On the night of May 24, the Japanese staged a daring commando raid on Yontan. Five Japanese bombers arrived suddenly, at low altitude, with wheels down, and attempted to land on the field. Four were shot down before they could land, but the fifth actually landed and taxied to a stop near the parking hardstands. A dozen Japanese commandos poured out of the airplane and spread out among the parked U.S. aircraft, destroying them with grenades and satchel charges. Nine American planes were destroyed, and more than two dozen damaged. Marine guards began firing wildly, including at each other, and many were injured or killed by friendly fire. The Japanese blew up a fuel dump, destroying 70,000 gallons of aviation fuel. The firefight continued all night, until the last Japanese commando was hunted down and killed after dawn. Colonel Ronald D. Salmon, a marine aviation officer at the base, described the situation as “pretty grim . . . one of the most exciting nights I’ve seen in any war.”35
Individual task groups were diverted north repeatedly to raid Kyushu, but the bulk of Task Force 58 remained pinned to the beachhead, with its mobility sharply restricted. The daily pattern became predictable, and predictability was dangerous. Mitscher grumbled that his task force had become “a high-speed stationary target for the Japanese air force.”36 Most nights, small groups of enemy patrol planes came out to snoop the fleet, dropping flares, and sometimes attacked with bombs or torpedoes. The intruders were tracked on radar, and night fighters were vectored out to intercept them. Larger raids occurred during the day, often in the late morning or early afternoon. Most Japanese planes were intercepted and shot down by the CAP, usually at least 30 miles from the heart of the task groups, but it was not uncommon for a few to get through the outer screen to make diving runs on the carriers. These were always high-tension affairs for the crews of the ships. Everything happened quickly, and no one could predict when a plane would slip through the storm of antiaircraft fire to crash a ship. Men below, especially, were unnerved by these raids—and with good reason, because fatalities were disproportionately high on the lower decks, where crewmen could easily be trapped by fire or suffocated by smoke.
The tedious routine seemed unending. Humor provided some relief. After several consecutive days of harrowing attacks, Admiral Jocko Clark signaled his task group: “See Hebrews 13, Verse 8.” On ships throughout the group, bibles were opened and the verse read aloud: “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever.”37
Men became irritable and short-tempered. It was an open secret, throughout the fleet, that many sailors were imbibing high-proof “torpedo juice” purloined from the weapons shacks on the hangar decks. All crewmen were told to apply an anti–flash burn ointment that left an oily white sheen on their faces and arms, but many detested the feel and odor of the stuff. The young pilots of the replacement squadrons now learned the meaning of pilot fatigue, and the flight surgeons warned that they must soon be relieved, or operational accidents would rise sharply. Orders and announcements over the loudspeakers urged all to stay alert, so that they could stay alive. On one carrier, someone scrawled a message on a blackboard in a fighter squadron ready room: “Keep alert—remember your poor scared pals on the ship!”38 On another, a plan of the day stated: “It is fully realized that our present operations have been tiring and difficult, but let’s not lose our sense of proportion.” All crewmen were urged to “guard against the hasty flow of ill-chosen words that not only cheapens you, but causes you to lose the friendship of a shipmate. . . . a sour disposition, like sour garbage, should be ground up and thrown overboard.”39
On the morning of May 11, 1945, Admiral Mitscher’s flagship Bunker Hill was the victim of one of the most horrific kamikaze strikes of the war. Two Mitsubishi Zeros took advantage of a low cloud ceiling over the task force, dropping through solid overcast before the gunners could react. The first approached the carrier’s starboard quarter in a shallow dive, releasing its 550-pound bomb just before crashing the flight deck aft of the No. 3 elevator, where it ploughed into a squadron of thirty-four fueled-up Hellcats. The bomb ripped through three decks before exiting the hull and exploding close aboard. The second plane came down in a nearly vertical dive, with speed probably surpassing 500 knots, and pierced the flight deck at the base of the island. As in all such disasters, the most catastrophic damage was caused by secondary explosions and fires as the Bunker Hill’s own ordnance and fuel ignited. Hundreds of sailors were killed without any chance of escape—either in the blasts, or in the fires, or through asphyxiation. Hundreds more were forced off the flight deck to the catwalks and galleries, where they awaited rescue or simply leapt into the sea on their own initiative. Fires raged and a column of black smoke ascended to a height of 1,000 feet. The journalist Phelps Adams, stationed on the nearby Enterprise, described the burning carrier:
The entire rear end of the ship was burning with uncontrollable fury. It looked very much like the newsreel shots of a blazing oil well, only worse—for this fire was feeding on highly refined gasoline and live ammunition. Greasy black smoke rose in a huge column from the ship’s stern, shot through with angry tongues of cherry-red flame. Blinding white flashes appeared continuously as ready ammunition in the burning planes or in the gun galleries was touched off. Every few minutes the whole column of smoke would be swallowed in a great burst of flame as another belly tank exploded or as the blaze reached another pool of gasoline flowing from the broken aviation fuel lines on the hangar deck below.
