Crucible of Hell

A forward artillery observer attached to George Company, 2/7th Marines, Donner had come ashore in the first wave of amtracs. But thanks to an error by the amtrac’s driver, he and his four-man team were deposited on a beach in the 6th Marine Division’s sector, when they should have been 300 yards farther to the south. Anxious to get back to the 1st Marine Division, he led his men obliquely to the right. ‘We began to run up the hill after the advancing infantry’, he recorded, ‘who were still blazing away at every bush or hole in the fields of vegetables.’ Helping to carry his team’s heavy radio set, he felt ‘exhilarated that there was as yet no enemy action’, and was only ‘slightly concerned about our confusion in landing’.

The 32-year-old Donner was a married Stanford graduate student with one child – a son born three weeks after Pearl Harbor – and could probably have avoided the draft. But he volunteered anyway, determined to do his bit, and had been overseas since the spring of 1943, seeing service with the 9th Defense Battalion of artillery on New Georgia and Guam. By late December 1944, he was just a month short of ‘stateside liberty’ when he was sent as a replacement to How Battery, 3/11th Marines, an artillery outfit in the 1st Marine Division.

Appointed a forward observer – the ‘roughest’ job in the artillery, with responsibility for directing fire for the grunts in the front line – he was given a crash course in ‘how to operate sets and phones, send messages in code, and arrange barrages of a sort’, and went on a week-long exercise with the 7th Marines’ George Company to get ‘an insight into how the infantry really moves’, ‘how fouled up it can become’, and ‘how little one should carry along as personal gear’. His own light pack for the landing included a poncho, field glasses, map case and gas mask. He was also carrying an M1 carbine,* and a jungle knife, ammunition and two canteens on his belt. His only luxuries were a seven-foot strip of green baize – ‘of the type used in covering pool tables’ – to wrap himself in at night, and a pint of whiskey.

Moving inland with his team, Donner eventually met up with George Company’s HQ, and together they reached the edge of Yontan airfield ‘and saw a mass of junked Japanese planes at one end of a runway which was not too badly scarred by bombs and shell craters’ At the far side of the airfield they met a large patrol of the 4th Marines who ‘were amazed to find our company here, for they were supposed to be the first unit to take this section’.

After a brief stop for lunch, they continued on into the nearby village of Irammiya where they found a ‘decrepit old man, clad in black robes, his chin trailing a long, scraggly white beard’. Many of the village’s houses were still standing, though their tile roofs and wooden walls had been riddled with shrapnel. Beyond Irammiya the forward platoon heard voices from a cave in the hillside. When no one responded to calls in Japanese for them to come out, the Marines shot into the cave with Browning automatic rifles (BARs).† Edging inside, they found three corpses – two men and a woman – and only a 3-year-old boy still alive, crying and ‘covered with his mother’s blood’. The boy was handed over to Monahan, one of Donner’s team, who washed off the gore and carried him on his shoulders.1

Landing later that day on the beach that Donner missed – Blue 1 – was Second Lieutenant ‘Jep’ Carrell, a platoon leader with King Company, 3/7th Marines. Raised in Philadelphia, Carrell was studying for a degree in physics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania when he switched to a V-12 programme as a prospective Marine officer. After boot camp at Parris Island – ‘really just one big nine-week adventure’ for the V-12 candidates, most of whom had ‘played intercollegiate sports’ and ‘completed at least the junior year of college’ – he was put through the eleven-week Special Officer Candidate School (SOCS) at Camp Lejeune that had been set up in late 1944, in the wake of heavy Marine casualties on Saipan, Tinian and Guam, to produce junior officers in a hurry. Carrell and his fellow officer candidates ‘thought this was a great idea’. They might have been ‘a hair less enthusiastic’, he wrote later, if they had ‘known what we were getting into’: fifty per cent of their class of 376 candidates would be killed or wounded within six months of graduation.

