CHAPTER TWELVE
Reports of the Battle of Kakazu Ridge were received by Lieutenant General Isamu Cho (he had received another star) and Colonel Hiromichi Yahara with predictable reactions. Although neither knew the exact number of enemy fallen or even their own losses, Yahara was eminently pleased with the result. The Americans had been dealt a bloody repulse exactly as he had planned in his defense-in-depth tactics, and soon the rate of attrition among them would so whittle the Tenth Army that the Americans would cancel their offensive so that not only the homeland would be saved, but Okinawa as well.
To General Cho it appeared that the enemy had suffered grievously and was so rocked back on their heels that the time had come for a full-scale offensive of the Thirty-second Army. Since his humiliation in the earlier showdown between him and Yahara, when General Ushijima had sided with his planning chief, the fiery Cho had not ceased to press for a counter-attack. But even his friend and mentor Ushijima remained unmoved, until an order from Imperial Headquarters was received urging the Thirty-second Army to overrun Yontan and Kadena Airfields. This was probably the result of a Japanese intelligence warning that Marine Corsairs would soon arrive at these airfields in strength and would make the mission of the various kikusui more difficult than ever. Cho seized on this directive to persuade Ushijima on April 6 to order an attack prepared for April 8. But the ever-alert Yahara pounced upon the appearance of a 110-ship convoy offshore of the Urasoe-Mura Escarpment on April 7 as proof that the Americans were going to strike the Sixty-second Division on its flank. Alarmed, Ushijima for the second time canceled a Cho-sponsored assault.
But then both the American failure at Kakazu Ridge and the “remarkable” destruction wrought upon the enemy fleet by the first of the kikusui convinced Ushijima and Cho that the time to strike had indeed come. This misconception was strengthened by “a stirring telegraph order” from Naval Headquarters claiming that Ten-Go had been “very successful.” “There are signs of uneasiness among enemy forces and odds are seven to three in our favor.” Everyone involved in the Okinawa defense should unite in “a general pursuit operation.”
Isamu Cho, though not as rational as his rival Yahara, was at least as clever. Everywhere he seemed to see signs of enemy weakness, among them slackening aerial activity on April 10, as well as a Navy report of a reduction in the number of American ships in the Hagushi Anchorage. The calculating Yahara could have explained the first as a result of the same cloudy, rainy weather that discomfited everyone on the island—Cho included —and the second as caused by the visible stream of unloaded enemy ships sailing back to base for reloading and return. But Cho was then at his argumentative best, and over the precise but uninspiring protests of the unhappy Yahara, General Ushijima ordered a “powerful” counter-attack for the night of April 12-13.
Cho’s plan was for massive infiltration of almost the entire east-west front of the U.S. Seventh and Ninety-sixth Divisions. Three battalions of the Japanese Twenty-fourth Division would strike the Seventh on the east (or right of the American line), while three more from the Sixty-second Division would assault the battered Ninety-sixth. They would, of course, attack at night, a Japanese preference born of a desire to negate that dreaded American artillery. Breaking through the advance American units, the troops would then spread out in the rear area to a point four miles below Kadena Airfield. There they would take refuge in known caves and tombs. On the morning of April 13 they would emerge to slaughter Tenth Army’s rear-echelon troops, usually technical, headquarters, supply, and soldiers armed with nothing more lethal than a pencil. In the mêlée that would ensue, troops of both sides would be so hopelessly intermixed that the enemy would not dare to bring his artillery, air, and naval gunfire to bear. Meanwhile, other battalions remaining in place opposite the Seventh and Ninety-sixth would launch a furious attack intended to compel the Yankees to retreat, perhaps in such panic that they would be included in the general slaughter of the enemy’s rear echelon. Cho did not specify what would happen next, whether he intended actually to overrun the airfields as Imperial Headquarters had suggested, destroying installations and aircraft at will, or would be content merely with unnerving Buckner and disorganizing his two forward divisions.
With troops marching in drenching rain to their jump-off positions on April 12, Hiromichi Yahara became so apprehensive that he committed an act of insubordination so incredible that in any Western army it could not have ended otherwise than in a court-martial and dismissal—or perhaps worse. He went to Lieutenant General Takeo Fujioka, commander of the Sixty-second Division, and Lieutenant General Tatsumi Amamiya, commander of the Twenty-fourth, and actually persuaded them not to use three battalions each in the forthcoming operation, but only two. Not six, but four battalions would march to the plan of Isamu Cho.
Three flares burst over Kakazu Ridge during the early darkness of April 12. Two were red, the first signaling, “Commence artillery fire,” and the other, “We are attacking with full strength tonight”; and the third, shaped like a dragon, was for “Make all-out attack.” Almost instantly, at about 7 P.M., there fell on the Americans the heaviest Japanese artillery concentration of the war. On the sector of the battered Ninety-sixth alone about twenty-two hundred rounds exploded, while within five minutes another two hundred rocked the Seventh’s zone. Fortunately these Yankees with their painfully acquired battle savvy had dug their holes so “dry and deep” that few casualties resulted.
First to strike the Americans was the Twenty-second Infantry Regiment, which had marched for two days in pouring rain from its base on Oroku Peninsula just south of Naha. Loaded down with 110-pound packs and bags of food—an immense burden for these normally small soldiers—they had been told by their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Masaru Yoshida, to move in “a sinuous eel line,” and they did indeed feel more like fish than flesh as they lay huddled and shivering in cane fields to escape detection by enemy air. By nightfall they were already dispirited and bewildered, moving over unfamiliar terrain and with no precise plan. Instead of attacking en masse, they sought to infiltrate the Seventh Division’s sector in twos or threes or a squad or two, but got nowhere. One massed attack of about a hundred Japanese was riddled by GIs firing rifles and machine guns, killing about a third of them, wounding another third, and compelling all survivors to take refuge in a cave.
