Islands of the Damned

by R. V. Burgin

  They hadn’t held our company in reserve because the whole landing was running so smoothly. They didn’t figure they’d need us later on.

  In our relief, somebody started singing “Little Brown Jug.” We all joined in.

  Ha, ha, ha, you and me,

  Little brown jug, don’t I love thee!

  It had been one of Hillbilly’s favorites.

  Still, I was thinking, This can’t go on. Something’s got to go wrong here.

  Nothing did. We motored on in. As we got close to the shore, we looked for the seawall that we’d spent all that time preparing to climb. There was a broken line of stones with gaps, like somebody’s bad teeth, but no wall. If there had been one to begin with, the Navy’s guns had punched it out. Farther in we could see the blackened hulk of a big artillery piece that had once pointed seaward. Our amtrac crawled out of the surf and through a gap between the stones. Then it stopped. The back gate slammed down and we piled out, ducking low out of habit. No shots came our way. It was more like one of our maneuvers than any battle we’d been through. We formed a line and began advancing across the beach. We heard occasional fire far to the left or right. But we were on our feet, moving calmly. There were plenty of shell holes to dive into if we had needed them. But we didn’t. We’d walked ashore like we were strolling down the driveway to pick up the mail.

  There was some action elsewhere along the lines. In the afternoon a sniper shot Colonel John Gustafson in the arm just as he stepped off an amtrac. He turned around and calmly walked back aboard and was taken out to the ship for treatment.

  * * *

  Marines still argue: Which was worse, Peleliu or Okinawa? I vote Peleliu, but others who went through both will tell you that Okinawa was worse, an opinion they base on the amount of artillery the Japs threw at us. After the first two or three days on Peleliu, we didn’t get much of that—we’d knocked out most of their heavy guns. But on Okinawa, once it started, it just kept coming at us right up to the last days.

  The Japs had learned from Peleliu. When we finally cornered them on Okinawa, once again they were holed up in caves and tunnels. We had to pry them out one by one, as we had on Peleliu. Lieutenant General Buckner called it a “blowtorch and corkscrew campaign.” They were fighting on home ground. Okinawa is in the center of the seven-hundred-mile chain of islands stretching from Formosa to Kyushu, the Ryukyus. The Japs considered the whole chain part of their home islands, just like we might think of the Florida Keys. On Okinawa we faced everything we had faced on other islands all over again. Rain, mud, malaria, flies, bodies crawling with maggots. And we were tired. Before it was over, the fight for Okinawa would seem to stretch out to forever, with no end in sight.

  But the first days gave us no hint of what was to come.

  The area behind the beach was jammed with amtracs and DUKWs bringing in supplies, and we moved off quickly. The island was about six miles wide where we came in, and the plan was for us to cut it in half. The First and Sixth Marine divisions were to capture Yontan, the larger of two airfields. Then the Sixth Marines would turn north and sweep up the island to the tip. We would head directly across to the eastern shore. The Army meanwhile would capture the smaller Kadena airfield and turn south. All this was supposed to take a couple weeks. But by the time we were off the beach, troops had already moved up to the edge of both airfields.

  The mouth of the Bishi Gawa River, where our mortar platoon landed, was choked with the wreckage of small boats. Some of them were the plywood suicide motorboats that had been caught by our planes before they could get out to our fleet. We advanced in a column past fields that had recently been harvested and were ready for the plow. The Okinawans grow rice and beans, yams and patches of sugarcane. It appeared they just let their livestock run free, because we kept encountering goats, pigs and chickens. We had some fine barbecues in prospect. The small farmhouses had thatched roofs, and looked tidy and well kept behind low stone walls. Yards were shaded by pine trees. But the buildings themselves were deserted. We found out later the Japs had been telling the natives tales of what terrible things the Americans, especially the Marines, would do to them.

  As we walked by, I checked out their horses. They were smaller and shaggier than the ones I was used to back home, more like a Shetland than a true horse. They turned out to be gentle little horses, good work animals. And while I don’t remember anybody trying to ride one, our mortar squad adopted one and soon had him carrying our ammo.

