CHAPTER SEVEN
Never before—and God willing, may it never be so again—had there been an invasion armada the equal of the 1,600 seagoing ships carrying 545,000 American GIs and Marines that streamed across the Pacific in that fateful spring of 1945 bound for the island of Okinawa. In firepower, troops, and tonnage it eclipsed even the more-famous D day in Normandy on June 6, 1944. In that invasion, except for the enormous thirty-to-one preponderance in air power conferred upon him by 12,000 aircraft, General Eisenhower commanded only 150,000 Allied assault troops (compared to Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner’s attacking force of 184,000 GIs and Marines). True, Eisenhower’s supporting craft would eventually number 5,300, but most of these were far from being seaworthy. And the Allied naval forces off the five Normandy landing beaches could not approach the firepower of Admiral Spruance’s Task Force Fifty-eight. Nor was there any comparison in the distances traveled from staging area to battle-ground. Only about 30 miles of English Channel separated southern England from western France, or at most perhaps 400 miles to faraway ports in the United Kingdom, but ships leaving the West Coast ports of embarkation at San Francisco and Seattle sailed 7,355 miles to the target. Yet, in feats of unrivaled seamanship still not generally recognized, the 1,300 ships arriving off the Hagushi Beaches of Okinawa did get there in time for the landings. And there were still 300 left behind in the various anchorages stretching across the western ocean.
From Seattle and San Francisco no fewer than 3,200 miles had to be traversed before these newest and farthest-away vessels could reach Hawaii, the point from which the stupendous American counter-attack was launched to its last battle 4,155 miles distant. Soon these ships were putting in at the island battlegrounds whose names they bore (Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Tarawa, and the lesser battles of the Gilberts and Marshalls, New Britain, the Admiralties, Buna, and Sidor) to begin the long drive up the New Guinea coast—then staging up through the latest battlegrounds at Peleliu, Leyte, and Saipan-Tinian-Guam. Under the Stars and Stripes they roved boldly and unmenaced across that Pacific Ocean that was now an American lake, for the Philippines were by then subdued; of the mighty Japanese Navy that was to guard the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—Japan’s euphemism for its stolen empire there—only great Yamato, the most powerful warship afloat, had survived the holocaust of disaster of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Of the emperor’s glorious young eagles whose sneak attack on the Day of Infamy had awakened the sleeping American giant, only a few weary veterans remained to join the ragged remnant of Japanese airpower. British warships were also in the invasion fleet, a fast carrier force of twenty-two vessels, for in Europe the gate had been found open at Remagen Bridge, American troops were over the Rhine, and the Old Queen of the Waves was sending help to her erstwhile daughter, now Sovereign of the Seas.
Fleet Admiral Nimitz was still in overall command in Hawaii as he had been when the Japanese were stopped at Midway, when the long charge began at Guadalcanal. Admiral Raymond Spruance commanded the Fifth Fleet, and there was the saltiest salt still giving orders to the expeditionary force. Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner had brought the Marines to Guadalcanal and now, nearly three years later, still roaming his flagship bridge in an old bathrobe, still a profane perfectionist with beetling brow and abrasive tongue, a matchless planner who would also not scruple to tell the coxswain how to beach his boat, Kelly Turner was bringing the Tenth Army to Okinawa. Many of the officers and men aboard Turner’s ships—especially the Marines—were not ecstatic to have the Old Salt in charge.
The Leathernecks could not forget his monstrous blunder at Guadalcanal, when he was the Amphibious Force commander at this first invasion in the long-awaited American counter-offensive. In the night of August 8-9, 1942, the Battle of Savo Island—better known to the sailors and Leathernecks involved as “the Battle of the Four Sitting Ducks”—Turner had lost four cruisers: Astoria, Quincy, Vincennes, and the Australian Canberra, while a fifth, Chicago, had its bow blown off. He lost them because he violated a commander’s basic principle: never act on the premise of what you think the enemy will do but what he has the capacity to do. Thus, he was unprepared for battle when a Japanese task force led by Rear Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, the hero of Pearl Harbor, came tearing down the Slot the day after the Americans landed to surprise Turner in a disaster that might have been a catastrophe. Guadalcanal might have been reconquered by the enemy but for the tenacity of the Marines whom Turner quickly abandoned—and wisely so, his fire support force having been almost annihilated—sailing away with empty transports and some supply ships not even half unloaded, others still deep in the water. And the U.S. Navy did not return to Guadalcanal in force until three months later. But for Turner’s friendship with Nimitz, he might have lost his head just as Admiral Husband Kimmel did at Pearl Harbor. But he did come back again and again—risking his ships in the submarine-infested waters of the Coral Sea, to bring reinforcements and badly needed supplies to Major General Alexander Vandegrift.
