The Twilight Warriors

by Robert Gandt

  For the capture of Ie Shima, Buckner intended to use the crack 77th Division, led by Maj. Gen. Andrew Bruce. Buckner was impressed with Bruce’s aggressive spirit. “I much prefer a bird dog that you have to whistle in to one that you have to urge out,” Buckner wrote. “He is of the former variety.”

  It had been Bruce’s 77th Division that seized the Kerama Retto in the days before the Love Day landings. The islands of the Retto were taken with surprising ease, and intelligence reports indicated that Ie Shima would be the same. Aerial reconnaissance and advance scouting teams revealed no sign of enemy activity. The base appeared to be abandoned and the runways ripped up. Fighter sweeps over the island had drawn no return fire. Ie Shima, it seemed, had been abandoned.

  It was a deadly deception. Hidden on the island were 3,000 Japanese troops, commanded by a tough army major named Masashi Igawa. With time to prepare his defenses, Igawa had constructed a classic beehive of interconnecting tunnels and fortified gun positions dug into the limestone rock. Igawa augmented his garrison with local conscripts and several hundred support personnel and armed them with every available weapon—mortars, antiaircraft guns, aircraft machine guns, even bamboo spears.

  The Japanese defenses were centered near the village of Ie, on the eastern end of the island. Overlooking the village was the pyramid-shaped Mt. Iegusugu, an extinct volcano that the Americans would call “the Pinnacle.” Rising like a monolith on the east of the island, the Pinnacle had the same deadly features as Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima. With its expanse of flat plateau, three long runways, and 578-foot-high promontory at one end, Ie Shima had the appearance of a giant, unmoving aircraft carrier.

  The assault began at dawn on April 16 with a massive naval bombardment. Two battleships, four cruisers, and seven destroyers pounded the island. The landing beaches on the south and southwest shores were blanketed with rockets, mortar shells, and close air support from carrier-based fighter-bombers. The covering fire was so intense that most of Ie Shima was obscured in smoke and billowing dust. A Japanese soldier wrote in his journal: “After a fierce air and naval bombardment, the enemy began his landing in front of the 4th Company, using amphibian tractors. Their firepower is so great we dared not show our heads.”

  Not until the Americans had charged several hundred yards inland did the truth become apparent: the enemy had not conceded Ie Shima. From concealed machine gun nests and mortar sites and cave openings, the Japanese opened fire. The resistance grew steadily more vicious as the soldiers of the 77th advanced to the eastern part of the island.

  On the second day of the battle for Ie Shima, America’s most famous war correspondent came ashore to see the action for himself.

  Ernie Pyle was tired. He was glad to be riding in a Jeep instead of slogging up another damned hill with the foot soldiers. Pyle was three weeks short of his forty-fifth birthday, but he looked older. Three years of sleeping in foxholes, riding troop transports, and witnessing the carnage in Europe had taken a toll on him. He was gray-haired, balding on top, with a haggard, war-weary expression. Pyle was beginning to look more and more like one of the “GI Joe” caricatures drawn by his friend, artist Bill Mauldin.

  Pyle arrived on Ie Shima April 17. That afternoon he watched the fighting from an observation post. The heaviest action was in the east of the island, where the Japanese were making a stand on a stretch of high ground the GIs were calling Bloody Ridge. The next morning he dutifully signed autographs for the troops, then had a meeting with General Bruce.

  What Pyle really wanted, though, was to see the fighting. That’s what he’d come for, not to sign autographs and get briefed by generals. Lt. Col. Joe Coolidge, who commanded the 305th Infantry Regiment, had a Jeep and was headed for the front. Pyle could come along.

  Pyle, Coolidge, and three soldiers were bumping along a dirt road that paralleled the southern shore. Their Jeep had joined a procession of three trucks and a military police Jeep. In the distance, from Bloody Ridge and the town of Ie, they could hear the crackle of gunfire and mortars.

  The convoy was nearing a road junction when they heard the sharp rattle of a machine gun. On either side of the Jeep, puffs of dirt kicked up. The front tires were hit, and steam gushed from a hit in the radiator. The machine gun fire was coming from a coral ridge ahead of them.

