by Toland, John
Otherwise little attention was devoted to Roosevelt’s death except on editorial pages. “It is Heaven’s punishment,” said the Mainichi. “As the incarnation of American imperialism, he has had a cursed influence on the whole of mankind.” The Asahi Shimbun quoted Admiral Nomura, who had worked so hard for peace in Washington, as saying, “This may be a foolish thing, but I had a dream four or five days ago. I was at the White House and when I went into Roosevelt’s room there was a coffin there. The adjutant pointed to the coffin and told me Roosevelt was in there. This dream has come true. But no matter who dies, the American war drive will undergo no change and we must be determined to fight it out to the finish.”
The news reached Okinawa at dawn on the thirteenth. “Attention! Attention! All hands!” loudspeakers blasted on American ships. “President Roosevelt is dead. Repeat, our Supreme Commander, President Roosevelt, is dead.” There was shock amounting to disbelief, and Admiral Turner was compelled to issue official confirmation. Beyond the grief loomed new concerns. Would his death affect the conduct of the war? Would his successor, Harry Truman, also demand unconditional surrender?
Japanese Army propagandists on Okinawa, taking a cue from the homeland, printed leaflets which linked the President’s demise with the fate of the Americans on the island.
We must express our deep regret over the death of President Roosevelt. The “American Tragedy” is now raised here at Okinawa with his death. You must have seen 70% of your CVs [aircraft carriers] and 73% of your Bs [battleships] sink or be damaged causing 150,000 casualties. Not only the late President but anyone else would die in the excess of worry to hear such an annihilative damage. The dreadful loss that led your late leader to death will make you orphans of this island. The Japanese special attack corps will sink your vessels to the last destroyer. You will witness it realized in the near future.
One GI looked up from the leaflet as blasts of gunfire from American ships reverberated from Nakagusuku Bay and exclaimed, “Where the hell do they think that stuff’s coming from?”
Few Japanese shared Goebbels’ illusion that Roosevelt’s death presaged a turn in the tide of war. Territories they had conquered in the first months of the conflict had been retaken or were falling. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Philippines. Yamashita still held his northern redoubt, but MacArthur was firmly entrenched on western Mindanao and was preparing a full-scale sweep across the island.
General Sosaku Suzuki had been forced to abandon Leyte to join the 743 men who had already been evacuated to Cebu. Almost all of the 12,000 or so left behind, including General Makino of the 16th Division, were fated to die—by starvation, suicide or at the hands of the enemy. Americans had already landed on Cebu by the time Suzuki reached the capital, and he decided to chance the perilous trip to Mindanao, where there were almost two full divisions of able-bodied troops as well as 12,000 Japanese civilians. Why not gather all these people in the mountains northwest of Davao? There they would be able to fight off the enemy indefinitely, and moreover, establish a self-sufficient society, intermarrying with the natives. It would be a paradise with absolutely no discrimination. His enthusiasm was shared by General Tomochika, his chief of staff. Between them they drew up a constitution and picked a temporary name for the “dream nation”—the Suzuki Kingdom.
“In case I die en route,” Suzuki told Tomochika just before they embarked in five bancas on April 10, “you must take my place as Thirty-fifth Army commander and carry on our project.” He memorialized the ordeal they faced with a poem:
Do not starve to death,
Go into the fields;
Even though we die bravely,
It will not stop the forward advance,
For I am the commander,
And fortunately I am still able to serve;
Give me many glories.
It took six days for the little flotilla, often beset by storms, to reach southern Negros. With dark they set out on the last long lap, across the open water to Mindanao. There was no wind and the tide ran against them, but resolute paddling brought them to the main current. All but Suzuki’s boat were swept into the Mindanao Sea, and by ten o’clock they were far ahead out of sight. Exhausted, Suzuki and his companions could no longer best the current, and their banca drifted back toward Negros. In the morning an American plane discovered them near a lighthouse.
“Jump!” cried the general’s aide, First Lieutenant Tokujo Watano, and leaped over the side. But Suzuki remained in the banca. As bullets ripped up the water toward the dugout, Watano saw his general, sword in hand, lean over as if committing hara-kiri. It was the end of Suzuki and of his dream kingdom.b
* Yoshimichi Hara had died in 1944.
