This was the last Japanese naval action of World War II.
Giving support to the Okinawa landing was the most costly naval engagement in U.S. history. Thirty-four American ships and landing craft were sunk and almost 400 others were seriously damaged, many beyond salvaging. Worse, nearly 5,000 sailors were killed in action and an equal number were wounded—most of them burned by flaming gasoline that incinerated the skin of their faces, bodies, and limbs.
By 8 April, the American forces on Okinawa were stopped in their tracks by the line of Japanese defenses in concrete reinforced pillboxes with steel doors unaffected by flame-throwers. Casualties on both sides were growing along with civilian deaths. Additional reinforcements were landed on 9 April, and American troops on the island now numbered 160,000.
Attention now focused on taking Shuri Castle, the key Japanese defensive position of resistance. The “castle” was another reinforced concrete fortification located in the southern part of Okinawa on high land between the eastern and western coasts. As usual, General Ushijima had prepared defensive positions with interlocking fields of fire and could direct his men across the island underground without having to encounter American troops.
The interconnected tunnels were almost impossible to get into. However, against these fortifications was the combined firepower of six U.S. Navy battleships, six cruisers, nine destroyers, and some 650 American aircraft—in addition to the 160,000 Marines and soldiers on the ground.
10TH ARMY ASSAULT FORCE
OKINAWA
21 APRIL 1945
0915 HOURS LOCAL
On 12 April, a major loss had occurred far from the battlefield on Okinawa. Word was communicated from the War Department in Washington that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was dead of a massive stroke after serving twelve years in office. Many of the young men fighting could remember no other president than FDR. Not many of them knew anything at all about their new commander in chief, Harry S. Truman.
Six days later, war correspondent Ernie Pyle headed to the front lines with GIs from the 77th Division. When Pyle joined the fight in the Pacific in early April, he had sought to become acquainted with the Marines. He wrote that their battles in the Pacific had been so brutal, and the Marines’ reputation so fierce, that he was almost afraid of them. But after meeting the Marines in person he wrote that, “they have fears, and qualms and hatred for the war the same as anybody else. They want to go home as badly as any soldier I’ve ever met.”
Pyle tried to understand the minds of the Marines he had chosen to follow. He found them to be young, polite, and compassionate. They bowed to civilians on the roads and did what they could to help them. They were Americans, after all. Pyle finally concluded that, “the Marines do not thirst for battles. I’ve read and heard enough about them to have no doubts whatever about the things they can do when they have to. They are okay for my money, in battle and out.”
Pyle’s dedication to getting his story in the heat of battle led him directly into machine gun crossfire on 18 April on the island of Ie Shima. He was with an American officer when a Japanese machine gun opened up on their vehicle. Both men jumped out of the vehicle and headed for a nearby ditch. But Pyle raised his head too soon, and enemy bullets from the machine gun pierced his head just below the brim of his helmet. He was killed instantly, and was later buried on the island.
The inclement weather reduced visibility and cut down on Allied aircraft assaults and recon. But it also helped to keep the kamikaze away. Yet without the recon to improve their handmade maps, the Americans had badly underestimated that only 50,000 to 65,000 Japanese troops were on the island. In truth, there were almost twice that many hiding in the maze of tunnels and caves.
One American general remarked to his superiors, “It’s going to be really tough.... I see no way to get them out except by blasting them out yard by yard.”
Okinawa’s torrential rains, mudslides, poisonous snakes, mosquitoes, and disease only added to the hell experienced by the American troops. While on Okinawa, the Marines and soldiers also had to endure the constant stench of rotting human flesh.
Nevertheless, in almost three weeks, on 21 April, the soldiers and Marines had put an end to resistance at the northern end of Okinawa. The Japanese defensive line was finally breached on 28 April. General Buckner’s troops attacked the two flanks of the enemy forces and fought ferociously against the Japanese soldiers, whose fortifications were beginning to weaken.
