The Pacific

by Hugh Ambrose

  The 3/5 would have heard that the other battalions of the Fifth Marines had nearly cracked Hill 55 and Wana Ridge "after intense hand-to-hand fighting," and that marines had begun to peer up the road to Shuri Castle when the rains came on May 21.526 It began as a light rain that chilled the bones. Rather than pass, the rain clouds settled in. Gene's unit got the word that it would be moving up to relieve a battalion of the Fourth Marines. The rain slowed everything, as did the enemy's shelling.

  The shelling began as it normally did. The heavy artillery, what men called the God of War, began to fire. R. V. Burgin was manning the forward observation post with his friend Jimmy. As the rounds started to get close, they threw themselves into a shell hole. They only just made it. Burgin landed on his stomach at the bottom and felt the concussion of the explosion, then the weight of the earth falling on top of him. He had been buried. Jimmy dug him out. Things got a little hazy after that. "They were shelling the hell out of us . . . it was one hell of a deal."

  The U.S. approach to Shuri Castle had touched off a maniacal fury of artillery. 527 Apparently the enemy's concerns about keeping his guns hidden or managing his dwindling supply of shells no longer mattered. To the men of the 3/5, "it seemed to some that the japs were no longer aiming at the marines' artillery, as one might expect. They were trying to destroy the very morale of the marines on the front line, and they were doing a pretty good job of it, because you just can't stand to be actually shelled like this day-in-and-day-out."528 The constant explosions disassociated the cause from the effect: trees disappeared in flashes of fire and smoke but the ear could not discern any Doppler effect, any directional sense, or even the sound of the shell destroying the tree. The pounding robbed the senses, disorienting the mind. "The artillery was going most directions and men was getting hit . . . and shrapnel was flying everywhere," when a brief pause came. Burgin heard Katz "just praying up a storm, out loud you know." Burgin yelled, "Katz! Shut the hell up. If you're going to pray, pray . . . silently. Don't be praying out loud like that . . . it unnerves my troops."

  Not unnerved so much as deadened by the concussions, R.V."sat down on my helmet and was eating a can of ham and lima beans, and a piece of shrapnel about three and a half inches long hit me in the neck." He touched the jagged metal and burned his fingers. So he picked up something to knock it out of his flesh and put the piece in his pocket. "Katz put some sulfur and a bandage on the wound and I walked back to an army field hospital, about a half mile back." An ambulance then took him back to a larger hospital.

  ALONG WITH THE NEW CLOTHES, THE MARINES IN SHOFNER'S UNIT RECEIVED replacements. The replacements were actually an extra 10 percent of men that the 1st Division HQ had trained on Pavuvu and stuck into various "work parties" unloading ships until needed. The replacements had two days to get assigned and trained. "Intensive training of these men began immediately," as the division commander decreed. "Use of weapons, as well as squad and platoon tactics were emphasized."529 On May 18 Shofner went with the regimental commander to scout the positions of the Seventh Marines because the next day they would relieve the Seventh. Shofner's 1/1 took the place of the 1/7, which was in "static situation." The 3/1 pulled the difficult duty of going directly on to Wana Ridge. Within twenty-four hours, though, all three battalions of the First Marines began seizing Hill 55 and Wana Ridge yard by yard, exchanging gunfire and grenades with the enemy at close range.

  Shofner's Charlie Company again captured part of Wana Ridge, a point his men called "Snag-tooth."530 Just because it held the ridgeline, however, did not mean that the Japanese in holes on the far side of the ridge would retreat. The enemy used its cover effectively and counterattacked that night. One hundred marines fought hand to hand with one hundred to two hundred Japanese. The Japanese battled their way back to the top until the early hours of May 22; Charlie Company reorganized itself and drove them down. The problem had become clear. The heavy artillery, and even the mobile tanks and self-propelled 105mms, could not fire at the reverse side of slopes. The engineers threw a hose over Wana Ridge and pumped napalm by the hundreds of gallons through it. When ready, they ignited the pools of jellied gasoline with white phosphorus grenades. The flood of burning napalm also failed to silence the defenders.

