Twilight of the Gods

by Twilight of the Gods (retail) (epub)

  Two Nakajima “Kate” torpedo planes now began a run at the Idaho, attacking on her port quarter. A 5-inch VT shell triggered the first Nakajima’s bomb, destroying the aircraft so comprehensively that no wreckage or debris was seen falling into the ocean. The second Kate kept coming, momentarily shielded by the smoke from its destroyed twin. A 20mm mount finally stopped that plane at point-blank range, perhaps as near as 20 feet from the Idaho’s port quarter. Its bomb detonated, hurling wreckage and shrapnel over the deck, flooding eight of the ship’s torpedo blisters, and injuring a dozen men. From his station forward of the Idaho’s superstructure, Lieutenant Wallace thought the plane must have hit the ship. “A bomb exploding so close to you does not make a booming sound, as heard in the movies,” he observed; “It makes a crackling sound, like lightning.”89

  Intermittent fights continued until dusk. Task Force 58 was spared any hits or damaging misses, and its fighters returned with claims of 151 Japanese planes shot down.90

  THE MORNING AFTER THIS UNPRECEDENTED ASSAULT upon the fleet, devastating news was distributed to every ship and station via an “ALNAV”—a message to the entire navy—from Secretary Forrestal in Washington. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was dead. He had succumbed to a massive cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. On the battleship Tennessee, still recovering from the kamikaze hit she had taken the previous day, the ship’s loudspeakers announced: “Attention! Attention, all hands! President Roosevelt is dead. Repeat, our Supreme Commander, President Roosevelt, is dead.”91

  The news was greeted with shock, grief, and apprehension about the future course of the war. Younger men had no memory of a time when FDR had not been president of the United States. A sailor on an attack transport off Hagushi recalled: “Few of us spoke, or even looked at each other. We drifted apart, seeming instinctively to seek solitude. Many prayed. Many shed tears.”92 New Yorker correspondent John Lardner was at a marine regimental command post on Okinawa when the news arrived by telephone. Lardner observed that many marines were “nonplussed and unable to put their thoughts into words; others were shocked into stillness and went about their work in a sort of walking reverie. . . . I had never seen any news have an effect quite like this one.”93

  John A. Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor’s sixth and youngest child, was a staff supply officer on the Hornet. Admiral Jocko Clark went down to Lieutenant Roosevelt’s stateroom and broke the news. Clark offered to send Roosevelt home for his father’s funeral, but the lieutenant declined, saying: “My place is here.”94

  By order of Secretary Forrestal, all ships held special memorial services on Sunday, April 15. In a typical ceremony, five minutes’ silence was observed by the ship’s company, and three volleys of rifle fire marked the late president’s passing.

  Harry Truman was FDR’s third vice president since 1933. Many Americans did not even recognize his name. William Dunn, the CBS radio correspondent in MacArthur’s Manila headquarters, sheepishly admitted that he could not remember the name of the sitting vice president. Upon hearing the news of FDR’s death, “I held the dubious distinction of being an American reporter who didn’t know who was at the helm of his great nation!”95 Gene Sledge recorded that he and his fellow marines were “curious and a bit apprehensive” about Truman: “We surely didn’t want someone in the White House who would prolong [the war] one day longer than necessary.”96

  By contrast, the mood in the Japanese Thirty-Second Army command bunker was euphoric. According to Colonel Yahara, “Many seemed convinced that we would now surely win the war!”97 Some conjectured that the ground attack on Okinawa and the massed Kikusui kamikaze attacks of April 12 must have triggered the stroke that killed FDR. A Japanese propaganda leaflet aimed at American forces on the island asserted that seven of every ten U.S. aircraft carriers had been sunk or damaged, and that the fleet had suffered 150,000 casualties. “Not only the late president but anyone else would die in the excess of worry to hear of such an annihilative damage. The dreadful loss that led your late leader to death will make you orphans on this island. The Japanese special attack corps will sink your vessels to the last destroyer. You will witness it realized in the near future.”98

  The same day that the news of FDR’s death was cabled around the world, momentous political developments were announced in Tokyo. Prime Minister Koiso and most of his cabinet had been ousted from power. Kantaro Suzuki, a seventy-seven-year-old retired admiral and senior figure in the imperial court, had been appointed the new prime minister. Five of six members of the Supreme War Direction Council (the “Big Six”) had been replaced; the sole survivor was Admiral Yonai, known to be a leader of the peace party. Admiral Ugaki wrote in his diary, probably ironically, that the recent massed kamikaze attack and ground offensive on Okinawa “thus overthrew the cabinet and killed Roosevelt, creating various reactions.”99

