CHAPTER NINETEEN
Okinawa
With disappointment, in June 1945, the Marines realized that one last battle lay beyond Shuri, a ridge as vicious as any other, and worse—within sight of the sea.
WAYBURN HALL
We never knew where we were in Okinawa, never got that info from above, but we knew about Kunishi Ridge, that’s where we were headed. It was part of the defensive line south of the Shuri Castle area.
We set up in a valley. Our rifle companies started attacking this ridge. That was some of the worst, most vicious fighting we ever encountered on Okinawa.
R. V. BURGIN
We knew the Japs would never give up. They were down to their last holes now, their last men, and they were fighting to the very end. We knew we’d need to beat them here, then go onto the Japanese mainland next. It was going to be real bloody fighting the Japs on their home ground. That was nothing to look forward to.
STERLING MACE
It was a bad twenty-four hours. First I got caught in the middle of a shelling, running between holes on the line, out in the open. A shell came in, I heard it coming, and hit the deck. The thing landed right behind me. It was a goddamn dud. They scare you just as well as a live one. The noise they make. It hits the ground and muck and dirt comes flying over you. It just sizzles there and you smell its metal.
A burst of nearby Jap bullets encouraged me to move. As I run, another 8mm shell falls from the heavens. You hear it, look up, but only see rain. This one is not a dud; its explosion knocks me down. The concussion from its blast bursts my eardrums and knocks my vision silly. I look up and see three horizons, not one.
I stumble back to my foxhole to sleep it off. I crawl under the poncho into my hole, and who is there—some new kid, a replacement just fresh out of boot camp named Piazza. The rain is coming down, and he’s telling me about him and his girlfriend in a car, and how the rain reminds him of how it sounded on the roof of the car. Like I needed to hear that.
The next morning I’m sitting along my foxhole, holding my head. My busted eardrums and concussion gave me one hell of a piercing headache. Then Bill Leyden comes over, and I said to Bill, “Look what I got here!” as I point to Piazza, “Another freaking kid!”
Bill looked away and I knew something was wrong. Even though I gave them hell, I had made friends with another of the new guys, Hudson. We called him “Junior.” Bill says to me, “You don’t want to hear it.” Turns out Junior caught one of the shells that missed me. He got evaporated, a direct hit on his hole.
That was all in one day.
A day or two later my head was blistering and eyes were bloodshot. So I went back to see our corpsman, Chupps, hoping he could give me some pills or something. He took a look at me and said, “Mace, don’t even bother. Go back to battalion, let their people check you out.” So I went back to battalion, and this one guy puts a tag on me that says, “Psychoneurosis Anxiety.” Then I walked around the sand and another guy comes up, takes the tag, and writes on the other side “Combat Fatigue.” I’ve got “Psychoneurosis” on one side and “Combat Fatigue” on the other. I didn’t know what psychoneurosis is, but I liked the sound of that better than combat fatigue.
I’m sitting there, and the next thing I know a doctor says, “I’m going to give you sodium pentothal.” So he gives me the shot. It’s an anesthetic that relaxes you. Then he starts talking to me. I was talking my ass off and don’t know what I must have told him. The next thing I know I was walking to a big tent. I lied down in a bed and fell asleep.
The next day the guy next to me says, “Geez, do you know what was going on while you were sleeping?” I says, “No.” He says that a USO group came to play in the tent for the wounded—trumpets, bugles, all that stuff—and they played at the foot of my bed and I slept right through it.
I was like that in the hospital, in my own world. I stayed by myself. I just didn’t want to listen to anyone’s bullshit stories. The next thing I know, a guy calls out eight names and I’m one of them. They drove me to the beach, and next thing I know I’m on a ship. That night the kamikazes came in and attacked our fleet. While these freaking kamikazes are coming in, the ships all broke and ran. The captain of our ship sneaked us out—and all the way to Guam. After Guam we went to Hawaii and from there to San Francisco.
R. V. BURGIN
We got into a lot of trouble fighting to take that Kunishi Ridge. We fought for two days to get up and take that ridge.
HARRY BENDER
I was wounded the night of June 17. We had made a nighttime move, up through a sugarcane field, up to a big coral ridge, Kunishi Ridge. And we’d gotten some replacements in. One was a sergeant, a banana marine who’d been in Panama but hadn’t seen any combat. He was the odd man. I was assistant BAR man, Bill Tyler was the BAR man; we shacked up together, and we took the sergeant into our hole. Actually, it wasn’t a real hole. Since it was all coral, you couldn’t dig in. There was a pillbox there that was ours, so we stacked up pieces of coral around the side of the pillbox, and that was our foxhole.
