Okinawa (16 page)

 

After that first quick nighttime surge over unoccupied ground on the Twenty-fourth’s right flank, the Twenty-seventh Division’s sector became a burial ground for American armor. Because the division’s foot soldiers failed to penetrate Kakazu’s defenses, the tanks—thirty of them including three armored flamethrowers and self-propelled 105 mm howitzers—had no supporting infantry. This left them exposed to the plunging fire of enemy 47 mm antitank guns above them, and the infiltration tactics of Nipponese suicide squads hurling satchel charges, usually against the vehicle’s bottom plate. Unfortunately for the Yankee tankers, the Japanese at Kakazu were actually waiting for them—praying for them. One 47 mm gunner named Fujio Takeda knocked out five tanks with six shots at four hundred yards. In all, of the thirty American tanks that attacked, only eight survived. Many of the tankers lived, most of them digging holes beneath their disabled steel monsters and remaining in them undetected for as long as three days. Others were killed when the Japanese pried open their turret lids and dropped grenades in.

It was thus that General Hodge’s hurricane attack was hurled back. Failing utterly to break through, it did not obtain a single lodgment or foothold in the enemy’s defenses, from which further assaults might be mounted. Possibly worse, General Griner in his decision to bypass Kakazu Ridge had left a gap of almost a mile between his Twenty-seventh Division and the Ninety-sixth in the center. No American troops were there to blunt any enemy counter-attack, and so General Hodge worried that a Japanese counter-strike could slip through to trap the entire Twenty-seventh, pressing it against the iron enemy defenses it had failed to pierce and there destroy it. Fortunately, those well-entrenched Japanese were as blind as the moles they resembled, having no idea of their foe’s whereabouts, and no enemy counter-attack was launched. Nevertheless, General Griner the next day reiterated his belief that the Japanese strongpoints should be bypassed and mopped up. In reply, Colonel “Screaming Mike” Halloran, commander of the 381st Infantry, gave a more accurate estimate of the enemy’s troops: “You cannot bypass a Japanese because a Jap does not know when he is bypassed.”

Thus ended the hurricane assault with Twenty-fourth Corps losses totaling 750 killed, missing, and wounded.

It was an entirely different American infantryman who wearily and warily greeted the dawn of April 20 on Okinawa. Up until the fiery failure at Kakazu during April 12-13 and the bloody repulse of April 19 at Shuri’s outer defenses, the Army infantry in the Pacific—apart from a few isolated instances and during only two major battles, Saipan and Guam—had been fighting a war in which maneuver was possible.

These were on the great land mass of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world, and the Philippine archipelago with its thousands of islands big and small. In these campaigns, maneuver was not only possible but mandatory if casualties were to be kept minimal, and the enemy being attacked was usually fighting from log-and-mud fortifications, half naked and half starved by the effectiveness with which the submarines and warships of the United States Navy had severed their supply lines. The casualties were indeed minimal—as the boastful Douglas MacArthur would trumpet to the world in his tireless pursuit of supreme command in the Pacific—and the Army infantry had few if any days such as the crucibles at Kakazu and before Shuri.

But now—though dimly—the GIs realized that they had come to their own Tarawa, Peleliu, or Iwo Jima with their fortifications of steel, concrete, and coral, interconnected by mazes of tunnels with interlocking fire and all approaches preregistered by every weapon. They now knew—as the Marines in the Central Pacific had learned—that enormous massed bombardment of these truly formidable defenses from sea, air, and land was usually if not always no more effective than a smoke screen. True, they would cause some casualties, but never enough to be decisive; and the accident of a lucky hit could never be repeated on
call.
Only the impetuous foot soldier slashing in with his hand weapons and using tanks, hurling explosives and aiming flame, can succeed in a war against armed and resolute moles. The naval shell’s flat trajectory, the bomb’s broad parabola, the artillery projectile’s arc—even the loop of the mortar—cannot chase such moles down a tunnel. If they can occasionally collapse the whole position with a direct hit, a rare feat, they have knocked out only one spoke in the enemy’s wheel. But the wheel still turns, killing and maiming, and again in the absence of that military miracle—direct hits
on call
—the man on foot has to go in. Too often even without his tanks.

