by Toland, John
The fighting near the west coast was not as fierce as that on the escarpment but had been almost as costly to both sides. The next day, April 30, the 1st Marine Division began relieving the 27th Infantry Division, which had suffered 2,661 casualties in less than two weeks. Down the line of Marines slouching ahead the word was passed: “Doggies coming back.” The Marines straightened up and smartly raised weapons to their shoulders. But the GI’s (to one Marine they looked “dirty and dispirited, turned into zombies”) ignored their parading replacements. A passing Marine made a sarcastic remark but was silenced by his comrades; perhaps they would come out the same way—those who survived.
Fresh Army troops were also moved up to Maeda Ridge. Time and again GI’s, carrying satchel charges, scaled the heights with ropes and grapnels but were repeatedly driven back by the Japanese, who emerged from an intricate network of caves. Shimura held his positions near Needle Rock against a dozen resolute assaults, and his defense was so impressive that Regiment ordered him to go on the attack himself. That night he was to retake the first rolling hummock to his right, called Satan Hill by the Japanese. He sent the 5 th Company. The men reached the hill soon after midnight and sent up flares to signal that they had taken the objective. But since they could not dig takotsubo in the rocky soil, they were caught unprotected at first light and were annihilated to the last man.
The enemy soldiers had been on the island for a month and their number had grown to 170,000. Okinawa had been transformed into a Little America. Roads had been widened and improved—to accommodate the tens of thousands of vehicles that swarmed ashore—supply dumps set up, antiaircraft guns emplaced, and phone service established linking all Army and Navy installations.
The Japanese, who had been taught to despise the Americans, were impressed by their rational way of fighting. They were dressed sensibly, had endless quantities of ammunition and food, and seemed to turn war into an adventure. Even the enemy’s tattoos intrigued the Japanese.
In a cave a hundred feet beneath the ancient Shuri Castle, where Commodore Perry had been received in state by the King of Okinawa almost a century before, Ushijima’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Isamu Cho, vociferously demanded another all-out counterattack. He was a hearty man who smoked and drank to excess. His Army career—like that of Tsuji—had been studded with acts of gekokujo. He had participated in the abortive Brocade Flag Revolution of 1931. Afterward he was transferred to Manchuria, where his penchant for intrigue prolonged the border fighting with Russia at Changkufeng in 1938. His temper was short, and it was not unusual for him to slap his orderly, his aide or a junior officer in a line unit. Now arguing with Ushijima, he brandished his long cigarette holder as if it were a weapon.
Ushijima listened politely. He often exhibited such deference that it made those around him uneasy—with the exception of Cho, whose present belligerence had been aggravated by the sake they had all consumed in the past hour. Ushijima’s reservations were supported only by his operations officer, who alone debated Cho’s repeated demands for a decisive strike. Colonel Hiromichi Yahara—a grim-faced man with the nickname “Sobersides”—refused to be intimidated. “To take the offensive with inferior forces against overwhelmingly superior enemy forces is reckless and will lead to early defeat.” Moreover, he went on, they would have to attack an enemy which held commanding ground. The sensible course was to continue current operations. He thought annihilation was inevitable, but invaluable time could be won for Imperial Headquarters by a strategic holding action. A counterattack would at best inflict light casualties on the enemy, and thousands of His Majesty’s troops would be sacrificed in vain. But the Japanese instinct to attack when cornered was irrepressible. The commander of the 62nd Division sprang to his feet and aggressively backed Cho, as did the other division and brigade commanders who had been frustrated by the defensive tactics forced upon them. With misgivings, Ushijima ordered the offensive to begin in two days.
It was a complicated and ambitious plan—co-ordinated with another massive kamikaze attack on shipping and supported by tactical bombers—to drive a wedge five miles north into the American lines. Two regiments, their way cleared by a heavy artillery barrage, would start the assault east of Highway 5 while a third stormed down from Maeda Ridge, and with considerable tank support press on along the highway to the heights beyond. The 44th Independent Mixed Brigade would follow for half a mile before turning left toward the west coast. To mislead the enemy there would also be two amphibious landings behind the American lines, one on the west coast and the other on the east coast.