The battle for the rest of the island would continue through the end of June. Before hostilities were over, more than half a million Americans of the 5th Fleet and the 10th Army would be involved.
There would be more casualties right up to the last day of battle on Okinawa. Private First Class Herman “Buff ” Buffington, an Army infantryman, had been lucky before shrapnel hit him on that last day.
PRIVATE FIRST CLASS
HERMAN “BUFF” BUFFINGTON, US ARMY
Vicinity Machinato, Okinawa
27 May 1945
1330 Hours Local
For the last two weeks, we had briefings that were puzzling to an eighteen-year-old kid. They were asking if we had drawn up our wills.
I had my nineteenth birthday on 7 May when we were right in the middle of this thing. The original first and second scouts had been wounded, so I was our platoon’s new first scout. And it got rougher and rougher.
There was a convoy coming up the road with five or six trucks coming back from the lines. After the first one passed, we noticed that they were stacked with dead American soldiers, stacked like wood. That was extremely hard to take. It really hit home as to what we were doing there.
The lieutenant said, “Well, would you like to say a prayer with me?” You never hear this ordinarily. But this was the front lines. Then the lieutenant pulled off his helmet and kneeled down and said the Lord’s Prayer.
My buddy pulled a letter out and gave it to the lieutenant and said, “Be sure and get this mailed because I won’t live beyond this afternoon.”
We encountered a lot of destruction. Bodies would be so thick you’d have to crawl over them sometimes and we couldn’t always see the enemy.
While I was up there, someone came up and stood behind me. I knew it was some kind of brass. He kneeled down and asked me, “Soldier, how’s it going?” Then he said, “Could I borrow your rifle?”
I said, “Yes, sir, you may.” You have to keep in mind that no one wore their rank on them anywhere. But anyway, I didn’t recognize him. He was about fifty years old. And he pulled off his binoculars and let me have them. And he says, “I want you to tell me if I’m still a pretty good shot.”
It was just like out at the firing range. So that’s what I did. And he shot for what seemed to me like ten or fifteen minutes. He was good—a sharp shooter.
As he’d shoot and hit one of the Japanese I’d tell him. He hit quite a few. When he got ready to leave he thanked me and wished me well. I gave him his binoculars back, and he handed me my rifle.
After he left, a few of the guys came up from the squad and one said, “Buff, do you know who that was?” I said, “No, I didn’t know him. I assume it’s some brass though.” They told me that it was General Simon Bolivar Buckner.
Combat here was a lot different than it was in Europe. We crawled most of the time. Sometimes it might take two or three weeks to take one spot. And to take those hills you’d have to have enough people left to hold the hill once you took it. When we took a place and got kicked off, we’d always try to go back. We’d be seesawing back and forth quite often. And in all those times you’re getting people killed and wounded. It’s just really unbelievable.
When you’re taking a hill and there are machine guns and small arms shooting at you, you haven’t got much of a chance. You use a sense that’s rarely ever used, a sense of survival. After several weeks, you act like there’s no tomorrow. There’s no tonight. There’s not even the afternoon. It’s only now. Now is all you think about, and how you’re goin
g to survive and help your buddies survive.
That’s all you do; you didn’t think about home. You didn’t think about your girlfriend. You didn’t think about anything but “now.” And you ask, “Am I going to make it?”
I was hit in the leg with shrapnel and got what they call “the million-dollar wound,” meaning I’d be going home. Well, it didn’t always happen like that. Guys wounded the night before were up the next morning picking up their packs and weapons.
I was hit in the leg, in a spot where it went right under my knee and went to the bone and stopped there. But the thing that you don’t realize is that the hot piece of shrapnel “fries” your flesh just like cooking bacon. You can hear it. And it does hurt. They cut the shrapnel out and in my case they said that they didn’t have time to wait for a morphine shot to deaden the pain of that wound.
Finally the Japanese started to collapse. But they would not come through our area. There’s a cliff on the southern end of Okinawa, and they were jumping off rather than surrendering.
