Crucible of Hell

At the end of the campaign, Dick was asked by his company commander if he wanted to be considered for a field commission. He agreed, and passed the initial assessment. But when told he would be reassigned to infantry, he changed his mind. ‘We all knew that another battle was shaping up,’ he wrote, ‘and the thought of being in the middle of it on foot really turned me off. I had found a niche in the tanks, and didn’t want to take any chances of missing combat in one of the monsters.’ Eighteen of Charlie Company’s ‘monsters’ were now in the bowels of Gunston Hall as she headed north from Leyte, and acted as useful ballast when a typhoon hit on day three, though the ship still ‘rolled and plunged like never before’. A day later, the skies cleared and the worst was over.3

By then, the capture of the Kerama Islands by the 77th Division was almost complete. On the morning of 26 March, once the sea had been cleared of mines and the beaches declared free of underwater obstacles, combat teams from the 305th, 306th and 307th Infantry Regiments landed on the islands of Aka, Geruma, Hokaji, Zamami and Yakabi where they met, for the most part, only minor opposition, much of which quickly melted into the interior. More landings took place on the 27th, including that of the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 306th Infantry on Tokashiki, at six miles long and one mile wide the largest of the group. By the evening of the 29th, all the islands were in American hands, as were 121 prisoners and 300 suicide boats* that were meant to be used against the American fleet. A further 530 Japanese soldiers had been killed, at a relatively minor cost of thirty-one American dead and eighty-one wounded.4

Buckner was on the Eldorado heading north when he heard the good news. ‘Word came’, he wrote his wife, ‘that the Kerama Retto had been occupied according to plan with very few casualties … twelve strangled native women were found in one cave.’5 In fact, many more civilians were dead – the victims of Japanese mendacity and their own naivety. What happened on Tokashiki, in particular, is almost beyond belief; but it would be repeated many times on Okinawa itself, forever haunting the men who survived the months-long battle.

An eyewitness to – and an unwilling participant in – the unfolding tragedy was Shigeaki Kinjo, a 16-year-old who lived with his mother and three siblings in a village in the south of Tokashiki. On 26 March, when the Americans began their landings on neighbouring islands, they and other civilians were ordered ‘to move to Nishiyama, in the north of the island, where the Japanese soldiers had their camp’. They walked after dark in pouring rain, to avoid American shells, and by morning had reached their destination. There they found themselves in a crowd of ‘about 700 or 800 people’ all ‘packed together tightly’ with many women and children crying. Surrounded by Japanese soldiers, they ‘feared that something bad was about to happen’.

Eventually the village head – himself an ex-soldier – told everyone to shout out ‘Banzai!’ (‘Long life!’) to the emperor three times. ‘We knew’, wrote Kinjo, ‘that this was what Japanese soldiers did when they were going to die on the battlefield. The village head didn’t exactly tell us to commit suicide, but by telling us to shout banzai, we knew what was meant.’

To assist the killings, Japanese soldiers began distributing hand grenades with instructions on how to use them. But there were not enough to go round, and Kinjo’s family did not get one. When they had all been handed out, ‘that was taken as a sign and the killing began immediately’. After the grenades had been detonated, most people were still alive so men began to use clubs and scythes on their families and each other. It was, remembered Kinjo, ‘the father’s role to kill his own family, but my father had already died’. So Kinjo and his older brother took on the grisly task. His memory of how they killed their mother is understandably hazy: ‘maybe we tried to use rope at first, but in the end we hit her over the head with stones. I was crying as I did it and she was crying too.’

They then moved on to their siblings: a girl about to enter the fourth grade of elementary school, and a brother in first grade. ‘I don’t remember exactly how we killed our little brother and sister but it wasn’t difficult because they were so small – I think we used a kind of spear. There was wailing and screaming on all sides as people were killing and being killed.’

With their siblings dead, they were discussing how they would kill each other when a boy of Kinjo’s age ran up and said: ‘Let’s fight the Americans and be killed by them, rather than dying like this.’

Kinjo knew they would be shot instantly if they tried to attack the heavily armed Americans. Yet he thought it a better way to die than by each other’s hand, as did his brother, so they ‘left that place of screaming and death’ to ‘find the Americans’. Fortunately for them, the first person they came across was a Japanese soldier. ‘We were shocked,’ recalled Kinjo, ‘and wondered why he was still alive when we had been told to kill each other. Why was it that only the locals had to commit suicide when the Japanese soldiers were allowed to survive? We felt betrayed.’

