Islands of the Damned

we came up on one we’d all gather around a circle daring each other to grab him. Of course when that rascal came charging, we all gave him plenty of space.

All this time we were listening to the Armed Forces Radio Service, so we got word whenever the Marines hit another island. I didn’t know how many of those islands there were out there, but I knew every one of them was on the way to Tokyo. We’d gone from Guadalcanal in 1942 to Tarawa, to Kwajalein, Saipan, Guam and Peleliu. When we returned to Pavuvu from maneuvers, the Third, Fourth, and Fifth divisions invaded Iwo Jima. We listened closely to every news report. Once again the Japs had holed up in caves and fought to the last man. It sounded a lot like what we had been through on Peleliu, but shorter and with three times the casualties. We knew we would be next. And we knew we were in for a helluva fight.

In February we went back to Guadalcanal for two more weeks of exercises and maneuvers off Tassafaronga Point, where the Navy had suffered a big defeat by the Japs in 1942. They worked us even harder, adding cliff climbing to our exercises because, they said, we would be climbing a seawall to get onshore at our next destination. We camped in what had been the Third Division’s bivouac before they left for Iwo Jima and hoped that wasn’t an omen.

During our stay on Guadalcanal some of us discovered the Seabees’ mess hall, where the chow was better and more abundant than what the Marines had been feeding us. The Seabees were pretty generous, allowing us to join the chow line after they had been through.

T. L. Hudson—“Peaches”—and I discovered the PX at Henderson Field, where we could buy ice cream bars, something we’d never seen on Pavuvu. They were four inches long, two inches wide and half an inch thick, covered with chocolate, and they cost a nickel. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven. T.L. and I would get in line and buy one each—they’d only sell you one at a time. We’d eat those then get in line and get another one. Then we’d come back around again. They never caught on or they didn’t mind. Either way, we made four or five trips through that line.

We almost didn’t make it off of Guadalcanal. At the end of the last day of maneuvers, our squad waited on the beach for the Higgins boat that was to take us back out to our mother ship, the USS McCracken. We were dog tired. The sun was getting lower and lower until we were the last bunch left on the beach. The wind had come up and the sea was getting choppy. Finally the boat came nosing in and dropped its ramp on the sand. We climbed aboard wearily and stowed our weapons. The bay was full of ships, and we passed several on our way out, bouncing on the waves. I looked down and saw water sloshing beneath the deck. We were overloaded and taking on water. I went forward and told the coxswain, “We better get this thing to a ship.” He took one look and turned toward the nearest ship. Meanwhile the water was coming up under our feet and the Higgins boat was riding lower and lower in the waves. The coxswain started the bilge pumps. We pulled alongside an attack transport and yelled for help. They yelled back, asking where we were from and what was the problem. Our coxswain explained that we were from the McCracken and we were taking on water and they threw a couple lines down to us. The water was creeping up our ankles now. As our boat started going down we got the lines attached. We scrambled up the cargo net and spent the night on the transport. The next morning a Higgins boat took us back to the McCracken.

* * *

Things were moving faster. The McCracken took us not to Pavuvu, but to Banika, where we spent a week loading ships and getting the usual round of inoculations that come before a major campaign. Troopships began appearing offshore. On March 14 we boarded the McCracken again and the next morning sailed out of the harbor and north to Ulithi.

Ulithi had been secured without a fight by the Army’s Eighty-first Wildcat Division about a week after we went ashore at Peleliu. It was really a cluster of small islands surrounding a deepwater port, where the fleet for our next operation was coming together.

We knew by now we were headed for Okinawa. For once they didn’t wait until we got on board ship to tell us. Scotty showed us a map of the island. It was only 350 miles from Tokyo.

Now we understood why they had pushed street fighting and tank warfare in our training. Unlike Cape Gloucester and Peleliu, Okinawa had a lot of open cultivated ground, including not just villages but real towns.

If we hadn’t been told, we would have known anyway that this was going to be bigger than any operation we’d had so far. From the deck of the McCracken all we could see was ship after ship, hundreds of them spread all the way out to the far horizon. It was as though they had assembled the entire U.S. Navy at Ulithi, from the biggest battleships and aircraft carriers down to escorts and patrol boats.

While we were at Ulithi, the battered hulk of the USS Franklin limped in and docked right next to us. I was standing only thirty or forty feet away. While we had been under way to Ulithi on March 19, a single Jap bomber had appeared out of the clouds and dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs on the carrier. She was just fifty miles off Kyushu, the westernmost of Japan’s main islands. The bombs went right through the flight deck and exploded in the hangars, setting off ammunition and fuel. Almost 725 of her crew died and more than 250 were injured. We heard that many of the wounded were still on board.

The survivors fought the raging fires, dodging exploding bombs and ammo, and managed to bring the ship hundreds of miles into Ulithi. She was listing 13 degrees to starboard when they got her docked, so we had a close-up view from the deck of the McCracken. Her sailors were crowded on her ruined flight deck, leaning against the tilt. Smoke still oozed from her side where the explosions had torn holes the size of a garage door. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the Franklin and her crew had been through. I guess every sailor who ever lived is also a firefighter. I had watched them hold drills on our transports. Every man knew exactly what to do and when to do it. I thought, At least on land we could dig foxholes and had some room to maneuver. On shipboard, there’s nowhere to go.

While we were in port at Ulithi a telegram came for me, from Jewett, Texas.

My younger brother, Joseph Delton Burgin, had joined the Army the year before and after basic training had been sent to France. Before he enlisted, J.D. had written to me asking about the Marine Corps. I had written back to discourage him. I thought he might have an easier time of it than I did if he joined the Navy. But I guess we were all in harm’s way, whether we were in the Marines or the Army or Navy.

Typical of J.D., he made up his own mind.

He was almost four years younger than me, always quiet, not a hell-raiser. But he would not be pushed around. When someone got in his face, you’d see those black eyes snapping in anger. When he was starting first grade, Momma made him a pair of overalls out of uncolored denim from cotton sacks. She had dyed them blue, so they looked like regular overalls. One morning she saw him sitting out on the porch cutting something with a pair of scissors.

“What are you doing out there, J.D.?”

“These overalls are hot, Momma. I’m cutting holes in them.”

She chased him all the way across the yard and under the fence, where he got hung up on the barbed wire.

J.D. and I used to go fishing together, and possum hunting at night with the dogs and a .410 shotgun. He was with me when I shot my first deer.

According to the telegram, J.D. had been killed by German artillery in Alsace-Lorraine. An Army officer wrote my folks that it had been sudden. J.D. hadn’t felt a thing.

* * *

Nights on the deck of the McCracken were cool and pleasant as we sailed north from Ulithi. We could almost forget we were getting closer to Japan. But a briefing from K Company’s officers sobered us right up. Okinawa would be the bloodiest campaign of the war, they warned us. We could expect 80 to 85 percent casualties.

Going in we would face heavy fire from a large Jap gun on the beach. Enemy paratroopers might drop in behind us, and there would probably be a banzai attack during our first night ashore. We were also facing a new tactic. Starting in October of 1944, Japanese pilots had been deliberately crashing their planes into American warships in a kind of aerial banzai attack.

The convoy that left Ulithi March 27 was the largest ever assembled in the Pacific. We had almost 1,300 ships of all kinds and more than 180,000 men from five Army divisions—the Seventy-seventh, Ninety-sixth, Twenty- seventh, Seventh and Eighty-first—and the First, Second and Sixth Marine divisions. We were facing at least 100,000 Jap troops who, we knew, would fight to the last man. Their back was to the wall.