Higher up on Skyline Ridge other soldiers of the Seventh advanced unmolested for five hundred yards—an ominously easy ascent that should have warned them—but when they moved into ground also preregistered, the same rain of enemy fire stopped them cold. Pinned down throughout the day, all formations of the Seventh were retreating into their former positions by shortly after four o’clock.
They had gained not a yard.
In the center of Hodge’s assault the Ninety-sixth Division found its experience even more frustrating than the Seventh’s. The objective was the Tanabaru-Nishibaru ridge line, which joined Skyline Ridge, Hill 178, and Kakazu Ridge to form the zone defended by General Fujioka’s Sixty-second Division. Repeated local attacks gained no more than outpost ground. Only one serious attempt to penetrate enemy defenses was made: by a platoon led by First Lieutenant Lawrence O‘Brien of Colonel Mickey Finn’s Thirty-second Regiment. O’Brien tried to move onto Skyline Ridge and thence westward to the towering mass of Hill 178. Apart from an exploding shell that killed one man and wounded three others, O‘Brien’s men moved rapidly up Skyline’s steep forward slope, then swung right toward 178. A Japanese machine gun chattered, and the Americans took refuge in an abandoned pillbox. From a ridge above, the Japanese hurled grenades and fired knee mortars. O’Brien was pinned down. Major John Connor, the battalion commander, sent a platoon to the rescue, but this unit also came under enemy fire so scourging that only six men of the platoon returned to base alive and unwounded. With this Connor recalled O’Brien. In another demonstration of how dangerous the forward slopes of the ridges could be with the rear slopes unconquered, Connor had lost eighty men and gained not an inch.
After that first quick nighttime surge over unoccupied ground on the Twenty-fourth’s right flank, the Twenty- seventh Division’s sector became a burial ground for American armor. Because the division’s foot soldiers failed to penetrate Kakazu’s defenses, the tanks—thirty of them including three armored flamethrowers and self-propelled 105 mm howitzers—had no supporting infantry. This left them exposed to the plunging fire of enemy 47 mm antitank guns above them, and the infiltration tactics of Nipponese suicide squads hurling satchel charges, usually against the vehicle’s bottom plate. Unfortunately for the Yankee tankers, the Japanese at Kakazu were actually waiting for them—praying for them. One 47 mm gunner named Fujio Takeda knocked out five tanks with six shots at four hundred yards. In all, of the thirty American tanks that attacked, only eight survived. Many of the tankers lived, most of them digging holes beneath their disabled steel monsters and remaining in them undetected for as long as three days. Others were killed when the Japanese pried open their turret lids and dropped grenades in.
It was thus that General Hodge’s hurricane attack was hurled back. Failing utterly to break through, it did not obtain a single lodgment or foothold in the enemy’s defenses, from which further assaults might be mounted. Possibly worse, General Griner in his decision to bypass Kakazu Ridge had left a gap of almost a mile between his Twenty-seventh Division and the Ninety-sixth in the center. No American troops were there to blunt any enemy counter-attack, and so General Hodge worried that a Japanese counter-strike could slip through to trap the entire Twenty-seventh, pressing it against the iron enemy defenses it had failed to pierce and there destroy it. Fortunately, those well-entrenched Japanese were as blind as the moles they resembled, having no idea of their foe’s whereabouts, and no enemy counter-attack was launched. Nevertheless, General Griner the next day reiterated his belief that the Japanese strongpoints should be bypassed and mopped up. In reply, Colonel “Screaming Mike” Halloran, commander of the 381st Infantry, gave a more accurate estimate of the enemy’s troops: “You cannot bypass a Japanese because a Jap does not know when he is bypassed.”
Thus ended the hurricane assault with Twenty-fourth Corps losses totaling 750 killed, missing, and wounded.
