Ripples of Battle

by Victor Davis Hanson

  It is a capricious and terrible thing to speculate that a good and decent man’s sudden and unearned death has often enhanced his reputation in a way that his continued career might not have. Surely the Lincoln we now venerate is at least in part the man who was saved from the mess of Reconstruction that ruined the administrations of Johnson and Grant. Furies were chasing John Fitzgerald Kennedy when he fell on November 22, 1963—a tough reelection, a dismal record of legislative accomplishment, a reckless personal life whose embarrassing disclosures rested only on the sobriety and ephemeral goodwill of a growing and restless circle of reporters. Pyle, who became famous by sending back dispatches from the frontline fighting in Europe, was forever immortalized on Okinawa as dying pencil in hand during the heat of combat—not embittered and worn out after witnessing too many deaths and so at last content in the last weeks of his life mostly to report on it all from the rear.

  In some sense, like Pyle’s death, the sudden and equally capricious—indeed, flukelike—death of the fifty-eight-year-old Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner saved the commanding officer from embarrassing questions and perhaps a military inquiry itself. On June 18, as the battle wound down, Buckner was visiting the Mezado Ridge to see a final advance by the 8th Marine Regiment. After he had observed the assault for about an hour, a sudden Japanese artillery salvo—from a single surviving gun of a decimated battery—zeroed in on the high-ranking Americans. A shell hit a nearby boulder and the flying shards struck Buckner in the chest. The general bled to death in minutes. None of the surrounding officers suffered a scratch.

  Thus just days before the fighting was over and the Generals Ushijima and Cho committed suicide, Buckner fell on the front lines—the highest-ranking American officer to be killed by enemy fire in the entire Pacific war. With his tragic death, in an instant the old lingering questions about Buckner’s generalship on Okinawa likewise disappeared. Why did the veteran 1st and recently formed 6th Marine Divisions remain nearly idle for weeks in the north while Buckner’s beloved army divisions were being annihilated at the Naha-Shuri line? Why did Buckner refuse Maj. Gen. Andrew Bruce’s suggestion to land the 77th Division to the rear of Ushijima at Minatoa Beach—or similar and even more imaginative requests by scores of veteran Marine officers concerned at the carnage growing out of Buckner’s head-on assaults? Why were not Maj. Gen. Lemuel Shepherd and Gen. Alexander Vandegrift listened to when they proposed taking their Marine divisions around rather than through the Japanese positions? Why instead did Buckner feed piecemeal into the inferno a stream of manpower, in unimaginative corkscrew-and-blowtorch tactics that simply allowed the Japanese to retreat from one fortified ridge to another? After mid-May, when the Japanese were cut off, could not the Americans have established fortified lines of encirclement, pounded Ushijima’s positions through bombing and artillery, and thus forgone the final hand-to-hand fighting necessary to kill every enemy soldier?

  Later General MacArthur himself would argue just that—and complain that Buckner’s tactics had sacrificed “thousands of American soldiers” in a needless desire to drive all the Japanese off the island when they could have been bypassed. Well before Buckner’s death, a host of newspaper reporters, fed by angry Marine and navy officers, were openly criticizing his unimaginative tactics that were tailor-made to the Japanese plan of defense, freely employing pejoratives like “ultraconservative,” “fiasco,” and “a worse example of military incompetence than Pearl Harbor.”

  But there was to be no postbellum inquiry that would have besmirched the reputation of a good soldier and a beloved general. His worst critics sighed that he had paid the ultimate price for a battle plan that probably unnecessarily sacrificed the lives of thousands of others. His supporters pointed out that no more could be asked of a general than to die at the front with his men after achieving an undeniably critical military victory. Buckner’s tragic and nonsensical death then ended criticism of his costly generalship, and thereby helps explain why there has been no comprehensive reexamination of his tactics on Okinawa to this day—a battle that led to twenty times as many casualties as Pearl Harbor when America was not weak and surprised, but enormously powerful and nearing complete victory.

