CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The rains became so heavy that at times we could barely see our buddies in the neighboring foxhole. We had to bail out our gun pit and foxholes during and after each downpour or they filled with water.
Snafu and I dug a deep foxhole close to the gun pit and placed pieces of wooden ammo crates across braces set on the muddy clay at the bottom. At one end of this foxhole, beyond the extension of the boards, we dug a sump. As the surface water poured into our foxhole and down under the boards, we bailed out the sump with a C ration can for a day or two. But the soil became so saturated by continued downpours that water poured in through the four sides of the foxhole as though it were a colander. We then had to use a discarded helmet to bail out the sump, because the ration can couldn't take out water fast enough to keep up with that pouring in.
The board “floor” kept us out of the water and mud, provided we worked diligently enough at the bailing detail. Necessity being the mother of invention, we had “reinvented” the equivalent of duckboards commonly used in flooded World War I trenches. The duckboards pictured and described in 1914-18 in Flanders were, of course, often prefabricated in long sections and then placed in the trenches by infantrymen. But the small board floor we placed in our foxhole served the same function.
Continued firing finally caused my mortar's base plate to drive the pieces of wood supporting it deep into the mud in the bottom of the gun pit. We couldn't sight the gun properly. We tugged and pulled the gun up out of the mud, then it was a choice of emplacing it either on some firmer base in the gun pit or on the surface outside. The latter prospect would have meant sure death from the enemy shelling, so we had to come up with something better in a hurry.
Somebody got the bright idea of building a “footing” on which to rest the base plate. So in the bottom of the gun pit, we dug out a deep square hole larger than the base plate and lined it with boards. We next placed several helmets full of coral gravel we found in the side of the railroad bed into the footing. We set the mortar's base plate on the firm coral footing, resighted the gun, and had no more trouble with recoil driving the base plate into the mud. I suppose the other two squads in our mortar section fixed their guns’ base plates in the same manner.
The Japanese infantry kept up their activity to our front and tried to infiltrate our lines every night, sometimes with success. Snafu made good about then on the threat he had made to the CP on Peleliu about any enemy headed toward the Company K CP. On Peleliu one night after we came off the lines Snafu shot two Japanese with his Thompson. He had killed one and fatally wounded the other. A sergeant made Snafu bury the dead soldier. Snafu objected strenuously because he said, and rightly so, if he hadn't shot the Japanese they would have kept on going right into the company CP. Sarge said maybe so, but the corpse had to be buried, and since Snafu had shot it, he must bury it. Snafu promised he would never shoot another enemy soldier headed for the CP.
One day as dawn broke with a thin fog and a pelting rain, Snafu woke me out of the nearest thing to sleep that could be attained in that miserable place with, “Halt who goes there? What's the password?”
Jolted out of my fatigue stupor, I saw Snafu's face silhouetted against the gray sky. Rain poured off his helmet, and drops of moisture on the end of each whisker of the thick stubbly beard on his jutting square jaw caught the dim light like glass beads. I snatched the Tommy up off my lap as he raised his .45 pistol and aimed it toward two dim figures striding along about twenty yards away. Visibility was so poor in the dim light, mist, and rain that I could tell little about the shadowy figures other than they wore U.S. helmets. At the sound of Snafu's challenge, the two men speeded up instead of halting and identifying themselves.
“Halt or I'll fire!” he yelled.
The two took off for the railroad bed as fast as they could on the slippery ground. Snafu fired several shots with his .45 but missed. Shortly we heard a couple of American grenades explode in the railroad bed. Then a buddy yelled that the Japanese had been killed by his grenades. Daylight came rapidly, so we went over to the railroad embankment to ask what had happened.
When Snafu and I got to the foxhole by the railroad embankment, we found two Marine snipers grinning and laughing. The grenade explosions had scared awake the Marines in the dryness under the tarpaulin in the company CP and had chased them out into the rain. They were drifting back to the shelter as we arrived. We waved, but got only glares in return.
We took a look at the dead enemy before returning to our foxhole. They had been wearing Marine helmets but otherwise were dressed in Japanese uniforms. A grenade had exploded in the face of one. There was no face and little head remaining. The other wasn't as badly mangled.
Snafu and I returned to our hole and got settled just in time to see Hank come stalking along from the CP. He was stopping at every foxhole along the way to find out who had been so negligent as to let the Japanese soldiers get past them and almost to the CP. Hank arrived at our foxhole and asked us why we hadn't seen the two soldiers pass if one of us was on watch as we were supposed to be.
Snafu spoke up immediately and said, “Hell, I saw 'em go right by here, but I reckoned they was headed for the company CP.” (He didn't mention his challenging the Japanese or firing at them.)
Hank looked astonished and said, “What do you mean, Snafu?”