  DURING THE DAY ON THE TWENTY- FIRST, THE RAINS CONTINUED, AND THEY WERE gaining strength on May 22 when word passed that King Company was moving out the next day.531 Battalion HQ also warned its marines to "be on the alert for Nips with American uniforms." More rain made the slog forward more difficult. They began to relieve the 2/4 at 1400. The 3/5 found out that as bad as the shelling had been in the previous days where they had been, just behind the lines, its effects had been far worse here, on the front line. Gene saw a "cratered, corpse strewn morass with its muddy, shell blasted ridges" and it repulsed him.532 The mortar squads found watery holes occupied by dead marines or dead Japanese. The mud and the shelling prevented men from moving or burying the corpses. The guys took to calling the area "Maggot Ridge."533

  The next day's patrols were not sent out by Stumpy Stanley. Overcome by malaria, he was led away. Sledge watched him being taken away, aghast. Not only had he lost another member of what he considered the Old Breed, but he knew that the company's XO would take his place. Sledge disliked Lieutenant George Loveday, nicknamed "Shadow." Loveday lacked neatness in his appearance, E. B. Sledge noted, and was cold to his men. E.B. hated the fact that Shadow had been entrusted with "our individual and collective destinies."534 Sergeant Burgin and Gunnery Sergeant Hank Boyes, however, noticed that Shadow had uncommon courage. Lieutenant Loveday led from the front. While he did so, Hank Boyes remained at the company CP, seeing to the logistical needs of King. When Shadow had to return to battalion HQ for briefings, Boyes came forward to check on things. Unnoticed by Sledge, King's gunnery sergeant and the new skipper worked as a team to handle the load. This cooperative arrangement in part recognized Boyes's experience and in part stemmed from the loss or disappearance of other key company personnel, like the first sergeant.535

  The patrols Shadow ordered on May 24 made almost no headway in the sticky mud and under fire from weapons of all calibers. The third patrol left at five p.m. It forced its way to the village of Asato, where it reported "encountering 50 japs" and killing twelve of them before being driven off. Shadow had some of his men blowing caves on the ridge when the enemy began laying a lot of smoke. It might mean a counterattack. He called his men back. Nothing developed. Dusk brought an end to the day's work.

  Patrols the following morning also made it past Maggot Ridge, also known as Half Moon Hill, and into the village of Asato, just before noon. The enemy snipers fired from all directions and King Company beat a hasty retreat and the Japanese reoccupied the positions. Gene stood a watch on the OP, up with the riflemen on the front line. The Japanese managed to position a 70mm to his extreme left and they "fired that sucker straight down our line."536 They knocked out tanks with their first round. They also fired it at the foxholes of King Company. Gene watched the third shell hit two foxholes away from him. One of the three men in it went flying in the air. The two men in the foxhole next to Sledge jumped out and began running around; one yelled, "Jesus Christ, I'm hit!" The other said, "Christ, let me die it hurts so bad." The latter marine toppled over soon thereafter. Eugene yelled for a corpsman as he and others began to get out of their foxholes. A sergeant yanked Gene from the chaos, yelling, "Sledgehammer, get back to your mortar. You may need to give fire on that jap gun."

  King Company soon fired everything it had at the 70mm artillery piece. Working in his gun pit, Gene saw the stretchers taking away some of his friends. One marine asked as he was carried by, "Sledgehammer, do you think I'll lose my leg?" He had already lost his lower leg. Gene lied and said, "Buddy, you'll be alright." As he said the words, he saw the man die. Gene called out to the other marine on a stretcher, Bill Leyden, but he was unconscious and possibly dead.

  In the days that followed, patrols from King "could get but two to three yard
s in front of the front lines."537 Battalion HQ warned them to "conserve all ammunition. Prepare for an all out counterattack."538 How the enemy could attack was information not given. The enemy's big field pieces reigned supreme in daylight, the largest an eight-inch cannon said to have been brought in from Singapore.539 The rain continued, filling each hole with water, flooding the roads into soup. In the deepening quagmire, the wounded went out by amtrac.540 With the road network mostly washed out, navy pilots came over in Avengers and dropped supplies. The marines' morale plummeted as the situation, dominated by the God of War, came to seem hopeless and intractable. The men in King Company "just kept scratching at the ground, trying to get in deeper into the mud."541 Fatalism grew within them, the feeling that "the only way you're going to get out of there is to get killed."

