by Alan Gratz
According to Linda Hervieux’s Forgotten, a book about the black soldiers who fought at D-Day, approximately 1,800 African Americans took part in D-Day—most of them in support roles. After serving with distinction in the war, black American soldiers returned home to racism, prejudice, and persecution. White German prisoners of war were treated better than black men who had served their own country during the war. The United States Army officially ended its policy of segregation in 1948, but the nation’s schools were not integrated until the late 1950s. The civil rights movement, which reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, sought to end segregation and establish racial justice and equality in all parts of American society. Perhaps its greatest achievement was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed any discrimination on the basis of race. Though the civil rights movement made great gains, the United States still struggles today with the same kind of racism and prejudice Henry faced seventy-five years ago.
OPERATION BATHING SUIT
French citizens who lived in the towns and villages of Normandy soon knew the Allied invasion was happening, and many of them rushed to the beaches to welcome their liberators and help in any way they could. One young French woman, a student nurse, really had left her bathing suit in a changing hut on the beach the day before, and rode her bicycle down to get it—just minutes before the first shots were fired. She ignored the catcalls and whistles of the soldiers on the beach and spent the next two days helping bandage up wounded men—including the English soldier who would later become her husband. I adapted her story here and made her much younger.
Dorothy Powell is based on the real-life reporter Martha Gellhorn, who disguised herself as a soldier to sneak ashore with a stretcher crew on D-Day. She was the first and only American woman to set foot on the beach at Normandy on June 6, 1944. It would be another thirty-eight days until the next American woman arrived, when forty-nine WACs—members of the Women’s Army Corps, a support branch of the United States Army—stepped off landing boats into France. It would be another fifty years before American women were allowed to serve in actual combat.
A war correspondent for a number of magazines and newspapers over her long career, Gellhorn reported on every major war and conflict from the Second World War through the US invasion of Panama in 1989. Today, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism recognizes men and women who chronicle the lives of ordinary people caught up in violent conflicts.
BEYOND OMAHA BEACH
While a number of smaller towns and villages lay claim to the title of “First village liberated on D-Day,” Bayeux was certainly the first French city freed by Allied soldiers. It was officially liberated on June 7, 1944, not June 6—I sped up Bayeux’s liberation by a few hours to get all my players there before midnight, thus taking us from twelve a.m. to twelve a.m. and limiting the events in the book to a single day—D-Day.
The area just beyond the bunker I used as inspiration for the one Dee and Sid take when they first come up off Omaha Beach is now a graveyard and memorial to all the American soldiers who died on D-Day. The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial is home to 9,380 graves and receives more than a million visitors each year.
Don’t miss Alan Gratz’s Grenade!
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An American bomb landed a hundred meters away—Kra-KOOM!—and the school building exploded. Hideki Kaneshiro ducked and screamed with all the other boys as they were showered with rocks and splinters.
Hideki couldn’t believe it—one minute his school was there, the next it was gone. Worse, the bombs meant that the American battleships had found them! He turned to run.
“Don’t move! Nobody is to move!”
Hideki froze. Every atom of his being told him to RUN. To find a cave somewhere to hide. But Lieutenant Colonel Sano’s voice was so commanding, so forceful, that he didn’t move. No one did. Even the governor of Okinawa, who was already three steps toward a shelter, stopped in his tracks.
“Return to your ranks!” Lieutenant Colonel Sano yelled.
Hideki inched back into line with the other boys and stood at attention, his heart pounding. Takeshi, another fourth-year boy, whimpered softly beside him. Katsumasa, who was Takeshi’s best friend, stood ramrod straight, a bead of sweat rolling down his face.
“What’s the matter, babies?” Yoshio whispered from the row of students behind them. “Ready to run home to Mommy?”
Hideki’s neck burned hot with shame for being scared. Yoshio was a fifth-year boy who had made it his personal mission to terrorize all the fourth-year boys—especially Hideki. Yoshio was half a head taller than Hideki, with arms as big as tree trunks and a face full of chicken pox scars that made him look twice as old. Hideki had always been the smallest boy in the school, and Yoshio had never let him forget it. Hideki was fourteen years old but looked like he was twelve, with a round boyish face, thin arms and legs, and short-cropped black hair.
Hideki had to keep an ear open for whatever stunt Yoshio might pull behind him. But the rest of him was transfixed on what was happening in front of him. If he could have moved without being scolded, Hideki would have made a rectangle with his fingers like a photographer had shown him once, to frame a picture of what he was seeing. And what a picture it would have made.
A hundred boys stood in a small clearing outside what was left of their middle school. All of them wore their tan Imperial Japanese Army uniforms and caps. It was almost two o’clock in the morning, and it was dark. The ground shook with the heavy booms of artillery shells falling all around them, fired by American battleships offshore. A single flickering lamp cast an eerie, dreamlike glimmer on two rows of students standing on one side of the schoolyard, and a row of teachers on the other.
In the middle stood their principal, Norio Kojima, alongside the governor of Okinawa and Lieutenant Colonel Sano of the Imperial Japanese Army.