Snafu swelled with indignation and answered, “You remember when they made me bury that Nip I shot on Peleliu when them two was headed for the CP?”
“Yeah, so what?” answered Hank in a low, menacing voice.
“Well, I told them then if they made me bury 'im, then by God, next time I seen a Nip headin’ for the CP I wasn't gonna’ stop 'im!”
I groaned in a low voice, “Oooh, shut up, Snafu.”
One didn't talk like that to a senior NCO and get away with it. Hank was a very formidable person and merited the tremendous respect we felt for him, but woe be unto the Marine who didn't do a task properly and incurred his wrath. Hank treated us with respect and compassion—if we followed orders and did our best. I had no desire to see what he would do to someone who didn't, but I thought I was about to. So I turned my head and half closed my eyes, as did all the awestruck men in the foxholes within earshot who had been watching Snafu and Hank.
Nothing happened. I glanced at Snafu and Hank as they stood there glaring at each other, a bantam rooster glaring up at a mighty eagle.
Finally Hank said, “You'd better not let that happen again!” He turned and stalked back to the CP.
Snafu mumbled and grumbled. The rest of us sighed with relief. I fully expected Hank at least to order Snafu to bury the two Japanese down there on the railroad, and then Snafu, as my corporal, would order me onto the burial detail as had happened on Peleliu. But he didn't, and someone else spaded mud over the two corpses.
Much later, when Hank was leaving Company K for home after an outstanding record in three campaigns, I asked him what he had thought about that incident. He just looked at me and grinned, but wouldn't say anything about it. His grin revealed, however, that he respected Snafu and knew he wasn't lax in any way, and probably that he himself had been ordered by some officer to look into the affair.
Because of the surroundings, our casualties during the stalemate on Half Moon were some of the most pathetic I ever had seen. Certainly a beautiful landscape didn't make a wound less painful or a death less tragic. But our situation before Shuri was the most awful place conceivable for a man to be hurt or to die.
Most of the wounds resulted from enemy shell fragments, but it seemed to me we had more than the usual number of cases of blast concussion from exploding shells. That was understandable because of the frequent heavy shellings we were subjected to. All the casualties were muddy and soaking wet like the rest of us. That seemed to accentuate the bloody battle dressings on their wounds and their dull expressions of shock and pain, which made the horror and hopelessness of it all more vivid as we struggled through the chilly driving rain and deep mud to evacuate them.
Some of the concussion cases could walk and were helped and led (some seemed to have no sure sense of direction) to the rear like men walking in their sleep. Some wore wild-eyed expressions of shock and fear. Others whom I knew well, though could barely recognize, wore expressions of idiots or simpletons knocked too witless to be afraid anymore. The blast of a shell had literally jolted them into a different state of awareness from the rest of us. Some of those who didn't return probably never recovered but were doomed to remain in mental limbo and spend their futures in a veteran's hospital as “living dead.”
The combat fatigue cases were distressing. They ranged in their reactions from a state of dull detachment seemingly unaware of their surroundings, to quiet sobbing, or all the way to wild screaming and shouting. Stress was the essential factor we had to cope with in combat, under small-arms fire, and in warding off infiltrators and raiders during sleepless, rainy nights for prolonged periods; but being shelled so frequently during the prolonged Shuri stalemate seemed to increase the strain beyond that which many otherwise stable and hardened Marines could endure without mental or physical collapse. From my experience, of all the hardships and hazards the troops had to suffer, prolonged shell fire was more apt to break a man psychologically than anything else.
In addition to the wounded, quite a number of men were evacuated and described in the muster rolls simply as “sick.” Some of them suffered attacks of malaria. Others had fever, respiratory problems, or were just exhausted and seemed to have succumbed to the rigors of exposure and the chilly rains. There were numerous cases of pneumonia. Many men weren't evacuated, although they suffered serious ailments resulting from the cold rains and being soaking wet for more than a week.
Most of us had serious trouble with our feet. An infantryman with sore feet was in miserable shape under the best of living conditions. During a period of about fourteen or fifteen days, as near as I can calculate the time (from 21 May to 5 June), my feet and those of my buddies were soaking wet, and our boondockers were caked with sticky mud. Being up on the line and frequently shelled prevented a man from taking off his boondockers to put on a pair of dry socks. And even if he had dry socks, there was no way to clean and dry the leather boondockers. Most of us removed our mud-caked canvas leggings and tucked our trouser cuffs into our sock tops, but it didn't help our feet much. Consequently most men's feet were in bad condition.
My feet were sore, and it hurt to walk or run. The insides of my boondockers gave me the sensation of being slimy when I wiggled my toes to try to warm my feet with increased circulation. The repulsive sensation of slippery, slimy feet grew worse each day. My sore feet slid back and forth inside my soaked boondockers when I walked or ran. Fortunately they never became infected, a miracle in itself.
