Storm Landings

by Joseph H. Alexander

  In earlier years of the war the sortie of this mammoth warship would have caused consternation among the U.S. fleet protecting an amphibious beachhead. Not now. Patrolling U.S. submarines gave Spruance early warning of Yamato’s departure from Japanese waters. “Shall I take them or will you?” asked Marc Mitscher, commanding the fast carriers of Task Force 58. Interesting choice. Spruance knew his battleship force yearned for a surface engagement to avenge their losses at Pearl Harbor, but this was no time for sentiment. “You take them,” he signaled. With that, Mitscher’s Hellcats and Avengers roared aloft, intercepted Yamato a hundred miles from the beachhead and sank her with ridiculous ease. The cost: eight U.S. planes, a dozen men.

  Another bizarre Japanese suicide mission proved more effective. On the night of 24–25 May, six transport planes loaded with Giretsu, Japanese paratroop commandos, approached the U.S. airbase at Yontan. Alert antiaircraft gunners flamed five. The surviving plane made a wheels-up, belly landing on the airstrip, discharging troops as she slid in a shower of sparks along the tarmac. The scrambling commandos dispersed in the darkness, blew up eight U.S. planes, damaged twice as many more, set fire to seventy thousand gallons of aviation gasoline, and raised hell throughout the night. Jittery aviation and security troops fired at shadows, injuring their own men more than the Japanese. It took twelve hours to hunt down and kill the last raider.

  Spruance at sea and Mulcahy ashore exerted herculean efforts to reduce the effectiveness of this air offensive. American and British carriers struck the heavily camouflaged Japanese airfields in Kyūshū and Formosa time and again. Small landing parties of soldiers and Marines seized outlying islands in the Ryukyus to establish early warning and fighter direction outposts. And fighter planes from all three services took to the air to intercept the intermittent waves of enemy planes.

  Not all the Japanese air strikes were kamikazes. An equal number of fighters and bombers accompanied each raid to guide the suiciders to their victims and attack other American targets by conventional means. Some of these included late-model fighters like the Nakajima “Frank.” Deadly air-to-air duels took place over hundreds of miles of ocean expanse. The CAP planes ran a double risk. Dueling a Japanese fighter often took both planes within range of nervous shipboard AA gunners who sometimes unwittingly downed both antagonists.

  Even without the mass kikusui attacks, small groups of suiciders appeared every night. The fleet seemed particularly vulnerable during the full moon. One naval officer described the nighttime raiders as “witches on broomsticks.” More often than not, the victims of these nocturnal attacks were the “small boys,” the picket ships and diminutive amphibs. Nineteen-year-old Signalman 3/c Nick Floros manned a 20-mm gun mount on tiny LSM-120 one midnight when a kamikaze appeared “out of nowhere, gliding in low with its engine cut off—like a giant bat.” The plane struck the adjacent LSM with a terrific explosion before anyone could fire a shot.

  The Japanese high command, accepting as always the inflated claims of observers accompanying the kikusui attacks, believed their suicidal air offensive had fatally crippled the U.S. armada. This was wishful thinking. The kamikazes had stressed and battered the Fifth Fleet, but Spruance’s force was simply too huge to be deterred. The fleet withstood the worst of these seemingly endless air attacks without for a moment forsaking its primary mission of supporting the amphibious assault on Okinawa. Naval gunfire support, for example, had never been so thoroughly effective, beginning with the thirty-eight hundred tons of explosive fire delivered on L-Day.

  Similarly, even during the most intense of the kikusui attacks of 1–16 April, the fleet unloaded an astonishing 557,000 tons of supplies over the Hagushi beaches to support the Tenth Army, executed the division-level assault on Ie Shima, and cleared mines and obstacles under fire to open the port of Nago. The only direct effect the mass kamikaze raids ever had on the conduct of Tenth Army operations ashore was the sinking on 6 April of the ammunition ships Logan Victory and Hobbs Victory. The subsequent shortage of 105-mm and 155-mm artillery ammunition delayed General Buckner’s first great offensive against the outer Shuri defenses by about three days. In all respects, the Fifth Fleet deserved its media sobriquet as “the Fleet That Came to Stay.”

