The relative shallowness of the East China Sea afforded the Japanese the opportunity to sow an unusually high number of antishipping mines. One sank a U.S. destroyer in a matter of minutes. Blandy’s minesweepers had their hands full clearing approach lanes to the Hagushi beaches. Navy underwater demolition teams, augmented by Marines, searched for man-made obstacles in the shallows. And in a full week of preliminary bombardment, the fire support ships delivered more than twenty-five thousand rounds of 5-inch shells or larger. The shelling produced more spectacle than destruction, however, because the invaders still believed Ushijima’s forces would be arrayed around the beaches and airfields. A bombardment of that scale and duration would have saved many lives at Iwo Jima or Peleliu; at Okinawa this precious ordnance produced few tangible results.
Operation Iceberg nonetheless got off to a roaring start on Love-Day. The enormous armada, assembled from ports all over the Pacific, now stood coiled to project its landing force over the beach. This would be the ultimate seaborne forcible entry, the epitome of all the amphibious lessons learned so painstakingly from the crude beginnings at Guadalcanal and North Africa.
Kelly Turner made his final review of weather conditions, marveling at his recent good fortune. As at Iwo Jima, the amphibians would be blessed with good weather on the critical first day of the landing. Skies would be cloudy to clear, winds moderate east to northeast, a decent surf. At 0406 Turner announced, “land the landing force.” Combat troops already manning the rails of their transports then witnessed an unforgettable display of naval power—the sustained bombardment by shells and rockets from hundreds of ships, alternating with formations of attack aircraft streaking low over the beaches, bombing and strafing at will. Spruance and Turner had concentrated thirteen hundred ships offshore—the sense of raw dominance was tangible.
Historians Jeter A. Isely and Philip A. Crowl captured the moment nicely in this passage written six years after Love-Day at Okinawa:
Through the din and smoke, vessels carrying the first waves of landing troops slowly felt their way to their assigned positions, dropped their stern anchors, and came to rest fronting a shore line more than seven miles in length. These were strange craft that would have shocked any honest sailor ten years before—ungainly, flat-bottomed, scrofulous with varicolored camouflage paint. They were the tank landing ships (LSTs) . . . with double doors fitted into their bows almost flush with the water line. As the doors swung open, out swarmed hordes of another singular craft, the tracked landing vehicle (LVT), one of the few truly amphibian vehicles of the war.
Turner confirmed H-Hour at 0830. Now came the turn of the 2d Marine Division and the ships of the diversionary force to decoy the Japanese with a feint landing on the opposite coast. The ersatz amphibious force steamed into position, launched LVTs and Higgins boats loaded conspicuously with combat-equipped Marines, then dispatched them toward Minatoga in seven waves. Paying careful attention to the clock, the fourth wave commander crossed the line of departure exactly at 0830, the time of the real H-Hour on the west coast. The landing craft then turned sharply away and returned to the transports, mission accomplished.
There is little doubt that the diversionary landing (and a repeat performance the following day) achieved its purpose. In fact, Ushijima retained frontline infantry and artillery units in the Minatoga area for weeks thereafter as a contingency against the secondary landing he fully anticipated.
Yet the deception proved too successful. Japanese air units, convinced that this was the main landing, vectored a flight of kamikazes against the small force, seriously damaging the transport Hinsdale and LST 844. The 3d Battalion, 2d Marines, and the 2d Amphibian Tractor Battalion suffered nearly fifty casualties; the two ships lost an equal number of sailors. Ironically, the division expected to have the least exposure in the L-Day battle lost more men than any other division in the Tenth Army that day.
On the southwest approaches, the main body experienced no such interference. An extensive coral reef provided an offshore barrier to the Hagushi beaches, but by 1945 reefs no longer posed a problem to the landing force. Unlike Tarawa, where the reef dominated the tactical development of the battle, at Okinawa General Buckner had more than 1,400 LVTs to transport his assault echelons from ship to shore without hesitation. These long lines of LVTs now extended nearly seven miles as they churned across the line of departure on the heels of 360 armored LVT-As, whose turret-mounted, snub-nosed 75-mm howitzers blasted away at the beach as they advanced the final four thousand yards. Behind the LVTs came nearly 700 DUKWs bearing the first of the direct support artillery battalions.
