by Jeff Shaara
He raised the snout of the flamethrower, fumbled with the mechanism, and behind him, Mortensen yelled, “No …”
But the liquid flowed out, straight into the mouth of the cave, then up, higher, Yablonski losing control, the nozzle rising, pushing Yablonski back, the man tripping, falling backward. The napalm still spewed out, a fountain straight overhead. It ignited now, a thick burst of fire, seemed to hang airborne for a long second, then fell, coming down on Yablonski, around him, the man screaming, the fire enveloping him. Adams stood frozen, nothing to do, Mortensen shouting out, “No you stupid … no!”
The Japanese troops in the cave had disappeared, and more of the Marines moved up, no one talking, the men trying not to see the horror, Yablonski’s charred body still wrapped in fire, the grass and rocks around him smeared with burning jelly. Adams saw the second flamethrower crewman, wounded, his shoulder covered in blood, moving up on his knees to his buddy, dropping down. The man with the nozzle had been ripped apart by the Nambu, his buddy curling up with grief, a corpsman there now, working to treat the man’s wounds. Adams felt drawn to the flames, moved up toward the dying fire, stared at all that remained of Yablonski, black twisted flesh, saw Mortensen still eyeing the cave, and the sergeant said, “Can’t just shoot the thing like a rifle. It kicks like a mule. You gotta be prepared for the kick. Stupid bastard.”
Men were coming to life again, focusing on the job at hand, gathering in a wide arc around the cave’s opening, some moving up higher, searching for any ventilation hole. More men were moving up, another flamethrower crew, and Adams heard orders from Captain Bennett, the second flamethrower moving up close. The Marines stood back, all of them staying clear of the dying flames around Yablonski. The flamethrower operator aimed the nozzle, braced himself with one leg behind, the nozzle spewing a thick stream right into the mouth of the cave, then igniting, the men doing the job the way it should be done. The Marines kept back, some cheering, but the energy was gone, most of them just staring at the flames, knowing that if the men inside did not die by fire, seared lungs, they would die by suffocation, the flames sucking the air out completely. Adams watched alongside the others, rolling the words through his brain. Roast you bastards. Roast.
“Private!”
He held his stare toward the cave’s mouth, raised the shotgun, searched for any movement, but nothing came from the cave but black smoke, brush burning around the opening.
“Private!”
He backed away, turned toward the voice, saw Mortensen down on one knee. Adams saw that the hillside near the dead flamethrower was littered with bodies, the effects of the Nambu gun. Some of them were wounded, corpsmen moving up quickly, Captain Bennett moving among them, guiding the medical men to the ones who could be helped. Mortensen called out again, “Private! Here!”
Adams realized the sergeant was calling him, and he moved that way, Mortensen staring at him with thick tired eyes.
“Your buddy.”
He saw now, the red hair, the glasses askew, Welty’s helmet off, lying in the grass. Adams dropped to both knees, shock stabbing him, and Mortensen said softly, “Sorry. He was a good man. Those dirty bastards.”
Adams couldn’t breathe, stared at Welty’s face, the eyes partially closed, blood pouring up through Welty’s chest in thick bubbles, one round red hole in Welty’s throat, more blood. Adams yelled out, “Corpsman! Doc! Get the doc here!”
No one responded, and Adams grabbed Welty’s arm, tried to pull him up.
“Come on Jack! It’ll be okay! Come on!”
He couldn’t hold the tears away, felt Welty’s arm limp, no response from the man’s eyes, the blood on Adams now, too much blood. Bennett was there now, stood above him.
“He’s gone, son. The Nambu took out a half dozen of us. We need to tend to the ones we can help.”
Adams didn’t respond, stared through tears at his friend, pulled the helmet back, put it on Welty’s head, straightened his arms, saw the shotgun lying to one side, the stock broken, shattered.
“What do I do, Jack? What do I do now?”
“Come on, Private. We’ve got to keep moving. They’ll take care of him. You know his family?”
