Ralph Berrier
Page 23
Seibert refused to send his men back out into the field until they got support, which came in the form of a tank that made short work of the Japanese machine-gun nests, opening the door for the platoon to cross the berm and work across the open field.
The end was in sight; it had to be. The soldiers could look at a map, see they were nearing the tip of the island, and understand the Japanese were running out of places to hide. Trouble was, tens of thousands of enemy troops had fallen back to the south, making the last few miles of southern Okinawa the most dangerous place on earth. The Japanese command was largely intact, as well. They would not let their men surrender.
F Company took no prisoners, except for pitiful, straggling columns of Okinawan civilians desperate to flee the killing fields. Clayton had seen hundreds of civilian corpses strewn across the cratered, rocky landscape. Most were women and children. Every available man had been dragooned into service by the Japanese. Hundreds of hapless people, mothers and children among them, had been caught in the murderous crossfire of the no-man’s-land between the American and Japanese guns. Others were killed by Japanese soldiers when they would not abandon their hiding places inside the tombs or caves that the fighters sought to occupy. Still others died by their own hand. Following the orders from Japanese commanders and from the imperial government, entire families committed suicide rather than be captured by the ruthless American soldiers. The real reason for such a wicked command was not to encourage honorable death, but rather to keep the population from giving critical information to the Americans. Many frightened families were given grenades to assist with the final act.
So they died. Clayton saw them as he worked his way to the sea. The sight of the mangled, decaying bodies of innocents was heartbreaking, even to a soldier who had long ago become inured to the shock of death, the smell of rotting flesh, and the immoralities of killing. He could not have known that he had not even seen the worst of it.
F Company tramped down the Yuza escarpment and plowed ahead toward the town of Aragachi. After a day of dodging bullets and blowing up caves, the Americans dug foxholes on the outskirts of a field. Just after nightfall, a few men heard rustling in the field. Another banzai charge? Hadn’t the Japs abandoned that idiotic tactic? Flares burst above the landscape but revealed nothing. After the flares burned out, the soldiers heard more rustling. Someone gave the order to fire, and a hail of bullets ripped across the field. After a few seconds of silence, a low moaning sound emanated from the area, followed by the most sickening sound the men had ever heard on a battlefield. Worse than the shouts of a banzai charge or the scream of a 320 mm shell.
They heard a baby crying.
No one knew what to do. Nothing in the field manual addressed the care of babies on a battlefield. Some men claimed it was a trick, a Jap ruse to lure them out of their foxholes and slaughter them. Others worried that the wails would drown out the sound of any approaching Japs. No one had a clue what to do. Then another sickening sound: a long machine-gun burst.
Then the most heartbreaking sound of all. Silence.
• • •
Papa Clayton was in a foxhole that night, probably close enough to have heard the baby’s cries. This was a war story he never shared with any of us. I discovered it in another soldier’s memoir. Papa Clayton would’ve been right there, hearing the cries, then the bullets, then nothing. I don’t know how you get over something like that. He probably never did.
I can’t get over it, either, and I wasn’t even there. I can empathize with his reticence. Today, I will hug my daughter close and kiss her many times and tell her I love her. If my wife asks me what I wrote about today, I will not tell her, because I do not want to talk about it.
• • •
The Japanese would not give up. Their backs were against the ocean, they had lost tens of thousands of men, but still they resisted, harassing the Americans with small-arms fire. The Americans never slowed, plowing ahead to the outskirts of a small, bombed-out village where the Japanese were prepared to make a final stand. The village was called Aragachi, a name Clayton would remember until the day he died in his living room while waiting for that tomato sandwich.
The Deadeyes had shelled the hell out of Aragachi, setting ablaze the thatched roofs of wooden and rock huts. The village was infested with hundreds of enemy troops and an unknown number of civilians. By the time F Company arrived under clouds of phosphorus smoke on the evening of June 20, 1945, the village resembled ruins unearthed by an archaeological dig.
