CHAPTER 27
Following the loss of four fleet carriers at Midway in June 1942 the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) did not sortie in force for two years, by which time the gross industrial disparity between Japan and the USA had made the outcome of the war a foregone conclusion. The Japanese Naval Air Arm was ground down at Guadalcanal and annihilated in the battle of the Philippine Sea (the 'Marianas Turkey Shoot'), when the IJN also lost another three carriers. The remaining carriers were used as decoys and sunk at Leyte in October 1944. The Philippine Sea battle came about because the IJN had to try to prevent the Americans from seizing Saipan and Tinian, the southern Mariana Islands, which brought the Japanese mainland within range of the USAAF's new B-29 bombers. Political considerations, plus ferocious inter-service rivalry and a desire to restore American imperial prestige, led to a second offensive being mounted in General Douglas MacArthur's south-west Pacific area to recover the Philippines. The two most savage small-island battles, at Peleliu in September 1944 and the northern Mariana island of Iwo Jima in February 1945, were fought to cover MacArthur's flank and to gain a base for P-51 fighters to escort the B-29s respectively. Hindsight suggests that both, as well as MacArthur's reconquest of the Philippines, were strategically irrelevant and that Admiral Chester Nimitz's central Pacific drive, his submarines and the USAAF, would have won the war without them. Starting at Leyte, Japanese pilots began to employ the 'body-crash' technique on a large scale, taking the name kamikaze (Divine Wind). For the remainder of the war about 2,800 kamikaze sorties sank or irreparably damaged more than 70 Allied ships and damaged, about 330 others, killing and wounding nearly 10,000 Allied personnel, the majority of them in the 82–day battle for Okinawa in April–June 1945. This was to be the last island invasion prior to the assault on the Japanese mainland and some 130,000 Japanese soldiers and about half as many Okinawan civilians died, against 13,000 dead, 36,000 wounded and nearly 25,000 battle-stress casualties among the American forces. The suicidal ferocity of the resistance on Okinawa was a crucial factor in the decision to use the atom bomb in September.
ROBERT SHERROD
War correspondent
The contrast between Tarawa and Eniwetok [February 1944] is what you would expect after we had learned a great deal about amphibious warfare. At Tarawa we were just starting, it was our first action against a defended beach, and Eniwetok was fifteen weeks later. We had learned at Tarawa that three thousand tons of bombs was not enough, particularly when it's the wrong type, when it's fragmentation instead of explosive, for instance. By Eniwetok we had forty thousand tons of preliminary bombardment and bombing, and we didn't have there the problem of the coral reefs, because central Eniwetok is not a coral island so our landing boats could get ashore all right. We had new equipment such as the Army DUKWs, pronounced 'ducks', which are trucks rather than tractors, not treaded but running on rubber tyres. Marvellous machines, especially for bringing us material – equipment of various types, food, water and so on. So we were well prepared for Eniwetok, which was a different type of island. It was hilly, even mountainous in a small way, it was eight square miles instead of the half square mile we had at Tarawa, but we still did not realise the extent of the difficulty that we were going to have with it. They were awfully good at digging into those ravines, tunnels forty, fifty even one hundred feet long with a great many exits to them. They were hard to get out, you needed a number of weapons – the flame-thrower was always good for clearing caves. You used Bangalore torpedoes, hand grenades, you even used bulldozers. Not many people realise that the bulldozer was a weapon in World War Two. We armoured the bulldozers and used them, with cover from the air of course, to close up the vents in the caves. There must have been thousands of Japanese who suffocated to death across the Pacific because their caves were closed by bulldozers.
MARINE SERGEANT WILSON COOKE
Iwo Jima
We used everything available – demolition charges, flame-throwers and what not – but the Japanese were so well entrenched and had been there for so many months preparing the islands for defensive situations that if you blew one entrance another would open up, and they had tools inside with which to work themselves back to the surface. They had sliding doors to close off so that the flame-throwers wouldn't get them and exhaust the oxygen. So it meant simply that men went in, active men, and you killed them underground. It was just that rough.
MARINE LENLY COTTON
Okinawa.