  Snafu and Eugene shared "a deep foxhole and our ponchos as a roof. It didn't leak, but one of us stayed up constantly to bail out the water that seeped in through the ground. We had a wooden floor and it allowed the water to run under it into a special hole and then we bailed out with a can."542 They hunkered down, trying to keep themselves and their weapons ready for action. In the foxholes around them, men broke--especially the new men.

  Shadow brought up some replacements one morning. Gene counted about twenty-five new men being hustled into position. By the end of the day, only six of them remained. Most of them, who had come almost directly from boot camp stateside, "went absolutely bananas. The place was so horrible they couldn't even stand the physical appearance of the battlefield."543 The guys said they had "combat fatigue"; Hank Boyes recorded them on the muster roll as "non- battle casualties" and had them sent to the rear. Their numbers exceeded the number of men killed. Gene often thought he would "just fold up" as his own dread smothered him and his senses filled with the decay and filth around him. He began to hallucinate; he caught himself watching dead bodies rising up like wraiths.544 He watched Hank Boyes make the rounds of the foxholes "giving encouragement," or "doing something brave as hell," and it set an example for him.545 Giving up meant giving his share of the burden to Snafu, Hank and the others; he wasn't there quite yet.

  BETWEEN MAY 24 AND MAY 27, THE MEN OF THE 1/1 HUNKERED DOWN AND awaited better weather and more ammunition and food. The storm grounded the airplanes. Their supplies arrived on the backs of other marines. Shofner would have heard from division GQ that there had been a lot of enemy movement seen in the area of Shuri Castle.546 After the initial report came a spotter reporting large numbers of enemy soldiers walking south. They were falling back to the next line of prepared positions. Thirteen minutes after the call went in, the first shells of artillery and naval gunfire arrived at the coordinates. Aircraft soon followed, even in awful weather. The prize was too big. The effort paid off handsomely. As General Pedro del Valle put it, the "nips were caught on the road with kimonos down."547 The clouds broke on May 28. The roads were still impassable, but division HQ believed the Japanese had abandoned Shuri for another line. Battalion commanders like Lieutenant Colonel Shofner received a lot of pressure to make sure the enemy was pursued. He, like others, demanded more replacements to fuel the attack.

  A light rain welcomed the twenty-ninth. Good news arrived at nine thirty a.m. Elements of the Fifth Marines had entered Shuri Castle against "little or no opposition." 548 They hung a Confederate flag on the former command center of the Imperial Japanese Army. The First Marines were ordered to support them. The 3/1 led the way and made it up the steep hill and the massive rock walls of Shuri by four p.m. Shofner's 1/1 was ordered to attack Shuri from the west. His rifle companies, whittled down to less than half their original strength, slogged around Hill 55 and ran into a nasty firefight. Rather than clean out the positions firing on them, though, Shifty spoke to his regimental commander about a new plan. Covered by a barrage of artillery, the 1/1 swung a bit farther south in single file and entered Shuri near its barracks and tied in with the 3/1. They had gotten behind a group of Japanese still holding the northern face of the castle. The two marine battalions moved quickly to create a unified defense, facing north and south, before dark. They did not have enough water, though, and thirsty men drank water from shell holes. The Japanese rifle fire did increase in the darkness, and one of his machine gunners killed thirty-five enemy in one of the stone alleyways, but no major push evolved.549

  Navy planes dropped bags tied to parachutes loaded with supplies the following day as Shifty's 1/1 held the great bastion with the 3/1. The two battalions were in the southern end of Shuri. Patrols sent northward through the complex, back toward the U.S. lines, ran into enemy troops armed with a 47mm cannon and machine guns. The marines backed away, needing more support. That night the Japanese abandoned the ancient fortification entirely. Shofner's patrols the following morning quickly revealed a lack of organized resistance. The process of mopping up the holdouts in and around Shuri Castle began.550

  THE BREAK BY THE 1/5 INTO SHURI CASTLE HAD BEEN A MORALE BUILDER IN King Company and in all of the 3/5. The day the 1/5 entered the bastion, Sledge and his comrades were pinned down after advancing six hundred yards past Maggot Ridge. They took heart in the knowledge that the locus of the enemy's resistance had been destroyed, although the Japanese troops in front of them betrayed no change in their dogmatism. The marines entered a horseshoe- shaped area with, they counted, fifty-eight caves, each one manned with snipers and machine guns. Boyes radioed battalion HQ they would not be able to move forward until the caves were cleaned and/or sealed.