Sore feet caused by prolonged exposure to mud and water was called immersion foot, I learned later. In World War I they called the same condition trench foot. To me it was an unforgettable sensation of extreme personal filth and painful discomfort. It was the kind of experience that would make a man sincerely grateful for the rest of his life for clean, dry socks. As simple a condition as dry socks seemed a luxury.
The almost constant rain also caused the skin on my fingers to develop a strange shrunken and wrinkled appearance. My nails softened. Sores developed on the knuckles and backs of both hands. These grew a little larger each day and hurt whenever I moved my fingers. I was always knocking the scabs off against ammo boxes and the like. Similar sores had tormented combat troops in the South Pacific campaigns and were called jungle rot or jungle sores.*
Our own mail came up to us in canvas bags, usually with the ammo and rations. It was of tremendous value in boosting sagging morale. On several occasions I actually had to bend over my letters and read as rapidly as possible to shield them from the torrents of rain before the ink was smeared across the soggy paper and the writing became illegible.
Most of us received letters from family and civilian friends. But occasionally we received letters from old Company K buddies who had returned to the States. Their early letters expressed relief over being back with family or with “wine, women, and song.” But later the letters often became disturbingly bitter and filled with disillusionment. Some expressed a desire to return if they could get back into the old battalion. Considering the dangers and hardships those men had been through before they were sent home, and considering our situation in front of Shuri, the attitudes of our buddies who had returned Stateside puzzled us.
They expressed themselves in various ways, but the gist of their disillusionment was a feeling of alienation from everyone but their old comrades. Although there was gasoline and meat rationing back in the States, life was safe and easy. Plenty of people were ready to buy a Marine combat veteran wearing campaign ribbons and battle stars a drink or a beer anytime. But all the good life and luxury didn't seem to take the place of old friendships forged in combat.
There was talk of war profiteers and able-bodied men who got easy duty at the expense of others. Some letters said simply that folks back in the States “just don't understand what the hell it's all about, because they have had it so easy.” I heard more than one buddy express the opinion, as we sat in the mud, that civilians would “understand” if the Japanese or .the Germans bombed an American city. Some men thought that would have been a good idea if no American civilians got killed, just scared. But nobody wanted it to be his hometown.
It was hard to believe that some of our old friends who had wanted so much to return home actually were writing us that they thought of volunteering again for overseas duty. (Some actually did.) They had had enough of war, but they had greater difficulty adjusting to civilians or to comfortable Stateside military posts. We were unable to understand their attitudes until we ourselves returned home and tried to comprehend people who griped because America wasn't perfect, or their coffee wasn't hot enough, or they had to stand in line and wait for a train or bus.
Our buddies who had gone back had been greeted enthusiastically—as those of us who survived were received later on. But the folks back home didn't, and in retrospect couldn't have been expected to, understand what we had experienced, what in our minds seemed to set us apart forever from anyone who hadn't been in combat. We didn't want to indulge in self-pity. We just wished that people back home could understand how lucky they were and stop complaining about trivial inconveniences.
Siegfried Sassoon, an English combat infantry officer and poet in World War I, experienced the same feeling when he returned home. He summed it up in the following verse:
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.*
The poet might just as well have been referring to Peleliu or to the mudfields in front of Shuri as to France in World War I. Some of the younger replacements who came to us then had trouble adjusting, and not just to the shelling. That was enough to shake up the strongest veteran, but they were utterly dismayed by our horrible surroundings. Numerous Marine replacements for combat units on Okinawa never had their names added to their units’ muster rolls, because they got hit before notice of their transfer from their replacement draft to the combat unit ever reached Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps. So they were listed on the casualty rolls as members of various replacement drafts.
It was also common throughout the campaign for replacements to get hit before we even knew their names. They came up confused, frightened, and hopeful, got wounded or killed, and went right back to the rear on the route by which they had come, shocked, bleeding, or stiff. They were forlorn figures coming up to the meat grinder and going right back out of it like homeless waifs, unknown and faceless to us, like unread books on a shelf. They never “belonged” to the company or made any friends before they got hit.
Of course, those replacements who got hit right away with the “million-dollar wound” were actually fortunate.*
Our food usually consisted of a cold can of C rations and, rarely, a canteen cup of hot coffee. When we could brew it up, it was a treat. It was difficult to warm anything with our little heat tablets because of the almost constant rain. Sometimes I had to hunch over and shield a can of C-ration stew from the rain, because the can would fill up with rainwater as fast as I spooned the cold stew into my mouth.
We ate only because hunger forced us to do so. No other stimulus could have forced me to eat when my nostrils were so saturated with the odor of decay that I frequently felt sick. I ate little during that period, but drank hot coffee or bouillon at every opportunity.
