by Robert Gandt
The problem was, there were no readily identifiable targets. And the enemy wasn’t cooperating by firing their shore batteries and revealing their positions. As far as anyone could tell, the western shore—and the landing beaches at Hagushi—were deserted.
The Alligator knew better. He’d seen this before. The Japanese never showed their hand until the battle had begun.
The mood in Boys’ Town changed again that night. Out from the lockers came the stashes of Coon Range, but not to mourn the loss of another Tail End Charlie. This was a night for celebration. The report had just reached Intrepid: Windy Hill, last seen floating in the Pacific off Kyushu, was alive and aboard an American submarine.
Hill’s life, in fact, had been saved by one of the VF-10 Grim Reaper pilots, Lt. George “Bee” Weems, who relieved Erickson on station over the place where Hill went down. Realizing that Hill had left his sinking Corsair without a raft, Weems managed to haul his own raft free and drop it to Hill. With the last of his energy, Hill had made a hundred-yard swim through the high seas and clambered aboard the raft. Thirty minutes later, he was astonished to see the gray shape of a submarine swell up from the ocean.
Eric Erickson’s incessant jabbering on the radio had produced results. Alerted by the transmissions, USS Sea Dog proceeded to the area. The sub skipper spotted the circling Corsairs through his periscope and made directly for Hill’s raft.
Hill had been rescued, but it didn’t mean he was coming home to the Intrepid. Not for a while. The Sea Dog had embarked on its war patrol only a few hours before picking up the downed pilot. Now the submarine was heading back into the Pacific. Like it or not, Windy Hill was along for the ride.
PART TWO
STORMING THE GREAT LOOCHOO
MARINE CORPS GENERAL, EXPLAINING THE REASON FOR INVADING OKINAWA: FROM OKINAWA WE CAN BOMB THE JAPS ANYWHERE—CHINA, FORMOSA, JAPAN.
MARINE CORPS GUNNERY SERGEANT, NODDING: YES, SIR. AND VICE VERSA.
THE PROSPECTS OF A LONG AND ILLUSTRIOUS CAREER FOR A DESTROYER ASSIGNED TO RADAR PICKET STATION DUTY IS BELOW AVERAGE EXPECTANCY. THAT DUTY IS EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS, VERY TIRING, AND ENTIRELY UNENJOYABLE.
—CMDR. FRANK L. JOHNSON,
COMMANDING OFFICER, USS PURDY
VBF-10 Corsairs attacking Yamato in the painting Imperial Sacrifice. (PAINTING © ROBERT BAILEY)
14 LOVE DAY
OKINAWA
EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 1945
It was a perfect morning for an invasion. The sea was glassy smooth, shimmering in the glow of the early spring sun. Waves of LCIs (landing craft infantry) and LVTs (landing vehicle tracked) were moving in parallel paths toward the beach, each craft trailing a long ribbon of foam. In the fore of each column were LCI gunboats, blazing away at the beach with 40-millimeter guns, .50-caliber machine guns, and Mark 7 rocket launchers.
The code name for the timing of the invasion was “Love Day.” The fact that the landings were also on April Fool’s Day wasn’t lost on the grim-faced soldiers and Marines hunched down in the landing craft. Some were veterans of the bloody landings on Peleliu, Saipan, and Tarawa. They all knew about Iwo Jima, where casualties had been horrific. Okinawa, they had no doubt, was going to be a bigger, bloodier version of Iwo.
One of the men in the landing craft of the 1st Marine Division was a skinny forty-five-year-old war correspondent named Ernie Pyle. Pyle was not one of the twilight warriors—latecomers to the war. He’d already seen more combat than most of the men in the landing craft. As a columnist and reporter for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, he’d covered the European theater from North Africa to Sicily, Italy, and France. He’d been on the beach at Normandy a day after D-day. His columns had won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1944.
Pyle hadn’t wanted to come out here. But after he returned from Europe, he couldn’t just stay home. He thought he owed it to the men who were fighting in the Pacific to tell their story.
Now Pyle was hunkered down with the Marines in the landing craft headed for a beach code-named “Yellow One,” on the northern half of the landing zone. “I felt miserable,” he reported, “and an awful weight was on my heart. There’s nothing whatever romantic in knowing that an hour from now you may be dead.”