  By afternoon we got to higher ground and began to catch occasional fire. Usually it was just a couple Japs on a Nambu light machine gun or a mortar, or a sniper. We’d knock them off as we came on them, and then run into another one a little farther along. But it seemed half-hearted, nothing like we’d faced in the jungles of New Britain. About four o’clock we halted to dig in for the night. The ground was soft, perfect for foxholes and setting up the mortars. I sent a couple of the men to check out a nearby farmhouse and they came back to report it clear.

  Tex Cummings and I had just started to dig a foxhole when we heard the distant buzz of airplanes. We looked up and spotted two of them, just specks, but low and coming from the bay.

  As we watched, the specks grew larger. They were going to fly close by.

  “Well, here come two of ours,” Tex said. “They’re looking out for us.”

  I spotted the red circles on the sides of the planes. Meatballs we called them. You learned to recognize them instantly, a warning like the red hourglass on a spider.

  “Better take another damn look, son,” I said. “Those are Jap planes. They’re probably spotting us.”

  They passed thirty or forty yards off, almost at eye level, and as they passed the pilots turned and looked right at us. It was one of those moments when time seems to stop, and I could clearly see every detail—their jackets, leather helmets, goggles up on their foreheads, white scarves. Then they roared on without swerving or changing course.

  We stood waiting until they were gone. “Probably looking for bigger stuff,” I said.

  Neither of us had bothered to reach for our M1. We’d have to have been very, very lucky to hit one.

  From where we dug in, we had a distant view of the invasion ships riding at anchor out in the bay. A little after our encounter with the two Zeros, another Jap plane passed high overhead, flying west toward the beach. Antiaircraft guns started banging away. We watched him calmly circle, like a hawk or a buzzard. As I stood there, I heard myself saying, “Somebody hit that son of a bitch! Somebody hit that son of a bitch.”

  Then he pointed his nose down and went into a steep dive, smacking one of our transports midship. Flame and smoke boiled up and the ship burned late into the evening. It was the first successful kamikaze attack I’d witnessed.

  After sunset, the temperature slipped into the sixties and we pulled on our wool-lined jackets. We broke out the little bottles of brandy that were supposed to keep us warm. A breeze had carried off the haze and one by one the early stars came out. We settled in, sharing foxholes, one sleeping while the other stood watch.

  Pretty soon somebody started scratching. Then somebody else joined in. Then we were all scratching. We had bedded down in a nest of fleas, and they were having a feast at our expense. All night they kept after us, and you’d hear men flopping around, scratching and cursing. Still, I thought fleas were a better deal than Japs. First day of the invasion and none of us hurt or wounded. No artillery or mortar shells rained down on our heads. No banzai attacks. We kept asking ourselves, where were the Japs? Gradually, those whose turn it was to sleep drifted off into an uneasy rest.

  Late at night the rattle of a tommy gun jerked us awake. Everybody popped up, alert. We shouted back and forth, “Everybody all right? What happened? Who’s firing?”

  Gene Sledge whispered that he was sure he’d spotted a Jap crouching over by a row of trees. Just to make sure he’d fired off a burst from the submachine gun. He didn’t know if he’d hit anything.

  Now, we were all
on edge, waiting in silence and squinting into the darkness, trying to see whatever Sledge had seen. We strained, listening for groans, half expecting any minute to hear cries of banzai! Minutes went by with only an occasional pop and rumble in the far distance as some other unit dealt with its own troubles. Finally, those of us who were scheduled to sleep curled up in our foxholes again. The rest went on watching and listening.

  At first light Sledge and a couple others walked over to the row of trees to see what, if anything, he’d hit. His Jap infiltrator turned out to be a small haystack that, seen from a certain angle in the darkness, just might have looked like a crouching man, at least to a nervous Marine.

  We gave Sledgehammer hell all the rest of that day.