The constant rain caused our weapons to rust. Most of us lined the holsters for our .45 automatic pistols with the green plastic covers we were issued. These came in long sleevelike pieces and could be placed over carbines, rifles, and Tommy guns. We kept a plastic hood draped over our mortar when it wasn't in use. This plastic cover was issued to be placed over ourselves while crouching down to avoid being sprayed with mustard gas, should that weapon have been used by the Japanese. We kept our weapons heavily oiled and actually had little trouble with them considering the battlefield conditions.
Field sanitation was nonexistent because of the shelling and the mud. Each man simply used a grenade canister or ammo carton and threw his own waste out into the already foul mud around his foxhole.
By day the battlefield was a horrible scene, but by night it became the most terrible of nightmares. Star shells and flares illuminated the area throughout the nights but were interspersed with moments of chilling, frightening blackness.
Sleep was almost impossible in the mud and cold rain, but sometimes I wrapped my wet poncho around me and dozed off for brief periods while my foxhole mate was on watch and bailing out the hole. One usually had to attempt sleep while sitting or crouching in the foxhole.
As usual, we rarely ventured out of our foxholes at night unless to care for wounded or to get ammunition. When a flare or star shell lighted the area, everyone froze just as he was, then moved during the brief periods of darkness. When the area lighted up with that eerie greenish light, the big raindrops sparkled like silver shafts as they slanted downward. During a strong wind they looked as though they were being driven along almost horizontal to the deck. The light reflected off the dirty water in the craters and off the helmets and weapons of the living and the dead.
I catalogued in my mind the position of every feature on the surrounding terrain. There was no vegetation, so my list consisted of mounds and dips in the terrain, foxholes of my comrades, craters, corpses, and knocked-out tanks and am-tracs. We had to know where everyone, living and dead, was located. If one of us fired at an enemy infiltrating or on a raid, he needed to know where his comrades were so as not to hit them. The position and posture of every corpse was important, because infiltrating Japanese also would freeze when illuminating shells lit up. So they might go unnoticed among the dead.
The longer we stayed in the area, the more unending the nights seemed to become. I reached the state where I would awake abruptly from my semisleep, and if the area was lit up, note with confidence my buddy scanning the terrain for any hostile sign. I would glance about, particularly behind us, for trouble. Finally, before we left the area, I frequently jerked myself up into a state in which I was semiawake during periods between star shells.
I imagined Marine dead had risen up and were moving silently about the area. I suppose these were nightmares, and I must have been more asleep than awake, or just dumbfounded by fatigue. Possibly they were hallucinations, but they were strange and horrible. The pattern was always the same. The dead got up slowly out of their waterlogged craters or off the mud and, with stooped shoulders and dragging feet, wandered around aimlessly, their lips moving as though trying to tell me something. I struggled to hear what they were saying. They seemed agonized by pain and despair. I felt they were asking me for help. The most horrible thing was that I felt unable to aid them.
At that point I invariably became wide awake and felt sick and half-crazed by the horror of my dream. I would gaze out intently to see if the silent figures were still there, but saw nothing. When a flare lit up, all was stillness and desolation, each corpse in its usual place.
Among the craters off the ridge to the west was a scattering of Marine corpses. Just beyond the right edge of the end foxhole, the ridge fell away steeply to the flat, muddy ground.*
Next to the base of the ridge, almost directly below me, was a partially flooded crater about three feet in diameter and probably three feet deep. In this crater was the body of a Marine whose grisly visage has remained disturbingly clear in my memory. If I close my eyes, he is as vivid as though I had seen him only yesterday.
The pathetic figure sat with his back toward the enemy and leaned against the south edge of the crater. His head was cocked, and his helmet rested against the side of the crater so that his face, or what remained of it, looked straight up at me. His knees were flexed and spread apart. Across his thighs, still clutched in his skeletal hands, was his rusting BAR. Canvas leggings were laced neatly along the sides of his calves and over his boondockers. His ankles were covered with muddy water, but the toes of his boondockers were visible above the surface. His dungarees, helmet, cover, and 782 gear appeared new. They were neither mud-spattered nor faded.
I was confident that he had been a new replacement. Every aspect of that big man looked much like a Marine “taking ten” on maneuvers before the order to move out again. He apparently had been killed early in the attacks against the Half Moon, before the rains began. Beneath his helmet brim I could see the visor of a green cotton fatigue cap. Under that cap were the most ghastly skeletal remains I had ever seen— and I had already seen too many.
Every time I looked over the edge of that foxhole down into that crater, that half-gone face leered up at me with a sardonic grin. It was as though he was mocking our pitiful efforts to hang on to life in the face of the constant violent death that had cut him down. Or maybe he was mocking the folly of the war itself: “I am the harvest of man's stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can't forget.”