  But the survival, not the death, of Allied soldiers on Okinawa also affected the lives of thousands of Americans who decades later would first read about the battle and gain some idea of what the fighting had been like—and what it had been for. There are two landmark memoirs of the American combat experience in World War II. Both not surprisingly focus on the savagery of the Pacific theater and culminate with the dreadfulness of Okinawa. If the tactics and strategic importance of the battle were forgotten after the war, the awfulness and the horror-induced courage displayed there could not be—and so would resurface later to teach thousands of readers what war and Americans at war were about. William Manchester’s Goodbye, Darkness and E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed are not merely graphic narratives of combat, but works of literature in their own right comparable to Xenophon’s Anabasis, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That.

  Unlike most battle narratives of the twentieth century, both Goodbye, Darkness and With the Old Breed achieve transcendence in connecting the absurdity of Okinawa with the not so absurd idea of fighting for something quite antithetical to and far better than Japanese militarism. More than just graphic, often sickening accounts of the stupidities and senselessness of war—although they are all that and more—both books convey a rare sense that men really do fight for more than just their colleagues on the battlefield. So, for example, E. B. Sledge ends his account of Okinawa with news of Hiroshima and the war’s end. After acknowledging that “War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste,” and that “Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it,” he nevertheless ends with, “Until the millennium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one’s responsibilities and to be willing to make sacrifices for one’s country—as my comrades did.” Note his key phrase, “and countries cease trying to enslave others.”

  William Manchester attempted to explain to a subsequent generation the near-mythical world for which his fellow Marines had once fought so ferociously: “Debt was ignoble. Courage was a virtue. Mothers were beloved. Marriage was a sacrament. Divorce was disgraceful. . . . All these and ‘God Bless America’ and Christmas or Hanukkah and the certitude that victory in the war would assure their continuance into perpetuity—all this led you into battle, and sustained you as you fought, and comforted you if you fell, and, if it came to that, justified your death to all who loved you as you had loved them.”

  After finishing with a description of the horrors of Okinawa, Manchester then concluded of such lost values of a lost age, “Later the rules would change. But we didn’t know that then. We didn’t know.” Somehow the stark paradoxes of Okinawa, the easy beach landings and horrific inland fighting, the suicides on land and kamikazes at sea, the civilian and quasicivilian casualties, the connection of Okinawa to Hiroshima, and the lingering questions over whether the worst battle of the Pacific was really necessary, all that brought out something in both men years later—Goodbye, Darkness was published in 1979, With the Old Breed reprinted in 1981—that otherwise might have stayed silent. Both books suggest that those few weeks on the island changed their authors in ways hundreds of thousands of events in their later lives decades later did not. And perhaps one reason why America acted so forcefully against the suicide bombers of September 11 was that, consciously or not, their fathers and grandfathers had seen it all—and dealt with it—long before on Okinawa.

  Goodbye, Darkness and With the Old Breed, of course, along with the death of the famous, are only the more public manifestations of thousands of private sagas that have circulated both here and in Japan since emanating from the killing fields of Okinawa. They are only the tiny visible tip of the far larger proverbial iceberg below, whose foreboding presence has been just below t
he surface in the collective minds of tens of thousands ever since. How a rural, farming Swedish family found itself linked with the madcap last plans of Mitsuru Ushijima and Isamu Cho a world away I am not quite sure yet. But it happened, and for dozens of us it has made all the difference ever since.

  CHAPTER 2

  Shiloh’s Ghosts,

  April 6–7, 1862

  Morning: The Birth of Uncle Billy

  Shiloh changed the life of William Tecumseh Sherman, even as he would thereafter go on to alter the course of the Civil War—and do so in a manner that still affects Americans to this day. That miraculous chain of events all started on the morning of April 6, 1862.

  The surprise Southern charge at Shiloh began shortly before 7 A.M. The Confederates broke first against William Tecumseh Sherman’s 5th Division of the Army of the Ohio posted on the extreme Union right wing, farthest away from Grant’s base camp at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. Sherman had little idea that the initial waves of attackers marked the onslaught of the greatest Confederate attack of the year-old Civil War. In fact, the day before, Sherman had assured an equally complacent Grant’s staff in written dispatches that the chances of an enemy offensive against the Union positions were virtually nil.