Mary Craddock Hoffman
Marine Corps LVTA-5 armored amphibians lead the massive assault ashore at Okinawa on Love-Day, 1 April 1945. The landing swept across a seven-mile beach and succeeded in putting sixty thousand men ashore by nightfall. (U.S. Naval Institute)
The horizon behind the DUKWs seemed filled with lines of landing boats. These would pause at the reef to marry with outward bound LVTs. Soldiers and Marines alike had rehearsed transfer line operations exhaustively. There would be no break in the assault’s momentum this day.
“My amphibian tractor passed right between two huge battleships that were so close together I could have thrown a ball to the sailors,” wrote Lieutenant Kennard, the forward observer from the 11th Marines. “You should have seen the way they cheered us Marines on as we went by.”
The first assault wave touched down within three minutes of the designated H-Hour. Infantrymen stormed out of their LVTs, swarmed over the berms and seawalls, and entered the great unknown. The forcible invasion of Okinawa had begun. Within the first hour the Tenth Army projected sixteen thousand combat troops ashore—in order, unscathed, a cakewalk at last.
The morning continued to offer pleasant surprises to the invaders. They found no mines along the beaches, discovered the main bridge over the Bishi River still intact and—wonder of wonders—both airfields relatively undefended. The 6th Marine Division seized Yontan Airfield by 1300; the 7th Division had no problems securing nearby Kadena.
The rapid clearance of the immediate beaches by the assault units left plenty of room for follow-on forces, and the division commanders accelerated the landing of tanks, artillery battalions, and reserves. The mammoth buildup proceeded with only a few glitches. Four artillery pieces went down when their DUKWs foundered along the reef. Several Sherman tanks grounded on the reef. And the 3d Battalion, 1st Marines, had to spend an uncomfortable night in their boats when sufficient LVTs could not be mustered for transfer line operations along the reef at sunset.
These were minor inconveniences. Incredibly, by day’s end Turner and Buckner had sixty thousand troops ashore, occupying an expanded beachhead eight miles long and two miles deep. Losses in the entire Tenth Army, even including the hard-luck 2d Marine Division, amounted to 28 killed, 104 wounded, and 27 missing on L-Day. This represented barely 10 percent of the casualties sustained the first day on Iwo Jima.
Nor did the momentum of the assault slow appreciably after the Tenth Army broke out of the beachhead. The 7th Division reached the east coast on the second day. On the third day, the 1st Marine Division seized the Katchin Peninsula, effectively cutting the island in two. Raymond Spruance exalted in this progress in a letter to his wife, then added—likely as a warning to himself: “But there are many thousands of Japs on Okinawa and undoubtedly they will put up a stiff fight and have to be killed.”
The soldiers of XXIV Corps would be the first to encounter Ushijima’s prepared defenses along the northern edge of the Shuri complex, but the first several days ashore seemed idyllic to the veteran landing force. Their immediate problems stemmed from a sluggish supply system, still being processed over the beach. The reef-side transfer line worked well for troops but poorly for cargo. While Navy beachmasters labored to construct an elaborate causeway to the reef, the 1st Marine Division demonstrated some of its amphibious logistics prowess learned at Peleliu. The Old Breed brought with them to Okinaw
a a number of swinging cranes mounted on powered causeways; these they launched on call, securing them along the seaward side of the reef. As boats would pull alongside in deep water the cranes would transfer nets full of combat cargo into the open hatches of a DUKW or LVT waiting on the shoreward side of the reef for the final run to the beach. This procedure worked so well that the Tenth Army made the division share these jury-rigged assets with the other units, a backhanded compliment.