  The Jeep lurched to a halt, and all five men dove into a ditch. The machine gun went silent. Pyle let several seconds go by, then he looked around. Coolidge was next to him in the ditch. The two men raised their heads to look for the other three. Pyle saw that they were all safe. He smiled and said to Coolidge, “Are you all right?”

  He had barely uttered the words when the machine gun opened up again. Coolidge ducked as a round kicked up dust in his face and whizzed over his head. At the same time he saw Pyle drop back into the ditch. It took him a moment to realize what had happened.

  Pyle was lying on his back, clutching the knitted cap he always had with him. Coolidge didn’t notice any blood, but then he saw the purplish hole in the left temple. He yelled for a medic while an infantry squad from the 305th went after the machine gunner. For Ernie Pyle it was too late. The bullet had killed him instantly.

  There was no time to mourn. The battle for Ie Shima was still raging. They buried the war correspondent, still wearing his helmet, in a long row of fresh graves on Ie Shima. A private lay on one side of him, an engineer on the other. Someone erected a wooden marker: “On this spot, the 77th Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April, 1945.”

  In the reporter’s pocket they found the rough draft of a piece he’d written in anticipation of the war ending in Europe.

  There are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.

  Dead men by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

  Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them …

  It was a final touch of irony. Ernie Pyle might have been writing his own epitaph.

  It took three more days to close the ring around the Pinnacle. Again and again the Japanese defenders made suicidal counterattacks, rushing the American lines, hurling satchel charges, and blowing themselves up with live mortar rounds.

  Even the old warrior General Bruce was shocked at the ferocity of the enemy defenses. After four and a half days of bloody fighting, as his troops were closing in on the last remaining stronghold, Bruce reported to General Buckner, “Base of Pinnacle completely surrounded despite bitterest fight I have ever witnessed against a veritable fortress.”

  And it still wasn’t over. Reaching the summit was an even more bitter fight. By the time the 77th had captured the Pinnacle and Ie Shima was declared secure, 218 American soldiers were dead and nearly 1,000 wounded. The Japanese had lost 4,700, and 409 were taken prisoner.

  At noon the next day, April 19, Intrepid pulled into the heart-shaped lagoon at Ulithi in the western Caroline Islands. Ulithi looked different than when Intrepid had been there in March. Gone were the long rows of gray warships assembling for the invasion of Okinawa. The only big ships in the anchorage were the battleship Iowa, the carrier Enterprise, which was undergoing repairs from her own kamikaze hit on April 11, and the fast carrier Shangri-La, on her way to join the task force off Okinawa.

  And Ulithi had become swelteringly hot. At 10 degrees above the equator, the atoll baked in the tropical sun and humidity. While crews labored to repair Intrepid’s combat damage, sailors sought relief from the heat on the recreation island of Mog Mog.

  Mog Mog was one of many islets nestled inside Ulithi’s coral reef. The Navy had persuaded the local chieftain, King Ueg, to move Mog Mog’s three hundred inhabitants to another island in the atoll. Now Mog Mog had a movie theater, a chapel, and an array of refreshment stands.
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br />   When the anchorage was filled with warships, as many as fifteen thousand sailors a day swarmed over the 60-acre island of Mog Mog. They were given coupons for two beers apiece, but enterprising sailors always found ways to exceed the limit. Separate areas were fenced off for officers, whose booze limits were less restricted. There was nothing much to do on the atoll except drink the rations of beer, try to cadge more from nondrinking buddies, and comb the beach for exotic shells. Mog Mog, someone cracked, had “no wine atoll, no women atoll, no nothing atoll.”

  Sailors being sailors, some managed to get drunk. The nightly trip on the LCVP (landing craft vehicle personnel) ferry boat to the ship was a classic return from shore liberty: fights, men falling overboard, sailors unaccustomed to alcohol heaving their guts out.

  Unlike most of the other Tail End Charlies, Erickson wasn’t interested in hanging out at the makeshift officers’ bar at Mog Mog. Instead, he finagled permission to visit the island of Fassari, which was off-limits to everyone except Navy photographers and journalists. Bartering cigarettes in exchange for posing, Erickson toured Fassari with his sketchbook in hand, filling pages with drawings of native life.

