by Robert Gandt
Buckner had good reason to be pleased, but he knew better than to delude himself. He’d studied the intelligence reports. Somewhere on this island were more than sixty thousand Japanese troops. Where the hell were they?
They were there. But Buckner’s intelligence reports were wrong. Instead of 60,000 enemy troops on Okinawa, there were nearly 120,000, dug into caves, tombs, and spider holes.
The man who commanded this force, Lt. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, watched from his observation post at the ancient Shuri Castle as the Americans advanced toward him. They were meeting only sporadic resistance, which was what Ushijima intended. Not until the enemy reached the open paddies and gentle hills three miles short of the first defensive line did Ushijima intend to show his hand. The approaches to the first defensive line were all pre-sited for artillery, mortar batteries, and machine gun nests to deliver enfilading fire on the advancing enemy.
Ushijima’s 32nd Army included battle-hardened veterans of the 62nd Infantry Division, which had seen action in China, and the 24th Independent Mixed Brigade from the home island of Kyushu. In addition to his 34,000 regular infantrymen, Ushijima’s force had 10,000 troops drawn from the Navy bases on Okinawa. Another 20,000 soldiers—called the Boeitai—were a home guard conscripted from the Okinawan population. Though the Boeitai lacked the grit and motivation of the homegrown Japanese soldiers, they were useful for the grunt work of digging emplacements and moving equipment.
Ushijima also had guns, more than any Japanese commander of a besieged island had possessed before. Much of the artillery had been destined for the Philippines, but time ran out before it could be delivered. Ushijima had three heavy artillery regiments, a tank regiment, and a regiment of the massive 320-millimeter guns that had been used with devastating effect at Iwo Jima. It was no match for what the Americans would bring with them, but for the first time in any of the Pacific battles Japanese artillery would be a major deterrent to the advancing enemy forces.
Ushijima had studied the previous invasions—Saipan, Leyte, Tarawa, Peleliu, and most recently Iwo Jima. His old Imperial Japanese Army colleague, Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had commanded the 21,000-man garrison at Iwo Jima. Outmanned and outgunned, with no hope of reinforcement or replenishment, Kuribayashi had chosen not to contest the American landings. Instead he fought a battle of attrition, resisting the enemy advance from a hidden honeycomb of tunnels, caves, and pillboxes. In the end, Kuribayashi and almost all his garrison went to their deaths.
Here on Okinawa Ushijima faced the same choices. His only option was to turn Okinawa into a Stalingrad for the Americans—a vast bloody pit into which the United States would throw lives and resources until they concluded that an unconditional surrender of Japan was not worth the sacrifice. Like Kuribayashi, Ushijima saw no point in wasting precious resources on the beaches. Nor did he believe in suicidal last-ditch banzai charges into the waiting muzzles of the enemy’s guns.
Mitsuru Ushijima was not cut from the same cloth as most of the bushido-embracing officers of the Imperial Japanese Army. Ushijima was a disciplined, fatherly officer who disdained shows of anger. In a departure from the harsh customs of the Imperial Japanese Army, Ushijima ordered his junior officers to refrain from striking their subordinates.
Ushijima’s second in command, fifty-one-year-old Isamu Cho, was his opposite in temperament. Newly promoted to the rank of lieutenant general, Cho was a fiery warrior with a history of extremist leanings. He’d been a conspirator in an unsuccessful attempt at a military dictatorship in 1931. During the infamous Rape of Nanking in 1937, it was Cho who had issued the orders to kill all prisoners. Prone to fits of rage, Cho didn’t hesitate to slap subordinates who displeased him.
During strategy sessions in Ushijima’s underground headquarters, Cho often clashed with the senior operations officer, Col. Hiromichi Yahara. At forty-two, Yahara was a calm, conservative officer who rejected the bushido notion of suicidal banzai charges. Such tactics, he insisted, were a stupid waste of lives. He counseled Ushijima that “the army must continue its current operations, calmly recognizing its final destiny—for annihilation is inevitable no matter what is done.”
To Cho, such thinking was timid and defeatist, a dishonorable way for Japanese warriors to die. He urged Ushijima to launch a massive counterattack, hurl the enemy back to the beaches, and take the offensive in the battle for Okinawa.