This writer well remembers the Four Sitting Ducks, for our battalion was lost in the jungle that night, and the monster explosions that shook the trees and flames that seemingly set the clouds on fire were not suggestive of good times to come. When we returned to the beach the next day and saw not a single ship on a bay that had been full of masts twenty-four hours earlier, we knew that we were all alone. Worse, our ship, the George F. Elliott—an African slaver if ever there was one—had been sunk on D day by a Zero that crashed her amidships, sending all our supplies—beans, bullets, and barbed wire—down to the bottom, along with our extra clothing and mosquito nets, so that many of us quickly came down with malaria, and the first time I shot a Jap, I had Jap clothing on. We also lived on wormy Japanese rice for the next few months. Worse for me, the portable typewriter that my mother had given me on my sixteenth birthday also sank into Davy Jones’s locker, thus wrecking my naive plan to fight by day and write by night.
So those Americans sailing toward Okinawa who had been on “the Canal” were not enchanted to have Kelly Turner at the helm again. It was well known that he was a constant thorn in Vandegrift’s flesh, trying to take personal command of the reinforcements he brought to the island, planning to deploy them in tactical traps when actually he had no authority on land arid knew exactly nothing about ground warfare. One infuriated officer wrote: “Turner was a martinet; very, very gifted, but he was stubborn, opinionated, conceited ... thought that he could do anything better than anybody in the world ... By and large naval officers, they were wary of trying to run land operations, but Turner, no; because Turner knew everything!”
Soldiers who served at New Georgia in the Solomons also were given a sampling of Admiral Turner’s hectoring style when he was playing general—especially Major General Oswald Griswold, commander of the Army Fourteenth Corps. Turner repeatedly usurped Griswold’s authority, divided his staff, and—his critics maintained—prolonged what turned out to be a miserable campaign. Whether or not General Simon Bolivar Buckner was aware of Turner’s tendency to interfere is not known, and it may be that the Tenth Army commander as a newcomer to the Central Pacific was unfamiliar with the amphibious chief’s abrasive personality.
Buckner was the son of the Confederate general of the same name, so often described by many military historians as “famous.” Actually, Buckner’s father was rather more infamous throughout the Southland, for it was he who had accepted the humiliating terms of unconditional surrender of Fort Donelson offered to him by his fellow West Point cadet U. S. Grant. It was to Grant that this adjective famous really applied, for he did become famous—not only because his capture of Donelson was received in the North with delirium (these were the early dark days of defeat and retreat for the Union) but also because his initials U.S. fitted his feat, and he became known thereafter as “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. Buckner junior—for some inexplicable reason called “the Old Man of the Mountain”—was definitely unlikely to submit to the sort of bluff Grant ran on his father. A big man, ruddy-faced and white-haired, avid for the conditioning of troops, he had served four years in Alaska and the Aleutians, where he had improved the defenses of the North Pacific. He had hoped to lead the invasion of Japan from this region, but the thrust from the Aleutians was never made. Instead it was coming from the Central Pacific, and Buckner had been called to Hawaii to lead it. His command was the Tenth Army, a new number for seven old divisions. These were the Seventh, Twenty-seventh, Seventy-seventh, and Ninety-sixth Infantry Divisions of the U.S. Army Twenty-fourth Corps commanded by Major General John Hodge, and the First, Second, and Sixth Marine Divisions of the Third Amphibious Corps under the silver-haired veteran of Guadalcanal, Major General Roy Geiger.
All of these troops, and especially the replacements who fleshed out formations left understrength by battle losses, disease, or accident, hated the Pacific with a fierce, personal venom. Upon arriving in the islands they stood breathless at the rail of their transports, drinking in the beauty of a tropical paradise seen from the sea, especially at sunrise or sunset. But then, when they went ashore—even on a peaceful island—they saw the backside of beauty, a face as hideous as Medusa’s. The first to be so disillusioned by the ambivalent South Seas were the men of the First Marine Division when they came on deck the morning of August 7, 1942, who stood at the rail of their ships studying Guadalcanal. My buddies and I—waiting to follow our machine guns down the cargo nets to the wooden Higgins boats waiting and wallowing in the swells—were enchanted until after we landed. Years later, I remembered that scene:
She was beautiful seen from the sea, this slender long island. Her towering central mountains ran down her spine in a graceful east-west keel. The sun seemed to kiss her timber-line, and lay shimmering on open patches of tan grass dappling the green of her forests. Gentle waves washed her beaches white, raising a glitter of sun and water and scoured sand beneath fringing groves of coconut trees leaning languorously seaward with nodding, star-shaped heads.
