D-DAYS IN THE PACIFIC

by Donald L. Miller

  Some of the dozing airmen had their throats cut before they had a chance to hear the alarm. “The ensuing battle, which lasted into the daylight hours, was confused and wild,” writes Richard Wheeler, “with hand grenades exploding, rifles and machine guns crashing, and men on both sides shouting and cursing and lamenting in pain and terror. The Seabees employed their training as infantrymen, the Army brought up flame tanks, and the Marines first formed a defense line and then counterattacked. With the Marines was a shore-party unit made up of blacks who had seen no previous action, and they performed splendidly.”51

  One of the dead Marines was Lieutenant Harry L. Martin. He earned the Medal of Honor that morning, the last of twenty seven to be earned by Marine and Navy combatants in the Battle of Iwo Jima.

  The dangerous “cleanup” operation went on into the summer, conducted by the 147th Regiment of the U.S. Army, which killed another 1,600 Japanese. “On moonlit nights,” a Japanese cave survivor wrote after the war, “I was particularly sad. Watching the moon, I counted the age of my son or thought of my wife’s face.”52

  Only about 1,000 Japanese were captured. The remains of thousands of their comrades still lie in the rocks and caves and shifting ash of desolate Iwo Jima.

  On April 7, 119 P-51 Mustangs took off from Iwo Jima to escort a fleet of Curtis LeMay’s Superforts on a daylight raid on Tokyo. As it turned out, however, the six fighter squadrons stationed on the island were neither effective nor needed, as they were in bomber runs over Nazi Germany. The brutal nine-hour trip to Japan and back, in the punishing winds over the home islands, was too great even for the long-distance Mustangs, which suffered a rash of mechanical and navigational breakdowns. And Japan was never able to put up enough defending aircraft to seriously bother the formidable Superforts. For the reminder of the war, only ten escort missions were flown from Iwo Jima. But to argue, as one historian does, that this made the storming of Iwo Jima a “horrific” mistake, is to see history from hindsight, not as it was lived.53 At the time the Iwo Jima operation was planned, B-29s were just arriving in the Marianas, and no one expected that they would not need heavy fighter coverage. Both Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay had been bomber commanders in Europe, where they saw their crews decimated on long-range, unescorted missions until the Mustang arrived in England in late 1943 and turned the tide of the air war.

  Before leaving Iwo Jima, William Clark attended the dedication ceremony of the 4th Division cemetery. The Marines had begun setting up this burial field on the third day of the battle, and the first bodies had arrived three days later. “From that point on, the number of bodies collected was much more than we could handle in any one day,” observes Lieutenant Gage Hotaling, a Navy chaplain assigned to the Graves Registration Section. “At one time, we had four hundred or five hundred bodies stacked up, waiting for burial…. I am not a smoker, but I found that the only way that I could go around and count bodies was to smoke one cigarette after another…. I was addicted to smoking for twenty-six days….

  “Once we had bodies lined up, I would give a committal to each one, with Marines holding a flag over the body. And I said the same committal words to every Marine, because they were not buried as Protestants or Catholics or Jews. They were buried as Marines.”54

  The cemetery was dedicated on March 15. Sergeant Bob Cooke, a combat reporter and former Scripps-Howard columnist, described the services. “The Catholic altar was a pile of water cans, the Protestant, the radiator of a jeep. The communion rail was a mound of black volcanic gravel…. Yet not in any of the world’s great cathedrals or churches was there more sincere reverence. Men ignored heavy shells overhead. Clouds of dust from tanks and bulldozers swept the area. But the chaplain’s vestments, the altar cloth, and cross gleamed through the pall of the battlefield.”55

  As the band played the Marine Corps Hymn, William Clark sang along with the other survivors of this epic Pacific battle. “Never in my life had I beheld such a sobering experience. Before me stretched row upon row of new white crosses and headboards. I stood there looking at the somber scene and in my mind formed a question, Why? Why must men be such fools? No war can possibly be won when so much human suffering must be endured.”

