Okinawa

On the night of March 25, the Marines of Major Jim Jones’s veteran Reconnaissance Battalion paddled their rubber boats to Kerama to scout the enemy. Reassured by their reports of little opposition, the Seventy-seventh landed there the next day, destroying the lairs of Ushijima’s suicide boats as they took the reef islets one after another.

On the morning of March 29, soldiers of the 306th Infantry[4] realized how cruel their enemy could be. In a valley below their position they found about 150 dead and wounded Okinawan civilians, many women and children among them. They had disemboweled themselves with grenades the Japanese had given them, after telling them the Americans would torture and murder the men and rape the women. In another three days Hodge’s two other divisions would be storming those Hagushi Beaches that Ushijima had chosen not to defend.

Major General James Bradley’s Ninety-sixth Division would be on the right flank of the Twenty-fourth Corps assault. Fresh from Leyte’s jungle and depleted by losses suffered during the fierce battle for Catmon Hill (and like Hodge’s other divisions denied replacements meant for them but sent to Europe to help crush Hitler’s last gasp in the Battle of the Bulge), the Ninety-sixth would face a far more punishing ordeal of blood and mud while attacking Ushijima’s monster Swiss cheese of steel and rock. The soldiers of the Ninety-sixth called themselves “the Dead- eyes” because Brigadier General Claudius Easley, the division’s assistant commander, was a crack shot, a somewhat illogical extension of the part for the whole; especially in a formation so recently formed and new to combat.[5] In the division’s spearheads would be the 381st Regiment, under Colonel Michael “Screamin’ Mike” Halloran, and Colonel Edwin May’s 383rd. Eddy May was a fine commander whose iron discipline was softened by his compassion for his troops. General Hodge considered him the finest soldier in the entire Twenty-fourth Corps.

On the left flank of Hodge’s zone would be his most experienced division: the Seventh, called “the Hour-Glass Division” because of its shoulder patch and commanded by Major General Archibald Arnold. Its GIs had seen action at Attu in the Aleutians with their subzero cold, then Kwajalein in the Marshalls with its decidedly yet infinitely more amenable heat, and finally those dripping, enervating, malarial jungles of Leyte. In corps reserve would be the 382nd Regiment of the Ninety-sixth Division, while the Seventy-seventh Division still engaged in mopping up the Keramas would be committed to the down-island attack once the landings at Hagushi had been completed, Yontan and Kadena Airfields had been seized, and the Twenty-fourth Corps wheeled right (or south) to attack Ushijima’s Swiss cheese.

Probably the most experienced and famous formation in the American armed forces was the First Marine Division of Major General Geiger’s Third Amphibious Corps. On Guadalcanal alone—where on August 7, 1942, its Leathernecks landed to launch the long, three-year American counter-offensive—they had been in combat a total of 142 days (from the landing date until December 26), probably a record for sustained combat without relief, if such statistics are kept anywhere. During this five-month campaign, which turned the tide of the Pacific War against Japan, these men of “the Old Breed” were responsible for destroying most of the fifty thousand Japanese who fell on “Death Island.” In this dreadful carnage they were assisted by General Collins’s infantry after command passed to the Army on December 9, 1942, and especially by General Geiger’s “Cactus” Air Force, the Marine, Navy, and U.S. Army Air Force pilots who literally blasted the once-dreaded Japanese Zero fighter out of the South Pacific skies while littering the bottom of its waters with sunken Nipponese ships. After “the island,” the First fought in the vicinity of Finschhafen, captured Cape Gloucester on New Britain, and seized Peleliu at a cost of 1,749 dead and wounded while exterminating its 4,000 Japanese defenders. Major General Pedro del Valle commanded the First. Born in Puerto Rico, he had been graduated from Annapolis, serving as an observer in Ethiopia with Italy’s Marshal Pietro Badoglio. Becoming an artillery expert, his guns had much to do with the victory at Guadalcanal.