For more than an hour there was no visible abatement in the fury of the flames. They would seem to be dying down slightly as hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and chemicals were poured on them, only to burst forth more hungrily than ever as some new explosion occurred within the stricken ship.40
Among the dead were three officers and ten enlisted men of the Task Force 58 staff.41 Admiral Mitscher had personally lost many good friends in the air group and the ship’s crew. At three that afternoon, he left the still-burning Bunker Hill with sixty surviving members of his staff, transferring to the Enterprise. As Mitscher came aboard, wrote Adams, “He looked tired and old and just plain mad. His deeply lined face was more than weather-beaten—it looked like an example of erosion in the dust-bowl country—but his eyes flashed fire and vengeance.”42
After an eight-hour fight to quell the flames and repair the damage, the Bunker Hill was a pitiful sight, much like her sister the Franklin six weeks earlier. She had lost 389 killed and 264 wounded. The abnormally high ratio of dead to wounded was explained by circumstances—the victims had been belowdecks when the planes struck, and succumbed to smoke inhalation before they could climb the ladders. While excavating the ready room of the carrier’s fighter squadron, VF-84, salvage teams found the bodies of twenty-two pilots piled in the hatchway, where they had been trying to escape when their compartment filled with smoke.
The Bunker Hill’s engine rooms and power plant were largely intact, and she was able to retire to Ulithi Atoll at nearly 20 knots. On May 12, she buried more than three hundred of her crew at sea. The gutted carrier was patched up at Ulithi and made the transpacific passage under her own steam. When the war ended three months later, she was under repair at Bremerton Naval Shipyard in Puget Sound.
Mitscher’s new flagship Enterprise was hit by a kamikaze three days later, forcing the admiral to shift his flag yet again, to the Randolph—which was herself no stranger to kamikaze attacks. Mitscher remarked to his operations officer, James Flatley, “Jimmy, tell my task group commanders that if the Japs keep this up they’re going to grow hair on my head yet.”43
One day after the Bunker Hill’s ordeal, Admiral Spruance’s flagship New Mexico caught it. The battleship was returning toward Hagushi Bay from Kerama Retto, where she had replenished her ammunition. It was a cool, calm day. At 5:00 p.m., two low-flying Japanese planes approached “up sun,” from astern. A 5-inch shell scored a direct hit on the lead plane, and it crashed about a quarter of a mile from the New Mexico’s port quarter. The second flew through and around the flak and c
rashed the starboard side of the ship, just abaft the foremast. Its bomb detonated on the gun deck, and the plane’s wreckage buried itself in the funnel, tearing a 30-foot hole in the thin steel skin of the smokestack. The explosion ruptured an aviation gasoline storage tank, and fires engulfed the superstructure. Ready service ammunition of the 40mm and 20mm batteries fell through the battle bars into the stack, and began detonating. But damage control parties had hoses working in less than sixty seconds, and soon brought the fires under control. All were extinguished within an hour.
