Okinawa

by Robert Leckie

  Later in the day Yokoi’s fighters arrived off Okinawa’s airfields and were intercepted by American fighters on patrol above them. At three o’clock, with the Yankee fighters presumably driven from the area, the suiciders struck. They dove on the pickets of the radar screen and that forest of masts in Hagushi Anchorage. Some 200 of them came plummeting down for five hours until darkness veiled the sea or magnified the funeral pyres of stricken American ships.

  Destroyers Bush and Colhoun were sunk, Colhoun hit and staggered so frequently that she had to be abandoned and sunk by friendly fire. The ammunition ships Logan Victory and Hobbs Victory also went down, creating a temporary ordnance shortage for the Tenth Army. Nine other destroyers were damaged, as were four destroyer-escorts and five mine vessels.

  It was an impressive day’s work for the first sally of the kikusui even though they had lost 135 planes. But the kamikaze reports were as usual exaggerated, rivaling even those of the Thirty-second Army, claiming thirty American ships sunk and twenty more burning. Such bloated estimates so encouraged Admirals Ugaki and Toyoda that the Navy chief began to think that perhaps the world’s first suicide battleship—great Yamato—might really stagger the Americans during its one-way voyage to Okinawa and eternal glory.

  Yamato—named for the clan generally credited with founding the Japanese nation—was not only the most powerful battleship afloat, but also the most beautiful. On April 6, while hundreds of kamikaze roared down from the north, Yamato came trailing afterward in the spreading white majesty of her mighty bow wave.

  Yamato had survived the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where her sister Musashi had not. Yamato could outshoot anything in the U.S. Navy. She had nine 18.1-inch guns firing a projectile weighing 3,200 pounds a distance of 45,000 yards, compared to the 2,700-pound shell and 42,000-yard range of the American 16-inchers. She displaced 72,809 tons fully laden, and drew 35 feet. She was 863 feet long and 128 in the beam. She could hit 27.5 knots at top speed or cruise 7,200 miles at 16 knots. And she was sortying out of the Inland Sea for Okinawa with only enough fuel in her tanks for a one-way voyage.

  If soldiers and tanks, fliers and airplanes, sailors and boats could be enrolled in the ranks of the suiciders, it was logical that admirals and dreadnoughts should follow. There were three admirals coming with Yamato, and the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers. There might have been more of them and more warships, but Admiral Toyoda could scrape up only 2,500 tons of fuel for the venture. Although Toyoda had high hopes for the success of the kikusui,he could not have regarded Yamato’s sally as anything but a forlorn hope; he gave Rear Admiral Seichi Ito, commanding this Surface Special Attack Force, only two airplanes for protection. If it was the good fortune of Yamato and company to reach Okinawa unscathed, or at least with the huge battle-wagon and a few other ships intact, their mission was to fall like wolves upon the sheep of the American troop transports and supply ships in the Hagushi Anchorage, and then, with their fuel almost exhausted, beach themselves to support a sally by Ushijima’s Thirty-second Army with all their guns led by Yamato’s 18-inchers. At three-twenty on the afternoon of April 6, exactly twenty minutes after the first of the Floating Chrysanthemums dove on the Hagushi targets, Yamato and her escorts shoved off from Tokuyama.

  There had been a ceremony. At six o’clock, all men and officers not on duty had been broken out on deck. A message from Admiral Jisaburu Ozawa, chief victim of the Americans’ “Marianas Turkey Shoot,” was read:

  “Render this operation the turning point of the war.”

  The men sang the somber National Anthem, “Umi Yukaba”:Across the sea, corpses in the water,

  Across the mountain, corpses in the field.

  I shall die for the Emperor.

  I shall never look back.

  Next the ship’s company, convinced to the man that they would never survive this voyage, gave three Banzais for the emperor and returned to quarters. At ten o’clock, Yamato was in the Pacific Ocean—racing down Kyushu’s eastern shores with her consorts gathering about her, shooing the American submarine Hackleback away, swinging to starboard off Kyushu’s southern nose to sail west through Van Diemen Strait into the East China Sea.

  Admiral Ito was taking the Surface Special Attack Force on a big swing west-northwest in hopes of pouncing on the Americans off Okinawa at about dusk of the next day.

