Turner had long put the demands of his job over tending to his public image. He had belatedly come to appreciate that this neglect had contributed to a distorted public perception of the navy’s amphibious campaigns in the Pacific. MacArthur’s anti-navy diatribes had gained him an edge in the interservice public relations war, and Turner considered it a point of honor to set the record straight.
Life magazine’s Robert Sherrod recalled the February 16 press conference aboard Eldorado vividly: “[It] was a rather emotional affair—there was the sort of pit-of-the-stomach emotion one feels when he knows many men who love life are about to die. Kelly Turner, peering over his spectacles and looking like Grant Wood’s American Gothic farmer, ran the conference.”
“The primary objective,” Turner began, “is to capture Iwo Jima for fighters which can accompany B-29 bombers in their raids on Japan . . . We expect losses, of ships, and of troops,” he continued solemnly. Turner’s entire demeanor—including the full back brace he wore daily—reflected the leaden weight of that burden.
“They will be considerable.”
He paused and looked into the faces around the room, as though to allow a moment for that unavoidable reality to be absorbed.
“But we are taking steps to keep them as low as possible . . . Iwo Jima is as well defended as any other fixed position in the world today. Gibraltar would be a setup by comparison . . . We are going to have losses, but we expect to take the position.”
He continued at length on the details of the upcoming operation, finishing his remarks by explaining that Eldorado would have to leave Iwo Jima “after a few days, to prepare for future operations.”
“Everyone knew he was talking about Okinawa,” Sherrod recalled, “but he did not name it.”
The next to take the microphone was USMC General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith who would be in charge of the tens of thousands of US Marines fighting ashore. The gathered assembly needed no introduction to Smith; he had already led a number of hard-won Pacific campaigns in the Gilberts, Marshalls, and Marianas. The general’s delivery was punctuated by deep, collecting breaths.
“There is very little I can add,” he began haltingly. “The stage is set. There has been a tremendous amount of preparation by a large number of officers and men. Everything that can be done has been done . . .
“This is not set up,” Smith then said abruptly, wagging his finger as though he’d heard a rumor. “Anybody who indulges in such wild flights of fancy has had no experience against these Japs. Every cook and baker will be on the beach with some kind of weapon . . . Aerial photographs show that the number of pillboxes has increased since October and especially since December, and the Japs on Iwo have no barracks aboveground. We have got to dig them out . . . There is no maneuver ground. This is a frontal attack.”
Smith paused.
“The proper way to do it is as quickly as possible,” he resumed, stressing the One and Only Marine Way. “We are not accustomed to defensive positions. There is nothing more detrimental to [Marine] morale than to be stabilized. Almost every weapon the Japs have got can reach us on the beaches. We may have to take high casualties—maybe forty percent of the assault troops.”
Here he paused again.
“In Admiral Turner we have full confidence—we would rather go to sea with him in command than any other admiral under whom we have served. The navy brought us out here, and we have never yet had to swim ashore . . . though sometimes it has been close.”
He allowed a smirk at the jab, which referred to the abrupt pullback of navy ships during the first landings on Guadalcanal. There were reports that by the end of his remarks, the tough-as-nails, foul-mouthed, cigar-chomping “Howlin’ Mad” Smith was misty-eyed. He concluded by saying, simply, “We have never failed, and I don’t believe we shall fail here.”
There was universal surprise when Admiral Turner introduced the next speaker: Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. He had traveled all the way from Washington to observe firsthand the battle for Iwo Jima.
“It has just been said,” Forrestal began, “that you are honored to have me here . . . Quite the reverse is true. It is a high privilege to see in action the quality of leadership America has produced. I have seen Admiral Turner before, in the summer of 1942. His job was to take Guadalcanal with the US Marines. It was a tough job—a very tough job. But that was his mission, and he did it. The American people still do not realize the narrow margin of that pivot point of the Pacific War.
“I am also impressed,” he continued, “by the meticulous precision of these operations; the amount and extent of planning that is required. This is a different kind of war that must be fought out here. These assaults on limited land areas present a tough task . . . Iwo Jima, like Tarawa, leaves very little choice except to take it by force of arms, by character, and courage.”