At first, Admiral Spruance could not be found, and his staff feared that he may have been killed. Rear Admiral Arthur C. Davis, the chief of staff, and Charles F. Barber, flag lieutenant, left the mess deck together and hurried up to the flag bridge. Spruance was not there. Eventually they found him on the second deck, manning a fire hose with other members of the crew. He was uninjured and, as always, unperturbed. Lieutenant Barber recalled: “Admiral Spruance, as he often did, took his time and finished what he was doing.”44 An hour after the attack, when the New Mexico’s damage had been contained, he told his staff that he did not see any reason to transfer his flag again: “I believe that we can remain on station, complete repairs, and carry on.”45
The New Mexico had suffered 177 casualties, including 55 dead. The bomb had blown a “ghastly huge crater” in the stack, but the ship was otherwise seaworthy.46 The next morning, Spruance wrote to Carl Moore, his former chief of staff: “I had just started for the bridge when the AA batteries opened up, so I remained under cover while going forward on the second deck, and we were hit before I got very far, which was fortunate for me as the two routes to the bridge led right through the area where the plane and bomb hit.” As usual, the Fifth Fleet chief was clinical in his appraisal: “The suicide plane is a very effective weapon, which we must not underestimate. I do not believe anyone who has not been around within its area of operations can realize its potentialities against ships.”47
MAY 8, 1945, BROUGHT NEWS of the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. The warships off Okinawa commemorated this historic occasion by launching one of the most awesome and sustained naval bombardments of the Pacific War. But for men in the trenches, V-E Day was met with shrugs and grimaces. The event seemed barely relevant to their own predicament. If V-E Day meant that troops and airplanes would be redeployed from Europe, it was to be welcomed. But they angrily spurned suggestions that it should be celebrated. As a marine fighting on Okinawa observed, the news “didn’t change the position of our lines, or the texture of the mud, the tint of this sky, or the amount of ammunition each of us carried in our ponchos.” Another agreed: “Nazi Germany might as well have been on the moon.”48
Three days later, on May 11, the Tenth Army renewed its offensive with a coordinated assault by two mixed corps—on the west, III Amphibious Corps, consisting of the 1st and 6th Marine Divisions; in the east, XXIV Corps, including the 77th and 96th Infantry Divisions, with the 7th Division in reserve. On the far right and left flanks, the army and marines would push south along the coasts, while keeping up strong pressure on the entire defensive system around Shuri Castle. This opened the most intense and desperate phase of ground combat on this or any other island of the Pacific War. The soldiers and marines advanced against well-fortified Japanese positions in nondescript and previously nameless hills and ridges, which the Americans named as they drew their maps: the Chocolate Drop, Flat Top Hill, Tombstone Ridge, Conical Hill, Wana Ridge, Wana Draw, and Sugarloaf Hill. Six weeks earlier, this had been a peaceful, green, cultivated region, a landscape of rolling hills and terraced hillsides, with vistas overlooking the brilliant blue sea. Now it was a colorless waste, denuded of vegetation, strewn with dead men and caked in mud.
The opposing armies advanced and retreated, attacking and counterattacking, surging up and down slopes, over tank traps and minefields, into the teeth of machine-gun fire, seizing summits and then being driven back, until the Japanese and American dead accumulated on the ground, scattered promiscuously together. Sky-splitting artillery and mortar barrages preceded each new thrust, while the Sherman tanks rumbled in idle, hatches open, their drivers waiting for the signal to advance. Mortarmen and howitzer crews were assigned “fire missions,” with coordinates and range cards, and instructions concerning how many rounds they should fire, and what kind, and for how long. The infantry drew ammunition, filled their canteens, and got their equipment squared away—and then tensed in their foxholes and trenches, heads down, awaiting the signal from their officers and sergeants to move out. The bombardment swelled to a crescendo, with the naval guns offshore adding their immense firepower to that of the field artillery, and nothing could be heard but an indistinguishable roar. Last came the phosphorus mortar rounds, to draw a curtain of smoke across the enemy’s sightlines. At a signal, the tank engines slammed into gear with an audible thud, the treads bit into the mud, and the infantrymen stood and advanced in a low crouching jog, keeping five paces between themselves and the men ahead and behind. Their objectives were the blind corners between the Japanese firing positions, where they could flank the pillboxes and cave entrances. Out of the smoke the enemy’s rifle and machine-gun fire whined, popped, and snapped around their ears, and they knew now that they were playing the law of averages, with life and death a matter of blind luck. Mortar shells fell among them. When the smoke was thick, the Japanese “nambu” light machine guns fired in quick, two- or three-round bursts to conserve ammunition: “Tat tat . . . tat tat tat . . . tat tat.” But the moment the smoke cleared, and the Japanese gunners could see a target, they held their fingers down and swept the field of fire. If a man to the left or right went down, his friends kept moving. “You look at it but you keep going,” a marine recalled. “You don’t stop, because he’s dead.”49
Rarely was there any chance of a flanking maneuver; the ground attacks were straight ahead. Each forward advance drew punishing fire from many different kinds of weapons, from seemingly unassailable positions. In an attack on Wana Draw on May 15, Japanese 47mm antitank fire destroyed several Shermans right away, and the others were forced back. If the tanks could make no progress against such defenses, what could the simple infantrymen hope to achieve? At times, they despaired of making any progress at all. The rattle of machine guns and popping of rifle fire rarely abated, and beneath it was the throaty roaring, whining, and blasting of artillery and mortars. There seemed too great a volume of steel in the air for any kind of attack to be anything other than suicidal. And yet the orders were blunt, and the pressure intense: they must break the back of the Japanese defenses, and they must do so quickly. They could do nothing but hammer away at the enemy line. Gradually, through costly trial and error, they refined new tactics. Often, innovations were developed by junior officers and NCOs on the line, who suddenly realized how an enemy position might be taken, and took local initiative. The Japanese use of reverse-slope entrenchments was shrewd and effective, but it could be countered with accurate and precisely timed use of mortar fire. Bit by bit, in fits and starts, the American mortarmen found the range. Mortars could be lobbed over the peaks of the hills and ridges, to land directly among the trenches and cave openings. If a barrage was timed with a feigned ground attack, the mortars would hit home just as the Japanese soldiers were emerging from their protected underground positions to repel the Americans. Many were killed, and others withdrew, allowing the American infantry squads to launch their “blowtorch and corkscrew” attacks while their enemies were still under the ground, blinded, at a tactical disadvantage.
