At 4:06 a.m. Admiral Turner's flagship signaled: “Land the Landing Force.” We saddled up in darkness, groaning under the weight, and waited by the cargo nets, watching shells burst on a beach we could not yet see. Then dawn came rapidly, so fast you could almost watch it travel across the water. In the first dim light I could see that there was land there; there were clouds on the horizon and then a denser mass that was shapeless beneath the clouds. As the first shafts of sunlight arrived the mass became lettuce green, an isle floating in a misty haze, and in the distance you could see the torn, ragged edges of the ridges supporting the rice terraces. I hadn't expected such vivid colors. All the photographs I had seen had been black-and-white.
Now we descended the ropes into the amphtracs, which, fully loaded, began forming up in waves. Yellow cordite smoke blew across our bows, battleship guns were flashing, rockets hitting the shore sounded c-r-r-rack, like a monstrous lash, and we were, as infantrymen always are at this point in a landing, utterly helpless. Then, fully aligned, the amphtracs headed for the beach, tossing and churning like steeds in a cavalry charge. Slowly we realized that something we had anticipated wasn't happening. There were no splashes of Jap mortar shells, no roars of Jap coastal guns, no grazing Jap machine-gun fire. The enemy wasn't shooting back because, when we hit the beach at 8:27 a.m., there wasn't any enemy there. It was an unprecedented stratagem — the greatest April Fool's Day joke of all time. Sixty thousand of us walked inland standing up and took Yontan (now Yometan) and Kadena airfields before noon. A Japanese fighter pilot landed on Yontan, climbed down, and ordered a tank of gas in Japanese before he realized something was wrong. He reached for his pistol and was gunned down before he could touch the butt. Idly exploring the quaint, concrete, lyre-shaped burial vaults built on the slopes of the low hills, we felt jubilant. In our first day we had established a beachhead fifteen hundred yards long and five thousand yards deep. None of us could have known then that the battle would last nearly three months, becoming the bloodiest island fight of the Pacific war; that over 200,000 people would perish; that Ernie Pyle, the famous war correspondent just arrived from the ETO, would be killed on Ie Shima; and that both Buckner and Mitsura Ushijima, the Japanese general, would be dead before the guns were silenced.
There was an omen, had we but recognized it. At 7:13 p.m. a kamikaze dove into the West Virginia, erupting in flame. That should have been the tip-off to the enemy's strategy: sink the ships, isolating the Americans ashore. Ushijima had 110,000 Nips of his Thirty-second Army, all Manchurian veterans, concentrated in the southern third of the island. Tokyo's high command had decided to make Okinawa the war's greatest Gethsemane, another Iwo but on a much grander scale. The Americans would be allowed “to land in full” and “lured into a position where they cannot receive cover and support from the naval and aerial bombardment.” Because of the tremendous U.S. commitment, there would be ten American soldiers for every foot of ground on Okinawa's lower waist, where Ushijima planned to make his stand. Thus wedged together, they would be like livestock in a slaughterhouse. Ushijima had studied the cable traffic from Iwo in its last days. Curiously, he found it encouraging. Pillboxes and blockhouses had been built here, too; but in addition, massive numbers of caves masked heavy artillery which could be rolled out on railroad tracks, fired, and rolled back in. Naha had been the site of Japan's artillery school for years. Every gully, every crossroads, every ravine in the south had been pinpointed by the defenders. It would be like an enemy attack on American infantry at Fort Benning. The Japs could target each shell within inches. Under these circumstances, Ushijima reasoned, Buckner's army could be “exterminated to the last man.”
The Allied fleet, in this scenario, would be wiped out by the kamikazes. Even before L-day, these human torpedoes had begun their destruction of our ships. Zeroes, Zekes, Bettys, Nicks, Vals, Nakajimas, Aichis, Kagas — virtually every Nip warplane that could fly was loaded with high explosives and manned by pilots, some mere teenagers, who would dive to their deaths and take sinking Allied warships with them. In the Philippines, in the early stages of this airborne hara-kiri, fliers had operated individually. Now the American and British seamen would confront massed suicide attacks called kikusui, or “floating chrysanthemums.” Ultimately they failed, but anyone who saw a bluejacket who had been burned by them, writhing in agony under his bandages, never again slandered the sailors who stayed on ships while the infantrymen hit the beach. Altogether, Nippon's human bombs accounted for 400 ships and 9,724 seamen — a casualty list which may be unique in the history of naval warfare.
