Strong Men Armed

by Robert Leckie

  Next day Ushijima began reinforcing his flanks again to hold off the Americans while his withdrawal began, but he was too late to prevent the turning of the west flank at Naha. The Sixth Division burst into the city’s ruins and began its reduction.

  Ushijima still counterattacked the 7th Division on the east flank at Yonabaru, trying to relieve the pressure there, but the 7th’s valiant dogfaces held fast.

  A nocturnal kamikaze raid hurled at Okinawa shipping to coincide with Ushijima’s land strikes was shattered, with 150 planes shot down in exchange for the loss of the destroyer-transport Bates and one LSM, plus damage to eight other ships.

  The most ferocious display of antiaircraft power yet seen in the Pacific broke up a daring airborne attack on Yontan and Kadena Airfields. It was an unusually clear night and there were thousands of witnesses to this small savage setback which the suicide spirit was able to inflict on the Americans.

  Perhaps 20 twin-engined bombers came gliding through a fiery lacework woven by American antiaircraft gunners. Eleven of them fell in flames. The rest, except one, fled.

  That solitary Sally bomber skidded on its belly along one of Yontan’s runways. When it stopped, eight of 14 men of the Japanese 1st Air Raiding Brigade were dead in their seats, but six of them were alive, tumbling out the door, coming erect and sprinting for parked planes while hurling heat grenades and phosphorus bombs. They blew up eight airplanes, damaged 26 others, destroyed two fuel dumps housing 70,000 gallons of gasoline and killed two Marines and wounded 18 others before they were finally hunted down and killed.

  In the morning the Tenth Army was still grinding down toward the heart of Ushijima’s defense in Shuri Castle. Marines of the First Division in Wana Draw began to draw swiftly closer to the city and its heights to their east. They began to notice Japanese sealing off caves and quitting the draw. At noon of May 26 Major General del Valle asked for an aerial reconnaissance over the Yonabaru-Naha valley. He had a hunch the Japanese were pulling back from Shuri, trying to sneak out under cover of a heavy rain.

  A spotter plane from the battleship New York reported that the roads behind Shuri were packed. Between 3,000 and 4,000 Japanese were on the rear-march with all their guns, tanks and trucks. In thirteen minutes, despite rain and bad visibility, the warships of the fleet were on the target. Soon 50 Marine Corsairs were with them, rocketing and strafing, and every Marine artillery piece or mortar within range had its smoking muzzle pointed toward the valley. They killed from 500 to 800 Japanese and littered the muddy roadways with wrecked vehicles.

  Three days later the Marines took Shuri Castle.

  It was not supposed to be theirs to take; it was the objective of the 77th Division, the very plum of the Okinawa fighting, but the First Marine Division took it anyway.

  General del Valle sent a battalion of the Fifth Marines climbing into Shuri on May 29. He wanted to get around and behind the Japanese still holding out in Wana Draw. The First Battalion quickly stormed Shuri Ridge to the east or left of the draw—so quickly that Lieutenant Colonel Charles Shelburne asked permission to go on to the castle 800 yards east. Del Valle granted it. The 77th Division was still two days’ hard fighting from the castle, and the chance was too good to ignore. The light defenses around Shuri might be only a temporary lapse.

  Company A of the Fifth Marines under Captain Julius Dusenbury began slogging east in knee-deep mud. Inside Captain Dusenbury’s helmet was a flag, as had become almost customary among Marine commanders since Suribachi. While the Marines marched, del Valle was just barely averting the 77th’s planned artillery and aerial strike on Shuri Castle—and then Dusenbury’s Marines overran a party of Japanese soldiers and swept into the castle courtyard, into the battered ruins of what had once been a beautiful palace with curving, tiered roofs of tile. They ran up to its high parapet and over this Captain Dusenbury flew his flag.

  Shuri Castle, the key bastion of the Okinawa defenses, was in American hands—and if the 77th Division was irritated, if the Tenth Army was displeased, the soldier who commanded the Americans on Okinawa could not be entirely annoyed. The flag which Captain Dusenbury of South Carolina flew was the flag of Simon Bolivar Buckner’s father. The Stars and Bars, not the Stars and Stripes, waved over Okinawa.