  Chapter Fourteen

  DETERMINED TO BREAK THE STALEMATE ON THE NAHA-SHURI-YONABARU line, General Buckner approved plans for a renewed ground offensive. Three army divisions—from west to east, the 7th, the 96th, and the 27th—would attack together in a line abreast, with the aim of winning control of the Kakazu Ridge, the Nishibaru Ridge, and the Tanabaru Escarpment. At dawn on April 19, the U.S. artillery and naval guns opened the largest barrage of the campaign. Tenth Army artillery fired 19,000 rounds on the Japanese lines for forty minutes. The guns of six battleships, six cruisers, and eight destroyers rained high-explosive projectiles down on assigned targets. Marine and naval carrier planes added bombs and rockets. The spectacle mesmerized all who witnessed it, but the bombardment was mostly sound and fury. Japanese troops had remained safely hunkered down in their caves and bunkers, well protected by natural limestone, and they surged back up to the surface as soon as it lifted. Brigadier General Joseph Sheetz, commanding the 24th Corps Artillery, judged that no more than one Japanese soldier had been killed for every one hundred artillery shells hurled against their lines.1

  The 27th Division attacked up Kakazu Ridge with thirty Sherman tanks backed by infantry. As the tanks reached the steeper section of the slope, Japanese artillery and mortars suddenly buried them under a murderous fire. Several machines were hit and disabled by 47mm antitank guns. As the barrage lifted, hundreds of screaming Japanese soldiers charged down the ridge. They drove the American infantry back and attacked the tanks with grenades and 22-pound satchel charges. Twenty-two Shermans were destroyed; it was the single worst one-day slaughter of American tanks in the Pacific War. To the west, the 7th Infantry Division was caught in the open under artillery and mortar fire that had been preregistered to hit the lower slopes. The 96th Division attacked the Tanabaru-Nishibaru ridgeline, at the heart of the zone defended by Japan’s Sixty-Second Division. Two advanced platoons that gained the ridgeline were pinned down by fire from higher ground, and could do nothing but withdraw with heavy losses. In the April 19 attack, Americans had gained no permanent advantage on any tactically important ridge in the area, and had been driven back almost to their starting lines, at a cost of 720 dead, wounded, and missing.

  Buckner and his subordinates began to understand that a long, hard, bloody battle lay ahead. The enemy’s line of fortifications was well constructed, and it crossed the island from coast to coast. The terrain offered scant prospects for flanking or field maneuvers, and many sections were too steep and broken to accommodate tanks. According to the army’s official history of the battle, the land was “utterly without pattern; it was a confusion of little, mesa-like hilltops, deep draws, rounded clay hills, gentle green valleys, bare and ragged coral ridges, lumpy mounds of earth, narrow ravines and sloping finger ridges extending downward from the hill masses.”2 For the Americans, control of the air and superior firepower were valuable advantages, but they were not decisive. The dilemma was similar to what the marines had faced on Iwo Jima, but on a larger scale. The Americans would have to use brute force, advancing uphill into some of the most onerous terrain in the Pacific.

  The failed attack of
April 19 was followed by five days of intense ground fighting all up and down the line. With bitter experience, the American infantrymen were learning how to attack the redoubtable Japanese fortifications. Mapping the battlefield down to every last boulder, cave, and pillbox, they discovered blind spots or “dead zones” between the Japanese firing ports. With closer timing of infantry movements with artillery barrages, advance patrols managed to infiltrate into those zones while the Japanese were still emerging from cover. If the squads could surround a pillbox or cave opening, or climb on top of it, the Japanese occupants would be blinded. As they emerged from their covered positions, they were cut down. It was slow, bloody, treacherous work, involving flamethrowers, grenades, satchel charges, small arms, bayonets, and even knives and bare hands. General Buckner referred to these tactics as the “blowtorch and corkscrew” method. The Japanese called it the “cavalry charge” or “horse-riding” attack.

