Storm Landings

by Joseph H. Alexander

  Most infantrymen developed an abiding fear of mutilation by exploding shells or mines. Recalled Lt. Col. Robert E. Cushman Jr., a battalion commander at Guam and Iwo, and later commandant: “I always had fear. I hated high explosives. Its effects are so terrible.”

  The Navy had been particularly traumatized by relentless kamikaze and conventional air attacks throughout the Okinawa campaign. Sleeplessness and fear took its toll. Officers with a driven personality like Kelly Turner found little time to recuperate. “When I came back from the Marshalls, I was dead tired,” he said. “I stayed dead tired for the rest of the war.”

  This is revealing, because Turner’s amphibs in Task Force 40 would have borne the brunt of the Ketsu-Go attacks. The battle for Kyūshū would to considerable extent depend on how proficiently the U.S. Navy had learned to deal with massed suicide attacks—the whole panoply of fleet air defense, including early detection, vectoring of combat air patrols for interception, evasive action, antiaircraft fire, and damage control. Whether Japan’s numerous but increasingly younger and “aviationally challenged” kamikaze pilots could have stayed the course through all these obstacles with sufficient presence of mind to identify troop transports from the hundreds of other ships filling the horizon and the requisite skill to press the attack successfully home remains conjecture.

  Based on the Okinawa experience, it appears likely that enough kamikazes would have survived the entire air defense gauntlet to hit and sink up to two dozen troop transports en route to the objective. Assigning an arbitrary loss rate of 40 percent (about four hundred men) per sunken ship presents a grim projection of ninety-six hundred deaths among the landing force before the first soldier or Marine ever hit the beach. In that regard, Ketsu-Go may have proven to be the best possible answer to Japan’s war-long search for an effective antidote to American storm landings.

  It still would not have been sufficient. Cumulative war weariness and heavy losses to mass kamikaze attacks would not have been enough to prevent the U.S. Sixth Army from landing in force on southern Kyūshū and—in probably ninety days of methodical killing—the American invaders would have secured the southern third of the island. Uprooting and killing six hundred thousand Japanese in that type of terrain would have proven costly, however—and in the political sense, dangerously costly. The forcible seizure of southern Kyūshū could well have cost the Sixth Army more than seventy-five thousand battle casualties. Couple this projection with preliminary losses among the transports en route and the inevitable nonbattle accidents and combat fatigue cases (not to mention the certain “collateral damage” deaths to easily half a million civilians), and the American public might indeed have grown discouraged about launching an even greater bloodbath against Honshū. This is strictly conjectural, of course, but one fact is certain: the Joint Chiefs of Staff read the ULTRA reports of the Japanese buildup in Kyūshū—and within southern Kyūshū, along the exact beaches to be assaulted—with mounting concern as July turned to August.

  The situation grew worrisome enough for the Joint Chiefs to give consideration to employing special weapons to reduce American casualties. These ranged the gamut of creativity, from reverse-engineered German V-2 rockets to “war-weary” B-17s loaded with TNT or napalm that would be “aimed” at Kyūshū by special crews before they bailed out to safety. The most likely candidate was poison gas.

  The Joint Chiefs had considered this option earlier for Iwo Jima. Neither Japan nor the United States had signed the prewar international accord banning the use of poison gas. General Kuribayashi had evacuated Iwo Jima’s few civilians before the battle. The United States had sufficient stocks of mustard-gas munitions in the Pacific at the time to deliver a lethal dose against an island that small. Aware of the political sensitivity of the issue, the JCS in 1944 assigned the project to the Office for Strategic Service (OSS). An OSS agent visited Chester Nimitz in 1944 to discuss the possible use of gas at Iwo. The plan had Orwellian overtones: jam all Japanese transmitters; change the tell-tale color-coded markings on the munitions to keep American crewmen unaware of the mission. Nimitz agreed in principal, but the process was academic. Only President Roosevelt could authorize such a plan, and FDR flatly opposed any use of gas. When the OSS recommendations reached his desk in late 1944, the president gave it short shrift: “All prior endorsements denied, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Commander in Chief.”