  Okinawa

  THE FINAL BATTLE

  In February 1945, Eugene Sledge and the 1st Marine Division were at their rest camp on Pavuvu preparing for another island blitz, what would be the last and largest of the more than 100 Pacific D-Days. In the evenings, after training exercises, they gathered around radios and listened to news reports of the desperate fighting on Iwo Jima. To many of them, it sounded “like a larger version of Peleliu.” It was also a foretaste of what they would confront on their next landing, where the Japanese would employ the defense-in-depth tactics of Peleliu and Iwo Jima with appalling effectiveness.

  Sledge and the other enlisted men had no idea where they were headed next. Their first hint was a map they were shown, without names on it, of a long, narrow island about 300 miles south of the Japanese mainland. A few days later, a friend “came excitedly to my tent,” Sledge recalls, “and showed me a National Geographic map of the Northern Pacific. On it we saw the same oddly shaped island…. It was called Okinawa.”

  The Old Breed sailed from Pavuvu on March 15, while fighting still raged on Iwo Jima, and on the other side of the world Eisenhower’s columns poured into Germany. They were bound for Ulithi Atoll, about 260 miles northeast of Peleliu, where their convoy would join the assembling invasion fleet. They arrived there six days later, anchoring in the spacious, necklace-shaped lagoon, with its crystal-clear water.

  Ulithi was the biggest dividend of the Peleliu campaign. While the Old Breed were suffering and dying in the smoking coral of the Umurbrogol, the Army’s Wildcats had captured this long atoll, with its 110 square miles of anchorage, without firing a shot or losing a man. Ulithi, not worthless Peleliu, was turned into the marshaling yard for the tremendous armadas that would be hurled against Iwo Jima and Okinawa. “We lined the rails of our transport and looked out over the vast fleet in amazement,” Sledge remembers. “It was the biggest invasion fleet ever assembled in the Pacific, and we were awed by the sight of it.”1

  This was only part of an amphibious force that was larger than the one that had assaulted the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944.2 From San Francisco to the Philippines, from Hawaii to Guadalcanal—from eleven ports in all—nearly 1,500 vessels, carrying over half a million men—soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen—and covering thirty square miles of ocean, would converge at Okinawa at approximately the same time, in what would be one of the logistical miracles of modern warfare.

  Spearheading the assault was an amphibious landing force comprised of 183,000 men, backed by another 115,000 support troops and the mightiest assemblage of warships in history: forty large and small carriers, eighteen battleships, five heavy cruisers, close to 200 destroyers and fifty submarines.* Their mission was to take the island and turn it into the England of the Northern Pacific, an assembling point, airbase, and anchorage for the even greater invasion fleet that was expected to strike the Japanese homeland, only 350 miles to the north, later that year.

  While Sledge and his friends were admiring the ships at anchor, they saw what turned out to be an awful omen. Anchored near them was “a terribly scorched and battered aircraft carrier…. A Navy officer told us she was the Franklin. We could see charred and twisted aircraft on her flight deck, where they had been waiting loaded with bombs and rockets to take off when the ship was hit. It must have been a flaming inferno of bursting bombs and rockets and burning aviation gasoline. We looked silently at the battered, listing hulk until one man said, ‘Ain’t she a mess! Boy, them poor swabbies musta caught hell.’”3

  They had. Seven hundred and ninety-eight of Franklin’s crew were dead and 265 more were wounded, many of them horribly burned. No ship in the entire war suffered more damage and managed to stay afloat, although it never returned to combat. “It seemed to us beyond human belief that the shatte
red Franklin could have made port,” wrote Robert Sherrod, who had flown to Ulithi from Guam for what everyone thought would be the last and largest battle of the Pacific island campaign. Unknown to Sledge and his pals, Franklin, and a number of other ships in Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58 had been hit by Japanese kamikazes while conducting raids against airfields on Kyushu.

  Beginning in mid March, Mitscher’s pilots destroyed almost 500 enemy planes, preventing the decimated Fifth Air Japanese Fleet from tearing into the troopships of the American invasion armada on L-Day. The cost was steep. Four carriers, Enterprise, Intrepid, Yorktown, and Wasp, were damaged (the Wasp, seriously) by kamikazes and conventional aircraft. But none suffered as badly as the Franklin. In the early morning of March 19, just as the carrier’s fueled and armed Helldivers, Corsairs, and Avengers were preparing to launch, a lone, low-flying Japanese bomber emerged from the soupy overcast and made a direct hit on Franklin’s wooden flight deck with two heavy bombs.