  Two days later Old Glory was in its rightful place. General del Valle sent a party with the standard of the First Marine Division, the one that had flown over Guadalcanal, New Britain and Peleliu.

  Now, above Shuri Castle not far from the spot where Commodore Perry had hoisted the American flag a century ago, the most victorious flag of the Pacific was caught and flung in the breeze.

  The Japanese retreating to the south could see it. They fired on it, missing. They kept firing, for they understood that the terrible power it symbolized was already massing to come south and destroy them.

  16

  It was the month of June, the month of Ushijima’s last stand.

  Lieutenant General Buckner had redisposed his Tenth Army for the final heave of the war. On the west or right flank the Marines’sector had been narrowed. The Sixth Marine Division was going to make a shore-to-shore amphibious assault on the Oroku Peninsula in the southwest, and the First Marine Division had not the strength to cover the entire Third Corps front.

  The Third Corps, in fact, was depleted. With the Second Marine Division sent back to Saipan—rather than kept afloat as a kamikaze target—Major General Geiger had not been able to rest either the First or the Sixth. He had no reserve, and the divisions themselves had tried to maintain battle efficiency by resting one regiment while the other two attacked. But it could not always be done. So the Third Corps needed troops, and soon the Eighth Regiment of the Second Marine Division would be brought into Okinawa to furnish them. But not until after the Eighth had finished capturing islands to the west of Okinawa to give Admiral Turner long-range radar and fighter-director stations.

  The Twenty-fourth Corps was in better shape. Major General Hodge had three divisions—exclusive of the 27th on garrison in the north—and had been able to rest one while the other two were attacking. Only infrequently, as in the final days before Shuri, were all three in the line. But from June 4 onward the Twenty-fourth Corps was grinding down on the Yaeju-Yuza Peaks where most of the 32nd Army’s remnants had holed up. Even General Ushijima was here, conducting the last stand from his headquarters cave just above the ocean.

  The Yaeju-Yuza’s caves were crammed with men, and also with misery. There were many sick and dying. Some caves had become reeking pest-holes. As many as 40 men lay in some of these hillside holes. At times a doctor or a corpsman came around to ask how they felt. They could do little more. They had no supplies. Men died from wounds not considered serious. Filth accumulated. The rain drummed outside, water streamed into the caves and the wounded nearly drowned. The smell was so overpowering that men could hardly breathe.

  Still Ushijima was determined to fight on with so many of his men in such affliction. He shared the fanaticism of those Army die-hards who were even then, in that month of June, attempting to wreck the peace party which the new premier, Baron Kantaro Suzuki, was forming with the secret encouragement of Emperor Hirohito. Tokyo had been savaged twice more, on May 23 and 25, and the Emperor was now genuinely dismayed by the slaughter among his people.

  But General Ushijima and General Cho, resuming their old relationship, were capable of no such dismay. The fight was to be to the finish, and on June 4 the Tenth Army shuddered and drove forward.

  On that date the Sixth Marine Division’s spearheads shoved off from Naha to make the last Marine amphibious assault of World War Two. Again the amtracks, the wallowing sea waves, the naval gunfire thundering overhead, the shores of the objective winking and spouting smoke—and in they went to conquer three-by-two Oroku Peninsula in a whirling ten-day battle. Again beaches, coral pinnacles, caves, hills, tunnel systems, 5,000 last-ditch Japanese to be killed, an admiral to be driven to suicide, and again death and wounds for Marines—1,608 of them. Oroku
was the Pacific War in microcosm—even in its Medals of Honor: Private Robert McTureous attacking machine guns firing on stretcher-bearers and losing his life to save his buddies; Corpsman Fred Lester continuing to treat wounded Marines while dying of his own wounds. But Oroku fell; it ended with Admiral Ota committing hara-kiri and it ended in a rout. On June 13 the Japanese threw down their arms and fled toward the mainland in the southeast. They could not escape. The First Marine Division had driven past the base of the peninsula and sealed it off. The Japanese began surrendering.

  Beneath Oroku, the First Marine Division had broken through to the south coast. Okinawa had been sliced down the middle, but more important to those weary, hungry Marines who did it was the sea outlet to which amtracks could now bring supplies. The men had been a week on reduced rations, slogging through the mud which made supply nearly impossible.