Our first night ashore was interrupted only by fitful machine-gun bursts and the wump-wump-wump of small mortars — there were a few Japs beyond our perimeter, left behind for nuisance value — and during morning twilight, after breakfasting on K rations, we NCOs shouted, “Route march, ho!” starting the long push northward, the Marines loping along in the unmistakable gait of the infantryman, our muscles feeling as though they had been pulled loose from the joints and sockets they were supposed to control. In those first days we covered about twenty miles a day, an ordeal, since we were carrying all our equipment, but we were young and grateful to be still alive. The scenery was lovely. To the left lay the sea; to the right, the hills rose in graceful terraces, each supporting rice paddies. Our path was of orange clay, bordered by stunted bushes and shrubs, cherry trees, and red calla lilies; I had never seen red ones before. Even the remains of the bridges, which had been taken out by our bombers, were beautiful. The Okinawans, like the Japanese, believe that straight lines are harsh, while curved lines suggest serenity, and the sinuosity of these arches conveyed a calm and repose wholly irrelevant to, and superior to, our mission here. Especially was this true when we rounded a curve and beheld, on the beach, the sprawled body of a girl who had been murdered. I had never seen anything like that. The thought that an American man could commit such a crime in fighting a just war raged against everything I believed in, everything my country represented. I was deeply troubled.
Northern Okinawa, we found, was not defenseless. Motobu Peninsula, steep, rocky, wooded, and almost trackless, was dominated by two mountains, Katsu and fifteen-hundred-foot, three-crested Yaetake. Entrenched on Yaetake were two battalions under the command of a tenacious officer, Takehiko Udo. In the ensuing battle the Sixth lost 1,304 men, among them Swifty Crabbe, who took a rifle bullet below his right elbow which severed a nerve, rendering his thumb uncontrollable — a ridiculous wound, but he was delighted to leave the island. To these casualties must be added the professional reputation of our redundant commanding officer, Colonel Hastings, who was fired in the middle of the fight. I was present at the dramatic moment. Lem Shepherd, the divisional commander, asked where the regiment's three battalions were, and the Old Turk, highly agitated, confessed that he wasn't aware of, familiar with, or apprised of where nearly three thousand men might be located, found, or situated. So Shepherd sent him back to the rearest echelon and appointed Colonel William J. Whaling as our new CO. Whaling had fought well on the Canal; we had confidence in him.
And our confidence in ourselves was growing. The Raggedy Asses were always in their element off parade, with no saluting and little sirring, unshaven and grimy in filthy dungarees, left to do what they did best: use their wits. There was no role here for mechanized tactics; tanks were useful only for warming your hands in their exhaust fumes. This was more like French and Indian warfare. Each of us quickly formed a map of the peninsula in his mind; we knew which ravines were swept by Nambu fire and how to avoid them. (Beau Tatum was the exception. His sense of direction, or rather the lack of it, was still uncanny. If a company had let Beau direct them, they would have wound up on Iwo Jima.) Much of the time I kept the battalion situation map, drawing red and blue greasepaint arrows on Plexiglas to show, respectively, what the Japs and our forces were doing. The genial operations officer, an Irish major from the Bronx, never pulled rank on me, though he must have been tempted. It was interesting work; better still,
it was comparatively safe. Unfortunately Krank found another job for me. Shepherd planned a viselike compression, an elaborate envelopment, with the Fourth Marines assaulting the face of Yaetake while we in the Twenty-ninth attacked the rear. A patrol was needed to link up the two regiments. The Raggedy Asses, it was decided, would provide the four-man patrol. Their craven sergeant was ordered to lead it.
