Strong Men Armed

Marine losses at 2,938 dead or missing and 13,708 wounded; the Army’s at 4,675 and 18,099; and the Navy’s at 4,907 and 4,824. There was little left of Japanese air power after losses of 7,800 planes, against 763 for the Americans; and the sinking of Yamato and 15 other ships meant the end of Nippon’s Navy. Though the American Navy had been staggered with 36 ships sunk and another 368 damaged, there were still plenty left to mount the fall invasion of Kyushu from Okinawa.

So the Great Loo Choo fell to the Americans after eighty-three days of fighting. A few hours after the Marine patrol reached Ara Point, Major General Geiger declared organized resistance to be at an end.

That night Mitsuru Ushijima and Isamu Cho wrote final messages and prepared to kill themselves.

“Our strategy, tactics, and techniques all were used to the utmost,” Ushijima signaled Tokyo. “We fought valiantly, but it was as nothing before the material strength of the enemy.”

Cho wrote: “22nd day, 6th month, 20 year of Showa Era. I depart without regret, fear, shame, or obligations. Army Chief of Staff; Army Lieutenant General Cho, Isamu, age of departure 51 years. At this time and place I hereby certify the foregoing.”

Precise to the end, Isamu Cho arose and vested himself in the white kimono proper for hara- kiri. He joined General Ushijima, who was dressed in full uniform. They sat down to the last banquet, while the roof of their cave shook to the muffled sounds of American grenades exploding above. Behind them, at the mouth of the cave, they could see moonlight shimmering on the sea. They finished eating and drank off toasts of Scotch whisky. They arose.

“Well, Commanding General Ushijima, as the way may be dark, I, Cho, will lead the way.”

“Please do so. I will take along my fan, since it is getting warm.”

They strolled out to the ledge above the sea, General Ushijima calmly fanning himself. They bowed in reverence to the eastern sky. They sat on a white sheet spread over a quilt.

A hundred feet behind them were the American soldiers. They began hurling grenades, unaware that Ushijima and Cho were so close to them.

First Ushijima, then Cho, bared their bellies to the upward thrust of the ceremonial knife, while the adjutant stood by with his saber, awaiting the sight of blood.

Two shouts, two sword flashes, and it was done—and the moon began sinking beneath a sea turning polished black.

17

And when he gets to Heaven,
To Saint Peter he will tell:
“One More Marine reporting, sir—
“I’ve served my time in Hell!”

It was everywhere behind them, this glorious rough epitaph. It had been pinpricked out on a mess pan nailed to a rough cross among the rots and stinks of Guadalcanal. It had been carved into coconut logs forming that dreadful sea wall at Tarawa. Men had spelled it out with cartridges pressed into the damp black earth of the Bougainville rain forest, or scrawled it beneath Stars of David rising from leveled kunai fields in New Britain. Makin knew it, and the hyphenated coral islets of Roi-Namur in the vast atoll of Kwajalein. Eniwetok, Choiseul, New Georgia, and a dozen forgotten islands where only a handful fell. Marines who lived to sail away from Saipan and Tinian, or from Guam, had left this farewell there in memory of those who did not sail. It had fallen from heat-shrivelled lips on Peleliu, had followed the flag that rose at Iwo Jima, and been scratched on a punctured helmet perched on a bayonet stuck in Okinawa mud.

It was the salute of the brave living to the braver dead, it was a Marine’s sad, sardonic “so long” to a fallen buddy. And yet it was also the epitaph of the mighty island empire that was once Japan’s, for the men who earned or wrote these lines were also the men whose long sea charge had now brought that very “Hell” to within 350 miles of Japan herself.

And they were ready to resume the charge. Six Marine divisions were again in training, again preparing for battle, on the sixth of August, 1945, when a great silvery airplane named Enola Gay rose from that very Tinian Island which had been the masterpiece of Marine warfare. It flew to Hiroshima to drop its horrible mushrooming egg. Three days later The Bomb was dropped again—on Nagasaki.

Five more days and Japan surrendered.

Sixteen more days, the thirtieth of August, and transports were sliding through the dawn mists into Tokyo Bay. They carried men of the Second Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment. The ships anchored off Futtsu Point, where massive stone forts flew white flags of surrender. For the last time came the order:

“Land the landing force.”

For the last time came the roaring run inshore, the salt sea spray in the face, the firmer hold on rifle slings; for the last time the grinding of steel keels on beaches, the lurching halt, the banging fall of the ramp and the buckskin-shod feet pelting through surf and sand.

For the first time, Nippon had been invaded. The men in green were forming orderly ranks on Japanese soil and marching on the silent forts to receive the surrendered arms of Japanese soldiers.

The long charge was over and there would be no more epitaphs.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Because this book has been written in a narrative style which might have been defeated by the use of footnotes, I have chosen to explain what needs to be explained, as well as to list a selected bibliography, in this Note.

To begin, all the persons herein are real and their names are real. Middle initials have been dropped because I find letters more ambiguous than numerals and have used only those which have significance, such as the M which explains how Holland M. Smith came to be called Howlin’ Mad or the P which gave Colonel Oliver P. Smith his nickname of “O.P.” General Roy Geiger’s middle initial S, however, has even less meaning than, say, the number 3 —and it will be remembered that George Washington, Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte, to name a few generals, did not use middle initials.

The ranks mentioned here are those held at the time and all distances are given in statute miles, usually rounded off to the nearest zero or hundred to avoid an impression of exactness. Casualties—always very difficult to determine with accuracy —are normally those given in the excellent battle monographs published by the Marine Corps Historical Branch. When these books failed to list casualties for a particular action, I have fallen back on the equally fine histories prepared by the Army’s Office of the Chief of Military History. Almost all the accounts of naval battles, together with ship and naval aircraft losses, are based on the nine volumes of Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II which deal with the Pacific War.

Generally these three sources—the Marine monographs, the Army histories (written, incidentally, by civilian historians), and the Morison volumes—provide the bones of military history on which I have attempted to lay the flesh of men speaking and acting. All three have also been rich in quotations from captured Japanese diaries or battle orders, and I must say frankly that Strong Men Armed could not have been written if these works had not all been published by 1960. Before then, without a research staff of my own, I would have been bogged down in literal tons of classified documents at the various headquarters around Washington and Arlington.

Japanese sources were works such as Kogun, the Japanese Army in the Pacific