During the day I sometimes watched big raindrops splashing into the crater around that corpse and remembered how as a child I had been fascinated by raindrops splashing around a large green frog as he sat in a ditch near home. My grandmother had told me that elves made little splashes like that, and they were called water babies. So I sat in my foxhole and watched the water babies splashing around the green-dungaree-clad corpse. What an unlikely combination. The war had turned the water babies into little ghouls that danced around the dead instead of little elves dancing around a peaceful bullfrog. A man had little to occupy his mind at Shuri—just sit in muddy misery and fear, tremble through the shellings, and let his imagination go where it would.
One of the very few humorous incidents I saw during those terrible days before Shuri occurred toward the end of the awful stalemate. Two Marines from the other mortar squad were dug in to the left of my gun pit. One morning at the first pale light of dawn I heard a commotion in their foxhole. I could hear a poncho being flung aside as someone began thrashing around. There were grunts and swearing. I strained my eyes through the steaming rain and brought the Tommy gun up to my shoulder. From all indications, one or more Japanese had slipped up on the weary occupants of the foxhole, and they were locked in a life-and-death struggle. But I could do nothing but wait and alert other men around us.
The commotion grew louder, and I could barely make out two dark figures struggling in the foxhole. I was utterly helpless to aid a buddy in distress, because I couldn't identify who was Marine and who was Japanese. None of us dared leave his own foxhole and approach the two. The enemy soldier must have already knifed one of the Marines and was grappling with the other, I thought.
The dark figures rose up. Standing toe to toe, they leaned into each other and exchanged blows with their fists. Everyone's eyes were fixed on the struggling figures but could see little in the semidarkness and pouring rain. The mumblings and swearing became louder and understandable, and we heard, “You dumb jerk; gimme that range card. It's mine.” I recognized the voice of a man who had come into Company K before Okinawa.
“No it's not; it's mine. You betta gimme it. I don't take no crap from nobody.” The latter was the familiar voice of Santos, a Peleliu veteran. We all started in surprise.
“Hey, you guys, what the hell's goin’ on over there?” growled an NCO.
The two struggling figures recognized his voice and immediately stopped hitting each other.
“You two eightballs,” the NCO said as he went over to them. “It woulda served ya right if we hada shot you both. We figured a Nip had got in your foxhole.”
Each of the two battlers protested that the other was the cause of all the trouble. The light was good by then, and some of us went over to their foxhole to investigate.
“What's all the row about?” I asked.
“This, by God; nothin’ but this!” snarled the NCO as he glared at the two sheepish occupants of the foxhole and handed me a range card.
I was puzzled why two Marines would squabble over a range card.* But when I looked at the card, I saw it was special and unique. Impressed on it in lipstick was the ruby red imprint of a woman's lips. The men had found the unique card in a canister while breaking out ammo for the guns the previous afternoon and had argued all night about who would keep it. Toward dawn they came to blows over it.
The NCO continued to chew them out, as I handed the card back to him and returned to my foxhole. We all got a good laugh out of the episode. I often wondered what that woman back in that ammunition factory in the States would have thought about the results of her efforts to add a little morale booster for us in a canister of mortar ammo.
During the last few days of May we received several small but vicious counterattacks from the Japanese soldiers who had been occupying the caves in the reverse slope of Half Moon's left-hand arm. One morning we got a message that a large number of enemy was massing behind the crescent. I was ordered to leave the OP and return to the gun pit in preparation for a big fire mission. I moved down the ridge and across the reeking, shell-pocked wasteland to the gun pits without mishap. Once there, we squared away the three 60mm mortars to fire on the reverse slope of the left crescent arm.
The firing pattern of the mortars was arranged to box in the Japanese and prevent their escape while our three guns shelled the area heavily in an attempt to wipe them out. Consequently, we had to fire rapid-fire, searching and traversing the target area. The ammo carriers were kept busy breaking out more HE shells, but I was so busy on my mortar I didn't have time to notice them. The tube (barrel) became intensely hot. We wrapped a dungaree jacket around the lower half of it, and one of the ammo carriers poured helmets full of water taken from a shell crater over the cloth to cool the steaming barrel, while we continued rapid-fire.*
We fired I don't know how many hundreds of shells before the order came to cease firing. My ears rang. I was exhausted, and had a roaring headache. Beside each of the three gun pits was a huge stack of empty HE canisters and ammo crates from the large number of shells we had fired. We were anxious to know the results of our firing. But our observers couldn't see the target area, because it was on the reverse slope of the ridge.
A few days later when our regiment went forward in the attack, we didn't move through the target area, so we still didn't see the effects of the fire mission. But one Company K NCO who did see the area told us that he had counted more than two hundred enemy dead who apparently had been trapped and killed by our fire. I assume he was right, because after our barrage, the Japanese ceased activity along the ridge.