The genial Ushijima presided over the debates in his headquarters more like a moderator than a commander. After listening to the impassioned arguments of both officers, he sided with Yahara. Better to bleed the enemy, making them pay in lives and time for each meter of ground they took.
As the days passed, more Okinawans came out of hiding. Gradually they realized that the invaders weren’t pillaging and murdering. The Okinawans stared at the American soldiers in dazed fascination.
Ernie Pyle was with a Marine company working its way north when they found a group of natives hiding in a cave. “They were obviously scared to death,” Pyle wrote. “After all the propaganda they had been fed about our tortures, they were a befuddled bunch of Okinawans when they discovered we had brought right along with us, as part of the intricate invasion plan, enough supplies to feed them too!”
The honeymoon continued. Nearly a week had passed since Love Day, and the Americans were still encountering little opposition. After the tense first few hours of the invasion, the men of the Tenth Army felt almost like celebrating.
Spring had come, the weather was benign, and the island seemed almost friendly. To the old hands who had fought in hellholes such as Tarawa and Saipan, the absence of thick jungle and oppressive heat was a blessing. Okinawa had a temperate climate. Its hillsides were covered with pine trees and wild raspberries. Flocks of pigeons fluttered overhead, offering the only targets for trigger-happy soldiers. Troops commandeered bicycles and horses. The most notable casualty of the first few days was a Marine who broke an ankle when he fell off a purloined bicycle.
One day passed into another as they made their careful advance across the island, still meeting no resistance. A few civilians, mostly children, approached the soldiers for handouts. Many of the GIs were farm boys from America’s heartland. They gazed around at the pleasant landscape, impressed by the efficient cultivation of the arable land. Almost every square inch of tillable ground was neatly terraced and cultivated. It seemed an unlikely backdrop for a great battle.
Meanwhile, several hundred miles to the northeast of Okinawa, in the ocean off Shikoku, Windy Hill had reached a conclusion: he hated submarines. They were dangerous, claustrophobia-inducing, smelly steel tubes.
It had taken Hill less than one full day aboard USS Sea Dog to make this discovery. He had been having dinner in the officers’ wardroom when the klaxon sounded: “General quarters, man your battle stations!”
The sub had been running on the surface, recharging its batteries. Hill watched with growing trepidation while the captain and all the officers charged out of the wardroom. The sub dove to periscope depth, and minutes later Hill heard the rumble of the forward torpedo tubes firing. The target, he learned, was a Japanese submarine that had been sighted on the surface.
Alone in the wardroom with only a steward for company, Hill huddled with his back against the bulkhead, trying to shut from his mind the vision of a torpedo slamming into the hull behind him.
They finally lost contact with the enemy submarine. Sea Dog returned to the surface, and the officers resumed their dinner. Gloomily Hill thought about his fellow airedales back aboard Intrepid. While he was stuck on this damned boat, they were shooting down Japs, bombing airfields, and collecting medals.
His gloom only deepened when the submarine’s skipper informed him that the fun was just beginning. Sea Dog’s war patrol would last another five weeks.
16 TEN-GO
MITAJIRI ANCHORAGE
INLAND SEA OF JAPAN
APRIL 5, 1945
Perched in his command chair on the sixth deck of Yamato’s bridge
tower, Vice Adm. Seiichi Ito watched the crew preparing the battleship for departure. Ito had been one of those who loudly opposed the operation, now called Ten-Go, which literally meant “heaven number one.” Ito, in fact, thought the whole tokko strategy was stupid, not for moral reasons—he was as much a samurai as the superpatriots—but because it was a waste of precious resources. Japan’s warriors—and their weapons—should be saved for the final battle in the homeland.
But Seiichi Ito was, above all else, a loyal officer. Now that the decision was made and the orders received, he had committed himself to the success of Ten-Go. He commanded the Imperial Japanese Navy Second Fleet and, with his flag aboard Yamato, would lead the task force into battle against the Americans.