  Meanwhile, crews from the repair ship Ajax struggled to get Intrepid back in fighting shape. It had already been determined that the carrier’s number three elevator was beyond fixing. Still, they figured that after repairing the damage to her hangar bays and electrical systems, the carrier would be 80 percent combat capable. There was a war on, and that was good enough.

  On April 24 came more bad news. They found that the number two elevator—the deck edge elevator on the ship’s port side—had been knocked out of alignment, probably from the effect of rolling forty damaged airplanes over its edge on the day of the kamikaze attack. The elevator didn’t work, and it couldn’t be fixed.

  Which meant that Intrepid couldn’t operate as a fighting carrier. With only one working elevator, she couldn’t move airplanes between the hangar and flight decks fast enough to support combat operations. Nimitz himself made the decision: Intrepid would return to the Hunters Point shipyard in San Francisco for permanent repairs.

  Most of Intrepid’s planes, however, were staying where they were needed. While still at anchor in Ulithi, pilots catapulted off the stationary carrier, then landed on the nearby runway at Ulithi. Each pilot gritted his teeth against the jolt of the catapult shot, which was harder than normal to compensate for the lack of wind over the deck.

  Now that Intrepid was leaving, no longer functioning as an aircraft carrier, she would become a transport. Instead of airplanes, the ship was hauling U.S.-bound passengers, including the pilots from the carrier San Jacinto.

  In the crew spaces there was jubilation. Going home, even for the brief time it would take to repair the ship, was an unexpected gift. For the Tail End Charlies in Boys’ Town, the news had a bittersweet flavor. The Battle of Okinawa wasn’t over, but the end was in sight. They were going to miss the finale of the show they had started.

  Or maybe not. Rumors were flying like missiles around the ship. The normal time for an air group to be deployed in a combat zone was six months. If a carrier was taken off the line, her air group was usually off-loaded to await another carrier headed back to the war. The time you spent waiting for the next carrier didn’t count.

  To the Tail End Charlies it meant they might have to hang around in the Pacific for months before they went back aboard a carrier. They might even miss the rest of the war.

  33 COUNTEROFFENSIVE

  YONTAN AIRFIELD, OKINAWA

  APRIL 22, 1945

  Stepping onto the tarmac at Yontan, Adm. Chester Nimitz surveyed the scene around him. Yontan still had the look of a base under siege. The place was covered with tents, sandbagged trenches, and fortified sentry posts. Marine Corps Corsairs were dispersed all over the field to make them less vulnerable to the nightly air attacks and artillery shellings.

  But the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet hadn’t come to Okinawa to inspect the facilities. He was there on urgent business. Normally a patient and even-tempered commander, Nimitz had lost his patience.

  The Navy’s ship losses at Okinawa had become unacceptable. Between April 1 and April 22, sixty vessels had been sunk or nearly destroyed by Japanese warplanes. More than eleven hundred Navy men had been killed and twice as many wounded.

  In Nimitz’s view, there was one overwhelming reason for these losses: the battle for Okinawa was dragging on too long. As long as the Tenth Army was bogged down on the island, the kamikazes would continue to savage Nimitz’s ships offshore.

  Waiting on the ramp to meet the admiral was the white-haired, fit-looking commander of the Tenth Army, Lt. Gen. Simon Buckner. Nimitz had brought with him an entourage: Fifth Fleet commander Adm. Raymond Spruance, Lt. Gen. Alexander Vandergrift, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and Nimitz’s chief of staff, Vice Adm. Forrest Sherman.

  The meeting started off amicably enough. Buckner took his guests on a tour of the captured sectors of Okinawa. The mood was still jovial and relaxed when Nimitz presented Buckner with a bottle of liquor, remembering his traditional toast, “May you walk in the ashes of Tokyo.” Buckner joked that he would keep the bottle in reserve until Okinawa had been secured.

  Then they sat down in Buckner’s headquarters, and the mood changed. Nimitz got right to the point. It was time to break the impasse, he told Buckner. If it took another amphibious landing behind the Japanese lines, then Buckner should do it. Whatever it took, he had to speed up the advance.

