CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Okinawa
By late May 1945, the Marines had fought their way to a series of muddy hills opposite Shuri Castle. From hills named Sugarloaf, Horseshoe, and Half Moon, they besieged the ruined castle. Eugene Sledge would call his foxhole opposite Shuri “a ghastly corner of hell.”
HARRY BENDER
It was about May 21 when we got Half Moon Hill. It had rained so damn much there was water lying around the hill. We referred to it as the sea of death, because there were dead Marines laying down there in that water. Graves Registration hadn’t had the chance yet to come and get them out, which is one thing the Marines pride themselves on and usually do real well. It was real sobering, seeing those bodies. The hill had the smell of death all around it—a sickening sweet smell, like something was rotting. Seeing those goddamn maggots in the bodies, boy, that was hard.
WAYBURN HALL
We’d moved to a ridge closer to Shuri Castle, the Japs’ main stronghold. The rains set in, and it bogged down everything and it all stopped to zero. No vehicles could move. We sat there for days in a mud hole.
Me and my buddy found some old boards from an ammunition crate or something and spread them out in the bottom of our foxhole. We covered ourselves with ponchos, but we were soaking wet all the time. You’re soaked all the time. Of course, it’s cold at night. We had jackets and blankets, but they were wet, too. You can kind of wrap up in them and try to keep warm, but it’s just miserable. I don’t think I took my boots off for ten days. When I did finally take them off, the skin came off, too.
The fighting had been heavy on that ridge before we ever moved in. Right in the middle of all that rain and mud, I woke up one morning. Over to my right was a human elbow sticking up out of the ground. It was about six feet from our foxhole. What we’d done was move up in an area where they’d buried a bunch of Jap bodies in a hurry. All that rain had started uncovering them. What was I thinking? Oh, by then it was just another Jap body. We’d all seen lots of Jap bodies by then, and plenty of them hadn’t been buried.
JIM ANDERSON
At times, they couldn’t get food to us. Sometimes we went four, five, six days without food. But we did not suffer very much. We found chickens and pigs, and dug sweet potatoes out of gardens and ate them. Airdrops got food to us sometimes.
HARRY BENDER
We were getting C rations that were made in Australia. Meat and beans and hash. Goddamn mutton. I think Australia was paying their war debt by making C rations. The Army got a new ration with spaghetti and ham, but we were getting the old Australian rations. One time an Army truck was in our area and it had all these rations all on it. We stopped the truck and started unloading rations. They said, “You can’t do that.” We said, “Watch us.” So we got some of their new C rations.
The Okinawans had these big Chinese-style burial vaults—tombs—and inside these vaults they had a big bowl of sea salt. They’d use the salt for ceremonies, I guess. Sometimes we’d get in there, scrape the dust off, and borrow that salt to use on our food. It made the food taste better, anyway.
JIM ANDERSON
Half Moon Hill was shaped like an upside-down half moon, and the Japanese were still hiding in caves below us. They’d come out under darkness.
At night we’d set up a circular defense line. One night we was on guard duty and bang, bang, bang, bang! Somebody called out, “Halt, who goes there?” And boom! boom! We tried to figure out what happened. One of the men who’d been on guard duty had fallen asleep. He woke up and saw two figures in front of him on the path. He shot at them, both Japanese, and they ran into the circle. The boom, boom we heard was that these two Japanese held hand grenades. They pulled the pins and killed themselves.
STERLING MACE
The Japs had cut the lines between the 5th and 7th regiments. I got called over to the captain. We were to go out and find out what we could about the situation. Now, Major Paul Douglas (the future senator from Illinois) wanted to go out on patrol with us. In other words, the mission was “Take the Major and go get lost.”
I took my fire team and Major Douglas. He was a brave one, so he’s going to lead the patrol. Sure, I let him. I’m a corporal at the time. Every time he saw a little hole, he thought it was a cave. So he came up to this hole. Maybe six foot deep. He took his .45 and shot into the cave. Word was that Douglas got nearly killed on Peleliu inspecting a cave. Then he wanted us to go in with him.
