Okinawa Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  Why Okinawa? - CHAPTER ONE

  Japan at Bay - CHAPTER TWO

  The Divine Wind - CHAPTER THREE

  The Japanese Samurai - CHAPTER FOUR

  First Blood for America - CHAPTER FIVE

  Kamikaze Strike/ Franklin’s Ordeal - CHAPTER SIX

  The “Americans” - CHAPTER SEVEN

  Love Day - CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Marines Overrun the North - CHAPTER NINE

  “Floating Chrysanthemums” - CHAPTER TEN

  Fiery Failure at Kakazu Ridge - CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Back to Banzai! - CHAPTER TWELVE

  Kikusui 2: Kamikaze Crucible - CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Uncle Sam: Logistics Magician - CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Hodge’s Hurricane Attack Hurled Back - CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Outer Line Cracked/ ushijima Retreats - CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Kamikaze Bases Scourged/ Kikusui 4 - CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Last Gasp of the Samurai Cho - CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Minatoga: A Missed Opportunity - CHAPTER NINETEEN

  May: Rain, Mud, Blood - and Breakthrough! - CHAPTER TWENTY

  Ushijima Retreats Again - CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Chrysanthemums Die in Sea and Sky - CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Ushijima’s Last Stand - CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A Samurai Farewell - CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Epilogue: The Value of Okinawa

  Index

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  OKINAWA

  Robert Leckie was the author of more than thirty books, most of them on military history, which include Helmet for My Pillow, a personal narrative of World War II. He joined the U.S. Marine Corps the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor and served nearly three years in the Pacific as a machine gunner and scout of the First Marine Division, and was wounded and decorated.

  To My Fourth Grandson,

  Sean Michael Leckie

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) · Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England · Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) · Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) · Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India · Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) · Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 1995

  Published in Penguin Books 1996

  Copyright © Robert Leckie, 1995 All rights reserved

  All photograph: AP/Wide World Photos

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19629-8

  1. World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Japan—Okinawa Island.

  2. Okinawa Island (Japan)—History. I. Title.

  D767.99.O45L43 1995

  940.54’25—dc20 94-39145

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  Why Okinawa?

  CHAPTER ONE

  On September 29, 1944, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Ocean Area (POA), and Fleet Admiral Ernest King, chief of U.S. Naval Operations, conferred in San Francisco on the next steps to be taken to deliver the final crusher to a staggering Japan. This was the conference’s stated purpose, but the unspoken objective was to persuade the irascible, often-inflexible King to accept Nimitz’s battle plan, instead of King’s own.

  This would not be easy, for the tall, lean, hard, humorless King was known to be “so tough he shaves with a blowtorch.” Indeed, his civilian chief, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, had ordered from Tiffany’s a silver miniature blowtorch with that inscription on it. Thus, there was some trepidation among Nimitz and his Army chiefs—Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner of Army Ground Forces (POA) and Lieutenant General Millard Harmon of the newly formed Army Air Forces (POA)—as well as Admiral Raymond Spruance, alternate chief with Fleet Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, of Nimitz’s battle fleet.1 They knew that King was convinced the next operation in the Pacific should be landings on the big island of Formosa off the Chinese southeastern coast. If Nimitz and staff could persuade King to accept General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur’s plan to invade Luzon in the Philippines rather than Formosa, the conference would end in a rare and high note of interservice cooperation.

  Each of the conferees was assigned a luxurious suite in the elegant Saint Francis Hotel, assembling in Admiral King’s opulent quarters for three days of discussions. Here they were served epicurean meals that were not often to be found on the menu in the Saint Francis dining rooms (wartime rationing then being in effect). Here also—and sometimes in the plainer Sea Frontier headquarters, where maps and logistic tables were more readily available—Nimitz presented his chief with one of those carefully drawn memoranda for which he was justly celebrated. With an outward calm and precision that did not reflect his inner apprehension, the pink-cheeked, white-haired, baby-faced Nimitz was careful not to provoke the stern-faced, short-fused Admiral “Adamant” while he explained exactly why King’s cherished invasion of Formosa would be impossible to mount at that time.

  First, defending that huge island now known as Taiwan, the Japanese had a full field army much too strong to be attacked by American forces then available in the Pacific, a point vigorously supported by both Buckner and Harmon.

  Second, the casualty estimate, based upon U.S. losses of 17,000 dead and wounded while eliminating 32,000 dug-in Japanese on the island of Saipan, would reach at least 150,000 or more, a slaughter that POA’s resources could not bear and the American public would never supinely accept. Conversely, MacArthur—always ready and happy to predict minimal losses in any of his own operations—had estimated Luzon could be taken with comparatively moderate casualties.