Center stage of the show was a six-mile stretch of beach on the west central shore of the island, near the village of Hagushi. Under covering gunfire, underwater demolition teams had already slithered ashore to prepare the beaches for the assault. The first key objectives were the two Japanese airfields Yontan and Kadena, directly behind the invasion beaches.
As the landing craft neared the reef that protected the lagoon inside, the thunder of gunfire swelled to a crescendo. Fighter bombers from the carrier task force flashed overhead, firing 5-inch rockets and blazing away with machine guns. Cruisers and battleships kept up a steady barrage with their heavy guns. The baritone rumble of the amphibious crafts’ diesel engines wafted over the surface of the water.
Each tracked landing craft, one after another, motored up to the reef, paused, then scuttled like a crab over the barely submerged coral. Plowing back into the sea, it made its final charge to the beach.
In his wallowing amphtrac—amphibious tractor—Ernie Pyle peered ahead through the smoke. So far there had been no enemy shelling of the landing craft. “We had all expected to go onto the beach in a hailstorm of tracer bullets, mortar shells throwing sand, and artillery shells whistling into the water near us,” he wrote. “And yet we couldn’t see a bit of firing ahead. We hoped it was true.”
At 0832 came the radio call, “First wave has hit the beach!” The thunder of the ships’ heavy guns abruptly ceased. Up and down the beach, amphtracs waddled onto the shore, discharging their loads of soldiers and Marines. As soon as each was empty, it turned and motored back over the reef, out to where transports waited to load the amphtrac with more troops.
It was exquisitely controlled chaos. For miles in each direction, hundreds of craft were churning the water like swarms of otters, crossing wakes, coming and going, missing each other by scant feet.
Aboard his flagship Eldorado, the Alligator was presiding like a conductor over the vast operation. At Iwo Jima, Turner had been accused by infantry commanders of hoarding his ammunition, saving it for the coming invasion of Okinawa. Nothing was being held back now. The bombardment of Okinawa was the most intense of any amphibious campaign in the war. Turner’s ships had fired more than forty thousand rounds of heavy shells, breaching seawalls, destroying farms and shacks, razing entire villages. Fighter-bombers from the Fast Carrier Force were sweeping over the island, strafing, rocketing, and dropping bombs.
It was mostly for nothing. Other than a few parked Japanese airplanes on the Yontan, Naha, and Kadena airfields, the warplanes were finding few identifiable targets. By all appearances, the island of Okinawa appeared to be uninhabited.
Hundreds of troops were now ashore, swarming inland. Japanese gunners were still not returning fire, keeping their positions hidden. So far the only enemy counterfire was a few rounds from mortars, which were quickly silenced by the ships’ guns. Meanwhile, more waves of troops were arriving, piling out of the landing craft, sprinting to the first available cover.
Despite the lack of resistance, the men on the beach felt exposed and vulnerable. The beach sloped steeply upward in places, making it hard to run with heavy packs and weapons. No one could shake the feeling that the Japanese were setting them up. A murderous enfilading fire would surely come in the next minutes from hidden nests in the hills and limestone bluffs above the landing zone.
The fire didn’t come. More troops hit the beach, and behind them came amphibious transports to disgorge tanks and artillery pieces. The beaches were becoming congested. By 0900, spotter planes reported that advance troops were already several hundred yards inland. U.S. tanks could be seen motoring up the slope of the overlooking hillside. Bulldozers and cranes were assembling on the beach. Offshore, the long parallel wakes of more than seven hundred landing craft stretched beyond s
ight.
Still no resistance. No one was ready to believe it. Men stormed out of their amphtracs on the beach, only to find the Marines and soldiers who’d preceded them moving at a leisurely pace, smoking and talking, making their way unopposed up the enemy slope. Nowhere were the killer mushrooms of enemy mortars, the dreaded rattle of machine guns. New arrivals on the beach exchanged wary looks. Where was the horde of fanatical Japs they’d been told to expect?
One of the most astonished was Ernie Pyle. His amphtrac lurched up on the beach, and the ramp dropped open. “We stepped out,” recalled Pyle. “We were on Okinawa an hour and a half after H-hour without getting shot at, and we hadn’t even got our feet wet.”
