquarters on the slopes of Mount Tenjo. ‘The XXIV Corps situation was discussed,’ recorded Buckner, ‘and it was decided that no present action would be taken in view of the SW Pac[ific Command]’s promises but that the latter would be watched closely … and action taken if any promises were not lived up to. I expressed myself as preferring to enter the campaign on time but not entirely ready rather than postpone D-Day and give the Japs more time to prepare defenses. In other words, time is working for the Japs, therefore hurry.’14

That afternoon Buckner’s party left for the island of Saipan, just half an hour’s flying time from Guam, to visit Major General Thomas E. Watson’s 2nd Marine Division. En route, Buckner instructed the pilot to fly via Rota which was still held by the Japanese.† As he entered the cockpit to get a better look, however, Buckner was shocked to find the plane ‘heading for the center of the island at a very low altitude’.

‘You do realise’, said Buckner, ‘that there are 5,000 Japs on the island armed with anti-aircraft guns?’

‘No, sir,’ responded the white-faced pilot. He changed course, noted Buckner, ‘just in time’.15

On 3 February, safely on Saipan, Buckner spent the day with the 2nd Marine Division. The highlight was a divisional parade on a ‘fairly level’ piece of ground. Watson had ordered all uniforms, cartridge belts, canteen covers and packs to be ‘washed and rewashed until they fairly sparked. Rifles were absolutely spotless.’ The lead unit was Able Company of the 8th Marines. As it reached the first marker on the parade ground, its commander Captain Fred Haley should have called out, ‘Left flank – march.’ Instead he shouted ‘Column left – march’, and chaos ensued. Eventually the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hayward, stepped in, ‘halted the entire Parade, shifted gears into reverse and marched the 1st Battalion off the parade ground in the direction whence it had come’. After some choice profanities by Hayward, the parade was resumed and, this time, Haley issued the correct command. He was told later by Marines in the makeshift reviewing stand that the ‘faintest shadow of a smile’ had crossed Buckner’s features as the drama unfolded. All Haley noticed was that Buckner had ‘command presence’ and was wearing a steel helmet with three stars that glittered in the sunlight.16

Haley’s faux pas aside, Buckner was impressed. ‘Spent the whole day with General Watson inspecting the 2nd Mardiv [Marine Division],’ he wrote in his diary. ‘They appear well trained and well disciplined. I was greatly impressed with the quality of his battalion commanders.’ He told Oliver Smith that he had ‘never before had the privilege of meeting such an alert group’.17 They finally arrived back at Pearl Harbor at midnight on 4 February, having flown 14,000 miles and criss-crossed most of the Pacific, including eighteen battlefields. Overall, Buckner was ‘well satisfied with the trip’. He was now ‘familiar with the tools with which he was going to work’, and any qualms about the quality of the Marine divisions had been dispelled. His chief of operations (or G-3), Brigadier General Walter A. Dumas, would later describe the Marine divisions as ‘in magnificent condition and splendidly trained’. Bucker’s chief concern, therefore, was for his army divisions: he worried that the 27th lacked the stomach for the fight, and that Hodge’s XXIV Corps would be under-resourced when it was finally released from MacArthur’s command. But, with no time to rectify matters, he would simply hope for the best.18

* This was the result of the Jones–Shafroth Act of 1917 which gave US citizenship with limited rights to all Puerto Ricans born on the island.

† The Japanese garrison on Rota – 947 soldiers and 1,853 navy personnel – finally surrendered to a detachment of Marines on 2 September 1945.

6

‘I’m going simply because I’ve got to – and I hate it’

Soon after Lieutenant General Buckner left Guam in early February 1945, an even bigger celebrity reached the island: the Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Accompanied by twelve officers and three enlisted men, Pyle had flown the 3,500 miles from Hawaii, via the Marshall Islands, in the same type of plane as Buckner, a Douglas C-54, but without its VIP modifications. To make it easier to sleep during the final twenty-four-hour leg, therefore, Pyle had taken his blanket and lain down on some mail bags.

His first view of Guam was from the cockpit, courtesy of the pilot. ‘We came out of the boundless sky and over our island destination’, wrote Pyle, ‘just a little after dawn. The island was green and beautiful – and terribly far from home. That we could have drawn ourselves to it so unerringly out of the vast Pacific spaces seemed incredible. It was a like a blind man walking alone across a field, and putting his finger directly on some previously designated barb of a wire fence. But … they do it all the time.’1

Pyle had had an extraordinary career. Born in Dana, Indiana on 3 August 1900, he saw active service as a petty officer in the US Navy at the tail end of the First World War before attending Indiana University where he edited the Daily Student newspaper. Keen to work as a journalist, Pyle quit his economics degree to accept a job at a small newspaper in La Porte, Indiana. He soon moved to the tabloid Washington Daily News where he met Geraldine ‘Jerry’ Siebolds, a bright and attractive woman a year his senior, and they married in 1925. But Jerry was a troubled soul, suffering from alcoholism and bouts of mental illness, and they divorced in 1942 before remarrying by proxy a year later. By then Pyle had made his name as a roving correspondent for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain, reporting on the lives of ordinary people in rural America in the 1930s, and ordinary soldiers in the Second World War. His daily column about life at the front for GIs – or ‘dogfaces’ as he affectionately called them – was syndicated to more than 300 newspapers.

In covering the North African, Italian and D-Day campaigns, Pyle had preferred the ground’s-eye view to generals’ press conferences. He became ‘the author of letters home’ that thousands of soldiers could not, or would not, write. He regarded the average American serviceman as a ‘good boy’, doing ‘an awful job that had to be done’.2 Their stories deserved to be told, and he was the one to do it. One of his most memorable despatches, written in January 1944, was ‘The Death of Captain Waskow’. In it he described the demise of a company commander in the 36th Division, a native of Belton, Texas, ‘only in his middle twenties’, who ‘carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him’. After Waskow’s body had been lowered from a mule to the ground, a succession of soldiers came to pay their respects. One said: ‘God damn it to hell anyway.’

Another: ‘I sure am sorry, sir.’

Then the first man ‘squatted down’, wrote Pyle, ‘and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently at the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there’. Finally he put the hand down, got up, ‘gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar,’ and ‘sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound’, before getting up and walking ‘down the road in the moonlight, all alone’.3

Pyle continued his unique style of reporting from north-west Europe – living with ordinary soldiers and sharing their privations – until he was almost killed when the USAAF mistakenly dropped bombs on US troops near Saint-Lo in Normandy, on 25 July 1944. A total of 111 Allied soldiers were killed and 490 wounded. The dead included Lieutenant General Leslie J. McNair whose body was so badly mutilated he could be identified only by the three silver stars on his collar. Pyle wrote of ‘a gigantic rattling’ as the bombs fell on the small farm he was visiting. He remembered ‘hitting the ground flat, all spread out like the cartoons of people flattened by steam rollers and then squirmed like an eel to get under one of the heavy wagons in the shed’. Suddenly he and an officer stopped crawling, ‘feeling it was hopeless to move farther’ as the ‘bombs were already crashing around us’. He added: ‘We just lay sprawled, gaping at each other in futile appeal, our faces about a foot apart until it was over.’4

After the strain and tension of months on the front line, witnessing countless deaths, the bombing was for Pyle the final straw. He spent more than a week prostrate with fever, diarrhoea and nervous exhaustion. Once back on his feet, he decided to go home. ‘I’m leaving for one reason only,’ he told his readers, ‘because I have just got to stop. “I’ve had it,” as they say in the Army. I’ve had all I can take for a while … I’ve been immersed in it too long. My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused. The hurt has finally become too great.’5

He was almost certainly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and had been for a while. A year earlier, working on a screenplay of Pyle’s bestselling collection of columns Here is Your War, the playwright Arthur Miller had travelled to New Mexico to interview the journalist who was on a break from the war. He was, wrote Miller, ‘a tortured man, uncertain of himself and ridden with guilt. Slight of build, with sandy hair thinning to baldness, gentle and self-effacing, he seemed the last man in the world to bring himself willingly into battle.’6

Pyle returned to the United States in the autumn of 1944 a national hero, admired by servicemen not only for his honest reporting, but for the material difference he had made to many of their lives by campaigning for soldiers’ ‘fight pay’ (the equivalent of airmen’s ‘flight pay’). The law passed by Congress in 1944, giving combat infantrymen an extra $10 a month, was dubbed the ‘Ernie Pyle Bill’. Yet within a few short months he was back in a war zone, this time in the Pacific. The question is: why? The answer is complex. He went partly to escape the demands on him in America: from his wife, who had recently tried to commit suicide; from the public, who were clamouring for his attention; and from his professional commitments, including the motion picture that had been adapted from his book, The Story of GI Joe.* He had never liked the film’s title, he admitted in February 1945, ‘but nobody could think of a better one, and I was too lazy to try’.7 But his greatest motivation was guilt: how could he remain safely in the United States when thousands of ordinary Americans were risking their lives on foreign battlefields? Or as he put it to his readers:

There’s nothing nice about the prospect of going back to war again. Anybody who has been in war and wants to go back is a plain damn fool in my book. I’m certainly not going because I’ve got itchy feet again, or because I can’t stand America, or because there is any mystical fascination about war that is drawing me back. I’m going simply because there’s a war on and I’m part of it and I’ve known all the time I was going back. I’m going simply because I’ve got to – and I hate it.

He had chosen the Pacific because he assumed the war in Europe would be over before he could return. That was not how it turned out. Yet he thought it best to stick with his original plan. ‘There are’, he explained, ‘a lot of guys in that war, too. They are the same guys who are fighting on the other side, only with different names, that’s all. It’s not belittling my friends in Europe to desert them and go to the Pacific for a while.’8

His decision was certainly appreciated by the first servicemen he met on Guam as he settled in to a room of the Bachelor Officer Quarters – cream-coloured huts made of corrugated metal, equipped with a clothes closet, washstand, chest of drawers and two beds with double mattresses – that had been hurriedly constructed by the Seabees all over the Pacific. Spotting him through the open window, one Seabee called out: ‘Say, aren’t you Ernie Pyle?’