  The action was wildly confusing that morning, with the enemy planes flying so close to the carriers and their escorts that men at the guns had no idea whether they were being attacked by kamikazes or conventional dive bombers. It didn’t matter. “Sailors who survived that terrible fight,” recalls Mort Zimmerman, a signalman on an LCI that laid smoke screens to camouflage the fleet, “lived in mortal fear of the Jap suicide planes for the rest of the war.”4 So did the American high command. “Any mention of suicide planes was taboo for six months,” Sherrod recalls. “In our news stories we simply had to ignore one of the most lurid stories of the war, or of any war.”5

  SAILORS ON LEAVE ON ULITHI ATOLL (USN).

  Nimitz would not remove these restrictions on the press until April 13. He did this less than an hour before President Roosevelt died of a stroke at his retreat in Warm Spings, Georgia, so the kamikaze threat went to the back pages of the American papers—but only for a few days.

  During the week they were anchored at Ulithi, the Old Breed went ashore on the palm-covered islet of Mogmog for what Sledge called some “recreation and physical conditioning.” Another Marine more accurately described the day as a raucous beer blast. Mogmog was a sixty-acre “recreational island” capable of accommodating over 15,000 sailors who had been at sea for weeks or months. On Mogmog they could swim, play baseball and basketball, and drink—beer for enlisted men and blended whiskey for officers at their segregated “lounges,” where they had exclusive access to the company of visiting Navy nurses, and where they were entertained by African-American Navy bands.

  After calisthenics, the officers of the 1st Marine Division broke out warm beer and Cokes, and Sledge and some of the guys played a game of pickup baseball. “Everybody was laughing and running like a bunch of little boys,” Sledge recalls. William Manchester, who was there with the 6th Marine Division, describes a different scene. “Each of the … U.S. fighting men heading into the battle was to be allowed … all the beer he could drink while PA systems belted out songs popular at home. It was a thoughtful gesture. Unfortunately, the picnic wasn’t left at that. A recreational officer thought red-blooded American boys deserved another outlet. It was his idea to issue us sports equipment so we could burn up all that energy accumulated during the long voyage here. It didn’t work quite as expected. He had no notion of what it meant to be psyched up for combat. We quickly got loaded and called … for madder music and stronger wine. When none was forthcoming, we destroyed most of the sports gear, and the hardchargers among us began hitting people over the head with Louisville Sluggers. The officer was furious, but his threats were as futile as a clock in an empty house. What could he do? Deprive us of the privilege of getting shot at?”6

  BOXING MATCH ON DECK (LRP).

  At island closing time, 6:00 P.M., the men jammed Mogmog’s single jetty for the short ride back to their ships. Onboard, the fights continued, with sailors and Marines throwing each other overboard and having to be fished out by the neutral Coast Guard.

  Back on the troopships, company commanders met with their men to give them their final briefings for Operation Iceberg. This time there was no promise of a short battle. “This is expected to be the costliest amphibious campaign of the war,” an officer told Sledge’s company. “We can expect 80 to 85 percent casualties on the beach.” Standing on the fantail of the assault transport George C. Clymer, with his men gathered around him in a tight semicircle, Lieutenant William Manchester unrolled a map of Okinawa, a place almost none of the men had heard of until the last week or so. Americans with a sense of history remembered it as the island Commodore Matthew Perry had landed on in 1853 on the journey that ended Japan’s 200-yearlong isolation from the rest of the world. The Commodore had planted the American flag on a hill adjacent to ancient Shuri Castle, a center of pre-Japanese culture where both Sledge and Manchester would experience some of the severest fighting of the war. Perry signed a treaty with the regent of Okinawa. It declared that “whenever citizens of the U.S. come to Luchu [Okinawa] they shall be treated with great courtesy and friendship [and] shall be at liberty to ramble where they please without hindrance.”7