Posted with three other SOCS friends to King Company of the 3/7th Marines, part of the famed 1st Marine Division (or ‘Old Breed’ as it was known), Carrell chose a rifle platoon. He knew perfectly well ‘that the survival rate for Machine Gun Platoon and Mortar Platoon Leaders was much better than Rifle Platoon Leaders’, yet he chose the latter, ‘not because of bravado’, but because his training had concentrated on that type of work and he ‘didn’t know as much about the other two jobs’. He would have no regrets, and became especially close to the forty or so men of his No. 1 Platoon (giving him the call sign King One). ‘In infantry combat’, he wrote later, ‘every member of a rifle platoon is dependent upon other members … Virtually every man will take serious risk to protect or save a member of his team. This translates into a fierce devotion to his buddies who have gone through the same, dangerous experiences. Having one of them killed or wounded affected me as if I had lost, or nearly lost, a brother.’

Part of the reserve battalion for the assault on Okinawa, Carrell got only as far as the southern end of Yontan airfield where he and his men spent the night. ‘While we were digging in,’ he recalled, ‘and about 45 minutes before dark, a small Japanese military plane came in for a landing, south-to-north. I could have thrown a rock underhand, and hit the fuselage.’2

The plane was a Zero that had just flown from the mainland. Unaware the airfield was in American hands, the pilot taxied up the runway and came to a stop near the control tower. He jumped down from the plane and was approaching a group of soldiers when he realised they were the enemy. Turning to run, he was shot in the back. ‘There’s always some poor bastard’, muttered a Marine, ‘who doesn’t get word.’3

Love Day was Sergeant William Manchester’s 23rd birthday and his chances of becoming 24 were, he reflected, ‘very slight’. He viewed Okinawa as ‘the last island’ before the invasion of mainland Japan, and was certain ‘the enemy would sacrifice every available man to drive us off it’.

When it was time, he and the ‘Raggedy Asses’ climbed down the side of the George C. Clymer into a waiting amtrac. ‘Yellow cordite smoke blew across our bows,’ he remembered. ‘Battleship guns were flashing, rockets hitting the shore sound c-r-r-rack, like a monstrous lash, and we were, as infantrymen always are at this point in a landing, utterly helpless.’ Once his wave of amtracs were properly aligned, they headed for the beach, ‘tossing and churning like steeds in a cavalry charge.’ Incredibly there were ‘no splashes of Jap mortar shells, no roars of Jap coastal guns, no grazing Jap machine-gun fire’. The enemy was not shooting back, because ‘there wasn’t any enemy there’. It was, thought Manchester, ‘the greatest April Fool’s Day joke of all time’.

Manchester and the rest of the 2/29th Marines walked inland – passing the northern edge of Yontan airfield – and into the low hills beyond where the Okinawans had built ‘quaint, concrete, lyre-shaped burial vaults.’ He felt ‘jubilant’.4

Another Marine who landed on the 6th Division’s beaches was 20-year-old Private Salvatore Giammanco of Love Company, 3/4th Marines. An Italian immigrant who had settled with his family in Brooklyn, Giammanco volunteered for the elite 2nd Marine Raiders‡ after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and served with them in Bougainville in late 1943 where he ‘spent days in water-soaked positions filled with rats, crocodiles and every kind of bug you can think of’. When the Marine Raiders were converted into the new 4th Marine Regiment in 1944 – the original had been captured on Bataan and Corregidor two years earlier – he fought with the 3rd Battalion as a machine-gunner on Guam as part of the 1st Marine Provisional Brigade.

By early 1945, Giammanco had been overseas for more than two years and was due leave. When it was cancelled because the next operation was imminent, he was offered the chance to stay with the rear echelon. He refused, saying he could never think of leaving his squad when they were about to go into action. Which is why, having hit the beach three hours earlier, he found himself at the north-west edge of Yontan airfield at 11:30 a.m. on Love Day. ‘I was’, he recalled, ‘surprised to see our tanks there and everybody messing around, telling Jap jokes.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Giammanco saw a single Japanese soldier with a rifle running up a nearby hill, but thought nothing of it. Eventually word came for Love Company to saddle up and move out. They did so in single file: riflemen, machine guns and then mortars. After all the riflemen had passed over a small incline, they were followed by Giammanco’s No. 1 Squad of machine-gunners. That was when they heard the first crack of a rifle bullet. Giammanco turned to ‘Meathead’ Bernachet, one of the replacements, and said: ‘You are now a combat veteran.’

He had barely finished speaking when a sniper’s bullet hit him in the left side of his chest, narrowly missing his heart, puncturing his lung and exiting through his back. The impact spun him around and, as he fell, his rifle and two boxes of ammunition went flying.