Our platoon was – other than the one that could vote – they were all under twenty. Ninety per cent were nineteen or younger, there were as many below eighteen as above, five or six that were sixteen, including myself, and one that was fifteen that I know of personally.
ROBERT SHERROD
The decision on the approach to Japan, now that we knew the end of the war was approaching, was taken in July 1944 at a meeting in Pearl Harbor between President Roosevelt, General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz. This was the only time MacArthur left his own area during World War Two – actually he never came back to the mainland. MacArthur and Nimitz made their presentations without their staffs and at the end of it Roosevelt told MacArthur he accepted his version and therefore we would approach Japan by two routes – MacArthur's from the south-west Pacific up to Leyte, and Nimitz across the central Pacific – of course by then we were already in the Marianas – on up to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Their forces would converge at Okinawa and the invasion would take place from there. I think you have to say politics were involved. Roosevelt was having a difficult election in 1944, when he ran for his third term against Thomas Dewey, the Republican, and MacArthur was a threat to him, always. MacArthur had a great following among the common people in the United States, particularly among the right-wingers, and he of course was a Republican. So I'm sure you could speculate sensibly that Roosevelt let MacArthur have his way because it did eliminate him as a factor in the election of 1944.
MARIANAS TURKEY SHOOT
JUNE 1944
ENSIGN ROY 'BUTCH' VORIS
Fighter pilot on the USS Enterprise
They'd picked them up on radar now and it was apparently a strike that we'd not had any intelligence on. It was a major wave and I would think it would be somewhere around two hundred to three hundred Japanese fighters and dive bombers and torpedo planes. They were somewhere between twenty-five and thirty thousand feet, that was way above our normal operating altitude in those days and so we climbed to intercept them and here we saw them coming and they had already started their run in and were heading downhill, picking up speed. And I remember the fighters criss-crossing over the dive bombers and the torpedo planes and we just went full throttle and came right on top of them, just a trail right on down. So were able to work the attack force for a period of about a hundred miles, one at a time, nibbling away at them and by the time they had traversed that last hundred miles I don't think more than a dozen of them, of the Japanese planes, ever reached our Task Force.
BATTLE OF SAMAR, LEYTE GULF
OCTOBER 1944
SEAMAN GEORGE SMITH
Flight-deck crewman on escort carrier USS White Plains
Someone yelled at me, 'You'd better get your helmet and your Mae West on, because here come the Japs,' and at about that time I heard an explosion on the fantail. First I thought it was one of our own planes exploding back there and I looked up and saw all this tin foil falling, this tin foil to jam our radar and of course it was general quarters and everybody manned their battle stations and then they started shooting, trying to get our range. Our skipper turned the ship where the shells landed, he was zigzagging, then we started to lay down smoke but they pulled in pretty fast on us, they caught one of the carriers back there [USS Kitkun Bay] and they sank it. They got so close we could see the Japanese flag flying. This was a running battle of about two hours and we were going between these two islands and the Japanese thought it was leading to a trap so they broke off the engagement.
CAPTAIN TADASHI NAKAJIMA
Commander Mabalacat base, the Philippines, organiser of first Special Attack Unit (Kamikaze)
The first attacks took place against the American carriers in Leyte Gulf. The reason why this development took place was that if the Americans succeeded in landing on Leyte and then set up air bases then they would cut us off completely from oil supplies and the United States would force Japan to its knees. Now, why were fighter planes used in these Special Attack forces? The reason was that Japan had fewer and fewer bombing planes, attack planes, and we had to rely on fighter planes. However, of course, fighter pilots were not trained in bombing attacks and therefore it was felt that the only way to solve this was to have these fighter pilots ram themselves, plane and body together, into the enemy ships.