SHURI
The rain began to slacken, and rumors spread that we would attack soon. We also heard that the main enemy force had withdrawn from the Shuri line. But the Japanese had left a strong rear guard to fight to the death. So we could expect no signs of weakness. The Japanese had been spotted retreating from Shuri under cover of the bad weather. Our naval guns, artillery, heavy mortars, and even a few airplanes had thrown a terrific bombardment into them. But withdrawal or not, Shuri wasn't going to fall easily. We anticipated a hard fight once the weather cleared.
On a quiet day or two before the 5th Marines moved out for the big push against Shuri, several Marines from the graves registration section came into our area to collect the dead. Those dead already on stretchers presented no problem, but the corpses rotting in shell craters and in the mud were another matter.
We sat on our helmets and gloomily watched the graves registration people trying to do their macabre duty. They each were equipped with large rubber gloves and a long pole with a stiff flap attached to the end (like some huge spatula). They would lay a poncho next to a corpse, then place the poles under the body, and roll it over onto the poncho. It sometimes took several tries, and we winced when a corpse fell apart. The limbs or head had to be shoved onto the poncho like bits of garbage. We felt sympathy for the graves registration men. With the corpses being moved, the stench of rotting flesh became worse (if possible) than ever before.
Apparently the enemy had withdrawn guns and troops from Shuri to the extent that their shelling of our area had all but stopped. A miserable drizzling rain commenced again. Almost out on my feet with fatigue, I decided to take advantage of the quiet. I unfolded an unused stretcher, set it on some boards, lay down on my back, and covered my head and body with my poncho. It was the first time in two months— since leaving my canvas rack aboard ship on 1 April (D day)—that I had been able to lie down on anything but hard ground or mud. The canvas stretcher felt like a deluxe bed, and my poncho shielded all but my mud-caked boondockers and ankles from the rain. For the first time in about ten days I fell into a deep sleep.
How long I slept I don't know, but after a while I became aware of being lifted upward. At first I thought I was dreaming, but then I awoke fully and realized someone had picked up the stretcher. Throwing the poncho away from me, I sprang off the stretcher, spun around, and saw two clean, neatly shaven Marines looking at me in utter astonishment.
Several of my grimy buddies squatting on their muddy helmets nearby began to laugh. The two strangers were graves registration men. They had picked up the stretcher thinking I was just another poncho-covered corpse. It never occurred to them that, instead, I was just a weary Marine trying to catch a nap on a comfortable stretcher who had covered himself to keep off the rain. They grinned when they realized what had happened. I accused my buddies of telling the two men to pick up my stretcher, but they only laughed and asked why my nap had ended so abruptly. I was left with an eerie feeling from the incident, but my buddies enjoyed the joke thoroughly.
Dawn broke clearly without rain on 28 May, and we prepared to attack later in the morning. About 1015 we attacked southward against long-range mortar and machine-gun fire. We were elated that the opposition was so light and that the sun was shining. We actually advanced several hundred yards that day, quite an accomplishment in that sector.
Moving through the mud was still difficult, but we were all glad to get out of the stinking, half-flooded garbage pit around the Half Moon. That night we learned that we would continue the attack the next day by moving directly against the Shuri Ridge.
About midmorning on 29 May, ⅗ attacked the Shuri with Company L in the lead and Companies K and I following closely. Earlier in the morning Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had attacked eastward into the rains of Shuri Castle and had raised the Confederate flag. When we learned that the flag of the Confederacy had been hoisted over the very heart and soul of Japanese resistance, all of us Southerners cheered loudly. The Yankees among us grumbled, and the Westerners didn't know what to do. Later we learned that the Stars and Stripes that had flown over Guadalcanal were raised over Shuri Castle, a fitting tribute to the men of the 1st Marine Division who had the honor of being first into the Japanese citadel.*
We all were filled with a sense of accomplishment that night as we dug in somewhere around Shuri Castle. We in the ranks were well aware of its strategic importance to the progress of the campaign.
Although the whole place was in ruins, we could still see that the area around Shuri Castle had been impressive and picturesque before its destruction by the incessant U.S. bombardment. Shuri Castle itself was a mess, and I couldn't tell much about its former appearance. It had been an ancient stone building surrounded by a moat and what appeared to have been terraces and gardens. As we picked our way through the rubble, I looked at the terraced stonework and shattered blackened tree stumps. I thought it must have been a pretty place once.
We dug in that night with the knowledge that even though we were at last in Shuri Castle, there were strongly entrenched Japanese still north of us in Wana Draw, east of us, and south of us. The lines were terribly confused to many of us in the ranks, and we assumed that the enemy could come at us from almost any direction. But they remained quiet during the night, except for the usual raiders.
