by E. B. Sledge
We dashed into the smoky, murky air. I lowered my head and gritted my teeth as the machine-gun slugs snapped and zipped around us. I expected to get hit. So did the others. I wasn't being brave, but Redifer was, and I would rather take my chances than be yellow in the face of his risks to screen us. If he got hit while I was cringing in safety, I knew it would haunt me the rest of my life—that is, if I lived much longer, which seemed more unlikely every day.
The smoke hid us from the gunner, but he kept firing intermittent bursts down the draw to prevent our crossing. Slugs popped and snapped, but we made it across. We rushed behind the knoll and flung the heavy ammo boxes down on the mud. We thanked Redifer, but he seemed more concerned with solving the problem at hand than talking.
“Boy, that Nip's got the best-trained trigger finger I ever heard. Listen to them short bursts he gets off,” a buddy said. We panted and listened to the machine gun half in terror and half in admiration of the Japanese gunner's skill. He continued to fire across the rear of our position. Each burst was two or three rounds and spaced: tat, tat… tat, tat, tat… tat, tat.
Just then we heard the engine of a tank some distance across the draw. Without a word, Redifer sped across the draw toward the sound. He got across safely. We could see him dimly through the drifting smoke as he contacted the tankers. Shortly we saw him backing toward us slowly, giving the tankers hand signals as he directed the big Sherman across the draw. The Nambu kept firing blindly through the smoke as we watched Redifer anxiously. He seemed unhurried and reached us safely with the tank.
The tankers had agreed to act as a shield for us in our hazardous crossing. With several of us crouching in the welcome protection it afforded us, the tank moved back and forth across the draw, always between us and the enemy machine gun. We loaded up on ammo and moved slowly across the machine-gun-swept draw, hugging the side of the tank like chicks beside a mother hen. We kept this up until all the ammo was brought safely across.
The troops often expressed the opinion that whether an enlisted man was or wasn't recommended for a decoration for outstanding conduct in combat depended primarily on who saw him perform the deed. This certainly was true in the case of Redifer and what he had done to get the ammunition across the draw. I had seen other men awarded decorations for less, but Redifer was not so fortunate as to receive the official praise he deserved. Just the opposite happened.
As we finished the chore of moving the ammo across the draw, a certain first lieutenant, who by some unlucky chance had been assigned to Company K after Peleliu, came up. We called him simply “Shadow.” A tall, skinny man, he was the sloppiest Marine—officer or enlisted—I ever saw.
His dungarees hung on him like old, discarded clothes on a scarecrow; his web pistol belt was wrapped around his waist like a loose sash on a dressing gown; his map case flopped around; and every pack strap dangled more “Irish pennants” than any new recruit had in boot camp. Shadow never wore canvas leggings when I saw him. His trouser legs were rolled up unevenly above his skinny ankles. He didn't fit his camouflaged cloth helmet cover tightly over his helmet like most Marines. It sagged to one side like some big stocking cap. For some reason, he frequently carried his helmet upside down in his left hand clutched against his side like a football. On his head he wore a green cloth fatigue cap like the rest of us wore under our helmets. But his cap was torn across the top so that his dark hair protruded like straw through a scarecrow's hat.
Shadow's disposition was worse than his appearance. Moody, ill-tempered, and highly excitable, he cursed the veteran enlisted men worse than most DIs did recruits in boot camp. When he was displeased with a Marine about something, he didn't reprimand the man the way our other officers did. He threw a tantrum. He would grab his cap by the bill, fling it onto the muddy deck, stamp his feet, and curse everyone in sight. The veteran sergeant who accompanied Shadow would stand silently by during these temper displays, torn between a compulsion to reprimand us, if it seemed his duty to do so, and embarrassment and disapproval over his officer's childish behavior.
In all fairness, I don't know how competent an officer Shadow was considered to be by his superiors. Needless to say, he wasn't highly regarded in the ranks, simply on the basis of his lack of self-control. But he was brave. I'll give him that.