It was my turn on watch. So I was sitting there in our foxhole, against the pillbox. Tyler and the sergeant were on the other side of me, both sleeping. I had my helmet on, but neither of them did. It was more comfortable to sleep without your helmet and fairly common for guys to do that.
Jap artillery started coming in. I guesstimated right, because the way the Japanese fire their shells is different than the way Marines did. The Marines hit four corners and then fill in the square. The Japanese make a half moon pattern.
The artillery started landing, and the pattern was coming our way. It was going to be real close. Sure enough, one shell came right at us, exploded above us, and shrapnel splattered down on us. The sergeant was killed outright. Tyler was alive, but he was hit in his skull. I was sitting up and took shrapnel in the upper front part of my legs. My back. My arm. It blew my helmet off, too, and I was combing tiny pieces of shrapnel out of my hair for a while, too. Hot metal. Burning metal.
I could still get up, so I did. I started running for the command post. I spotted a corpsman, and I yelled at him to go take care of the other guys. One thing I’d like to mention is that some of the real heroes were the corpsmen. They were really something else. When somebody got hit, everybody else would try to dig in deeper, but the corpsmen, they’d go running toward the trouble. They were exceptional men of valor.
The corpsmen took us to the aid station, then they put Tyler and me in the back of an ambulance and took us to a field hospital.
Tyler was a big guy, about six-two and 220 pounds. He’s wounded in the head and out of his mind, ranting. They have him tied down, but he’s getting loose. I’m in the stretcher right across from him. I said, “This is no place for me.” So I crawled up front to the passenger side of the ambulance. When we got to the hospital, they said, “You’re supposed to have two wounded, where’s the other at?”
I said, “Me, up here in the front seat.” So they took me in and lay me down on a table and started dressing my wounds. I don’t know where Tyler went. I never seen Tyler again after that night.*
The thing that pissed me off was that this Army nurse came by and said, “How are you, little boy?” I looked rather young anyhow, so I guess she was just trying to be funny in a stupid way. I told her, “I’m no goddamn little boy, I’m a goddamn U.S. Marine!” She shut up. I didn’t take too kindly to that shit.
R. V. BURGIN
The Japs were on the sides of the ridges, on the top, in caves—anywhere you look, they could be. We had to root them out. I tell you one thing—I carried my M1 rifle all the way from New Britain to Okinawa, and I used it a lot those days. It never failed me one time.
JIM ANDERSON
K Company run up against a pillbox there with Japanese in it, and we couldn’t get them out of there. This was near the end, so an interpreter was brought up, but he couldn’t talk them out.
So they brought up a demolition squad who had satchel charges. A satchel is about a foot square and full of explosives. Now, a good friend of mine was Ted Barrow, who was first cousins with a famous outlaw, Clyde Barrow, as in “Bonnie and Clyde.” He was a very forward-fighting man; he carried a tommy gun and was always on the front lines. Anyhow Ted crawled up on top of that pillbox with me. When they threw that satchel charge through the porthole, six Japanese came rushing out. Ted and I cut them down, but Ted got most of them.
I went over to one of the dead Japanese. One of the .45 bullets from Ted’s Thompson submachine gun had hit the scabbard on the man’s hip and dented it. I took the bayonet off the guy’s rifle, slid it back into the dented scabbard, and then took it as a souvenir. It wasn’t grisly. We earned it. I respected Ted but never said a word to him about Bonnie and Clyde. Rumor was he didn’t want to talk about that.
While moving to attack Kunishi Ridge in the dark, K Company was nearly annihilated when friendly artillery began exploding amid the company.
JIM ANDERSON
We had some of our own artillery firing harassing fire at the enemy, five shots about every ten minutes. But it was landing extremely close to K Company. Now, in battle, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you do not move at night. The Japanese move at night, but we stayed strictly in our foxholes.
That artillery was coming in within fifty yards of our front yards. The company commander said, “You think you can get back there and get that stopped?”
I said, “This is night, you’re not supposed to move. But I’ll give it a whirl.” Our artillery was about a half mile away from the front lines.
I crawled on my stomach through the water and all that filth. I got challenged a few times. Luckily none of our guys shot at me.
Finally I got back to where our artillery was coming from, and I told the lieutenant, “Your artillery is falling on our front lines.”
