The “enemy” was also hurling neutralizing thunderbolts at the homeland. Giant B-29’s had begun to strike Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe in 300-plane raids. On March 9 the Superforts came down to 6,000 feet over Tokyo to loose the dreadful fire-bombs which burned up a quarter of a million houses, made a million persons homeless and killed 83,793 others. Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki would equal the carnage of this most lethal air raid in history.
Throughout February and March, while the Marines were conquering Iwo Jima, land- and carrier-based air struck again and again at the Great Loo Choo. Superforts began to rage all over the Ryukyus. Okinawa was effectively cut off from Kyushu in the north, Formosa in the south. On March 1, while the Fast Carrier Forces were returning to Ulithi from their third strike at Japan, there were so many planes strafing, bombing and rocketing Okinawa that pilots had to get in line for a crack at a target. Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima was impressed.
“You cannot regard the enemy as on a par with you,” he told his men. “You must realize that material power usually overcomes spiritual power in the present war. The enemy is clearly our superior in machines. Do not depend on your spirits overcoming this enemy. Devise combat method based on mathematical precision—then think about displaying your spiritual power.”
Ushijima’s order was perhaps the most honest issued by a Japanese commander throughout the war. It was
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There were 1,300 ships and perhaps another 300 left behind in the anchorages. Some of the ships were new, some came from the West Coast and were sailing 7,200 miles to battle, putting in at island battlegrounds whose names they bore, staging up through the latest battlegrounds at Ulithi, Leyte and Saipan. They roved boldly about that Pacific Ocean which was now an American lake, for Manila had fallen on February 24 and only the mighty battleship
Fleet Admiral Nimitz was still in over-all command in Hawaii as he had been when the Japanese were stopped at Midway, when the long charge began at Guadalcanal. Admiral Spruance commanded the Fifth Fleet, and there was the saltiest salt still giving orders to the expeditionary force. Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner had brought the Marines to Guadalcanal and now, nearly three years later, still roaming his flagship bridge in an old bathrobe, still a profane perfectionist with beetling brow and abrasive tongue, a matchless planner who would also not scruple to tell the coxswain how to beach his boat, Kelly Turner was bringing the Tenth Army to Okinawa.
A newcomer to the Central Pacific led the ground troops: Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., “the old man of the mountain,” the son of the famous Confederate general of that name and rank, himself a product of the strictest Army training, a big man, ruddy-faced, white-haired, strong for the physical conditioning of troops. He had served four years in Alaska and the Aleutians and had built up the Alaskan defenses. He had hoped to lead the invasion of Japan through the North Pacific, but the thrust from the Aleutians was never made. It was coming from the center, and Simon Bolivar Buckner was called down to lead it—commanding that Tenth Army which was in fact only a new number for seven veteran divisions which had made the assault possible.
These were the 7th, 27th, 77th and 96th Infantry Divisions making up Major General John Hodge’s Twenty- fourth Corps, and the First, Second and Sixth Marine Divisions of Major General Roy Geiger’s Third Corps.
The 27th, which had seen action at Makin and Saipan and was still commanded by Major General George Griner, would be in Tenth Army reserve. The 77th of Major General Andrew Bruce—those “Old Bastards” who had waded ashore at Guam and gone on to Leyte—were to start the battle for Okinawa.
On March 26 the 77th’s soldiers began taking the islands of the Kerama Retto, destroying the lairs of Ushijima’s suicide boats. They also occupied those reef islets of Keise Shima which the Marines of Major Jim Jones’ Reconnaissance Battalion had scouted in night rubber-boat landings. On these islets went the 155-millimeter long toms of the 420th Field Artillery Group. They began laying down a galling fire on southwestern Okinawa, especially in the vicinity of the Hagushi Beaches.
These beaches were to be taken with the Marines on the left or north, the soldiers on the right. Nailing down the right flank was the spearhead team which Hodge had used in the Philippines—the 7th, led by Major General Archibald Arnold and blooded at Attu, Kwajalein and Leyte, and the 96th of Major General James Bradley, also a veteran of Leyte. Once these two divisions were ashore, they were to capture Kadena Airfield, drive east across the island’s waist and then wheel south to attack abreast in that direction.