Moreover, the losses in armor and the casualties among the American GIs on that near-disastrous April 19 were not only the result of attacks made into Ushijima’s clever and sometimes-invisible defenses spouting death and destruction, but also complicated by the terrain of southern Okinawa itself. It was, as the Army’s official history states: “ground utterly without pattern; it was a confusion of little, mesa-like hilltops, deep draws, rounded clay hills, gentle green valleys, bare and ragged coral ridges, lumpy mounds of earth, narrow ravines and sloping finger ridges extending downward from the hill masses.”

On April 20, General Hodge’s three-division assault into Ushijima’s meat grinder was renewed: Seventh on left, Ninety-sixth in the center, and Twenty-seventh on the right. In these first two formations the GIs, now thoroughly blooded in this type of warfare, moved forward more warily and skillfully. The Thirty-second Infantry of the Seventh, or “Hour Glass,” took Ouki Hill with surprising ease, and then struck at Skyline Ridge, blanketing it with smoke to blind the numerous enemy mortarmen there. The tactic worked, especially after two gallant soldiers—First Lieutenant John Holms and Staff Sergeant James McCarthy—led a final charge to seize the hill, but later perished in a fierce enemy counter-attack that was hurled back. Flamethrowing tanks were of major assistance in this action, burning out a forward mortar position that could have been troublesome.

But the Skyline’s dogged defenders did not submit so tamely. One machine gunner in a pillbox was particularly tenacious until Sergeant Theodore MacDonnell, a mortar observer not expected to join a battle, entered the struggle on his own, charging the pillbox throwing grenades. Next he borrowed a BAR, and when that jammed, a carbine—rushing the enemy position with this ordinarily most useless weapon in the American arsenal. At close range, however, it could do damage, and MacDonnell used it to kill all three gunners. Then, his Celtic blood aroused, he picked up the enemy gun and heaved it down the embankment, followed by a knee mortar. Without pausing to thank MacDonnell for this distinguished favor, one of Colonel Finn’s companies proceeded to clear Skyline at a cost of two killed and eleven wounded. Hill 178 now came under American fire, and after two days patrols blasting enemy caves found these positions stuffed with corpses: two hundred in one, a hundred in another, fifty in a third, and forty-five in a fourth. Those who had survived had been withdrawn.

The 184th Infantry’s objective was the Rocky Crags, two coral pinnacles that had to be taken before towering Hill 178 could be assaulted. But no headway was made the first day. Dismayed, General Arnold came to the front to study these obstacles. Deciding that the crags could be fragmented by direct artillery fire, he ordered a 155 mm howitzer up front. Setting up on a knoll eight hundred yards away and firing over open sights, the crew’s first missile—a ninety-five-pound shell with a hardened tip and a concrete-piercing fuse—sent a hefty chunk of coral flying into the air. Seven more destructive shots so upset the Japanese that they sprayed the knoll with machine-gun fire. Two men were wounded, and the survivors quickly dug a hole for their gun. Now unseen, assisted by other guns and flamethrowing tanks, the Americans literally shot both crags into smithereens until both collapsed on themselves.

 

To the Seventh’s right the Ninety-sixth struck at three ridges: Tanabaru-Nishibaru-Tombstone. It took two days of savage fighting to clear Tombstone and to advance to the crest of Nishibaru. On the night of April 21-22 the Japanese counter-attacked three times against a battalion of the 382nd commanded by Lieutenant Franklin Hartline. In one charge Staff Sergeant David Dovel lifted his machine gun to fire it at the enemy full-trigger, severely burning his hands on the red-hot barrel. Dovel was also wounded in both legs, but survived. Meanwhile soldiers firing light or 60 mm mortars elevated their small stovepipes to a dangerously close eighty-six degrees, dropping shells only thirty yards to their front. Colonel Hartline joined the battle, throwing grenades and firing the weapons of the fallen. At 3:15 A.M. the Japanese retreated, leaving 198 dead comrades behind.

Tanabaru now lay temporarily open, and it was Captain Hoss Mitchell’s Lardasses who seized the opportunity. Its earlier losses filled by replacements, the company fought a savage hand-grenade battle that lasted nearly four hours, until Mitchell with three grenades and a carbine rushed the crest to wipe out a machine-gun nest. By nightfall of April 23 the Ninety-sixth held its objectives securely, though it had paid a bloody price of 99 killed and 19 missing with a staggering 660 wounded. Even so, the success of the Seventh and Ninety-sixth clearly indicated to General Hodge that Ushijima’s outer line was cracking.