I took Knocko, Crock, Pisser, and Killer Kane because they were immediately available and the afternoon was waning. The veins and arteries of the dying day streaked the horizon over the East China Sea. My throat was thick with fear. We moved silently down the path, half crouched, passing Japanese corpses on both sides, any of which could be shamming. Darkness began to gather. Now I was more worried about the Fourth Marines than the enemy. Because the Nips were so skillful at infiltration, the rule had been established that after night had fallen, no Marine could leave his foxhole for any reason. Anyone moving was slain. Two nights before, a man in our battalion had been drilled between the eyes when he rose to urinate. So I moved along the path as quickly as I could, and I recall ascending a little wiggle in the trail, turning a corner, and staring into the muzzle of a Browning heavy machine gun. “Flimsy,” I said shakily, giving that day's password. “Virgin,” said the Fourth Marines' gunner, giving the countersign. He relaxed and reached for a cigarette. He said, “You heard the news? FDR died.” I thought: my father.
Resistance ended on Yaetake's peak after a hand-to-hand struggle; 347 Japs died. Since the Marines had killed nearly three thousand Japs and captured the northern two-thirds of the island — 436 square miles — we expected a respite, hot chow, and a few days in the sack. We didn't get any of them. For over a week we had heard ominous rumors of stiffening resistance in the south. GIs were encountering unprecedented concentrations of Japanese artillery fire. Progress was being measured in yards, then in feet. Regrouping, the GIs launched a massive attack and were stopped cold. It was Peleliu and Iwo all over again, but to the nth degree; because of it, Morison wrote, “the battle for Okinawa was the toughest and most prolonged of any in the Pacific war since Guadalcanal.” Being Marines, and therefore arrogant, we assumed that the dogfaces simply lacked our spirit. What infuriated us, however, was the news that one of Buckner's chief problems lay on his right flank. The division stalled there was the infamous Twenty-seventh. They couldn't keep up with the other army outfits, couldn't even recover their own dead. So we were going to relieve them and they would move up here as garrison troops. Before boarding the six-bys for the trip south, the Raggedy Asses gave the children in the little town of Nago a lesson in elementary English. When the GIs came up to take our place, we told them, they should chant loudly: “Twenty-seventh Division eats shit! Twenty-seventh Division eats shit!” Later we were told they had performed superbly. It was probably the greatest event in the history of Nago. Doubtless it was unfair to some doggies. I'm sure there were brave men in the Twenty-seventh. But if anyone bleats to me about the division's reputation and asks for sympathy, I can tell him where to find it. In the dictionary.
Our movement into the southern line took two days. As we rode south, we became aware of a grumbling on the horizon, which turned into a thumping, then a drumming, then a rumbling, and then an enormous thudding, as though Fafner and Fasolt, the giants in the Rhinegold, had been let loose. The enemy's main line of resistance bore various names, depending upon what part of it faced you; to GIs it would be remembered as Skyline Ridge, or the Kakazu, or the Kochi, or the Maeda Escarpment. The First Marine Division, which moved up on our left flank, called it the Shuri Line, because their immediate objective was the ancient ruins of Shuri Castle. We named it the Machinato Line, after a village on our front. But it was all of a piece, all horrible. Counting both sides, the line represented an extraordinary concentration of 300,000 fighting men, and countless terrified civilians, on a battleground that was about as wide as the distance between Capitol Hill in Washington and Arlington National Cemetery. In the densest combat of World War I, battalion frontage had been approximately eight hundred yards. Here it was less than six hundred yards. The sewage, of course, was appalling. You could smell the front long before you saw it; it was one vast cesspool. My first glimpse of the line itself came when our truck was stopped by the convoy traffic and I jumped over the tailgate to climb a little hillock and see where we were heading. By sheer chance, I had chosen a spot from which the entire battlefield was visible. It was hideous, and it was also strangely familiar, resembling, I then realized, photographs of 1914–1918. This, I thought, is what Verdun and Passchendaele must have looked like. The two great armies, squatting opposite one another in mud and smoke, were locked together in unimaginable agony. There was no room for a flanking operation; the Pacific Ocean lay to the east and the East China Sea to the west. A landing behind Japanese lines would have been possible and would have relieved the pressure on the front, but despite the pleas of the Marine generals for an amphibious operation, Buckner insisted on fighting it out this way.