At dusk on May 3, artillery began to pound enemy front-line positions, and kamikaze planes struck at U. S. shipping, sinking the destroyer Little and LSM-195, and damaging four other ships. Just after midnight an attack by sixty conventional bombers on Tenth Army’s rear areas coincided with the two amphibious forces’ advance up the coasts in barges. The western unit mistakenly landed near a Marine company. Alerted by shouts of “Banzai!” the Marines turned on the surprised Japanese a murderous mortar barrage and concentrated machine-gun and rifle fire. The few who escaped were hunted down and killed. The sole captive was a carrier pigeon. It was released carrying a typical Marine taunt: “We are returning your pigeon. Sorry we cannot return your demolition engineers.” The amphibious force plowing up the east coast was sighted by a naval patrol which illuminated the area with star shells. Most of the barges were destroyed, and the score of men who made it to shore were eliminated.
An hour before dawn the Japanese artillery barrage reached a deafening climax which continued for half an hour. Then two red flares shot up: the signal to attack. Japanese infantrymen surged forward pell-mell. On the right, two thousand were soon caught in the open terrain by American artillery. Those who survived tried to forge ahead but were systematically picked off on the exposed flatland.
The successful outcome of the assault in the center was dependent on armored support. But since accurate enemy artillery fire had immobilized all the medium tanks, no more than nine light ones managed to pull behind the spearhead, Captain Koichi Ito’s 600-man battalion. Ito’s troops pierced the American lines in the predawn gloom but were pinned down by automatic-weapons fire. The nine tanks tried to close up but artillery found their range one by one. Ito decided to go on without tank support and led his scattered battalion toward the first objective, a hill mass one mile northeast of Maeda near the town of Tanabaru.
Fragmentary reports reaching 32nd Army headquarters later in the morning claimed impressive victories and touched off celebrations in the cave under the wreckage of Shuri Castle. However, no one but Ito had made a substantial breakthrough, and he was ordered to assault the hill above Tanabaru that night. With his men he pushed ahead along either side of Highway 5 until they were blocked by enemy shells. Since Ito now had armored support—the tanks had come up under cover of darkness—he was able to continue. Six tanks were destroyed during the fierce fire fights that followed, but Ito and his men covered the long, arduous mile through the American lines to Tanabaru. He mined the road running through town and by dawn had set up a perimeter defense on the slope of the hill. Then he radioed in the clear—his code men were dead—that he and almost 450 of his troops had reached the objective. He was ordered to stay in place.
By noon of May 5 it was obvious even to the blustery Cho that the counterattack, which he had fathered, had failed. Now he saw no hope at all for Okinawa; defeat was certain.
Ito was still lodged above Tanabaru but he was under constant pressure from all sides. During the day a hundred more of his detachment had been killed by flamethrowers, mortars and grenades. The next morning the American assaults continued and were repulsed by sacrificial measures. There were now fewer than 150 of the 600 men who had started the offensive, and Ito was preparing himself for death when a message wrapped around a rock hurtled into his takotsubo. It was from his radioman: an order had just been received to fall back. On taking leave of the wounded, he distributed grenades amon
g them before he assembled his able-bodied men at the foot of the hill. At midnight they moved south in the darkness but the one mile of enemy territory took its toll. Only Ito and a dozen others broke through.
The Japanese had struck with every resource they could muster but were easily crushed by Hodge’s XXIV Corps. The success coincided with a much more significant achievement. At high noon on May 8 every American artillery piece and naval gun fired three volleys—Germany had surrendered.
Defeating the Japanese in an open, wasteful charge was one thing, but dislodging them from dug-in defenses was devastating. Maeda Ridge had turned into a bloody version of “King of the Hill,” with first one side holding the crest and then the other. One GI battalion, the 1st of the 307th Infantry Regiment, lost more than half its men in eight days, including eight company commanders in a thirty-six-hour period.