† The Emperor was equally sensitive to Suzuki’s aims. After the war he told Kido’s chief secretary, Marquis Yasumasa Matsudaira, “I was aware of Suzuki’s sentiments from the very beginning of his appointment as premier, and likewise I was convinced that Suzuki understood my sentiments. Consequently I was in no hurry at the time to express to him my desires for peace.”
‡ After the war Admiral Toyoda said, “I knew very, well what the fate would be of warships without air cover, and that the probability of success was very slight. Nevertheless, we had to do everything to help our troops at Okinawa.”
§ Yamato had a crew of 3,332, of whom 269 survived.
ǁ There were other suicidal measures, but all were relatively unsuccessful. Miniature submarines, which received so much publicity, were involved in six verified raids: Pearl Harbor; Sydney Harbor, May 31, 1942; the Guadalcanal area, November 23 and December 7, 1942; off Madagascar, May 31, 1942; and west of the Mindanao Sea, January 5, 1945. Twenty-eight submariners died and insignificant damage was inflicted. A new two-man submarine, Kairyu (Sea Dragon), with a range of 250 miles and a payload of two aviation-type torpedoes, was in production. By the end of the war there were 230, but not one was used.
Another notable failure was the kaiten (turn toward Heaven), a human torpedo which was brought close to the target on the deck of a conventional submarine. An early model penetrated the Ulithi lagoon and sank the oiler Mississinewa carrying 400,000 gallons of aviation gas. This success spurred improvements, and the final kaiten model was fifty-four feet long and carried a warhead of 3,000 pounds of high explosives. Such a charge, the inventors claimed, could sink any warship afloat, and a submarine carrying four kaiten on its back could approach a U. S. anchorage and sink four large ships in a single attack. That was the prophecy and hope. Hundreds of kaiten were launched against Allied vessels but they sent only one more to the bottom, the merchant vessel Canada Victory. The destroyer escort, Underhill, was hit by a kaiten, then sunk accidentally by friendly forces. Almost nine hundred Japanese died in the kaiten program.
Equally futile was Operation Flying Elephant, an ambitious program to launch thousands of large hydrogen balloons, equipped with incendiary bombs, against the heavily wooded northwest section of the United States. Over Japan the balloons would be caught up in the jet stream at 33,000 feet and travel eastward at 120 miles an hour, reaching Washington, Oregon or Montana in approximately forty-eight hours. The balloons, which had a lifting power of 300 kilograms at sea level, were manufactured in a number of Tokyo movie theaters and a sumo stadium by a work force of paperhangers, schoolgirls and women from the iromachi (red-light districts). The balloons were fashioned out of rice paper strengthened with konnyaku (devil’s-tongue root, an important ingredient in sukiyaki); the entire konnyaku crop was requisitioned. Each balloon required 600 strips of paper, pasted together to form a sphere. Several million workers were involved in the production of 10,000 balloons. On November 1, 1944, the commanders of the launching sites in Chiba, Ibaraki and Fukushima prefectures were ordered to “initiate the attacks on North America!” A staff officer was dispatched to the Ise Shrine to pray for success. In the next six months 9,300 balloons were released into the jet stream. The results were disappointing: a few minor forest fires were started in the Pacific N
orthwest.
a Suzuki’s broadcast was not reported in the Japanese press, and even his son knew nothing of it until after the war.
b Only Tomochika’s boat reached Mindanao, and shortly the island was dominated by MacArthur. “What started as a dream,” Tomochika later remarked, “ended in a nightmare.”
29
The Iron Typhoon
1.
On the day of Roosevelt’s death Kantaro Suzuki’s Cabinet authorized the organization of a Volunteer Army of men from fifteen to fifty-five and women from seventeen to forty-five for the mainland battle. Newspapers continued to write confidently of Okinawa, whose fall would necessitate the use of the volunteers. “The enemy did the very thing we expected when we were working out the details of our plans for dealing with him,” said a retired admiral named Endo. “The strategy under which we have allowed the enemy to invade the Okinawan islands has much in common with the strategy of fighting with our backs to the wall. We could not resort to this strategy unless we were fully conscious of our power to thrust at the enemy’s vitals while letting him thrust at our less vital parts.”
