spigot mortar mounted in a cave on the reverse slope. Just one of its 320 mm shells could destroy the Americans on the saddle. With Captain Hoss, Solch and his buddies attacked the huge mortar, destroying it with hand grenades and killing its nine-man crew.
At about noon, sensing that the Americans had but a small force in front of him, Colonel Hara ordered his men to make a series of four furious counter-attacks on the enemy. So that they might surprise the Americans, and with brutal indifference to their destruction or survival, he sent them charging through his own mortar fire. Lieutenant Bill Curran killed both the leaders of the first charge, while his men repulsed the Japanese with heavy loss. When a second assault came, Solch, squatting on his haunches, fired his Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) from the hip to repel an entire company. In the final charge, the Japanese—throwing “satchel charges as big as boxes of apples”—came within a few feet of overrunning the “American devils” but finally fell a few feet short.
Even so, Mitchell’s company was being badly whittled. Because his soldiers were lying on hard coral, they could not get below ground by scooping out foxholes, and thus were inviting targets for enemy riflemen and exposed to the flame and fragments of exploding mortar shells.
Fierce fighting also raged atop Kakazu Ridge to the east, or left of Mitchell’s position. Here the Japanese popped in and out of their barricaded caves to strike the men of companies led by Captain Jack Royster and First Lieutenant Dave Belman. They also charged up the reverse slope, again braving their own mortars. An entire American platoon was pinned down by a pair of enemy machine guns. Pfc. Edward Moskala crawled toward them, clutching his BAR. When close enough but still unobserved, he hurled grenades at the unsuspecting Japanese, rising to rush them spraying bullets. Both guns were knocked out.
Now Lieutenant Belman was hit, refusing evacuation despite great loss of blood. Captain Royster took a mortar fragment in the face. In exquisite pain and nearly blind, he also refused to leave. But it was becoming plain to both officers that the enemy was gaining the upper hand. GIs had already begun to withdraw off the ridge crest, hunting protection in the numerous caves and holes on the ridge’s northern face. After Royster radioed battalion for help, Lieutenant Colonel King ordered another company to the rescue. But this unit got no farther than the gorge, crouching with the men who had been pinned down there since sunup. King now believed that his battalion was in trouble and asked May for permission to withdraw. May refused, telling King that he’d lose as many men withdrawing as he would holding the hill. He also told him that if he was “jumpy, have the executive officer take over.” Understandably, there was no reply.
Captain Royster on the ridge had a far better appreciation of his danger than either hard-boiled Eddy May or the cautious Colonel King. His and Belman’s company could not possibly retreat in full view of the enemy. So Royster called for smoke shells from the Eighty-eighth Chemical Mortar Battalion. They went humming up and looping down, but the wind blew them back into Royster’s face. Eventually there was enough smoke to conceal a withdrawal, and the GIs began crawling down toward the gorge, many of them carrying wounded buddies with them. Ed Moskala was the last man down, but when he learned that a wounded man unable to move was still atop the ridge, he went back up to bring him safely down.
Now the remnants of King’s entire battalion were pinned down in the gorge, immobilized by enemy fire. To leap erect was to die. Second Lieutenant Leo Ford, the officer now in charge, decided that the best way out was to creep down the defile to the jump-off point of Hoss Mitchell’s company earlier in the day. Snaking along inch by inch on their bellies, dragging their wounded, Ford and his men moved westward at a snail’s pace. Ed Moskala, who had volunteered again to act as rear guard, covered their withdrawal. Twice he rescued wounded buddies, but on his second trip he paid for his gallantry with his life. For these acts of infinite compassion, and his bravery in destroying the enemy guns, Moskala received the posthumous award of the Medal of Honor.
By four in the afternoon, the men led by Ford reached a point opposite the north slope of Kakazu West, and were soon joined by Mitchell’s GIs moving rapidly under billowing smoke skillfully called down by Captain Hoss himself.