  Throughout this recital Ernest King’s face remained stony. It is possible—though not reported anywhere—that at the introduction of the name of Douglas MacArthur, one of the admiral’s eyelids might have flickered. But Nimitz was prepared for this moment, for he had long ago learned that you cannot take without giving, and Nimitz would give with an alternative to King’s cherished plan. He suggested to his chief that if he acquiesced in MacArthur’s liberation of Luzon and recapture of Manila, these victories would clear the Pacific for the direct invasion of Japan’s home islands by seizing Iwo Jima and Okinawa and using them as staging areas. King’s eyebrows rose as Nimitz continued: this would completely sever Japan from her oil sources in Borneo, Sumatra, and Burma, and without this lifeblood of war her fleets could not sail, her airplanes fly, her vehicles roll, or her industries produce. Equally satisfying, from Okinawa and Iwo the giant B-29s or Superforts could intensify their bombardment of Japan proper and might conceivably even bomb Nippon into submission without the necessity of invading her home islands.

  Admiral King listened intently to Nimitz’s recital, shooting out tough, incisive questions. He
admitted that he had read a Joint Chiefs’ report questioning the feasibility of a Formosa invasion, although he did wonder openly about the wisdom of hitting Iwo only 760 miles from Japan and within the Prefecture of Tokyo itself. Turning to Admiral Spruance, who three months earlier had informed the Navy chief that he favored attacking Okinawa, he asked: “Haven’t you something to say? I thought that Okinawa was your baby.” Never a man to allow himself to be caught between the upper and nether millstones of command, Spruance replied that he thought his direct superior—Nimitz—had summarized the situation nicely, and he had nothing to add.

  To the Nimitz team’s gratified surprise, Admiral Adamant graciously agreed to substitute Iwo and Okinawa for his cherished Formosa plan, even though that meant he must put his eagerness to help China on hold. It might have been that Nimitz’s proposal was attractive to him because it delayed the politically explosive question of who would be the Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific: Nimitz or MacArthur? For years Douglas MacArthur had actively sought that eminence, almost insanely jealous as he was of the title Supreme Allied Commander, European Theater, held by his “former clerk,” Dwight Eisenhower. To that end he had cultivated the support of powerful politicians and the conservative stateside press, desisting only when an exasperated Franklin Delano Roosevelt informed him that if the Pacific were to have a Supreme Commander, it would be Nimitz. This way, King may have reasoned, his decision—bound to be popular with neither side in the abrasive Army-Navy rivalry of World War II—could be delayed until the actual invasion of Japan, if there were such an operation, for both Nimitz and King dreaded the fearful carnage, both American and Japanese, that might occur if it were attempted. As sailors they understood perhaps better than the always-optimistic soldier MacArthur the terrible consequences if such a gigantic amphibious operation were to fail.

  So the conference in San Francisco ended on a happy note, with King returning to Washington to report his approval to his comrades on the Joint Chiefs, and Nimitz with his flag officers going back to Hawaii to plan for the new operations and especially for Iwo and Iceberg, the code name for Okinawa.

  Okinawa lies at the midpoint of the Ryukyu Islands2 and almost between Formosa (Taiwan), 500 nautical miles to the southwest, and Kyushu, 375 miles to the north.

  In ancient times Okinawa was a dependency of China, paying an annual tribute to the Imperial Court at Peking. The group of islands was called Liu-chi’u, the Chinese word usually pronounced “Loo Choo,” meaning either “pendant ball” or “bubbles floating on water”; but after annexation by Japan in 1879, their new lords, who have great difficulty pronouncing the “L” sound, changed their name to Ryukyu.

  These islands lie southwest of Japan proper, northeast of Formosa and the Philippines, and west of the Bonins, which include Iwo Jima. Peaks of drowned mountains, they stretch in an arc about 790 miles long between Kyushu and Formosa. Approximately in the center of the arc is the Okinawa Group of some fifty islands clustering around the largest of them, Okinawa: 60 miles long (running generally north to south), from 2 to 18 miles wide, and covering 485 square miles. Obviously such a base so close to Japan, able to support dozens of airfields, as well as dozens of divisions together with all manner of warships anchored either in the enormous Hagushi Anchorage off the west coast or the equally valuable Nakagusuku Bay off the southeast shore, would be almost “another England”—the staging area for the Allied invasion of Europe—for the waterborne attack upon Japan.

  In 1945 Okinawa had a population of about five hundred thousand, of whom roughly 60 percent lived in the southern third, much more amenable than the rugged and mountainous north above the two-mile-wide Isthmus of Ishikawa.

  Originally, Okinawans resembled Japanese, but an influx of Malay, Chinese, Mongol, and other races left them smaller and fuller of face than their new masters from the north. They were also among the most docile people in the world. They had no history of war, neither making nor carrying arms. (When a traveler informed Napoleon of this fact, the Corsican conqueror was indignant.) Although Jesus, Allah, and Confucius had been to Okinawa, their missionaries persuaded few if any natives to renounce their primitive animist religion based on a mystical reverence for fire and hearth and worship of the bones of their ancestors. These were placed in urns kept inside fairly large lyre-shaped tombs, which the Japanese, with their customary indifference to the feelings of any race but their own, began to fortify with machine guns and cannon at the outbreak of the war. Okinawan standards of living were low, and the Japanese made no attempt to raise them.