  On the eastern flank the 7th and 96th Infantry Divisions were also nearing the southern coast. Lieutenant General Buckner had already made a surrender appeal to Ushijima. He had had a letter dropped behind the lines. It said:

  The forces under your command have fought bravely and well, and your infantry tactics have merited the respect of your opponents…. Like myself, you are an infantry general long schooled and practiced in infantry warfare…. I believe, therefore, that you understand as clearly as I, that the destruction of all Japanese resistance on the island is merely a matter of days….

  The letter was dropped on June 10. It reached Ushijima and Cho on June 17. They thought it hilarious. How could a samurai surrender? A samurai can only kill himself.

  Ushijima and Cho had already resigned themselves to hara-kiri by that seventeenth of June, for by then all was over. On the west flank the First Marine Division was battling through Kunishi Ridge while the Sixth had again come into line on the right and was racing for Ara Point, the southernmost tip of Okinawa. In the east, the 96th Division was finishing off resistance in the Yaeju-Yuza Peaks, and the 7th Division’s soldiers were closing in on the 32nd Army’s very headquarters.

  There was nothing left, save the satisfying news next day that the American who had insulted them with a surrender offer was himself dead.

  Simon Bolivar Buckner had come down to Mezado Ridge to see the fresh Eighth Marine Regiment enter battle. The Eighth had come to Okinawa on June 15, after seizing Admiral Turner’s radar outposts, and was attached to the First Division. As had happened in the beginning at Guadalcanal, when another regiment of the Second Division was attached to the First, so it was happening in the end at Okinawa.

  Colonel Clarence Wallace sent the Eighth Marines in at Kunishi Ridge. They were to attack in columns of battalions to seize a road, to split the enemy in two, to carry out General del Valle’s plans for a decisive thrust to the sea. Lieutenant General Buckner joined Colonel Wallace on Mezado Ridge at noon. He watched the Marines for about an hour. They moved swiftly on their objective. Buckner said:

  “Things are going so well here, I think I’ll move on to another unit.”

  Five Japanese shells struck Mezado Ridge. They exploded and filled the air with flying coral. A shard pierced General Buckner’s chest and he died within ten minutes—knowing, at least, that his Tenth Army was winning.

  Command went to Roy Geiger, senior officer and about to be promoted to lieutenant general. The grizzled white bear who had been at Guadalcanal in the beginning was leading at the end on Okinawa.

  That came three days later.

  On June 21 a patrol from the Sixth Marine Division reached a small mound atop a spiky coral cliff. It was the tip of Ara Point. Beneath them were the mingling waters of the Pacific Ocean and the East China Sea.

  A few more days of skirmishing and a reverse mop-up drive to the north remained. When these were over, and the last of the kamikaze had been shot down, the Japanese 32nd Army was no more, with roughly 100,000 dead, and, surprisingly, another 10,000 surrendered. American casualties totaled 49,151, with Marine losses at 2,938 dead or missing and 13,708 wounded; the Army’s at 4,675 and 18,099; and the Navy’s at 4,907 and 4,824. There was little left of Japanese air power after losses of 7,800 planes, against 763 for the Americans; and the sinking of Yamato and 15 other ships meant the end of Nippon’s Navy. Though the American Navy had been staggered with 36 ships sunk and another 368 damaged, there were still plenty left to mount the fall invasion of Kyushu from Okinawa.

  So the Great Loo Choo fell to the Americans after eighty-three days of fighting. A few hours after the Marine patrol reached Ara Point, Major General Geiger declared organized resistance to be at an end.

  That night Mitsuru Ushijima and Isamu Cho wrote final messages and prepared to kill themselves.

  “Our strategy, tactics, and techniques all were used to the utmost,” Ushijima signaled Tokyo. “We fought valiantly, but it was as nothing before the material strength of the enemy.”

  Cho wrote: “22nd day, 6th month, 20 year of Showa Era. I depart without regret, fear, shame, or obligations. Army Chief of Staff; Army Lieutenant General Cho, Isamu, age of departure 51 years. At this time and place I hereby certify the foregoing.”