Adams looked up at the captain, shook his head. There was sadness in Bennett’s face, acceptance, and Adams realized that the captain had seen this before, too many times, had already lost most of the men he brought to the island.
“Let’s go, son. We’ve got more caves to root out.”
Bennett moved away, and Adams looked across the open ground, the black stain that had been Yablonski, the stink from the cave, the Marines moving on, mopping up what was left of the Japanese resistance. He tried to stand, no strength in his knees, stared at Welty’s face, could not stop the tears, wanted to say something, anything, some kind of goodbye. But there were no words, his thoughts a jumble of pain and grief. He put a hand on Welty’s arm, a thought flickering in his brain, and he raised Welty’s shoulder, saw the backpack, reached in, fished his hand around, felt the cardboard box, the K rations. He pulled it out, ripped it open, scattering the contents, picked up the small round can of stew, stuffed it in his pocket.
24. USHIJIMA
HEADQUARTERS CAVE,
NEAR MABUNI, SOUTHERN OKINAWA
JUNE 21, 1945
The letter had come from General Buckner on the seventeenth, but the date on the paper showed there had been a week’s delay in reaching Ushijima’s hand. That made perfect sense to the Japanese, since Yahara’s plan of retreat had depended on Buckner making the mistake of believing that Ushijima was still at his headquarters beneath the wreckage of the castle at Shuri. The letter had been gracious, polite, as though the American general was trying to reach out with a hand of sympathetic understanding, offering a warm handshake, while the other hand held a grenade.
The forces under your command have fought bravely and well. Your infantry tactics have merited the respect of your opponents in the battle for Okinawa. Like myself, you are an infantry general, long schooled and experienced in infantry warfare. You must surely realize the pitiful plight of your defensive forces. You know that no reinforcement can reach you. I believe, therefore, that you understand as clearly as I, that the destruction of all Japanese resistance on the island is merely a matter of days. It will entail the necessity of my destroying the vast majority of your remaining troops.
Ushijima had tossed the letter aside, the others on his staff reacting with loud derision and insults. But Ushijima’s reaction had surprised even his staff. The note made him laugh, the first real laughter he had enjoyed in many weeks. Buckner’s letter seemed to offer a compliment for Ushijima’s skills while also showing what seemed to be pity. It was obvious that Buckner assumed that Ushijima had options, one of which was surrender. He had not replied to the letter, could think of nothing at all that would educate the American commander in the ways of his army, his culture, in the vows that bound the Japanese to only one outcome. Now, as he sat alone in his room, reading the transcript of the radio message from Tokyo, he had another laugh, different this time. For the first time, Ushijima felt pity for the man whose complete ignorance of the Japanese had now resulted in an extraordinary piece of history. Ushijima had not believed it at first, assumed that the dispatch from the High Command was pure fiction, still more propaganda flowing out of Tokyo that only insulted the truth. But on the ground out beyond his headquarters, his own communications officers confirmed what the message said, others, artillerymen, reporting to Ushijima what they had seen. The final confirmation of the news had come from the Americans, the Japanese listening posts picking up amazingly blunt transmissions that echoed across their positions.
It had happened as so many monumental events happened, by pure accident. On June 18, Ushijima’s artillery spotters had caught the glimpse of a cluster of men gathered in an American observation post, a small clearing that was guarded by tall boulders. The Japanese had known of the place for days, Americans staring back at them through binoculars, a gue
ssing game that might result in a duel between the vast power of the American guns and those few that remained tucked into Ushijima’s defensive line. The Japanese had no reserves of ammunition, and so wasting shells on an observation post made little sense. But on this one day, the officer in command of Ushijima’s only remaining heavy gun along that part of the front had sensed that what he saw through his glasses were more than observers. And so the Japanese gun had fired five shells in quick succession toward the fat rocks that offered protection to the Americans. The gun had been rolled back quickly into hiding, the officer knowing that five bursts of fire were all he could dare before the Americans would find him with guns of their own. What that artillery officer could not yet know had come to Ushijima days later from Tokyo. In the American observation post, one of those men had been General Buckner himself. As a result of the accuracy of Ushijima’s gunner, or more likely, by pure dumb luck, Buckner had been struck by a blast of shrapnel from the rocks and the shells themselves, and had died in a matter of minutes.
