The World War II Chronicles Read online

  For some months after Saipan fell in July of 1944, American strategists had looked for the next most strategically desirable islands to invade on the way to Japan. Following the Honolulu conference that summer, MacArthur had carried out the occupation of Leyte in October. He now stood on Luzon. Once Iwo Jima was taken, Admiral Nimitz had wanted to invade Formosa—but Formosa was eventually ignored in favor of Okinawa. Sixty miles long and the largest of the Ryukyu Islands, Okinawa could be used by the United States both as a jumping-off point for the invasion of Japan and as a base for intensive bombings of the Home Islands of Kyushu and Honshu.

  Fresh troops of the newly formed Tenth Army were to mount the assault on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945. Under the command of Simon Bolivar Buckner, the son of a Confederate general, the Tenth was composed of veteran outfits molded in the jungles of other waystops to Japan. Its divisions were already hallowed: the First Marines from Guadalcanal, New Britain and Peleliu; the Second Marines, as reserve, from Tarawa and Saipan; the Seventh from Attu and Leyte; the Seventy-seventh from Guam and Leyte; the Ninety-sixth from Leyte; the Twenty-seventh from the Marshalls and Saipan; the newly formed Sixth Marines made up of men from Eniwetok, Guam and Saipan. The soldiers and Marines, elite troops of the Pacific, would need the experience gained in countless confrontations with the Japanese; for even as they clambered into transports for the pitching ride to the shores of Okinawa, other Americans were suffering from the newly revised defense tactics of the Japanese on Iwo Jima.

  The Imperial General Staff in Tokyo had decided that the tactic of the banzai charge was too costly, and the “meet them at the beach” theory was replaced on Iwo by “let the enemy come to us.” On that island, the Japanese stayed in caves and poured fire down on the heads of the Marines, who had trouble even getting a glimpse of them. Heavy artillery was used as an integral part of Japanese weaponry, and the corpse-strewn beaches of Iwo showed that for the first time in the long island-hopping trail to Tokyo, the Japanese were literally tearing the Americans to bits.

  The same tactics awaited the Tenth Army at Okinawa, where General Mitsuru Ushijima, a tall, stocky veteran of the war in Burma and, most recently, superintendent of the military school at Zama, was in command. A realist, Ushijima understood the power that would be brought against him. Not wanting to squander his resources, he planned a bitter end defense on the southern part of the island. Japanese last-ditch strategy for Okinawa included kamikazes at maximum strength. Ushijima would wait to spring his trap until the kamikazes had come down from the Home Islands and destroyed the hundreds of ships standing offshore. With American land forces cut off from their apparently endless supply of manpower and material, Ushijima could attack and win a crushing Japanese victory. The kamikazes were the key. If they failed, Ushijima was as good as dead.

  The general watched passively as United States Army combat teams occupied the offshore Kerama atolls in late March. He watched passively as the first soldiers strolled onto Okinawan beaches on April 1.

  Forty-eight hours later, the American Ninety-sixth Division crossed the waist of the island and reached the eastern shore. Then, while the Sixth Marines wheeled north, other units moved south toward the capital city, Naha.

  On April 5, the bulk of the Tenth Army ran headlong into General Ushijima’s concealed defenses. He unleashed his personal surprise, the largest concentration of artillery assembled by a Japanese army in one place during the whole war. Two hundred and eight-seven heavy fieldpieces began to fire at American soldiers burrowing frantically into shallow foxholes. The advance to the south stopped abruptly. The dying began.

  On April 6, Onishi’s kamikazes came in great strength. From Oita and Kanoya, from airfields scattered throughout the island of Kyushu, hundreds of men lifted their airplanes into the sky for a final sortie against the enemy. Their foreheads were girdled with the white hachimaki; their farewell letters had been mailed to their families.

  The first American units to detect the presence of suicide craft were picket boats, destroyers placed to the north of the invasion beaches. These graceful gray warships slipped through the calm seas, their crews listening carefully to electronic equipment on board or searching the skies for the telltale specks.