Deciding not to kill themselves after all, Kinjo and his brother stayed in the hills and scavenged for food. After a couple of weeks, close to starving, they surrendered to an American soldier and were taken to a prisoner-of-war camp. There they learned that ‘300 people had perished that day’, and 600 overall in two separate mass suicides in the Keramas. Kinjo, who was later so wracked with guilt for what he had done that he turned to Christianity, put the blame squarely on the Japanese. ‘Part of the reason we had been prepared to kill our own families’, he explained, ‘was because of the nationalistic education we had received. We were taught that the Americans were not human.’6

The lie was revealed to one group of survivors when soldiers of the 306th Infantry came upon the site of a mass suicide on Tokashiki – probably Kinjo’s – in the morning of 29 March. According to eyewitnesses, they ‘found a small valley littered with more than 150 dead and dying Japanese, most of them civilians. Fathers had systematically throttled each member of their families and then disembowelled themselves with knives or hand grenades.’ Under a blanket lay a father, two small children, and both grandparents, ‘all strangled by cloth ropes’. As American soldiers and medics did what they could, providing food and care for the survivors, an old man who had killed his daughter ‘wept in remorse’.7

On 25 March, the day before the first troops landed on the Keramas, the softening up of Okinawa itself began with the long-range shelling of the south-east coast by Rear Admiral W. H. P. Blandy’s Amphibious Support Force (TF 52). This was to cover the work of minesweepers and frogmen whose job was to clear the approaches to the Hagushi beaches of mines and underwater obstacles. From 29 March, the bombardment proper began when the battleships, cruisers, destroyers and gunboats of Rear Admiral M. L. Deyo’s Gun & Covering Force (TF 54) ‘closed the range’ and used their heavy guns to ‘hit their objectives with increasing effectiveness’. In the seven days prior to L-Day, naval guns would fire ‘more than 13,000 large-calibre shells (six-inch to sixteen-inch) in shore bombardment’, a total of 5,162 tons of high explosives. This fire was supplemented by numerous strikes from carrier planes – mostly from Vice Admiral Mitscher’s Fast Carrier Force (TF 58) – who targeted barracks, gun positions, airfields and midget-submarine bases with rockets, bombs and napalm.8

Forced to endure this storm of steel was the bulk of Okinawa’s civilian population, still concentrated in the south of the island. Among them was Kikuko Miyagi, 16, a boarder at the prestigious First Okinawa Prefectural Girls’ High School in Asato near Naha. She was one of 222 girls, between the ages of 15 and 19, from the High School and the Okinawa Normal School who had recently been inducted into the Himeyuri Student Corps† to work as auxiliary nurses at the Okinawa army field hospital, sited in underground caves near the village of Haebaru, three miles south-east of Naha.9

Like their male counterparts – many of whom were recruited into the Blood and Iron Student Corps – Kikuko and her fellow pupils had long been exposed to nationalist propaganda and were fiercely patriotic. They were taught how to use bamboo spears and the Japanese halberd, practised air-raid defence drills and went on long marches of up to forty miles to improve mental and physical health. From June 1944, as more and more classes were cancelled, they helped construct Oroku airfield. Their training as military nurses began in late 1944 and was continued in early 1945. They were also issued with ‘The Principle of the Battle’ orders which stated that each person must destroy ten of the enemy and one tank.10

It was around this time that Kikuko went home to say goodbye to her parents. She promised them she would ‘win the Imperial Order of the Rising Sun, eighth class, and be enshrined at Yasukuni’. This infuriated her father, a country schoolteacher. ‘I didn’t bring you up’, he shouted, ‘to the age of 16 to die!’

Kikuko was ashamed of her father’s reaction, and ‘thought he was a traitor to say such a thing’. She felt only pride as she left home for the battlefield.11

On 23 March, she and her schoolmates were woken in their dormitory and addressed by the school principal: ‘It’s time you demonstrated what you’ve been trained for and served your country. I was ordered by the military to join the headquarters. You will go to the army field hospital with your teachers and do your best there for our country.’