‘Right.’

‘Whoever thought we’d meet you here? I recognised you from your picture.’

The pair started chatting, and other Seabees joined in. It made Pyle’s day, and confirmed his decision to come.9

Yet, as he knew already, there were considerable challenges for a journalist covering the Pacific War. The first was distance. ‘I don’t mean distance from America so much,’ he wrote, ‘for our war in Europe was a long way from home too. I mean distances after you get right on the battlefield. The whole western Pacific is our battlefield, and whereas distances in Europe are at most hundreds of miles, out here they are thousands. And there’s nothing in between but water.’

Then there was the issue of boredom as the days went by in their ‘endless sameness’. But the hardest adjustment, Pyle felt, was the ‘different attitude’ towards the enemy. In Europe there was a feeling that the Germans, ‘horrible and deadly as they were, were still people’. In the Pacific, he had quickly got the feeling ‘that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice’.10 The reasons for this hatred were not hard to fathom: the unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor; Japan’s despicable treatment of its prisoners of war (more than a quarter of whom died from malnourishment, disease and overwork); and its soldiers’ refusal to surrender, in line with the bushido code of honour that was supposed to dictate the samurai warrior’s way of life.†

At first, even the humane Pyle felt this repulsion. The sight of a group of Japanese prisoners ‘wrestling and laughing’ had given him ‘the creeps’, he admitted, and he wanted a ‘mental bath’. But after talking to many veterans on Guam, he got over the ‘creepy feeling that fighting Japs’ – or ‘Japes’, a racist combination of ‘Jap’ and ‘ape’ that many American servicemen liked to use – was ‘like fighting snakes or ghosts’. They certainly held different ideas about the war, but they fought with specific tactics which the Americans had come to know. ‘Our men’, wrote Pyle, ‘were no more afraid of the Japs than they were of the Germans. They were afraid of them as any modern soldier is of his foe, not because they are slippery or ratlike, but simply because they have weapons and fire them like good tough soldiers. And the Japs were human enough to be afraid of us in exactly the same way.’11

While still in the United States, Ernie Pyle had told his readers that he planned to spend some time with the US Navy – since it was ‘so dominant’ in the Pacific and he had ‘done very little in the past on that part of the service’ – before going ashore on the next major operation with the foot soldiers (or, as he put it, ‘my noble souls, the doughfoots’).12

In fact, the first unit he lived with was a squadron of the USAAF flying B-29 Superfortresses out of the Marianas. ‘Their lot’, he wrote, ‘was a tough one’ as they ‘were over water every inch of the way to Japan and every inch of the way back’. They had to contend with flak and Japanese fighters over the target, but their main concern was ‘sweating out’ those six or seven hours of ocean beneath them on the way back, often in darkness. If they were shot up or had engine trouble, and were forced to ditch, their chances of being picked up were only one in five. ‘It’s mighty hard’, noted Pyle, ‘to find a couple of little rubber boats in a big, big ocean.’

Pyle even went up in a B-29 on a training run and found it a thrilling, if somewhat disconcerting, experience. The plane was so packed with gas tanks and bomb racks that the only way the crew of eleven could move around was along a thirty-foot narrow tunnel, ‘just big enough to crawl in on your hands and knees’. Some crew members slept in it for an hour or so on missions; but others found it too claustrophobic and preferred to stay awake. They wore regular clothes on missions, usually coveralls, because the cabin was pressurised and heated. But as they approached the target they put on flak vests and oxygen masks in case the Plexiglas was shattered and the plane depressurised.

While he was with the squadron, several planes were lost on missions. One should have been, but somehow survived. Hit over the target, it dropped back and was attacked by five Japanese fighters and shot to pieces. It kept flying, though its horizontal stabilisers were gone, and every so often would go into a spiral. Each time the pilot regained control. He finally reached his home base and crashed on the runway, tearing off the plane’s wings and breaking its huge fuselage in two. ‘Yet’, wrote an astonished Pyle, ‘every man came out of it alive, even the wounded ones.’13

In mid-March, finally making good his earlier promise, Pyle joined the light-aircraft carrier USS Cabot, part of Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s Fast Carrier Force (known as Task Force 58) which was heading north to attack the airfields of Kyushu, and thus weaken Japanese air power before the Okinawa invasion. Pyle had deliberately asked to be put on one of the smaller carriers because they received less attention in the press and had fewer people on board. But he was still shocked at her size: 700 feet long, carrying 1,000 people, and with ‘all the facilities of a small city’, including five barbers, three doctors, two dentists, a preacher, laundry, general store, two libraries and movies every night. The ship had been at sea since November 1943 without once returning to port, and the crew could think of nothing but home. Yet they were inordinately proud of their achievements: steaming 149,000 miles, surviving five typhoons (one of which sank three destroyers), shooting down 228 enemy planes and sinking twenty-nine big ships. Having fought in every battle in the Pacific since the start of 1944, the Cabot was known as ‘the Iron Woman’.

One particularly close shave was off Luzon in late November 1944 when a kamikaze plane hit the port side of the flight deck, destroying an anti-aircraft gun, and killing and wounding sixty-two. This caused one disgruntled member of crew to exclaim: ‘Oh, boy, this is great. Now at last they’ll have to send us back to America for repairs.’

He was promptly felled by a blow from outraged Boilermaker 1st Class Jerry Ryan, from Davenport, Iowa. Pyle got to know Ryan well, describing him as ‘a tall, well-built, mustached sailor’ who always knew right from wrong. He was, wrote Pyle, ‘what is known in the Navy as “a good man”: skilled in his work, dependable, and very smart. He’d die before he’d curry favor with anybody.’ One of Ryan’s closest friends on board was ‘a tall, athletic’ black cook from the same town called Wesley Cooper. He was the best basketball player on ship and had a scholarship waiting for him at the University of Iowa.

Some of the Cabot’s sailors asked Pyle how their service compared to that in Europe. His blunt response was that it was ‘much better’. Most saw the sense of this. ‘I can stand a lot of monotony’, said one, ‘if I know my chances are pretty good for coming out alive.’ But others disagreed, saying ‘I’d trade this for a foxhole any day.’ Pyle’s scornful reaction: ‘You just have to keep your mouth shut to a remark like that.’

The people on board he had infinite respect for, however, were the pilots. ‘Landing on the deck of a small carrier in a rough sea’, wrote Pyle, ‘is just about like landing on half a block of Main Street while a combination hurricane and earthquake is going on.’

Some came in too fast and blew a tyre; others ‘half-sideways, and the cable will jerk them around in a tire-screeching circle.’ A few come in so high they missed the arresting cables and hit the high wires stretched across the mid-decks called ‘the barrier’, causing them to somersault and even catch fire. Pyle could hardly watch, telling the air officer he needed ‘heart-failure medicine’. The man replied: ‘I’ve had to watch 2,000 of them. It’ll drive you nuts.’

The start of the cruise north seemed ‘peaceful and routine’, with each sub-unit of carriers protected by an array of battleships, cruisers and destroyers. Messages were constantly being transmitted across the fleet by signal flag, light blinker and even planes dropping packages on the flight deck; only radio messages were forbidden, to prevent the Japanese from eavesdropping. There were daily baths, lots of good food (including steaks and ice cream), movies every night and as many cigarettes as a man could smoke. Pyle even had his dirty clothes laundered and pressed by the cabin boy. It was like a hotel.

But gradually the weather got colder and, as it neared mainland Japan, the ship went into battle stations and the captain ‘never left the bridge, either to eat or to sleep’. Everybody was issued with ‘flash gear’ – including a thin grey hood to cover the head and shoulders, a white mask, glass goggles and long grey gloves – to protect against fire; all compartment doors were closed, and aid stations were manned across the ship. Finally on 18 March, from a position about ninety miles from the coast of Kyushu, the strike planes were launched from across the fleet. Finding few Japanese aircraft on the ground, they bombed hangars and barracks instead.14

The response of Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, commanding the 5th Air Fleet on Kyushu, was to order a counter-strike of heavy bombers and kamikazes. Fifty were shot down or crashed, though not before some damage had been done to three aircraft carriers: the Enterprise, Intrepid and Yorktown. The following day two more carriers, Wasp and Franklin, were hit by Japanese bombs that caused fires and over 1,600 casualties. ‘Listening to the [Japanese] claims of attacks,’ noted Ugaki in his diary, ‘it looked like we had inflicted heavy damage on the enemy, but the fact wasn’t so. Each time a search was made, I wondered why so many remained if the claimed result of attack was true.’15

This was certainly the case with the Cabot’s carrier group – TF 58.3 – which came through the operation unscathed. Pyle’s main concern on the 19th was waiting for the strike planes to return from an attack on ships in the Tokyo area. Slowly but surely they did, until just six were absent. It later transpired that the plane piloted by Ensign Robert Buchanan had been hit by flak and forced to ditch in Tokyo’s outer bay. The other five, all members of the same flight, had remained in the area to locate a rescue ship. They eventually found one thirty miles away. But as it steamed slowly towards the outer bay, the aerial escort began to run short on fuel and, one by one, its planes were ordered by their leader, Lieutenant John Fecke of Duxbury, Massachusetts, back to the carrier.

As the rescue ship entered the outer bay, its skipper realised the danger he was in – from mines, enemy planes and shore-based guns – and radioed Fecke he could not go any farther.

‘It’s only two miles more,’ begged Fecke. ‘Please try.’

‘OK, we’ll try.’

Incredibly he located the pilot, pulled him from the water and got safely away. Only now did Fecke and the other remaining pilot, Lieutenant Bob Murray, return to the Cabot. ‘They had flown six hours on a three-hour mission,’ wrote Pyle, ‘but they helped save an American life by doing so.’