We attacked again the next day, and got shelled badly. I was totally confused as to where we were for several days and can't clarify it now in my mind even after careful study of the notes and references at my disposal.
At dusk on one of those last few days of May, we moved onto a muddy, slippery ridge and were told to dig in along the crest. One of the three 60mm mortar squads was to set up its gun down behind the ridge, but my squad and the remaining squad were ordered to dig in along the ridge crest and to function as riflemen during the night. The weather turned bad again, and it started raining.
Mac, our mortar section leader, was nowhere to be seen. But Duke, who had been our section leader on Peleliu and who was by then leading the battalion's 81mm mortar platoon, came up to take charge. He ordered an NCO to have us dig two-man foxholes five yards apart along the crest of the ridge. My buddy went off down the ridge to draw ammo and chow while I prepared to dig.
The ridge was about a hundred feet high, quite steep, and we were on a narrow crest. Several discarded Japanese packs, helmets, and other gear lay scattered along the crest. From the looks of the muddy soil, the place had been shelled heavily for a long time. The ridge was a putrid place. Our artillery must have killed Japanese there earlier, because the air was foul with the odor of rotting flesh. It was just like being back at Half Moon Hill. Off toward our front, to the south, I had only a dim view through the gathering gloom and curtain of rain of the muddy valley below.
The men digging in on both sides of me cursed the stench and the mud. I began moving the heavy, sticky clay mud with my entrenching shovel to shape out the extent of the foxhole before digging deeper. Each shovelful had to be knocked off the spade, because it stuck like glue. I was thoroughly exhausted and thought my strength wouldn't last from one sticky shovelful to the next.
Kneeling on the mud, I had dug the hole no more than six or eight inches deep when the odor of rotting flesh got worse.There was nothing to do but continue to dig, so I closed my mouth and inhaled with short shallow breaths. Another spadeful of soil out of the hole released a mass of wriggling maggots that came welling up as though those beneath were pushing them out. I cursed, and told the NCO as he came by what a mess I was digging into.
“You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart.”
In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket buried in the mud—and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit the breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shovel skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels.
I began choking and gagging as I yelled in desperation, “I can't dig in here! There's a dead Nip here!”
The NCO came over, looked down at my problem and at me, and growled, “You heard him; he said put the holes five yards apart.”
“How the hell can I dig a foxhole through a dead Nip?” I protested.
Just then Duke came along the ridge and said, “What's the matter, Sledgehammer?”
I pointed to the partially exhumed corpse. Duke immediately told the NCO to have me dig in a little to the side away from the rotting remains. I thanked Duke and glared at the NCO. How I managed not to vomit during that vile experience I don't know. Perhaps my senses and nerves had been so dulled by constant foulness for so long that nothing could evoke any other response but to cry out and move back.
I soon had a proper foxhole dug to one side of the site of my first attempt. (A few spades full of mud thrown back into that excavation did little to reduce the horrid odor.) My buddy returned, and we began to square away our gear for the coming light. There was some small-arms fire to our left, but all was quiet around us. Duke was down at the foot of the ridge behind us with a map in his hand. He called us to come down for a critique and a briefing on the next day's attack.
Glad to leave the stinking foxhole, I got up and carefully started down the slippery ridge. My buddy rose, took one step down the ridge, slipped, and fell. He slid on his belly all the way to the bottom, like a turtle sliding off a log. I reached the bottom to see him stand erect with his arms partially extended and look down at his chest and belt with a mixed expression of horror, revulsion, and disbelief. He was, of course, muddy from the slide. But that was the least of it. White, fat maggots tumbled and rolled off his cartridge belt, pockets, and folds of his dungaree jacket and trousers. I picked up a stick and handed him another. Together we scraped the vile insect larvae off his reeking dungarees.
That Marine was a Gloucester veteran with whom I had often shared a hole on Peleliu and Okinawa. He was as tough and as hard as any man I ever knew. But that slide was almost too much for him. I thought he was going to scream or crack up. Having to wallow in war's putrefaction was almost more than the toughest of us could bear. He shook himself like a wet dog, however, cursed, and threw down the stick when we got him scraped free of maggots.
Duke's group of eight to ten Marines showed their sympathy for my buddy and their appreciation of the vileness of his accident. Muddy, bearded, and red-eyed with fatigue, Duke called our attention to the map, and that helped us focus on other subjects. He showed us where we were and told us some of the plans for the next day's attack, which was supposed to break completely through the Shuri line.
I was so revolted and sickened by what had just happened and so weary that I didn't remember much of what he told us. It is a pity in retrospect, because that briefing was the only time in my combat experience that an officer ever showed a group of privates a map of the battlefield and explained recent events and future attack plans. Usually an NCO simply relayed the word to us. We then followed orders as they were given, rarely knowing what was going on.
