Goodbye, Darkness (51 page)

Resistance ended on Yaetake's peak after a hand-to-hand struggle; 347 Japs died. Since the Marines had killed nearly three thousand Japs and captured the northern two-thirds of the island — 436 square miles — we expected a respite, hot chow, and a few days in the sack. We didn't get any of them. For over a week we had heard ominous rumors of stiffening resistance in the south. GIs were encountering unprecedented concentrations of Japanese artillery fire. Progress was being measured in yards, then in feet. Regrouping, the GIs launched a massive attack and were stopped cold. It was Peleliu and Iwo all over again, but to the nth degree; because of it, Morison wrote, “the battle for Okinawa was the toughest and most prolonged of any in the Pacific war since Guadalcanal.” Being Marines, and therefore arrogant, we assumed that the dogfaces simply lacked our spirit. What infuriated us, however, was the news that one of Buckner's chief problems lay on his right flank. The division stalled there was the infamous Twenty-seventh. They couldn't keep up with the other army outfits, couldn't even recover their own dead. So we were going to relieve them and they would move up here as garrison troops. Before boarding the six-bys for the trip south, the Raggedy Asses gave the children in the little town of Nago a lesson in elementary English. When the GIs came up to take our place, we told them, they should chant loudly: “Twenty-seventh Division eats shit! Twenty-seventh Division eats shit!” Later we were told they had performed superbly. It was probably the greatest event in the history of Nago. Doubtless it was unfair to some doggies. I'm sure there were brave men in the Twenty-seventh. But if anyone bleats to me about the division's reputation and asks for sympathy, I can tell him where to find it. In the dictionary.

Our movement into the southern line took two days. As we rode south, we became aware of a grumbling on the horizon, which turned into a thumping, then a drumming, then a rumbling, and then an enormous thudding, as though Fafner and Fasolt, the giants in the
Rhinegold,
had been let loose. The enemy's main line of resistance bore various names, depending upon what part of it faced you; to GIs it would be remembered as Skyline Ridge, or the Kakazu, or the Kochi, or the Maeda Escarpment. The First Marine Division, which moved up on our left flank, called it the Shuri Line, because their immediate objective was the ancient ruins of Shuri Castle. We named it the Machinato Line, after a village on our front. But it was all of a piece, all horrible. Counting both sides, the line represented an extraordinary concentration of 300,000 fighting men, and countless terrified civilians, on a battleground that was about as wide as the distance between Capitol Hill in Washington and Arlington National Cemetery. In the densest combat of World War I, battalion frontage had been approximately eight hundred yards. Here it was less than six hundred yards. The sewage, of course, was appalling. You could smell the front long before you saw it; it was one vast cesspool. My first glimpse of the line itself came when our truck was stopped by the convoy traffic and I jumped over the tailgate to climb a little hillock and see where we were heading. By sheer chance, I had chosen a spot from which the entire battlefield was visible. It was hideous, and it was also strangely familiar, resembling, I then realized, photographs of 1914–1918. This, I thought, is what Verdun and Passchendaele must have looked like. The two great armies, squatting opposite one another in mud and smoke, were locked together in unimaginable agony. There was no room for a flanking operation; the Pacific Ocean lay to the east and the East China Sea to the west. A landing behind Japanese lines would have been possible and would have relieved the pressure on the front, but despite the pleas of the Marine generals for an amphibious operation, Buckner insisted on fighting it out this way.

I lingered on that hummock, repelled and bewitched. It was a monstrous sight, a moonscape. Hills, ridges, and cliffs rose and fell along the front like gray stumps of rotting teeth. There was nothing green left; artillery had denuded and scarred every inch of ground. Tiny flares glowed and disappeared. Shrapnel burst with bluish white puffs. Jets of flamethrowers flickered and here and there new explosions stirred up the rubble. While I watched, awed, an American observation plane, a Piper Cub, droned over the Japanese lines, spotting targets for the U.S. warships lying offshore so that they could bring their powerful guns to bear on the enemy. Suddenly the little plane was hit by flak and disintegrated. The carnage below continued without pause. Here I was safe, but tomorrow I would be there. In that instant I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.