  Generally the haughty Nipponese despised the Okinawans as inferior people and were content to regard them as hewers of wood and drawers of water, useful with their small-scale farms to supply them—and eventually their troops—with sugarcane, sweet potatoes, rice, and soybeans. Aside from teachers trained in Japan, almost all Okinawans—like the Amerindians of America—had no desire to enjoy the blessings of industrial society, but were content to live as their ancestors had lived in tiny villages of about one hundred people or towns numbering one thousand. Although the Japanese, for all of their contempt for them, had drafted many young Okinawan males into their militia, on the whole Japanese troops in the Great Loo Choo were hated with a quiet and sullen resentment similar to the attitude of the early American colonists toward the British redcoats quartered in their homes. Although the Japanese and Okinawan languages are alike, neither is intelligible to the other race.

  The southern third of the island below Ishikawa, where most of the fighting would rage, is rolling, hilly country lower than the mountainous, jumbled North, but actually much easier to defend. Steep, natural escarpments, ravines, and terraces—as well as ridges abounding in natural caves—were generally aligned east and west across the island. This meant that an attacking force must engage in the most difficult warfare: “cross-hatch” fighting. There were no north-south ridges with river valleys or passes through which troops might move easily. Thus, moving south, the Americans would encounter a succession of these heavily fortified east-west ridges, and each time one fell, a new one would have to be assaulted.

  The only two-way decent road in the South was in the Naha-Shuri area: Naha, the new port and commercial center; Shuri, the capital of the ancient Okinawa kings. Even these were impassable during the torrential rains that regularly turned the entire island, except for the limestone ridges, into a sea of mud—for the skies of the Great Loo Choo were capable of pouring out eleven inches of rainfall in a single day.

  Just as inimical to health or endurance was an enervating humidity unrivaled even by Eritrea or the Belgian Congo, and the best description of the country lanes over which a modern, mechanized army would have to travel is an American soldier’s wry comment: “Okinawa had an excellent network of bad roads.”

  Shuri Castle was the point of Okinawa’s defensive arrowhead. It lay on high ground overlooking Naha to the east (or right, as it would face the American invaders). Beneath it an ancient cave system was being extended and strengthened to provide a completely safe bomb- and shell-proof headquarters for the Japanese Thirty-second Army. Heavy guns emplaced nearby could bombard any part of southern Okinawa. If the Americans, in spite of heavy losses, were able to penetrate Shuri’s outer defenses, the defending Japanese could withdraw toward the center. So long as Shuri remained unconquered, so did Okinawa.

  These fortifications resembled the blood-soaked caves and fissures of Peleliu, a drowned coral mountain that had heaved itself above the sea. But Okinawa’s were man-made; its soft coral and limestone could be grubbed up with pick and shovel, and small natural caves expanded to hold as many men as a company of two hundred or more. The fill thus removed was eminently useful in building barricades that, when soaked with water and baked by the sun, were almost as hard as concrete. But Peleliu was only six miles long by two miles wide, while southern Okinawa was about twenty miles long and in some places eighteen miles wide.

  This, then, was the terrible fortified terrain that would c
onfront the Americans when they came storming ashore in the spring of 1945. Even worse—for the seamen of the U.S. Navy, at least—would be the Japanese new weapon of the kamikaze.

  Japan at Bay

  CHAPTER TWO

  No one—and especially not the members of Japanese Imperial General Headquarters or the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff—expected Okinawa to be the last battle of World War II. Why the surprise? The Joint Chiefs, having woefully underestimated enemy striking power at the beginning of the Pacific War, had just as grievously exaggerated it at the end.

  Actually, as some perceptive Okinawans were already privately assuring each other: “Nippon ga maketa. Japan is finished.” In early 1945, after the conquest of Iwo Jima by three Marine divisions, the island nation so vulnerable to aerial and submarine warfare had been almost completely severed from its stolen Pacific empire in “the land of eternal summer.” Leyte in the Philippines had been assaulted the previous October by an American amphibious force under General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur, and in the same month the U.S. Navy had destroyed the remnants of the once-proud Japanese Navy in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. On January 9, Luzon in the Philippines was invaded, and on February 16—17, like a “typhoon of steel,” the fast carriers of the U.S. Navy launched the first naval air raids on Tokyo Bay. A week later Manila was overrun by those American “devils in baggy pants.” In late March Iwo fell to three Marine divisions in the bloodiest battle in the annals of American arms. Not only was Old Glory enshrined forever in American military history by the historic flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi, but more important strategically and more dreadful for Japanese fears was the capture of this insignificant little speck of black volcanic ash—a cinder clog, 4½ miles long and 2½ miles wide—for it guaranteed that the devastating raids on Japan by the new giant B-29 U.S. Army Air Force bombers would continue and even rise in fury.