Ushijima sipped from his teacup, thought, it is arrogance, the same arrogance that put the pen in General Buckner’s hand, daring to tell me how hopeless my situation must be. It was arrogance that took him to his own front lines, puffed up by the need to strut among his troops, displaying his plumage, like some fat peacock. What inspiration has his army drawn from their commander’s stupidity?
Ushijima set the cup down, tried to find some comfort on the hard mat beneath him, the wetness in the earth around him sucking any joy out of the moment. He had watched his staff react to the news of Buckner’s death with outright joy, and Ushijima thought, that is appropriate, certainly. Is that not what war is about? My equal, my foe has been destroyed by my guns. Not so long ago that would mean victory for my army, the enemy crushed by the mere symbolism of it, the slicing off of their head. Throughout history, how many wars have been lost by the death of a single man, the leader who would inspire his army by bearing the mantle as his army’s greatest warrior? But, no, the times have changed. The warrior has been replaced by the weaponry, so that even the coward may destroy his enemy from great distances. Even the unwilling can be ordered onto the battlefield, protected by steel. A single general cannot claim any victory, no matter what General Cho might believe. By pure chance we killed one arrogant fool, and there is not even a pause in the fighting. Already another fool has taken his place. Ushijima had received those reports as well, that Buckner’s position at the head of the American Tenth Army had been filled by the Marine general, Roy Geiger. So, he thought, what has been lost? Buckner will be denied his victory celebration, his promotion, the glory of a parade in his honor. And still we sit in mud and our own sewage, infested with lice and dysentery, waiting for the final battle. Or has that battle already been fought?
The cave that Yahara had secured for the new headquarters faced away from the enemy advance, with its primary entrance on a spectacular promontory that offered Ushijima a serene view of the wide-open ocean to the south. The hill overhead was yet another lush tropical landscape, the slopes bathed in sago palms and low pines, coral and rock chiseled by millennia of tropical storms. From the main entrance Ushijima could view the flat sugarcane fields to the west, a panorama of the small villages that dotted the coast. Though the cave was a poor comparison to the relative luxury at Shuri, Ushijima knew that Colonel Yahara had done his job, had located the most suitable place available, and there would be no complaints, not even from General Cho. But the serenity was short-lived, and already the Americans had disturbed the beauty of the ocean with their warships, and very soon the ground across the peninsula where his troops found new shelter was tormented by the ongoing assault of the American navy’s enormous guns. With the dryer weather, the planes came as well, daylong bombing attacks, strafing from the fighter planes, no safe place for his men to be, except the dark stinking holes in the ground. The fight to the north and east of his hill was going as badly as he had expected, the American army divisions there delayed only awhile by the valiant spirit of those few men he could place on the line. That spirit was no match for tanks, and from their caves the Japanese troops could not hold back the relentless push by American troops who knew that the end of this great fight was drawing closer every day. In a few short days after the retreat from Shuri had been completed, the lush hills around his own headquarters had become targets. The Japanese withdrawal had put his troops in a more compact defensive position, making them an easier target for the overwhelming American wave. There was no sanctuary at all, not even for Ushijima and his staff, the rumbles filling the caves, artillery and bombs already blowing away the vegetation, the hillsides above and around him churned up and denuded of anything green. The tropical paradise had been replaced now by the rotting corpses of his own men, too many for anyone to retrieve, too many for the meager memorial he knew they deserved. There was simply nowhere else to put them, and so they would be left where they fell. Each night now, instead of retrieving bodies, the patrols had one primary mission. The caves above Mabuni had no drinkable water at all, so patrols had to be sent down to the farmland for fresh water and anything edible, mostly sugarcane and sweet potatoes. Ushijima’s staff had been reduced to eating filthy balls of rice, the barest minimum to maintain their stamina, and the vegetables had been welcomed as a rare luxury. Even Ushijima had been forced to limit his own meals to the same fare his men relished, along with a few remaining cans of pineapple. But there was no illusion that his soldiers were enjoying even that much luxury. Along the front, food was usually nonexistent, some men scavenging any way they could. That might include stripping the bodies of dead Americans for the precious K rations or ravaging what remained of the food that might be held by the desperately terrified Okinawans. Reports of brutality reached him, but Ushijima chose not to punish anyone. There was no longer any time for courtesy to the farmers, to anyone who was not a part of his dwindling army. Ushijima had erased any thoughts of the civilians from his mind, had rationalized their plight completely. On every battlefield across the island, the Okinawans had experienced the consequences of staying put.