That night the 222 students set out with eighteen teachers for the Haebaru army field hospital. It comprised three surgical clinics – the 1st, 2nd and 3rd – hidden in caves under a gently sloping hill. The caves were still in the process of being dug out, lined with wooden supports and filled with medical equipment, so the Himeyuri Corps was recruited to help.

While they worked the American bombardment of the island began. It seemed to Kikuko that it was literally raining shells ‘for five or six days’. On 29 March, as the shellfire continued, a graduation ceremony was held for the Himeyuri students in their ‘crude, triangular barracks’. They knelt together on the floor, their faces hardly visible in the flickering candlelight, as their principal spoke of their duty to ‘Work so as not to shame the First Girls’ High School.’ They then sang patriotic songs, including ‘Give Your Life for the Sake of the Emperor, Wherever You Go’, and one penned by Kikuko’s 23-year-old music teacher called ‘A Song of Parting’. It was, she noted, ‘really wonderful’ and ‘not a war song at all’. They had memorised it while they were digging the shelters, particularly the verse ‘We shall meet again’. They sang it as they walked back to their cave, ‘the reverberations of the explosions shaking the ground’. Next morning ‘that triangular building wasn’t there any more’.12

Another Okinawan almost killed by American shells was Yoshiko Sakumoto, the young schoolgirl who had witnessed the bombing of Naha. Now 14, but still too young to be called up for military service, she and her family were part of the exodus to the north of the island in January 1945. They went in a horse-drawn carriage, with Yoshiko and her father pushing a cart filled with their belongings, and found refuge with a family in the village of Seragaki, near Mount Onna, in the centre of the island. But her father travelled back to Naha every few weeks to get supplies and check on relatives, and Yoshiko went with him. They were returning from one such trip with two friends, making their way along the prefectural highway south of the Hagushi beaches, when Yoshiko looked out to sea and froze. ‘The ocean’, she recalled, ‘was crowded with a colossal number of ships that stretched north from the Naha area. They had surrounded our island. We could tell right away they weren’t Japanese ships.’

They hurried on and were close to Kue, near the town of Chatan, when the ships opened fire on 29 March. ‘Shells flew over our heads’, remembered Yoshiko, ‘making a “shoo-shoo” sound, and exploded with an enormous thump. At the same time, planes began dropping bombs. I could see the machine guns firing from the planes.’

Abandoning the cart, they looked desperately for somewhere to hide. On their right was a sugar-cane field; the beach to their left. Neither provided much cover. They dived under some bushes. But when the explosions got close, showering them with ‘small rocks and dust’, they knew they had to escape to a safer spot. ‘If we stay here’, shouted her father over the tumult, ‘we’ll all be killed. Lets run for the woods.’

He was gesturing to a small wooded area about thirty metres away. They set off for it, but more explosions forced them to the ground. ‘When we finally made it to the woods,’ wrote Yoshiko, ‘we looked back and saw huge holes, about the size of eight tatami mats,‡ blasted open by the bombs.’ In the wood were some thatched houses and a small concrete shed. Three of them dashed into the shed, leaving Yoshiko’s father outside. Seconds later ‘a huge explosion lifted the shed and shook the ground’. Yoshiko could not hear and feared her eardrums had burst. She had wounds on her elbow and her head. As these were being bound, her father appeared, ‘pointing at a spot just behind the shed’ where the shell had exploded. Yoshiko was shocked. A direct hit, she knew, would have killed them instantly.

They decided to head back towards Naha and seek refuge in the tomb of Chatan Moshi on a rocky hill. On they way, they passed the bodies of four Japanese soldiers. ‘One lay by the sugar-cane field,’ recalled Yoshiko, ‘the second on the roadside, and two others near a bridge.’ It was a chilling reminder of how close they had all come to death.13

* Well dispersed throughout the islands, these plywood boats were eighteen feet long and five feet wide, and powered by six-cylinder Chevrolet automobile engines, generating eighty-five horsepower and capable of twenty knots. Each carried two 264-pound depth charges on a rack behind the pilot, to be detonated close to the target ship on a five-second fuse. (Appleman et al., Okinawa, p. 60.)

† ‘Himeyuri’ was the nickname given to the two schools which had been established in the Meiji period and were sited next door to each other. ‘Hime’ means princess, and ‘yuri’ is lily in Japanese.

‡ A typical tatami mat is six feet by three feet.