Seiichi Ito was fifty-four, a tall, stooped man with a square-cut, rugged face. Like his fellow admirals Toyoda and Oikawa, Ito had spent most of the war in Combined Fleet and Imperial Japanese Navy general staff assignments. All his requests for a major sea command had been denied. To Ito, it now seemed a stroke of irony that his first sea battle would, in all probability, be his last. It would probably also be the last for the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Ten-Go would be the first of a series of massed kamikaze attacks called kikusui, which meant “floating chrysanthemum.” Like most Japanese war plans, the enchanting label masked a macabre strategy. The name came from the heraldic device of the fourteenth-century warrior Masashige Kusunoki, who personified the classic self-sacrificing warrior. According to legend, Kusunoki, obeying the command of the emperor Go-Daigo, led his army into certain death against vastly superior forces. Surrounded by the enemy and his situation hopeless, Kusunoke and six hundred of his surviving troops committed seppuku—the samurai ritual suicide by disembowelment.
The kikusui attacks were supposed to emulate Kusunoki’s sacrifice, but on an even grander scale. Involving more than two thousand tokko aircraft, they would attack the U.S. fleet in ten waves.
The kikusui operation had been envisioned purely as a series of airborne tokko attacks directed from the Kanoya base by Admiral Ugaki. No one had suggested that they be accompanied by a surface attack of Imperial Japanese Navy warships.
Not until a few days ago. Now the mighty Yamato and her entourage were about to embark on their own tokko mission.
Aboard New Mexico, Adm. Raymond Spruance read the decoded message. It had been transmitted that afternoon, April 5, from the Imperial Japanese Navy Combined Fleet commander to the commander in chief of the Second Fleet. Like almost all Japanese military communications, the intercepted message was deciphered by U.S. cryptologists in Makalapa, Hawaii, then flashed to Chester Nimitz’s headquarters in Guam, where it was relayed to Raymond Spruance off the shore of Okinawa.
It was the official order for an operation called Ten-Go.
Yamato and the Second Destroyer Squadron will sally forth in a naval special attack via Bungo Channel at dawn of Day Y-minus-one; at dawn of Day Y they will charge into the seas west of Okinawa and will attack and destroy the enemy’s invasion fleet. Day Y will be 8 April.
The intercepted report came as no real surprise to Spruance and his intelligence officers. For the past week reconnaissance aircraft had observed the Japanese fleet maneuvering in the Inland Sea as if preparing for the long-expected breakout. That they were coming through the Bungo Strait, the wide passage between Kyushu and Shikoku, was also no surprise. Their only other route would have been westward through the narrow Shimonoseki Strait, between the tips of Honshu and Kyushu, which were dangerous waters for a warship the size of Yamato. The strait was shallow, only 10 fathoms in places, and had been sown with mines by B-29 bombers. The strait was already littered with the hulks of unlucky ships that had stumbled into mines.
So the Imperial Japanese Navy fleet—what remained of it—was coming out to fight. To an old battleship sailor like Spruance, it presented a tantalizing possibility. He could send Task Force 54, Rear Adm. Mort Deyo’s formidable array of battleships and cruisers, to confront the Japanese in what would likely be the last great surface engagement of the war. Or he could use the more expedient weapon—the warplanes of Marc Mitscher’s Fast Carrier Task Force.
Or both, and let the quickest take the prize.
In either case, he had more to worry about than the Yamato surface force. He also had a report that the Japanese would be timing the surface attack with a simultaneous massive air assault and a counterattack from the Japanese ground forces on Okinawa. The battle for Okinawa was heating up.
The crew of the Yamato stopped in midstride. The voice of their executive officer, Capt. Jiro Nomura, was booming over the bullhorn: “Distribute sake to all divisions.”
It was an announcement seldom heard aboard a warship of the Imperial Japanese Navy. On this, the eve of Yamato’s last battle, both Nomura and Yamato’s commanding officer, Rear Admiral Ariga, had decided to memorialize the occasion. Except for a skeleton crew of lookouts and duty officers, the crew of Yamato was going to have a monumental party. The galleys were ordered open. Cooks were instructed to break out all the extra rations. There was no longer a need to keep the best food and drink in reserve. Crates of sake were opened and bottles distributed to all the divisions on the ship.
The cooks prepared delicacies of sekihan, a red bean paste, and okashiratsuki, sea bream served with the head still intact, all washed down with vast quantities of warm sake. Emboldened by alcohol and the brash hubris of youth, the sailors on the mess decks were making boisterous toasts, drinking to one another’s death.