The Japanese losses were far more grievous. Young Captain Shimura, for example, had once had 600 men on the ridge line; now there were fewer than 150 left and most of them were severely wounded. Still he refused to withdraw on order; he wanted to die where most of his men had been killed. Regiment insisted that he was to fall back, and a staff officer of the 24th Division sent a personal message in code with the argument that he would “find other suitable battlefields to die on.” Shimura told his men of the order but he was going to remain as a guerrilla. “Those who wish to stay with me, can. We’ll stick it out here on this ridge until we die.” Some of the men went underground and the rest withdrew, leaving Maeda Ridge to the Americans.
With the fall of Maeda, the American offensive slowly ground forward all across the island. Two full Marine divisions (III Amphibious Corps) now held the western flank: after an arduous battle the 6th had seized Sugar Loaf Hill, the western anchor of the entire defense line, less than a mile from Shuri, and the 1st Division, which had been in battle since Guadalcanal, advanced through Wana Draw, a narrow, rocky passage leading to the center of the former capital. Farther east, all the way to the coast, the three divisions of XXIV Corps, advancing slowly, captured Chocolate Drop, Flattop and other hills just east of Shuri. By dusk on May 21 the city itself was invested from three sides but as darkness overtook the fighting, so did torrential rains. Wana Draw became a swamp. Tanks and amphibian tractors churned helplessly in mud. All along the front, foxholes carved out of the clay slopes began to disintegrate, and those on lower ground had to be bailed constantly like leaky boats. For almost a full week the downpour continued. Little food could be brought up front; sleep in the constant deluge was impossible; the dead could not be buried and were left to decompose.
The respite granted him by the rain notwithstanding, General Ushijima decided to abandon Shuri. More than sixty thousand of his troops had been killed in the bloody defense of the city. The 62nd and 24th divisions and the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade—the heart of his army—had been shattered by relentless enemy naval gunfire, artillery fire and bombings, as well as infantry and tank assaults. He overrode protests against any retreat, however localized, on the grounds that an attempt to make a stand at Shuri would accelerate the fall of Okinawa.
2.
In the May issue of the commercial magazine Jitsugyo-no-Nippon, Rear Admiral Etsuzo Kurihara wrote:
Some people favor the method of letting the enemy cut our skin while we cut the enemy’s body, and of letting him cut our body while we cut his bone. I am opposed to such a calculating strategy. Rather, I am in favor of letting the enemy cut our bone while we cut the enemy’s bone. Each Japanese can do this. This method will give rise to a great tenacity among our people. This is the tactics of our Special Attack Corps.
Kamikaze tactics had been tried against the Americans since the battle for Leyte Gulf, but at Okinawa they became an integral part of the defense. Since the Easter landing six massive kamikaze attacks, involving more than fifteen hundred planes, had been loosed at the hundreds of American vessels concentrated around the island. Several hundred of these planes had careened through dense flak and exploded on their targets, sending to the bottom almost a score of American ships and seriously damaging some twenty-five others. Grim as the figures were, they did not tell the true story of death, terror and heroism on either side. It was blood-curdling to watch a plane aim relentlessly at your ship, its pilot resolved to blast you and himself to hell.
The seventh kamikaze raid, on May 25, co-ordinated with Ushijima’s withdrawal from Shuri and was preceded by a suicide unit of saboteurs which was brought by five bombers to Yontan Airfield in central Okinawa. Four of the two-engine planes were shot down, but the fifth made a belly-landing on the field. Americans watched incredulous as its occupants disgorged and scattered to the flight line lobbing grenades and incendiaries into parked planes. Seven aircraft were destroyed, twenty-six others damaged, and two fuel dumps containing 70,000 gallons of gasoline set ablaze before the raiders were killed.
Offshore, kamikaze were already sweeping in toward the transport area, and in the next twelve hours 176 Special Attack planes bored in on their targets. They sank LSM-135 and the destroyer escort Bates. Four other ships had to be scuttled, scrapped or decommissioned as a result of damage.
