BOURBON AND PUDDLE WATEROKINAWA
APRIL 3, 1945
For Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., a few months short of his fifty-ninth birthday, just being at Okinawa was a personal triumph. By 1945, the handsome, white-haired general was no less a twilight warrior than the kids on the ships and on the beach. Buckner was aware of the controversy over his posting. With minimal battle experience, he had been appointed over a plethora of seasoned combat commanders.
Like Douglas MacArthur, Buckner was a West Pointer and the son of a Civil War officer. His father, Gen. Simon B. Buckner, was named after the South American liberator. He had fought in the Mexican War, joined the Confederate side as a brigadier general, and gained infamy for making a hasty surrender to Ulysses Grant. He was exchanged and returned to fight until the end of the Civil War.
Now his son, Simon Buckner Jr., had arrived at his new command after thirty-seven years in the Army, most of it in staff and administrative positions. He’d missed combat in World War I, having spent the duration giving military training to Army aviators. Like MacArthur, he’d seen two tours of duty in the Philippines. He’d been an instructor at various Army schools and, also like MacArthur, had returned to West Point, serving in the mid-thirties as commandant of cadets.
When World War II began, Buckner was a colonel and a division chief of staff with every expectation of a combat command. Instead of going to Guadalcanal or North Africa, he received a promotion to brigadier general and the unenviable task of defending Alaska—a region one-fifth the size of the United States, with a coastline nearly as long.
Buckner threw himself into the mission of fortifying Alaska. For a while it even seemed possible that the Japanese might attempt an invasion. They seized the Aleutian islands of Kiska and Attu and made a thrust at the Dutch Harbor military complex before being turned back by airpower. Buckner played only a minor role in the Aleutian action. For most of three frustrating years he paced the tundra while his Army contemporaries were fighting battles—real battles—in Europe and the Pacific.
In June 1944, fate finally smiled on Simon Buckner. Now wearing three stars, he was assigned to command the new Tenth Army, which was being formed for the invasion of Formosa. While he was still assembling his army, Buckner learned that Formosa would be bypassed. His first landing would be on Okinawa.
There were other similarities between Buckner and the media-conscious MacArthur. Buckner cultivated an image of himself as a hard-charging, outdoors-living, chest-thumping man of action. A Time interviewer profiled him as “a ruddy-faced, white-thatched, driving apostle of the rigorous life.”
Buckner’s favorite drink was “bourbon and puddle water,” with which he made his traditional toast, “May you walk in the ashes of Tokyo.” The general had a laugh, a journalist reported, that “starts with a little chuckle in his throat, and then he really lets go and shakes the walls.”
Now, with the bulk of his army ashore on Okinawa, Buckner could allow himself to laugh. To his left, Maj. Gen. Roy Geiger’s III Marine Amphibious Corps was rolling like a freight train northward through the Ishikawa Isthmus toward the neighborhood of Kim. Opposition to their advance was virtually nil. It was the same to the right, where Maj. Gen. John Hodge and XXIV Army Corps were marching southward toward Naha, the island’s capital.
Buckner had good reason to be pleased, but he knew better than to delude himself. He’d studied the intelligence reports. Somewhere on this island were more than sixty thousand Japanese troops. Where the hell were they?
They were there. But Buckner’s intelligence reports were wrong. Instead of 60,000 enemy troops on Okinawa, there were nearly 120,000, dug into caves, tombs, and spider holes.
The man who commanded this force, Lt. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, watched from his observation post at the ancient Shuri Castle as the Americans advanced toward him. They were meeting only sporadic resistance, which was what Ushijima intended. Not until the enemy reached the open paddies and gentle hills three miles short of the first defensive line did Ushijima intend to show his hand. The approaches to the first defensive line were all pre-sited for artillery, mortar batteries, and machine gun nests to deliver enfilading fire on the advancing enemy.
Ushijima’s 32nd Army included battle-hardened veterans of the 62nd Infantry Division, which had seen action in China, and the 24th Independent Mixed Brigade from the home island of Kyushu. In addition to his 34,000 regular infantrymen, Ushijima’s force had 10,000 troops drawn from the Navy bases on Okinawa. Another 20,000 soldiers—called the Boeitai—were a home guard conscripted from the Okinawan population. Though the Boeitai lacked the grit and motivation of the homegrown Japanese soldiers, they were useful for the grunt work of digging emplacements and moving equipment.
Ushijima also had guns, more than any Japanese commander of a besieged island had possessed before. Much of the artillery had been destined for the Philippines, but time ran out before it could be delivered. Ushijima had three heavy artillery regiments, a tank regiment, and a regiment of the massive 320-millimeter guns that had been used with devastating effect at Iwo Jima. It was no match for what the Americans would bring with them, but for the first time in any of the Pacific battles Japanese artillery would be a major deterrent to the advancing enemy forces.
Ushijima had studied the previous invasions—Saipan, Leyte, Tarawa, Peleliu, and most recently Iwo Jima. His old Imperial Japanese Army colleague, Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had commanded the 21,000-man garrison at Iwo Jima. Outmanned and outgunned, with no hope of reinforcement or replenishment, Kuribayashi had chosen not to contest the American landings. Instead he fought a battle of attrition, resisting the enemy advance from a hidden honeycomb of tunnels, caves, and pillboxes. In the end, Kuribayashi and almost all his garrison went to their deaths.
