Crucible of Hell

Though he later failed as the vice-presidential nominee of the ‘Gold Democrats’ in 1896, the elder Buckner was a hard act to follow. His young son made a start by graduating from the US Army’s military academy at West Point in 1908. But thereafter his career was largely uneventful as he completed two tours of the Philippines, saw no combat in the First World War and spent much of the interwar period as a student or instructor at various military schools, including a final spell as commandant of cadets at West Point. In the latter appointment he was remembered as a martinet, a stern disciplinarian who allowed his cadets few luxuries. ‘Buckner forgets,’ commented one aspiring officer’s parent, ‘cadets are born not quarried.’2

Lacking field experience, Buckner clung to US Army doctrine that artillery played the decisive role in combat. Infantry were needed to find and hold the enemy; but only artillery could destroy it. After war came a second time in December 1941, he was eager to put this theory into practice. But by then he was commanding the army’s Alaska Defense Command, a relative backwater that saw only limited action. In 1943, for example, when amphibious landings recovered the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska from the Japanese, both operations had been navy-led. A frustrated Buckner clashed repeatedly with both the naval commander for the northern Pacific and the civilian authorities in Alaska, the latter objecting to his illegal hunting of walruses.3

Salvation came in the summer of 1944 when Buckner was appointed commander of the new US Tenth Army in Hawaii, a joint army–Marines formation that was intended for the invasion of Formosa. Worried about resupply, he was relieved when the objective was switched from Formosa to the smaller Okinawa; but that still required a completely new plan of assault. Fortunately Buckner had an excellent staff to take care of that, led by Brigadier General E. D. Post who had served with him since West Point. Their relationship, noted a colleague, was ‘very close, almost that of father and son’. It helped that Post had a ‘pleasing personality and a very even temper’, and was a man ‘it would have been hard not to get along with’.4

Under Post were two deputy chiefs of staff: one for the US Army, Brigadier General Lawrence E. Schick; and one for the US Navy/Marines, Brigadier General Oliver P. Smith. Like Post, Schick had served with Buckner in Alaska, and was one of Buck’s boys. Smith was an outsider, joining the Tenth Army’s staff on Hawaii only in early November 1944 after combat stints with the 1st Marine Division on Cape Gloucester (as colonel of the 5th Marines) and Peleliu (assistant division commander). The new job was not one he was looking forward to. ‘It is hard to come back from an operation,’ he wrote, ‘and start over again the whole tedious process of training for a new operation. What is needed is new blood.’5

Smith had grown up in northern California where he attended the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the wartime Marine Corps as a second lieutenant in 1917. He later matriculated from the École supérieure de guerre in France, the first Marine to do so, and returned to teach at the Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, Virginia, where he was known as ‘the Professor’ and an expert in amphibious warfare. Intelligent, easy going and with valuable combat experience, he was the perfect choice as Buckner’s Marine deputy chief of staff. Not least because army–Marine relations were then at a low ebb, following the sacking of Major General Ralph Smith as commander of the US Army’s 27th Division by his Marine superior, Lieutenant General Holland M. ‘Howlin’ Mad’ Smith – the so-called Smith vs Smith controversy – during the Saipan campaign in July 1944. Already ill disposed to the 27th Division for a perceived lack of aggression in a previous battle, Holland Smith accused its men of failing to attack on time and costing Marine lives. Ralph Smith was relieved of his command and ordered off the island, a humiliation that his senior army colleagues – including US Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall – found hard to forgive.

The bad blood probably cost the abrasive Holland Smith the command of the Tenth Army. ‘I found out later,’ wrote Oliver Smith, ‘that both Admiral Spruance and Admiral Turner had recommended that General Holland Smith be given the Okinawa job, but they were overruled by Admiral Nimitz.’6 It was handed instead to the untried Buckner who, in a second snub to Holland Smith, was put in charge of the all-army board of inquiry into Ralph Smith’s sacking. The board eventually – and predictably – ruled in favour of the dismissed officer, though he would never command troops in action again. ‘Saw Holland Smith at Adm[iral] Nimitz’s conference,’ noted Buckner in late August 1944, ‘and he greeted me without much enthusiasm. (He has probably seen my board report to the effect that Ralph Smith’s relief from command was not justified.)’7