The assault on the Ninety-sixth Division’s front, however, was much heavier, better organized, and of longer duration—personally directed as it was by General Fujioka. Guileful and stealthy as always, a long column of Japanese sought to penetrate the Ninety-sixth’s position by pretending to be GIs marching openly down Highway 5 in a column of twos. Twenty of them slipped past scrutiny until the Americans, realizing that they were not friendly troops on their flank, opened fire with all weapons. Those who survived scurried for cover in caves and tombs, but fifty-eight of their comrades were left dead on the field. Two more attacks were mounted against the Ninety-sixth, but both failed with heavy loss.
General Fujioka next tried to roll up his enemy with two companies following an artillery barrage against Kakazu Ridge. A small force staged a diversion around the western flank of Kakazu West while the main body tried to overrun the draw between that point and Kakazu Ridge. First to meet them was Pfc. William Daily at the trigger of a heavy machine gun in the draw. Unable to depress his gun enough to strike the approaching enemy below him, Daily began tossing grenades. Their explosions alerted Staff Sergeant Beauford “Snuffy” Anderson, holed up in a tomb with his light mortar section. Anderson left the tomb to hurl all of his grenades at the Japanese, and then emptied his carbine. Glancing about him, his eye fell on a dud enemy mortar. Seizing it he spiraled it football-style into the draw and was rewarded by an explosion and screams. Rushing back into the tomb he collected his own mortars, wrenched them from their casings, yanked out the safety pins, slamming the shell against a rock to release the setback pin, and spiraled this heavier and more lethal “football” into the draw. Again an explosion and screams ... With this impromptu “passing attack,” Anderson sent all of his fifteen lethal footballs spinning into the darkness below, and by this effective exercise in Yankee battle ingenuity he stopped an entire enemy platoon. In the morning he counted twenty-five enemy bodies, plus seven abandoned knee mortars and four machine guns. For his bravery and quickness of thought, Anderson received the Medal of Honor.
Other Japanese who had infiltrated Kakazu West met the same end. When an enemy officer approached a BAR man and asked him if he were Japanese, the GI snorted, “No!”—and shot him dead, along with ten of his men following in single file. Soldiers of a company command post under attack in a tomb sallied forth to kill twenty Japanese. On the western slope of Kakazu West a single American machine gunner mowed down twenty-three more sons of Nippon.
Another enemy force nearly broke through the draw, until they were illuminated by star shells fired over the battlefield by American warships offshore, a technique developed at Peleliu and so successful that night actually could be turned into day. Silhouetted against the dark, the enemy was easily riddled and their attack broken in blood. Dawn revealed a draw covered with sprawling corpses.
General Cho’s desperation attack was also hurled back on Kakazu Ridge proper. When the Ninety-sixth’s heavy mortar crews were informed that about forty Japanese were threatening to overrun their battalion observation post, they decided to risk close support of their riflemen buddies up front. Hoping that their comrades would be safely below ground in pits and foxholes, they sent about eight hundred high-explosive shells humming skyward, to come plunging straight down with a horrible whistling noise that was the last sound many Japanese ever heard. Marine artillery also joined the bombardment, firing shells that drew a curtain of explosives around the endangered position. In the morning enemy dead were “stacked like cordwood” below.
In their headquarters below Shuri Castle a sorrowing General Ushijima and a despairing General Cho heard nothing but depressing reports from the front. Nevertheless, it was still hoped that a battalion of the Twenty-second Regiment that had slipped through American lines undetected to enter the Ginowan area might hide out in caves until daybreak, when they could emerge to shoot up the American rear echelons—and even perhaps reach Yontan and Kadena to destroy enemy aircraft. But in scattering for sanctuary during the night, they had become so fragmented that daybreak showed them incapable of concerted action. So they remained hidden until nightfall of the thirteenth, when half of them successfully slipped back into their own lines. Two final Japanese counter-attacks were repulsed during the early-morning darkness of the fourteenth, one of them with losses of 116 men, closing out Isamu Cho’s abortive counter-offensive.
It had not, of course, been a proper Banzai!: howling, sake-crazed troops, screaming and screeching as they ran through the darkness banging canteens on bayonets and yelling in singsong English what they presumed to be blood-curdling oaths—“Japanese boy drink American boy’s blood!”—only to be herded into enemy barbed wire by American mortars falling behind them, there to be riddled or sometimes even exterminated by accurate machine-gun and rifle fire. But it was still a reversion to bamboo-spear tactics, and worse, a decision to come outside of the caves and tombs and pillboxes from which they had successfully halted the two-division advance of General Hodge’s Twenty-fourth Corps, and expose themselves to the devastation of overwhelmingly superior American artillery, mortar, and naval gunfire, as well as accurate small arms. Ushijima, in authorizing this romantic regression into the failed tactics of the past, had blessed an operation ill conceived, understrength, misdirected, haphazard, and uncoordinated. As a result, more than half the force involved—1,594 men—were killed. To approve a plan calling for splendid defensive fighters to take the offensive at night while moving over unfamiliar terrain and woefully inferior in numbers and firepower was simply to grasp the muzzle of military success rather than the pistol grip; and also to surrender his own enormous advantage in terrain and tenacious troops: natural obstacles made unassailable by improved fortifications, thus canceling out his enemy’s superior firepower, and manned by invisible troops movable only in death.
He did this because, like Isamu Cho, his heart had conquered his head; and because most Japanese commanders from Midway-Guadalcanal to Okinawa itself could never shed that Bushido-born, carefully cultivated conviction that the soft, spoiled, luxury-loving Americans would quail at the first flash of a Samurai saber.