It was too good to be true. A Marine first lieutenant, Lawrence Bangser, had seen other invasions, and this one didn’t feel right. “Either this Jap general is the world’s greatest tactician,” he told a reporter, “or the world’s stupidest man.”
Time correspondent Robert Sherrod waded ashore with the Marines on northern Hagushi beach. He made his way up to a regimental command post. “From the high ground I could see about 1,000 of the 1,400 ships involved around Okinawa. The colonel said that some of his men were browned off because there had been no opposition on the beaches. They had been built up to such a high pitch of combat efficiency that they were bound to feel let down and slightly sheepish. Said the colonel: ‘This is the finest Easter present we could have received. But we’ll get a bellyful of fighting before this thing is over.’ ”
A few minutes before 1000, Marines in the northern sector reported that they were on the edge of Yontan airfield. The battleships and cruisers of the task force had to suspend covering fire because the assault troops were moving too fast. At 1035, the invaders had reached the edge of the second objective, Kadena airfield. Along the way they encountered only Okinawan peasants, most of them shell-shocked by the barrage. The Okinawans stared at the Americans as if they were seeing aliens from another galaxy.
The fight for the airfields was over quickly. Yontan was seized at a cost of two Marines dead and nine wounded. The capture of the critical airfield happened so quickly it surprised even the Japanese. Marines at Yontan watched in astonishment as a dusky-colored fighter with a distinctive red ball on its right wing and fuselage glided down to a landing on the still-uncleared runway.
The Zero taxied up to the flight line. Too late the startled pilot realized what had happened. When he jumped from the cockpit with his gun drawn, he was mowed down by the new owners of the airfield.
It was the same story everywhere. Casualties were light. Few units were encountering any significant resistance. By noon both Yontan and Kadena airfields were in U.S. hands. The battle plan allowed three days, and it had taken less than four hours.
One Marine battalion, hunting for Japanese defenders, managed to find and kill four. An army colonel sent them a message: “Please send us a dead Jap. A lot of my men have never seen one. We’ll bury him for you.”
The landings continued without opposition. While the invasion force was rumbling ashore at Hagushi, another wave under Rear Adm. Jerauld Wright was making a simulated landing further to the south, to draw Japanese forces away from the real landing beaches at Hagushi. Wright’s decoy unit had all the elements of an amphibious force—a heavy pre-landing bombardment by surface ships, transport ships, and LSTs (tank landing ships) loaded with Marines.
The ruse brought no response from the enemy ashore, but it attracted attention from the sky. While the decoy force was still maneuvering for its final approach, a kamikaze appeared overhead. Diving on the clustered vessels below, the Japanese tokko plane smashed into the port quarter of LST-884, which had three hundred Marines aboard. Fire and exploding ammunition nearly destroyed the craft before a rescue party from the destroyer Van Valkenburgh were able to board and extinguish the fires. Twenty-four sailors and Marines were killed and twenty-one wounded aboard the unlucky LST.
At the same time the kamikaze was ramming LST-884, another was crashing into the transport ship Hinsdale, killing sixteen men, wounding thirty-nine, and leaving the ship without power. Tugs came to haul both stricken vessels to the new repair facility in nearby Kerama Retto.
None of this could diminish the Alligator’s high spirits. At 1600 he sent a message to Spruance and Nimitz: “Landings on all beaches continued, with good progress inland against light opposition. Beachhead has been secured … Approximately 50,000 troops have landed over beaches … 420th Field Artillery Group with two battalions 155-millimeter guns on Keise Shima in support ground troops … Unloading supplies over Hagushi beaches commenced, using LVTs, dukws [six-wheeled amphibious trucks], LSMs [landing ships medium] and LSTs [tank landing ships].”
The chain of command for the invasion of Okinawa was as convoluted as any in the Pacific military structure. Because the Navy had responsibility for the invasion, Adm. Raymond Spruance was in overall charge of the campaign. The officer in command of the ships and men assigned to the invasion was the Alligator, Vice Adm. Kelly Turner. The invading ground force, the Tenth Army, was a mix of Army and Marine divisions, all under the command of a white-haired Army lieutenant general named Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr.