SEAMAN SMITH
At about two o'clock that afternoon we were still at battle stations in a formation of four carriers because they'd sunk one in the morning and at the time we didn't know it but we were attacked by kamikazes. We thought they was dropping bombs on us because one of the carriers off the port side there [USS St Lô] took a direct hit and after that we saw a plane come down and hit them and we knew we was under attack by suicide bombers. They hit this carrier dead centre and as we went by men were abandoning ship and as we got beyond it the whole ship seemed to explode and there was nothing there. And at about that time on our own ship a kamikaze came in on us and went in just like a regular landing. I guess he was trying to sneak up on us like one of our own planes coming in. As he started to drop in the skipper seen what he was doing and turned the ship hard port. Well, the men on the starboard side they swung their guns around and shot across the flight deck, hitting the kamikaze, and he winged over and dropped on the other side of the catwalk into the water and exploded with debris showering up on to the flight deck.
LIEUTENANT FRANK MANSON
Crew on Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer USS Laffey
I was on the bridge of our destroyer in a bay in the Philippines and these shiny planes appeared over us and they dived on two of the destroyers and hit them. I turned to my skipper, who was a veteran of the South Pacific, and said, 'Captain, did you ever see anything like this in the South Pacific?' He said, 'Hell, no, I've never seen anything like it,' and he put on flank speed and we started to turn in a tight circle – he thought that was the best manoeuvre.
IWO JIMA
FEBRUARY–MARCH 1945
MARINE JACK STEARN
We didn't expect much opposition because there was going to be a tremendous bombardment by the Fleet and the Air Force. The Air Corps had been bombing continually for over a month. When we began to get close to the island it was during the night and I came up on deck to watch the excitement. It was a beautiful sight to see these different ships of war firing at the beaches, the flashes, the roar, the tremendous power that seemed to overpower the island. Then it began to get late so I went below to get myself some sleep before we had to land. And coming up for the landing the firing was still going on and you could see the flash – well, it was day by this time but you could still see the flashes from the gunships, the battleships and cruisers and destroyers, and you also could see the strikes of the rounds of artillery on the beach, a lot of flames and a lot of dust.*69
MARINE SERGEANT COOKE
It had been bombed for seventy-odd days by the Air Corps and prior to going in we shelled it for two days and we'd found this normally suppressed anything on the beach from former operations, that is Saipan in the Marshalls, etc. I went in on Blue Beach with the 24th Marines and when we hit the beach we moved about – oh, possibly three hundred yards in – just as far as they, meaning the Japanese, decided for us to go and then they turned loose with everything they had, so they pinned us on the beach itself. So we spent the first night, we meaning my company, spent the first night on the beach. We did not go in – we could not go in, we tried an attack and it did not work. The next morning at daybreak my company, that was Charlie Company – and Bravo Company, which was in front of us was shot off the hill, unfortunately by some of our planes and a hell of a lot of Japanese – we relieved Bravo. We were committed and we stayed committed for twenty-six days after that. I have a picture taken on Iwo of my company. There's sixteen of us left out of two hundred and seventy that went in.
MARINE CORPSMAN HERMAN RABECK
The other islands were just normal islands but this thing looked like something out of godforsaken. As you hit the island it was – if there's ever been hell, this was it. There wasn't a living thing anywhere in sight. I would say that forty to fifty per cent of the men I got close to were dead. I was actually hopping over bodies and you never could tell who was alive and who wasn't because everybody hit the ground and stayed there. There was a little incline and everybody clung to the incline because the fire was that heavy and everything that hit the beach was blasted out of the water as fast as it hit it. In fact our own men were blasting ships out of the water to make room for more guys to get in, it was that bad. The whole line of the shores was just one mess of debris, of LSTs and LCTs [Landing Craft Tanks] and God knows what else that tried to get up on the beach, stopped at that point and couldn't get back. They just blew them right out of the water's edge so we couldn't get any wounded off the island. It was just one of the biggest messes I have ever seen. I don't know who the beach master was but he had the roughest job of any man I've heard of because there was absolutely no way of getting boats in or out without blasting your way in, one way or another.