It was into this potentially poisonous atmosphere on Hawaii that Oliver Smith arrived on 7 November. Fortunately Admiral Nimitz had helped to clear the air a month earlier by sounding out Buckner on his attitude to the Smith vs Smith controversy. ‘Finding’, wrote Buckner, ‘that I deplored the whole matter and harbored no inter-service ill feeling’, Nimitz ‘announced that I would command the “new joint project”.’8

Smith’s early impressions of his new boss, after they met at army headquarters in Schofield Barracks on 8 November, were mostly positive. ‘He was’, noted Smith, ‘in excellent physical condition: ruddy, heavy-set, but with considerable spring in his step. He had snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes: the eyes were almost hard.’ Though he had ‘surprisingly little troop duty’ and ‘limited’ experience in amphibious operations, he did not lack for ‘character’ and Smith had ‘no reason to feel he would not continue to operate well in a joint undertaking [with the navy]’. While Buckner’s ‘methods and judgements were somewhat inflexible’, wrote Smith, ‘you always knew where you stood’.

It helped that Smith thought highly of Buckner’s right-hand men, Post and Schick, describing the latter – ‘a small, wiry man, quick of speech and action’ – as the ‘finest staff officer with whom I have ever had the pleasure of serving’. But not every aspect of life at Schofield Barracks, sited on a picturesque red-soiled plateau 900 feet above sea level, was to Smith’s liking. He particularly resented Buckner’s ‘fetish’ for ‘physical conditioning’, and his insistence that all his staff officers, many of whom were over fifty, took part. ‘For the older officers,’ noted Smith, ‘the program resulted in broken collarbones, broken arms, sprained ankles and charley horses [cramps in the leg muscles]. Included in the required conditioning were the running of the Combat Course (for which Lieutenant General Buckner held the record), firing all infantry hand and shoulder weapons, soft ball and conditioning hikes.’ One of the latter was eight and a half miles in length, with a climb and descent of 2,000 feet. Recently back from Peleliu, Smith gave it a miss. ‘What I needed was food and relaxation.’

Yet there were limits to even that, and the vibrant social life at Schofield Barracks was not, in Smith’s opinion, ‘an appropriate one for troops preparing for combat’. He added: ‘It is true there were no families present, but there were dances every Wednesday and Saturday evening which were not stag affairs; there were plenty of WACs [Women’s Army Corps], nurses and Red Cross workers. There were dinner parties, beach parties and cocktail parties. At some … the women wore evening gowns. You had the feeling you were half in the war and half out of it.’9

Buckner’s diary backs up Smith’s concern. Hardly a day goes by without him mentioning his attendance at a dinner party or dance, usually in the company of an attractive young woman. One name keeps cropping up: ‘Missy’ Keleher, the wife of a naval officer on duty in the Pacific. A typical entry (for 21 November) reads: ‘Took Missy Keleher … to dinner at Chinese restaurant. Missy wangled a photo of myself and asked me to autograph it with an appropriate message. I did. “To Missy with misgivings.”’

On another occasion, not long before he departed Hawaii for the theatre of war, Buckner took Missy to a dinner and dance at the Wheeler Field Officers’ Club, and then for a nightcap at a fellow officer’s quarters. It was 2:00 a.m. by the time he got home. ‘Moral: Don’t take girls to parties who live too far away if you want any sleep.’ Undoubtedly flattered by Missy’s attention, Buckner’s behaviour towards her might have been, as far as we know, entirely honourable. But the number of evenings he spent in her and other women’s company – often for tête-à-tête dinners – would surely not have gone down well with Adele Buckner, his wife of almost thirty years, and the mother of their three children, if she had known.10

When not carousing, Buckner and his staff were busy planning for Operation Iceberg, the assault on Okinawa. Their first priority was to gather all the geographical, meteorological and demographic information they could find on the island and its people from captured documents and prisoners of war, former residents and old Japanese publications. The bulk of their data came from aerial photographs which, taken by planes 1,200 miles from their bases, were frustratingly small-scale or incomplete. Yet the basic facts they revealed were not in dispute. Okinawa is the largest island in the Ryukyus, a chain that stretches almost 800 miles in a long arc from Kyushu to Formosa, and forms a boundary between the East China Sea and the Pacific. Of these 140 islands, only thirty were inhabited in 1945. The climate is subtropical, with temperatures ranging from 60 degrees Fahrenheit to 85 degrees, heavy rainfall, high humidity and violent typhoons between May and November.