  With Truman in the White House—acutely concerned about American casualties—and Kyūshū appearing more formidable every week, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall resurrected the idea to support Olympic. To Marshall, the offensive use of lethal gas made sense—it was hardly more inhumane than napalm or white phosphorous, and its use would decidedly save many U.S. lives. According to military historian John Ray Skates, the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service conducted tests of poison gases against caves and underground fortifications at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, in 1945. Three agents proved highly effective: mustard, cyanogen chloride, and phosgene. “Preparations for the use of gas were built into the Olympic plans,” concluded Skates. On 6 July 1945 General MacArthur reported to Marshall his readiness to use gas offensively. Assault troops would have landed wearing gas masks and full suits of protective clothing.

  General Marshall took his concern for the anticipated casualties at Kyūshū a notch higher. During the critical two-day period in August when the Japanese government seemed unresponsive to the atomic bombs, Marshall concluded that the invasion would still have to go. He then asked the Manhattan Project scientists whether atomic bombs could be downsized for tactical application against Japanese defenses on Kyūshū. The answer came swiftly: nine “tactical nukes” could be produced in time for the 1 November landings—and they could be profitably used against military targets on Kyūshū. The Japanese surrender announcement the next day, however, put a quick end to these deliberations.

  The Marines of the V Amphibious Corps knew little of these high-level proceedings. They knew enough to expect the bloodiest landing of the war. Their intelligence officers reported that VAC’s three divisions would be landing in the teeth of the Japanese 40th Army, four divisions under the overall command of Lt. Gen. Mitsuo Nakazawa. The Marines would first encounter the newly created 146th Division, formed to defend the Satsuma beaches with little mobility or firepower (“human breakwaters” in the apt description of Edward J. Drea). Next would come the heavier, more combat-effective 206th Division, which contained its own heavy artillery, mortars, and engineer units. The Marines expected the 77th Division in Kagoshima and the 303d Division in Sendai to constitute a counterattacking mobile reserve in their sector.

  The VAC beaches were narrow, dominated by dunes, and fully exposed to observation and direct fire from a line of six-hundred-foot hills less than a kilometer away. The Marines would also have to force a crossing of the Ozato River, which flowed parallel to the beach about five hundred yards inland. The Japanese had a number of high-velocity, direct-fire guns mounted on rails behind steel doors in hidden caves in this part of the island. They also had plenty of their 120-mm mortars and Nambu machine guns on hand.

  When Col. Samuel G. Taxis, D-3 of the 2d Marine Division, landed on Kyūshū during the postsurrender occupation, he made a point of walking the ground his division would have had to take by force of arms. “We would’ve faced a very difficult landing against vicious opposition—all in all, it looked pretty tough,” he reported. “It could have been a lot worse than anyone figured.” Most Marines sensed this. Even those units on Okinawa, earmarked for Coronet, grew uneasy about Olympic. Said Col. Wilburt S. Brown, commanding the artillery regiment in the 1st Marine Division, “I was scared to death that the Tenth Army would have been called on to relieve or augment the Sixth Army in Kyūshū.”

  Emperor Hirohito’s decision to accept unconditional surrender after the second atomic bomb attack immediately relegated Olympic to the historical dustbin. In truth, however, it was the combination of pressures on Japan that did the job—the bombs, certainly, but also the
Soviet invasion of Manchuria (and very-near amphibious assault of Hokkaido), the sustained conventional bombing and submarine strangulation, and the very real threat of a massive invasion of the home islands.

  Ironically for the Marines, their actual first landing in Japan turned out to more closely resemble the 1853 landing of Commodore Matthew C. Perry and his Fleet Marine Officer, Brevet Maj. Jacob Zeilin, than any vestige of a twentieth-century storm landing. On 30 August, Brig. Gen. William T. Clement led ashore the Third Fleet Marine Landing Force, which included a company of bluejackets from the fleet (as well as a combined force of Royal Marines and Royal Navy seamen) at Yokosuka, Japan. Clement’s main body consisted of the veteran 4th Marines, fresh from victory in Okinawa and loaded for bear, but the landing was bloodless, unopposed. The war had truly ended.