ROBERT SHERROD
I remember walking along the beach and seeing how many people had been killed during the night, and the splattered arms and legs and guts and blood you found all along. The casualties were horrible. I described one battalion that was commanded by a captain because all the other officers had been killed or wounded. Several battalions had over one hundred per cent casualties, that is counting the reinforcements that came in against the original baseline, of course, and you'd find such things as not a single officer remaining in a regiment, except perhaps one, with the rank of major or higher. It's the only battle in the Pacific War when our casualties were the same as the Japanese, although the Japanese were all dead except a few hundred that surrendered, and ours included dead and wounded.*70
CORPSMAN RABECK
Our own shells were pretty accurate – we had no problems on this particular island with our own shells, we had enough to contend with the Japanese shells. They were too damned accurate, they were unbelievably accurate, they just lobbed in like clockwork, rhythmically patterned, one after another, just bounced right in there and they didn't miss anything that was in sight. That spotter up on Mount Suribachi had everybody in his line, couldn't miss, we were sucked in beautifully.
MARINE LIEUTENANT CLAYTON EASTON
The thirty-first day was just as bad as the first one. They could reach us any time with anything they had. Their fire-control plots, their gun cables, their gun controls were blocked off to where they could fire at any inch of the island at any time. It was just a fact that you put two and two third divisions of marines in, and then put the Japanese there, if a bullet hit the island anywhere it had to hit somebody.
MARINE GEORGE SLATTERY
One thing that impressed me about Iwo was the underground noise, the rumbling that used to go on under the ground. You'd hear this rumbling all through the night and the ground was warm – you see, this was a volcanic island. We heard this noise underneath and there were people, marine officers, who were convinced that the Japanese were digging underneath us and were going to blow up the whole island or that something awful was going to happen.
MARINE SERGEANT COOKE
Iwo is volcanic, as the world knows, I'm sure. Well, with the bombardment that occurred on this particular island the entire vegetation was gone, gone completely, and you'd waken in the morning before the shooting would start and you'd look out across this expanse of no man's land and it was bubbling and seething with steam coming out of the ground. In fact we had to use cardboard from the ration packs to put down in the foxhole so that your ass wouldn't burn up when you were using the hole to protect yourself. Now my reaction was that if there's a hell I'm living through it now so I don't have to worry about going to hell any time in the future – I've been there.
CORPSMAN RABECK
The ash was almost like quicksand and in fact when I finally got hit they had to dig me out by shovelling with their hands, because it covers you that fast. It would just cover you right up and just drift in. That's the way the ash actually was – it moved, it was alive, and if you didn't move fast enough it covered you up.
MARINE SERGEANT COOKE
We had lost so many people, my CO he just came round and said, 'Cooke, you're company commander. We'll talk about commissioning you later.' So with that I accepted responsibilities I'd not had before and it started to get rough because I saw more of the picture than you could on a platoon front. From platoon front to company front you got about four or five hundred more yards, so the realisation came to me that we could have taken a licking then, a bad licking. We came very near to doing that particular thing, we found out – of course much later.
MARINE STEARN
I was on the island a total of six days and it seemed like six thousand years. I couldn't differentiate between night and day because everything kept going, the fear that was always there, the shelling that was always there, there was no place to really go back and relax a bit and then come back forward and say OK we're going back into it again. You were always in it, wherever the heck you went you were always in it.
CORPSMAN RABECK
This was about the fifth day and I was standing on board the ship completely taped up. I had practically a straightjacket on to keep me from bending because I couldn't support my torso, but I was up on top and one of the boys started to holler, 'There goes the flag,' and I don't care where you were on the island, you could see right up to Suribachi and the flag was raised and everybody started to howl because we figured the island was secure. It was far from secure – we had a long way to go yet – but it was nice to see the flag up there anyway.
MARINE JOHN GREET
Most of the time we had to use flame-throwers to get them out, they were buried so deep. Very few of them came out on their own and when they did, usually the one in front he'd come out with his hands up and the one behind he'd come out with a grenade.
MARINE C S AXTELL
We were heavily attacked that night and some measure of the infiltration is that there were twenty dead enemy within ten yards of the colonel's foxhole. As the morning sun came up we started to pull out of our foxholes and relax a bit and one of the West Virginia boys – he was a tall gangly fellow, very dry humour – he was sitting against a stone wall with his knees up under his helmet as we used to sit quite often, when one of the enemy ran out on top of the stone wall and held a small explosive charge to his abdomen. A chunk of his torso went spiralling into the air and came down on John's knees with the absolute posterior devoid of any clothes staring him right in the face. And he looked at that and he says, 'God, have I been hit that bad?' And that was the trigger that released the tensions of the previous night and there were several of us that were perfectly useless for as much as an hour – we just lay there on the ground in convulsions.