Here on Okinawa Ushijima faced the same choices. His only option was to turn Okinawa into a Stalingrad for the Americans—a vast bloody pit into which the United States would throw lives and resources until they concluded that an unconditional surrender of Japan was not worth the sacrifice. Like Kuribayashi, Ushijima saw no point in wasting precious resources on the beaches. Nor did he believe in suicidal last-ditch banzai charges into the waiting muzzles of the enemy’s guns.
Mitsuru Ushijima was not cut from the same cloth as most of the bushido-embracing officers of the Imperial Japanese Army. Ushijima was a disciplined, fatherly officer who disdained shows of anger. In a departure from the harsh customs of the Imperial Japanese Army, Ushijima ordered his junior officers to refrain from striking their subordinates.
Ushijima’s second in command, fifty-one-year-old Isamu Cho, was his opposite in temperament. Newly promoted to the rank of lieutenant general, Cho was a fiery warrior with a history of extremist leanings. He’d been a conspirator in an unsuccessful attempt at a military dictatorship in 1931. During the infamous Rape of Nanking in 1937, it was Cho who had issued the orders to kill all prisoners. Prone to fits of rage, Cho didn’t hesitate to slap subordinates who displeased him.
During strategy sessions in Ushijima’s underground headquarters, Cho often clashed with the senior operations officer, Col. Hiromichi Yahara. At forty-two, Yahara was a calm, conservative officer who rejected the bushido notion of suicidal banzai charges. Such tactics, he insisted, were a stupid waste of lives. He counseled Ushijima that “the army must continue its current operations, calmly recognizing its final destiny—for annihilation is inevitable no matter what is done.”
To Cho, such thinking was timid and defeatist, a dishonorable way for Japanese warriors to die. He urged Ushijima to launch a massive counterattack, hurl the enemy back to the beaches, and take the offensive in the battle for Okinawa.
The genial Ushijima presided over the debates in his headquarters more like a moderator than a commander. After listening to the impassioned arguments of both officers, he sided with Yahara. Better to bleed the enemy, making them pay in lives and time for each meter of ground they took.
As the days passed, more Okinawans came out of hiding. Gradually they realized that the invaders weren’t pillaging and murdering. The Okinawans stared at the American soldiers in dazed fascination.
Ernie Pyle was with a Marine company working its way north when they found a group of natives hiding in a cave. “They were obviously scared to death,” Pyle wrote. “After all the propaganda they had been fed about our tortures, they were a befuddled bunch of Okinawans when they discovered we had brought right along with us, as part of the intricate invasion plan, enough supplies to feed them too!”
The honeymoon continued. Nearly a week had passed since Love Day, and the Americans were still encountering little opposition. After the tense first few hours of the invasion, the men of the Tenth Army felt almost like celebrating.
Spring had come, the weather was benign, and the island seemed almost friendly. To the old hands who had fought in hellholes such as Tarawa and Saipan, the absence of thick jungle and oppressive heat was a blessing. Okinawa had a temperate climate. Its hillsides were covered with pine trees and wild raspberries. Flocks of pigeons fluttered overhead, offering the only targets for trigger-happy soldiers. Troops commandeered bicycles and horses. The most notable casualty of the first few days was a Marine who broke an ankle when he fell off a purloined bicycle.
One day passed into another as they made their careful advance across the island, still meeting no resistance. A few civilians, mostly children, approached the soldiers for handouts. Many of the GIs were farm boys from America’s heartland. They gazed around at the pleasant landscape, impressed by the efficient cultivation of the arable land. Almost every square inch of tillable ground was neatly terraced and cultivated. It seemed an unlikely backdrop for a great battle.
Meanwhile, several hundred miles to the northeast of Okinawa, in the ocean off Shikoku, Windy Hill had reached a conclusion: he hated submarines. They were dangerous, claustrophobia-inducing, smelly steel tubes.
It had taken Hill less than one full day aboard USS Sea Dog to make this discovery. He had been having dinner in the officers’ wardroom when the klaxon sounded: “General quarters, man your battle stations!”
The sub had been running on the surface, recharging its batteries. Hill watched with growing trepidation while the captain and all the officers charged out of the wardroom. The sub dove to periscope depth, and minutes later Hill heard the rumble of the forward torpedo tubes firing. The target, he learned, was a Japanese submarine that had been sighted on the surface.
Alone in the wardroom with only a steward for company, Hill huddled with his back against the bulkhead, trying to shut from his mind the vision of a torpedo slamming into the hull behind him.
They finally lost contact with the enemy submarine. Sea Dog returned to the surface, and the officers resumed their dinner. Gloomily Hill thought about his fellow airedales back aboard Intrepid. While he was stuck on this damned boat, they were shooting down Japs, bombing airfields, and collecting medals.
His gloom only deepened when the submarine’s skipper informed him that the fun was just beginning. Sea Dog’s war patrol would last another five weeks.