This is just one corner of the logistical masterpiece under way along Okinawa’s beaches to sustain the 180,000-man landing force of the U.S. Tenth Army in its protracted battle. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Beach congestion also slowed the process. Both Marine divisions resorted to using their replacement drafts as shore party teams. The inexperience of these men in this unglamorous but vital work, combined with the constant call for groups as replacements, created turmoil—traffic mayhem, haphazard supply dump development, rampant pilferage. The rapidly advancing assault divisions had an unexpected and soon-critical need for motor transport vehicles and bulk fuel, but these proved slow to land and distribute. Okinawa’s rudimentary road network further compounded the situation. In all, there were enough problems building up sustainability without the customary interference from enemy action or bad weather.
General Mulcahy did not hesitate to move the command post of the Tactical Air Force ashore as early as L+1. Operating from crude quarters between Yontan and Kadena, Mulcahy kept a close eye on the progress being made by the SeaBees (and Army and Marine engineers) in repairing both captured airfields. The first American aircraft, a Marine observation plane, landed on 2 April. Two days later the fields were ready to accept fighters. By the eighth day, Mulcahy could accommodate medium bombers and announced to the Fifth Fleet his assumption of control of all aircraft ashore. By then his fighter arm, the Air Defense Command, had been established ashore nearby under the leadership of Marine brigadier general William J. Wallace. With that, the F4U Corsairs of Col. John C. Munn’s MAG-31 and Col. Ward E. Dickey’s MAG-33 flew ashore from their escort carriers. Wallace immediately tasked them to fly Combat Air Patrols (CAP) over the fleet, already seriously embattled by massed kamikaze attacks.
Other air units poured ashore as well: air warning squadrons, night fighters, torpedo bombers, and an Army Air Forces fighter wing. While neither Yontan or Kadena were exactly safe havens—each received nightly artillery shelling and long-range bombing for the first full month ashore—the two fields remained in operation around the clock, an invaluable asset to both Spruance and Buckner.
General Geiger unleased the 6th Marine Division to sweep north in pursuit of a regiment of Japanese defenders. These were heady days for General Shepherd’s troops: riflemen clustered topside on tanks and self-propelled guns, streaming northward against an elusive foe. Not since Tinian had Marines enjoyed such exhilarating mobility. By 7 April the division had seized Nago, the largest town in northern Okinawa, and the Navy obligingly swept for mines and employed UDT to breach obstacles in order to open the port for direct, seaborne delivery of critical supplies. The 22d Marines continued north through broken country, reaching the far end of the island on L+12, having covered fifty-five miles from the Hagushi landing beaches.
Things took a serious turn for the balance of the division when the two thousand members of the Kunigami Detachment went to ground in prepared positions atop twelve-hundred-foot Mount Yae Take on the Motobu Peninsula. Rooting out these tenacious soldiers took the division six days of stiff fighting and nearly a thousand casualties, but in this process the new unit came of age. Shepherd and his colorful operations officer, Lt. Col. Victor H. “Brute” Krulak, already demonstrated great prowess with supporting arms. On 17 April, as one result, the 29th Marines found their assault on the deadly mountain eased considerably by exceptional fire support from the 14-inch guns of the old battleship Tennessee and low-level, in-your-pocket bombing from the Corsairs of Marine Fighting Squadron 322.
During the battle for Motobu Peninsula, the 77th Division again displayed its amphibious virtuosity by landing on the island of Ie Shima to seize its airfields. Major Jones’s Force Reconn Battalion helped pave the way by seizing a tiny islet six thousand yards from Ie Shima. Here the soldiers positioned a 105-mm battery as a fire support base to bolster the assault. The 77th needed plenty of fire support. Nearly five thousand Japanese defended the island. The soldiers overwhelmed them in six days of very hard fighting at a cost of eleven hundred casualties. One of these was the popular war correspondent Ernie Pyle, shot in the head by a Japanese Nambu gunner. Pyle was beloved of enlisted infantrymen in all theaters of World War II. Soldiers and Marines alike on Okinawa grieved his death. Six days earlier they had dealt with the news of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s passing.
The war in southern Okinawa had already turned ugly. Within the first week the soldiers of the 7th and 96th Divisions had answered the riddle of “Where are the Japs?” By the second week, both Buckner and Hodge were painfully aware of Ushijima’s intentions and the depth of his defensive positions. The Americans were entering killing zones of savage lethality.