This guy, Whitby, I went to see him in Florida sixty years after the war. We’re sitting in Whitby’s living room, and he said, “Do you remember what you told Major Douglas when he told you to go into the cave?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I said something like ‘You got to do more than shoot a .45 in a cave. Throw a hand grenade in there.’”
“No, that wasn’t it,” Whitby said. “You told him to go f—k himself.”
We laughed. Did I actually say that? Nah, maybe I thought that, but I wouldn’t actually say that to an officer.
Anyway, there were no Japs in the cave.
HARRY BENDER
When we were on Half Moon my platoon got all the shitty details. Bucky Pearson led us out on patrol to find out what was out there. We knew what the hell was out there. The goddamn Japanese were out there!
So we went out, nine of us. We went out so far that the Japanese were behind us on this little knoll. They started shelling us.
Well, for that patrol I was the guy on the walkie-talkie. It wasn’t me usually, but the regular guy couldn’t go on the patrol that time. So it was on to Bender. I was in the rear, and Bucky yelled for the walkie-talkie. The corpsman I was with said that every step I took running forward, he could see a shell landing behind me on my heels.
I got to Bucky and he got to Stumpy and he said, “Get out the best way you can.” So we threw smoke grenades and just started running forward into the smoke. That’s how we got out.
There were nine of us on that patrol, and only one of us got hit.
JIM ANDERSON
The Okinawa people had burial vaults in their hillsides. Inside them were urns, maybe two feet high. It’s rumored that those were the remains of their relatives. We wouldn’t go in there unless we were receiving artillery fire. We didn’t go into them because of curiosity or anything like that. It was a good place to be when you were being shelled.
STERLING MACE
I was sitting in a foxhole when I took a sniper’s bullet right through the poncho. I don’t know where the hell that Jap was who did that, but he had to be well over a hundred yards away because I didn’t see anybody around at first.
More fire came in. We sat there a bit longer, and I heard Major Douglas calling for help. He was up at the lines helping to bring the wounded back and two of his guys were hit.*
“We can’t, Major,” someone hollered back. “We’re taking fire.”
We sat there awhile longer, still taking fire. Pretty soon about six of our guys were hit. Nobody was doing anything. Everyone was afraid to move.
I spotted this jeep sitting in an open field, stuck in the mud. I though, Geez, if I could get to that jeep, I could load these wounded guys on it and take them back to the battalion aid station.
So I ran out to the jeep, hopped in, and hit the starter. It turned over but didn’t start. I was so nervous I’d forgotten to turn the ignition on. I started the jeep up and drove back to where these wounded guys are. We put the six on the jeep—one in the front with me, two in the backseat, two hanging on the back, and one clinging to the side.
I wanna tell ya, we went through about thirty yards of mud about a foot deep. I still don’t know how we did it. I must have shifted twelve times to keep the momentum going. Shifting, clutching, shifting, clutching, but I’m doing it. I think the weight of all the guys in the jeep gave us the traction we need. We get through this mud and hit hard ground, came up about a foot and cruised straight to the aid station.
The greeting I got, you wouldn’t believe it. This lieutenant came over to me and said, “Where the hell did you get that goddamn jeep? It’s mine.” He chewed my ass out.
I’m looking at the wounded guys—the corpsmen are running around getting them out, but this lieutenant was only interested in his jeep.
So that was my big heroic thing. The wounded getting to safety. And me getting my ass chewed out.
On May 28, under the cover of darkness, the Japanese evacuated Shuri Castle and fled southward to regroup and resist to the bitter end.
HARRY BENDER
When we were moving toward Shuri Castle, the Navy was shelling it, using those big sixteen-inch shells. You focus your eyes, hear those things, then look up. It looked like a garbage can floating in the air toward the castle. All it did was chip the wall. It wasn’t doing any real damage to it at first.
From where we sat, Shuri Castle just looked like one big wall. The Japs had their headquarters in there. Compared with Half Moon Hill and Sugar Loaf, the battle for Shuri wasn’t nothing. We just blasted it for a while and eventually it fell.
JIM ANDERSON
We were close to Shuri Castle but never actually went in it. I was within a half a mile of it. To me it looked like partial ruins on the top of a hill. I guess it was a monastery or something like that.