I couldn’t believe the Japanese would ever surrender. You’d think when they did that we went out, threw our hats up, and hollered all over the place. We didn’t do it. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning when we found out that they’d all surrendered. Instead of celebrating, we just stretched out on our bunks and stayed there until late that afternoon, even missing our noon chow time.
I remember praying, “God, I might just live yet.” And thinking I might even get home.
10TH ARMY ASSAULT FORCE
VICINITY SHURI CASTLE, OKINAWA
31 MAY 1945
1330 HOURS LOCAL
In Europe, things had happened rapidly. On 28 April, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was captured and killed, and his body was hung in the street by Italian partisans while the Allies were taking Venice.
Two days later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker while Soviet troops entered the city, and a week later an unconditional surrender of German troops to Allied forces was announced. These events brought about the official end of the war in Europe.
Three days after V-E Day, General Buckner launched an attack against the Japanese Shuri Castle line, bringing about the fiercest fighting yet on Okinawa. General Ushijima asked Tokyo to send more reinforcements and supplies, but he was refused. Tokyo could not spare any more troops, and had already begun to plan how to deploy all remaining soldiers to protect the Home Islands from an American invasion.
On 20 May, the Japanese had begun their withdrawal from China, getting ready for the inevitable invasion of Japan. Ushijima knew now that it was over. After two months of brutal combat, incurring over 50,000 American casualties, the soldiers and Marines of the 10th Army secured the Shuri Castle line.
Japanese Premier Suzuki announced to the people of Japan that the entire nation “will fight to the very end” rather than accept unconditional surrender. But the Japanese people had to be aware of the obvious.
On 11 June, General Buckner sent a message to General Ushijima to surrender. The Japanese leader dismissed it with great disdain—surrender meant endless shame.
Corporal Mel Heckt was at Shuri Castle as part of the 4th Marine Regiment, made up almost entirely of Marine Raiders. He was a squad leader when his replacement company was sent in to help take Shuri Castle and the rest of the Oroku Peninsula. By the time the combat ended, Heckt had been promoted to platoon leader, a job for a sergeant, simply because the Marines’ heavy casualties had used up all of the sergeants.
CORPORAL MELVIN “MEL” HECKT, USMC
Oroku Peninsula, Okinawa
18 June 1945
0940 Hours Local
We made the landing at night. We got up to the hill and as soon as we got there, I remember mortar fire killed our BAR man. I lost two of my machine gun ammo carriers on the second day. The Japanese artillery was great when we were on top of Sugar Loaf Hill. An artillery shell came over that ridge and killed three of my machine gunners. I’d just left the wounded with a corpsman and was going toward Naha when we came to a bridge. We lost all kinds of men in trying to take that bridge.
One fellow had a leg blown off, and Tex Durasole took out his K-bar knife and cut off the guy’s leg in order to extricate him and save his life.
On Oroku Peninsula, one of the worst experiences happened one night on a ridge toward the end of the island. I took the last watch on the gun and about 5 AM I heard a banzai attack. They were coming right at me. My machine gun jammed and then my rifle jammed. Fortunately some A Company guys were standing in a semicircle—like they were at a firing range—and they picked off all these guys.
The next morning, Eddie Dunham from Detroit went up early to drop a satchel charge over the ridge. A bullet hit him right in the head and I helped carry him down. I thought he was alive, but my corpsman said later, “Mel, he was dead. You were feeling your own pulse.” And he was such a close friend of mine that I broke down and cried.
One of my machine gunners, Bobby Banker from Racine, Wisconsin, was firing at quite a long distance and doing really well, and he got a bullet right in his neck. We got a corpsman up there and we tried to clamp the artery and stop the bleeding. Finally the doctor came, but he had died.
I lost a heck of a lot of men. Out of my fifty-three-man machine gun platoon, only four didn’t get hit or killed. I was one of the four.