Whether any of them actually welcomed death was immaterial. By training and upbringing each was ensnared in a complex code of loyalty to his fellow sailors, his family, and ultimately to the emperor. The fear of disgrace held more sway over them than the fear of death.
One of the celebrants on the mess deck was eighteen-year-old Kazuhiro Fukumoto. It took only a couple of sakes, and the inexperienced young sailor was soused. Fukumoto was finding it hard to take all this mawkish talk about honor, death, and disgrace seriously. He was convinced that Yamato was unsinkable. It was an unreasoning belief, a gut feeling that came just from being aboard such a dreadnought. How could a warship of this size and firepower be sunk? It was impossible. Sure, in the thick of battle some of the crew might be killed by bullets and bombs. Still, the odds were in his favor. Given the number of crew aboard, his chances of being one of those killed were very slim.
He hadn’t discussed Yamato’s mission with his parents, who lived in Kure, Yamato’s home port. With most of the crew, Fukumoto had been given a few days’ shore leave to say farewell and settle his affairs. He’d had dinner with his parents and younger sister and told them to watch after his things while he was gone. For Fukumoto, it wasn’t an emotional farewell. He didn’t expect to be away for long.
In the officers’ main wardroom, they were drinking not only sake but real Scotch whisky, part of the loot seized from the British after the capture of Singapore nearly four years earlier. Someone had pulled out the hand-cranked turntable, and they were singing along to the scratchy music from their collection of 78-rpm vinyl records. Even the skipper, Rear Admiral Ariga, and the executive officer, Captain Nomura, showed up, each bearing a huge bottle of sake.
Most of the officers were drunk, and Ariga, known as a hard drinker himself, was no exception. Forty-eight years old, Ariga had been in command of Yamato for only four months. He was a stern but fatherly commanding officer, revered by most of his young sailors. Their nickname for him was “Gorilla,” for his stout, ungraceful build and hairless head.
For once the stiff formality of navy protocol went by the boards. Nomura was swept up in a mock scrimmage, his jacket getting ripped. Junior officers took turns thumping Ariga’s bald, dome-shaped head. It was a wild, one-of-a-kind bash.
Soon after midnight, while most of the besotted crew was still stumbling to their bunks, the shadowy, taper-winged silhouette of a four-engine airplane passed high overhead. It was a B-29 reconnaissance bomber snapping pictures of t
he anchored battleship below, radioing its exact position back to Allied headquarters.
The early hours of April 6 were spent off-loading combustible materials and unnecessary stores. The deadline for mail was 1000, and the executive officer urged each officer and man to write a final letter to his family.
In his cramped quarters, Ens. Mitsuru Yoshida struggled to find words for a letter to his parents. He tried to push out of his mind the picture of his mother bent over in grief. Finally he wrote, “Please dispose of my things. Please, everyone, stay well and survive. That is my only prayer.”
One of Yoshida’s friends was Ens. Kunai Nakatami, who was a nisei—a Japanese American. Nakatami had been studying in Japan when war broke out. Conscripted into the navy, he was an assistant communications officer whose job was to interpret American emergency transmissions. Nakatami was a man whose homeland and enemy were the same. Two of his brothers were U.S. soldiers fighting in Europe. Most of his fellow officers aboard Yamato despised him for being an American.
Nakatami had just received a letter from his mother, via neutral Switzerland, which only added to his misery. “How are you?” his mother asked. “We are fine. Please do put your best effort into your duties. And let’s both pray for peace.” Nakatami broke down in tears, certain that he would never be able to reply to his mother’s letter.
Similar scenes were playing out on the nine other ships that would sail with Yamato. Aboard Yahagi, the cruiser that would lead the attack force into the East China Sea toward Okinawa, Capt. Tameichi Hara wrote a last letter:
The Combined Fleet has shrunk unbelievably in the past two years. I am about to sortie as skipper of the only cruiser remaining in the fleet—8,500-ton Yahagi. With my good friend Rear Adm. Keizo Komura on board, we are going on a surface tokko mission. It is a great opportunity as well as a great honor to be skipper of a ship in this sortie to Okinawa. Know that I am happy and proud of this opportunity. Be proud of me.