She was beautiful, but beneath her loveliness, within the necklace of sand and palm, under the coiffure of her sun-kissed treetops with its tiara of jeweled birds, she was a mass of slops and stinks and pestilence; of scum-crested lagoons and vile swamps inhabited by giant crocodiles; a place of spiders as big as your fist and wasps as long as your finger, of lizards the length of your leg or as brief as your thumb; of ants that bite like fire, of tree-leeches that fall, fasten and suck; of scorpions without the guts to kill themselves, of centipedes whose foul scurrying across human skin leaves a track of inflamed flesh, of snakes that slither and land crabs that scuttle—and of rats and bats and carrion birds and of a myriad of stinging insects. By day, black swarms of flies feed on open cuts and make them ulcerous. By night, mosquitoes come in clouds—bringing malaria, dengue or any one of a dozen filthy exotic fevers. Night or day, the rains come; and when it is the monsoon it comes in torrents, conferring a moist mushrooming life on all that tangled green of vine, fern, creeper and bush, dripping on eternally in the rain forest, nourishing kingly hardwoods so abundantly that they soar more than a hundred feet into the air, rotting them so thoroughly at their base that a rare wind—or perhaps only a man leaning against them—will bring them crashing down.
And Guadalcanal stank. She was sour with the odor of her own decay, her breath so hot and humid, so sullen and so still, that all those hundreds of thousands of Americans who came to her during the ensuing three years of war cursed and swore to feel the vitality oozing from them in a steady stream of enervating heat.
The same reaction was felt by Buckner’s troops at the same island—then a huge staging area—and from the same division. Staff Sergeant George McMillan wrote of the Marine replacement on Guadalcanal who ran from his tent at dusk and began to pound his fists against a coconut tree. “I hate you, goddamit, I hate you,” the man cried, sobbing, and from another tent came the cry: “Hit it once for me!”
Almost all the troops of Buckner’s Tenth Army shared this loathing, for they had not enjoyed malaria or monsoons or playing hide-and-seek with crocodiles or scorpions, snakes or poisonous centipedes. Indeed, as late as February 1945, General Hodge’s infantry divisions were still mopping up on Leyte in weather and terrain exactly duplicating Guadalcanal’s. Hodge was dismayed. A veteran and respected infantry commander who had served during the mop-up at Guadalcanal under the famous “Lightning Joe” Collins—a future Army chief of staff—and had again defeated the Japanese on New Georgia and Bougainville in the Solomons, as well as Leyte, Hodge knew that his troops were dearly in need of what is today called “Rest and Rehabilitation”: i.e., a rousing beer-and-girls furlough in Melbourne or Sydney, Australia; Wellington, New Zealand; or even Manila. But he was not able to withdraw them from combat until March 1, with D day at the Great Loo Choo scheduled for April 1—exactly a month away. Yet, like the Marines training on Guadalcanal, when the GIs heard that their next campaign was to be on Okinawa, they were inexplicably reassured—perhaps because that island’s highest temperature of 85 degrees in no way approached the “paradise” reading of 120.
Before landing day, meanwhile, the Seventy-seventh Division would be in action on the Kerama Islands. GIs of the Seventy-seventh—known as “the Statue of Liberty Division” because of its shoulder patch—had fought at Guam alongside those fuzzy-cheeked Marine youngsters who pinned on them the nickname of “the old Bastards.” Their commander was Major General Andrew Bruce, who had also led them on Leyte. They were the first in action because Admiral Turner, having already felt the shudder of a “kamikazed” ship beneath his feet, wanted a safe group of islands with deep anchorages to be used as a “ships’ hospital” to which the victims of Japanese suiciders could be towed and repaired. General Hodge also wanted a base for long-range artillery to support his corps’s landing.
On the night of March 25, the Marines of Major Jim Jones’s veteran Reconnaissance Battalion paddled their rubber boats to Kerama to scout the enemy. Reassured by their reports of little opposition, the Seventy-seventh landed there the next day, destroying the lairs of Ushijima’s suicide boats as they took the reef islets one after another.