Fecke and Buchanan had form. The previous autumn, off Formosa, they had helped to save two crippled American cruisers by engaging seventy Japanese planes with a flight of just eight, commanded by Fecke. They shot down twenty-nine, for the loss of just one of their own planes, and drove the rest away. Fecke and Buchanan each downed five planes – making them ‘aces’ after a single engagement – and were awarded the Navy Cross. ‘So the little Tokyo Bay incident’, wrote Pyle, ‘didn’t rattle them.’16

* The film was premiered in June 1945 and earned its co-star, Robert Mitchum, his only Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

† Even senior commanders were not immune from this dehumanisation of the enemy. ‘You’ve got to instill in your men’, insisted Major General Lem Shepherd, commanding the 6th Marine Division, ‘the will to kill the enemy to the point … that killing a Jap was like killing a rattlesnake.’ (Quoted in Lacey, Stay off the Skyline, p. 83.)

7

‘I was crying as I did it and she was crying too’

From the deck of the USS Gunston Hall, Sergeant Robert C. ‘Bob’ Dick of the 763rd Tank Battalion could see ‘every kind of ship built, or so it seemed, and there looked to be hundreds’ stretching all the way to the horizon. ‘It was’, he thought, ‘both reassuring and at the same time unsettling. A lot of help is always good, but we must be going to where a lot of help would really be a big necessity.’1

A veteran of eight previous campaigns, the Gunston Hall (or LSD-5 as she was also known), a 7,900-ton flat-bottomed dock landing ship, had left Leyte on 25 March 1945, as part of a convoy of ships carrying the 7th and 96th Infantry Divisions towards Okinawa. Also setting off that day were ships carrying the assault groups of the 1st and 6th Marine Divisions from Ulithi, the 2nd Marine Division from Saipan, and the 27th Infantry Division from Espiritu Santo. Lieutenant General Buckner and his staff were due to leave Leyte on Admiral Turner’s faster command ship Eldorado on the 27th. Ahead of everyone, however, was the 77th Infantry Division. It had departed Leyte on March 19 and was now nearing its target, the Kerama Islands, which needed to be captured before the Okinawa landings.2

Like most enlisted men in the gigantic armada, Sergeant Dick only learned where he was headed en route. ‘We were told’, he recalled, ‘that the island was only about 350 miles from the Japanese mainland, and that the fight ahead was going to be a tough one.’ Born and brought up in El Monte, southern California, Dick was just seventeen when he joined the 40th Infantry Division of the National Guard in 1938. He was then six feet two inches tall and ‘a skinny 155 pounds, with brown hair combed in no particular direction or style’. Posted to Hawaii in 1942, he transferred to the 763rd Tank Battalion after an ankle injury put paid to his career as an infantrymen. He was assigned as the driver of Tank No. 60 – nicknamed Cutthroats – a thirteen-ton Stuart M3 with a 37 mm cannon, later upgraded to the much heavier thirty-ton Sherman M4 with a 75 mm cannon and three .30 calibre machine guns. The Sherman also had ‘state-of-the-art radio equipment’ and ‘an intercom’ so that the four-man crew could communicate in battle, and the commander no longer needed to tap Dick with his foot to get him to change direction.

Dick’s first and only experience of combat was with Charlie Company of the 763rd, part of the 96th (‘Deadeyes’) Division, in the Leyte operation in the autumn of 1944. But the rough terrain on Leyte was unsuitable for tanks and Dick saw little action until one terrifying experience when his tank was part of a platoon of four that was ambushed on a narrow road with ditches on either side by Japanese ‘carrying mines attached to long bamboo poles’. Before anyone could react, the lead and rear tanks had their tracks blown off and the two in the middle, including Cutthroats, were trapped. Suddenly, recalled Dick, a Japanese officer jumped onto the back of the tank in front, ‘and as the turret began to traverse in our direction (in order to shoot the Japs off our tank), the officer began hacking away at the machine-gun barrel with his two-handed sword!’ On the fourth blow the blade snapped, and the officer was shot by Dick’s gunner. ‘The attack couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes but it seemed an eternity … Several Jap soldiers, still alive, were found in the ditches among the dead, and they were quickly despatched by our crews.’

At the end of the campaign, Dick was asked by his company commander if he wanted to be considered for a field commission. He agreed, and passed the initial assessment. But when told he would be reassigned to infantry, he changed his mind. ‘We all knew that another battle was shaping up,’ he wrote, ‘and the thought of being in the middle of it on foot really turned me off. I had found a niche in the tanks, and didn’t want to take any chances of missing combat in one of the monsters.’ Eighteen of Charlie Company’s ‘monsters’ were now in the bowels of Gunston Hall as she headed north from Leyte, and acted as useful ballast when a typhoon hit on day three, though the ship still ‘rolled and plunged like never before’. A day later, the skies cleared and the worst was over.3

By then, the capture of the Kerama Islands by the 77th Division was almost complete. On the morning of 26 March, once the sea had been cleared of mines and the beaches declared free of underwater obstacles, combat teams from the 305th, 306th and 307th Infantry Regiments landed on the islands of Aka, Geruma, Hokaji, Zamami and Yakabi where they met, for the most part, only minor opposition, much of which quickly melted into the interior. More landings took place on the 27th, including that of the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 306th Infantry on Tokashiki, at six miles long and one mile wide the largest of the group. By the evening of the 29th, all the islands were in American hands, as were 121 prisoners and 300 suicide boats* that were meant to be used against the American fleet. A further 530 Japanese soldiers had been killed, at a relatively minor cost of thirty-one American dead and eighty-one wounded.4

Buckner was on the Eldorado heading north when he heard the good news. ‘Word came’, he wrote his wife, ‘that the Kerama Retto had been occupied according to plan with very few casualties … twelve strangled native women were found in one cave.’5 In fact, many more civilians were dead – the victims of Japanese mendacity and their own naivety. What happened on Tokashiki, in particular, is almost beyond belief; but it would be repeated many times on Okinawa itself, forever haunting the men who survived the months-long battle.

An eyewitness to – and an unwilling participant in – the unfolding tragedy was Shigeaki Kinjo, a 16-year-old who lived with his mother and three siblings in a village in the south of Tokashiki. On 26 March, when the Americans began their landings on neighbouring islands, they and other civilians were ordered ‘to move to Nishiyama, in the north of the island, where the Japanese soldiers had their camp’. They walked after dark in pouring rain, to avoid American shells, and by morning had reached their destination. There they found themselves in a crowd of ‘about 700 or 800 people’ all ‘packed together tightly’ with many women and children crying. Surrounded by Japanese soldiers, they ‘feared that something bad was about to happen’.

Eventually the village head – himself an ex-soldier – told everyone to shout out ‘Banzai!’ (‘Long life!’) to the emperor three times. ‘We knew’, wrote Kinjo, ‘that this was what Japanese soldiers did when they were going to die on the battlefield. The village head didn’t exactly tell us to commit suicide, but by telling us to shout banzai, we knew what was meant.’

To assist the killings, Japanese soldiers began distributing hand grenades with instructions on how to use them. But there were not enough to go round, and Kinjo’s family did not get one. When they had all been handed out, ‘that was taken as a sign and the killing began immediately’. After the grenades had been detonated, most people were still alive so men began to use clubs and scythes on their families and each other. It was, remembered Kinjo, ‘the father’s role to kill his own family, but my father had already died’. So Kinjo and his older brother took on the grisly task. His memory of how they killed their mother is understandably hazy: ‘maybe we tried to use rope at first, but in the end we hit her over the head with stones. I was crying as I did it and she was crying too.’

They then moved on to their siblings: a girl about to enter the fourth grade of elementary school, and a brother in first grade. ‘I don’t remember exactly how we killed our little brother and sister but it wasn’t difficult because they were so small – I think we used a kind of spear. There was wailing and screaming on all sides as people were killing and being killed.’

With their siblings dead, they were discussing how they would kill each other when a boy of Kinjo’s age ran up and said: ‘Let’s fight the Americans and be killed by them, rather than dying like this.’

Kinjo knew they would be shot instantly if they tried to attack the heavily armed Americans. Yet he thought it a better way to die than by each other’s hand, as did his brother, so they ‘left that place of screaming and death’ to ‘find the Americans’. Fortunately for them, the first person they came across was a Japanese soldier. ‘We were shocked,’ recalled Kinjo, ‘and wondered why he was still alive when we had been told to kill each other. Why was it that only the locals had to commit suicide when the Japanese soldiers were allowed to survive? We felt betrayed.’