  It was a tense moment. That a Navy admiral had overall command of a land campaign had always been a sensitive issue with Army brass. Bristling, Buckner informed Nimitz that the ground assault was the Army’s job. He would take care of it.

  Nimitz’s eyes flashed, and his temper rose to the surface. “I’m losing a ship and a half a day,” he snapped. “If this line isn’t moving within five days, we’ll get someone here to move it so we can all get out from under these damn air attacks.”

  Buckner held his ground. What this son of a Confederate general might have lacked in imagination, he made up for in stubbornness. Supporting another front, in his opinion, didn’t make sense. He’d already lost two ammunition ships at Kerama Retto. Opening another front would overstretch his supply system.

  Vandergrift, the Marine commandant, sided with Nimitz. He told Buckner he ought to “play the amphib card.” Vandergrift’s 2nd Marine Division, which had played a diversionary role in the initial landings, was now on Saipan and available. They could make a landing on the southeast coast of Okinawa, just north of Minatoga, turn the Japanese right flank, and end the stalemate.

  Even Buckner’s division commanders, including his favorite, Maj. Gen. Andrew Bruce, were on record as favoring an amphibious end run. Bruce himself had executed such a move behind Japanese lines during the Leyte invasion with brilliant success. Here was the perfect opportunity to do it again.

  Buckner wasn’t having any of it. If he erred, it was damned well going be on the side of caution. The proposed landing beaches were directly beneath a set of treacherous steep cliffs. Buckner thought the landings could turn into “another Anzio [the disastrous 1944 landing in Italy] but worse.”

  The argument, like the battle itself, dragged to a stalemate. Buckner would not be swayed. As long as he was in command, he intended to continue the classic frontal assault. In the long run, he insisted, it would save lives.

  Spruance, for one, didn’t think so. “I doubt if the Army’s slow, methodical method of fighting really saves any lives in the long run,” Spruance wrote to a friend. “It merely spreads the casualties over a longer period. The longer period greatly increases the naval casualties when Jap air attacks on ships is a continuing factor.… There are times when I get impatient for some of Holland [Howlin’ Mad] Smith’s drive.”

  Nothing had been resolved. At the end of the historic meeting, it was Nimitz who backed down. The last thing Nimitz wanted at Okinawa was another Army-Navy brawl over a fire
d general.

  The next day they were again standing on the ramp at Yontan. Nimitz shook hands with Buckner and climbed back aboard his plane. Buckner was still in command of the Tenth Army. He would continue to run the campaign his way. No surprises, no amphibious landing, no flanking maneuvers. Everyone expected that the battle would drag on.

  And then that night, the enemy did something no one expected.

  It began soon after dusk. An intense artillery barrage, more than a thousand rounds, poured down on the front-line American units. Directly behind the bombardment, almost as if summoned by the Japanese, came a dense fog that enshrouded the entire battle zone. Beneath the fog and the artillery cover, the Japanese defenders slipped away in the darkness, withdrawing to the second defense line on the Urasoe-Mura escarpment.

  At first, the American troops on the front line didn’t believe it. It had to be another Japanese deception. The pockmarked ground for which they had fought so bitterly was unoccupied. After days of sacrifice and failure the first Japanese line of defense, including the bloody Kakazu Ridge, was theirs for the taking.

  The withdrawal, in fact, had gone exactly according to the plan proposed by Colonel Yahara and approved by General Ushijima. Despite their success at holding off the American assault, the Japanese had lost ground over the past few days on Skyline Ridge, Nishibaru Ridge, and the Tanabaru escarpment. Rather than stand their ground and be annihilated, the Japanese had executed a strategic withdrawal so they could continue fighting.

  Still, the fire-eaters on Ushijima’s staff, led by General Cho, were belligerent. That night in the headquarters under Shuri Castle, the same old debate raged on about defensive versus offensive tactics. Cho continued urging a counterattack, throwing the Americans back to the beach. As usual, Ushijima listened, nodding respectfully, letting all his officers weigh in. He wasn’t inclined to change the strategy, at least not after the failed night attack of April 12. For now, he was sticking with Yahara’s campaign of slow, measured attrition.