Secretary Forrestal ended by giving generous due credit. “My hat is off to the marines. I think my feeling about them is best expressed by a letter written by a major general to his wife after Tarawa. He said, ‘I can never again see a United States Marine without experiencing a feeling of reverence.’ ”
THREE DAYS OF THE most intense naval bombardment of the Pacific War immediately got under way. The ships’ pounding of Iwo Jima came after seventy-four straight days of aerial bombardment, the longest ever ahead of a Pacific invasion. In all, 7,500 tons of bombs were dropped, and 22,000 shells were lobbed at the tiny atoll, mostly—the marines would soon find out—for naught.
The Japanese had tunneled down seventy-five feet beneath Iwo’s barren landscape and constructed a vast, impregnable bulwark, which the long cannonade barely scratched. Miles of tunnels linked subterranean command posts, living quarters, ammunition dumps, and hundreds of concealed pillboxes with forty-inch-thick walls. Mount Suribachi alone had seven levels of passageways connecting a thousand individual chambers. There were multiple entrances, exits, stairwells, and interconnecting corridors, all lined with an ultrahard concrete made from plentiful indigenous volcanic ash.
Iwo Jima’s D-day—February 19—began at 0830 with Admiral Turner’s customary bellow through the ships’ speakers, “Land the landing force!” Waves of marine-loaded landing craft and amtracs cranked away from the anchorage toward the beaches at the signal.
At the shoreline, however, they were stopped in their tracks by soft, black volcanic ash, exposing men and machines to torrents of fire coming from concealed subterranean hideouts. By the end of Day One, two thousand casualties littered the beaches and barely beyond.
CINCPAC’s After Action Report detailed the unfolding horror:
With each wave, boats would be picked up and thrown broadside onto the beach, where succeeding waves swamped and wrecked them and dug them deeply into the sand, beyond hope of salvage . . . [They] . . . could not be dragged up even when assisted by caterpillars. The coarse volcanic sand had no cohesive consistency . . . Troops debouched from the landing crafts struggled up the slopes under heavy fire, ankle deep in it. Wheeled vehicles bogged to their frames, tanks stalled in the surf, and the 40% grade of the cinder slope brought amphibious tractors to a halt. As vehicles left the LST ramps, they immediately sank down, their spinning treads banking the sand back under the ramps, making it harder for each succeeding vehicle.
In his first Iwo dispatch from Eldorado, Robert Sherrod summarized the early landings with astounding understatement: “The Jap plan of defense was plain. Only a few men would defend the beaches. The mortars and machine guns from the hillside caves . . . would stop the landing.”
Up on deck, Turner, Smith, Forrestal, and rotating flag staff watched through binoculars with jaws clenched. Rising smoke and ash obscured their view, but beachhead reports confirmed quickly what their collective gut already had: the landings had emphatically not gone according to plan. Little ground had been gained, and bullet-riddled bodies were strewn along miles of beach.
Bill barely saw his bunk in the grim early going of Iwo Jima. He spent most of that
time shuttling between Admiral Turner’s quarters and the CIC. He also monitored relays among the Navajo code talkers; the admiral demanded every decoded transmission as soon as it was available. Tensions ran high as Navajo receivers in Eldorado’s CIC transcribed each gruesome transmission (“Catching all hell from the quarry”; “Taking heavy casualties and can’t move. Mortars killing us”), and Bill delivered them dutifully to Admiral Turner.
By February 21—D-day Plus 2—Holland Smith’s dreaded estimates had already become reality: casualties on the beach were running 40 percent. “[The beach] is a two-mile stretch of death . . . all of it ours,” reported Staff Sergeant David Dempsey. “An officer in charge of a tank landing boat received a direct shell hit while trying to free his boat from the sand. He was blown in half. A life preserver supports the trunk of his body in the water.”
That evening brought another rude surprise. The hundreds of warships at anchor themselves came under siege. Fifty planes, thirty-two of them kamikazes, dropped from a low cloud ceiling just before nightfall—the witching hour for such raids, nerve-frayed crews would learn—and thrust themselves with savage ferocity at ships in the anchorage. The carrier Bismarck Sea was hit by two planes and sank in ninety minutes. Attempts to rescue the hundreds of sailors left foundering in dark and heavy seas continued through the night, but more than three hundred were lost. Several other ships were damaged; a mere foretaste of what was to come.