Deciding not to kill themselves after all, Kinjo and his brother stayed in the hills and scavenged for food. After a couple of weeks, close to starving, they surrendered to an American soldier and were taken to a prisoner-of-war camp. There they learned that ‘300 people had perished that day’, and 600 overall in two separate mass suicides in the Keramas. Kinjo, who was later so wracked with guilt for what he had done that he turned to Christianity, put the blame squarely on the Japanese. ‘Part of the reason we had been prepared to kill our own families’, he explained, ‘was because of the nationalistic education we had received. We were taught that the Americans were not human.’6

The lie was revealed to one group of survivors when soldiers of the 306th Infantry came upon the site of a mass suicide on Tokashiki – probably Kinjo’s – in the morning of 29 March. According to eyewitnesses, they ‘found a small valley littered with more than 150 dead and dying Japanese, most of them civilians. Fathers had systematically throttled each member of their families and then disembowelled themselves with knives or hand grenades.’ Under a blanket lay a father, two small children, and both grandparents, ‘all strangled by cloth ropes’. As American soldiers and medics did what they could, providing food and care for the survivors, an old man who had killed his daughter ‘wept in remorse’.7

On 25 March, the day before the first troops landed on the Keramas, the softening up of Okinawa itself began with the long-range shelling of the south-east coast by Rear Admiral W. H. P. Blandy’s Amphibious Support Force (TF 52). This was to cover the work of minesweepers and frogmen whose job was to clear the approaches to the Hagushi beaches of mines and underwater obstacles. From 29 March, the bombardment proper began when the battleships, cruisers, destroyers and gunboats of Rear Admiral M. L. Deyo’s Gun & Covering Force (TF 54) ‘closed the range’ and used their heavy guns to ‘hit their objectives with increasing effectiveness’. In the seven days prior to L-Day, naval guns would fire ‘more than 13,000 large-calibre shells (six-inch to sixteen-inch) in shore bombardment’, a total of 5,162 tons of high explosives. This fire was supplemented by numerous strikes from carrier planes – mostly from Vice Admiral Mitscher’s Fast Carrier Force (TF 58) – who targeted barracks, gun positions, airfields and midget-submarine bases with rockets, bombs and napalm.8

Forced to endure this storm of steel was the bulk of Okinawa’s civilian population, still concentrated in the south of the island. Among them was Kikuko Miyagi, 16, a boarder at the prestigious First Okinawa Prefectural Girls’ High School in Asato near Naha. She was one of 222 girls, between the ages of 15 and 19, from the High School and the Okinawa Normal School who had recently been inducted into the Himeyuri Student Corps† to work as auxiliary nurses at the Okinawa army field hospital, sited in underground caves near the village of Haebaru, three miles south-east of Naha.9

Like their male counterparts – many of whom were recruited into the Blood and Iron Student Corps – Kikuko and her fellow pupils had long been exposed to nationalist propaganda and were fiercely patriotic. They were taught how to use bamboo spears and the Japanese halberd, practised air-raid defence drills and went on long marches of up to forty miles to improve mental and physical health. From June 1944, as more and more classes were cancelled, they helped construct Oroku airfield. Their training as military nurses began in late 1944 and was continued in early 1945. They were also issued with ‘The Principle of the Battle’ orders which stated that each person must destroy ten of the enemy and one tank.10

It was around this time that Kikuko went home to say goodbye to her parents. She promised them she would ‘win the Imperial Order of the Rising Sun, eighth class, and be enshrined at Yasukuni’. This infuriated her father, a country schoolteacher. ‘I didn’t bring you up’, he shouted, ‘to the age of 16 to die!’

Kikuko was ashamed of her father’s reaction, and ‘thought he was a traitor to say such a thing’. She felt only pride as she left home for the battlefield.11

On 23 March, she and her schoolmates were woken in their dormitory and addressed by the school principal: ‘It’s time you demonstrated what you’ve been trained for and served your country. I was ordered by the military to join the headquarters. You will go to the army field hospital with your teachers and do your best there for our country.’

That night the 222 students set out with eighteen teachers for the Haebaru army field hospital. It comprised three surgical clinics – the 1st, 2nd and 3rd – hidden in caves under a gently sloping hill. The caves were still in the process of being dug out, lined with wooden supports and filled with medical equipment, so the Himeyuri Corps was recruited to help.

While they worked the American bombardment of the island began. It seemed to Kikuko that it was literally raining shells ‘for five or six days’. On 29 March, as the shellfire continued, a graduation ceremony was held for the Himeyuri students in their ‘crude, triangular barracks’. They knelt together on the floor, their faces hardly visible in the flickering candlelight, as their principal spoke of their duty to ‘Work so as not to shame the First Girls’ High School.’ They then sang patriotic songs, including ‘Give Your Life for the Sake of the Emperor, Wherever You Go’, and one penned by Kikuko’s 23-year-old music teacher called ‘A Song of Parting’. It was, she noted, ‘really wonderful’ and ‘not a war song at all’. They had memorised it while they were digging the shelters, particularly the verse ‘We shall meet again’. They sang it as they walked back to their cave, ‘the reverberations of the explosions shaking the ground’. Next morning ‘that triangular building wasn’t there any more’.12

Another Okinawan almost killed by American shells was Yoshiko Sakumoto, the young schoolgirl who had witnessed the bombing of Naha. Now 14, but still too young to be called up for military service, she and her family were part of the exodus to the north of the island in January 1945. They went in a horse-drawn carriage, with Yoshiko and her father pushing a cart filled with their belongings, and found refuge with a family in the village of Seragaki, near Mount Onna, in the centre of the island. But her father travelled back to Naha every few weeks to get supplies and check on relatives, and Yoshiko went with him. They were returning from one such trip with two friends, making their way along the prefectural highway south of the Hagushi beaches, when Yoshiko looked out to sea and froze. ‘The ocean’, she recalled, ‘was crowded with a colossal number of ships that stretched north from the Naha area. They had surrounded our island. We could tell right away they weren’t Japanese ships.’

They hurried on and were close to Kue, near the town of Chatan, when the ships opened fire on 29 March. ‘Shells flew over our heads’, remembered Yoshiko, ‘making a “shoo-shoo” sound, and exploded with an enormous thump. At the same time, planes began dropping bombs. I could see the machine guns firing from the planes.’

Abandoning the cart, they looked desperately for somewhere to hide. On their right was a sugar-cane field; the beach to their left. Neither provided much cover. They dived under some bushes. But when the explosions got close, showering them with ‘small rocks and dust’, they knew they had to escape to a safer spot. ‘If we stay here’, shouted her father over the tumult, ‘we’ll all be killed. Lets run for the woods.’

He was gesturing to a small wooded area about thirty metres away. They set off for it, but more explosions forced them to the ground. ‘When we finally made it to the woods,’ wrote Yoshiko, ‘we looked back and saw huge holes, about the size of eight tatami mats,‡ blasted open by the bombs.’ In the wood were some thatched houses and a small concrete shed. Three of them dashed into the shed, leaving Yoshiko’s father outside. Seconds later ‘a huge explosion lifted the shed and shook the ground’. Yoshiko could not hear and feared her eardrums had burst. She had wounds on her elbow and her head. As these were being bound, her father appeared, ‘pointing at a spot just behind the shed’ where the shell had exploded. Yoshiko was shocked. A direct hit, she knew, would have killed them instantly.

They decided to head back towards Naha and seek refuge in the tomb of Chatan Moshi on a rocky hill. On they way, they passed the bodies of four Japanese soldiers. ‘One lay by the sugar-cane field,’ recalled Yoshiko, ‘the second on the roadside, and two others near a bridge.’ It was a chilling reminder of how close they had all come to death.13

* Well dispersed throughout the islands, these plywood boats were eighteen feet long and five feet wide, and powered by six-cylinder Chevrolet automobile engines, generating eighty-five horsepower and capable of twenty knots. Each carried two 264-pound depth charges on a rack behind the pilot, to be detonated close to the target ship on a five-second fuse. (Appleman et al., Okinawa, p. 60.)

† ‘Himeyuri’ was the nickname given to the two schools which had been established in the Meiji period and were sited next door to each other. ‘Hime’ means princess, and ‘yuri’ is lily in Japanese.

‡ A typical tatami mat is six feet by three feet.

8

‘Tomorrow is our big day’

‘At 10:45 a.m.’, wrote Lieutenant General Buckner in his diary on 27 March, ‘our convoy weighed anchor and moved with an air of dignified confidence on its non-stop trip to strike the enemy.’

He was heading for Okinawa from Leyte in the Philippines on Admiral Turner’s flagship Eldorado, the last leg of a 6,000-mile journey that had begun for him and his senior staff on 5 March with a flight from Pearl Harbor to Guam, via Kwajalein Atoll. They boarded the Eldorado at Guam on 7 March and reached Leyte five days later. The time since had been spent watching amphibious exercises, going over the plans and waving goodbye to the slower-moving landing ships bound for the Keramas and Okinawa. Now that it was his turn, Buckner felt both nervous and excited. The day before, he had received a warning from Vice Admiral Mitscher that Okinawa was ‘honey-combed with caves, tunnels and emplacements’, and the fight would be ‘very tough’. Buckner preferred to see it as a ‘great adventure’.1

He had a cabin to himself, but most of his senior officers were doubled up. Brigadier General Oliver P. Smith, for example, was bunking with Major General F. G. Wallace, the prospective island commander of Okinawa, in a stateroom on the main deck. As one of its portholes was near an exhaust ventilator from the galley, they ‘got a choice assortment of odors’.2 Colonel Vernon E. Megee, 44, a veteran of Iwo Jima who would command all Marine air-support units on Okinawa, thought himself lucky to be sharing a small stateroom with only three other officers: an army brigadier, a navy commodore, and an air-force colonel. ‘We were not only integrated but entwined when it came to dressing in that restricted cubbyhole … We all accepted the situation in good spirits and not without humor – it was all part of going to war.’