  Naval gunfire and air support were valuable on Okinawa, but they never superseded the bravery, initiative, and grit of individual infantry units. In the end, the soldiers and marines had to dig their enemies out of the ground and kill them. There was no other way. Rarely could they gain an advantage through flanking maneuvers. On the constricted terrain around the Shuri ridges, each battalion was wedged into a densely populated section of the line—on average, a thousand troops for every 600 yards—and the only way to hit the enemy was by frontal assault. They might briefly seize control of the top of a facing ridge, but then be driven back by heavy artillery fire from positions farther south, or by Japanese infantry counterattacks in superior force. That was a recurring pattern on Okinawa: the high ground often changed hands, in a succession of attacks and counterattacks, sometimes as many as a dozen times. American and Japanese dead were splayed side by side on the battlefield. All foliage had been blasted or burned away from the once-verdant landscape, and the zones between the opposing lines were a scarred and denuded wasteland. Artillery and mortar shells fell relentlessly, shaking the walls of the trenches and foxholes. Japanese infiltration attacks were a nightly horror. More than on any previous Pacific battlefield, infantrymen suffered psychotic breaks, and had to be evacuated as “psycho” cases. The war correspondent John Lardner saw a soldier led away from the front line by two medical corpsmen. He was uninjured, but wide-eyed and shrieking: “They’ll get every one of you! They’ll get every one of you!”3

  On the Motobu Peninsula, which protruded from the coast of northwest Okinawa, the 6th Marine Division had gradually hunted down and destroyed two battalions of Japanese troops. Hard fighting was required in the rugged, thickly wooded high ground at the center of the peninsula, and even after the marines had secured control, they required a lengthy process of mopping up. Three regiments of the 77th Infantry Division had landed on Ie Shima, a small island just off the western cape of the Motobu Peninsula. Reconnaissance flights had failed to determine the extent of Japanese troop strength on the island, and the army ran into unexpectedly stiff resistance on a terrain feature they called “Bloody Ridge.” Five days were needed to quell resistance on Ie Shima. The Americans suffered 258 killed and 879 wounded; virtually the entire garrison of 4,700 Japanese troops was wiped out.

  The fierce scrap on Ie Shima also claimed the life of Ernie Pyle, the famed and much-loved war correspondent, whom the GIs had nicknamed “the Soldier’s Friend.”4 During past campaigns in Africa, Italy, northern Europe, and the Pacific, Pyle had often exposed himself to serious danger while marching and living with troops in the field. The Ie Shima operation was to be his last combat assignment of the war; he had already been assigned a seat on a C-54 transport for return to the United States. On April 18, Pyle was riding with a battalion commander in the back of a jeep, on a tour of the front lines. As the vehicle slowed at a crossroad, a Japanese machine gun opened fire. The weapon had been concealed in a patch of thick brush, a few feet from the side of the road. The driver and passengers leapt out of the vehicle and took cover in a ditch on the opposite side of the road. None had been hit by that first burst, but Pyle made the mistake of raising his head to have a look. He was hit in the left temple, just below his helmet, and died instantly. Later, soldiers erected a wooden sign: “On this spot, the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April, 1945.”5

  On April 30, General Buckner ordered the marines into the center and western sections of the Shuri Line. Heading south on May 1, marines on trucks passed through tent cities, supply dumps, and road construction sites where bulldozers and earthmoving equipment were reshaping the landscape. Marching north, the other way, were the bloodied veterans of the 27th Division, whom the 1st Marine Division would be replacing in the line. “Tragic expressions revealed where they had been,” wrote Gene Sledge. “They were dead beat, dirty and grisly, hollow-eyed and tight-faced. I hadn’t seen such faces since Peleliu.” One passing soldier told Sledge what to expect: “It’s hell up there, Marine.”6

  As they approached the front, the din of battle grew steadily louder, and the rustic, rolling landscape gave way to a gray, pitted wasteland. On the higher parts of the ridge, artillery had exposed the ivory-colored coral escarpments, where the rock was chipped and blasted by artillery shells. Corporal William Manchester, gazing ahead from a rise at the top of a hill, thought the scene looked “hideous, but it was also strangely familiar, resembling, I then realized, photographs of 1914–1918. This, I thought, is what Verdun and Passchendaele must have looked like. The two great armies, squatting opposite one another in mud and smoke, were locked together in unimaginable agony. There was no room for a flanking operation; the Pacific Ocean lay to the east and the East China Sea to the west.”7