Outer Line Cracked / Ushijima Retreats
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was an entirely different American infantryman who wearily and warily greeted the dawn of April 20 on Okinawa. Up until the fiery failure at Kakazu during April 12-13 and the bloody repulse of April 19 at Shuri’s outer defenses, the Army infantry in the Pacific—apart from a few isolated instances and during only two major battles, Saipan and Guam—had been fighting a war in which maneuver was possible.
These were on the great land mass of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world, and the Philippine archipelago with its thousands of islands big and small. In these campaigns, maneuver was not only possible but mandatory if casualties were to be kept minimal, and the enemy being attacked was usually fighting from log-and- mud fortifications, half naked and half starved by the effectiveness with which the submarines and warships of the United States Navy had severed their supply lines. The casualties were indeed minimal—as the boastful Douglas MacArthur would trumpet to the world in his tireless pursuit of supreme command in the Pacific—and the Army infantry had few if any days such as the crucibles at Kakazu and before Shuri.
But now—though dimly—the GIs realized that they had come to their own Tarawa, Peleliu, or Iwo Jima with their fortifications of steel, concrete, and coral, interconnected by mazes of tunnels with interlocking fire and all approaches preregistered by every weapon. They now knew—as the Marines in the Central Pacific had learned— that enormous massed bombardment of these truly formidable defenses from sea, air, and land was usually if not always no more effective than a smoke screen. True, they would cause some casualties, but never enough to be decisive; and the accident of a lucky hit could never be repeated on
Moreover, the losses in armor and the casualties among the American GIs on that near-disastrous April 19 were not only the result of attacks made into Ushijima’s clever and sometimes-invisible defenses spouting death and destruction, but also complicated by the terrain of southern Okinawa itself. It was, as the Army’s official history states: “ground utterly without pattern; it was a confusion of little, mesa-like hilltops, deep draws, rounded clay hills, gentle green valleys, bare and ragged coral ridges, lumpy mounds of earth, narrow ravines and sloping finger ridges extending downward from the hill masses.”
On April 20, General Hodge’s three-division assault into Ushijima’s meat grinder was renewed: Seventh on left, Ninety-sixth in the center, and Twenty-seventh on the right. In these first two formations the GIs, now thoroughly blooded in this type of warfare, moved forward more warily and skillfully. The Thirty-second Infantry of the Seventh, or “Hour Glass,” took Ouki Hill with surprising ease, and then struck at Skyline Ridge, blanketing it with smoke to blind the numerous enemy mortarmen there. The tactic worked, especially after two gallant soldiers— First Lieutenant John Holms and Staff Sergeant James McCarthy—led a final charge to seize the hill, but later perished in a fierce enemy counter-attack that was hurled back. Flamethrowing tanks were of major assistance in this action, burning out a forward mortar position that could have been troublesome.
But the Skyline’s dogged defenders did not submit so tamely. One machine gunner in a pillbox was particularly tenacious until Sergeant Theodore MacDonnell, a mortar observer not expected to join a battle, entered the struggle on his own, charging the pillbox throwing grenades. Next he borrowed a BAR, and when that jammed, a carbine—rushing the enemy position with this ordinarily most useless weapon in the American arsenal. At close range, however, it could do damage, and MacDonnell used it to kill all three gunners. Then, his Celtic blood aroused, he picked up the enemy gun and heaved it down the embankment, followed by a knee mortar. Without pausing to thank MacDonnell for this distinguished favor, one of Colonel Finn’s companies proceeded to clear Skyline at a cost of two killed and eleven wounded. Hill 178 now came under American fire, and after two days patrols blasting enemy caves found these positions stuffed with corpses: two hundred in one, a hundred in another, fifty in a third, and forty-five in a fourth. Those who had survived had been withdrawn.
The 184th Infantry’s objective was the Rocky Crags, two coral pinnacles that had to be taken before towering Hill 178 could be assaulted. But no headway was made the first day. Dismayed, General Arnold came to the front to study these obstacles. Deciding that the crags could be fragmented by direct artillery fire, he ordered a 155 mm