Situated roughly in the centre of the Ryukyus, Okinawa is seventy miles long and from two to eighteen miles wide, running north to south, and covering a distance of 485 square miles. Composed of porous coral rock, it is fringed with reefs, close to shore and rarely more than a mile wide on the western side, but much wider on the eastern side, where the coast is more sheltered.

When Commodore Perry’s black ships first sailed into Naha Port on the west of the island in 1853, Okinawa was a semi-independent country that paid tribute to both China and Japan. Ryukyuan kings had ruled the surrounding islands from their capital at Shuri Castle, to the east of Naha, since the early fifteenth century. But after the entire Ryukyu archipelago was annexed by Japan in 1879, and the monarchy abolished, the Okinawan people became fully integrated into the Japanese governmental, economic and cultural structure. With a similar racial heritage to the Japanese, and resembling them in looks and physique, the Okinawan stock and culture have also been heavily influenced by the Chinese. In 1945 they spoke Luchan, not Japanese, and their predominant religion was an animistic cult that worshipped fire and the hearth, and venerated ancestors.

Most of the 435,000 inhabitants were poor – subsisting on small-scale agriculture and fishing – and much of the useable land in the bottom third of the island was cut into small fields and planted with sugar cane, sweet potatoes, rice and soy beans. This was because northern Okinawa, the two-thirds of the island above the Ishikawa Isthmus, is rugged and mountainous, with a central spine of 1,000 feet or more running the length of the region. Descending from both sides of this ridge are terraces dissected by ravines and watercourses, and ending at the coast in steep cliffs. A similar terrain is found on the Motobu Peninsula, jutting out to the west, where two mountain tracts are separated by a central valley. Covering the whole of this northern area in 1945 were pine forests and dense undergrowth, with only a few poor roads clinging to the western coast.

South of Ishikawa, on the other hand, is a more benign landscape of rolling hills, ravines and escarpments. It contained three-quarters of the population, four airfields and the large towns of Naha, Shuri, Itoman and Yonabaru. Generally aligned east to west, the hills provided a series of natural lines of defence. There were more roads in the south, but mostly country lanes unsuitable for motorised traffic. Drainage was poor, and heavy rains would quickly turn the deep, claylike mud into a quagmire.

The obvious place for a landing was the 9,000-yard stretch of the western coastline, a little south of Ishikawa, known as the Hagushi beaches. Divided by the Bishi River, the beaches ranged from a hundred to 900 yards in length and from ten to forty-five yards in width at low tide. Composed of coral sand, they mostly had at least one exit road and were flanked by a low coastal plain which was dominated by rolling hills. The plain was also the site of two of the island’s four main airfields: Yontan, north of the Bishi, and Kadena to the south.

American estimates of enemy troop strength on Okinawa grew slightly from 48,600 in October 1944 to 65,000 in March 1945. They correctly identified the main infantry formations – the 24th and 62nd Divisions, and the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade – as well as a regiment of tanks and large numbers of heavy artillery pieces and anti-tank guns. These forces were grouped, according to aerial photos, in at least three main areas of defence: Naha, the Hagushi beaches and the Yonabaru–Nakagusuku Bay area on the lower east coast. It was assumed, in the event of the landings being successful, that the main line of enemy resistance would be across the narrow waist of land south of Hagushi.11

Operation Iceberg’s initial landing plan – known as Plan Fox – was to disembark troops at Hagushi on the west coast where, as Oliver Smith explained, ‘a very limited advance would put in our hands the Yontan and Kadena airfields’. The plan included the capture of the island of Keise Shima, just off the west coast of Okinawa, prior to Love Day to allow the citing of heavy artillery to support the main landings. Eight infantry divisions* were assigned to the operation: the XXIV Corps of the US Army (7th, 27th and 96th Divisions); the III Amphibious Corps of the US Marine Corps (1st, 2nd and 6th Marine Divisions); and two extra US Army divisions, the 77th and 81st, in floating reserve. When support units were added, this brought the landing-force strength up to 183,000. Buckner wanted an additional 70,000 service troops. He was refused on the grounds that the troops were not available and, even if they had been, both the shipping and beach capacity were inadequate.12