On the morning of March 29, soldiers of the 306th Infantry4 realized how cruel their enemy could be. In a valley below their position they found about 150 dead and wounded Okinawan civilians, many women and children among them. They had disemboweled themselves with grenades the Japanese had given them, after telling them the Americans would torture and murder the men and rape the women. In another three days Hodge’s two other divisions would be storming those Hagushi Beaches that Ushijima had chosen not to defend.
Major General James Bradley’s Ninety-sixth Division would be on the right flank of the Twenty-fourth Corps assault. Fresh from Leyte’s jungle and depleted by losses suffered during the fierce battle for Catmon Hill (and like Hodge’s other divisions denied replacements meant for them but sent to Europe to help crush Hitler’s last gasp in the Battle of the Bulge), the Ninety-sixth would face a far more punishing ordeal of blood and mud while attacking Ushijima’s monster Swiss cheese of steel and rock. The soldiers of the Ninety-sixth called themselves “the Dead-eyes” because Brigadier General Claudius Easley, the division’s assistant commander, was a crack shot, a somewhat illogical extension of the part for the whole; especially in a formation so recently formed and new to combat.5 In the division’s spearheads would be the 381st Regiment, under Colonel Michael “Screamin’ Mike” Halloran, and Colonel Edwin May’s 383rd. Eddy May was a fine commander whose iron discipline was softened by his compassion for his troops. General Hodge considered him the finest soldier in the entire Twenty-fourth Corps.
On the left flank of Hodge’s zone would be his most experienced division: the Seventh, called “the Hour-Glass Division” because of its shoulder patch and commanded by Major General Archibald Arnold. Its GIs had seen action at Attu in the Aleutians with their subzero cold, then Kwajalein in the Marshalls with its decidedly yet infinitely more amenable heat, and finally those dripping, enervating, malarial jungles of Leyte. In corps reserve would be the 382nd Regiment of the Ninety-sixth Division, while the Seventy-seventh Division still engaged in mopping up the Keramas would be committed to the down-island attack once the landings at Hagushi had been completed, Yontan and Kadena Airfields had been seized, and the Twenty-fourth Corps wheeled right (or south) to attack Ushijima’s Swiss cheese.
Probably the most experienced and famous formation in the American armed forces was the First Marine Division of Major General Geiger’s Third Amphibious Corps. On Guadalcanal alone—where on August 7, 1942, its Leathernecks landed to launch the long, three-year American counter-offensive—they had been in combat a total of 142 days (from the landing date until December 26), probably a record for sustained combat without relief, if such statistics are kept anywhere. During this five-month campaign, which turned the tide of the Pacific War against Japan, these men of “the Old Breed” were responsible for destroying most of the fifty thousand Japanese who fell on “Death Island.” In this dreadful carnage they were assisted by General Collins’s infantry after command passed to the Army on December 9, 1942, and especially by General Geiger’s “Cactus” Air Force, the Marine, Navy, and U.S. Army Air Force pilots who literally blasted the once-dreaded Japanese Zero fighter out of the South Pacific skies while littering the bottom of its waters with sunken Nipponese ships. After “the island,” the First fought in the vicinity of Finschhafen, captured Cape Gloucester on New Britain, and seized Peleliu at a cost of 1,749 dead and wounded while exterminating its 4,000 Japanese defenders. Major General Pedro del Valle commanded the First. Born in Puerto Rico, he had been graduated from Annapolis, serving as an observer in Ethiopia with Italy’s Marshal Pietro Badoglio. Becoming an artillery expert, his guns had much to do with the victory at Guadalcanal.
The Sixth Marine Division was commanded by another Guadalcanal veteran: Major General Lemuel Shepherd, who would one day be commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. His was an unblooded unit, sometimes called “the New Breed,” yet 70 percent of its men and officers were veterans of combat in orphan regiments that had been combined under the Sixth’s emblem of the silver Crusader’s Sword. Only two of its twelve rifle battalions had never known “the music” of bombs and bullets, and among its battle-wise veterans were Lieutenant Colonel Victor Kulak, a belligerent bantam called “the Brute,” the sarcastic nickname that Annapolis midshipmen pinned on all the coxswains of its rowing crews. In the ranks of this most gung ho of Marine divisions were such improbable swashbucklers as twenty-year-old Corporal Donald “Rusty” Golar, the self-styled Glory Kid. A brawny redhead, Rusty had fought with the Twenty-second Regiment on Guam and won a Bronze Star. “I’m a storybook Marine,” he would say, grinning when his buddies laughed outright. “I’m lookin’ for glory, and I’m lookin’ for Japs.” There were glory boys from collegiate football, too. Colonel Alan Shapley, commander of the Fourth Marines; had been one of the Naval Academy’s finest athletes. Lieutenant George Murphy of the Twenty-ninth Marines had been captain of the Notre Dame football team.