Shadow “pitched a fit” in reaction to what Redifer had done in facilitating our ammo transportation across the draw. It was just the first of many such performances I was to witness, and they never ceased to amaze as well as disgust me.
He went to Redifer and unleashed such a verbal assault against him that anyone who didn't know better would have assumed that Redifer was a coward who had deserted his post in the face of the enemy instead of having just performed a brave act. Shadow yelled, gesticulated, and cursed Redifer for “exposing himself unnecessarily to enemy fire” when he was throwing the smoke grenades into the draw and when he went to contact the tank.
Redifer took it quietly, but he was obviously dismayed. We looked on in disbelief, having expected Shadow to praise the man for showing bravery and initiative under fire. But here was this ranting, raving officer actually cursing and berating a man for doing something any other officer would have considered a meritorious act. It was so incredibly illogical that we couldn't believe it.
Finally, having vented his rage on a Marine who rightfully deserved praise, Shadow strode off grumbling and cursing the individual and collective stupidity of enlisted men. Redifer didn't say anything. He just looked off into the distance. We growled mightily, though.
As midday approached on 9 May, everyone was tense about the coming attack. Ammunition had been issued, men had squared away their gear and had done their last-minute duties: adjusting cartridge belts, pack straps, leggings, and leather rifle slings—all those forlorn little gestures of no value that released tension in the face of impending terror. We had previously registered our mortars on selected targets and had stacked HE and phosphorous shells off the mud on pieces of boxes for quick access.
The ground having dried sufficiently for our tanks to maneuver, several stood by with engines idling, hatches open, and the tankers waiting—waiting like everyone else. War is mostly waiting. The men around me sat silently with drawn faces. Some replacements had come into the company to make up for our earlier losses. These new men looked more confused than afraid.
The big guns had fired periodically during the morning, but then had died away. There wasn't much noise as we waited for the preattack bombardment to begin.
Then the preassault bombardment commenced. The big shells swished overhead as each battery of our artillery and each ship's guns began to shell the Japanese Awacha defenses ahead of us. At first we could identify each type of shell— 75mm, 105mm, and 155mm artillery, along with the 5-inch ship's guns—as it added to the storm of steel.
We saw our planes overhead, Corsairs and dive bombers. Air strikes began as the planes dove, firing rockets, dropping bombs, and strafing to our front. The firing thundered and rumbled until finally even the experienced ears of the veterans could distinguish nothing, only that we were glad that all that stuff was ours.
Enemy artillery and mortar shells began coming in as the Japanese tried to disrupt the attack. The replacements looked utterly bewildered amid the bedlam. I remembered my first day in combat and sympathized with them. The sheer mas-siveness of the preattack bombardment was an awesome and frightening thing to witness as a veteran, let alone as a new replacement.
Soon the order came, “Mortar section, stand by.” We took directions from Burgin, who was up on the observation post to spot targets and direct our fire. Although our 60mm shells were small compared to the huge shells rushing overhead, we could fire close-in to the company front where bigger mortars and the artillery couldn't shoot without endangering our own people. This closeness made it doubly critical that we fire skillfully and avoid short rounds.
We had fired only a few rounds when Snafu began cursing the mud. With each round, the recoil pushed
the mortar's base plate against the soft soil in the gun pit, and he had trouble re-sighting the leveling bubbles to retain proper alignment of the gun on the aiming stake.
After we completed the first fire mission, we quickly moved the gun a little to one side of the pit onto a harder surface and resighted it. At Peleliu we often had to hold the base plate as well as the bipod feet onto the coral rock to prevent the recoil from making the base plate bounce aside, knocking the mortar's alignment out too far. On Okinawa's wet clay soil, just the opposite happened. The recoil drove the base plate into the ground with each round we fired. This problem got worse as the rains increased during May, and the ground became softer and softer.