  Okinawa is a big island, sixty miles long and two to eighteen miles wide. The north is hilly and thickly forested; the south is rolling farmland, broken by a series of steep ridges and cliffs near Shuri. Here the Japanese concentrated their defenses. General Mitsuru Ushijima’s forces, working furiously for 100 days under the direction of Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, Ushijima’s operations officer, had built fortifications of great scope and strength. The Okinawans buried their dead in elaborate concrete tombs that dotted the landscape, and the 110,000 defenders—about 24,000 of them Okinawan conscripts—also planned to use these as shelters and fire points. This would give the defenders both concealment and the high ground; and with five times the number of the troops that defended Iwo Jima, an excellent chance of bleeding the Americans badly, while the kamikazes pounded their fleet. At Okinawa, as combat correspondent John Lardner pointed out, the Japanese would fight two suicide battles: “the violent, quick suicides of the kamikaze forces,” and “the equally certain suicide of a strong, armed land force, dug into fine positions behind big guns, with no hope whatever of reinforcement or escape.”8

  Tokyo conceded defeat before the battle began. This was to be a delaying action designed to give the barbarians a foretaste of what taking the home islands would entail. But to the men on the other side, victory hardly seemed foreordained. For one thing, the Americans had not yet figured out the enemy’s plan for opposing the landings. What most concerned Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, commander of the amphibious force, was the depth and ferocity of the opposition on the beaches. Having no idea what to expect, he had to be ready for a Tarawa-like resistance, right at the waterline.

  He might also have been concerned about the commander of the land forces, Army Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., son of the Confederate general who had surrendered Fort Donelson to Ulysses S. Grant. Fifty-eight-year-old “Buck” Buckner was one of the most respected leaders in the American Army, a West Point graduate and a former commandant at the Point, a charismatic instructor in the service’s highest staff colleges, and the commander who had cleared the Japanese out of the Aleutian Islands. An outwardly confident man, he looked every inch the leader: tall, hard-muscled, and robustly handsome, with thick white hair and sharply chiseled features. Turner found him easy to like, but Buckner was all-Army in the way he fought and Admiral Turner was a Marine at heart. He feared that Buckner would move with a deliberateness bordering on caution, using heavy artillery fire and a continuous flow of reinforcements to take ground a yard at a time, in an effort to wear down the enemy without suffering intolerable casualties. Turner favored the Marine way of fighting—going in fast and light, taking big risks in order to win in a flash and move on to the next objective. At Okinawa, fewer men would be lost this way, he reasoned, than by the Army method of digging in and pounding the enemy at a distance, tactics that would expose Buckner’s own troops, wh
ich included Turner’s beloved Marines, to the enemy’s heavy guns, emplaced in high, concealed positions.

  Admiral Turner also worried about the fleet, which had to stay and provide air cover and gun support for the ground forces. A ponderous infantry offensive spelled deadly danger for the blue jackets battling the kamikazes.

  And while Buckner might be a big brain and a brave man, this was the first time he would lead a full army into combat, the new and tremendously formidable Tenth Army, with a landing force, including reserves, of eight divisions, five Army and three Marine.9

  The plan for L-Day, April 1—Easter Sunday—was for Buckner to land four divisions—two Army, the 96th and the 7th, and two Marine, the 1st and the 6th—on beaches just south of the island’s midriff. They would be preceded by the greatest naval bombardment in history, almost 45,000 rounds of shells, 33,000 rockets, and 22,500 mortars.10 The immediate objective was the seizure of Yontan and Kadena air fields, not far from the beachhead. Once the airstrips were in American hands, the GIs would swing south, into the most densely populated area of the island, while the Marines wheeled northward into wild, weakly defended Motobu Peninsula.

  Admiral Nimitz was more concerned about this invasion than any previous one. He expected the fleet to be hit hard by both kamikazes and conventional aircraft from the hundred or so enemy airfields within range of Okinawa. “This is the biggest thing yet attempted in the Pacific,” declared the naval intelligence officer at the briefing Robert Sherrod attended on the command ship Panamint, “all the forces available in the Western Pacific are involved except those in the Philippines and the Aleutians.” This included the B-29 units in the Marianas. Curtis LeMay had been pressured by Nirnitz to suspend his fire raids against Japanese cities in order to bomb the enemy’s fighter fields.