“Oh, you’re crazy,” he said.
“No sir,” I said. “With all due respect, you’re going to kill someone if you continue firing.”
Well he just didn’t see how that could be happening.
Finally I used some pretty strong language and used some pretty dirty words that today if you used them you’d be court-martialed.
Finally, I said, “If you don’t stop it, then somebody’s going to die, and it’s not going to be us dying up on the front lines—it’s going to be you dying back here.”
“Just a minute” he said. “Don’t get excited.”
He checked around, and sure enough, his artillery group was shooting at us. So they stopped. When I got back to the company the next morning, the company commander put me in for the Bronze Star.
R. V. BURGIN
That was our last big fight. K Company lost thirty-three men during those days, five of them killed. We didn’t know it at the time, but the war was practically over. No one wanted to be the last one to die.
WAYBURN HALL
In June, toward the end of the battle, a truck pulled up to deliver mortar ammunition. A dozen of us went down in this grove of trees to pick up the ammo. The truck driver looked familiar. Would you believe it was Bayling—the ex-boxer who had defended me in boot camp? Here he was in Okinawa, driving a six-foot truck! We had a good time with each other, like you do when you haven’t seen a buddy for a long time. It was real brief but a real joy.
Then the Japs dropped in mortars on us. Did we ever scramble. We went running clear up the ridge we had come down from, and I never saw Bayling again. His truck was gone. I hope he drove away and didn’t get hit.
DAN LAWLER
There were still skirmishes. At the end of Okinawa we had some Japs cornered down at the end of the island. We were on high ground, a ridge. They were out near the water. A few of them came up toward us with white flags. They still had weapons with them and their uniforms on. But white flags? Why didn’t they surrender before? Why were they waiting until the end? The hell with those bastards. We were firing down on them. With my machine gun, I took most of them out.
We had a new captain, who was hollering, “Cease fire, Cease fire!” Of course he doesn’t know shit. Our captain was patting me on the shoulder, hollering at me, and I didn’t pay any attention to him.
When it was all done, he said, “I’m going to give you a general court-martial!” I said, “You know what, sir, I couldn’t hear a damn thing you were saying over that machine gun, and it’s going to be ten or fifteen minutes before I can hear ya.” I was bullshitting him, you know.
He just walked away. Everybody was for that deal we pulled. I believe it was on Wake Island where the Japs cleaned out everyone they captured.*
WAYBURN HALL
About the 15th of June we were pulled off the line. We left the Kunishi Ridge area and moved into this valley near the coast. Late in the evening we settled into a wooded area there near a little town. We got a little concerned when we found it was a rocky area and we couldn’t dig foxholes. Anyways, we told ourselves we were just safe by then and that the fighting was all over.
After we gave up digging, near dark the Japs poured mortars on us. They must have spotted us moving in. They had the range, and that night the shells were coming close. Didn’t they know the battle was almost over? This ole boy was scared, I tell ya.
R. V. BURGIN
We got pulled off the line on June 18, relieved by the 8th Marines. We were sent out on burial details, shoveling dirt over enemy dead. A few Japs were still alive in caves, and we got them out or shut up the caves. I watched one small group creep out of a cave, maybe three of them at the most. They wore only their jock straps. One carried a white flag. It was the only Japs I’d ever seen surrender.
WAYBURN HALL
On the 21st of June they officially declared Okinawa over. There were still some Japanese stragglers running about, trying to infiltrate our lines, and once in a while we’d get one. That was eighty-two days total on Okinawa. Some of it was good days. Some of it was not too bad of days. And some days was the most hell you’ve ever been in.
DAN LAWLER
When Okinawa was over, we were a real sight to see, all spattered with blood and matted hair. We stunk. I had a hard time hearing because of all the machine gun fire.
When we were heading back through the rear-echelon guys, they were all clapping and saluting us. We were just dragging our asses at first, but our commander stopped us and said, “Let’s show these guys we’re still goddamned Marines.” So we picked up our cadence. Eyes right, forward march. There was a general there, and he was saluting us, clapping at the same time. I’d never seen that before. A general saluting us. So that felt pretty good.
R. V. BURGIN
After the battle was over, we were down there for a week, ten days or so, on the south end, policing the place and burying the Japs, picking up brass, cleaning things up a bit. Around July 10 we went by trucks to the north end of the island.
WAYBURN HALL
Our division was sent to the northern part of the island, where we started building a training camp up there. The idea was to start training for our next big push, which was going to be the main island of Japan.