 

Soldiers of the Twenty-seventh on the twentieth—except for two companies that panicked and fled in disorder when they blundered into an enemy position—were not quite so careful as their comrades in the center and left, probably because they had had a comparatively easy time of it on April 19. Still on the right flank, the New Yorkers moved confidently against a position called Item Pocket, unaware that it was probably Ushijima’s toughest and most cleverly designed fortification. Its name derived from its presence in the
I,
or “Item,” grid square on the American tactical map. It consisted of coral and limestone ridges running like spokes on a wheel from a swale at its center.

Against it came two battalions of Colonel Gerard Kelly’s 165th Infantry, the first commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James Mahoney on the left and the second under Lieutenant Colonel John McDonough on the right. Resisting them was Lieutenant Colonel Kosuke Nishibayashi’s Twenty-first Independent Infantry Battalion of about six hundred soldiers together with two or three hundred Okinawan conscripts. All had been working for months on Item’s defenses, which they called Gusukuma after a nearby town. There was no safe way to approach the position. Because two bridges on Highway 1 had been knocked out, tanks could not menace it. Every ridge was protected by mortars with machine guns zeroed in from others. Tunnels ran beneath the ridges with openings on either side and on the top. Thus each ridge was a Kakazu in miniature, abundantly stocked with food, ammunition, and water. Until Item fell, there could be no real progress south.

No real attempt to penetrate Item was made on the first day, but on the night of the twenty-first a detail of eight men from McDonough’s battalion led by Technical Sergeant Ernest Schoeff tried to seize a ridge in a night attack, and provoked one of the wildest fights of the Okinawa campaign. Forty to fifty Japanese screaming “Banzai!” and hurling grenades charged them from about forty yards away. Scrambling into foxholes that they had dug, Schoeff’s men fought back with grenades of their own, rifle shots, rifle butts—even hurling rocks. Pfc. Paul Cook took out ten of the enemy before being killed himself, and when they closed for hand-to-hand fighting, Schoeff broke his M-1 rifle over one enemy’s head, grabbed an
Arisaka
rifle from another’s hands to bayonet him, and then shot a third mushroom-helmeted assailant. Wisely, the GIs made a fighting withdrawal, counting only two of their own dead and another missing. Such fierce local encounters would characterize the Item Pocket fighting lasting until April 25, and it was a company led by Captain Bernard Ryan that finally broke through the stubborn Item barrier.

On the twenty-fifth Ryan with two platoons climbed a key ridge and was savagely attacked by Japanese trying to drive them off. But they held, and then, assisted by other companies, began clearing the ridge to turn Item’s seaward flank. Nevertheless resistance continued until April 28, when Highway 1 was finally opened to southbound American traffic. Now Griner’s troops began to extend their grasp on the Urasoe-Mura Escarpment’s western flank, suffering so severely that the division’s losses rose above five hundred during a single day. By the morning of April 24, the western end of the Urasoe-Mura Escarpment was in American hands. Only Kakazu in Ushijima’s outer defenses remained unconquered. Hoping to reduce that stubborn position, Hodge formed a special attack force under Brigadier General William Bradford, the Twenty-seventh’s assistant division commander. Called “Bradford Force,” it was to strike Kakazu early on the twenty-fourth. But that night during a heavy fog a powerful enemy artillery barrage struck the American forward elements. When Bradford Force attacked, its men found to their amazement that there was little or no resistance. Under cover of the fog and the bombardment, the wily Ushijima had ordered a general retreat to preserve his remaining strength.

For five days since April 19 the Japanese had fought a dogged defensive battle, limiting the Americans’ gains to yards and at Kakazu stopping them in their tracks. But by darkness of April 23 the line had been pierced in so many places that it was in danger of collapsing with a consequent loss of many men; either by enemy action or suicide. So General Ushijima withdrew to his next chain of defenses.

In effect, the battle for southern Okinawa had advanced but a single, solid step—with many more steps to follow.

Major General Curtis Le May had been in command of the Twentieth Air Force since the summer of 1944. At thirty-nine, this burly flier, so big he could barely fit into a fighter cockpit, was anxious to apply his theories of incendiary bombing with the new B-29 Superfortress bomber then coming off the production lines. It was not until February 1945, however, that he had enough of these gigantic aircraft to stage a major firebombing raid—this time on Kobe and with such excellent results that an ecstatic Le May prepared for the monster March 9 strike at Tokyo that became the most destructive air raid in history.