In General Geiger’s Third Corps reserve was the Second Marine Division. Its Second Marines had joined the original landing on Guadalcanal to be joined later by their comrades of the entire division. Derisively nicknamed “the Hollywood Marines” because they were based in California, they were not playacting when they waded ashore at Tarawa in 1943 to take in four days the island citadel that Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki had claimed could not be captured by “a million men in ten thousand years.” They went on to fight the grinding battle at Saipan in 1944. Major General Thomas Watson still commanded the Second. Because his Leathernecks had staged the eminently successful feint of the textbook shore-to-shore operation at Tinian, he had been asked to do it again at the Minatoga Beaches on Okinawa.
It was fitting that the commander of the Third Amphibious Corps, which included these three Marine divisions, should be Geiger, the gruff and grizzled white bear of a man more prone to deeds than words. Though a flying general, he had been in so many other invasions since Guadalcanal and had devoured so many textbooks on tactics that he had emerged as an excellent leader of ground troops as well.
Finally, Tenth Army’s Seventh Division—the Twenty-seventh Infantry commanded by Major General George Griner—was to be in “floating reserve” at Okinawa. If all went well there, the Twenty-seventh would occupy the island as a garrison division. For a division supposedly blooded in combat, such an assignment was not particularly dangerous, but the Twenty-seventh’s record in the Pacific had not been outstanding. A New York National Guard outfit, the Twenty-seventh saw its first action on Makin, where sixty-five hundred of its GIs landed on November 20, 1944. On the first night many of these half-trained guardsmen were panicked by Japanese scare tactics. Actually, the enemy numbered only five hundred lightly armed garrison soldiers holding paper-thin fortifications. But they held out for a week, though outnumbered thirteen to one and with almost no artillery to match the overwhelming American superiority in ordnance. During this delay the escort carrier Liscome Bay was sunk on the last day of battle, with a large loss of life. It was not the fault of the troops—it never is—for as Napoleon said: “There are no bad regiments, only bad colonels.”
Many of the Twenty-seventh’s officers from Major General Ralph Smith down to the lowliest second lieutenant were ineffective ; in fact, they were so indifferent to their responsibility that during maneuvers in Hawaii more than a few of them checked into Honolulu hotels for a night of revelry while their men slept on the bare ground. Again on Saipan under Smith the Twenty-seventh in between two Marine divisions moved so slowly that it lagged fifteen hundred yards behind these advancing formations. Thus a giant U was formed with the Twenty-seventh at the base, presenting the enemy with an unrivaled opportunity to exploit it. Immediately Marine Lieutenant General Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, commander of the Fifth Corps, relieved Ralph Smith and replaced him with another Army general. This episode exploded with the loudest bang of the Pacific’s shameful Army-Navy rivalry. Prior to Saipan five Army generals had been relieved in the Pacific, but that had been by Army generals. For a Marine general to have the insolence to remove an Army general was to join cardinal sin to unforgivable insult. Actually, the Twenty-seventh improved after General Griner took command, and he was still in command at Okinawa, with many brave men eager to follow him and redeem their division’s honor—which they would do. The Twenty-seventh was not at full strength, only 16,143 men, compared to the 22,000 of the other Army divisions and the 24,000 for the Marines—which brought their replacements with them.
Altogether, General Buckner’s seven combat divisions numbered 183,000 men, of whom 154,000 would be in assault on the Hagushi Beaches—half again as many as Ushijima’s 110,000, although many of the Japanese commander’s troops were raw Okinawa conscripts. However, traditional military doctrine specifies that an attacking force, especially an invader from the sea, should possess at least a three-to-one superiority over the defense.
These, then, were the troops with which General Buckner intended to make rapid conquest of Okinawa, unaware that only at Peleliu had Americans encountered such a formidable fixed position. At Okinawa Ushijima commanded at least twenty times as many men and had fortified in depth ten times as many square miles. That Buckner was unaware of the grueling, step-by-step, shot-for-shot battle that awaited him was neither his nor his intelligence’s fault, for the winter and spring clouds that shielded the Great Loo Choo from the skies had made aerial pinpointing of enemy defenses extremely difficult, while the Japanese, unrivaled at camouflage, had so artfully concealed their caves and crevasses that a man might stand but a few paces from a 47 mm antitank gun and never notice it.