MARINE GREET
Sometimes we got them out by coaxing, if we got one that could speak English. We found quite a few of them over there and they'd lead the rest of them out. But they were very sceptical, they'd got the idea that we were going to torture them, like they did to our boys I guess. We saw some pretty terrible sights over there.
MARINE SLATTERY
One thing we found out about the Japanese throughout the war was something that couldn't be written about during the war, which was that once a man had surrendered he had sort of written himself off. If you see what I mean, he was disgraced anyway so he was likely to tell you everything he knew. It was quite unlike interrogating prisoners in any other war that I ever heard of.
MARINE RICHARD COLEMAN
I was always taught to hate them, to detest them, that they were the animals and we were the men. By the same token we were taught that they would die for the Emperor and we weren't taught to die for our President. To come up against an individual who wants to die, or who doesn't care about dying, is a tough thing to combat in your mind. We wanted to live, we wanted to kill him and survive.
OKINAWA
APRIL–JUNE 1945
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER DONALD GARY
Fleet carrier USS Franklin, 19 March 1945
By the time I got back to my battle station and then further aft the lights were dimming and smoke was pouring through the ventilation system, and everyone it seemed was going toward a given compartment that had a light and it's like moths where they go to the light – you were groping in the dark so you go where the light is, and that's what I did and that's what about two hundred and eighty-five other fellows did. There we found ourselves reasonably smoke free but with only one little cup of ventilation through the skin of the ship. So there we were, all of us afraid and just stood by while the terrific explosions from the topside just rocked the ship. There were explosions from the seventy-two other planes on deck and they were blowing up. It was our own bombs that at that time made us more afraid of what the eventual outcome was going to be. We were trapped for about an hour and a half and during that time the list on the ship grew greater and all in all everyone was just waiting to die, it was that bad. But suddenly something stirred in my mind and I knew a way out. I stood up and declared myself, told them I knew a way out and if I could get there I'd get back for the rest of them. Five times 1 went back, I got them all out too.*71
CAPTAIN NAKAJIMA
At the beginning we were able to select from the large number of people who volunteered. But as the war situation deteriorated and when the attack planes had to take off from Japan proper, when Japan itself was under threat of attack, we needed a large number of Special Attack Force pilots. And then it could be that not all of them were volunteers but may have included those who did not actually desire to volunteer and those who were sort of dragged in by their comrades and persuaded to volunteer.
LIEUTENANT MANSON
When the five-inch guns opened the plane is out about maybe five or six miles, that's when you see the big puffs, and then when the forties open you see smaller puffs and they're getting within maybe one mile or two miles and then when the twenties open they're less than a mile and you know there's an explosion imminent and you just hope it's not against your ship. But you really don't know because you can't tell what the pilot's going to do at the last minute, whether he's going to veer off, what his judgement is going to be like, whether he's going to try to hit the water-line, whether he's going to try to hit the bridge, or whether he's going to hit your ship or one close by. But it's a human bomb, that's what it is, and it's got a man's brain in it.
CAPTAIN NAKAJIMA
When the Special Attack pilots' cause was set up and if time was available then we did have special ceremonies. But, in general, the feeling was that it was natural for these pilots to take off and attack the enemy and there was no special, no important ceremony put on.