  But Hackleback had already alerted Admiral Spruance, and shortly before half-past eight the next morning a scout plane from Essex spotted the Japanese force just southwest of Kyushu, less than four hundred miles above Okinawa.

  Patrol planes began taking off from Kerama-retto.

  At ten o’clock, Yamato’s pathetic pair of fighter escorts flew back to Japan.

  At ten-thirty Rear Admiral Morton Deyo was ordered to take six battleships, seven cruisers, and twenty-one destroyers north and place them between the approaching Japanese warships and the American transports. At almost the same moment the patrol planes found Yamato sailing at twenty-two knots in the middle of a diamond-shaped destroyer screen, with cruiser Yahagi trailing behind. The big planes shadowed the naked enemy fleet like vultures.

  “Hope you will bring back a nice fish for breakfast,” Admiral Turner signaled Admiral Deyo.

  The commander of the intercepting force seized a signal blank and pencil to write his reply. “Many thanks, will try—” An orderly handed him an intercepted message. Scouts of the Fast Carrier Forces had found the enemy. Three groups totaling 380 planes were preparing to strike. “Will try to,” Deyo concluded, “if the pelicans haven’t caught them all!”

  The “pelicans” had.

  At half past twelve the American warbirds were over the target. Ten minutes later two bombs exploded near Yamato’s main-mast. Another four minutes and a torpedo had pierced her side. At the same moment destroyer Hamakaze stood on her nose and slid under, and Yahagi took a bomb and a fish and went dead in the water.

  There was a respite.

  The Americans came again at half-past one and planted five torpedoes in Yamato’s port side. Water rushed into boiler and engine rooms, and the stricken mammoth began to lean to port. Rear Admiral Kosaku Ariga, Yamato’s captain, ordered counter-flooding in the starboard boiler and engine rooms. Ensign Mitsuru Yoshida attempted to warn the men there. Too late. They were sacrificed.

  Still Yamato listed, and she had but one screw working. Her decks were a shambles of cracked and twisted steel plates. Her big guns would not work. The watertight wireless room was filled with water, and an explosion had wrecked the emergency dispensary and killed everyone inside.

  At two o’clock the final attack began.

  Hellcats and Avengers plunged from the skies to strike at the hapless ship. Yamato was shaken fore and aft and the entire battleship shuddered violently. Communications with the bridge were cut off, the distress flag was hoisted, the steering room became flooded, and with the rudder jammed hard left, mighty Yamato sagged over to a list of thirty-five degrees.

  “Correction of list hopeless!” the executive officer cried.

  Down came the Americans for the death blow.

  “Hold on, men!” Ariga shouted. “Hold on, men!”

  Bombs were striking around and upon Yamato, raising a giant clanging, flinging waves of roaring air across her decks, jumbling men together in heaps. Out of one pile crawled high-ranking staff officers. Admiral Ito struggled to his feet. His chief of staff arose and saluted him. The two men regarded each other solemnly. Ito turned, shook hands with each of his staff officers, wheeled, and strode into his cabin, either to embrace death or await it—the world will never know which. Admiral Ariga rushed to save the emperor’s portrait, but met death instead.

  Yamato was dying slowly, like the giant she was. Her decks were nearly vertical, her battle flag all but touched the waves, explosions racked her monster body, her own ammunition began blowing up—and all around her were her sister ships in death agonies. Yahagi was sinking, Isokaze, Hamakaze, Asashimo, and Kasumo had received their de
ath blows.

  At twenty-three minutes after two Yamato slid under, a full day’s steaming from Okinawa.

  Japan had lost her navy, the suicide battleship had failed, and it was now up to the kikusui and the men of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima.

  Fiery Failure at Kakazu Ridge

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The honeymoon had been brief for Major General John Hodge’s Twenty-fourth Corps—hardly more than a weekend.

  The day after Love Day, the Twenty-fourth’s spearheads raced across the island, Seventh Division on the left, Ninety-sixth on the right, turning to their right (or south) the next day for the anticipated rapid down-island advance. Their progress seemed as bloodless as the Marine drive in the north.

