Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  So the kamikaze was born in a storm of enthusiasm and anticipated glory. A huge kamikaze corps was organized in the homeland under Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki. By January of 1945 they were a part of Japanese aerial strategy, if not the dominant part. So many suiciders would be ordered out for an operation, to be joined by so many fighters and bombers. Often the duty of the fighters would only be to protect these six-plane units of suiciders; the duty of the bombers would be to guide them to the targets.

  They needed to be guided because they were often a combination of old, stripped-down aircraft and young, hopped-up flyers. Admiral Ugaki did not use his best planes or his best pilots, as Admiral Onishi had in the Philippines. Ugaki considered this wasteful. He considered that the spiritual power of “the glorious, incomparable young eagles” would compensate for their own lack of flying skill as well as the missing material power of obsolete aircraft from which even the instruments had been removed. To this end, as well as to inspire the nation, the kamikaze were hailed as saviors. They were wined, dined, photographed and fondled. Many of them attended their own funerals before taking off, or climbed into the cockpit with legs made wobbly by the exuberance of farewell feasts. It did not seem to occur to the Japanese that the saki drunk at such inspiring leave-takings might influence the purpose, as well as the aim, of the kamikaze. It did not, because the kamikaze had so thoroughly captivated them. It was this very deep, this very real faith in the kamikaze’s second coming which dictated how the battle on Okinawa would be fought.

  Okinawa was to hold out as long as possible to make the supporting American fleet a target as long as possible.

  This was the order which Major General Isamu Cho took down to Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima in January of 1945.

  They had served together in Burma, Ushijima as an infantry group commander, Cho as chief of staff of the Southern Army. They had returned to Japan together, Ushijima to become Commandant of the Japanese Military Academy, Cho to serve on the General Military Affairs Bureau. They had come to Okinawa together, Ushijima to command the Japanese 32nd Army, Cho to be his chief of staff. And they were as unlike as two men could be.

  Lieutenant General Ushijima, graying, a senior officer in line for full general, was a man of great presence and serenity, capable of inspiring his subordinates, capable of seeing his own incapacities. To fill these he had chosen Major General Cho, a firebrand of fifty-one years, already in line for his second star, a planner and an organizer, strict but resourceful, aggressive, and so invincible in argument as to be unpopular.

  Since August of 1944, when Ushijima had taken command on Okinawa, the two men had been anticipating Tokyo’s orders to fight the kind of battle which would bleed the Americans white. Their plans were reflected in the 32nd Army’s battle slogans:

  One Plane for One Warship

  One Boat for One Ship

  One Man for Ten of the Enemy or One Tank

  Fulfillment of the first slogan was up to the kamikaze, for General Ushijima had little air power based on Okinawa’s five airfields.

  The second would be handled by nautical Divine Winds of the Sea Raiding Squadrons. They were enlisted youths fresh out of high school, trained to ram explosive-stuffed motor-boats into American ships. There were about 700 suicide boats hidden in the Ryukyus, and about 350 were only about 15 miles west of southern Okinawa in the islets of the Kerama Retto.

  The third stricture was left to a force of about 100,000 men, of whom about a fifth were conscripted from an Okinawan population of nearly half a million people. The great bulk of these men were concentrated in the southern third of Okinawa’s 485 square miles, where a fantasia of cliffs and caves made formidable defensive terrain.

  Here Ushijima began to build a line facing north like a broad arrowhead. Its point rested on the heights surrounding Shuri and Shuri Castle, the city and citadel of Okinawa’s ancient kings. Its flanks swept back to the sea on either side, through a jungle of ridges to the chief city of Naha on the west or left, through similar hills back to Yonabaru Airfield on the right. It was the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line. It held the bulk of Ushijima’s fighting men—the 62nd Division which had served in China, the 24th Division, and the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade. To its left on Oroku Peninsula jutting into the sea west of Naha were about 3,500 Japanese sailors and 7,000 Japanese civilians under Vice Admiral Minoru Ota. Roughly 3,000 soliders of the 2nd Infantry Unit under Colonel Takehiko Udo held the wild, uninhabited northern half of Okinawa—that part which Ushijima under the urging of Cho had chosen not to defend. Nor would Ushijima attempt to defend the Hagushi Beaches in west central Okinawa. He would defend the Minatoga Beaches to the south because they were in the rear of his Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line, but he would defend almost nothing north of that line, except, of course, its approaches. He would not even defend Yontan and Kadena Airfields to the east of the Hagushi Beaches. These would be wrecked the moment the Americans appeared by a special force drawn from the Boeitai, the Home Guard of about 20,000 men which Ushijima had ruthlessly called up from among the Okinawan males of between twenty and forty. The wrecking crew was called the Bimbo Butai, or Poor Detachment, by those Japanese soldiers whose loathing of Okinawa and all things Okinawan had already become a problem to General Ushijima.