  The destroyers were both guardians and sacrificial lambs. While alerting the main line of ships to the south, they would offer themselves as targets to the kamikazes in order to keep them away from the huge capital ships hovering about the beaches.

  The Japanese came singly, in pairs and in large groups. Most of them concentrated on the small picket ships. A few drove farther toward the beaches. During the morning, the pickets suffered badly as the Divine Wind blew across their bows. The sky was filled with black clouds of flak and the sea was laced with white necklaces of pom-pom fire as the destroyers blasted the oncoming planes. Though the Japanese incurred severe losses, the destroyers too showed effects of the combat. At least fifteen ships received gaping wounds from hurtling aircraft.

  The U.S.S. Bush was not one of those struck on the morning of April 6. Well into the afternoon, she and her complement of more than three hundred men had escaped any physical damage. Only the men’s nerves showed strain. Exhausted by hours at battle stations, they were forced to keep a constant, nerve-wracking vigil.

  Then, at thirteen minutes after three, a single-engined kamikaze was sighted dead ahead and low on the water, headed straight for the Bush at Picket Station One.

  The enemy craft was employing evasive tactics to upset the aim of the ship’s gunners. It dipped and rose, sometimes coming within ten feet of the ocean. Tracer bullets reached for it in vain. It bored in at the Bush, which twisted desperately to avoid a collision.

  At 3:15 the kamikaze smashed into the destroyer at deck level between Number One and Number Two stacks, demolishing the galley, laundry, sick bay and repair locker, and rendering the automatic-firing guns inoperative. Although the Bush caught fire, it seemed possible to save her. Another destroyer, the Colhoun, moved closer to offer help.

  For over an hour the stricken Bush labored in the swells as her crew sought to repair the damage. The dead were removed from the shambles. The wounded were treated as quickly and efficiently as possible. The Bush continued to ride the ocean in a reasonable state of seaworthiness. Knotted lines were hung over the side so that sailors could escape enemy planes coming directly for their positions. In this way, the affected crew members could avoid both machine gun attacks and an ultimate crash dive on their particular position. The captain hoped to spare lives by this unusual expedient.

  At 4:35, the crew of the Bush was horrified to see American air cover disappear to the south without any prior warning. Crippled and exposed, the ship lay helpless as the kamikaze attack intensified. Ten to fifteen fighters approached from the north. They circled the destroyers below, then veered off. One headed unerringly toward the Bush, its guns blazing. It smashed into the port side, nearly cutting the destroyer in two. The Bush was now a derelict, both sides gaping, wreckage and death inside her hull. Just before twilight a single plane flew over at mast height and soared away to the port side. Then it wheeled slowly and began a last run, holding a level course just above the water. The men on deck were paralyzed at the sight. It tore into the middle section of the Bush. Her back broken by violent collisions with three aircraft, she settled lower in the water. The ship was finished. Sailors began to abandon her. The forward and aft sections of the picket each pointed toward the sky. As water rushed into the jagged tear amidships, the battered destroyer slid slowly beneath the sea.

  In the twilight, survivors of the slaughter dotted the ocean. The grueling and ferocious struggle with a fanatical enemy had taken its toll among them. One after the other, officers and men were seen hysterically stripping off their life preservers. In a frenzy, they swam off to some imagined haven, some refuge from the maddening horror of the kamikazes. Thirty-three men struck out for safety without their life jackets, without any real hope. One by one they sank beneath the waves.


  Others waited quietly for rescue ships to pick them up. As destroyers moved among them, the last tragedy of the Bush was enacted. Reaching out for lines, for a helping hand, several men smashed their heads against the hulls and sank in silence. Others were swept by waves into the screws of ship propellers and disappeared in a froth of blood. Ten sailors died in these last moments, bringing to a total of eighty-seven the men lost aboard the U.S.S. Bush.

  Altogether, twenty-four ships were sunk or damaged by the kamikazes that day. Though the suicide planes had not succeeded in penetrating to the beaches, the cost to the United States Navy had been high. And April 6 was only a prelude to mounting terror in the seas off Okinawa.