8

‘Tomorrow is our big day’

‘At 10:45 a.m.’, wrote Lieutenant General Buckner in his diary on 27 March, ‘our convoy weighed anchor and moved with an air of dignified confidence on its non-stop trip to strike the enemy.’

He was heading for Okinawa from Leyte in the Philippines on Admiral Turner’s flagship Eldorado, the last leg of a 6,000-mile journey that had begun for him and his senior staff on 5 March with a flight from Pearl Harbor to Guam, via Kwajalein Atoll. They boarded the Eldorado at Guam on 7 March and reached Leyte five days later. The time since had been spent watching amphibious exercises, going over the plans and waving goodbye to the slower-moving landing ships bound for the Keramas and Okinawa. Now that it was his turn, Buckner felt both nervous and excited. The day before, he had received a warning from Vice Admiral Mitscher that Okinawa was ‘honey-combed with caves, tunnels and emplacements’, and the fight would be ‘very tough’. Buckner preferred to see it as a ‘great adventure’.1

He had a cabin to himself, but most of his senior officers were doubled up. Brigadier General Oliver P. Smith, for example, was bunking with Major General F. G. Wallace, the prospective island commander of Okinawa, in a stateroom on the main deck. As one of its portholes was near an exhaust ventilator from the galley, they ‘got a choice assortment of odors’.2 Colonel Vernon E. Megee, 44, a veteran of Iwo Jima who would command all Marine air-support units on Okinawa, thought himself lucky to be sharing a small stateroom with only three other officers: an army brigadier, a navy commodore, and an air-force colonel. ‘We were not only integrated but entwined when it came to dressing in that restricted cubbyhole … We all accepted the situation in good spirits and not without humor – it was all part of going to war.’

They were part of, wrote Megee, ‘a most formidable armada’ with other ships stretching as far as the horizon. As darkness fell, ‘not a light showed nor siren or bell sounded. Radio transmitters were silent for the voyage.’ He imagined the thousands of soldiers and Marines in those darkened hulls, ‘standing in little silent knots about the decks, or lying wide-eyed in their crowded bunks in stifling troops compartments, thinking the thoughts that men think on the eve of battle’.3

For the first day or so, the sea conditions were rough as the Eldorado changed course to avoid a typhoon. The Tenth Army staff used the time to conduct a command-post exercise by ‘re-enacting the first day of the battle for Iwo Jima with everyone performing his appropriate duties’. It took place in the Joint Operations Room where one large table had places for Buckner, his chief and deputy chiefs of staff, and G-2 and G-3. At another sat the naval gunfire officer and artillery officer, while naval officers manned a U-shaped table for the Air Support Control Unit. With no actual messages coming in ‘over the air’, they flashed up those sent and received during Iwo Jima on screens. ‘The exercise proved’, wrote Oliver Smith, ‘to be very interesting and instructive.’4

Buckner also found time to finish the third volume of Douglas Southall Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants: Gettysburg to Appomattox, a history that featured Buckner’s own father. Was he looking for inspiration? For tips? His diary gives no clue, beyond the comment: ‘A tragic epitaph to a nobly defended cause.’5

He and his staff were cheered by news that the 77th Division’s landings on the Kerama Islands had been conducted ‘aggressively, effectively, and according to schedule’.6 By 29 March, the anchorages in the Keramas had been buoyed, and ‘ships were able to refuel and rearm without enemy interference’. Two days later came word that a battalion of 155 mm guns had been sited on the small island of Keise Shima and were ready to fire.7

Also on the 31st, Buckner’s chief of intelligence, Colonel Ely, returned from the Keramas with the ‘latest pictures and reports of the landing beaches’. These, said Ely, had been ‘distributed to every battalion that is to land tomorrow’.8 After months of meticulous planning, Operation Iceberg – the invasion of Okinawa – was ready to be launched. Thirteen hundred naval ships of all sizes were in position: some in the Demonstration Group off the south-east coast of Okinawa; but most off the west coast where the actual landings would take place. ‘All ships arrived on time,’ noted Oliver Smith, ‘and there were no collisions. Gunfire ships, which had been pounding Okinawa for several days, were still pounding away. The combat air patrol from the escort carriers was over the ships of the convoy to guard against Japanese interference.’9

With the final say, Vice Admiral Turner announced late on the 31st that weather and surf conditions appeared to be suitable for a landing the following morning. H-hour was set for 8:30 a.m. ‘With members of my staff, I am attending Easter service this evening,’ Buckner wrote to his wife. ‘Tomorrow is our big day.’10

Across the vast fleet, soldiers were ruminating on the task ahead. ‘My thoughts,’ wrote 20-year-old Private First Class (PFC) Don Dencker of L Company, 382nd Infantry, ‘and those of my buddies … were on the coming battle and the dangers to be faced. Would we all come through this one unscathed? The mortar section had been lucky on Leyte. Would our luck hold on Okinawa?’