The Sixth Marine Division was commanded by another Guadalcanal veteran: Major General Lemuel Shepherd, who would one day be commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. His was an unblooded unit, sometimes called “the New Breed,” yet 70 percent of its men and officers were veterans of combat in orphan regiments that had been combined under the Sixth’s emblem of the silver Crusader’s Sword. Only two of its twelve rifle battalions had never known “the music” of bombs and bullets, and among its battle-wise veterans were Lieutenant Colonel Victor Kulak, a belligerent bantam called “the Brute,” the sarcastic nickname that Annapolis midshipmen pinned on all the coxswains of its rowing crews. In the ranks of this most gung ho of Marine divisions were such improbable swashbucklers as twenty-year-old Corporal Donald “Rusty” Golar, the self-styled Glory Kid. A brawny redhead, Rusty had fought with the Twenty-second Regiment on Guam and won a Bronze Star. “I’m a storybook Marine,” he would say, grinning when his buddies laughed outright. “I’m lookin’ for glory, and I’m lookin’ for Japs.” There were glory boys from collegiate football, too. Colonel Alan Shapley, commander of the Fourth Marines; had been one of the Naval Academy’s finest athletes. Lieutenant George Murphy of the Twenty-ninth Marines had been captain of the Notre Dame football team.

In General Geiger’s Third Corps reserve was the Second Marine Division. Its Second Marines had joined the original landing on Guadalcanal to be joined later by their comrades of the entire division. Derisively nicknamed “the Hollywood Marines” because they were based in California, they were not playacting when they waded ashore at Tarawa in 1943 to take in four days the island citadel that Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki had claimed could not be captured by “a million men in ten thousand years.” They went on to fight the grinding battle at Saipan in 1944. Major General Thomas Watson still commanded the Second. Because his Leathernecks had staged the eminently successful feint of the textbook shore-to-shore operation at Tinian, he had been asked to do it again at the Minatoga Beaches on Okinawa.

It was fitting that the commander of the Third Amphibious Corps, which included these three Marine divisions, should be Geiger, the gruff and grizzled white bear of a man more prone to deeds than words. Though a flying general, he had been in so many other invasions since Guadalcanal and had devoured so many textbooks on tactics that he had emerged as an excellent leader of ground troops as well.

Finally, Tenth Army’s Seventh Division—the Twenty-seventh Infantry commanded by Major General George Griner—was to be in “floating reserve” at Okinawa. If all went well there, the Twenty-seventh would occupy the island as a garrison division. For a division supposedly blooded in combat, such an assignment was not particularly dangerous, but the Twenty-seventh’s record in the Pacific had not been outstanding. A New York National Guard outfit, the Twenty-seventh saw its first action on Makin, where sixty-five hundred of its GIs landed on November 20, 1944. On the first night many of these half-trained guardsmen were panicked by Japanese scare tactics. Actually, the enemy numbered only five hundred lightly armed garrison soldiers holding paper-thin fortifications. But they held out for a week, though outnumbered thirteen to one and with almost no artillery to match the overwhelming American superiority in ordnance. During this delay the escort carrier Liscome Bay was sunk on the last day of battle, with a large loss of life. It was not the fault of the troops—it never is—for as Napoleon said: “There are no bad regiments, only bad colonels.”

Many of the Twenty-seventh’s officers from Major General Ralph Smith down to the lowliest second lieutenant were ineffective ; in fact, they were so indifferent to their responsibility that during maneuvers in Hawaii more than a few of them checked into Honolulu hotels for a night of revelry while their men slept on the bare ground. Again on Saipan under Smith the Twenty-seventh in between two Marine divisions moved so slowly that it lagged fifteen hundred yards behind these advancing formations. Thus a giant U was formed with the Twenty- seventh at the base, presenting the enemy with an unrivaled opportunity to exploit it. Immediately Marine Lieutenant General Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, commander of the Fifth Corps, relieved Ralph Smith and replaced him with another Army general. This episode exploded with the loudest bang of the Pacific’s shameful Army-Navy rivalry. Prior to Saipan five Army generals had been relieved in the Pacific, but that had been by Army generals. For a Marine general to have the insolence to remove an Army general was to join cardinal sin to unforgivable insult. Actually, the Twenty-seventh improved after General Griner took command, and he was still in command at Okinawa, with many brave men eager to follow him and redeem their division’s honor—which they would do. The Twenty-seventh was not at full strength, only 16,143 men, compared to the 22,000 of the other Army divisions and the 24,000 for the Marines—which brought their replacements with them.

Altogether, General Buckner’s seven combat divisions numbered 183,000 men, of whom 154,000 would be in assault on the Hagushi Beaches—half again as many as Ushijima’s 110,000, although many of the Japanese commander’s troops were raw Okinawa conscripts. However, traditional military doctrine specifies that an attacking force, especially an invader from the sea, should possess at least a three-to-one superiority over the defense.

These, then, were the troops with which General Buckner intended to make rapid conquest of Okinawa,