  But on April 4 they found resistance “stiffening.”

  It grew stiffer daily until, on April 8, “greatly increased resistance” was reported. They had come into the outerworks of Ushijima’s Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru Line, and probably its most formidable position: Kakazu Ridge.

  At first glance, Kakazu (pronounced “Cock-a-zoo”) did not seem especially difficult: neither unusually high nor uncommonly steep. Three-quarters of a mile south the Urasoe-Mura Escarpment seemed a much more difficult natural barrier. That was what Colonel Eddy May thought when he prepared to send his 383rd Regiment of the Ninety-sixth Division against it. Studying Kakazu from his headquarters atop another ridge, he considered its seizure a preliminary to an assault on Urasoe-Mura. His maps suggested no other conclusion, although Colonel May was not aware that the map was probably made from photographs taken when the entire area was obscured by clouds. Kakazu was a rough coral hogback about a thousand yards long running from the coastal flats in the west on a northwest-southeast keel. It was formed by two hills of the smaller Kakazu West on May’s right flank, and the larger Kakazu Ridge proper to his left.

  What Colonel May—and General Hodges—also could not suspect was that Kakazu’s defenders under Colonel Munetatsu Hara had been fortifying their position for months. Assisted by Okinawan laborers, they had constructed a subterranean honeycomb of caves, tunnels, and passageways. This would not be the first such “impregnable” position encountered by Americans in the Pacific War: what made it unique was its complete camouflage, its incredible variety and number of fortified positions, its depth, its abundance of supplies and ammunition—including a spigot-mortar unit launching huge 320 mm shells—its network of mutually supporting emplacements firing interlocking fire, and its absolute invulnerability to those nineteen-hundred-pound shells hurled at it by the battleship Colorado cruising offshore.

  Because Colonel Hara had buried his headquarters deep below the main ridge, he had complicated his communications: his only problem. Although many tunnels had interconnecting passages and there were also voice tubes, some underground positions were isolated, compelling Hara to use runners who would be exposed to enemy fire once they appeared above ground. Hara had no fear of the Americans’ plentiful and powerful tanks, so superior to the Japanese diminutive “kitchen sinks” that had been nevertheless unstoppable against inferior or lightly armed troops in the Manchuria-Burma-Philippines campaigns. Fronting Kakazu Ridge and running its entire length was a deep gorge cut into the coral by the immemorial passage of a narrow stream. The gorge was a natural antitank obstacle, impassable to tracked vehicles. For tanks to attempt to turn either flank of the ridge would bring down on them a storm of artillery.

  Finally, Colonel Hara had emplaced outposts in tombs and concrete pillboxes on the ridge’s northern face. Most effective of all, he had cleverly emplaced most of his infantry and all of his mortars on the southern or reverse slope of the ridge. They were thus in untouchable defilade, shielded from enemy troops, artillery, and even American battleships. Not even enemy mortars, with that weapon’s high, looping trajectory, could reach them. Moreover, the Americans were absolutely unaware of this reverse-slope concentration; while Hara, of course, had his entire front registered by his own guns.

  Thus, Kakazu Ridge.

  Colonel May was sometimes called “a soldier of the old school”—meaning that he believed that the brave charge could usually carry the day. This does not suggest that he would not maneuver, only that faced by such a forbidding unflankable position, he would instinctively fall back on the frontal assault. So he ordered two of his three battalions to storm Kakazu Ridge and Kakazu West on April 9, actually expecting both to fall by the following morning. This meant that—in accordance with American infantry doctrine—a battalion of three companies would use two of them in attack with the third in reserve, and thus, two companies would strike the main ridge and two more Kakazu West, with the remaining two on call in their rear. To achieve surprise, there would be no artillery preparation beforehand, and all units would attack before daylight.

  Right at the start one of the companies assaulting Kakazu West was late moving out and did not march until daylight, when it was sighted and promptly pinned down. The other company was commanded by a born fighter and leader, First Lieutenant Willard Mitchell, a powerfully built southerner who had played both football and basketball for Mississippi State. Idolized by his men and called “Captain Hoss,” he was also beloved for his un-bashful battle cry: “Watch out! Here comes ‘the Hoss’—and God is on the Hoss’s side!” Mitchell returned their affection by calling them his “Lardasses,” a fondly derisive and droll nickname that they loved.