  Neither Sherman nor any other officer in the Federal Army realized that Albert Sidney Johnston’s army of over forty thousand Southerners had camped undiscovered a mere two miles from their lines. Now in the early Sunday morning of April 6, 1862, it was planning to smash the division, then across the battlefield turn the Union left flank and drive the smaller Northern army into the Tennessee River. “Take your damned regiment back to Ohio. There is no enemy nearer than Corinth,” Sherman barked out to one of his colonels when he was correctly warned that a large Confederate force was nearing his lines.

  Suddenly the advance guard of two regiments of Gen. Patrick Cleburne’s Mississippians and Tennesseans—nearly a thousand men—came out of the thicket. They quickly overran the front line of the Ohioans—most were hurriedly finishing breakfast or just waking up—and headed directly for Sherman himself. They began firing volleys at fifty yards. “Sherman will be shot!” screamed Adjutant Dawes of the 53rd Ohio Regiment as he saw his general about to be overwhelmed.

  “My God, we are attacked,” Sherman yelled. The first volley cut down several around him. A few feet away at his side a Private Holliday was killed instantly, among the first officially recorded Union casualties at Shiloh. “The shot that killed him was meant for me,” he wrote a week later of his miraculous escape. As a mounted Sherman raised his hand in defense, a pellet from a .69-caliber round—each such cartridge contained a single ball and three smaller buckshot—struck his hand and passed through. In seconds a stunned Sherman recovered enough to ride through another hail of bullets back to his nearby headquarters at Shiloh Church, trying to mold some type of defensive perimeter before his surprised regiments—none before the battle had ever fired a shot in anger—were completely overwhelmed.

  Just before the 53rd Ohio Regiment collapsed, its final volleys, aided by canister shot from Union batteries, for a time slowed the Confederate juggernaut. The surprised Northerners regrouped to inflict 70 percent casualties among the attackers as the Southerners lumbered uphill over the final five hundred yards of open ground. Although Cleburne’s Confederates had surprised Sherman’s regiments, by 8:30 A.M. the first line of Confederate attackers had wilted under the increasing fire of the retiring Union division, bending but not yet breaking the Union ranks.

  In support of Cleburne’s initial assault, Braxton Bragg, with nearly ten thousand men, now brought a massive second line of infantry against Sherman’s reeling amateurs. Fortunately for the Union regiments, Bragg’s efforts were anything but orderly. Confusion, misplaced orders, and the wait for tardy artillery support had all combined to delay and then interrupt Bragg’s planned early morning charge. But by 8:30 the huge Confederate mass was finally bringing its weight to bear against the last two surviving regiments of Sherman’s original defensive line. Sherman finally admitted that he was “satisfied for the first time that the enemy designed a determined attack on our whole camp.” Yet he still did not yet appreciate his danger: not just his own seven thousand men, but the entire Union Army—from his own right wing all the way to the Tennessee River—were in danger of being crushed in minutes by simultaneous Confederate charges. For one of the few times in the entire war, there were soon to be more Southerners on a single battlefield than Union troops. Sherman was both completely calm and yet—despite later denials—utterly surprised.

  As Sherman’s division slowly crumbled under the Southern weight, his aide-de-camp, John Taylor, remarked that its general was “smoking a cigar, cool and unperturbed.” His complete mastery of fear “soon instilled a feeling that it was grand to be there with him.” Even so, by 9:30 A.M. the Union lines were falling back thousands of yards to their support camp at Shiloh Church. Many of their precious batteries were already overwhelmed and captured. And some of the Ohioans had no intention of stopping there to form a new line of defense. Instead, an increasing number headed for the last refuge of the Union base at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, about a mile farther to the east. By late afternoon some 10,000 to 15,000 Northerners—well over a third of the army—were either missing or congregating beneath the cliffs, trembling in panic. Sherman rode among these collapsing companies, striving to halt the fleeing small groups of terrified soldiers as bullets whizzed in from both sides.

