Strong Men Armed

kamikaze to strike and stagger an American fleet as none had been shaken before, for the Great Loo Choo to pour out some 15 inches of water during seventeen days of storm and torrential rain, for the Japanese to attempt airborne raids on the airfields, and for the month of May to become a mad compound of mud, misery and death.

Even as General Geiger’s Third Corps took over the western half of the Tenth Army’s front, the rains came rushing down with an intensity reminiscent of New Britain. By late afternoon of May 7 they had begun to make that mud which was nowhere to be matched, which was to become a factor in the down-island attack.

Okinawa mud was everywhere, in the ears, under the nails, inside leggings or squeezed coarse and cold between the toes. It got into a man’s weapon, it was in his food and sometimes he could feel it grinding like emery grains between his teeth. Whatever was slotted, pierced, open or empty received this mud. Wounds also. Men prayed not to get hit while rain fell and made mud. It embarrassed the bulldozer and made pick-and-shovel men of those haughty tank Marines. Some days it denied the Americans the use of roads altogether, and Marines attacking Shuri only a few miles from base had to be supplied by air-drop. Some days it was hardly possible to walk in it. Two strides and a man’s shoes were coated, two more and they seemed as though encased in lead, another two and it was easier to slip out of the shoes and walk barefooted. Engineers around the airfield threw their shoes away, working with sacking drawn over bare feet and tied around the knees.

It was this mud which bogged down the entire Tenth Army on the eighth of May, the day on which smeared and dripping soldiers and Marines received the splendid news that Germany had surrendered.

“So what?” they snorted.

The death of Hitler and the fall of the Third Reich had as much meaning to them as the pardon of one condemned man might have to another still under sentence. General Ushijima and the Japanese 32nd Army were their only concern, and at that very moment Ushijima was taking advantage of the rain to strengthen his flanks while his men were reminding the Americans of reality by striking them with deliberate artillery shots fired from carefully husbanded guns and shells. Ushijima reinforced his strong-points over a 40-foot-wide concrete highway running east-west behind his barrier line. He settled down to that grim war of attrition urged on him by Colonel Yahara, and because of this, as well as the rain, the attack to the south moved slowly on the following day, May 9.

As it did, the kamikaze’s scourging of the invasion fleet rose to almost that pitch of destruction predicted for it by the Japanese High Command. Nowhere was the ordeal more terrible and sustained than among those small ships of the radar picket line.

Here, perhaps mistaking destroyers for battleships and minesweepers for cruisers, the kamikaze and the baka struck in massed hundreds. Men were horribly burned. They were blown into the ocean, either to drown or pass agonizing hours awaiting rescue and the ministrations of a corpsman. Those who survived the suiciders’ screaming dives went for days on end without sleep, their nerves exposed and quivering like wires stripped of insulation. Men in the boiler rooms worked in fierce heat. The superheaters built to give quick pressure needed for sudden high-speed maneuvering under aerial attack were often kept running three or four days at a time, though they had been made for intermittent use. It had to be that way, for the war off Okinawa was war at a moment’s notice. Very little time separated that moment when radar screens clouded with pips and the next when the kamikaze came plunging through the ack-ack.

Following them down were those Marine Corsair pilots who had come to Okinawa to fly close-up support but had been called to the rescue of the radar picket line instead. Even with ammunition expended, they rode the suiciders down, forcing them away from their targets and into the water—even going after them with their propellers, as Lieutenant Robert Klingman did in the battle of the frozen machine guns.

That was the dogfight fought at over 40,000 feet among a Japanese two-seater Nick fighter and two Corsairs piloted by Klingman and Captain Kenneth Reusser. On combat air patrol over Ie Shima on May 10 they spotted the vapor trail of the Japanese at 25,000 feet. They chased him, climbing steadily from 10,000 altitude until, after a pursuit of 185 miles, firing off most of their ammunition to lighten their load, they caught up with the Nick at 38,000 feet.

They closed.