Beginning on May 21, a ten-day deluge of slashing rains turned the battlefield into a sea of mud. Soldiers and marines huddled under their ponchos, soaking and miserable. Their foxholes began to fill in with water, and they bailed with their helmets. Men attempted to salvage ammunition boxes to create a wooden floor at the bottom of their flooded entrenchments. The skin on their hands and fingers was wrinkled and pellucid. Their feet, never dry, developed open sores, and became slimy
to the touch—and when they pulled off their boots, they found small clumps of dead flesh clinging to their wet socks. When they read letters from home, they were obliged to read quickly, before the ink was smeared and blotted out by the rain. When they opened their ration cans, the can filled with rainwater and turned their food into a cold soup. Jeeps and trucks sank to their axles, immobilized. Even tanks and tracked vehicles were unable to advance. Ammunition, provisions, and 5-gallon water cans had to be muscled up to the lines by hand, through knee-deep mud, in driving rain, over fields swept by Japanese fire.
Under relentless, pounding rains, visibility was sometimes cut to 10 feet. Occasionally, the Americans caught a glimpse of their enemy—small, stocky men with brown uniforms and wide-rimmed helmets, moving quickly and efficiently over the ruined terrain. No-man’s-land was kept illuminated all night long by the use of starshells and parachute flares. The Americans were on constant guard against night infantry attacks, by small parties of stealthy infiltrators or by company-sized bayonet charges, with the attackers shouting “Nippon Banzai!” Japanese soldiers were known to wear captured American helmets and uniforms and to walk nonchalantly into the American lines, where they would suddenly open fire. On Okinawa, the enemy could be coming from any direction, at any time. From the Japanese lines, of course—but they could also approach from the flanks, or from behind, via tunnels or bypassed positions. The American infantrymen even cast wary glances at the sky whenever an aircraft engine was heard, because they had been warned to watch for paratroopers.
Corpses were strewn across the battlefield, and the stomach-churning stench of putrefying flesh was pervasive and inescapable. On the front lines, it was impossible to remove the dead without exposing burial crews to deadly fire. If corpses were buried where they lay, mortar and artillery blasts exhumed them in violent upheavals and scattered them in fragments across the battlefield. Continued explosions mashed the exposed remains into fragments of bone and flesh, until nothing remained but streaks of red in the mud. The problem of sanitation was worse than on any other Pacific battlefield. William Manchester observed, “If you put more than a quarter million men in a line for three weeks, with no facilities for the disposal of human waste, you are going to confront a disgusting problem. We were fighting and sleeping in one vast cesspool.”50 Plump, writhing white maggots lived among them in the muck. When a man fell and then stood again, he found maggots squirming on his dungarees and cartridge belt, or tumbling out of his pockets. A fellow marine would scrape them off with the edge of a knife. For Gene Sledge, the maggots were very nearly the last straw: “Having to wallow in war’s putrefaction was almost more than the toughest of us could bear.”51 Seven months earlier, on Peleliu, he had been certain that he and his fellow marines were suffering through the worst combat conditions imaginable. But now, “I existed from moment to moment, sometimes thinking death would have been preferable. We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war. During the fighting around the Urmurbrogal Pocket on Peleliu, I had been depressed by the wastage of human lives. But in the mud and driving rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.”52
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