On June 21, the soldiers chaperoned mighty Sherman tanks into the rubble of the village. Infantrymen pointed out Japanese emplacements, and tanks responded with long streams of napalm-enhanced flame that incinerated the enemy. Japanese soldiers, some engulfed in flames, ran into the open only to be mowed down by M1-toting foot soldiers. Bullets flew from behind every rock and fallen house. F Company moved through the heart of the village, blasting and burning anything that moved. The men even employed an antiquated, yet effective, battlefield tactic by forming a long skirmish line of a dozen or more men, marching shoulder to shoulder through the center of the village. The formation resembled an old-fashioned Revolutionary War–era battle line, except these soldiers were armed with high-powered automatic weapons instead of muskets. The marching machine gunners swept their fire from side to side. Browning automatic rifle marksmen fired directly ahead. When these groups reloaded, the M1 riflemen, Clayton included, opened up. The company rolled ahead like a murderous bulldozer, forcing the Japanese forever backward.
Near the middle of the village, Clayton saw trouble on his left. A machine gun opened up on his squad and a tank. Clayton ran behind the tank and reached for the phone mounted on the back that allowed communication with the tank crew, but the phone had been blown off. He waved his arms frantically in hopes that the gunner would see him. He hollered, “Machine gun at nine o’clock!” Just then, he felt a whack against his right shin as if he’d been struck with a baseball bat. The tank spun quickly to the left and Clayton stumbled to the right and belly-flopped onto a pile of palm leaves and sticks that gave way like a floor caving in. He had fallen into a Japanese trench. Before he knew what had happened, a couple of Japanese heads rose from out of the leaves five feet in front of him … then a couple more … and a couple more.
And that’s how it happens. One minute, you’re alive, flailing in the cauldron of battle. Fighting, fighting, always fighting. A few more days, that’s all you need, and you will have made it through. You will have survived this brutal war. You will live to see your home again. Your mother’s worn and worried face, which you have not seen for so many years, will melt into sobs upon the return of her son, her brave son, gone all this time to fight for such a noble, divine cause. You will be celebrated as a hero for fighting this good fight, you will marry, and you will raise a family. If only you survive. But then it happens. Some son of a bitch from a wretched place called The Hollow falls right on top of you. Worse yet, he lands on his knees and elbows with his M1 pointing right at you, and you, armed with enough explosives to stop a tank, don’t have so much as a pistol or a knife or any small weapon that could easily kill this man. So you do the only thing you can. You die.
Clayton opened up into the knot of Japs crouched in the trench. He emptied his eight-round clip and killed eight men in a matter of seconds.
The official citation for Clayton’s Bronze Star award reported that Clayton was aided by at least two other men in killing the eight Japanese troops, whose intent most likely was to stop the tank. Other descriptions from that day mention the story of several soldiers killing a trenchful of Japanese. The citation reads:
For heroic service in connection with military operations against the enemy on Okinawa Island on 21 June 1945. While protecting a tank which was supporting the attack of our troops upon the town of Aragachi, Sergeant (then Private First Class) Hall and two others killed eight Japanese soldiers intent on neutralizing the tanks. The tank with the three accompanying Infantry
men approached a ditch in which Sergeant Hall spied eight Japanese soldiers with demolition charges, hand grenades and knee mortar shells, intended for the tank’s destruction. Sergeant Hall, with utter disregar [sic] for his personal safety, and with full realization of the danger from this type of fire, ran to the ditch, followed by the other two men, stood above and fired down into the enemy engaging in a close up battle with them until the enemy were all killed. His heroic service saved the tank and facilitated the accomplishment of the company’s mission.
Clayton always, always, contended that he fell into the trench. That doesn’t mean he got it completely right, but I believe him. I also accept the army version that two other men were there. They just never fell into the trench. Clayton did and he was the only man to climb out of that trench alive, to eventually raise a family that would one day produce the likes of me. Some days, I can’t shake the notion that I should have made a whole lot more of myself.