  Mitchell’s Lardasses were quick to ascend Kakazu West under cover of darkness, and not particularly dismayed to learn that they were alone on its crest and that their supporting comrades were pinned down below. They also found that the position was composed of two knolls—one on the north, and the other to the south, forming Colonel Hara’s reverse slope. Between them was a shallow saddle of land. The moment that the Japanese emerged from their steel-and-coral fortress, Mitchell quickly formed his company into a perimeter on the saddle, just deep enough to conceal a prone man. He hoped to riddle them if they charged forward to clear both saddle and northward knoll. But the enemy refused to oblige, opening fire from their own position and showering the saddle with hand grenades and satchel charges, bags stuffed with explosive. Mitchell’s men fought back with the same weapons, and a furious battle raged back and forth all morning long—with men killed and wounded on both sides.

  Throughout the action, Mitchell roved the besieged saddle, hurling grenades and firing his carbine, his battle cry booming from his lips. His men were his gallant equal, and one of them —Pfc. Joseph Solch—spotted an enemy spigot mortar mounted in a cave on the reverse slope. Just one of its 320 mm shells could destroy the Americans on the saddle. With Captain Hoss, Solch and his buddies attacked the huge mortar, destroying it with hand grenades and killing its nine-man crew.

  At about noon, sensing that the Americans had but a small force in front of him, Colonel Hara ordered his men to make a series of four furious counter-attacks on the enemy. So that they might surprise the Americans, and with brutal indifference to their destruction or survival, he sent them charging through his own mortar fire. Lieutenant Bill Curran killed both the leaders of the first charge, while his men repulsed the Japanese with heavy loss. When a second assault came, Solch, squatting on his haunches, fired his Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) from the hip to repel an entire company. In the final charge, the Japanese—throwing “satchel charges as big as boxes of apples”—came within a few feet of overrunning the “American devils” but finally fell a few feet short.

  Even so, Mitchell’s company was being badly whittled. Because his soldiers were lying on hard coral, they could not get below ground by scooping out foxholes, and thus were inviting targets for enemy riflemen and exposed to the flame and fragments of exploding mortar shells.

  Fierce fighting also raged atop Kakazu Ridge to the east, or left of Mitchell’s position. Here the Japanese popped in and out of their barricaded caves to strike the men of companies led by Captain Jack Royster and First Lieutenant Dave Belman. They also charged up the reverse slo
pe, again braving their own mortars. An entire American platoon was pinned down by a pair of enemy machine guns. Pfc. Edward Moskala crawled toward them, clutching his BAR. When close enough but still unobserved, he hurled grenades at the unsuspecting Japanese, rising to rush them spraying bullets. Both guns were knocked out.

  Now Lieutenant Belman was hit, refusing evacuation despite great loss of blood. Captain Royster took a mortar fragment in the face. In exquisite pain and nearly blind, he also refused to leave. But it was becoming plain to both officers that the enemy was gaining the upper hand. GIs had already begun to withdraw off the ridge crest, hunting protection in the numerous caves and holes on the ridge’s northern face. After Royster radioed battalion for help, Lieutenant Colonel King ordered another company to the rescue. But this unit got no farther than the gorge, crouching with the men who had been pinned down there since sunup. King now believed that his battalion was in trouble and asked May for permission to withdraw. May refused, telling King that he’d lose as many men withdrawing as he would holding the hill. He also told him that if he was “jumpy, have the executive officer take over.” Understandably, there was no reply.

  Captain Royster on the ridge had a far better appreciation of his danger than either hard-boiled Eddy May or the cautious Colonel King. His and Belman’s company could not possibly retreat in full view of the enemy. So Royster called for smoke shells from the Eighty-eighth Chemical Mortar Battalion. They went humming up and looping down, but the wind blew them back into Royster’s face. Eventually there was enough smoke to conceal a withdrawal, and the GIs began crawling down toward the gorge, many of them carrying wounded buddies with them. Ed Moskala was the last man down, but when he learned that a wounded man unable to move was still atop the ridge, he went back up to bring him safely down.