Hideki studied Sano, who stood rigid in his khaki uniform and knee-high leather boots. A sword hung from the lieutenant colonel’s belt, and the breast of his jacket was crowded with colorful ribbons. Hideki knew that all the other boys were as spellbound by Sano as he was. Sano was the one they wanted to be.
They were gathered here now, outside their bomb shelters, because tonight Hideki and his classmates were graduating early. The governor of Okinawa and a Japanese lieutenant colonel usually weren’t in attendance at graduation, and the ceremony wasn’t usually held at two o’clock in the morning. But then, it wasn’t every day America invaded your island either.
Today was the end of everything Hideki had ever known.
“Later this morning, the enemy will land on Okinawa,” Lieutenant Colonel Sano announced in his imposing voice as the bombs continued to fall. “American devils, whose only purpose is to kill you and your families in the most brutal, merciless ways possible.”
Hideki shuddered, hoping that Sano—and Yoshio—wouldn’t notice.
“They will hunt your grandparents down and burn them alive,” Sano continued. “They will torture your mothers. Butcher your brothers and sisters. They will try to trick you too. Offer you food and kindness. But the food they carry is poisoned, and the hand that beckons you with friendship hides the one behind their back, holding a grenade.”
Kra-KOOM!
Another bomb exploded nearby, destroying a tree that had stood for generations, but no one was going anywhere now. Sano had their attention.
Hideki knew that America and Japan had been at war for almost four years, fighting each other all over the Pacific in places like the Solomon Islands, the Philippines, and Iwo Jima. Then, a year ago, the Imperial Japanese Army had arrived in force on Okinawa to dig defenses for the inevitable American invasion.
Okinawa was a tiny island, just a hundred and ten kilometers long and eleven kilometers wide. It lay south of the Japanese mainland and had once been an independent kingdom, with its own language and religion. But Japan had annexed Okinawa and made it a province back when Hideki’s grandparents were
children. And now, because Okinawa belonged to Japan, the American army was coming to attack.
“From this moment,” Sano went on, his voice heavy with importance, “you have graduated from students to soldiers. You are now the Blood and Iron Student Corps. Each of you must be ready to die a glorious death in the name of the Emperor. This is your island. It is you who should be fighting for it, not the Imperial Japanese Army! You must fight like demons to protect your homeland. One plane for one battleship, one man for ten of the enemy!”
Another bomb exploded nearby, and Hideki cowered. He agreed with Sano, but if this ceremony went on too much longer he would never get to trade his life for ten American soldiers. An American battleship would kill him and all the rest of the students with one shot.
Fearless as he was, Sano seemed to come to the same conclusion. He nodded, and one of his lieutenants went down the row and put two grenades into the hands of each middle schooler.
Hideki glanced at Takeshi and Katsumasa in disbelief—the IJA was giving them real grenades!
Hideki accepted his two grenades. Each was cylindrical, like a drinking cup, and weighed about a pound. They were a little bigger than Hideki’s hands and looked like pineapple-shaped lanterns painted shiny black.
“What’s this?” Yoshio asked, and Hideki turned to look. Yoshio had been given two grenades that were very different from Hideki’s. Yoshio’s grenades were made out of pottery!
“The American naval blockade has made metal scarce,” the lieutenant explained. “Some of you will be given ceramic grenades.”
“Ceramic?” Yoshio said when the lieutenant moved down the line. “But if these crack, they’re useless!” He glanced up, saw Hideki had been given two metal grenades, and quickly took them without asking, pushing his pottery grenades into Hideki’s hands with a wolfish grin. Hideki wanted to complain, but he knew it was pointless—and would only make things worse with Yoshio.
Hideki examined the glazed brown pottery grenades he’d been stuck with. They were the size and shape of baseballs, and much lighter than the real metal grenades. Inside the small rubber cap at the top, there was a match-like fuse and a little piece of rough wood. You activated the grenade by striking the fuse against the wood, but Hideki had no idea how fast the fuse burned and how long he would have before the grenade exploded.
The complicated trigger distressed him, and the soft clink of the delicate pottery grenades against each other made him worried that they would crack—or worse, explode in his jacket pocket.
But if these grenades work, Hideki thought, I can finally overcome my family’s curse. I can prove to Lieutenant Colonel Sano and to Yoshio and to everyone that I really am brave. And I can make the Kaneshiro family fearless again.
“One grenade is for the American monsters coming to kill your family,” Sano told them, and Hideki looked up. Sano’s gaze swept down the row of boys until it stopped on Hideki, like he was talking to him alone. “Then, after you have killed as many Americans as you can,” Sano added, “you are to use the other grenade to kill yourself.”
Private Ray Majors took a nervous peek over the side of the boat carrying him and his squad across the choppy waves toward Okinawa. Through the salty sea spray, he saw every American ship in the bay—more than a thousand of them—shooting their guns at the island. Battleships, destroyers, cruisers. And overhead, wave after wave of planes flew over the island, dropping agony and death from above. All to protect the sitting-duck GIs and Marines like Ray in their little boats.
One of the battleships’ big guns was so loud and so close that the BOOM rattled Ray’s stomach. This was it. The real deal. The invasion of Okinawa. What the brass called “Operation Iceberg,” even though an iceberg wouldn’t have survived ten seconds in this blazing heat. It was Ray’s first battle of the war, and it was a big one.