We never knew why Duke held the little critique that night, whether he was ordered to do so or not. I suspect he did it on his own. He realized we wanted to know and understand our role in the overall plan.
It was a historic time, and we were participating in events of key importance to the American effort on Okinawa. All eyes were on Shuri. My buddies and I were key participants at a critical juncture in one of the epic land battles of World War II, and we were having our tiny role in that battle explained. Duke asked if there were any questions. A few were asked, which he answered clearly. I maintained my condition of near stupefaction through it all. Then we slowly climbed back up the filthy ridge after he dismissed us.
That night the rain came down in torrents. It was without exaggeration the most terrific deluge I've ever seen. The wind blew fiercely, slashing the rain horizontally across the crest of the ridge and stinging our faces and hands. The star shells burst but gave little illumination because they were snatched away immediately by the unseen hand of the gale. Visibility was limited to about six feet. We couldn't see our buddies in their foxholes on either side of us. What a terrible night to grapple with Japanese infiltrators or a counterattack, I thought to myself all night long.
Considerable machine-gun fire, bursts of rifle fire, and grenade explosions erupted throughout the night a short way down the line to our left. But all was mercifully quiet, albeit tense, in our immediate area. Next morning I realized why we weren't molested by the enemy as the men to our left had been. For a considerable distance to our right and left, the ridge fell away almost perpendicularly to the valley below. The Japanese simply couldn't crawl up the slick surface.
In the latter days of May while the Japanese held on to the center of their line around Shuri, the U.S. Army divisions to the east and the 6th Marine Division to the west (around Naha) finally made progress to the south. Their combined movements threatened to envelop the main Japanese defense forces in the center. Thus the enemy had to withdraw. By dawn on 30 May most of the Japanese Thirty-second Armyhad departed the Shuri line, leaving only rear guards to cover their retreat.
In the sixty-one days of fighting on Okinawa after D day, an estimated 62,548 Japanese soldiers had lost their lives and 465 had been captured. American dead numbered 5,309; 23,909 had been wounded; and 346 were missing in action. It wasn't over yet.
* After the campaign on Okinawa ended, a battalion surgeon told me the sores on my hands were probably caused by malnutrition, the filth we lived in, or both. The festering sores that developed on my hands in late May didn't heal until nearly five months after we came out of combat.
*Sassoon, Siegfried, “Suicide in Trenches” in Collected Poems, Viking Press, N.Y. 1949.
*K/⅗ landed at full strength of 235 officers and men on 1 April 1945. The company joined 250 replacements during the campaign for a total of 485 serving. Of the fifty men left at the end of the campaign, only twenty-six had made the landing.
* The flat, muddy, cratered landscape to the west of Half Moon Hill was a no-man's-land to the railroad and beyond to the Horse Shoe and Sugar Loaf Hill, where the left flank of the 6th Marine Division was located. At no time did I see any Americans in that low, flooded ground astride the railroad. Thus a gap of considerable size existed between the 1st and 6th Marine Divisions.
An officer told me that machine guns and strongpoints to the right rear covered the area. He said the low flat terrain was so vulnerable to Japanese fire from the heights of Shuri that extending the lines to meet on that flooded ground would have sentenced the men involved to sure death. At night star shells illuminated the area so that the enemy couldn't infiltrate across it.
* A five-by-seven-inch range card came in each canister of 60mm mortar ammunition. It contained printed columns of numbers denoting range, sight setting, and number of powder increments to be attached to each mortar shell for a given range. Thus the cards were as common as ammo canisters.
*I've read accounts of “mortars glowing red” when firing rapidly for long periods. They sound dramatic and impressive. But from my experience I'm skeptical that a mortar can be fired safely and accurately when its barrel is glowing red. My experience was that if a barrel got very hot from rapid fire—so hot that the surrounding air had insufficient cooling effect—it was dangerous to drop a round down the tube. The one time I did, the heat ignited the increments, then the propellant cartridge ignited before the shell slid all the way down the barrel. Consequently, the shell wobbled out of the barrel and fell short after having slid down only about half its length.
Thus, to avoid short rounds, we either had to wait for the air to cool our barrel, fire at a slower rate, or, as in this fire mission, which was an emergency, cool the barrel with water.
* For the assault against Shuri Castle, ⅕ and ⅗ actually attacked eastward, turning approximately ninety degrees to the left of the southward-facing front. The 5th Marines thus crossed over into the zone of the 77th Infantry Division to reach Shuri Castle. The 77th Infantry Division was located north of Shuri, and a large number of Japanese were still entrenched between the army division and the 5th Marines as the latter moved eastward behind the Japanese who were blocking the 77th Division's advance.