A tall, skinny kid with prominent ears, Dencker was the only child of a home builder who rarely sat still: having finished a house, he would sell it and move on. Fortunately for his family, he always bought in the same neighbourhood of southern Minneapolis where Dencker attended the Roosevelt High School. A good student whose hobby was raising and racing homing pigeons, Dencker had completed three terms of a chemical engineering degree at the University of Minnesota when he was drafted into the army in the summer of 1943. After basic training he was accepted into the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) and sent to complete an engineering programme at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago with the ‘implied promise’ of Officer Candidate School after graduation. But a manpower crisis caused the programme to close in spring 1944, and Dencker was one of 250 former ASTP students assigned to the 96th Infantry Division, a reserve formation that was composed almost entirely of draftees.

On joining Love Company, 3/382nd Infantry, Dencker was asked by the XO what speciality he preferred. ‘Mortars, sir,’ he replied, adding that he had got to know the weapon well during basic training. What he did not say, for obvious reasons, was that he thought that ‘being with the mortars was a safer place to serve than being in a Rifle Platoon’. Assigned to the 3rd Mortar Squad – one of three, making a section, in the 4th Weapons Platoon – he served in Leyte as a lowly ammunition bearer before being promoted to private first class and assistant gunner (with responsibility for preparing and loading the mortar shells).

Dencker had been ‘somewhat relieved’ to learn that the assault troops for the next landing would be from the 381st and 383rd Infantry Regiments, while his 382nd was in reserve. Yet he and the rest of Love Company were loaded aboard the 8,000-ton attack transport ship USS Banner (APA 60) on 13 March, a fortnight before their departure from Leyte. ‘Why we all boarded so early I do not know,’ he wrote, ‘as the transport and cargo ship group did not depart Leyte Gulf … until March 27th.’

Once under way, they were given details about their destination – Okinawa – and lectured on what to expect. ‘We were told’, recalled Dencker, ‘that the climate on the island was temperate, that the people were of mixed Chinese and Japanese heritage, and that the Ryukyu Islands had been an independent feudal nation before being annexed by Japan.’ Hazards included the Habu snake, said to be so poisonous that if bitten you had to ‘take a trench knife and make cross-shaped slits across the fang marks, then quickly suck the venom out’. Their indoctrination also included Japanese translations for useful phrases like ‘Come out’, ‘Hands up’ and ‘Take off your clothes’. Dencker only remembered the first one: ‘Dete koi’, pronounced ‘De-tay-ko-ee’.

Dencker’s ship hit rough weather on 28 March, with ‘strong winds, rain, and large waves’ making almost everyone seasick. ‘The whole below-deck quarters reeked from vomit and body odors,’ wrote Dencker. ‘It was best to stay up near the deck hatches where the air was fresher.’ By the 31st, however, the ‘weather was clear and the sea calm as we moved steadily toward our objective’. That afternoon, Love Company was told about the 77th Division’s successful landings on the Kerama Islands. ‘Everything looks encouraging’ was the theme of a message from Dencker’s divisional commander, Major General James L. (‘Smiling Jim’) Bradley. That evening, having attended a Protestant service at which the chaplain gave a ‘reassuring message’, Dencker read the 23rd Psalm (‘The Lord is my shepherd’) from his pocket New Testament before getting some rest.11

Also travelling on an attack transport ship from Leyte was Private Don ‘Slim’ Carlton, a machine-gunner with the 1/184th Infantry. Raised in rural Minnesota, where he ‘learned to love the outdoors along with hunting and fishing’, Carlton was working in an aircraft factory in San Diego, helping to build B-24 Liberator bombers, when the news of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor prompted him and two friends to quit their jobs and join the army. Having seen ‘too many John Wayne movies’, he felt he was ‘missing out on some fun’.