  Infantrymen of the 6th Marine Division enjoy a rare free ride on a north-bound Sherman tank in early action in central Okinawa. Kyūshū would have been big enough to permit opportunities for maneuver warfare, but the presence of half a million Japanese troops in the vicinity would probably have caused another meat-grinder campaign like southern Okinawa. (U.S. Marine Corps)

  Few of the men of the U.S. Sixth Army ever expressed any regret that Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs eliminated the requirement to forcibly seize Kyūshū against the Ketsu-Go. The words of one Army veteran spared from that ordeal likely reflect the reaction of all hands at the time: “When word got around that the bombs had forced the Japanese surrender, we knelt in the sand and cried. For all our manhood, we cried. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.”

  * MacArthur assigned the 11th Airborne Division as Sixth Army reserve afloat for Olympic.

  * For the Balikpapan landing, Allied cruisers provided sixteen days of preliminary saturation shelling, the longest sustained naval bombardment of the war.

  * The 40th Army redeployed from Formosa to the Ijuin area of southwestern Kyūshū in May–June 1945.

  Epilogue

  Parting Shots

  The outstanding achievement of this war, in the field of joint undertakings, was the perfection of amphibious operations, the most difficult of all operations in modern warfare.

  Fleet Adm. Ernest J. King, USN

  Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet

  War Reports, 1947

  In the late summer of 1941 the Honorable Frank Knox, forty-seventh secretary of the Navy, traveled to Parris Island, South Carolina, to observe a demonstration amphibious landing conducted by a rifle platoon of the 2d Battalion, 7th Marines. At a given signal, the Leathernecks paddled ashore in half a dozen inflatable rubber boats. Secretary Knox then met with the Marines on the beach, commending them on their amphibious prowess.

  The Marines and the Gator Navy of mid-1941 had developed more sophisticated means of executing the ship-to-shore movement, to be sure, but only rubber rafts were available to show the secretary of the Navy that day. The Marines had to rely on “paddle power,” just as their forebears had in the Vera Cruz landing of 1847, just as some of their immediate successors would during the second day at Tarawa in 1943.

  By early 1945, however, the scope and scale of amphibious warfare had changed almost beyond comparison. To cite one example, the 5th Marine Division executed its storm landing at D-Day on Iwo Jima by means of this abundance of specialized craft: 1 dock landing ship, 19 tank landing ships, 12 medium landing ships, 7 tank landing craft, 72 medium landing craft, 339 Higgins boats, 204 LVTs, 36 LVT-As, and 100 DUKWS.

  The designated Navy wave guide for the night landing at Tanambogo in August 1942 was a ship’s dentist, a brave officer but totally unskilled in his duties. Assault waves at Saipan and the Philippines would be led across the line of departure by highly trained crews manning specialized, thirty-ton landing craft control boats (LCCs).

  The Japanese considered the initial American landings on Tulagi and Guadalcanal in 1942 such an operational fluke that Prime Minister Tojo did not even mention them in his nightly radio report to the Japanese public. Less than three years later the entire Japanese nation would listen breathlessly to every radio dispatch from their embattled garrisons at Iwo Jima and Okinawa as U.S. amphibious forces inexorably squeezed them into oblivion.

  Marine colonel Alan Shapley’s Pacific War began when Japanese dive-bombers blew him off the battleship Arizona at Pearl Harbor; by 1945 he had led Raider battalions and the 4th Marines ashore in the Solomons, Marshalls, Guam, and Okinawa. Recalling this “rags to riches” theme in the emergence of American amphibious might, Shapley said: “We were getting powerful. . . . You just can’t [envision]—nobody can unless they can see an invasion force. Eniwetok anchorage as far as you could see, nothing but ships of all kinds and thousands and thousands and thousands of men. It will never happen in this world again. Never. We were unstoppable.”

