But they were not. The honeymoon was ending. They were staying on Okinawa and going south, down to that Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line which had stopped the Army’s Twenty-fourth Corps.
14
The honeymoon had been brief for the Twenty-fourth Corps—hardly more than a weekend.
The day after Love-Day, while the Second Marine Division made another feint off southern Okinawa, the Twenty-fourth’s soldiers raced across the island. Next day they turned south, 7th Division on the left flank, 96th on the right. Their advance seemed to be as effortless as the Marine thrust in the north.
But on April 4 they found resistance “stiffening.”
It grew stiffer daily until, on April 8, “greatly increased resistance” was reported. They had come into the outerworks of Ushijima’s barrier line. Three days later they were stopped cold beneath one of the Pacific War’s most furious and skillful artillery barrages. A regiment of the 27th Division—now ashore while the Second Marine Division was sailing back to Saipan—was ordered in with the 96th Division on the right.
On April 12 the Japanese launched a land-air counterattack. Another massed
It seemed that the time for the American breakthrough had arrived. Major General Hodge planned a powerful thrust with three divisions abreast. It was scheduled for April 19.
In the interval, the 77th Division, assisted by Major Jones’s Recon Battalion, moved to seize Ie Shima just off the western tip of Mobotu Peninsula. Ie was a good-sized island and had an airfield. The 77th landed on April 16 and fought a savage four-day battle, killing 4,706 Japanese while losing 258 soldiers killed or missing and 879 wounded. Among the 77th’s dead was the most famous and beloved civilian who ever marched with the dogfaces: the correspondent Ernie Pyle.
Pyle was killed going up front again. Back at Ulithi, as he shoved off to join the First Marine Division, with whom he landed at Hagushi, another newsman called out jokingly, “Keep your head down, Ernie,” and Pyle had snorted, “Listen, you bastards—I’ll take a drink over every one of your graves.” But Pyle’s grave was dug on Ie Shima and over it his new comrades in the Pacific placed the inscription: “On this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.”
It was the following day that General Hodge’s grand assault began. With the 7th Division on the left, 96th in the center, 27th on the right; with six battleships, six cruisers and nine destroyers firing on call; with 650 Marine and Navy planes flying close-up support or scourging enemy supply and assembly areas; with 27 battalions of artillery massed and hurling everything from 75-millimeter to eight-inch shells all along that five-mile front—the Twenty-fourth Corps attacked.
And it began to measure gains by the yard.
The Army infantry had come to its own Peleliu or Iwo Jima. It had come to defenses against which enormous massed fires, from sea, land or air, were often hardly more useful than a smokescreen. Bombardments might get them close to such positions, but only ardor could overrun them. Only the impetuous foot-soldier slashing in with his hand weapons and using tanks, explosives and aimed flame can succeed in a war against armed and resolute moles. The naval shell’s flat trajectory, the bomb’s broad parabola, the artillery projectile’s arc, even the loop of the mortar, cannot chase such moles down a tunnel. If they can occasionally collapse the tunnel and the whole position with a direct hit—a rare feat—they have knocked out only one spoke of the wheel. But the wheel still turns, and in the absence of that military miracle—direct hits on call—the man on foot has to go in. With his tanks, if he can.
In southern Okinawa on that April 19 the soldiers of the Twenty-fourth Corps found it tough to take the tanks along. Up-and-down terrain and Ushijima’s careful preparations had made it so. Not long after the 27th Division moved out on the right, a company of tanks ran into a trap at Kakazu Ridge. Mortar spreads and the fire of machine-gun infiltrators cut them off as they sought to pull out of a pass. Without covering infantry, they were defenseless against antitank guns and hurled satchel-charges. Only eight of 30 tanks came out of the Kakazu action. In one day, the 27th had lost almost a third of its armor.
It was not so disastrous in the center and on the left, but the attack was nevertheless slow. During twelve days of seesawing battle toward the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line, the front did not advance two miles. In spots it failed to make a mile. The situation called for fresh, veteran troops, and on April 27 Lieutenant General Buckner ordered the First Marine Division to stand by. The next day he put the entire Third Corps of Marines on alert. The First Division would enter the line on the west on May 1, relieving the 27th. The 27th would move north as garrison troops, relieving the Sixth Marine Division, which would also come south. In the meantime, the 77th Division would relieve the battered 96th. By May 7 the line would be divided between two full corps, Twenty-fourth on the left or east, Third on the right. In that order the divisions would be: 7th Infantry, 77th Infantry; First Marine, Sixth Marine.
On April 30 the men of the First Marine Division stopped harmonizing. They knocked down their shanties and trucked to the south. On May 1 they entered the line. They began patrolling, realigning, marking time until the Sixth came down to take up the slack on their right.
Two miles southeast of them, in a dimly lighted tunnel underneath Shuri Castle, the fiery Isamu Cho was preparing their annihilation.
The top commanders of the 32nd Army had come to the tunnel at the summons of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima. They sat on canvas chairs at a rough flat table covered with maps. Around them the stones of the tunnel glistened with sweat. Water from the moat surrounding medieval Shuri Castle seeped through crevices and dripped on the earthen floor. Sometimes the dim light glinted off the glasses worn by all these men or danced on the collar stars of the numerous generals present.
Isamu Cho, now wearing the double stars of a Japanese lieutenant general, sat near Lieutenant General Ushijima. Cho stared arrogantly into the questioning gaze of Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, the 32nd’s senior staff officer and operations chief. Yahara, outspoken, persuaded by neither the rank nor the rhetoric of Isamu Cho, had raised the single voice of protest against the abortive counterattack of April 12-13. He was alone again in opposing the present plan for a massive counterstroke put forward by Cho and his friend, Lieutenant General Takeo Fujioka, commander of the 62nd Division. Even Lieutenant General Tatsumi Amamiya, no admirer of the boastful Fujioka, supported the plan—for it would put his untested 24th Division into battle at last. Major General Kosuke Wada, who led the 5th Artillery Command, was for it, too. He agreed with the others that the 32nd Army had made an achievement unprecedented in Pacific warfare: it had preserved its main body intact after a month of fighting the Americans. Yahara had said bluntly that this was only because there had been no costly counterattacks, and also because the Americans had not yet hurled their full strength against the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line.
The argument had raged for days, with much bitterness and acrimony between commanders of the 62nd and 24th Divisions. Concurrently with dissent among the top command had come discontent among the troops. The Emperor’s birthday had passed without the promised issue of sweet-potato brandy. The American attack, though slow, was inexorable. For thirty days these men had arisen every morning to look from the heights of their bastion upon bays and anchorages choked with American ships. The Divine Winds had not blown them away. It was difficult even for Japanese soldiers to believe that the American fleet held the bottom half of the ocean—nor could they fail to complain about being left to fight alone only one day’s sail from the homeland.
The situation was difficult, and now, on the night of May 2, Mitsuru Ushijima, a general cast in much the same formal mold as his opponent, Simon Bolivar Buckner, had called for final presentations. Then he would say, “I decide.”
Isamu Cho arose. It was true, he said, that the Americans had not thrown in all their strength. But they