  But as April dragged toward May, and the Tenth Army seemed bogged down in unimaginative frontal attacks along the Shuri line, Spruance and Turner began to press Buckner to accelerate his tactics in order to decrease the vulnerability of the fleet. Admiral Nimitz, quite concerned, flew to Okinawa to counsel Buckner. “I’m losing a ship and a half each day out here,” Nimitz said. “You’ve got to get this thing moving.” Buckner bristled at this criticism of his tactics, and Nimitz threatened to relieve him—but nothing came of the confrontation.

  The senior Marines urged Buckner to “play the amphib card,” to execute a major landing on the southeast coast, preferably along the alternate beaches at Minatoga, in order to turn the Japanese right flank. Several Army generals, who already perceived what a meat-grinder the frontal assaults along the Shuri line would become, joined in this recommendation. The Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Alexander A. Vandegrift, visited the island and seconded these suggestions to Buckner. After all, Vandegrift observed, Buckner still had control of the 2d Marine Division, a veteran amphibious outfit that had demonstrated effectively against the Minatoga beaches on L-Day. Buckner had subsequently returned the embarked division to Saipan to reduce its vulnerability to kamikaze attacks, but the unit still had their assigned ships at hand, still combat loaded.

  General Buckner was a popular, competent commander, but his experience with amphibious warfare had been limited to observing the Aleutian landings. He also had a conservative nature. His staff warned of logistics problems involved in a second front. His intelligence advisers predicted stiff enemy resistance around Minatoga. Buckner had also heard enough of the costly Anzio operation in Italy to be leery of any landing executed too far from the main effort. He honestly believed the Japanese manning the Shuri defenses would soon crack under his massed firepower. Buckner therefore rejected the amphibious option out of hand.

  Surprisingly, Nimitz and his operations officer, Rear Adm. Forrest Sherman, agreed. Not so Spruance and Turner or the Marines. As Spruance later admitted, “There are times when I get impatient for some of Holland Smith’s drive.” General Shepherd noted, “General Buckner did not cotton to amphibious operations.” Even Col. Hiromichi Yahara, operations officer for General Ushijima, admitted under interrogation that he had been baffled by the American’s adherence to a purely frontal assault from north to south. “The absence of a landing [in the south] puzzled the 32d Army Staff,” he said, “particularly after the beginning of May when it became impossible to put up more than a token resistance in the south.”

  By then the 2d Marine Division was beginning to feel like a yo-yo. Lt. Col. Samuel Taxis, Division G-3, remained unforgiving of Buckner’s decision. “I will always feel,” he stated after the war, “that the Tenth Army should have been prepared the instant they found they were bogged down; they should have thrown a left hook down there in the southern beaches. . . . They had a hell of a powerful reinforced division, trained to a gnat’s whisker.”

  Buckner stood by his decision. There would be no “left hook.” Instead, both the 1st and the 6th Marine Divisions would slog toward Shuri as infantry divisions under the Tenth Army. The 2d Marine Division, less one reinforced regimental landing team (the 8th Marines), would languish back in Saipan. Then came Okinawa’s incessant spring rains.

  The bitterest fighting of the campaign took place within an extremely compressed battlefield. The linear distance from Yonabaru on the east coast to the bridge over the Asa River above Naha on the opposite side of the island measured barely nine thousand yards. By 8 May General Buckner had four divisions on this line: two Army divisions on the east, two Marine divisions on the west. Each division would fight its own desperate, costly battles against disciplined Japanese soldiers defending elaborately fortified terrai
n features. The funneling effects of the region’s cliffs and draws reduced most attacks to brutal frontal assaults by fully exposed tank-infantry-engineer teams. Tactical efforts to conquer features like the Awacha Pocket, Conical Hill, Wana Draw, or the Sugar Loaf complex were each protracted, point-blank, bloody battles fought under unspeakable conditions of mud, filth, and death.

  General Buckner captured the fancy of the media with his metaphor about the “blowtorch and corkscrew” tactics needed for effective cave warfare, but this was simply stating the obvious to the Army veterans of Biak and the Marine veterans of Peleliu. Flamethrowers represented the blowtorch, demolitions the corkscrew—but both weapons had to be delivered from close range by tanks and their exposed riflemen.