  More rain showers fell as King Company worked on the horseshoe the next day, May 30. At least the enemy artillery had fallen off to a sporadic level. At two thirty p.m. the Avengers flew over to resupply them with water and the six types of ammunition they needed.551 The problem with the bundles dropped from airplanes was that they were a contrived response to a problem, not a solution. The men who packed the bundles and the pilots who dropped them had no preparation or training. 552 The marines used colored panels or colored smoke to mark the drop zone to the best of their ability. The Japanese set off the same color of smoke to confuse the situation. The pilots flew at 250 feet and were traveling a little faster than the plane's stall speed, or about ninety- five knots, into the canopy of arching shells fired from both sides of the line.553 King Company as a rule received minimal amounts of necessities, and often opened the packages to find items that were not needed.554 Combat efficiency suffered.

  More bundles of rations came floating down under parachutes the following day, May 31, arriving about fifteen minutes before the riflemen of the 3/5 poured from their foxholes and pushed south. The fall of Shuri had broken the enemy's defenses and for the next few days King spearheaded advances of fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred yards a day in their sector. Enemy artillery was light to nonexistent. They crossed a key highway and later seized a bridge over the Kokuba River intact. Occasionally a skirmish broke out, as it did on the far side of the bridge, on any high ground like Hills 42 and 30, or in important villages like Gisushi. Night infiltration was rarely a problem until the night of June 2, when the Japanese made a concerted effort all along the line. The marines had long since developed a range of countermeasures--some technological, some training-based--that prevented the enemy from inflicting much damage. The marines liked planting the M-49 trip flare around their positions, when they had them, and shooting anything that moved.

  Trucks with supplies did not accompany the move south because the roads were still impassable. Supplies came on the backs of marines or in the bellies of navy Avengers. Keeping their marines supplied demanded a lot from Shadow and Sergeant Boyes. On June 5 their job became a little easier when the first trucks arrived at the town of Gisushi.555 The following day King Company sent some patrols up to the summit of Hill 107. These met with no resistance. Companies from the First Marines arrived to take over. Having taken no casualties in three days, the 3/5 went into reserve.

  THE RIFLE COMPANIES OF THE FIRST MARINES RECEIVED REPLACEMENTS WHILE mopping up Shuri Castle.
All the marines joining them had been humping supplies forward to them except for one, the regimental chaplain, who had cheerfully volunteered to lug forty-pound ration boxes with the privates.556 The new men took their first steps as combat troops while exploring vast caverns underneath the castle, well constructed and undamaged by the salvos from battleships or 155mms.557 The replacements' indoctrination period lasted until June 4, when the 1/1 hustled south and passed through the lines of the 2/5 and 3/5 on Hill 107. Shofner's orders were to continue the offensive from Hill 107 and seize the high ground north of two villages called Iwa and Shindawaku. As he prepared to carry out the mission, orders came to wait until the supply problems were worked out. A half hour later, the orders reversed again because the Seventh Marines on his right flank had advanced and the Seventh's left flank could not be left exposed. At four thirty p.m. Shofner's riflemen pushed forward, leaving the Fifth Marines in their foxholes on the hill. The 1/1 advanced about eight hundred yards without a shot being fired. A stream, raging with all the recent rains, halted progress. Shifty received word that no bridges existed along the division's entire front line--except the one footbridge his scouts had found in his sector. The intact bridge represented a key tactical objective. He immediately ordered his men across.558

  Two platoons from Charlie Company crossed the bridge. Machine guns in the high ground fired down upon them. Mortar shells began to explode. Charlie Company was pinned down. The mud, rain, and cloud cover impeded support from the battalions of artillery and the ships onshore. Shofner had his men dig in and provide what covering fire they could. After sunset the process of pulling his men and their wounded back across the river began. Marines wanted to be safe in their holes on a rainy night, not moving around, but they needed the cover of darkness to shield them from the machine gunners. When everyone had crossed the bridge, Shofner ordered the 1/1 to fall back to the line of departure for the night of June 4.