We had a typhoon blow in there, while we were still building the camp. We got down behind a seawall, and that protected us from the wind, which was blowing pretty good. That’s where we spent the night of the typhoon, behind that seawall, with a quart of sick bay alcohol: about 190 proof. One of the guys finagled it from a corpsman or something. We cut it with grapefruit juice. Wasn’t too bad.
R. V. BURGIN
We were there in that last camp for weeks. Nothing to do now but wait. A little road ran through the camp and was used frequently by a Piper Cub airplane that would come in and out to deliver messages and pick people up. It was smooth enough and long enough for a Piper Cub to take off from. It don’t take very much runway for a Piper Cub.
Me and Jim Burke, and maybe three or four more of us, would sit out there along the road and watch the Piper Cubs come in. We used to make bets on when the Piper Cub was going to lift off. How far one would taxi after it landed. All that kind of stuff. I bet you a dollar, I bet you a dime, I bet you a quarter.
We would see a Corsair fighter fly over every once in a while, and he would do a victory roll for us. When they would do that victory roll, it was our impression that they had shot down a Zero. The war wasn’t over then, of course.
One day I looked up and there was a Corsair coming in from the west, roaring down at our little road in a dive. Just a little bit before he got to ground level, he flipped the Corsair upside down and flew down that little road upside down and close enough that if he stuck his hand out of the canopy he would have touched the ground. He did a victory roll then went out a little ways, came back around, and did the same thing going the other direction. Upside down. The whole length of that road. He did another victory roll and flew away. I’ll never forget that if I live to be a hundred. That’s not very long from now. I still don’t know what that pilot was celebrating.
JIM ANDERSON
When we was on the northern end of the island, they dropped the atomic bombs and Japan surrendered. One morning we heard a tremendous barrage of artillery. It was our own. Later on word came through that the war was over, and they’d fired a big barrage in celebration. In December 1943, there were 235 men in K company. The amount who ended up alive and well at the end of Okinawa was 19.
R. V. BURGIN
We didn’t celebrate much when we heard over the radio that the atomic bomb was dropped. An atomic bomb, what’s that? we thought. Same with when the war ended. We didn’t celebrate like the people did back home. It was quiet and somber. If anything, you think of the buddies you lost. We were pretty stressed out by the end of the war. Flat numb. I slept with Florence’s picture underneath my pillow.
When I figured out what an atomic bomb was, I thought it was the best thing that ever happened in World War II, as far as I’m concerned. Some people say it was awful us using it. But if they think that was awful, I don’t think people have a damn clue what would have happened if we’d hit Japan. The war in Europe was over. We had all our planes. All our manpower. All our Navy. Tanks. Artillery. If we’d have hit Japan, we’d have bombed it 24-7 and shelled it with naval guns from offshore. We would have killed millions of Japanese, and there’s no telling how many of us would have been wounded or killed, too, going in. The Burgin family lost one son in Europe, and maybe those bombs saved them from losing another in the Pacific.
Meanwhile in America…
SID PHILLIPS
On V-J Day, I was at the University of North Carolina. There’d been a rumor that the Japs were going to surrender. It was announced that the Japs had surrendered, but nobody believed it was actually over, until it became true. We turned on the radio, and they talked about how the war was truly over. We just went wild with joy.
We came pouring out of the dormitories we were in and ran down to the main street at Chapel Hill. Somebody started a bonfire right there in the middle of the intersection. People were running up and down behind the stores, finding boxes, anything they could. They kept adding to the bonfire until it became gigantic. It must have been thirty feet across. It burned up the traffic light in the middle of the street. Everyone was jumping up and down and cheering.
The Chapel Hill fire department came and started pumping water on the fire. Then the police arrived. I think there was one police car in Chapel Hill. We told the guys, “Go on, everything’s all right.” We picked them up and put them back in their police car. But oh, we were happy.
We were thrilled that the war wasn’t going to go on and on, forever. A ground war in Japan would have meant many, many killed.
* Harry Bender would remember, “About ten years ago I tried. I sent a letter to every Bill Tyler I could find. But I never got an answer back.”
* When the Japanese seized Wake Island they captured 450 American service personnel and 1,150 civilians. The Japanese beheaded five prisoners on the ship en route to a prison camp; then in October 1943, they blindfolded and machine gunned 98 of the civilians after keeping them on the island as laborers. Before one prisoner was killed, he carved “98 US PW 5-10-43” into a rock that remains today and is known as “the 98 rock.”