  Onishi’s planes were not the only expedient by which the Japanese Navy hoped to turn Okinawa into a victory for the Emperor. From Tokuyama on the Inland Sea, the colossal battleship Yamato, displacing 72,909 tons, sped toward the Bungo Suido, between Kyushu and Shikoku. She was accompanied by two cruisers and six destroyers. Her destination was Okinawa. Her goal was the destruction of American transports and disruption of the beachhead. Since the Yamato carried only enough oil to take her to the island, she would have to be beached after firing her nine massive batteries of eighteen-inch guns at the American fleet. She had been sent out as floating suicide ship sui generis.

  Shortly after five o’clock on the afternoon of April 6, the commanders of the submarines Threadfin and Hackleback watched in fascination as the monstrous Yamato moved across their periscopes. They noted her direction and signaled back to American carriers and heavy capital ships that nine ships were apparently headed south toward Okinawa. As darkness closed around the Japanese warships, they churned westward in a course designed to keep them away from American airpower as long as possible. The Japanese themselves had no protective cover in the skies.

  Like chess players, the Americans maneuvered to thwart the enemy. Carriers and battleships moved up to intercept the Yamato at the first light of day. On the Yamato, nearly three thousand men waited tensely for the dawn and the ultimate confrontation.

  At 8:22 A.M., a plane from the carrier Essex picked up the group, churning ahead at twenty-two knots. For the next four hours, Catalina flying boats hovered over the Japanese convoy as it ran due south toward Okinawa. Shortly after noon, massed carrier attacks began. Flying out of low clouds and rain, the American planes harried the Yamato and her escorts for over two hours. Repeated bomb and torpedo hits reduced the flagship to a shambles, yet she stayed afloat, firing continually at her tormentors.

  When at last she was listing heavily, her captain ordered his men to abandon ship. Despite repeated protests from his aides, Captain Ariga refused to leave with them. Instead he had himself lashed to a support with heavy cord. Survivors recall one seaman remaining behind with him. From his pocket the seaman took a handful of biscuits, broke one, and held a piece up to the captain’s lips. Ariga looked at the man, then at the biscuit, smiled, and opened his mouth. The Yamato began to go under. Bound to his ship, Captain Ariga and his crewman died with her at 2:23 on the afternoon of April 7.

  The last suicidal surface attack by the Japanese Imperial Navy had been a complete failure. Only four destroyers got back to Japan to report the loss of the most powerful battleship in the world.

  In terms of overall strategy, the battle for Okinawa—the last land campaign of the Pacific war—was over before it began. American superiority was a foregone conclusion. But to the American Marines and soldiers struggling for survival there, it seemed that the Japanese had never fought as fiercely or as effectively. The land war was a savage killing match, fought on terrain which uniquely resembled Japan itself—familiar to the enemy, thus all the more alien to the Americans.

  As April passed, the ruthless ferocity of the island war was evidenced on any given day. Marines running through gullies toward a rise called Wana Draw were attacked from the flanks by guns, pistols and mortars that fired and fired till all the men in the open had ceased to move. American flamethrowing tanks seared hillsides with gallons of liquid fuel, roasting hundreds of Japanese hiding in caves. As survivors ran out, waiting infantrymen fired clip after clip into them. Japanese shellfire was incessant, night and day, as never before in the Pacific war.

  Ushijima’s heavy guns fired ceaselessly, searching out the Americans cowering in shallow depressions in the ground. Under the constant whine and roar of gunfire, sleep was fitful for the Marines and soldiers, and physical and mental exhaustion became commonplace. Cases of combat fatigue grew alarmingly, to a point where, before the campaign was over, thirteen thousand Americans had been brought to the edge of collapse.

  Once a quiet haven for farmers, Okinawa soon stank of cordite and decaying corpses. The fields were torn, the roads pocked with holes. On both sides of the line, men crouched, waiting for the enemy to show himself and then rising up to beat him or shoot him or stab him again and again—until the next appeared. They lived in holes in the ground that were filled with water from the constant rain. Their clothes were continually soaked. Their boots and socks rotted. Their morale disintegrated and their minds were consumed with hatred and fear of the enemy just across the ravine or beyond the trees. Japanese and Americans alike wallowed in filth.