‘I’m hit!’ he yelled.

His friend Paul ‘Peu’ Ulrich dropped down beside him and used his Ka-Bar knife§ to cut away Giammanco’s pack, dungaree jacket and skivvy shirt. When Peu saw how close the bullet had come to his heart, he said: ‘Don’t worry, GI. You’re going to live. The bullet went right through you.’

Given morphine and a little brandy, Giammanco felt furious that someone had shot at him ‘without my permission’. He began to struggle and, to calm him, Peu handed him the rifle the New Yorker had dropped. Peu was dressing his wounds when two more bullets narrowly missed them. ‘Peu, get down!’ shouted Giammanco.

A minute after Peu had moved on to rejoin the rest of the squad, two corpsmen arrived with a stretcher. But when one saw the seriousness of his injury, he told the other to get a jeep with a stretcher. ‘This guy has a hemorrhage interplural. I’ll start him with a plasma bottle, but he’s going to need whole blood. He’s bleeding inside.’

Five minutes later, the corpsman returned with a jeep and Giammanco was driven slowly back to a large medical tent. As they took him inside, a young corpsmen said: ‘Why bring him in, too? He’s dying, like this guy lying here.’ He was gesturing towards another badly injured Marine.

Hearing this, another corpsman got up, grabbed the loudmouth kid and threw him outside, with the words: ‘Can’t you see this guy is still alive, you sonofabitch?’

But as it was obvious that Giammanco needed whole blood to survive, he was taken down to the beach, loaded into a Higgins boat and taken out to a hospital ship where he fell into coma. He was saved by a transfusion.5

The news that the landings were unopposed, meanwhile, had prompted Admiral Turner to bring his command ship Eldorado closer to the northern beaches. From his station on the ship’s searchlight platform, Brigadier General Oliver Smith now had a panoramic view of the coastline. ‘Coral ledges, pitted with caves, jutted out from the beaches north of the Bisha Gawa [River]. Back of the beaches was flat or gently sloping terrain, culminating in the flat high ground on which the Yontan Field was located. Further back was still higher and more rugged terrain. All beaches were under observation from the higher ground inland.’

Smith knew from intelligence reports that the Japanese had at least 400 large-calibre artillery pieces on Okinawa. He could now see with his own eyes that the ground was ideal for defence. ‘Yet’, he wrote, ‘our troops went in standing up with no greater obstacle than the terrain itself.’6

By nightfall, the beachhead was 15,000 yards long and, in places, 5,000 yards deep. More than 60,000 men were ashore, including all reserve regiments and 15,000 service troops. In addition, numerous tanks and anti-aircraft units had been landed, as had all the divisional artillery and, by evening, guns were in position to support the forward troops. Kadena airfield, moreover, was serviceable for emergency landings.7

Lieutenant General Buckner was elated. ‘From start to finish’, he wrote in his diary, ‘the landing was a superb piece of teamwork, which we could watch from the fifty-yard line in the command room on the flag deck. We landed practically without opposition and gained more ground than we expected to for three days, including the Yomitan [sic] and Kadena airfields. [Major General Archibald V.] Arnold’s 7th Div made the furthest gains and got halfway across the island … The Japs have missed their best opportunity on the ground and in the air. When their counter-attack comes we will be holding strong ground.’8

Admiral Turner was even more optimistic. ‘I may be crazy,’ he signalled his boss Admiral Nimitz, ‘but it looks like the Japs have quit the war.’

Knowing full well the fight would be a tough one, Nimitz messaged back: ‘Delete all after crazy.’9

* The smaller version of the M1 Garand rifle, weighing just five pounds and with a fifteen-round magazine. It was carried by officers and members of weapons teams.

† The M1918 BAR was a .30 calibre light machine gun with a twenty-round magazine that could be fired from the hip or steadied by a bipod.

‡ The Marine Raiders were created in 1942 to carry out amphibious operations behind enemy lines. By early 1944 there was no longer a need for such specialised units and the Raider battalions were redesignated the 4th Marine Regiment.

§ First issued to Marines in 1942, the Ka-Bar was a utility/fighting knife with a leather non-slip handle and a broad seven-inch carbon steel blade.