Right before tumbling into the ditch, Clayton had been shot in his lower leg, but the wound required only a bandage. The day after Clayton’s heroics, Okinawa was declared secure. The skirmishes, however, did not end. The company began the mopping-up phase. A mop could never cleanse the stench of death and devastation that had swallowed Aragachi, though. On the day Clayton killed the eight enemy soldiers, the Ninety-sixth division’s historian, Captain Donald Mulford entered the decimated village and wrote the following:
Aragachi was a living, stinking testimonial to the horror that war brings to a civilian population. The men who of necessity had laid it to waste were Americans, and though they hated the Japanese soldier, they spared the natives whenever it would not endanger their own lives to do so. But the natives here had been caught, partly by the force of circumstance and partly by fear of advancing Americans, a fear bred of constant propaganda by the Japanese Army.
Consequently they huddled in their holes, refusing to give up until burned or blasted out—some killing themselves and their children rather than face the horrors they had been led to expect. As morning came on the 21st, the town lay burned and broken under the hot sun with the sickly smell of death hanging like an unseen mist over the rubble. Old men, women, and children dressed in tattered black kimonos were herded to the rear by the dozens. One had to walk carefully, for the dead were everywhere.
Against the base of a stone wall was the naked body of an infant about a year old. No one seemed interested except the hundreds of flies that swarmed over it. There was little noise except for the occasional zing of a die-hard sniper’s bullet and the distant chatter of machine guns.… For Aragachi, the war was over. The little town had paid the price for the empire lust of the Tokyo war lords.
And my Papa Clayton was there.
• • •
The army pushed southward like a massive press, squeezing thousands of innocents and many more frenzied enemy soldiers into a pocket of death, caught between the advancing forces and the sea. The estimated number of civilian dead has varied over the years, but most experts figure that at least 100,000 Okinawans perished, perhaps as many as 150,000. Even in the final days of the fighting, families continued to commit suicide rather than be captured by the bloody Americans.
For more than sixty years, the Japanese government has downplayed the role its former military commanders played in urging civilians to take their own lives. In 2007, the government began watering down its history textbooks for schoolchildren. This outraged Okinawans, including those who had lived through the battle and remembered well the military’s gruesome instructions. They protested in crowds 100,000 strong, approximately one protestor for every civilian dead. They knew the truth.
• • •
I have read that Okinawa’s Peace Memorial Park and museum is located atop breathtaking bluffs that offer panoramic views of the ocean and the neighboring cliffs. I’ve never seen it myself. I have long known that one of the ironies of terrible battles is that they are often fought in the most beautiful places—the rolling battlefields at Gettysburg, Pennyslvania, and Sharpsburg, Maryland, for example. Left to nature, the landscape heals itself; grass grows on hills where men died, and trees and bushes sprout from death trenches.
Those eight-hundred-foot cliffs are where many people—Japanese soldiers, Okinawan civilians, mothers, children—jumped to their deaths near the end of the battle. Even more died farther south. Their names are among the more than two hundred thousand inscribed on the Cornerstone of Peace, a series of black granite markers that form interlocking walls that crisscross the park. In photographs, the cornerstone reminds me of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., except with quadruple the number of names.
• • •
By battle’s end, Clayton hated the Japanese with a passion. Then again, so did every other Deadeye. Clayton thought nothing of killing Japanese soldiers wherever he ran into them during the mopping-up phase. For the first time, large numbers of enemy troops were surrendering. A few handfuls at first, then scores, and finally hundreds and thousands of loincloth-wearing Japanese soldiers emerged from the sugarcane fields and rice paddies of southern Okinawa. Personally, Clayton didn’t much care for taking prisoners.
Shortly after the Aragachi fight, he and another soldier kept watch over a small stream where a few Japanese had been observed—and killed—gathering water. Clayton saw a strange-looking woman he was sure was a Japanese soldier in a woman’s clothes. Clayton crept up behind and hollered. The person spun around quickly and pulled a pistol from his clothes. Clayton killed the cross-dressing Japanese soldier with one shot. Next, he probably frisked him for souvenirs.
