Strong Men Armed

“What’s happening in there, son?”

“Don’t ask me, Doc. All I know is everybody’s goin’ in standin’ up.”

The surgeon sighed. He glanced shoreward again, turned and went back inside the ship to eat lunch. He came out. Still no return traffic. He called to his solitary patient, “C’mon, son, let’s go make you a new finger. We’ve got plenty of time to do it in.”

That was Love-Day on Okinawa, a most fortuitous eight hours of daylight during which the Tenth Army captured two airfields and a beachhead eight miles long and three to four miles deep—all at a cost of 28 killed, 27 missing and 104 wounded. Only a few of the dead or missing was from either of the assaulting Marine divisions— but 16 of them were from that Second Marine Division which had drawn the soft assignment of making the feint off southern Okinawa.

Down there a kamikaze crash-dived LST 884 with 300 Marines aboard her. The ship burst into flames. Ammunition began to explode. The LST had to be abandoned temporarily. Eight Marines were killed, eight were missing and 37 were wounded. Another kamikaze put three holes in destroyer Hinsdale and the stricken ship had to be towed away by fleet tugs. The departure may have prompted General Ushijima’s report of having forced the enemy to withdraw “after being mowed down one after another.”

Up north, though, there were 50,000 of the enemy on Okinawa. Objectives which were expected to require three or more days and many lives were firmly in American hands. At Yontan Airfield that dusk of April 1, there were bulldozers clearing away wrecked planes and General Ushijima’s clever dummies of sticks and stones. Already an airplane was touching down. But it had a red ball on its fuselage. It came in as bulldozers stopped and men hopped quickly to the ground. Marines heating their rations stood erect and walked quietly toward the landing strip. The Zero swung seaward and turned back to a smooth landing.

The pilot wriggled out of his parachute pack. He climbed down. He walked toward the Marines. He stopped. Between that moment in which he reached for his pistol, and the next when he slumped to the runway, riddled, an expression of indescribable horror had passed over his face.

“There’s always one,” a Marine said, shaking his head ruefully—“ there’s always one poor bastard who doesn’t get the word.”

12

It was the morning of April 2. The Marines were awake, stamping chilled feet, amazed to see their breath making vapor puffs while they drew their newly issued wool-and-gabardine field jackets tighter around them. It was something less than 50 degrees, it would not go above 60, but it was nippy enough to chill the thinned blood of men with years in the tropics behind them.

They moved out rapidly along the narrow roads, passing through peaceful fields sprinkled with little thatched farm-houses, each sheltering behind stone walls or bamboo wind-breaks. They gathered momentum, the Sixth Division striking swiftly for Zampa Cape in the north to seize the site for Admiral Turner’s badly needed radar station, the First speeding east across island for Nakagusuku Bay.

“Off and on!” the sergeants shouted. “Let’s keep moving!”

“You there—whattaya keep looking behind yuh for?”

“I can’t help it, Sarge—I keep feelin’ somebody’s gonna slug me from behind.”

It was a common sensation, as Love-Day turned into Honeymoon Week at Okinawa. Only the Sixth Division was running into any kind of opposition, and this in ambushes or isolated attacks on scattered strong-points— battles real enough to the few men who died or were wounded in them, but not in large enough volume to deter the Sixth’s swift advance.

The First Division was having a picnic. Major General Del Valle called a press conference in the afternoon and told the newsmen: “I don’t know where the Japs are, and I can’t offer you any good reason why they let us come ashore so easily. We’re pushing on across the island as fast as we can move the men and equipment.”

They were, and in two days of “fighting” the First Division’s casualties totaled three dead and 18 wounded. Next day, the Division’s jubilant Marines were standing on the eastern sea wall overlooking the bay and the Pacific Ocean. They had severed the island. That same day, scouting parties turned sharply right and swept out onto the narrow finger of the Ketchin Peninsula, traversing it without opposition. With the Tenth Army lifting all restrictions, the First Division rapidly secured all the east coast between Yontan and the Ishikawa Isthmus, that narrow neck of about two and a half miles which lay two-fifths of the way up Okinawa’s 60-mile length. In four days, the First had taken territory expected to require three weeks of heavy fighting.

Above these Marines, the Sixth Division was sealing off the base of the isthmus preparatory to its drive north. The First would clean up behind the Sixth, and also attend to the problem of the Okinawan refugees now clogging the roads.

There were so many of them: women with babies at their breasts; children without parents; grizzle-bearded ancients hobbling along with bent backs, leaning on staffs and carrying pitiful small bundles representing all that the war had left them, that terrible war which had also robbed them of the authority of their beards and had exposed them to Japanese mockery and American pity; and the old white-haired women who could not walk, who merely squatted in the road, shriveled, frail, hardly bigger than monkeys, waiting to be carried, waiting for the kind Marine who might stop and stick a lighted cigarette between their toothless gums.

They were a docile people, and now they were terrified because the Japanese had told them the Americans would torture them. They were frightened also because they knew that among them were Japanese soldiers disguised as civilians. But their fear vanished with gentle treatment, with the policy of carefully searching all males between fifteen and forty-five—to discover many a knife or cartridge belt beneath a smock—and of placing all of these within prisoner-of-war camps. Soon the Okinawans were speaking openly of their hatred for the Japanese, their loathing for the Reign of Radiant Peace.

“Nippon ga maketa,” they said. “Japan is finished.”

But Nippon was neither maketa nor zemmetsu. Nippon had at last recovered from the American carrier strikes at the homeland and was about to hurl her thunderbolts with characteristic suicidal fervor. On April 6 hundreds of kamikaze came roaring down from the north, and trailing after them in the spreading white majesty of her mighty bow wave came nothing less than a suicide battleship.

She was the Yamato, the mightiest warship ever built, the most beautiful battleship afloat and the last capital ship left to Japan.

Yamato had survived Leyte Gulf where her sister ship, Musashi, had not. Yamato could outshoot anything in the U.S. Navy. She had nine 18.1-inch guns firing a projectile weighing 3,200 pounds a distance of 45,000 yards, compared to the 2,700-pound shell and 42,000-yard range of the American 16-inchers. She displaced 72,809 tons fully laden, and drew 35 feet. She was 863 feet long and 128 in the beam. She could hit 27.5 knots at top speed or cruise 7,200 miles at 16 knots. And she was sortying out of the Inland Sea for Okinawa with only enough fuel in her tanks for a one-way voyage.

If soldiers and tanks, fliers and airplanes, sailors and boats could be enrolled in the ranks of the suiciders, it was logical that admirals and dreadnoughts should follow. There were three admirals coming with Yamato, and the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers. There might have been more of them and more warships, but Admiral Toyoda could scrape up only 2,500 tons of fuel for the venture. Toyoda also had only 699 planes, half of them kamikaze, to hurl against the Americans in the aerial phase of the attack. He had hoped to have 4,500, but American strikes on the homeland had crippled aircraft production and had also destroyed many planes on the ground.

Still, Toyoda hoped for great things from the kikusui, or “floating chrysanthemums,” which was the name given to 10 massed kamikaze attacks planned for Okinawa. His hopes for the Surface Special Attack Force led by Vice Admiral Seichi Ito aboard Yamato could not have been other than forlorn. He gave the great ship only two fighter planes for cover.