  Out on the seas the immense American fleet continued to stand by. Here too nerves stretched beyond endurance as the Japanese pressed the kamikaze attacks throughout the month of April. Over a hundred American ships were damaged or destroyed. Nearly a thousand Japanese planes were lost in this period. But still Ushijima’s dream of routing the fleet and isolating the enemy on land remained unrealized.

  Despite this disappointment, the kamikazes figured heavily in one last all-out effort undertaken by the Japanese command on May 3. The new strategy came into being painfully, born of bickering and bitterness among Ushijima’s staff. In headquarters one hundred feet below the ground, under the stronghold of Shuri Castle, an increasingly belligerent group of officers had tired of remaining on the defensive and were urging a massive counterattack. One of the radical leaders was Colonel Naomichi Jin, a staff officer who was disgusted at the conservative elements around Ushijima. As casualties mounted and the Americans inched down the island, Jin and his followers openly threatened the life of Colonel Yahara, chief proponent of a defensive strategy. General Ushijima faced a rebellion within his own ranks.

  The inevitable showdown occurred in an acrimonious meeting in which General Isamu Cho, a man who for years had been an extreme rightist in army affairs in Japan, hotly argued for a strong attack on American fortifications. Hard-pressed by the shouts and threats of Cho, Jin and other diehards, Ushijima relented and gave weary approval to a massive offensive beginning May 4. The objective was to destroy the American Twenty-fourth Corps and to force back the entire American line. Arrangements were made with Admiral Onishi’s air arm for an intensive new kamikaze assault on the ships offshore to begin on the evening of May 3. Once more the Japanese hoped to effect a complete rupture of naval support to the army on the island.

  Onishi’s squadrons came down from airfields in Kyushu as planned and managed to put eighteen ships out of action. One of them, the destroyer Aaron Ward, took five kamikaze dives, lost ninety-eight men killed or wounded, yet stayed miraculously afloat. But the vast bulk of American ships remained undamaged.

  The land fighting that began at dawn on May 4 was chaotic, costly, and for the Japanese, hopeless. A thunderous initial bombardment by Japanese artillery was followed by the confusion of close-quarter fighting, where friend and foe passed each other in the fluid battle zones without realizing it. An entire squad of Japanese soldiers marched in close order right into the automatic rifles of the Seventy-seventh Infantry Division and was annihilated on the spot. A column of American soldiers, smoking and talking, their rifles loosely slung, walked toward the front lines under the eyes of Japanese infiltrators and were all killed in seconds. One Japanese advance late in the afternoon of May 4 succeeded in penetrating over a mile behind American positions. It was qu
ickly blunted by superior firepower.

  This action of May 4–5 represented the full extent of the last Imperial Army offensive in World War II. Japanese resources could not sustain another. On the next day General Ushijima ordered his badly beaten forces back into their caves and bunkers, and his army resumed a defensive posture. The influence of Cho and Jin and their supporters broke against the hard facts of reality.

  In the deep shelter under Shuri Castle, General Ushijima tried without much hope to encourage his aides. On the other side of the lines, General Simon Bolivar Buckner ordered his forces to go over to the offensive. By May 8, V-E Day, the initiative had passed forever to the Americans.

  The Japanese situation deteriorated steadily through May and the early part of June as American forces slowly pushed into the southernmost area of the island. General Ushijima’s forces were unable to withstand the relentless pressure of superior firepower. When Shuri Castle, the last bastion, fell on May 31, the battle was nearly over.

  American infantrymen walking into that former headquarters of Ushijima’s Thirty-second Army witnessed a scene of utter devastation. Heavy shells and bombs had torn apart the town which ringed the castle grounds. Only a Methodist church and a two-story concrete building still stood. Shuri Castle itself was demolished. In this fortress from which former kings of Okinawa had ruled, nothing lived. The Japanese had left their dead and retreated to the south. The last center of organized resistance had dissolved.

  In the next three weeks, the retreating General Ushijima managed to perform a minor miracle by organizing another zone of defense, but he knew it could hold only a short time. The end was close.