  Regiments to his immediate left—belonging to John McClernand’s 1st Division—now came up to the front to plug gaps arising between Sherman and Benjamin Prentiss’s 6th Division before the second Confederate wave broke the Union line entirely. Then John Taylor saw Sherman go down as his wounded horse stumbled and fell dead. The stunned general himself somehow jumped clear from the horse, leaving his saddle and holster beneath the carcass. He raced over to Taylor, grabbed his aide’s mount, and returned to the fray. “Well, my boy, didn’t I promise you all the fighting you could do?” Sherman screamed as he rode off. He was in his element.

  His efforts to make a stand at Shiloh Church and preserve the divisional headquarters were now doomed, as it became clear that even further retreat was necessary. Both his immediate right and left flanks were crumbling under the pressure. By 10 A.M. Sherman was trying to bring what was left of his division to a new line of defense even farther to the rear at the Purdy-Hamburg road. The general himself was helping to position a battery when his second horse was shot.

  Lieutenant Taylor found his stunned superior once more on the ground facing a wave of advancing Confederates. Somehow he helped him catch one of the stricken battery horses. Sherman had mounted three different horses in less than an hour. Now his hand was bleeding profusely, his coat was riddled with bullet holes, and a ball had passed through his hat. Was he trying to get shot? It did not seem that way to observers on the battlefield, who found him collected rather than reckless. One of his artillery commanders, Lt. Patrick White, remarked of the muddy and bloodstained general that he was “the coolest man I saw that day.”

  And he was. Within minutes yet another bullet hit his shoulder strap. Apparently it was a ricochet and did not penetrate deeply into the flesh. Hand bleeding, shoulder in a sling, bruised from two falls from his horses, and filthy dirty, Sherman still continued to ride his third mount along the lines amid a hail of gunfire, encouraging his green troops to buy time for the Union Army with their lives. He later wrote his wife of these nightmarish moments, “I did the best I could with what remained, and all admit I was of good service—I noticed that when we were enveloped and death stared us all in the face my seniors in rank leaned on me.”

  In the heat of battle Sherman realized instantaneously that if his flank could retire without collapsing, there might soon be help from over 25,000 fresh Union reinforcements that were within a ten-mile radius of Shiloh. But for now the battered Union Army on the battlefield was outnumbered by anywhere from 5,000 to
10,000 troops, more so as the Sunday morning wore on and thousands of Northerners fled their positions to find safety at Pittsburg Landing. By noon Grant’s wonderful Army of the Tennessee was nearly wrecked.

  Fortunately for the Northerners, the Confederates were just as shocked that their initial assaults had caught the enemy completely surprised, unentrenched, and outnumbered. Thus they had no contingency plan for rapidly moving successive waves of reinforcements to finish off Sherman’s distraught division before turning to their right to cut the Union Army off from its supply base at Pittsburg Landing.

  Such good fortune was rare for the usually outmanned and outsupplied Confederates during early 1862. For the last six months the war in the West had gone disastrously. By February 1862 the losses of Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers respectively, together with the easy capture of over fifteen thousand Southern prisoners—irreplaceable soldiers who might have turned the tide at Shiloh—were followed by the Union occupation of Nashville, the second largest Confederate city in the West after New Orleans. As Albert Sidney Johnston fled south in retreat, Memphis and the entire Mississippi Valley were now undefended and vulnerable, raising the specter that the critical nexus of the Western states of Texas and Arkansas might be severed by both water and rail connection from the rest of the Confederate nation. Johnston, once thought the savior of the Confederacy, was now bitterly pilloried in Southern newspapers as either incompetent or cowardly.

  In response, the march up the Tennessee River to Shiloh was to be the Confederates’ grand offensive, as their woefully unprepared armies were hastily thrown together to prevent the coalescence of two Union forces under Grant and Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell from finishing the occupation of Tennessee and the upper Mississippi River altogether. The Southerners had a vague sense that, Napoleon-like, they might occupy the central position, destroying Grant and Buell separately before the two combined to crush them through sheer numbers and matériel. For their part, the North vastly overestimated the size of their Confederate enemies. In their nervousness they had no appreciation that a desperate Southern move on either the Army of the Tennessee or the Army of the Ohio could easily prove suicidal, allowing Grant or Buell to reinforce each other under attack. In Tennessee alone the North held at least a two-to-one edge in manpower.