To protect the ship’s battle command center, not to mention the secretary of the navy, Eldorado briefly withdrew to a protected position that night. From that point forward, a raw fear hung over the seven-mile-wide flotilla. Kamikazes seemed to select targets at random and were nearly impossible to defend against.
There was much discussion of this terrifying new threat in the 0400 CIC briefing on D-day Plus 3. Among the decisions made was that the press would not be allowed to report on this disturbing new enemy tactic. Recently returned from the beachhead, a shaken Robert Sherrod handed Bill his draft copy for review. Its opening line was: “Iwo Jima can only be described as a nightmare in hell.”
Sherrod then dropped a bomb of his own. “Wheeler’s been hit. He got it right through the neck when he stood up in the shell hole.” Bill’s dismay at the loss registered before Sherrod could add that his foxhole companion at Attu, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Saipan, and Tinian “was lucky, actually—he fell into the arms of two doctors and less than ten feet from a box of plasma. On his way to Aiea Heights by now.”
Otherwise the day began much as the previous two had: with high casualty reports and gained ground measured in yards. On the other side of the command center, a glum Secretary Forrestal studied aerial photographs of the thoroughly pocked objective. “The planes just can’t do it on an island like this,” he said. Forrestal had hoped to go ashore to observe the operation, but Holland Smith would not allow it.
D-day Plus 4 began rainy and gray, reflecting the mood inside the smoky nerve center. Clacking teletype and the pinging, buzzing, and beeping of electronics were interrupted less by conversation than by the percussive snap of metal cigarette lighters. Next to the Navajo transmission operators—perhaps the busiest of all—were the men directing evacuation of the wounded to hospital ships already overflowing with casualties.
Around midmorning, the somber din was broken by an unusually excited transmission over the Navajo radio net. It was from code talker Teddy Draper to Holland Smith’s command post on the beach. Bill stood impatiently over the translator as he methodically transcribed this message: “Asdla-ma-as-tso-si tse-nihl gah tkin nesh-chee dzeh Ashihi, Tkin Ts-a Ma-e A-Kha: Belasana Be Moasi. Bi-tsan-dehnah-jad-ah n-kih tseebii Dzeh Nakia, taa has-clish-nih Besh-legai-a-lah-ih Lin Klizzie . . . nihl neeznaa n-kih nos-bas.”
When he finished, the translator handed Bill the piece of paper. Bill blinked his bloodshot eyes and studied the document:
To: 5th Marine Division Info: ADC
From: LT 28 E Company, 3rd Platoon:
Sergeant Ernest Thomas [USMCR] platoon raised US flag and secured Mt. Suribachi at 1020.
A tremendous chorus of cheers and ships’ horns reverberated throughout the anchorage as Bill clutched the message and loped in the direction of Admiral Turner. He found his boss standing on the flag bridge in the mist, already training his field glasses to Iwo Jima’s highest elevation where Old Glory was rippling in the breeze.
ON MARCH 9 ELDORADO hastened out of Iwo Jima waters, even though the battle would rage on for two more weeks. The five-day estimate to secure the island had been weeks short of the mark; their delayed departure further shrank the flagship’s planned rehearsal hiatus in the Philippines. That delay was exacerbated by a seven-hundred-mile detour to Guam to collect a surprise addition to the Okinawa leadership team.
In a dispatch straight from Washington, US Army Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner had been ordered to replace USMC General Holland Smith as commander of all landed forces at Okinawa. Grounded in spite, the decision was a direct result of Holland Smith’s controversial demand for the replacement of Army General Ralph Smith at Saipan in the heat of battle.
Senior army brass all the way up to General Marshall had seethed over the incident ever since, and this would be their revenge. The revered Holland Smith thus became the highest-ranking victim of an interservice power struggle that had plagued the Pacific War from its inception. Not only would he not lead the invasion at Okinawa, the ground force charged with taking the next objective would be army infantry this time, not marines; a first for Admiral Turner and the amphibians. Moreover, neither Buckner nor his infantry had any previous amphibious assault experience.