They were part of, wrote Megee, ‘a most formidable armada’ with other ships stretching as far as the horizon. As darkness fell, ‘not a light showed nor siren or bell sounded. Radio transmitters were silent for the voyage.’ He imagined the thousands of soldiers and Marines in those darkened hulls, ‘standing in little silent knots about the decks, or lying wide-eyed in their crowded bunks in stifling troops compartments, thinking the thoughts that men think on the eve of battle’.3

For the first day or so, the sea conditions were rough as the Eldorado changed course to avoid a typhoon. The Tenth Army staff used the time to conduct a command-post exercise by ‘re-enacting the first day of the battle for Iwo Jima with everyone performing his appropriate duties’. It took place in the Joint Operations Room where one large table had places for Buckner, his chief and deputy chiefs of staff, and G-2 and G-3. At another sat the naval gunfire officer and artillery officer, while naval officers manned a U-shaped table for the Air Support Control Unit. With no actual messages coming in ‘over the air’, they flashed up those sent and received during Iwo Jima on screens. ‘The exercise proved’, wrote Oliver Smith, ‘to be very interesting and instructive.’4

Buckner also found time to finish the third volume of Douglas Southall Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants: Gettysburg to Appomattox, a history that featured Buckner’s own father. Was he looking for inspiration? For tips? His diary gives no clue, beyond the comment: ‘A tragic epitaph to a nobly defended cause.’5

He and his staff were cheered by news that the 77th Division’s landings on the Kerama Islands had been conducted ‘aggressively, effectively, and according to schedule’.6 By 29 March, the anchorages in the Keramas had been buoyed, and ‘ships were able to refuel and rearm without enemy interference’. Two days later came word that a battalion of 155 mm guns had been sited on the small island of Keise Shima and were ready to fire.7

Also on the 31st, Buckner’s chief of intelligence, Colonel Ely, returned from the Keramas with the ‘latest pictures and reports of the landing beaches’. These, said Ely, had been ‘distributed to every battalion that is to land tomorrow’.8 After months of meticulous planning, Operation Iceberg – the invasion of Okinawa – was ready to be launched. Thirteen hundred naval ships of all sizes were in position: some in the Demonstration Group off the south-east coast of Okinawa; but most off the west coast where the actual landings would take place. ‘All ships arrived on time,’ noted Oliver Smith, ‘and there were no collisions. Gunfire ships, which had been pounding Okinawa for several days, were still pounding away. The combat air patrol from the escort carriers was over the ships of the convoy to guard against Japanese interference.’9

With the final say, Vice Admiral Turner announced late on the 31st that weather and surf conditions appeared to be suitable for a landing the following morning. H-hour was set for 8:30 a.m. ‘With members of my staff, I am attending Easter service this evening,’ Buckner wrote to his wife. ‘Tomorrow is our big day.’10

Across the vast fleet, soldiers were ruminating on the task ahead. ‘My thoughts,’ wrote 20-year-old Private First Class (PFC) Don Dencker of L Company, 382nd Infantry, ‘and those of my buddies … were on the coming battle and the dangers to be faced. Would we all come through this one unscathed? The mortar section had been lucky on Leyte. Would our luck hold on Okinawa?’

A tall, skinny kid with prominent ears, Dencker was the only child of a home builder who rarely sat still: having finished a house, he would sell it and move on. Fortunately for his family, he always bought in the same neighbourhood of southern Minneapolis where Dencker attended the Roosevelt High School. A good student whose hobby was raising and racing homing pigeons, Dencker had completed three terms of a chemical engineering degree at the University of Minnesota when he was drafted into the army in the summer of 1943. After basic training he was accepted into the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) and sent to complete an engineering programme at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago with the ‘implied promise’ of Officer Candidate School after graduation. But a manpower crisis caused the programme to close in spring 1944, and Dencker was one of 250 former ASTP students assigned to the 96th Infantry Division, a reserve formation that was composed almost entirely of draftees.

On joining Love Company, 3/382nd Infantry, Dencker was asked by the XO what speciality he preferred. ‘Mortars, sir,’ he replied, adding that he had got to know the weapon well during basic training. What he did not say, for obvious reasons, was that he thought that ‘being with the mortars was a safer place to serve than being in a Rifle Platoon’. Assigned to the 3rd Mortar Squad – one of three, making a section, in the 4th Weapons Platoon – he served in Leyte as a lowly ammunition bearer before being promoted to private first class and assistant gunner (with responsibility for preparing and loading the mortar shells).

Dencker had been ‘somewhat relieved’ to learn that the assault troops for the next landing would be from the 381st and 383rd Infantry Regiments, while his 382nd was in reserve. Yet he and the rest of Love Company were loaded aboard the 8,000-ton attack transport ship USS Banner (APA 60) on 13 March, a fortnight before their departure from Leyte. ‘Why we all boarded so early I do not know,’ he wrote, ‘as the transport and cargo ship group did not depart Leyte Gulf … until March 27th.’

Once under way, they were given details about their destination – Okinawa – and lectured on what to expect. ‘We were told’, recalled Dencker, ‘that the climate on the island was temperate, that the people were of mixed Chinese and Japanese heritage, and that the Ryukyu Islands had been an independent feudal nation before being annexed by Japan.’ Hazards included the Habu snake, said to be so poisonous that if bitten you had to ‘take a trench knife and make cross-shaped slits across the fang marks, then quickly suck the venom out’. Their indoctrination also included Japanese translations for useful phrases like ‘Come out’, ‘Hands up’ and ‘Take off your clothes’. Dencker only remembered the first one: ‘Dete koi’, pronounced ‘De-tay-ko-ee’.

Dencker’s ship hit rough weather on 28 March, with ‘strong winds, rain, and large waves’ making almost everyone seasick. ‘The whole below-deck quarters reeked from vomit and body odors,’ wrote Dencker. ‘It was best to stay up near the deck hatches where the air was fresher.’ By the 31st, however, the ‘weather was clear and the sea calm as we moved steadily toward our objective’. That afternoon, Love Company was told about the 77th Division’s successful landings on the Kerama Islands. ‘Everything looks encouraging’ was the theme of a message from Dencker’s divisional commander, Major General James L. (‘Smiling Jim’) Bradley. That evening, having attended a Protestant service at which the chaplain gave a ‘reassuring message’, Dencker read the 23rd Psalm (‘The Lord is my shepherd’) from his pocket New Testament before getting some rest.11

Also travelling on an attack transport ship from Leyte was Private Don ‘Slim’ Carlton, a machine-gunner with the 1/184th Infantry. Raised in rural Minnesota, where he ‘learned to love the outdoors along with hunting and fishing’, Carlton was working in an aircraft factory in San Diego, helping to build B-24 Liberator bombers, when the news of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor prompted him and two friends to quit their jobs and join the army. Having seen ‘too many John Wayne movies’, he felt he was ‘missing out on some fun’.

After completing his basic training in Fort Fannin, Texas, Carlton was sent as a battle replacement to the 7th Infantry Division on Leyte. He was assigned to the 184th Infantry’s Dog Company (Heavy Weapons) where the officer took in his massive build – six feet four inches and 180 pounds – and said: ‘Wow! Look at the size of this guy. He’ll be good at toting a machine gun.’ So Carlton was assigned to a squad in the Machine-Gun Platoon, equipped with the old water-cooled .30 calibre Browning M1917A1 heavy machine gun, weighing 103 pounds (including the seventy-pound tripod) and firing 600 rounds a minute. His job was to carry the tripod, in addition to all his other gear. Fortunately, most of the heavy fighting on Leyte was over by the time Carlton arrived there, and his contribution was ‘mopping up’ patrols in the mountains and jungles. Okinawa, therefore, would be his first proper campaign.

Having set off from Leyte, he and his fellow soldiers wondered where they were going. ‘Darned if I know,’ said one. ‘According to the sun we are headed roughly north so it’s not Australia.’

When eventually told their destination was Okinawa, one soldier asked: ‘Where in the hell is that?’

They were soon enlightened by an officer who told them that the island was 350 miles from Japan and in easy range of enemy aircraft. According to intelligence reports, the Japanese ‘were well entrenched and willing to fight to the death’. Their division, the 7th, would ‘make the assault landing on “L” [Love] day, April 1st’. Their initial objective on day one was Kadena airfield. ‘After that’, said the officer, ‘we will cross the island to the eastern shore, then turn south. For the first three days you are to take no prisoners.’

He did not explain what they should do with any Japanese who did surrender. ‘I guess’, wrote Carlton, ‘he left that up to each of us.’

Later, as he considered the task ahead, Carlton’s ‘thoughts were a mix, worried about facing a determined enemy again, but anxious to be able to come to grips with whatever the future had in store’. He was no ‘gung-ho’ warrior, but felt he could do his job. ‘It was a little quieter in the hold that night,’ he recalled. ‘I cleaned and oiled my carbine for the tenth time.’12

Sergeant William Manchester, commanding the 2/29th Marines’ intelligence section, had spent much of the voyage from Ulithi on the attack transport ship USS George C. Clymer ‘absorbed in an endless chess tournament’ with one of his men. The others ‘read, wrote letters home, shot the breeze, told sea stories, played hearts, and sang songs based on awful puns’. While not relishing the prospect of combat, he did feel ‘a kind of serenity, a sense of solidarity’ with his men, a disparate group of bright if unconventional ex-college kids from across America he had dubbed the ‘Raggedy Asses’. It was a feeling that did not fit with the ‘instinctive aloofness’ which had been part of his ‘pre-war character and would return, afterwards, like a healing scar’.13

Born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, the son of a Marine veteran who returned from the First World War with a badly withered arm, Manchester came from one of New England’s oldest families with a pedigree dating back to the seventeenth century. Two William Manchesters, for example, had fought under George Washington in the Revolutionary War. Any remaining family money, however, had been squandered by Manchester’s grandfather Seabury, a ‘gambler and drinker’. Manchester himself was a sickly child who almost died of pneumonia and spent much of his early childhood indoors. As a result he became an avid reader and a prolific writer, penning his first poems at the age of seven. Though puny for his age, and often picked on because he refused to fight back, Manchester came to admire martial achievement. ‘The pacifism of the 1930s maddened me,’ he recalled. ‘I yearned for valor … Most of the rest of my generation believed in appeasement, at least when it came to war, but I was an out-and-out warmonger, a chauvinist dying for the chance to die.’14

He was an 18-year-old freshman at the Massachusetts State College in Amherst when his father died in January 1941, partly from war wounds. ‘It was my first experience of traumatic amnesia … I was in deep shock.’ Just over a year later, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. He did his basic training at the infamous Parris Island in South Carolina, ‘an isle whose reputation was just marginally better than those of Alcatraz and Devil’s Island’. Yet, incredibly, he ‘adored’ his time there. ‘Boot camp’, he wrote, ‘is a profound shock to most recruits because the Corps begins its job of building men by destroying the identity they brought with them. Their heads are shaved. They are assigned numbers. The DI [drill instructor] is their god.’