  Precise to the end, Isamu Cho arose and vested himself in the white kimono proper for hara-kiri. He joined General Ushijima, who was dressed in full uniform. They sat down to the last banquet, while the roof of their cave shook to the muffled sounds of American grenades exploding above. Behind them, at the mouth of the cave, they could see moonlight shimmering on the sea. They finished eating and drank off toasts of Scotch whisky. They arose.

  “Well, Commanding General Ushijima, as the way may be dark, I, Cho, will lead the way.”

  “Please do so. I will take along my fan, since it is getting warm.”

  They strolled out to the ledge above the sea, General Ushijima calmly fanning himself. They bowed in reverence to the eastern sky. They sat on a white sheet spread over a quilt.

  A hundred feet behind them were the American soldiers. They began hurling grenades, unaware that Ushijima and Cho were so close to them.

  First Ushijima, then Cho, bared their bellies to the upward thrust of the ceremonial knife, while the adjutant stood by with his saber, awaiting the sight of blood.

  Two shouts, two sword flashes, and it was done—and the moon began sinking beneath a sea turning polished black.

  17

  And when he gets to Heaven,

  To Saint Peter he will tell:

  “One More Marine reporting, sir—

  “I’ve served my time in Hell!”

  It was everywhere behind them, this glorious rough epitaph. It had been pinpricked out on a mess pan nailed to a rough cross among the rots and stinks of Guadalcanal. It had been carved into coconut logs forming that dreadful sea wall at Tarawa. Men had spelled it out with cartridges pressed into the damp black earth of the Bougainville rain forest, or scrawled it beneath Stars of David rising from leveled kunai fields in New Britain. Makin knew it, and the hyphenated coral islets of Roi-Namur in the vast atoll of Kwajalein. Eniwetok, Choiseul, New Georgia, and a dozen forgotten islands where only a handful fell. Marines who lived to sail away from Saipan and Tinian, or from Guam, had left this farewell there in memory of those who did not sail. It had fallen from heat-shrivelled lips on Peleliu, had followed the flag that rose at Iwo Jima, and been scratched on a punctured helmet perched on a bayonet stuck in Okinawa mud.

  It was the salute of the brave living to the braver dead, it was a Marine’s sad, sardonic “so long” to a fallen buddy. And yet it was also the epitaph of the mighty island empire that was once Japan’s, for the men who earned or wrote these lines were also the men whose long sea charge had now brought that very “Hell” to within 350 miles of Japan herself.

  And they were ready to resume the charge. Six Marine divisions were again in training, again preparing for battle, on the sixth of August, 1945, when a great silvery airplane named Enola Gay rose from that very Tinian Island which had been the masterpiece of Marine warfare. It flew to Hiroshima to drop its horrible mushr
ooming egg. Three days later The Bomb was dropped again—on Nagasaki.

  Five more days and Japan surrendered.

  Sixteen more days, the thirtieth of August, and transports were sliding through the dawn mists into Tokyo Bay. They carried men of the Second Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment. The ships anchored off Futtsu Point, where massive stone forts flew white flags of surrender. For the last time came the order:

  “Land the landing force.”

  For the last time came the roaring run inshore, the salt sea spray in the face, the firmer hold on rifle slings; for the last time the grinding of steel keels on beaches, the lurching halt, the banging fall of the ramp and the buckskin-shod feet pelting through surf and sand.

  For the first time, Nippon had been invaded. The men in green were forming orderly ranks on Japanese soil and marching on the silent forts to receive the surrendered arms of Japanese soldiers.

  The long charge was over and there would be no more epitaphs.

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  Because this book has been written in a narrative style which might have been defeated by the use of footnotes, I have chosen to explain what needs to be explained, as well as to list a selected bibliography, in this Note.

  To begin, all the persons herein are real and their names are real. Middle initials have been dropped because I find letters more ambiguous than numerals and have used only those which have significance, such as the M which explains how Holland M. Smith came to be called Howlin’ Mad or the P which gave Colonel Oliver P. Smith his nickname of “O.P.” General Roy Geiger’s middle initial S, however, has even less meaning than, say, the number 3—and it will be remembered that George Washington, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte, to name a few generals, did not use middle initials.