  The nature of this deliberate attrition warfare made Okinawa the biggest battle of the war for artillery outfits. Tenth Army artillery units would fire 2,046,930 rounds down range—in addition to 707,500 rockets, mortars, and shells of 5-inch or larger from naval gunfire support. Marine lieutenant colonel Frederick P. Henderson described this combination of fire support: “Not many people realize that the artillery in Tenth Army, plus the LVT-As and naval gunfire equivalents, gave us a guns-per-mile-of-front ratio on Okinawa that was higher than any U.S. effort in World War II, similar to the Russian front.”

  The Okinawa campaign finally brought Marine Corps aviation and ground units into synchronized alignment. Here a Landing Force Air Support Control Unit operations officer briefs pilots of a TBM squadron on a bombing mission in support of the III Amphibious Corps. (U.S. Marine Corps)

  The landing force also made great strides toward refining supporting arms coordination during the battle. Commanders established Target Information Centers (TICs) at every level from Tenth Army down to battalion. Each TIC provided a centralized target information and weapons assignment system responsive to both assigned targets and targets of opportunity. Finally, all three component liaison officers—artillery, air, and naval gunfire—were aligned with target intelligence information officers. Simple as it may sound, it took virtually the entire war to work out such an arrangement.

  Close air support coordination also greatly improved in this battle. Air liaison parties accompanied frontline divisions to request close air support and direct (but not control—the front was too narrow) aircraft to the target. Coordination of lower-echelon air requests became the province of three Marine Landing Force Air Support Control Units, one representing Tenth Army to the fleet commander, the others responsive to the Army XXIV Corps and IIIAC. This technique further refined the experiments instigated a few weeks earlier at Iwo Jima. In most cases, close air support to the infantry proved exceptionally effective. Some units reported prompt, safe delivery of ordnance on target within a hundred yards. In other instances there were inordinate delays or mind-numbing accidents, usually where the front lines were too intermingled to distinguish the muddy antagonists from the air.

  Once again the fragile little observation “Grasshoppers” proved their great value, flying 3,486 missions of artillery spotting, photoreconnaissance, and medical evacuation.* One senior artillery officer described the VMO (observation) pilots as “the unsung heroes of Marine aviation. . . . Often they would fly past cave openings at the same level so they could look in and see if there was a gun there.” Colonel Yahara complained that his artillery units knew from bitter experience that the presence of an improbable Piper Cub overhead presaged quick retribution for any Japanese gun that fired.

  In sum, each supporting arm surpassed itself in providing improved relief to the foot-slogging infantry. As one rifle battalion commander remarked, “It was not uncommon for a battleship, tanks, artillery, and aircraft to be supporting the efforts of a platoon of infantry during the reduction of the Shuri position.”

  Shuri Castle fell to the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, on 29 May, but it was a hollow victory. Ushijima had skillfully withdrawn most of his forces during the torrential rains. Now his remnants occupied prepared positions along a series of forbidding cross ridges, “sticking out like bones from the spine of a fish.” Behind them lay the rocky southern coast. Frontally attacking these final eight miles would cost Buckner three more weeks of frightful casualties—and his own life.

  General Shepherd, despairing of Buckner’s endless meat-grinder and appreciative of the vast amphibious resources still available offshore, decided to inject tactical mobility and surprise into the sluggish campaign. In order for the 6th Marine Division to reach Naha Airfield, Shepherd first had to overwhelm the forbidding Oroku Peninsula. Shepherd could do this the hard way, attacking from the base of the peninsula and scratching seaward—or he could launch a shore-to-shore amphibious assault across the estuary to catch the defenders in their flank. The answer seemed obvious to Shepherd. Buckner agreed without enthusiasm, but gave the 6th Division barely thirty-six hours to plan and launch a division-level amphibious assault.

  Shepherd and Krulak nevertheless proceeded with relish. Scouts from Maj. Anthony “Cold Steel” Walker’s 6th Reconnaissance Company stole across the estuary at night and confirmed the existence on the peninsula of a cobbled force of Imperial Japanese Navy units under an old adversary from the Solomons. Fittingly, this final opposed amphibious landing of the war would be launched against the last surviving Japanese rikusentai commander, Rear Adm. Minoru Ota.