Minor infractions drew brutal punishments and woe betide the recruit who failed to use the correct terminology for field boots (boondockers), rumours (scuttlebutt), company commander (skipper), coffee (Joe), battle dress (dungarees), bar (slopchute), latrine (head), information (dope) and neck (stacking swivel). There were three ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way, and the Marine way. Yet Manchester embraced all this ‘petty tyranny’ because, in the wake of his father’s death, he ‘yearned for stern discipline’ and Parris Island gave it to him ‘in spades’. Though physically frail, he had ‘limitless reserves of energy’ and could feel himself ‘toughening almost hourly’. It helped, too, that he was an excellent shot, scoring 317 out of 330 on the rifle range with the M1 Garand and easily earning the highest rating of ‘Expert’ rifleman.

Thanks to his college education and easy adjustment to Marine life, Manchester won a place at the corps’ Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Quantico, Virginia. But he did not take to his fellow cadets. ‘I had known many of them, if distantly, in college,’ he wrote. ‘They were upper-middle-class snobs, nakedly ambitious conservative conformists, eager to claw their way to the top. In another ten years their uniforms would be corporate gray-flannel suits.’ Yet he stayed on and had been measured for his uniform when he came to grief: he had earlier refused to evaluate critically his fellow cadets; now he disobeyed a corporal’s chickenshit order to cancel the cadets’ final weekend leave to clean their rifles properly (they were already clean). He was court-martialled and thrown off the course just days before graduation.

Posted instead to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where new battalions were forming for overseas duty, he took over the intelligence section of the 2nd Battalion, 29th Marines (2/29th). Its main tasks were, wrote Manchester, to ‘estimate enemy strength on the battalion’s front, to identify enemy units by the flashes on the tunics of their dead, to patrol deep behind enemy lines, to advise our junior officers who were having trouble reading maps, and to carry messages to company commanders whose field radios … were out of order’. Of the nineteen men in his section, most were ‘military misfits, college students who had enlisted in a fever of patriotism and been rejected as officer candidates because, for various reasons [they] did not conform to the established concept of how officers should look, speak, and act’. They resembled a ‘slack-wire, baggy-pants act out of a third-rate circus’ and were ‘rarely given liberty, because the skipper was ashamed to let civilians see us wearing the Corps uniform’.

Shipped out of San Diego in early August 1944 for Guadalcanal in the Solomons, Manchester’s 2/29th became part of the newly activated 6th Marine Division. Of the 29th Regiment’s three battalions, only the 1st had previously seen action, in Eniwetok and Guam, whereas many of the soldiers in the division’s other two infantry regiments, the 4th and 22nd, had fought on Guadalcanal, New Georgia, Bougainville, Eniwetok, Saipan and Guam.

As the commander of his section, Manchester’s main task on the voyage from Ulithi was to brief his men. He did this by spreading a big map of Okinawa in the fantail of the George C. Clymer and explaining that their division, the 6th Marine, would assault the five most northerly of the Hagushi beaches.* Further south would land, in turn, the 1st Marines, the 7th and the 96th Divisions. The assault troops’ immediate objectives were the Yontan and Kadena airfields. Once they had been seized, the 6th and 1st Marine Divisions would wheel north, while the two army divisions moved south. It seemed to Manchester that the ‘most ambitious goals’, including the mountainous Motobu Peninsula, had been assigned to his division because it was assumed that ‘the enemy was entrenched in the north’.

He then passed on the ‘usual crap’ about the dangers of ‘malaria, dengue, filariasis, typhus, leprosy, dysentery and jungle rot’, and stressed the need to ‘watch out for snipers, don’t shout names (a Jap would shout the same name again a minute later and drill the poor jerk who stuck his head up), maintain fire discipline when the enemy screams to draw fire and thus spot automatic weapons, and if you face a banzai charge, stay loose: don’t fire till you see their buck teeth’.

As he prepared for his first taste of combat, Manchester felt intensely close to the ‘Raggedy Asses’, an emotion contrary to all his instincts. ‘I had been,’ he wrote, ‘and after the war I would again be, a man who usually prefers his own company, finding contentment in solitude. But for the present I had taken others into my heart and given of myself to theirs.’ Only later would he realise how vulnerable that made him, and ‘how terrible’ the price he ‘might have to pay’.15

* The troops landed on twenty-one beaches. From north to south: Green 1 and 2 (22nd Marines); Red 1, 2 and 3 (4th Marines); Blue 1 and 2 (7th Marines); Yellow 1, 2 and 3 (5th Marines); Purple 1 and 2 (17th Infantry); Orange 1 and 2 (32nd Infantry); White 1, 2 and 3 (381st Infantry); Brown 1, 2, 3 and 4 (383rd Infantry).

9

‘It was quite a show’

‘I had a good rest’, recalled PFC Don Dencker on the USS Banner, ‘and was awakened by reveille at 4:00 a.m. Love Day had arrived!’ After dressing, he and his squad joined ‘a long chow line to be served a fine breakfast of steak and eggs, bread, fruit cocktail, and coffee’. They were then issued their Love Day rations: a D-bar* of ‘hard, waxy chocolate’, a K-ration† and one assault ration – ‘a form of candy’. As dawn broke, they were allowed up on deck to watch the landings. ‘It was’, recalled Dencker, ‘a beautiful, clear, calm morning with excellent visibility after the haze lifted … What a sight! About a mile from the beaches a line of battleships and cruisers engaged in the softening-up process. Flame and smoke belched from their guns as they fired repeated salvos.’

Shortly before 8:00 a.m., he saw ‘US Navy planes come in waves of horizontal bombers, dive-bombers, and fighters, giving the entire length of beach in front of our four divisions a thorough working over with bombs, rockets and strafing’. Then waves of amphibious tanks and amtracs began moving towards the beach, ‘crawling successfully over the reefs starting about 800 yards from the shore’. At 8:30 a.m. the tanks reached the breaches in the sea wall, ‘and a minute later our troops were scaling the walls’ from the amtracs. ‘With a few minor hitches,’ wrote Dencker, ‘the entire landing validated the detailed planning and preparation put into our effort. It was quite a show.’1

Part of that ‘show’ in the 96th Division’s sector, following the assault troops of the 383rd Infantry on to Brown Beach 3, were the Sherman tanks of Sergeant Bob Dick’s Charlie Company, 763rd Battalion. Dropped off by a landing craft at the coral reef, about half a mile from the shore, the tanks used ‘deep-water wading stacks’ to prevent water getting into the engine while they covered the remaining distance across the coral shelf. Unfortunately the tank running parallel to Dick’s Cutthroats drove into a shell hole and capsized. ‘They went into the water upside down,’ he wrote, ‘and our reports said that the driver drowned.’ In fact the whole four-man crew was lost.2

Approaching the shore, Dick headed for a large opening in a huge sea wall that appeared to be at least twenty feet thick and twenty feet high. As he drove Cutthroats through, he was astonished to see ‘quite a number of photographers, both still and movie type’, milling around on the beach, as well as MPs directing traffic. His mission was to ‘find and drive up a fairly narrow dirt road for approximately one mile’ and then ‘stop and sit there, in plain sight, and wait’. He did exactly that, nervous in the knowledge that Cutthroats was to act as bait for a hidden coastal gun. As soon it showed itself, they had been told, the navy would ‘take it out’. Fortunately the only sign of movement was a goat wandering by.

‘All of us were in disbelief’, recalled Dick, ‘over the total lack of opposition by the Japanese. We had not heard a single shot fired by them, and the longer they delayed in opposing us, the more our forces would pour ashore. The lack of any enemy seemed almost scary. What’s going on, what do they have up their sleeves?’ Knowing that his division was due to head south, Dick hoped ‘that just maybe all the Japs were up north and the Marines could take care of them for us’. It was wishful thinking.3

Back on the USS Banner, meanwhile, Don Dencker heard the welcome news that GIs from the 381st and 383rd Infantry had met ‘only scattered light opposition and that some units were already one mile inland’. With the landings well ahead of schedule, Dencker’s L Company was ordered below to prepare for their own disembarkation. Told to leave behind their duffel bags and shelter halves – which would be put ashore later – they put on their light packs, containing a waterproof jungle poncho, spare socks, toilet articles, mess kit, writing paper and envelopes, personal photos, a pocket New Testament, and other minor items like matches. Attached to the back of the pack was an entrenching tool, while each soldier also carried two full canteens of water, plus his specialist arms and ammunition.

In the case of most US infantrymen, that meant the .30 M1 Garand, the first standard-issue semi-automatic military rifle. Weighing nine and a half pounds, the Garand could rapidly fire a clip of eight bullets, one after the other, by repeated pulls on the trigger. Once the last bullet had been fired, the clip would drop out and the bolt lock open, ready to be reloaded. This gave it a much higher rate of fire than the bolt-action Arisaka Type 99 rifle used by the Japanese army. The Garand was a fine weapon: well constructed, durable and easy to operate and maintain. But as Dencker was an assistant gunner – with responsibility for carrying the 60 mm mortar’s baseplate – he was armed only with a .45 semi-automatic M1911 pistol, which could fire repeated single shots from a seven-round detachable magazine. Trying it out on a range in Leyte, Dencker had found it almost impossible to hit a target more than twenty-five yards away, and concluded that his sidearm ‘was strictly a close-in personal protection weapon’.

Dencker wore the standard infantry M1 helmet, a one-size-fits-all steel construction with chin strap and a hard inner plastic liner with an adjustable sweatband and cotton webbing for comfort. On a chain around his neck was suspended a pair of stainless steel dog-tags, debossed with his name in reverse order (DENCKER DONALD O), his serial number (37570375), the year or years he was given a tetanus shot (44), blood type (A) and religion (P for Protestant, a detail included for the benefit of those who might need to administer last rites). Finally, to assist with the battlefield control of troops, each man had a unit symbol stencilled onto the back of his fatigue shirt. In the case of Dencker’s 3/382nd Infantry, this was the ‘Queen of Battle’ logo, the outline of a naked lady wearing a helmet, and holding a rifle with a bayonet attached in front of her crotch. It was, according to Dencker, the ‘envy of every other unit’.