Geiger’s Third Corps would capture Yontan Airfield, drive east cross-island and turn north to overrun that half of Okinawa. This would be done by the Sixth and First, while the Second made a feint off those southern or Minatoga Beaches which General Ushijima had so carefully fortified.
Covering the landings would be the biggest bombardment force yet assembled—10 old battleships, 10 cruisers and scores of destroyers and gunboats—as well as the far-ranging new battleships and fleet carriers of the Fast Carrier Forces, the flying buffer of the British task force in the southern Ryukyus, the Navy’s minesweepers and Underwater Demolition Teams, the big bombers of the Twentieth Air Force, and the Tenth Army’s own Tactical Air Force made up chiefly of Marine flyers and commanded by a Marine—Major General Francis Mulcahy.
Okinawa was to be the biggest battle of the Pacific, with 548,000 Americans of all services involved, as well as history’s greatest amphibious assault, with an attack force of 183,000 men, of which 154,000 were in the actual combat divisions.
Okinawa would also crown the unique mission of the Marine Corps, one which began after the Allied disaster at Gallipoli in World War One had convinced most military thinkers that hostile and fortified shores could not be overcome by invasion from the sea. The Marines disagreed. They insisted amphibious assault could be successful and developed the craft and techniques to make it so. They also trained the Army in this speciality, which was to be needed in Europe as well as the Pacific. The Army’s first three amphibious divisions—the 1st, 3rd and gth—were trained by Marines. Those very infantry divisions going into Okinawa—the 7th, 77th and 96th —were Marine-trained, while the 81st Division which Lieutenant General Buckner was holding in area reserve in New Caledonia had also been taught by Marines. And the Tactical Air Force led by Major General Mulcahy was to put into the air an overwhelming number of Marine pilots especially trained in the Marine tactic of close-up aerial support.
It was also fitting, in this last battle of the war, that the First Marine Division, which had launched the long counteroffensive, should be in at the kill. The First had a new commander, Major General Pedro del Valle. He had relieved Major General Rupertus, who went back to the States to die in his bed. Del Valle was a Puerto Rican who had gone through Annapolis and had served with Italy’s Marshal Badoglio as an observer in Ethiopia. Hot- tempered—with dark brows the equal of Admiral Turner’s—he was quick-witted as well, an artillerist whose guns had saved the First at Guadalcanal so that the hard-noses could go on to fight at New Britain and Peleliu.
There was the Second Marine Division, which had also come a long way from Guadalcanal, had passed through bloody Betio in Tarawa and fought the grinding fight on Saipan. Major General Thomas Watson still led the Second, and he had broken in 8,000 replacements by setting them to mopping-up Japanese stragglers in the Marianas. The Second’s battalions would make the feint off southern Okinawa. They had done it so well at Tinian, they were being asked to do it again; but even so, there were frequent growls about how come the upstart Sixth was going into the assault on the left of the First.
If the Sixth was new in number, it had a faultless, veteran staff and command under Major General Lemuel Shepherd. It had men such as Brute Krulak, the sawed-off dynamo who had made so much smoke at Choiseul and was now a lieutenant colonel in charge of operations. It had 70 per cent veterans and only two of its battalions had not yet been in battle. The Sixth was “gung ho,” and veterans of other outfits might have been startled to find that the division with a silver Crusader’s sword for its emblem harbored such seemingly passe types as the Glory Kid. He was a brawny red-haired corporal of twenty years and his name was Donald (Rusty) Golar. He had fought with the Twenty-second Regiment on Guam and won a Bronze Star. “I’m a storybook Marine,” Golar said. “I’m lookin’ for glory and I’m lookin’ for Japs.” There were glory-boys from the ranks of collegiate football, too. In the Fourth Regiment commanded by Colonel Alan Shapley, one of the Naval Academy’s finest athletes, there were enough football stars to field two All-American teams. Lieutenant George Murphy of the Twenty-ninth Marines had been