The Kakazu attack had failed, but it had not been a disaster. In all, Colonel May’s 383rd Regiment had suffered 326 casualties, with 23 dead, 47 missing and presumed dead, plus 256 wounded. Colonel Hara’s command may have lost half of its strength of 1,200; and for the defenders to lose nearly twice as many as the attackers, while fighting from a most formidable fixed position, testifies to the valor and skill of the American infantry.
Even before the failure at Kakazu became known at Ninety-sixth Division headquarters, Brigadier Claudius Easley, assistant commander of the Ninety-sixth, had prepared a second much more massive assault under his personal command. This “powerhouse attack” with no attempt at surprise was to be spearheaded by four battalions of infantry—about three thousand soldiers—supported by eight battalions of 105 and 155 mm artillery, together with air strikes and bombardment from the sea led by the battleship
At 7:15 A.M. on April 10 the assault began. Furious as the preliminary bombardment had been, it in no way depleted Ushijima’s troop strength. When the bombardment lifted, his men—safe and invisible within his steel-and- coral fortress—would reply with small arms, machine guns, mortars, and occasionally one of those huge 624-pound mortar shells. Once again the Ninety-sixth fought gallantly, but flesh-and-blood advancing in the open, no matter how valiantly, simply cannot overcome an unseen enemy firing from within underground fortifications of steel and coral. It was almost as though the Japanese and the Americans had exchanged battle doctrines: the defenders relying upon firepower and the invaders on spiritual power, with the inevitable consequence: The Americans were stopped. Fortunately for them, a heavy rain—the forerunner of drenching downpours soon to come—squelched the battle, or their casualties might have been greater.
It required two more days of hideous combat to convince General Easley that Kakazu was simply too formidable for the Ninety-sixth to conquer alone. On April 11 Colonel John Cassidy’s battalion of the 381st Regiment made its second attempt to seize the top of the ridge and was again driven back. That night the Japanese began bombarding the Americans pinned down in the gorge with their 320 mm spigot mortars. One of these huge projectiles, woefully inaccurate and fired so haphazardly, seemingly did strike harmlessly on the ground—but with enough force to start a landslide that buried a cave being used as an aid station, killing thirteen Americans and wounding nine.
On the morning of the twelfth, Easley ordered another attack by Cassidy’s battalion, supported by heavy air strikes. When the Ninety-sixth moved out, there fell upon them a shower of mortar shells so thick that they came down at the rate of better than sixty a minute. Forty-five men were lost, and that was the end of the Kakazu debacle of April 9-12.
During the failed April 9-12 assaults the only appreciable gains made by the Twenty-fourth Corps was by the veteran Seventh Infantry Division on the left or eastern flank of the Ninety-sixth. From Triangulation Hill to Ouki on Nakagusuku Bay, the Seventh drove forward one thousand yards. Ouki fell to the Thirty-second Infantry on April 11, but the Americans were promptly evicted. By the night of April 12 all of the Seventh’s formations were halted in front of Hill 178, a towering crag in roughly the center-east of Ushijima’s line, which was also a Japanese artillery observation point. Farther east the Ninety-sixth’s 382nd Regiment had been stopped cold at Tombstone Ridge, where on April 11 it went into defensive positions. Tombstone may have been every bit as tough as Kakazu, but no assault was planned until General Hodge and his division commanders could assess the situation.
Casualties in the Seventh and Ninety-sixth divisions had been 451 dead, with 241 missing and presumed dead and 2,198 wounded, for a total of 2,890. Enemy losses were estimated at 5,750—all killed—although this was almost certainly exaggerated. A truer figure more likely would be about 4,000. Most of these men were killed by bombardment, for during April 9-12 the American invaders had hurled a massive weight of metal from land, sea, and air upon the defending Japanese. The fact that Kakazu, Tombstone, and Ouki remained in enemy hands demonstrated to the American commanders that the key to success on Okinawa lay in possession of the reverse slopes of all those ridges from Kakazu to Shuri Castle. Seizing the forward slopes, though difficult, could be done— but any attempt to drive past them would bring upon the attackers that dreadful rain of enemy fire.
What was needed, it seemed to General Hodge, was even heavier bombardments—and there was not yet enough ammunition ashore. The loss of those two ammunition ships to the