On 1 November 1944, Plan Fox and an ‘alternate plan’ to land on the south-east coast of Okinawa were presented to Vice Admiral Kelly Turner, commanding the amphibious task force and Buckner’s immediate superior. Described by one colleague as ‘pig-headed and determined’, Turner was a talented naval officer but not easy to get along with. Born in Portland, Oregon in 1885, the son of a rancher and sometime printer, he had graduated fifth from the US Naval Academy class of 1908. His varied postings since then included battleships in the First World War, naval aviation in the 1920s and the War Plans Division from 1940 to December 1941, where, as director, he said it was ‘probable’ Japan’s next act of aggression would lead to war with the United States (the statement was appropriated by President Roosevelt who substituted ‘possible’ for ‘probable’). Turner then blotted his copybook by failing to pass on to Admiral Kimmel, the naval commander at Pearl Harbor, intercepted Japanese communications that pointed strongly to an imminent attack on the Pacific Fleet’s base at Pearl Harbor. Kimmel later claimed that had he known, he would have maintained a much higher level of alert and the fleet would not have been taken by surprise† on 7 December 1941.13

Since then, Turner had led a string of successful amphibious assaults in the Pacific, including Guadalcanal, the Russell Islands, Tarawa and Makin, the Marshall Islands, Tinian, Guam and Saipan, and was Nimitz’s first choice to do the same for Okinawa. A ferocious worker who would not suffer fools gladly, Turner was known to chew out his subordinates. Which is why, when Buckner’s staff told him on 1 November 1944 they had no confidence in the alternative plan, and were presenting it only because they thought there should be one, he loudly disagreed. From the navy’s perspective the alternative was preferable because the approach was through open sea, whereas Plan Fox meant sailing through the Kerama Islands just west of Okinawa. Even with these islands in our hands, said Turner, the navigational aspects of the approach would be more difficult, and the weather conditions harder to predict. He therefore requested a reconsideration of the east coast landing and a possible feint at Hagushi. Despite Turner’s request, wrote Oliver Smith, ‘the Plan Fox Estimate was distributed to all hands on November 5th’.14

Love Day was delayed twice during the next month: from 1 March to 15 March, and then to 1 April, the final date. This was partly down to weather concerns, and partly the availability of shipping. Admiral Turner, meanwhile, came round to Plan Fox after he requested an in-depth study that described the Hagushi beaches as the ‘best’ in Southern Okinawa ‘for the purpose’. His proviso was that, in addition to Keise Shima, the Kerama Islands were also seized seven or eight days prior to Love Day ‘to provide a much needed protected anchorage where supporting ships could be refueled and rearmed and thus assure uninterrupted support of the landing’.15 This, of course, meant the allocation of part of an infantry division, the 77th, to take the Keramas, a diversion of resources that Buckner opposed, but could do nothing about. Turner ‘scattered too much’, he noted in his diary. ‘I prefer greater concentration on the main objective.’16

For the assault phase of the operation, Buckner would be known as Commanding General, Expeditionary Troops, or CTF 56. His immediate superior was Vice Admiral Turner, commanding Joint Expeditionary Force 51, who in turn reported to Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, commanding the US 5th Fleet (CTF 50), the victor of two of the most significant naval battles of the war, Midway and the Philippine Sea, whose calmness in moments of crisis had earned him the nickname ‘Electric Brain’. A small, trim man of simple tastes – he liked classical music and hot chocolate in the morning – Spruance was surprisingly modest, putting his success down ‘largely to the fact that I am a good judge of men. I am lazy, and have never done things myself that I could get someone to do for me.’17

With the chain of command settled, and his assault plans well in hand, Buckner saw in the New Year of 1945 in characteristic fashion by accompanying a young woman to a party given by her aunt, an artist who lived in a house on the valley road ‘built over a pool with a 10-ft waterfall’. The quality of the paintings on display was, according to Buckner, mixed: ‘Many good and some bad.’18

His deputy Oliver Smith had more serious concerns. First, how not to alienate Buckner over the issue of who would present the Legion of Merit that Smith had been awarded for outstanding service at Peleliu. As the award had been forwarded via the Tenth Army, Buckner would normally have done the presentation. But Smith thought it more appropriate to receive it from General Holland Smith, Buckner’s hated rival, because he had signed the citation. Luckily Brigadier General Schick agreed with Smith, and the medal was duly awarded by the Marine general at the Fleet Marine Force HQ on 1 January.19

