Strong Men Armed

were doing so now. There was a new Marine division in the line, the First, the hated butchers of Guadalcanal. The moment to destroy this fresh power was opportune. Strike them now and annihilate them before the Americans can grind down to the main line. Careful, full-scale counterattack, not the foolish splendor of the banzai, would do it. There must be help from the kamikaze, then massed artillery fire with the troops attacking all along the line. The fresh 24th would be hurled at the center, would open a hole through which the 44th Brigade would pour in a thrust to the west coast. Then the 44th would wheel south and the First Marine Division would be isolated, then annihilated. Twenty-fourth Corps would be rolled up. There should also be counterlandings on both flanks. The 26th Shipping Engineer Regiment would embark from Naha in barges, small boats and native canoes to strike the rear of the Marine division. Later, the youths of the 26th, 28th and 29th Sea Raiding Squadrons would cross the reef and wade ashore to help the engineers. A similar counterlanding would strike the rear of the 7th Infantry Division on the east. It was a good plan, detailed, realistic. Even Colonel Yahara could agree that Cho’s tactics were excellent. It was his strategy that was bad.

“To take the offensive with inferior forces against absolutely superior enemy forces is reckless and will only lead to certain defeat,” Yahara said. “We must continue the current operation, calmly recognizing its final destiny— for annihilation is inevitable no matter what is done—and maintain to the bitter end the principle of a strategic holding action. If we should fail, the period of maintaining a strategic holding action, as well as the holding action for the decisive battle for the homeland, will be shortened. Moreover, our forces will inflict but small losses on the enemy, while on the other hand, scores of thousands of our troops will have been sacrificed in vain as victims of the offensive.”

Yahara sat down.

It was now up to Ushijima.

He nodded to Cho.

The attack would begin at dawn on May 4. Before that, the flank counterlandings would be launched. Before them the artillery would commence, and before everything would come the kamikaze.

The Japanese aerial assaults began at six o’clock on the night of May 3. Once again, the bombers sought to get at the rich pickings in the Hagushi Anchorage, but 36 of them were shot down and the rest forced to unload at high altitude, with little damage. Only the suicide-diving kamikaze broke through. They sank destroyer Little and an LSM, while damaging two mine-layers and an LCS. After midnight, 60 bombers struck Tenth Army rear areas, coming in scattering “window” or streamers of metal foil to cloud radar screens with blips of nonexistent aircraft. Terrible antiaircraft fire rose in crisscrossing streams of light, as though a million narrow-beamed searchlights were aimed into the night, and the bombers dropped their loads aimlessly—though some of them landed in a Marine evacuation hospital.

An hour later Marine amtanks guarding Machinato Airfield on the west coast fired at voices on the beach. American cruisers, destroyers and gunboats on “flycatcher” patrol shot at squat Japanese barges sliding darkly upcoast from Naha. The barges lost their way. Instead of landing far enough north to take the Marines in their rear, they veered inshore and blundered into the outposts of B Company, First Marines.

The Japanese sent up a screeching and gobbling of battle cries and the surprised Marines sprang to their guns. All up and down the sea wall the battle raged, with Marine amtracks waddling out to sea and coming in again to grind the Japs to pieces between two fires. Some 500 Japanese died in this futile west-flank landing.

The east-flank landings came to the same annihilating end. Navy patrol boats sighted the Japanese craft. They fired at them and turned night into day with star-shells. Soldiers of the 7th Division’s Reconnaissance Troop joined the sailors to complete the destruction of 400 men.

At dawn, the main attack began.

It went straight to the doom which Colonel Yahara had predicted. Wave after wave of the 24th Division’s men shuffled forward to death in that gray dawn, moving among their own artillery shells, taking this risk in hopes of getting in on the Americans. But the soldiers of the 7th and 77th Divisions held firm—while American warships, 16 battalions of division artillery and 12 battalions of heavier corps artillery plus 134 airplanes, smothered the enemy in a wrathful blanket of steel and explosive. Ships as big as the 14-inch-gunned New York and Colorado, as small as gunboats with 20-millimeter cannons, ranged up and down the east coast firing at the Japanese on call.

Across the island, the kamikaze dove again on ships in the Hagushi Anchorage, again falling on the luckless small vessels of the radar picket screen. With them were the baka or “foolish” bombs, those piloted, rocket-fired suicide missiles flown to the target area beneath the bellies of twin-engined bombers. When a baka’s pilot had sighted his victim, he was released from his mother plane with a swooshing of rockets. The bakas were well named. Clumsy, with low fuel capacity and piloted by ill-trained suiciders, they seldom hit anything. This May 4 one of the bakas hit the light mine-layer Shea and set it temporarily on fire. But the kamikaze sank two more destroyers, Luce and Morrison, as well as two LSM’s, while damaging the carrier Sangamon, the cruiser Birmingham, another pair of destroyers, a minesweeper and an LCS. Again, they failed to get at the cargo and transport ships. And they lost 95 planes.

Ashore, Isamu Cho’s massive counterthrust was being broken by that very material power for which Mitsuru Ushijima had shown such great respect. Much of the Japanese assault died a’borning. Sometimes the Japanese closed, but rarely. There were seesaw battles up and down some of the ridges held by the 77th, but they ended with the soldiers either in command of their previous position or holding new ground farther inside the Japanese territory. One battalion of the Japanese 24th Division got behind the 77th on the left, but it was annihilated by a reserve battalion of the 7th Division in a three-day fight. Otherwise the 24th Division never punched that hole through which the 44th Brigade was to race and isolate the First Marine Division.

And the First began attacking on the morning of May 4. Even as the soldiers on their left bore the brunt of Cho’s big sally, these Marines were battling toward the key bastion of Shuri to the southeast. They scored gains of up to 400 yards. Next day they attacked again, once more pushing the Japanese back —even though their advance was made more costly by the fact that they were up against rested battalions of the Japanese 62nd Division which had not joined the counterassault. By the night of May 5 the Marines had picked up another 300 yards, and by that night also Lieutenant General Isamu Cho’s massive stroke had been completely shattered. Those two days of fighting had cost the Japanese 6,227 dead. The 7th and 77th Divisions had lost 714 men killed or wounded while holding the line, the First Marine Division had taken losses of 649 men in the more costly business of attack. Next day the First gained another 300 yards, and added a fourth Medal of Honor winner to its rolls since coming into the line on May 1. Corporal John Fardy had smothered a grenade with his life, as had Pfc. William Foster on May 1 and Sergeant Elbert Kinser on the fourth. Two days before that Corpsman Robert Bush had risked his life to give plasma to a wounded officer, driving off a Japanese rush with pistol and carbine, killing six of the enemy and refusing evacuation though badly wounded.

There would be more Medals of Honor won in the days to come. The First Division by that night had come against Ushijima’s main line, as had the soldiers on their left. In front of the First was the western half of the Shuri bastion. To their right was Naha, and this would be assigned to the Sixth Marine Division next day. In the sector of both these Marine divisions were systems of interlocking fortified ridges such as those encountered on Iwo Jima. Nor would the way be made easy here by further counterattack.

A change had taken place at Shuri Castle. In tears, Lieutenant General Ushijima had promised Colonel Yahara that from now on he would listen to no one but him. The Ushijima-Cho relationship had ended in the recrimination of a red and useless defeat. Isamu Cho argued no longer. He became stoic.

From now on, said General Cho, only time stood between the 32nd Army and ultimate destruction.

15

Time, yes—time for 60,000 men of the 32nd Army to set a high price on their ultimate destruction, for the