Reusser shot up all his ammunition in damaging the Japanese’s left wing and left engine. Klingman bored in to within 50 feet and pressed his gun button. His guns were frozen. He drove in, his propellers whirling. They chopped up the rudder and left it dangling. In the Nick’s rear cockpit the gunner was banging his fists on his own frozen guns. The Corsair’s big propellers chewed on. Klingman turned and came back for another pass. He cut off the rudder and loosened the right stabilizer. He was running out of gas. He decided he didn’t have enough to make Okinawa anyway, and turned for a third pass. He cut off the Nick’s stabilizer. The plane went into a spin and at 15,000 feet it lost both wings and plunged into the East China Sea.

Klingman started down, losing his oxygen at 18,000 feet, and his power at 10,000. But he landed at Kadena Field, dead-stick and on his belly, his wings and fuselage sewn with bullet holes and pieces of the destroyed Nick in his cowling.

Next day Klingman’s fellow pilots were whirling among 150 Japanese planes that struck the radar picket lines, coming to the aid of little destroyers Evans and Hugh W. Hadley in one of the classic ship-airplane battles of World War Two.

For an hour and a half without letup Evans and Hadley fought off 50 kamikaze. Hadley alone shot down 23 of them while Evans claimed 15. The Marines from Yontan and Kadena knocked another 19 out of the skies. Commander Baron Mullaney of Hadley called for Marines to help him. Back came the squadron leader’s answer: “I’m out of ammunition but I’m sticking with you.” He did, flying straight into a flurry of 10 kamikaze coming at Hadley fore and aft, trying to head them off—while other Marines of his squadron rode down through the ack-ack with stuttering guns. They were not always successful, for both of these tough little ships took four kamikaze hits apiece. But they survived to be towed to that anchorage in Kerama Retto which had become a vast hospital ward for stricken and maimed American ships, and there Commander Mullaney could write this tribute to the Yontan and Kadena fliers: “I am willing to take my ship to the shores of Japan if I could have these Marines with me.”

But the commander’s ship would be a long time repairing, as would dozens of others which had limped or been towed to Kerama Retto. It had been because of this terrible loss among picket ships, as well as mounting casualties among the big vessels of the fleet, that Admiral Turner had asked General Buckner to speed up his drive to the south. Buckner had agreed. He had set May 11, the very day of Hadley’s ordeal, as the date for the Tenth Army to attack all along the line.

On that day the attack rolled forward in massive frontal assault. In its numbers and in the fact that it was being fought on foot, it was similar to those great offensives in France during World War One. But in its terrain and in the quick splintering off of its actions it was as unlike France as battle could be. It was mountain warfare on the broad scale. Each of these four divisions in line were fighting for a specific height: the refreshed 96th Infantry, which had relieved the 7th Infantry on the left, struck out for Conical Hill; the 77th Infantry fought for Shuri Castle; the First Marine bucked at Shuri Heights; and the Sixth Marine marched on the Sugar Loaf.

Like the terrible Meatgrinder of Iwo Jima, the Sugar Loaf of Okinawa was not one hill but a complex of three. Coming down from the north the men of the Sixth Marine Division saw Sugar Loaf as an oblong of about 50 feet in height, protected to its left rear by the Half-Moon and to its right rear by the Horseshoe, a long ridge stuffed with mortars. Commanding their approach from the left was Shuri Heights, also stuffed with gunners and many of them able to hit Sugar Loaf.

To attempt to get at Sugar Loaf was to be hit by the others. To strike at the others was to be hit by Sugar Loaf. But this was not suspected until the main position was reached on the morning of May 14, after a fighting crossing of the Asa River and steady grinding down of smaller hills guarding the approaches.

On that May 14 most of the morning was spent evacuating Marines stricken while crossing the flat open ground approaching that harmless-looking loaf of earth. In the afternoon a charge with supporting tanks was driven back when three of four tanks were knocked out and artillery from Sugar’s front, left-rear and rear fell among the riflemen. A second assault before dusk reached Sugar Loaf’s base. But of 150 Marines from the Second Battalion, Twenty-second, who began it—only 40 reached the hill. They were exhausted. They were out of supplies. It was