The fanaticism of these fliers was frightening to Americans in its finality, yet “there was a hypnotic fascination to a sight so alien to our Western philosophy,” Vice Admiral C. R. Brown observed. “We watched each plunging kamikaze with the detached horror of one witnessing a terrible spectacle rather than as the intended victim. We forgot self for the moment as we groped hopelessly for the thought of that other man up there.” Out of this almost morbid fascination came a welter of theories and rumors: kamikaze fliers went into battle like priests in hooded robes; they were drugged; they had to be chained to their cockpits; they were an elite group trained from youth for suicide. They were, in fact, average young Japanese who were volunteers. Their goal was to die a meaningful death and they were convinced that the Special Attack system was the best possible way to overcome Japan’s inferior productivity vis-à-vis America. One man could damage or sink a carrier or battleship and take a thousand enemies with him.
Ensign Yasunori Aoki, born in Tokyo twenty-two years earlier, believed in their slogan: “One plane, one warship.” His love of nature had led him to Agricultural and Forestry College on Formosa. Faced with conscription, he joined the Imperial Navy “for its glamor,” learned to fly, and by early 1945 was an instructor at Kochi on the island of Shikoku. There, volunteers were sought for the Special Attack Corps. Each flier, instructor as well as student, was told to write his name on a piece of paper. Those who wished to volunteer would place a circle above their name; those who declined, a triangle. There was no coercion and several unhesitatingly drew triangles, but Aoki felt it would be cowardly. Besides, since no one would survive the war, he preferred to die as a flier; he might even sink a ship.
The volunteers were trained to skim the water at 30 feet, then climb and fire at a control tower. They flew the Shiragiku (White Chrysanthemum), a slow, bulky, two-seat trainer. Aoki, as commander of his plane, became its navigator, although, in his opinion, one was not needed; but without a superior in the second seat, perhaps the pilot would be tempted to turn back.
The weeks went by quickly. The training was absorbing and the mission itself was so far in the future that it seemed unreal. But once the training ended, Aoki began to realize that he was under sentence of death; the sense of doom grew as the planes were remodeled for the mission. An extra fuel tank was lashed inside the cabin, and a 250-kilogram bomb fixed to either wing. As he surveyed his own aircraft Aoki could not help thinking, This is the plane that is going to take me on a one-way trip.
On May 25 his group was transferred to Kanoya on Kyushu, a staging area for the last flight to Okinawa. The finality of his fate overwhelmed him. His comrades’ appearance of serenity gave him a feeling of inferiority. At dusk Aoki watched a flight of kamikaze leave for Okinawa—his own group was next. He returned disconsolate to the barracks, an elementary school, wh
ere he found to his amazement half a dozen men who he thought had just taken off. Their refusal to go assuaged his own burden of shame; he could never be that cowardly.
The following noon he was lying in the grass watching the planes of his group being wheeled out and prepared for the mission. Suddenly the ground around him erupted; the Americans were bombing the base. Aoki didn’t move. It made no difference if he was killed, he told himself; he hoped he would live in a more peaceful time in his reincarnation. But as he sauntered back to the barracks, life, which had seemed too cheap moments before, became more precious than ever. An extra day of living would be priceless; even an extra hour, a minute, a second. He stopped to watch the antics of a fly. “How lucky you are to be alive,” he said aloud. After supper the group gathered for a briefing on next day’s mission. Each crew was to pick its own altitude and course. The majority chose to take an indirect course to the east or west. Aoki suggested going to Okinawa direct. His pilot, a seventeen-year-old named Yokoyama, was agreeable.
They went to bed early and Aoki awoke, composed, just before dawn. I’m all right! he thought. May 27, his last day on earth, was brilliant and clear, and he felt extraordinarily refreshed and keen. He had already put aside fingernail clippings and a lock of hair for his family. Now he wrote postcards to each of his parents, his four younger sisters and his younger brother. “Our divine country will not be destroyed,” he told them, and then prayed that Japan would survive total defeat.
Late that afternoon his group was given a ceremonial supper. An administrative officer proposed a toast. Aoki downed his sake in one gulp before noticing that his drinking friends sipped theirs. A newsreel cameraman asked the young men to pose. They donned leather helmets decorated with the emblem of the Rising Sun; a few banded their helmets with hachimaki. Linking arms, they sang lustily “Doki no Sakura” (“Class of Cherry Blossoms”).