The order came to secure the guns and to stand by. The air strike ended, and the artillery and ships’ guns slacked off. The tanks and our riflemen moved out as tank-infantry teams, and we waited tensely. Things went well for a couple of hundred yards during this attack made by ⅗ and 3/7 before heavy fire from Japanese on the left flank stopped the attack. Our OP (observation post) ordered us to fire smoke because heavy enemy fire was coming from our left. We fired phosphorous rapidly to screen the men from the enemy observers.
Our position got a heavy dose of Japanese 90mm mortar counterbattery fire. We had a difficult time keeping up our firing with those big 90mm shells crashing around us. Shell fragments whined through the air, and the big shells slung mud around. But we had to keep up our fire. The riflemen were catching hell from the flank and had to be supported. Our artillery began firing again at the enemy positions to our left to aid the harassed riflemen.
We always knew when we were inflicting losses on the Japanese with our 60mm mortars by the amount of counter-battery mortar and artillery fire they threw back at us. If we weren't doing them any damage, they usually ignored us unless they thought they could inflict a lot of casualties. If the Japanese counterbattery fire was a real indicator of our effectiveness in causing them casualties, we were satisfyingly effective during the Okinawa campaign.
During the attack of 9 May against Awacha, Company K suffered heavy losses. It was the same tragic sight of bloody, dazed, and wounded men benumbed with shock, being carried or walking to the aid station in the rear. There also were the dead, and the usual anxious inquiries about friends. We were all glad when the word came that ⅗ would move into reserve for the 7th Marines—for a couple of days, it turned out. The 7th Marines were fighting to our right against Dakeshi Ridge.
In the path of the 1st Marine Division, from north to south, lay Awacha, Dakeshi Ridge, Dakeshi Village, Wana Ridge, Wana Village, and Wana Draw. South of the latter lay the defenses and the heights of Shuri itself. All these ridges and villages were defended heavily by well-prepared, mutually supporting fortifications built into a skillful system of defense-in-depth. Similarly powerful defensive positions faced the 6th Marine Division on the right and the army infantry divisions on the left. The Japanese ferociously defended every yard of ground and conserved their strength to inflict maximum losses on the American forces. The tactics turned Okinawa into a bloodbath.
The battle against Awacha raged on to our left. We dug in for the night in the wet ground. Our mortars weren't set up. We were to act as riflemen and to keep watch across an open, sloping valley. Above us the other two mortar squads dug in in two parallel lines about twenty feet apart and perpendicular to the line of the crest of the embankment above us. Water and rations were issued and mail brought to us.
Mail usually was a big morale booster, but not for me that time. There was a chilly drizzling rain off and on. We were weary and my spirits weren't the best. I sat on my helmet in the mud and read a letter from my parents. It brought news that Deacon, my beloved spaniel, had been hit by an automobile, had dragged himself home, and had died in my father's arms. He had been my constant companion during the several years before I had left home for college. There, with the sound of heavy firing up ahead and the sufferings and deaths of thousands of men going on nearby, big tears rolled down my cheeks, because Deacon was dead.
During the remainder of the night, the sound of firing toward Dakeshi Ridge indicated that the 7th Marines were having a lot of trouble trying to push the Japanese off the ridge. Just before dawn we could hear heavy firing off to our left front where ⅕ and ⅖ were fighting around the Awacha Pocket.
“Stand by, you guys, and be prepared to move out,” came the order from an NCO on the embankment above us.
“What's the hot dope?” a mortarman asked.
“Don't know, except the Nips are counterattacking on the 5th Marines’ front and the battalion [⅗] is on standby to go up and help stop 'em.”
We greeted the news with an understandable lack of enthusiasm. We were still tired and tense from the punishment the battalion took at Awacha the day before. What's more, we didn't relish moving anywhere in the darkness. But we squared away our gear, chewing gum nervously or gnawing on ration biscuits. The sound of firing rose and fell to our left front as we waited and wondered.
Finally, during the misty gray light of early morning, the order came, “OK, you guys, let's go.” We picked up our loads and moved toward the front lines.