It was an inauspicious beginning. Admiral Turner and General Buckner had only one thing in common: neither had ever landed a field army—another immense bait-and-switch for the planners. Moreover, this newlywed amphibian team now had less than half the allotted time to rehearse landing an untested force on a land mass fifty-six times the size of Iwo Jima and maniacally defended by 120,000 Japanese. Despite these escalating pressures, Admiral Turner insisted that Bill go ashore at Leyte as planned.
On the evening of March 15, Eldorado finally led the amphibian task force into Leyte Gulf and Bill took the launch to the beachhead the next morning. He hurried from Quonset hut to Quonset hut making inquiries to harried staff at each stop. It took half that first day to learn he was on the wrong island. Evacuating prisoners were being processed at a place called San Fernando la Union, and the central repository for prisoner records was Bilibid Prison in Manila. Both places were on Luzon.
The next morning, March 17, Bill’s Irish luck was with him. He caught a transport to Luzon’s Poro Point on Lingayen Gulf, also now a bustling Allied beachhead. Bill hitched a ride into San Fernando la Union with an army sergeant. They chatted amiably as the jeep lurched along a sandy road lined with mango groves and into the ruins of San Fernando. Bill walked toward a shrapnel-pocked train station, next to which stood a temporary structure with a “Replacement Center” sign over the door. This was where he’d been told that ex-prisoners were being processed. Was his search for Barton about to come to an abrupt end?
He found the enclosure mostly empty. One hundred twenty-five US Navy prisoners had just been put on a ship in Lingayen Gulf and evacuated to the States, a sympathetic army nurse told him; would he like to see the list? The manifest was of prisoners recently liberated from Bilibid. In his initial split-second review, Bill’s heart made the wildest of leaps. He thought he’d caught the prize: “Cross, USNR, Cavite Navy Yard.” Could it be? He had to steady himself before tracing his finger back to the spot, for a careful rereading. “Cross, Cornelius, USNR, Cavite Navy Yard.” The crush of disappointment lengthened with the discovery that there were no other Crosses on either the “liberated” or subsequent “rescued” lists supplied by the nurse.
That didn’t mean Barton hadn’t survived, she assured an obviously disappointed Bill. Too little was known at this point. And yes, she added, he should go to Manila. Thousan
ds of prisoner records were at Bilibid; tens of thousands, actually.
Back at Poro Point, Bill boarded one of the many PT boats traveling back and forth between Lingayen Gulf and Manila Bay. A call at Manila during his midshipman cruise had dimmed in Bill’s memory, but he remembered the general layout of the city. Given the reported condition of Manila’s roads and likely difficulty finding transportation, he might have to make his way to Bilibid on foot. The Lingayen nurse had warned that GIs working at the prison had only just started to make sense of the jumble of records, grave registrations, and other documents left in total disarray by the fleeing Japanese.
Reports of Manila’s final ravaging had prepared Bill for a city radically altered from what he remembered. But what came into focus during the slow putter toward Pier 7 was beyond his bleakest imaginings. The sheer volume of floating wreckage—bodies drifting past scores of overturned hulks, masts poking up like dead trees from a swamp. The bay was nearly unnavigable. The stench of rotting flesh in the tropical heat forced Bill to pick his way up the bomb-pocked pier with his nose covered with a handkerchief.
US troops had stormed Manila in early February, but there had been another month of vicious street-by-street, building-by-building, and floor-by-floor combat before the city was declared secure. MacArthur himself had only entered Manila’s smoldering remains on March 4, and not along a cheering parade route feting his sixty-fifth birthday as he had once envisioned. Between the rubble from blasted buildings and the bomb-cratered, body-strewn pavement, the streets were barely passable—even for General MacArthur. An estimated hundred thousand civilians had died in the final struggle, many first brutally raped or mutilated. The bodies of countless Manileros—men, women, and children—were covered with pieces of corrugated tin or other debris to preserve some tiny measure of dignity.
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