These early U.S. assaults set the pattern to be encountered for the duration of the campaign in the south. Buckner committed the 27th Division, the XXIV Corps reserve, to the southern front, but it took time to readjust the front lines and build up adequate units of fire for field artillery to support the mammoth, three-division offensive the Tenth Army envisioned. After a week of intense staff activity (and troop inactivity), the offensive began on 19 April, preceded by the ungodliest preliminary bombardment of the ground war, a heralded “typhoon of steel” delivered by artillery, ships, and up to 650 aircraft. But the Japanese simply burrowed deeper into their underground fortifications and waited for the infernal pounding to cease. The XXIV Corps executed the assault with great valor, made some gains, then were thrown back with heavy casualties. The Japanese also exacted a heavy toll on U.S. tanks supporting the 27th Division in the fighting around Kakazu Ridge. In that battle, the Japanese separated the tanks from their supporting infantry by fire, then blew up twenty-two of the thirty Shermans with everything from mines to 47-mm guns to hand-delivered satchel charges.
The cakewalk had ended. Overcoming the concentric Japanese defenses around Shuri was going to require several divisions, massive firepower, and time—perhaps a very long time. Buckner needed immediate help. His operations officer directed General Geiger to provide the 1st Tank Battalion to the 27th Division. Neither Geiger nor del Valle would countenance the breakup of the 1st Marine Division’s veteran tank-infantry team. Geiger appealed to Buckner to refrain from piecemeal commitment of his Marines. Buckner agreed, then ordered Geiger to provide del Valle’s entire division.
During the next three days the 1st Marine Division moved south to relieve the now shot-up 27th Division on the western flank of the lines. The 6th Marine Division received a warning order to prepare for a similar mission in the south. The long battle for Okinawa’s southern highlands had shifted into high gear.
Meanwhile, throughout April and with unprecedented ferocity, the Japanese kamikazes had punished the ships of the Fifth Fleet supporting the operation. So intense had the aerial battles become that the western beaches, so beguilingly harmless on L-Day, became positively deadly each night with the steady rain of shrapnel from thousands of antiaircraft guns in the fleet. Ashore or afloat, there were no more safe havens.
The swarming kamikazes had bedeviled the Fifth Fleet from the time the advance force first steamed into Ryukyuan waters. No one had imagined the devastation these inexperienced pilots in their ramshackle, one-way planes would create. Spruance’s task forces, after all, contained the most effective combination of fighter-interceptors and antiaircraft batteries in the naval world. Indeed, only a few of the 2,373 kamikazes launched against the American fleet off Okinawa ever reached a target. But those “special attack unit” pilots who somehow survived the air and surface screens inflicted grievous damage. By the end of the
campaign, the Fifth Fleet would suffer 34 ships and craft sunk, 368 damaged, and over 9,000 casualties—the greatest losses ever sustained by the U.S. Navy in a single battle.
The Japanese also attacked the Fifth Fleet off Okinawa with their newest weapon, the “Baku bomb,” a manned, solid-fuel rocket packed with forty-four hundred pounds of explosives, launched at ships from the belly of a twin-engine bomber. The Baku bombs became in effect the first antiship guided missiles, screaming toward the target at an-unheard-of five hundred knots. One such weapon blew the destroyer Manert L. Abele out of the water. Fortunately for dozens of other U.S. ships, most Bakus missed their targets, the missiles proving simply too fast for the inexperienced pilots to control in their few dizzy seconds of glory.
The ultimate suicide attack was the final sortie of the superbattleship Yamato, the last of the world’s great dreadnoughts, whose feared 18.1-inch guns could outrange the biggest and newest U.S. battleships. Imperial General Headquarters dispatched Yamato on her last mission, a bizarre scheme by western standards—no air cover, a handful of surface escorts, only enough fuel for a one-way trip. She was to distract the American carriers to allow a simultaneous kikusui attack against the remainder of the fleet. Achieving this, Yamato would beach herself directly on Okinawa’s west coast, using her big guns to shoot up the nearby amphibious ships and the landing force ashore.
Storm Landings Page 19