10TH ARMY ASSAULT FORCE
OROKU PENINSULA, OKINAWA
8 JULY 1945
1100 HOURS LOCAL
After a month of bloody and violent combat, American Marines and soldiers finally broke through General Ushijima’s defenses and conquered Okinawa by the end of June.
Back in the States, America’s new president, Harry Truman, wanted to end World War II quickly, with minimal casualties. After witnessing the quick, unconditional surrender of Germany, Truman hoped that Japan might be convinced to do the same.
Mopping-up operations began on the southern end of Okinawa, and Winston Churchill spoke directly to Americans to tell them just how important the Battle of Okinawa was to the world. He said, “The strength and willpower, devotion and technical resources applied by the United States to this task, joined with the death struggle of the enemy... places this battle among the most intense and famous in military history.”
Okinawa was supposed to be the hoped-for turning point that essentially ended the war in the Pacific. But the Imperial Army was unquestionably well fortified and had enough supplies to hold out for many months. The Americans, on the other hand, didn’t want to prolong the combat on Okinawa any longer than necessary. Finally, with guts, determination, and commitment, the Americans gave it their all. Both sides sacrificed many lives, but in the end, the Americans finally broke through.
It was said that one Marine division assaulted a hill about a dozen times, taking the hill, losing it, and retaking it again and again in what seemed to be a never-ending cycle. In the process, the division lost twice the number of men in their original troop complement.
Japanese casualties also grew steadily. The Americans slowly pierced the Japanese lines, and they retreated, charging the Americans in a futile suicidal attack. A few actually surrendered. Nevertheless, the Marines and soldiers had to seize the island inch by bloody inch.
Then, by late June, General Ushijima and his officers knew it was utterly hopeless. Still, unconditional surrender seemed out of the question—true to Japanese tradition. Most of the Imperial Army wanted no part of surrender, and they continued to throw themselves into hopeless suicidal charges. Finally, even General Ushijima recognized that by now the battle was over and his cause was lost. Believing that he had embarrassed himself before his emperor, he determined to end his life in an honorable way. So he brought together his officers and said his goodbyes to them. Then he and his chief of staff, General Cho, took part in the traditional ceremonial feast, after which each of them wrote a haiku poem. Then the two officers dressed in their white robes and went out to the front of the cave in which Ushi
jima had his command headquarters. Each of the two officers knelt and disemboweled himself with a sword. A Japanese junior officer then took his own sword and cut off the heads of the two generals.
The American commander, General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., was killed by Japanese artillery fire on 18 June. That same day, Marine General Roy Geiger assumed command of the 10th Army on Okinawa, the first time a U.S. Marine would command a field army.
Failure to stop the Americans at Okinawa meant that Japan had to face the unimaginable—an American invasion of the Japanese homeland.
On 21 June, the 10th Army pushed through to take the only part of the island still not in American hands, the southernmost point on Okinawa. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Japanese troops followed the lead of General Ushijima in ritual suicide. On the next day, the American flag flew over Okinawa. The eighty-two-day Okinawa campaign was finally declared officially over on 2 July.
The cost had been horrendous for both sides. American casualties amounted to more than 68,000 sailors, soldiers, and Marines, with some 16,000 killed or missing in action. The Navy lost more men than the Marines did in the Battle of Okinawa, mainly from kamikaze attacks.
The Japanese lost some 131,000 men, with about 108,000 killed in action and another 24,000 sealed in caves or underground fortifications. Fewer than 11,000 Japanese soldiers, most of them wounded, surrendered or let themselves be captured.
Tragically, some 150,000 Okinawa civilians—about one-third of the population—also lost their lives. And before the battle ended, another third to half of the civilians had been wounded. Many were caught in the crossfire of combat between the two armies, although the Japanese killed many of the civilians when they tried to surrender to the Americans. Only the Battle of Stalingrad, in the European theater, saw a greater loss of civilian lives.
War Stories II Page 39