Other than occasional shells whining over in both directions, things were rather calm. Our column moved along a ridge just below the crest to the emplacements of the Marines who had been under attack. We found them assessing the damage they had done to the Japanese and caring for their own wounded. Some of the men told us the enemy had come into bayonet range before being repulsed. “But we tore their ass up, by God,” one man said to me as he pointed out at about forty Japanese corpses sprawled beyond the Marine foxholes.
In the pale dawn, the air was misty and still smoky from phosphorous shells the enemy had fired to hide their approach. There was a big discussion in the ranks. Comments passed along to us from the Marines in place had it that somebody had seen a woman advancing with the attacking Japanese and that she was probably among the dead out there. We couldn't see her from our positions.
Then word came, “About face; we're moving back.” In short, our help wasn't needed, so we were to be deployed somewhere else. Back through the rain and the mud we went.
All movements during most of May and early June were physically exhausting and utterly exasperating because of the mud. Typically, we moved in single file, five paces apart, slipping and sliding up and down muddy slopes and through boggy fields. When the column slowed or stopped, we tended to bunch up, and the NCOs and officers ordered sternly, “Keep your five-pace interval; don't bunch up.” The everpres-ent danger of shells even far behind the lines made it necessary that we stay strung out. However, sometimes it was so dark that in order not to get separated and lost, each man was ordered to hold on to the cartridge belt of the man in front of him. This made the going difficult over rough and muddy terrain. Often if a man lost his footing and fell, several others went down with him, sprawling over each other in the mud. There were muffled curses and exasperated groans as they wearily disentangled themselves and regained their footing, groping about in the inky darkness to reform the column.
As soon as we stopped, the order came, “Move out.” So the column always moved forward but like an accordion or an inchworm: compressed, then strung out, stopping and starting. If a man put down his load for a brief respite, he was sure to hear, “Pick up your gear; we're moving out!” So the load had to be hoisted onto shoulders again. But if you didn't put it down, chances were you missed an opportunity to rest for a few seconds, or even up to an hour, while the column halted up ahead for reasons usually unknown. To sit down on a rock or on a helmet when drunk with fatigue was like pressing a button to signal some NCO to shout, “On your feet; pick up your gear; we're moving out again.” So the big decision in every man's mind at each pause in the column's forward progress was whether to drop his load and hope for a lengthy pause or to stand there and support all the weight rather than putting it down and having to pick it up again right away.
The column wound around
and up and down the contours of terrain, which in May and early June was covered nearly always with slippery mud varying in depth from a few inches to knee deep. The rain was frequent and chilly. It varied from drizzles to wind-driven, slashing deluges that flooded our muddy footprints almost as soon as we made them. The helmet, of course, kept one's head dry, but a poncho was the only body protection we had. It was floppy and restricted movement greatly. We had no raincoats. So, rather than struggle over slippery terrain with our loads, encumbered further by a loose-fitting poncho, we just got soaking wet and shivered in misery.
We tried to wisecrack and joke from time to time, but that always faded away as we grew more weary or closer to the front lines. That kind of movement over normal terrain or on roads would try any man's patience, but in Okinawa's mud it drove us to a state of frustration and exasperation bordering on rage. It can be appreciated only by someone who has experienced it.
Most men finally came to the state where they just stood stoically immobile with a resigned expression when halted and waited to move out. The cursing and outbursts of rage didn't seem to help, although no one was above it when goaded to the point of desperation and fatigue with halting and moving, slipping and sliding, and falling in the mud. Mud didn't just interfere with vehicles. It exhausted the man on foot who was expected to keep on where wheels or treaded vehicles couldn't move.
At some point during our moves, our mortar section completely wiped out an enemy force that had held an elongated ridge for three days against repeated Marine infantry attacks supported by heavy artillery fire. Burgin was observing. He reasoned that there must have been a narrow gully running along the ridge that sheltered the Japanese from the artillery fire. He registered our three mortars so that one fired from right to left, another from left to right, and the third along the crest of the ridge. Thus the Japanese in the gully couldn't escape.