WAYBURN HALL
When the rains stopped, we pushed on. The Japs evacuated Shuri and started heading to the southern end of the island. We had spotter planes up as soon as it got daylight, and they spotted a column of Japanese headed south. The planes started bombing and strafing that column.
This stopped a lot of Jap artillery fire, too. They knew they couldn’t expose themselves because we had spotter planes up a lot and they would record the gun flashes, then our return fire, our artillery, and especially our aircraft would get them. So they’d fire off a few rounds and then hide in a cave.
R. V. BURGIN
I was in the hospital when most of the bad rains came on Okinawa, when the unit fought for Shuri Castle. When I came back, we’d lost thirty-six men in the fighting.
Just after I got back to K Company from the hospital, I explored a cave with a Sterno can on the end of a stick. I was all by myself. The cave was four to five foot in diameter. I thought maybe I’ll get some souvenirs. It was about the stupidest thing I ever did.
I went about thirty to forty steps back in there and you couldn’t see three feet in front of you. I came upon a cot on my right and reached down and touched it. It was still warm. I thought, Oh shit. I stood real still and listened. I heard a clock ticking. So I backed out of there as quick as I could. I just backed out all the way. I called a demolition squad and they closed it up. If that Jap had killed me in that cave, nobody would have ever known where I was at. I would have just disappeared off the face of the earth. That was the last cave I ever went in.
WAYBURN HALL
We started moving rapidly then, pursuing the Japs and trying to get down there quick before they could get set up in the south and create defensive positions. We had them on the run, was the idea. So we were moving real quick down from Shuri to the southern tip.
R. V. BURGIN
We moved out one morning going single file on both sides of a dusty road. A sniper picked me out. I felt the bullet zing right by my ear so close, but it didn’t hit me. Somebody got the sniper, and he didn’t fire a second round after that. I thought, Those sons of bitches are still trying to kill me.
JIM ANDERSON
As we pushed on down toward the end of the island, I went into a cave and picked up a Japanese flag. It was white with a red sun with Japanese writing all over it.*
DAN LAWLER
One day we were looking for Japs and came upon a cave. We could hear talking in there, so I took out my pistol and shot three warning shots right over the top of the cave. Nobody came out, so we figured there weren’t any Japs in there. It was undoubtedly just civilians. In Japanese I said, “Come out, we’ll give you food and water.”
Sure enough, a few people slowly came out. About four or five adults, Okinawans. Along with the parents was a little boy, maybe five years old, and a little girl, maybe two or three. At first, they were quite a ways away and very cautious of us.
I motioned for them to come closer, and slowly they did, little by little. Other Marines took care of the adults, but the little girl came closer to me. Her hair was all messed up. She didn’t have any shoes on, and she had blood all over her. As far as I could see, she hadn’t been wounded, but somewhere along the line someone had been shot in close proximity to her, and the blood had spread all over. She was shaking ’cause she was so scared.
I broke a piece off a candy bar and held it out to her. She wouldn’t eat either end of the bar. I guess the Japs had told stories of us poisoning food, but finally she ate from the middle of the bar.
She was still shaking then, so I picked her up and set her on my knee. That’s when she put her arms around me. Well, I broke right there and started crying. It was terrible to see civilians caught in the middle of war.
A captain come along and asked me, “You all right?”
“Yeah, I’m all right,” I said. “But why do these innocents need to be involved?”
“It’s war,” was all he said.
HARRY BENDER
Okinawa was eighty-two days of fighting. Only one time did we get pulled off the line to get to change our clothes. It was early June. We got a hot meal that day, and dry socks. Goddamn. You can’t appreciate how you like dry socks until you’ve worn wet socks for days on end.
* Days later, Douglas would himself be shot by a machine gun and his left arm forever disabled.
* Anderson would remember, “A few years back, a friend of mine took a picture of the flag and got it interpreted. I wrote to the Japanese consulate in Chicago and got in touch with the owner’s son, fifty-six years old, who lives in Tokyo. I gave the flag back to him and he sent me a photo of him and his wife holding it.”