It was also around now that Smith became aware of a seemingly minor decision of Buckner’s that would have, in time, the gravest consequences: his plan for all Tenth Army general officers to wear a metal star on their combat helmets. Smith heard about it from Major Frank Hubbard, Buckner’s recently appointed aide, who came to take his order. ‘I told him’, wrote Smith, ‘that in the type of warfare encountered in the Pacific, it had been found advisable for generals to hide their identity if they valued their skins … There were always hidden Japanese snipers to fire on persons carrying field glasses or other equipment identifying them as officers.’

According to Smith, a ‘compromise was finally reached by which the helmet was untouched, but small white stars were painted on the liner; this on the theory that the helmet without the liner would be worn only in the rear areas’. That may have been true for Buckner’s subordinates; but the general himself would insist on going through the campaign wearing a liner-less helmet with three distinctive metal stars.20

* Both army and Marine divisions were based on a triangular structure of three infantry regiments, nine battalions (three per regiment), twenty-seven companies (three per battalion), eighty-one platoons (three per company) and 243 squads (three per platoon). They also included support units of artillery, engineers, armour, pioneers and service troops. Marine divisions numbered around 26,000 men; army divisions about 2,000 men fewer.

† The aerial attack by carrier-borne Japanese planes sank four US Navy battleships and badly damaged another three; fortunately the US Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carriers were not at Pearl Harbor and escaped. A day later, shortly before America declared war on Japan, President Roosevelt condemned the unprovoked attack in Congress as ‘a day that will live in infamy’.

3

‘Everybody go home!’

10 October 1944 was ‘a beautiful day with soft rays of sunshine’, remembered 13-year-old Yoshiko Sakumoto. ‘I never dreamed that such a bucolic town as Naha would be raided from the air without warning.’ She was on her way to school with her brother, and had just reached Tomari Bridge, when she saw about twenty people, including several Japanese soldiers, looking towards Naha Port. They were watching three or four low-flying planes approach the port and drop some black objects. ‘With booming explosions,’ wrote Yoshiko, ‘black smoke and flames soared high into the sky. Then gasoline tanks at Naha Port blew up one after the other.’

Thinking it must be an air-raid exercise, some of the bystanders seemed confused. ‘It’s unthinkable’, said one, ‘to practise with real bombs.’ But the soldiers knew the truth. ‘Everybody go home!’ they yelled. Yoshiko did as she was told, pulling her brother along with her.

Born in a modest house in Naha’s port area of Tomari, the daughter of a shipbuilder and a maker of panama hats, Yoshiko Sakumoto had experienced a typical Okinawan childhood: celebrating the many festivals with sweet dumplings, playing with bouncy rubber balls decorated with painted flowers, and having her hands tattooed at the age of eight, as local custom decreed. But by then she had experienced the grief of losing two siblings: a younger sister to encephalitis, and a brother who drowned in the sea.

The gloom was lifted five years later by the birth of another brother, Kōkichi, making three children in all. ‘I was 11,’ wrote Yoshiko, ‘and my younger brother, Kōzen, was 6. With the youngest boy, Kōkichi, we three grew rapidly and stayed healthy.’ Their diet included rice, sweet potatoes, fresh fish, vegetables, seaweed, and, for special occasions, fish cakes, meat and eggs. ‘Our eating habits were simple, but everybody had enough to eat … Neighbours were thoughtful, warm, generous and forgiving. The island was small, but the islanders’ hearts were many times bigger.’

Even before the war began, Japanese culture was making inroads into Okinawan life. Expected to speak Japanese at school, children were forced to wear punishment placards if they slipped into local dialect. Yoshiko’s mother and neighbours tried to hold back the tide by wearing traditional Ryukyuan kimonos and conversing in Okinawan. But her children could not help being caught up in the excitement of Japan’s military victories. On hearing of the Japanese navy’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Yoshiko felt ‘very proud’ and ‘admired the brave Japanese soldiers’. Until that point, she noted, ‘Japan had never experienced defeat and we had a feeling of superiority … People were intoxicated as if at a festival.’ By the start of 1942 she was ‘burning with patriotism’ and pledged she would do her ‘utmost for the nation’.