The Twilight Warriors (21 page)

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.”

T
he 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].”

T
he 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

F
or 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.

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?

T
hey 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.