It was all Ray could do not to pee his green pants. But he was almost relieved to finally be going into battle. For weeks, he and two hundred other Marines had been holed up with twenty Sherman tanks in the dark belly of a rolling, creaking ship as Japanese suicide bombers came dropping out of the sky at them. As far as Ray was concerned, being trapped like a rat in the bottom of a ship was ten times worse than being on deck and watching the kamikazes come in.
But then, at last, had come H-Hour: 8:30 a.m., April 1st. Easter Sunday, 1945. Code name: “Love Day.” The day that Ray and the other 183,000 American soldiers and Marines of the Tenth Army finally boarded amphibious troop carriers and headed east toward the beaches of Okinawa.
The fact that Love Day was also April Fool’s Day had not been lost on a single one of them.
When he’d enlisted in the Marines a few months ago, Ray had never thought he’d end up on a boat four hundred miles from Japan. He thought he’d be sent to Europe, to fight Hitler and the Nazis. But Allied forces had just freed France and crossed the Rhine River into Germany, and the end of the war in Europe was near. Everybody could sense it.
But the war against Japan was far from over. Almost four years ago, the Japanese had sneak-attacked Pearl Harbor, a US naval base in the Hawaiian Islands. Ray remembered exactly where he was when he’d heard the news—sitting in a soda shop with Tibby Lundgren, her blond hair shining in the bright afternoon sun. Their first date. His first ever date with anybody. The music on the radio had come to a sudden stop, and a reporter had read the shocking news. Battleships sunk. Airplanes burning on the runway. Almost twenty-five hundred Americans dead and a thousand more wounded. Ray understood then that life as he knew it—the farm, high school, Tibby Lundgren—all of it was over.
A day later, President Roosevelt declared war against Japan, and Ray ran away from home to join the Marines. They wouldn’t take him though—they made him wait until he was eighteen.
Ray shifted uncomfortably on the metal bench, remembering the belt-whipping his father had given him when he’d slunk back home.
The acrid, sickly sweet smell of someone vomiting in the boat brought Ray back to the here and now. The rocking of the boat made Ray feel sick too, and he went through the equipment in his pack to distract himself. Flashlight, pistol, canteen, first aid kit, extra cartridges for his M-1 rifle. The Marine-issue “entrenching tool,” which as far as Ray could tell was just a shovel with a fancy name.
And then there were the grenades. Two of them. Cast iron. Each one was about the size of a pear, but round in the middle and tapered at the top and bottom. The raised squares on them made them look like pineapples. Each was painted a drab olive green, the army’s favorite color, and had a bright yellow collar around the neck. To activate the grenade, you gripped the gray handle on the side and pulled a big wire ring attached to a pin. The grenade activated when you let go of the handle, igniting the fuse. Then you had just four or five seconds before it went boom.
In another pocket, Ray found the brochure Naval Command had given him and all the other Marines to explain the difference between Okinawans and Japanese. Apparently, there was a difference. The brochure said the Okinawans were generally smaller, and were “simple, polite, law-abiding, and peaceful.” If they could help it, the Marines were supposed to pass Okinawan civilians on to the shelters being set up for their relief by the military government. But the brochure also warned that the Marines might get a chilly reception from Okinawans: All they know about Americans they get from Tokyo propaganda, it said. So you can expect them to look at you as though you were a cross between Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster—at first, anyway.
The handout included some Japanese phrases to help draw the Okinawans from hiding, and Ray had been practicing them in the dark hold of the ship for the past two weeks.
“DEY-tey ko-ee,” he sounded out now. Come out. “hee-DOY koat-o wa shee ma-SEN.” You will not be hurt.
“Forget all that stuff,” said Corporal John Barboza, who sat across from Ray. Big John—as everyone called him—was an enormous guy from the Bronx, New York, who’d probably been shaving since he was five.
Ray, with hi
s close-cropped sandy brown hair, short legs, and round freckled face, looked young enough to be Big John’s son—even though Big John couldn’t have been more than five years older than him.
Big John was one of the few members of the 1st Marines to survive the division’s last battle in the Philippines. He was also Ray’s designated foxhole buddy.
“A Jap’s a Jap, Majors,” Big John told him. “You want my advice? Shoot them before they shoot you. That’s how you survive.”
“Your last name is Majors?” asked their squad leader, Sergeant Walter Meredith. The sergeant was tall and lean and tan and had been with the 1st Marines even longer than Big John had. “This kid needs a nickname, pronto. The enemy hears us calling him ‘Majors,’ they’ll think we’re talking to a real Marine major and throw everything they’ve got at him.”
Ray felt the blood drain from his face. How was that fair? He hadn’t picked his last name!
“Where ya from, kid?” another Marine asked.
“Norfolk, Nebraska,” Ray replied.
“ ‘Cornhusker,’ then.”
“No, ‘Babyface’! Kid looks like he’s thirteen.”
“ ‘Shorty,’ ” somebody else suggested.
“Let’s wait and see if the kid survives the beach landing,” Big John said. “Then we can worry about a nickname for him.”