Shortly before 11:00 a.m., Dencker and the rest of Love Company, heavily burdened with packs, weapons, life belts and gas masks, climbed down the Banner’s cargo net and into a line of large landing craft. They then transferred to amtracs for the trip across the reef, reaching White Beach 1 at 11:30 a.m. ‘So far,’ noted Dencker, ‘Love Day for Love Company could not have been more benign.’

The beach was a hive of activity as the Corps of Engineers unloaded supplies from ‘Ducks’.‡ Reaching slightly higher ground, about a hundred yards from the edge of the surf, the men of Love Company dropped their gas masks and life belts before moving quickly inland, in the wake of the 381st Infantry, though the latter were ‘nowhere to be seen.’ After an hour they stopped at the junction of two small roads to eat a K-ration lunch and to drink water from their canteens. ‘It was sunny and mild,’ remembered Dencker, ‘with a temperature of about 70 degrees, so we weren’t very thirsty. It would have been a perfect Easter Sunday back home.’

The only indication they were in a war zone was the ‘disconcerting sight’, on the far side of the road, of the bodies of five US soldiers, covered by ponchos with only their combat boots protruding.4

A little further to the north, Private Don ‘Slim’ Carlton of Dog Company, 1/184th Infantry, had been forced to walk through chest-high water to get to Purple Beach 1 after his landing craft grounded on the reef. ‘Some of the shorter men were having trouble with the depth of water,’ he wrote. ‘Lucky for me I was well over six feet tall and was having little difficulty. The heavy machine-gun tripod kept me firmly anchored to the bottom as I churned my way shoreward.’

Suddenly the man in front of him went under the water and did not resurface. Had he been shot, wondered Carlton, or just fallen into a hole? Just to be certain, he skirted a few yards to the left, scanning the water for any sign of the man. There was nothing. He continued on and, once on dry land, realised he and a few other Dog Company men were north of the Bishi River in the 1st Marine Division sector, when they should been to the south. As they discussed where to cross back, they saw several Japanese planes target some of the big ships offshore. Instantly the air was filled with tracers and black puffs of smoke as scores of anti-aircraft guns opened fire. ‘One plane was hit’, recalled Carlton, ‘and exploded with an orange flash’, leaving ‘a trail of black smoke as it spiraled to the sea’.

Led by a non-com back across the Bishi, they moved inland, passing Kadena airfield which had been their primary objective. What was wrong? Where were the Japs? they wondered. ‘We had landed almost unopposed much to our surprise,’ wrote Carlton. ‘Were we being led into a trap?’ They continued on across ‘small hills covered with scrub trees and bushes’. In a cave they found twenty or so bewildered civilians, mostly elderly. Unsure what to do with them, they left one man to guard the cave entrance and continued on up the next hill where they established a perimeter and dug in for the night. Still wet, Carlton put on an extra sweater and wrapped himself in his poncho. Unable to sleep, he listened to the sound of naval shells passing overhead ‘like a distant freight train’.5

Having watched the assault troops of the 5th Marines land without incident, the journalist Ernie Pyle followed in the 7th wave with the regimental command group at around 9:30 a.m. ‘We had all expected to go onto the beach in a hailstorm of tracer bullets, mortar shells throwing sand, and artillery shells whistling into the water near us. And yet we couldn’t see a bit of firing ahead. We hoped it was true.’

It was. Stepping from the amtrac onto Japanese soil, he heard an incredulous Marine say: ‘Hell, this is just like one of MacArthur’s landings,’ which were famously unopposed.§ It was a beautiful day, ‘sunshiney and very warm’, and Pyle soon stopped to take off one of the two pairs of trousers he was wearing. Like the Marines, he was dressed in a green herringbone combat uniform, known as ‘corduroy’, and wearing a helmet with its distinctive Marine camouflage cover. He also had two water canteens and was carrying, in a pack on his back, three rubber life preservers, two jackets, the extra pair of trousers, assorted knives, first-aid kits, a shovel and a blanket rolled up in a poncho. He was, he wrote, ‘overladen as usual’.

Pyle followed the headquarters group for about a mile and a half inland, stopping every now and then to rest while the others forged ahead. ‘A lifetime of sin and crime’, he commented ruefully, ‘finally does catch up with you.’ The land was mainly cultivated, and ‘rose gradually from the sea in small fields’. It was not, he thought, unlike his native Indiana in late summer ‘when things have started to turn dry and brown, except that these fields were much smaller’. Edged by ditches and small two-foot wide dykes, they were filled with sugar cane, sweet potatoes and wheat, which the Marines cut with small sickles. Further inland the fields gave way to rougher, hilly country with less cultivation and more trees. ‘It is’, noted Pyle, ‘really a pretty country.’

Not so attractive were the farmhouses destroyed by the bombardment, some reeking of the ‘sickening odor of death’. There were, Pyle knew, ‘always people who won’t leave, no matter what’. Those civilians who had survived were either ‘very old or very young’ and all ‘very, very poor’. The women were dressed in traditional Okinawan kimonos, the old men ‘in skintight pants’. All were filthy and seemed ‘shocked from the bombardment’; one or two spoke scant English but did not make much sense. They were handed over to officials of the Military Government whose job it was to look after the civilian population. ‘The poor devils,’ commented one Marine officer. ‘I’ll bet they think this is the end of the world.’

That evening, having caught up with the 5th Marines’ headquarters group, Pyle dug his foxhole alongside the others, at the foot of a small embankment, and inflated his three life preservers to use as an improvised mattress, a trick he had learned in Europe. The Marines seemed impressed. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ commented one. ‘Why in the hell couldn’t I have thought of that?’

At dusk, three planes flew overhead which Pyle assumed were friendlies. He was wrong. ‘In a moment’, he noted, ‘all hell cut loose from the beach. Our entire fleet and the guns ashore started throwing stuff into the sky. I’d never seen a thicker batch of ack-ack.’ It seems as if, said one Marine, there were more bullets than sky. All three planes were shot down.

Lying in his foxhole, Pyle could hear the low voices of officers nearby, directing troops by field telephone and radio. Every now and then the stillness was broken by the boom of a naval gun, a burst of machine-gun fire or a few scattered rifle shots. These sounds were eerily familiar, ‘unchanged by distance or time from war on the other side of the world’. It was a pattern, wrote Pyle, ‘so embedded in my soul that, coming back to it again, it seemed to me as I lay there that I’d never known anything else’.6

* A high-energy chocolate bar, made by Hershey’s, that would not melt.

† First introduced in 1942, the K-ration consisted of three boxed meals of candy, hard biscuits and canned processed meat, totaling 2,830 calories, for a single day’s consumption.

‡ DUKW, a six-wheel-drive amphibious truck, produced by Sparkman & Stephens and the General Motors Corporation.

§ After his unopposed landing on the island of Leyte on 20 October 1944, MacArthur announced: ‘People of the Philippines: I have returned.’

10

‘There’s always some poor bastard who doesn’t get word’

‘We hit with a jolt that tumbled us in a heap’, recalled First Lieutenant Chris Donner, ‘and ground up onto a coral shelf, then onto sand. The stern ramp dropped, and as some of the infantrymen swarmed over the sides, I led the rush out onto the beach.’

A forward artillery observer attached to George Company, 2/7th Marines, Donner had come ashore in the first wave of amtracs. But thanks to an error by the amtrac’s driver, he and his four-man team were deposited on a beach in the 6th Marine Division’s sector, when they should have been 300 yards farther to the south. Anxious to get back to the 1st Marine Division, he led his men obliquely to the right. ‘We began to run up the hill after the advancing infantry’, he recorded, ‘who were still blazing away at every bush or hole in the fields of vegetables.’ Helping to carry his team’s heavy radio set, he felt ‘exhilarated that there was as yet no enemy action’, and was only ‘slightly concerned about our confusion in landing’.

The 32-year-old Donner was a married Stanford graduate student with one child – a son born three weeks after Pearl Harbor – and could probably have avoided the draft. But he volunteered anyway, determined to do his bit, and had been overseas since the spring of 1943, seeing service with the 9th Defense Battalion of artillery on New Georgia and Guam. By late December 1944, he was just a month short of ‘stateside liberty’ when he was sent as a replacement to How Battery, 3/11th Marines, an artillery outfit in the 1st Marine Division.

Appointed a forward observer – the ‘roughest’ job in the artillery, with responsibility for directing fire for the grunts in the front line – he was given a crash course in ‘how to operate sets and phones, send messages in code, and arrange barrages of a sort’, and went on a week-long exercise with the 7th Marines’ George Company to get ‘an insight into how the infantry really moves’, ‘how fouled up it can become’, and ‘how little one should carry along as personal gear’. His own light pack for the landing included a poncho, field glasses, map case and gas mask. He was also carrying an M1 carbine,* and a jungle knife, ammunition and two canteens on his belt. His only luxuries were a seven-foot strip of green baize – ‘of the type used in covering pool tables’ – to wrap himself in at night, and a pint of whiskey.

Moving inland with his team, Donner eventually met up with George Company’s HQ, and together they reached the edge of Yontan airfield ‘and saw a mass of junked Japanese planes at one end of a runway which was not too badly scarred by bombs and shell craters’ At the far side of the airfield they met a large patrol of the 4th Marines who ‘were amazed to find our company here, for they were supposed to be the first unit to take this section’.