Nearly nine months had passed since he had killed his first enemy soldier. He had been so scared then, stumbling upon a Jap in the jungles of the Philippines, that he almost vomited after killing the man. Remorse had long ago become a casualty of the war. Every day was like going to work. His job was to shoot Japs.
• • •
The bloody math is incomprehensible. The Allies (mostly Americans) killed more than 100,000 Japanese fighters. American losses have been recalculated several times over the years, with a total just over 14,000 generally accepted as a fair accounting of the dead and missing. More than half of those were soldiers, the rest marines and sailors. Tenth Army commander Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., was killed, the highest-ranking U.S. officer to die from enemy fire during World War II. Brigadier General Claudius Easley was also killed on Okinawa. The top two Japanese commanders killed themselves.
Then there are the poor, innocent civilians. Okinawa was believed to have had a population of about 300,000 when 1945 dawned. By the end of the fighting, fewer than 200,000 were left alive. On a sliver of an island barely detectable on most schoolhouse globes, the combined number of American, Japanese, and Okinawan dead topped 250,000. F Company lost 40 men, twice the number that had died on Leyte.
Three hundred and thirty miles away, the main islands of Japan girded for invasion.
The battle of Okinawa has long been overshadowed by iconic World War II events such as the D-Day landings at Normandy and the images of the American flag raising on Iwo Jima. Yet, it was Okinawa—not Normandy, Iwo Jima, or Guadalcanal—that constituted the largest and deadliest land-and-sea operation of World War II. American casualties on Okinawa were double the number of Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal combined.
And still the killing was not finished.
• • •
The two young privates were green-as-grass rookies who arrived on Okinawa after the fighting was mostly over. One of them, just a kid who was probably pulling schoolgirl pigtails a couple months before, crowed about how badly he wanted to kill a Jap. The war might end before he ever got the chance, he whined.
Clayton tuned out the chattering as he walked along high ground just above flowering cane stalks waving in the sea breezes. Out toward the middle of the field, he noticed the stalks waving a little too much. Was a Jap in there? Civilians? He signaled to the two privates to move to the far en
d of the cane field. Clayton would enter the opposite end and chase whoever was hiding into a trap.
Clayton charged into the cane field, his face and arms slapped and scratched by the rough stalks, and chased whoever it was toward the two nervous privates. Clayton caught glimpses of the person through the rows of cane—a man in uniform, a Japanese soldier. He plowed through the cane and ran the Jap over, dropping him with a rifle butt to the gut.
The enemy soldier writhed on the ground. He was as bedraggled and withered as the other few prisoners F Company had taken. He wore no hat or helmet, but his chest was unusually decorated with medals. On his hip, he carried a pistol, of which Clayton relieved him. Clayton hoped he had a saber, too, but he did not.
“You a colonel?” Clayton spit at the Jap.
The soldier attempted to rise, but Clayton caught him again with the rifle butt. He shouted at him to stay down. That’s when Clayton noticed the fancy-looking wristwatch.
Clayton reached down and grabbed the Jap’s wrist. The soldier wriggled his arm free, lunged his face toward Clayton’s hand, and bit it. Hard.
Clayton hollered as he yanked his hand free. He came down with the rifle butt again, this time harder, squarely on top of the pitiful Jap’s head. Clayton shouted at him to get up. He took the man’s arm and lifted him to his feet. The Jap wobbled, barely able to stand. Clayton hated Japs, hated them.
“Boys,” he said to the two rookies, who had stood by silently during the beat down. “Y’all want to shoot a Jap?”
The two guys were too stunned to answer at first.
“You mean, this close?” stammered the kid who had been all hot for killing Japs just a minute earlier.
“Yes, this close,” Clayton said. “You’ll never get an easier shot. You better shoot him now, or you might miss and he’ll shoot you.”
“I … I don’t want to shoot a Jap like this,” the soldier said.