  There was indeed little to love about the Great Loo Choo, as Okinawa was called when Chinese influence was great enough to give the entire chain its original name of the Loo Choos or “bubbles floating on water.” Japanese military power and Japanese difficulty in pronouncing the letter L changed it to Ryukyus in 1875, but even the Divine Emperor could do nothing about those floating bubbles. Neither Eritrea nor the Belgian Congo is more humid than Okinawa, and the Great Loo Choo’s skies are capable of pouring out 11 inches of rainfall in a single day. Its people, of mixed Chinese, Malayan and Ainu blood, are among the most docile in the world.

  The Okinawans have no history of war. They neither make nor carry arms, a fact which filled Napoleon with enraged incredulity in the early nineteenth century, and which, in the mid-twentieth, led the Japanese to regard the Okinawans as an inferior race. Apart from those schoolteachers trained in Japan, Okinawans were disdained as good for nothing but farming their tiny plots of sweet potatoes, sugar cane or rice. So spurned, they resented their masters and clung doggedly to their Chinese culture.

  “The houses and customs here resemble those of China,” a Japanese private wrote in his diary. “They remind one of a Chinese town.”

  Christ, Allah and Buddha had been to Okinawa with venturesome European and Malay sailors, with Chinese culture—but the people still practiced a primitive animism while worshipping the bones of their ancestors. These were placed in urns kept within lyre-shaped tombs sprinkled over plains and low hillsides. Many tombs within the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line had also been fitted with machine guns and cannon, and strengthened by those diggers and drillers of Ushijima’s unwilling Boeitai.

  Conscription of the Boeitai had unwittingly led to one of the chief complaints among Ushijima’s soldiers: the lack of fresh vegetables. There hadn’t been enough adult males around to produce the normal vegetable crop that fall and winter, and Tokyo was shipping in bullets, not beans.

  “I cannot bear having just a cup of rice for a meal with no side dishes at all,” a soldier wrote. “Our health will be ruined.”

  The lament was raised frequently elsewhere, and Ushijima took account of it by urging his men to “display a more firm and resolute spirit, hold to the belief of positive victory, and always remember the spirit of martyrdom and of dying for the good of the country.”

  By way of consolation, the general issued each man a pint and a half of sweet-potato brandy, proclaimed a temporary amnesty for drunkards and promised another issue on April 13, when the Emperor Hirohito would become forty-four years old. That had been in January, just before General Ushijima dispatched General Cho to Tokyo on a flying visit.

  Cho came back in late January. He reported that Ushijima’s defense plans dovetailed with
Imperial Headquarters strategy and that he had been able to dispel some doubts about the decision not to defend the Hagushi Beaches. Cho was also elated by a secret report on the kamikaze which he had seen. The attacks of 26 of Admiral Ugaki’s six-plane units had brought about instantaneous sinking of one American battleship, six carriers and 34 cruisers. Even the clearheaded Cho had been blown overboard by the Divine Wind. He got out an inspirational message for the 32nd Army’s top commanders. It said:

  “The brave ruddy-faced warriors with white silken scarves tied about their heads, at peace in their favorite planes, dash out spiritedly to the attack. The skies are slowly brightening.”

  But the skies were rather darkening with the airplanes of the American Fast Carrier Forces which began striking the Great Loo Choo late that month. After the raid of January 22, a Japanese superior private wrote in his diary:

  While some of the planes fly overhead and strafe, the big bastards fly over the airfield and drop bombs. The ferocity of the bombing is terrific. It really makes me furious. It is past three o’clock and the raid is still on. At six the last two planes brought the raid to a close. What the hell kind of bastards are they? Bomb from six to six!

  They were “hard-nosed bastards,” these Americans, and there were more and bigger ones coming—both at the Ryukyus and Japan, both by air and by sea. Naha was being pounded to rubble and the wolf packs of the American submarine service were littering the floor of the China Sea with sunken cargo vessels and drowned soldiers.

  “The enemy,” wrote another private, “is brazenly planning to destroy completely every last ship, cut our supply lines and attack us.”

  The “enemy” was also hurling neutralizing thunderbolts at the homeland. Giant B-29’s had begun to strike Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe in 300-plane raids. On March 9 the Superforts came down to 6,000 feet over Tokyo to loose the dreadful fire-bombs which burned up a quarter of a million houses, made a million persons homeless and killed 83,793 others. Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki would equal the carnage of this most lethal air raid in history.

  Throughout February and March, while the Marines were conquering Iwo Jima, land- and carrier-based air struck again and again at the Great Loo Choo. Superforts began to rage all over the Ryukyus. Okinawa was effectively cut off from Kyushu in the north, Formosa in the south. On March 1, while the Fast Carrier Forces were returning to Ulithi from their third strike at Japan, there were so many planes strafing, bombing and rocketing Okinawa that pilots had to get in line for a crack at a target. Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima was impressed.

  “You cannot regard the enemy as on a par with you,” he told his men. “You must realize that material power usually overcomes spiritual power in the present war. The enemy is clearly our superior in machines. Do not depend on your spirits overcoming this enemy. Devise combat method based on mathematical precision—then think about displaying your spiritual power.”

  Ushijima’s order was perhaps the most honest issued by a Japanese commander throughout the war. It was Bushido revised, turned upside down, but the revision had been made too late.