But General Ushijima’s 32nd Army had already been dealt a more grievous wound. In two weeks of fighting, almost seven thousand of its best troops had fallen, and although the Shuri line was holding, Marines had overrun the northern half of the island—which was defended by two battalions—except for Motobu Peninsula. On April 16 they seized Yae-take, a rugged 1,200-foot peak which dominated the peninsula, after an arduous three-day struggle, virtually ending the campaign in northern Okinawa.
A few miles west of the peninsula lay Ie Shima, an oval-shaped island five miles long, flat except for an extinct volcano which rose dramatically 600 feet near the center where the last Japanese troops in the area were garrisoned. Occupation of the island was assigned to the Army, and at eight o’clock that same morning, after a naval bombardment, GI’s clambered over the high dunes toward the airfield, the main objective of the invasion. On their approach to the volcano they encountered a maze of tunnels, bunkers, caves and spider holes. From these positions the outnumbered garrison, buttressed by hundreds of civilian volunteers, gave the 77th Division the toughest opposition yet.
Ernie Pyle temporarily left the Marines on Okinawa to be with the GI’s, for whom he had a special affinity. On April 18 he was on his way up front in a jeep with a regimental commander when the road was swept by machine-gun bullets. Pyle, a frail little man, leaped into a ditch. As he raised his head to get a look, he was hit in the temple. He died instantly and was buried nearby.*
Back on Okinawa the Marines sat around that evening reciting favorite passages from his columns. “It seems a shame such a big guy had to get it on such a lousy little island,” said a corporal. They checked his bedroll, which he had left behind. It contained a single personal item—a chain of colored sea shells. They wrapped it and forwarded it to Pyle’s widow, “That Girl.”
North of the Shuri line the Army had been readying a general attack on its defense system. “It is going to be really tough,” predicted Major General John Hodge, commander of XXIV Corps. “There are sixty-five to seventy thousand fighting Japs holed up in the south end of the island, and I see no way to get them out except blast them out yard by yard.”
The Navy was brought in to help. At five-forty the next morning six battleships, six cruisers and eight destroyers began bombarding the five-mile defense complex extending across the island. Twenty minutes later, twenty-seven battalions of artillery—324 pieces in all—sounded off, digging up front-line positions before lifting 500 yards to the rear. At six-thirty the artillery lowered, splattering the front lines for another ten minutes. It was the greatest single concentration of artillery in Pacific warfare—19,000 shells.
The artillery elevated once more while assault platoons of two divisions, the 7th in the east and the 96th in the center, rushed forward. Fifty minutes later another division, the 27th, assaulted Kakazu Ridge on the west end of the line.
Incredibly, the unprecedented bombardment left the Japanese relatively intact, and though all three units attacked aggressively, all three were thrown back. Casualties were high, particularly in the 27th Division sector, where twenty-two tanks were destroyed in futile charges against formidable Kakazu Ridge. By late afternoon XXIV Corps had lost 720 dead, wounded and missing. During the next four days the two divisions on the flanks made negligible gains in slow, grinding advances, but the GI’s of the 96th did manage to drive forward more than 1,000 yards—only to face the heart of the Shuri defenses, a rugged little escarpment that stuck up like a segment of the Great Wall of China. This was Maeda Ridge, which, with its forbidding sheer cliffs, proved to be a fortress in fact as well as in appearance. The GI’s were promptly repelled. General Buckner, the Tenth Army commander, rejected a proposal to make an amphibious landing behind the Japanese lines: the reefs in the south were too dangerous, the beaches inadequate for supplies, and any beachhead could be contained by the multitude of Japanese in the area.
Buckner’s reasoning was logical—but incorrect. Much as Ushijima feared such a maneuver (“It would bring a prompt end to the fighting”), he was compelled to transfer his rear-guard division north to beef up the Shuri line. These replacements began marching up front at night, and by the evening of April 25 most of them were in position to relieve the casualty-ridden defenders. They arrived in time to face the brunt of a renewed American attack on Maeda. It too failed. One company of the 96th Division scaled up to the top at a prohibitive cost of eighteen casualties in minutes. Another company formed a human chain to breast the ridge, but the three key men at the top were cut down by machine-gun bullets.