  The development of storm landings as the embodiment of an assault launched from the sea against defended beaches accelerated the Allied victory in the Pacific and constituted a major factor—admittedly one of several—in convincing the Japanese to surrender unconditionally. Amphibious forces, having earned their spurs so convincingly in both theaters of the war, went on to make significant contributions to national security throughout the Cold War, covering the spectrum of conflict, from major opposed landings like Inchon (1950); to unopposed landings in force in Lebanon (1958), DaNang (1965), Dominican Republic (1965); to the mere threat of a storm landing (Cuba 1963, the Gulf War 1991). The abiding principles of unity of command, parallel and concurrent planning, detailed coordination of supporting arms, and flexible execution stood the tests of time and technology.

  The handful of Marine Corps and Navy pioneers who sat down in Quantico in the early 1930s to produce a viable offensive amphibious doctrine from the ruins of Gallipoli had proven themselves men of exceptional vision and common sense. Their concept, boiled down to the bare bones, was simply this:

  • Attain at least temporary air, sea, and surface superiority over the enemy in the objective area to enable the execution of a full-scale ship-to-shore assault at acceptable cost.

  • Develop the control measures and landing craft needed to project the landing force ashore rapidly, in the desired tactical formation, with full unit integrity, on the right beach, at the right time.

  • Maintain unity of command in a seamless passage of control from sea to shore as the tactical situation permits.

  • Achieve these objectives in the minimum time possible in order to reduce the great vulnerability of the amphibious task force to enemy interdiction by air, surface, subsurface, and counterlanding attacks.

  Amphibious techniques, tactics, and hardware changed throughout the war—and indeed ever since—but these primal concepts have remained constant. In 1992 the Joint Chiefs of Staff produced Joint Publication 3-02, Joint Doctrine for Amphibious Operations, one more milestone in the lineage that began with publication of Tentative Manual for Landing Operations in 1935. The newest authority’s basic tenets would be familiar to the Quantico pioneers of sixty years earlier. An amphibious operation is now defined as “a military operation launched from the sea by naval and landing forces embarked in ships or craft involving a landing on a hostile or potentially hostile shore.” The “essential usefulness” of an amphibious operation “stems from its mobility and flexibility.” And this reminder appears early: “The salient requirement of an amphibious assault . . . is the necessity for swift, uninterrupted buildup of sufficient combat power ashore from an initial zero capability to full coordinated striking power.”

  Three other components of amphibious warfare need special emphasis in this survey of storm landings in the Central Pacific: leadership, logistics, and tactical mobility.

  Executing an opposed landing on a hostile shore exerts special demands on combat leadership. In the words of Joint Pub 3-02: “The complexity of amphibious operations and the vulnerability of forces engaged in these operations require an exceptional degree of unity of effort and operatio
nal coherence.” Both the amphibious task force commander and the landing force commander must “gain and maintain exceptional situational awareness.” Chronic communications failures during the first thirty hours of Tarawa kept Harry Hill and Julian Smith completely in the dark regarding the situation ashore. Fifteen months later, Kelly Turner and Harry Schmidt maintained such “exceptional situational awareness” of conditions along the beaches and terraces at Iwo Jima on D-Day that they could accurately direct the massive flow of reinforcements and supporting arms ashore.

  That’s one kind of leadership. When “situational awareness” on the flagship failed at Tarawa, the battle would be won or lost on the raw courage of the men on the scene, officers like David Shoup, Mike Ryan, Alexander Bonnyman, Deane Hawkins, or staff noncommissioned officers like William Bordelon. Tactical success in each case required the leader to inspire small groups of disorganized men to overcome two inevitable characteristics of the assault beachhead—chaos and inertia. “Chaos reigned” reported the landing force commander after the 1924 Fleet Problem in the Caribbean—and in fact chaos reappeared to some degree in every subsequent landing in the Pacific, even Tinian. Inertia surfaced among those who survived a particularly harrowing ship-to-shore movement, as at Tarawa or Peleliu. At Betio, getting the masses of exhausted, demoralized troops huddled against the seawall to resume the offensive took incredible leadership. Some leaders like Shoup and Henry Crowe got results literally by “kicking ass.” Others—Bordelon, Bonnyman, Hawkins—set a personal, sacrificial example. Mike Ryan seemed to combine the two styles. Men such as these won that pivotal battle by surpassing themselves and motivating others.