  Despite heavy rains on 4 June, Shepherd kicked off the assault on schedule. The peninsula erupted in flame under the pounding of hundreds of naval guns, artillery batteries, and aerial bombs. Major Walker’s scouts seized Ono Yama Island, the 4th Marines swept across the estuary, and LCMs and LCIs loaded with tanks appeared from “Loomis Harbor” to the north. The first waves of troops scrambled ashore and into the brush quickly. Too many worn-out LVTs broke down en route, causing uncomfortable delays, but enemy fire proved intermittent, and empty LVTs from the first waves quickly returned to transfer the stranded troops. Shepherd, the future commandant, had attained both tactical surprise and operational momentum against an enemy who more than any other Japanese commander on the island should have known to protect his flanks from the sea.

  Admiral Ota, aroused and enraged, struck back savagely. His spirited sailors fought with elan, and they were very heavily armed. No similar-size force on Okinawa possessed as many automatic weapons or employed mines so effectively. The attacking Marines also encountered some awesome weapons at very short range—8-inch coast-defense guns that swiveled inland and rail-mounted 8-inch rocket launchers that fired the dreaded Screaming Mimi’s. Wresting the Oroku Peninsula from Ota’s death grasp took Shepherd ten days and cost 1,608 casualties and thirty tanks. In the end, the 6th Marine Division had slain 5,000 Japanese sailors, forced the ritual suicide of the last rikusentai (Ota’s final message: “Enemy tank groups are now attacking our cave headquarters; the Naval Base Force is dying gloriously”), and opened up unopposed naval resupply to the nearly starving troops along the southwest coast. General Buckner was impressed.

  On 18 June, Buckner climbed a ridge to watch the newly arrived 8th Marines advance along the valley floor. Japanese gunners on the opposite ridge saw the official party and opened up. Shells struck a nearby coral outcrop, driving a lethal splinter into the general’s chest. He died in ten minutes, the highest-ranking U.S. officer to be killed in action throughout World War II.

  As previously arranged, Roy Geiger assumed command. Geiger had already been selected for promotion; his third star became effective immediately. The Tenth Army remained in capable hands. Geiger became the only Marine—and the only aviator of any service—to command a field army. The soldiers on Okinawa had no qualms about this. Senior Army echelons elsewhere did. Army general Joseph Stillwell received urgent orders to Okinawa. Five days later he relieved Geiger, but by then the battle was over.

  Okinawa proved extremely costly to all participants. Well over 100,000 Japanese died defending the island. Native Okinawans endured the worst, suffering as many as 150,000 deaths, a figure representing one-third of the isla
nd’s population. The Tenth Army sustained nearly 40,000 combat casualties, including more than 7,000 Americans killed. An additional 26,000 nonbattle casualties occurred, mainly combat fatigue and accidents.*

  Admiral Spruance described the battle of Okinawa as “a bloody, hellish prelude to the invasion of Japan.” As protracted a nightmare as Okinawa had been, every survivor knew in his heart that the next battles in Kyūshū and Honshū would be incalculably worse. Everyone knew that plans for invading Japan specified the Kyūshū landings would be executed by the surviving veterans of Iwo Jima and Luzon; the reward of the Okinawa survivors would be the landing on the main island of Honshū.

  By coincidence, the enormous and virtually flawless amphibious assault on Okinawa occurred thirty years to the month after Gallipoli’s colossal disaster in World War I. By 1945 the Americans had refined this difficult naval mission into an art form. Spruance had every possible advantage in place for Okinawa—a proven doctrine, specialized ships and landing craft, mission-oriented weapons systems, trained shock troops, flexible logistics, unity of command. Everything clicked. The massive projection of sixty thousand combat troops ashore on L-Day and the subsequent series of smaller landings on the surrounding islands fully justified a doctrine earlier considered ill-advised, harebrained, or downright suicidal.

  Yet the Tenth Army squandered several opportunities for surprise and maneuver available in the amphibious task force. An unimaginative reliance on firepower and siege tactics played to the strength of the Japanese defenders, prolonged the fighting, and increased the costs. The landings on Ie Shima and Oroku Peninsula, despite their successful executions, comprised the only division-level amphibious assaults undertaken in the ten weeks after L-Day. How discouraging it must have seemed to the veteran amphibians to have reached the very pinnacle of strategic and operational offensive power, only to fritter away the advantage by unenlightened tactical rigidity.