After a brief stop for lunch, they continued on into the nearby village of Irammiya where they found a ‘decrepit old man, clad in black robes, his chin trailing a long, scraggly white beard’. Many of the village’s houses were still standing, though their tile roofs and wooden walls had been riddled with shrapnel. Beyond Irammiya the forward platoon heard voices from a cave in the hillside. When no one responded to calls in Japanese for them to come out, the Marines shot into the cave with Browning automatic rifles (BARs).† Edging inside, they found three corpses – two men and a woman – and only a 3-year-old boy still alive, crying and ‘covered with his mother’s blood’. The boy was handed over to Monahan, one of Donner’s team, who washed off the gore and carried him on his shoulders.1

Landing later that day on the beach that Donner missed – Blue 1 – was Second Lieutenant ‘Jep’ Carrell, a platoon leader with King Company, 3/7th Marines. Raised in Philadelphia, Carrell was studying for a degree in physics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania when he switched to a V-12 programme as a prospective Marine officer. After boot camp at Parris Island – ‘really just one big nine-week adventure’ for the V-12 candidates, most of whom had ‘played intercollegiate sports’ and ‘completed at least the junior year of college’ – he was put through the eleven-week Special Officer Candidate School (SOCS) at Camp Lejeune that had been set up in late 1944, in the wake of heavy Marine casualties on Saipan, Tinian and Guam, to produce junior officers in a hurry. Carrell and his fellow officer candidates ‘thought this was a great idea’. They might have been ‘a hair less enthusiastic’, he wrote later, if they had ‘known what we were getting into’: fifty per cent of their class of 376 candidates would be killed or wounded within six months of graduation.

Posted with three other SOCS friends to King Company of the 3/7th Marines, part of the famed 1st Marine Division (or ‘Old Breed’ as it was known), Carrell chose a rifle platoon. He knew perfectly well ‘that the survival rate for Machine Gun Platoon and Mortar Platoon Leaders was much better than Rifle Platoon Leaders’, yet he chose the latter, ‘not because of bravado’, but because his training had concentrated on that type of work and he ‘didn’t know as much about the other two jobs’. He would have no regrets, and became especially close to the forty or so men of his No. 1 Platoon (giving him the call sign King One). ‘In infantry combat’, he wrote later, ‘every member of a rifle platoon is dependent upon other members … Virtually every man will take serious risk to protect or save a member of his team. This translates into a fierce devotion to his buddies who have gone through the same, dangerous experiences. Having one of them killed or wounded affected me as if I had lost, or nearly lost, a brother.’

Part of the reserve battalion for the assault on Okinawa, Carrell got only as far as the southern end of Yontan airfield where he and his men spent the night. ‘While we were digging in,’ he recalled, ‘and about 45 minutes before dark, a small Japanese military plane came in for a landing, south-to-north. I could have thrown a rock underhand, and hit the fuselage.’2

The plane was a Zero that had just flown from the mainland. Unaware the airfield was in American hands, the pilot taxied up the runway and came to a stop near the control tower. He jumped down from the plane and was approaching a group of soldiers when he realised they were the enemy. Turning to run, he was shot in the back. ‘There’s always some poor bastard’, muttered a Marine, ‘who doesn’t get word.’3

Love Day was Sergeant William Manchester’s 23rd birthday and his chances of becoming 24 were, he reflected, ‘very slight’. He viewed Okinawa as ‘the last island’ before the invasion of mainland Japan, and was certain ‘the enemy would sacrifice every available man to drive us off it’.

When it was time, he and the ‘Raggedy Asses’ climbed down the side of the George C. Clymer into a waiting amtrac. ‘Yellow cordite smoke blew across our bows,’ he remembered. ‘Battleship guns were flashing, rockets hitting the shore sound c-r-r-rack, like a monstrous lash, and we were, as infantrymen always are at this point in a landing, utterly helpless.’ Once his wave of amtracs were properly aligned, they headed for the beach, ‘tossing and churning like steeds in a cavalry charge.’ Incredibly there were ‘no splashes of Jap mortar shells, no roars of Jap coastal guns, no grazing Jap machine-gun fire’. The enemy was not shooting back, because ‘there wasn’t any enemy there’. It was, thought Manchester, ‘the greatest April Fool’s Day joke of all time’.

Manchester and the rest of the 2/29th Marines walked inland – passing the northern edge of Yontan airfield – and into the low hills beyond where the Okinawans had built ‘quaint, concrete, lyre-shaped burial vaults.’ He felt ‘jubilant’.4

Another Marine who landed on the 6th Division’s beaches was 20-year-old Private Salvatore Giammanco of Love Company, 3/4th Marines. An Italian immigrant who had settled with his family in Brooklyn, Giammanco volunteered for the elite 2nd Marine Raiders‡ after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and served with them in Bougainville in late 1943 where he ‘spent days in water-soaked positions filled with rats, crocodiles and every kind of bug you can think of’. When the Marine Raiders were converted into the new 4th Marine Regiment in 1944 – the original had been captured on Bataan and Corregidor two years earlier – he fought with the 3rd Battalion as a machine-gunner on Guam as part of the 1st Marine Provisional Brigade.

By early 1945, Giammanco had been overseas for more than two years and was due leave. When it was cancelled because the next operation was imminent, he was offered the chance to stay with the rear echelon. He refused, saying he could never think of leaving his squad when they were about to go into action. Which is why, having hit the beach three hours earlier, he found himself at the north-west edge of Yontan airfield at 11:30 a.m. on Love Day. ‘I was’, he recalled, ‘surprised to see our tanks there and everybody messing around, telling Jap jokes.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Giammanco saw a single Japanese soldier with a rifle running up a nearby hill, but thought nothing of it. Eventually word came for Love Company to saddle up and move out. They did so in single file: riflemen, machine guns and then mortars. After all the riflemen had passed over a small incline, they were followed by Giammanco’s No. 1 Squad of machine-gunners. That was when they heard the first crack of a rifle bullet. Giammanco turned to ‘Meathead’ Bernachet, one of the replacements, and said: ‘You are now a combat veteran.’

He had barely finished speaking when a sniper’s bullet hit him in the left side of his chest, narrowly missing his heart, puncturing his lung and exiting through his back. The impact spun him around and, as he fell, his rifle and two boxes of ammunition went flying.

‘I’m hit!’ he yelled.

His friend Paul ‘Peu’ Ulrich dropped down beside him and used his Ka-Bar knife§ to cut away Giammanco’s pack, dungaree jacket and skivvy shirt. When Peu saw how close the bullet had come to his heart, he said: ‘Don’t worry, GI. You’re going to live. The bullet went right through you.’

Given morphine and a little brandy, Giammanco felt furious that someone had shot at him ‘without my permission’. He began to struggle and, to calm him, Peu handed him the rifle the New Yorker had dropped. Peu was dressing his wounds when two more bullets narrowly missed them. ‘Peu, get down!’ shouted Giammanco.

A minute after Peu had moved on to rejoin the rest of the squad, two corpsmen arrived with a stretcher. But when one saw the seriousness of his injury, he told the other to get a jeep with a stretcher. ‘This guy has a hemorrhage interplural. I’ll start him with a plasma bottle, but he’s going to need whole blood. He’s bleeding inside.’

Five minutes later, the corpsman returned with a jeep and Giammanco was driven slowly back to a large medical tent. As they took him inside, a young corpsmen said: ‘Why bring him in, too? He’s dying, like this guy lying here.’ He was gesturing towards another badly injured Marine.

Hearing this, another corpsman got up, grabbed the loudmouth kid and threw him outside, with the words: ‘Can’t you see this guy is still alive, you sonofabitch?’

But as it was obvious that Giammanco needed whole blood to survive, he was taken down to the beach, loaded into a Higgins boat and taken out to a hospital ship where he fell into coma. He was saved by a transfusion.5

The news that the landings were unopposed, meanwhile, had prompted Admiral Turner to bring his command ship Eldorado closer to the northern beaches. From his station on the ship’s searchlight platform, Brigadier General Oliver Smith now had a panoramic view of the coastline. ‘Coral ledges, pitted with caves, jutted out from the beaches north of the Bisha Gawa [River]. Back of the beaches was flat or gently sloping terrain, culminating in the flat high ground on which the Yontan Field was located. Further back was still higher and more rugged terrain. All beaches were under observation from the higher ground inland.’

Smith knew from intelligence reports that the Japanese had at least 400 large-calibre artillery pieces on Okinawa. He could now see with his own eyes that the ground was ideal for defence. ‘Yet’, he wrote, ‘our troops went in standing up with no greater obstacle than the terrain itself.’6

By nightfall, the beachhead was 15,000 yards long and, in places, 5,000 yards deep. More than 60,000 men were ashore, including all reserve regiments and 15,000 service troops. In addition, numerous tanks and anti-aircraft units had been landed, as had all the divisional artillery and, by evening, guns were in position to support the forward troops. Kadena airfield, moreover, was serviceable for emergency landings.7

Lieutenant General Buckner was elated. ‘From start to finish’, he wrote in his diary, ‘the landing was a superb piece of teamwork, which we could watch from the fifty-yard line in the command room on the flag deck. We landed practically without opposition and gained more ground than we expected to for three days, including the Yomitan [sic] and Kadena airfields. [Major General Archibald V.] Arnold’s 7th Div made the furthest gains and got halfway across the island … The Japs have missed their best opportunity on the ground and in the air. When their counter-attack comes we will be holding strong ground.’8

Admiral Turner was even more optimistic. ‘I may be crazy,’ he signalled his boss Admiral Nimitz, ‘but it looks like the Japs have quit the war.’

Knowing full well the fight would be a tough one, Nimitz messaged back: ‘Delete all after crazy.’9

* The smaller version of the M1 Garand rifle, weighing just five pounds and with a fifteen-round magazine. It was carried by officers and members of weapons teams.

† The M1918 BAR was a .30 calibre light machine gun with a twenty-round magazine that could be fired from the hip or steadied by a bipod.

‡ The Marine Raiders were created in 1942 to carry out amphibious operations behind enemy lines. By early 1944 there was no longer a need for such specialised units and the Raider battalions were redesignated the 4th Marine Regiment.

§ First issued to Marines in 1942, the Ka-Bar was a utility/fighting knife with a leather non-slip handle and a broad seven-inch carbon steel blade.

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