  * * *

  The First and Sixth divisions reached the east coast by afternoon on the third day, almost ten days ahead of schedule. We looked out across an area of marshes and freshwater ponds to Chimu Wan Bay and the East China Sea. Behind us, both airfields had been secured and the Seabees were starting to patch up the runways. Within a few more days squadrons of Marine Corsairs would settle in at both fields. Word was passed along that losses since the April 1 landing had been minimal—of the sixty thousand troops who came ashore, twenty-eight were killed, 104 wounded and twenty-seven missing.

  The next morning it started to rain, and it would rain off and on for days after that, turning the roads to mud and slowing the flow of supplies. The Sixth Division turned north and the First Division got the order to move inland and probe the country to the southwest. K Company would spend the next week or so on patrol, looking for the enemy. While we didn’t turn up a living Jap anywhere, to our north a patrol sent out by the Third Battalion of the Seventh Marines—also K Company, incidentally—ran into an ambush near a place called Hizoanna. Three of their men were killed and a dozen wounded in the firefight.

  Within a few days we were ordered to patrol the same area. In the morning, the section set out with Scotty in charge. The rain had let up and the road was dry, so we made good time moving along between rows of fragrant pine trees. But soon we passed the first sign of the Seventh Marines’ scrape. A dead Jap was sprawled in a wooded ravine beside the road. A little farther along we came upon bloodied bandages and wrappings, and knapsacks that corpsmen had cut from injured Marines. There were about twenty more Jap bodies scattered around, along with empty ammo boxes and clips and lots of brass. Dark clots of blood soiled the ground. This had been more than a skirmish. We were all sharply reminded, if any of us needed reminding, that we were on Japanese soil. We were still in a war that could turn bloody any minute.

  I sent a couple men forward to check the road where it dipped into a deep, tree-shaded cut. Scotty, our lieutenant, had wandered off into a nearby farmyard.

  There was a shot, a pause, then another shot. Everyone dove for cover. The shots had come from the farmyard, not from the road, and my first thought was that Scotty had run into trouble.

  I rose up to get a better look and spotted Scotty calmly standing in the open, taking aim with his carbine at the carcass of some dead animal. Just then he fired again.

  I had no idea what the man was doing. But I knew it couldn’t be very helpful. We picked ourselves up and gathered around while he cheerfully explained that he was trying to shoot the teeth out of the skull one by one. A regular shooting gallery.

  Suddenly I was furious. The rest of the patrol standing around, white-faced, looked from me to Scotty and back to me again.

  I decided to take him aside where we wouldn’t be overheard.

  “Lieutenant, what the hell did you think you were doing?” I said. “Now every Jap in ten miles is going to know exactly where we’re at.”

  He looked down and shuffled his feet.

  “You’re responsible for the lives of twenty-two men here, and we’re in the middle of God knows how many Japs. We don’t need to hang up a billboard to tell them where to look for us.”

  He mumbled something about remaining alert while on patrol. I told him I didn’t think being alert included taking target practice at dead animals.

  It was a typical Scotty episode, the kind of dumb thing he’d probably think about later and come to regret. Scotty still had a lot to learn. I was doing my best to educate him.

  He would give me another opportunity pretty soon after that.

  Third Battalion got word to get ready to move out for another operation. Trucks drove us to the east coast, where amtracs waited on the shore. A cluster of five or six islands lay a few miles out in the bay, and while intelligence was pretty sure none of them harbored Japs, it was felt the enemy might use them in the future to launch a sneak attack.

  While we waited to board the amtracs, we built a small fire to keep off the chill. Some of us were squaring away our gear when there was a familiar pop! About the time I’d made up my mind it was a grenade primer cap and everybody scattered for cover, there was a louder pop! and we were showered with ashes and sparks. A few grenade fragments landed among us, fortunately without doing any damage.

  “Who’s the stupid son of a bitch who pulled the pin on that grenade?” I yelled.

  We all looked at Scotty, who was grinning sheepishly.

  “Heh, heh. I guess I didn’t get all the powder out of it,” he said.

  It was the old joke on maneuvers. Unscrew the detonator, pour the powder out of a grenade, screw the detonator back on, pull the pin and toss it to somebody. Everybody scatters, then everybody has a good laugh. But this time he hadn’t poured out all the explosive charge, and we weren’t laughing. And we weren’t on maneuvers.