  10

  There were 1,300 ships and perhaps another 300 left behind in the anchorages. Some of the ships were new, some came from the West Coast and were sailing 7,200 miles to battle, putting in at island battlegrounds whose names they bore, staging up through the latest battlegrounds at Ulithi, Leyte and Saipan. They roved boldly about that Pacific Ocean which was now an American lake, for Manila had fallen on February 24 and only the mighty battleship Yamato had survived the holocaust of Leyte Gulf. There were British vessels present, a fast carrier force of 22 warships, for in Europe the gate had been left open at Remagen, American troops were over the Rhine, and the old queen of the waves was sending help to the new lord of the seas.

  Fleet Admiral Nimitz was still in over-all command in Hawaii as he had been when the Japanese were stopped at Midway, when the long charge began at Guadalcanal. Admiral Spruance commanded the Fifth Fleet, and there was the saltiest salt still giving orders to the expeditionary force. Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner had brought the Marines to Guadalcanal and now, nearly three years later, still roaming his flagship bridge in an old bathrobe, still a profane perfectionist with beetling brow and abrasive tongue, a matchless planner who would also not scruple to tell the coxswain how to beach his boat, Kelly Turner was bringing the Tenth Army to Okinawa.

  A newcomer to the Central Pacific led the ground troops: Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., “the old man of the mountain,” the son of the famous Confederate general of that name and rank, himself a product of the strictest Army training, a big man, ruddy-faced, white-haired, strong for the physical conditioning of troops. He had served four years in Alaska and the Aleutians and had built up the Alaskan defenses. He had hoped to lead the invasion of Japan through the North Pacific, but the thrust from the Aleutians was never made. It was coming from the center, and Simon Bolivar Buckner was called down to lead it—commanding that Tenth Army which was in fact only a new number for seven veteran divisions which had made the assault possible.

  These were the 7th, 27th, 77th and 96th Infantry Divisions making up Major General John Hodge’s Twenty-fourth Corps, and the First, Second and Sixth Marine Divisions of Major General Roy Geiger’s Third Corps.

  The 27th, which had seen action at Makin and Saipan and was still commanded by Major General George Griner, would be in Tenth Army reserve. The 77th of Major General Andrew Bruce—those “Old Bastards” who had waded ashore at Guam and gone on to Leyte—were to start the battle for Okinawa.

  On March 26 the 77th’s soldiers began taking the islands of the Kerama Retto, destroying the lairs of Ushijima’s suicide boats. They also occupied those reef islets of Keise Shima which the Marines of Major Jim Jones’ Reconnaissance Battalion had scouted in night rubber-boat landings. On these islets went the 155-millimeter long toms of the 420th Field Artillery Group. They began laying down a galling fire on southwestern Okinawa, especially in the vicinity of the Hagushi Beaches.

  These beaches were to be taken with the Marines on the left or north, the soldiers on the right. Nailing down the right flank was the spearhead team which Hodge had used in the Philippines—the 7th, led by Major General Archibald Arnold and blooded at Attu, Kwajalein and Leyte, and the 96th of Major General James Bradley, also a veteran of Leyte. Once these two divisions were ashore, they were to capture Kadena Airfield, drive east across the island’s waist and then wheel south to attack abreast in that direction.

  Geiger’s Third Corps would capture Yontan Airfield, drive east cross-island and turn north to overrun that half of Okinawa. This would be done by the Sixth and First, while the Second made a feint off those southern or Minatoga Beaches which General Ushijima had so carefully fortified.

  Covering the landings would be the biggest bombardment force yet assembled—10 old battleships, 10 cruisers and scores of destroyers and gunboats—as well as the far-ranging new battleships and fleet carriers of the Fast Carrier Forces, the flying buffer of the British task force in the southern Ryukyus, the Navy’s minesweepers and Underwater Demolition Teams, the big bombers of the Twentieth Air Force, and the Tenth Army’s own Tactical Air Force made up chiefly of Marine flyers and commanded by a Marine—Major General Francis Mulcahy.

  Okinawa was to be the biggest battle of the Pacific, with 548,000 Americans of all services involved, as well as history’s greatest amphibious assault, with an attack force of 183,000 men, of which 154,000 were in the actual combat divisions.

  Okinawa would also crown the unique mission of the Marine Corps, one which began after the Allied disaster at Gallipoli in World War One had convinced most military thinkers that hostile and fortified shores could not be overcome by invasion from the sea. The Marines disagreed. They insisted amphibious assault could be successful and developed the craft and techniques to make it so. They also trained the Army in this speciality, which was to be needed in Europe as well as the Pacific. The Army’s first th
ree amphibious divisions—the 1st, 3rd and gth—were trained by Marines. Those very infantry divisions going into Okinawa—the 7th, 77th and 96th —were Marine-trained, while the 81st Division which Lieutenant General Buckner was holding in area reserve in New Caledonia had also been taught by Marines. And the Tactical Air Force led by Major General Mulcahy was to put into the air an overwhelming number of Marine pilots especially trained in the Marine tactic of close-up aerial support.