  IN THE JAPANESE THIRTY-SECOND ARMY COMMAND BUNKER, deep below Shuri Castle, the rain of U.S. artillery shells and bombs was little more than a nuisance. The blasts were comfortably muffled, as if they were a long way away. But the bunker was clammy and stifling, and smoke sometimes drifted down the ventilation shafts, sending everyone scrambling for their masks. On April 29, Lieutenant General Cho summoned the staff and divisional commanders to a conference. Cho was in favor of launching another counterattack, but on a scale many times larger than the abortive operation of April 12. As usual, Colonel Yahara took the other side of the argument; he was for continuing the defensive attrition tactics that had bled the American forces for three weeks. Yahara observed that the enemy’s advance toward Shuri had been held to a pace of about 100 meters per day. To send the Japanese troops out of their secure fortifications, to expose them to the enemy’s vast array of artillery, naval firepower, and air power, would be “reckless and would lead to certain defeat.”8 But Cho’s desire to seize the initiative resonated with the division and field commanders, who foresaw that Yahara’s defensive tactics must lead eventually to total defeat.

  After hearing the views of all his subordinates, General Ushijima ruled in favor of the attack. It was scheduled for predawn on May 4. The final order urged: “Display a combined strength. Each soldier will kill at least one American devil.”9

  The operation commenced with the heaviest Japanese mortar and artillery barrage of the entire battle, expending 13,000 rounds in the first three hours. Small commando patrols crept out of the Japanese caves to attempt to infiltrate behind American lines. The Japanese Twenty-Seventh Tank Regiment brought its light and medium tanks forward, intending to launch them into the center of the XXIV Corps front, near the boundary between the U.S. 7th and 77th Divisions. Japanese amphibious striking forces set out in boats from beaches south of Naha and Yonabaru. Early progress seemed encouraging. The Thirty-Second Regiment captured a hill east of Maeda village, and the Twenty-Second Regiment advanced to a ridge north of Onaga, driving two American machine-gun crews from their positions. Three companies of the U.S. 184th Regiment were outflanked and isolated on the rocky ridgetop features they had named the Chimney Crag and the Roulette Wheel. By noon, however, the forward momentum of the Japanese attack was petering out. Counterbattery fire and airstrikes
destroyed more than fifty Japanese artillery pieces, and most of the others were pulled back into caves for cover. Some of the Japanese tanks lost their way, and were forced to pull back; others were disabled or destroyed by U.S. artillery or aircraft. The amphibious attacks failed on both the east and west coasts; most of the boats were destroyed before any of the troops could get ashore, with losses of five hundred to eight hundred troops and nearly all of the landing craft.

  By the end of May 5, Ushijima acknowledged the failure of the offensive, and recalled all attacking units to their earlier positions. The Japanese had lost at least 6,000 troops, and the Twenty-Seventh Tank Regiment had only six remaining medium tanks. The Japanese artillery battalions had lost many guns and also had expended a great deal of their remaining ammunition. In a tearful encounter in the Shuri bunker, Ushijima told Colonel Yahara that he had been right, and pledged to stick to defensive attrition tactics for the remainder of the battle on Okinawa. However, as Colonel Yahara said, “There was no miracle medicine to heal the critical wounds of the May 4 debacle.”10 A feeling of despair spread through the Japanese ranks.

  The two U.S. Army divisions had suffered 335 casualties on May 4, and another 379 casualties on May 5. But the balance of power along the line had shifted, and the Americans moved immediately to exploit their advantage. General Buckner informed his division and corps commanders that he expected to break through to Shuri in another two weeks. The 1st Marines attacked Hill 60, a main feature at the western end of the Japanese line. The summit changed hands twice in fierce fighting between May 6 and 9, when the marines finally consolidated their hold on the hill. To their left, the 5th Marines attacked with tanks and infantry into confused terrain south of the town of Awacha. The 184th Infantry (7th Division) opened a new offensive on Gaja Ridge and Conical Hill, and made surprisingly rapid progress on May 7 and 8. At the center of the U.S. lines, the 77th Division advanced down Route 5, overcoming fanatical Japanese resistance on every hill and ridge. By May 11, the Tenth Army had control of a line running through Maeda, Kochi, and Awacha, with secure supply lines running back to the Hagushi beachhead. But the menacing citadel of Shuri Castle still loomed to the south, and more hard fighting would be needed to take it.