Because Imperial General Headquarters wanted to bleed the Americans white at Okinawa just as dearly as the United States Chiefs of Staff desired to seize it, Ushijima was prepared to sacrifice every man in his command to soak the soil of the Great Loo Choo in American blood.
In the wardrooms of the troop transports flowing up the curve of the world, nervous planners pored over maps and those skimpy aerial montages of enemy positions, some of them delighted that there seemed to be so few pillboxes and blockhouses, others, more practical—remembering Biak, Peleliu, and Iwo—scornfully exclaiming : “No resistance, huh? Wait till we get ashore!”
On the troop decks most of the conversation was about the deadly habu, a long, thick, dark snake whose bite was supposed to have no known remedy. Intelligence said the habu was something like a cobra, even displaying pictures of it. It was indeed a venomous-looking reptile, but in the lighthearted way of the American warrior, Buckner’s troops made jokes about it, and the habu soon passed into the immortal GI-Marine menagerie of the goony-birds of Midway, the upside-down pissing-possum of Guadalcanal, Australia’s lunatic-lunged kookaburra, the “beavers” of the North African beaches, the New Zealand kiwi, and the indecent snow-snake of Iceland. The men speculated so much about the habu that they almost forgot the Japanese, although officers frequently “held school” on the weather decks to stress the dangers of their objective.
“From Okinawa,” one lieutenant told his platoon, “we can bomb the Japs anywhere—China, Japan, Formosa ...”
“Yeah,” a sergeant mumbled, “and vice versa.”
It was true, of course, that the Japanese had sixty-five airfields on Formosa to the south and fifty-five on Kyushu to the north, as well as a few dozen scattered throughout the southern Ryukyus, but such discouraging information is not normally disseminated among the troops. More pointed and helpful information came from veterans such as Corporal Al Biscansin of the Sixth Marine Division, who offered this earnest advice to the boots:
“When you aren’t moving up or firing, keep both ends down! The GI Bill of Rights don’t mean a thing to a dead Marine.”
The GI Bill rivaled the habu as a topic of conversation, for a surprising number of these young men intended to go to college when the war was over. They even expected that great event to happen soon.
“Home alive in ‘45,” they said, a happy revision of Guadalcanal’s gloomy estimate of “the Golden Gate in ’48.” They sang “Good-bye, Mama, I’m off to Okinawa,” and joked about the latest horrendous estimates of American disaster broadcast by Radio Tokyo.
Admiral Ugaki had already made the mistake of believing that his airmen had crippled Spruance’s fleet in those mid-March attacks and seriously delayed invasion of Okinawa. Because of his error, the Kerama Islands landings caught the Japanese unprepared. Only Ushijima’s handful of obsolete crates on Okinawa and a few kamikaze from Kyushu were able to intervene, but they inflicted only slight damage. Yet, on March 28, the GIs and Marines aboard the transports heard Radio Tokyo announce the sinking of a battleship, six cruisers, seven destroyers, and one minesweeper, and then the voice of an American-educated announcer simpering:
This is the Zero Hour, boys. It is broadcast for all you American fighting men in the Pacific, particularly those standing off the shores of Okinawa ... because many of you will never hear another program ... Here’s a good number, “Going Home” ... it’s nice work if you can get it ... You boys off Okinawa listen and enjoy it while you can, because when you’re dead you’re a long time dead ... Let’s have a little jukebox music for the boys and make it hot.... The boys are going to catch hell soon, and they might as well get used to the heat ...
Then, having described the varieties of death instantly impending for “the boys off Okinawa,” the voice concluded: “Don’t fail to tune in again tomorrow night.”
Two days later the voice was somber. “Ten American battleships, six cruisers, ten destroyers, and two transports have been sunk. The American people did not want this war, but the authorities told them it would take only a short while and would result in a higher standard of living. But the life of the average American citizen is becoming harder and harder and the war is far from won ...”
On March 31 the assault troops were given an eve-of-battle feast. “We had a huge turkey dinner,” the famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle reported. “ ‘Fattening us up for the kill,’ the boys said.”
The next day Radio Tokyo had lost its audience: “The boys off Okinawa” had gone ashore.
That was on April 1—Easter Sunday, 1945, April Fool’s Day, or L day, as it was called officially. The L stood for “Landing,” but the Americans who hit the Hagushi Beaches with hardly a hand raised to oppose them had another name for it.
They called it Love Day.