I lingered on that hummock, repelled and bewitched. It was a monstrous sight, a moonscape. Hills, ridges, and cliffs rose and fell along the front like gray stumps of rotting teeth. There was nothing green left; artillery had denuded and scarred every inch of ground. Tiny flares glowed and disappeared. Shrapnel burst with bluish white puffs. Jets of flamethrowers flickered and here and there new explosions stirred up the rubble. While I watched, awed, an American observation plane, a Piper Cub, droned over the Japanese lines, spotting targets for the U.S. warships lying offshore so that they could bring their powerful guns to bear on the enemy. Suddenly the little plane was hit by flak and disintegrated. The carnage below continued without pause. Here I was safe, but tomorrow I would be there. In that instant I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.
That afternoon we pushed ahead a thousand yards, retrieving the Twenty-seventh's fallen, but our optimism was premature. The Japs were giving us the ground. They knew who we were. They now had a word for American Marines — kai-he-tai — and had developed special tactics for us. These followed a pattern. Each line was held stubbornly until it was about to be overwhelmed; then the Japs withdrew to prepared positions, leaving snipers in coral grottoes to carve up our CPs. A truer sign of what lay ahead was a stark statistic from the Seventh Marines, who had preceded us into the line and held our left flank. In nine days of attacks on a little wrinkle of land called Wana Ridge, the regiment had suffered 1,249 casualties. Our own baptism in siege warfare came when we forced a passage across the Asa Kawa, or River. The Japs had burned the bridge behind them. In those days Americans still prided themselves on their knack for mechanical improvisation — one vehicle which had made its debut on L-day was a tank which actually swam — and our Engineer Battalion welcomed the Asa problem as a challenge. At night, moving like shadows in the slimy stream, they threw a footbridge across the river. Assault companies raced across it in the first moments of morning twilight. Japs wired dynamite to their bellies, darted out of tall grass, and blew up both the footbridge and themselves. Amphtracs ferried more Marines across the water until the following day, when the engineers built a Bailey bridge strong enough to bear the weight of tanks.
Meanwhile the spring rains had begun, coinciding, I might point out, with my own arrival on the line. Torrents blew in from the East China Sea for three straight weeks, day and night, and no one who has not fought under such conditions, or even worked under them, can possibly envisage how miserable they are. Plasma, for example, was usually fed into the veins of a wounded man by taping the plasma container to the stock of a reversed rifle with a fixed bayonet; the bayonet was driven into the ground, providing a post from which the plasma could flow downward. The gruel of Okinawa mud was so thin that it couldn't support a rifle bayonet; men had to be withdrawn from the line to hold the containers. On the other side of the globe Bill Mauldin was writing: “I'm sure Europe never got this muddy during peacetime. I'm equally sure that no mud in the world
is so deep or sticky or wet as European mud.” Mauldin should have seen what the Twenty-ninth Marines were up against. In places our muck was waist-deep. Jeeps, artillery pieces, even bulldozers — everything but amphtracs and DUKWs — sank in it. And there is one massive difference between peacetime mud and wartime mud. In peacetime it is usually avoidable. You can step around it, or take another route. In combat you fight in the mud, sleep in it, void in it, bleed in it, and sometimes die in it.
Your torment in combat is compounded by your utter ignorance of how the battle is going elsewhere. You know what is happening in this gully, or what lies behind that stump, but you have no idea of how things look back at the platoon CP, let alone the company, battalion, regimental, divisional, corps, or army CPs. As keeper of the situation map, I knew more than most. My map was gridded with numbered squares representing areas each of which was two thousand feet wide. Each of these was then divided into twenty-five lettered squares, A through Y, these being four hundred feet wide. In turn, the tiny squares could be further divided, for those who knew the gen, into 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, indicating the four corners and the center. Thus the naval gunfire officer in every battalion headquarters could order gunfire from a warship offshore and put it within two hundred feet of the target. In addition, each battalion carried on its roster a full-blooded Navaho. He could talk to other Indians in other battalions over SCR-300 radios, confident that no Japanese eavesdropper would understand a word. But such information was fragmentary at best, and there was nothing from the regimental level or further up. The army divisions on the left were fighting just as hard as we were, but I don't recall any dope about how things were going for them.