Buckner had not been the choice of Spruance or Turner. Both admirals preferred that a Marine lead the ground forces they put ashore on Okinawa. Their first choice was Lt. Gen. Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, the cantankerous leatherneck who had led the amphibious assaults on the Gilberts, the Marshalls, Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. Smith had also commanded Task Force 56, the amphibious force that charged ashore on Iwo Jima, and had earned the confidence of Spruance and Turner.
But Howlin’ Mad Smith had become controversial. At the height of the Saipan invasion, he peremptorily fired an Army division general for what Smith considered to be inept leadership. The incident enraged the Army brass in Washington, including chief of staff George Marshall, who had never believed that Marines had any business commanding Army units. The Army’s resentment went all the way back to World War I, when, in their view, the Marine Corps had usurped the Army’s rightful glory on the battlefields of France. At Saipan, Howlin’ Mad Smith had reignited the old Army–Marine Corps feud.
Pacific commander in chief Chester Nimitz, ever the diplomat, moved to restore peace. Throwing a bone to the Army, he vetoed the choice of Howlin’ Mad Smith and chose Lt. Gen. Simon Buckner to command the invasion force at Okinawa.
It was a decision Nimitz would have reason to regret.
15 BOURBON AND PUDDLE WATER
OKINAWA
APRIL 3, 1945
For Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., a few months short of his fifty-ninth birthday, just being at Okinawa was a personal triumph. By 1945, the handsome, white-haired general was no less a twilight warrior than the kids on the ships and on the beach. Buckner was aware of the controversy over his posting. With minimal battle experience, he had been appointed over a plethora of seasoned combat commanders.
Like Douglas MacArthur, Buckner was a West Pointer and the son of a Civil War officer. His father, Gen. Simon B. Buckner, was named after the South American liberator. He had fought in the Mexican War, joined the Confederate side as a brigadier general, and gained infamy for making a hasty surrender to Ulysses Grant. He was exchanged and returned to fight until the end of the Civil War.
Now his son, Simon Buckner Jr., had arrived at his new command after thirty-seven years in the Army, most of it in staff and administrative positions. He’d missed combat in World War I, having spent the duration giving military training to Army aviators. Like MacArthur, he’d seen two tours of duty in the Philippines. He’d been an instructor at various Army schools and, also like MacArthur, had returned to West Point, serving in the mid-thirties as commandant of cadets.
When World War II began, Buckner was a colonel and a division chief of staff with every expectation of a combat command. Instead of going to Guadalcanal or North Africa, he received a promotion to brigadier general and the unenviable task of defending Alaska—
a region one-fifth the size of the United States, with a coastline nearly as long.
Buckner threw himself into the mission of fortifying Alaska. For a while it even seemed possible that the Japanese might attempt an invasion. They seized the Aleutian islands of Kiska and Attu and made a thrust at the Dutch Harbor military complex before being turned back by airpower. Buckner played only a minor role in the Aleutian action. For most of three frustrating years he paced the tundra while his Army contemporaries were fighting battles—real battles—in Europe and the Pacific.
In June 1944, fate finally smiled on Simon Buckner. Now wearing three stars, he was assigned to command the new Tenth Army, which was being formed for the invasion of Formosa. While he was still assembling his army, Buckner learned that Formosa would be bypassed. His first landing would be on Okinawa.
There were other similarities between Buckner and the media-conscious MacArthur. Buckner cultivated an image of himself as a hard-charging, outdoors-living, chest-thumping man of action. A Time interviewer profiled him as “a ruddy-faced, white-thatched, driving apostle of the rigorous life.”
Buckner’s favorite drink was “bourbon and puddle water,” with which he made his traditional toast, “May you walk in the ashes of Tokyo.” The general had a laugh, a journalist reported, that “starts with a little chuckle in his throat, and then he really lets go and shakes the walls.”
Now, with the bulk of his army ashore on Okinawa, Buckner could allow himself to laugh. To his left, Maj. Gen. Roy Geiger’s III Marine Amphibious Corps was rolling like a freight train northward through the Ishikawa Isthmus toward the neighborhood of Kim. Opposition to their advance was virtually nil. It was the same to the right, where Maj. Gen. John Hodge and XXIV Army Corps were marching southward toward Naha, the island’s capital.