To their left, at the eastern terminus of Maeda, GI’s gained the tops of two rolling hills and caught more than five hundred Japanese out in the open at the very moment when American tanks and armored flamethrowers rolled up Highway 5, which curved around the end of the ridge. The cross fire annihilated the Japanese.
Fearing that the enemy might break through in force and come up behind the escarpment, Ushijima sent a curt directive to 62nd Division: “The enemy with troops following tanks has been advancing into the southern and eastern sectors of Maeda since about 1300. The 62nd Division will dispatch local units … attack the enemy advancing in the Maeda sector with a view to repulsing him decisively.” Ushijima also ordered the 24th Division to help its neighbors seal up this hole regardless of the division boundary and to “put its main strength northeast of Shuri this evening.” Maeda had to be held at all costs.
On the morning of April 27 American infantry, tanks and flamethrowers, working in close co-operation, again assaulted the remaining Japanese positions at the eastern end of Maeda, and before dusk held the two rolling hills. With the entire eastern segment of the escarpment in enemy hands, Ushijima ordered a regiment of the 24th Division to clear the entire ridge at once. The task of seizing the center portion was given to a battalion commanded by one of the youngest captains in the Imperial Army, Tsuneo Shimura. Most of his six hundred men had never before seen battle. For example, a few weeks earlier nineteen-year-old Shuzen Hokama was still going to the Normal School in Shuri, but like so many patriotic Okinawans he volunteered for front-line duty.
As the battalion slowly wound through the ancient capital that evening, the men had to pick their way around a hundred bodies tossed “like rag dolls” in the street opposite a large Christian church—a naval shell had hit a wagonful of ammunition. Hokama saw pieces of flesh sticking to a stone wall, and blood was splattered over the cobblestones. Leaving the town, the men continued north in two files along a muddy road until shells scattered them into the fields. During a rest each soldier was given a slice of canned pineapple—“a final good taste” before death.
They failed to reach the line of departure until well after midnight, and it was almost three o’clock in the morning by the time Captain Shimura launched a two-company attack. Almost immediately mortar rounds lobbed over the ridge into the ranks. Shimur
a ordered the men to proceed cautiously through the mortar screen. As soon as they started up the steep incline in the first pasty light of day, tanks appeared to the right on Highway 5 like questing tigers. All their guns opened fire simultaneously, and more than a hundred men were killed in the first moments. The survivors took cover in Chinese tombs and rude air shelters, or behind rocks. Shimura and seven others found safety in a tomb, where they hid for the rest of the day.
The tanks finally departed with the last rays of sunlight. Shimura emerged to find one third of his men dead, but Regiment still insisted that he take the cliffs that night. He marked his back with white strips and led his men forward along a dry streambed. Halfway up the incline he stumbled across a camouflaged opening. Crouched inside the cave were fifty men—the remnants of the Kaya Detachment. Armed only with a few rifles, they had been driven off the escarpment. Shimura’s entrance was greeted with exclamations and tears. Colonel Kaya embraced Shimura with relief. “From now on I’m leaving everything up to you,” he said. He wouldn’t discuss the battle or what he knew of the enemy’s positions; instead he proffered a cup of sake, which the captain refused.
Shimura left the cave in disgust and brought his men to the lip of the crest. They remained hidden until dawn, when they suddenly launched grenades, and under cover of fire from light machine guns burst over the edge, screeching and brandishing their glistening bayonets. Their momentum carried them to the summit of the ridge, a jutting piece of limestone that resembled a castle turret—it had already been nicknamed “Needle Rock” by the GI’s. Here they overran the handful of Americans at the center of the escarpment, and then spread out along a front of two hundred yards, positioning themselves behind rocks or in small caves. Their quick success was due as much to their élan as to the debilitating struggle that had seesawed along the ridge for four days. The American units facing them had been reduced to about 40 percent combat efficiency, and some platoons were down to half a dozen men.