  This time I didn’t bother to take him aside.

  “Well, how stupid can you get, Scotty?” I yelled at my section leader.

  For once, he apologized.

  We boarded the amtracs in a sour mood. Accompanied by a destroyer escort, they took K Company about four miles out to the largest of the islands, Takabanare. It didn’t take us long to sweep the place, shore to shore. Whenever we came upon a house we’d check it out like a SWAT team, going from room to room with our pistols drawn. We turned up a few Okinawan natives but no enemy soldiers.

  The first night Scotty and I dug in together. We took the split-bamboo mats the natives used for rugs and put them in the bottom of the foxhole to keep us dry. As it started to get dark, I noticed Scotty’s .45 was still cocked.

  “Scotty! Your pistol’s cocked.”

  “God a-mighty,” he said. “You know, I cocked that thing when we came ashore this morning, and never did uncock it.”

  For the next three nights we slept in the open. Our mortars were set up on a rocky hillside overlooking the beach, which was a fine place for swimming. A few swam out to the destroyer escort, which was anchored just offshore, and enjoyed the Navy’s hospitality. Then, without explanation, the amtracs took us back to Okinawa, where we resumed our patrols.

  With the Marine fighters onshore, things started getting interesting overhead. In my time overseas, I’d never seen planes tangle in dogfights before. On New Britain, there was so much jungle you couldn’t see the sky most of the time, and during our time on Peleliu, the Japs had never been able to put a single plane into the air.

  But on Okinawa the country was open, and we were close enough to Japan that they could fly in, fight, and then turn around and fly home. So we witnessed several dogfights, right over our heads. They were awesome.

  Often they were so high you couldn’t tell which planes were enemy and which were ours. They were just specks circling around up there. Then you’d see one get shot out of the air, and a wing would come spiraling down, or chunks of metal burning and trailing smoke. We’d just stand there staring upward.

  On April 13, they passed the word along the lines that President Roosevelt had died the day before. It was a shock. Most of us hadn’t spent much time thinking about events back home, what was going on in Washington and so forth. I guess we just assumed when we got back home he’d still be president. None of us knew a thing about t
his new man, Harry Truman.

  I remember the day because that morning a Jap plane had come in low over our positions, treetop level. You could almost see his eyeballs. I thought, Oh, shit. He’s after somebody. And just as I was thinking that, here came one of our Corsairs right on his tail. You could see the Marine pilot just as clearly. He was looking straight ahead, hunched over slightly. He hadn’t started firing yet, but he was moving faster than the Zero. They disappeared behind the trees and I didn’t get to see how it turned out. But I’d be willing to bet money that Marine caught him. And if he didn’t catch him, somebody else did. Little by little we started to see fewer Jap planes.

  Except for the dogfights, K Company had been on Okinawa almost a month now without seeing any combat. We’d been roaming the countryside, going out on patrol. Sometimes we’d just go out on our own, poking around farmhouses looking for chickens or pigs. Anything to relieve the monotony of K rations.

  Toward the end of April I went out on my own to see what I could scare up. I came to this farmhouse with a shed built onto the side. The shed was about twenty feet long and six to eight feet deep with a door in front. It looked like the kind of place you might keep chickens, so I opened the door and went in. There was a ragged pile of pine limbs stacked near the door and I reached down and kind of shook one, hoping to scare up a chicken. And this man popped up instead.

  You talk about West Texas quick-draw. The flap of my holster was down and snapped, but in one split second I had my .45 out and in that guy’s face.

  Then I saw that he was a civilian, an Okinawan. He just bowed, and bowed again and came out from behind the woodpile. I’m not sure which one of us was more startled. I patted him on the shoulder and bowed myself and left him standing there. I don’t know where he went after that, whether he crawled back behind that woodpile or went somewhere else.

  It was a nice farmhouse, wood frame, well kept. I don’t think the Okinawans were happy to see us in the beginning. The Japs had kind of brainwashed them to think we were barbarians. But after they were in contact with us, word spread that we were okay. That we weren’t the barbarians. The Japs were.