He swallowed the last of the tea, thought, they are an amazingly inferior people. They observed all the work we did, did much of it themselves, giving up their tombs so we could anchor machine guns among their ancestors. They chopped and shoveled to build Yahara’s caves, they saw our guns, they saw our soldiers, and when the Americans came they suffered the bombardments worse than we did. And yet, through all of that, so many of them have kept to their soil, their meager homes, their primitive protection, as though they believed all of this noise would just … pass them by. When we left Shuri, we warned them what would happen there, and yet so many of them chose to remain. We told them we were occupying these heights, and yet, right here, in these villages close to this hill, they still keep to their huts. Are their lives so miserable, so limited that their only source of hope comes from staying in their homes? Hope is not a part of anything we do now, and the Okinawans should know that. If they do not, it is not my fault. If they insist on remaining in the line of fire, that is a choice I cannot help. If my men find them to be of use, either in fighting the Americans or in other ways, then my men shall have what they need. He knew that his soldiers carried a new desperation, that the urgent retreat from the Shuri Line had crushed their morale. He had stopped paying attention to any protests from Okinawan officials, who begged him to give protection to their people. There are only so many caves, he thought, and only so many places where my men can fight the enemy. That will take priority over any civilian’s safety. Yes, civilians have been massacred, some in their own homes, some huddling beside the urns that hold their ancestors. But there is no time for pity. I have nothing to give them, and Tokyo has nothing to give me. There is no more mercy, for any of them, for any of us. It is, after all … war.
For the past two days, as the Americans understood that Ushijima’s diminishing army was now anchored in a much more compact area, the intensity of the Ame
rican bombardment had increased dramatically. Worse for the Japanese, the Americans were using a new weapon, napalm, dropped from aircraft on those places where the Americans suspected anyone could be hiding. Often they were accurate, the gelatinous fire engulfing the occupants of a cave, usually with no survivors. The blessing, of course, was a quick death, and Ushijima had convinced himself that it was the best way, that his soldiers accepted that as he did. The Yasukuni Shrine will welcome us all, he thought. There need not be suffering in this life for men who have done their duty.
Outside, the American loudspeakers could be heard, broadcasting messages in perfect Japanese, that his soldiers surrender themselves, that no one would be tortured. The civilians were receiving those messages as well, a rain of paper leaflets in every populated area, urging them to come over to the American positions, where food and safety awaited. Ushijima doubted that many of the Okinawans would believe the promises, the people too ignorant and too easily swayed by the Japanese propaganda that had been fed to them even before his army had arrived. Reports had also reached him of mass suicides, civilians and soldiers both, assembling in groups within the caves, grenades most efficient when detonated amid a tightly packed gathering. For his soldiers it was the proper way to die, to pass on to the afterlife without the humiliation of capture. For the civilians … Ushijima pondered that for a moment. I have no explanation for what they do. They believe the enemy is evil, and so I suppose that death is a preferable choice to capture. Whether they have honor at all … he stared at the earthen walls close to one side of him. I have no idea. Some of them serve us in honorable ways. For that we should be grateful. The women, certainly, and not in the ways Cho uses them. The nurses, yes, I do respect the nurses. He felt better now, as though some part of his conscience had been addressed.