LIEUTENANT MANSON
USS Laffey, 16 April 1945
The first four planes we were able to shoot down but I believe it was the fifth plane that hit us coming in from the stern, and once they'd hit us and made a ball of fire and a lot of smoke, why of course they had something to aim at from up there and from that point forward we had a holocaust on that destroyer, fire and explosions and shrapnel. This attack went on for seventy to ninety minutes and was the most sustained and continuous attack against a single ship of World War Two. There were twenty-six planes that made suicide attacks against our ship and seven of the planes were shot down by our gunners and fifteen managed to miss the ship and we were actually hit, direct hit, by four. We had two that grazed the ship and did some damage but there were four that plunged right into the after part of the ship.*72
MOMOKO YONAHA
Okinawan girl conscripted, into medical service with the Japanese Army
It was at dawn on 19th June that I finally reached the Yamashiro mountain. I hid in the mountain all day but from the air the American bombers kept bombing us and we were also subjected to strafing attacks and also heavy bombardment from the warships lying offshore. Many who were beside me died. I somehow survived and when night came I was afraid to stay any longer in the mountain and I walked down towards the coast. I was walking along the beach and met other people until finally nine of us formed a group. All around us the soldiers and the inhabitants were running helter-skelter, here and there, obviously confused. We got into a small air-raid shelter more to get out of the rain than anything; we found four soldiers who had taken shelter there. From the beach we could hear the US Army calling on us through loudspeakers, they kept shouting, 'Come out, come out.' Whoever it was spoke a very beautiful Japanese. They were telling us, 'We will not inflict any harm on women and children and old people, so please come out,' but we had always been taught that we cannot ever become prisoners of war so we did not lend our ears to the invitations. I had already decided to the and one of the soldiers had a hand grenade and he said, 'Let's all commit suicide,' and we all agreed. And once we had made that decision I felt a great relief and calmness came over me. Just while I was waiting for the soldier to pull the pin, suddenly one of the soldiers took out a sword and started waving it around. 'You women and children get out,' he said, 'you shouldn't die here.' We were quite taken aback by this, by the sudden, loud shouting, so we stood up and stepped backward. Of course the air-raid shelter in which we were hiding was very small so one step back and we were outside. We looked up and there we saw a US soldier pointing a pistol to us, gesturing with his pistol to come out. This is how I managed to survive.
MARINE COTTON
I hear crying and there's a dead Japanese woman with a baby with sores all over him and so I give him some water and some K-rations and wanted to take care of the baby, and at about that time I see a head pop up out of the ground and I see it's a woman and child and they're down this cave. Well, I'm not too happy about crawling down into a cave where there's probably a huge complex of them. At that time a tank comes round and sees that I've got a cave and I'm trying to have this Japanese talk these people out of there. Anyway, these people don't want to come up and the tank wants to throw a round down there and all. With women and children down there, there's no reason to do this and if there are some soldiers down there let Military Police or what's coming behind take care of them. There was four of us and I don't recall whether it was five or six prisoners we'd got. They were down to their loin-cloths, they just wanted to be taken prisoner. Fortunately the word was out to try to show kindness and so we gave them all our water and whatever we could. There must have been a thousand eyes watching us, because when they seen this here comes soldiers piling out of every nook and cranny, and the next thing you know there's four of us and we have hundreds of prisoners. And a few of them, thinking about their honour, start using the grenades on themselves, just committing suicide.
ROBERT SHERROD
It was right at the end of the battle. These were people who had been indoctrinated with the fear that they would be killed or tortured by Americans and so they chose suicide – jumping off these high cliffs at the southern end of the island. I don't know if anybody tried to count them but there were hundreds of them because of the bodies we found days afterwards around the island. These bodies marching along in the water, it was a horrible sight to see. It was the great crowning horror of all the sights, something we never believed could happen even though we'd seen suicide attacks before. But the useless destruction of babies and children – some people threw their children over the cliff and then jumped after them – was something that was horrid for the Western mind to comprehend.
LIEUTENANT MANSON
There were a number of individual experiences aboard ship that you can't get out of your mind, and you remember them every time you think about the kamikaze days. One man, he was in a forty-millimetre mount and he had been fighting against quite a number of planes that had come in, but we had been hit in his area also two or three times, and all of a sudden, with nobody understanding why, he just yelled out, 'It's hot today' and jumped over the side, and that's the last we saw of him. Had he stayed on board he might have survived but of course we couldn't find his body or anything after that. But it was an unusual type of reaction. He stayed with it just as long as he could until he broke, and then that was the end of his fighting. Every man has his breaking point and the kamikaze, I would estimate, probably tests that breaking point more than any other form of combat.