That afternoon we pushed ahead a thousand yards, retrieving the Twenty-seventh's fallen, but our optimism was premature. The Japs were giving us the ground. They knew who we were. They now had a word for American Marines —
kai-he-tai
— and had developed special tactics for us. These followed a pattern. Each line was held stubbornly until it was about to be overwhelmed; then the Japs withdrew to prepared positions, leaving snipers in coral grottoes to carve up our CPs. A truer sign of what lay ahead was a stark statistic from the Seventh Marines, who had preceded us into the line and held our left flank. In nine days of attacks on a little wrinkle of land called Wana Ridge, the regiment had suffered 1,249 casualties. Our own baptism in siege warfare came when we forced a passage across the Asa Kawa, or River. The Japs had burned the bridge behind them. In those days Americans still prided themselves on their knack for mechanical improvisation — one vehicle which had made its debut on L-day was a tank which actually swam — and our Engineer Battalion welcomed the Asa problem as a challenge. At night, moving like shadows in the slimy stream, they threw a footbridge across the river. Assault companies raced across it in the first moments of morning twilight. Japs wired dynamite to their bellies, darted out of tall grass, and blew up both the footbridge and themselves. Amphtracs ferried more Marines across the water until the following day, when the engineers built a Bailey bridge strong enough to bear the weight of tanks.

Meanwhile the spring rains had begun, coinciding, I might point out, with my own arrival on the line. Torrents blew in from the East China Sea for three straight weeks, day and night, and no one who has not fought under such conditions, or even worked under them, can possibly envisage how miserable they are. Plasma, for example, was usually fed into the veins of a wounded man by taping the plasma container to the stock of a reversed rifle with a fixed bayonet; the bayonet was driven into the ground, providing a post from which the plasma could flow downward. The gruel of Okinawa mud was so thin that it couldn't support a rifle bayonet; men had to be withdrawn from the line to hold the containers. On the other side of the globe Bill Mauldin was writing: “I'm sure Europe never got this muddy during peacetime. I'm equally sure that no mud in the world is so deep or sticky or wet as European mud.” Mauldin should have seen what the Twenty-ninth Marines were up against. In places our muck was waist-deep. Jeeps, artillery pieces, even bulldozers — everything but amphtracs and DUKWs — sank in it. And there is one massive difference between peacetime mud and wartime mud. In peacetime it is usually avoidable. You can step around it, or take another route. In combat you fight in the mud, sleep in it, void in it, bleed in it, and sometimes die in it.

Your torment in combat is compounded by your utter ignorance of how the battle is going elsewhere. You know what is happening in this gully, or what lies behind that stump, but you have no idea of how things look back at the platoon CP, let alone the company, battalion, regimental, divisional, corps, or army CPs. As keeper of the situation map, I knew more than most. My map was gridded with numbered squares representing areas each of which was two thousand feet wide. Each of these was then divided into twenty-five lettered squares, A through Y, these being four hundred feet wide. In turn, the tiny squares could be further divided, for those who knew the gen, into 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, indicating the four corners and the center. Thus the naval gunfire officer in every battalion headquarters could order gunfire from a warship offshore and put it within two hundred feet of the target. In addition, each battalion carried on its roster a full-blooded Navaho. He could talk to other Indians in other battalions over SCR-300 radios, confident that no Japanese eavesdropper would understand a word. But such information was fragmentary at best, and there was nothing from the regimental level or further up. The army divisions on the left were fighting just as hard as we were, but I don't recall any dope about how things were going for them.

I yearned for a better view. It did not seem to be an impossible dream. Before our invasion the island had supported 400,000 Okinawans, and a few relics of civilization had somehow endured. War which displaces civilizations always leaves a few odd reminders of the peaceful past — a half-demolished wall, say, or the front door of a home which no longer exists. Until L-day a large concrete sugar mill had flourished in western Okinawa, on what was now our end of the Machinato Line. Bombardments had destroyed all of it except two tall brick chimneys which overlooked the entire battleground. The Japanese were using these smokestacks for observation posts, and despite our naval gunfire, artillery, and aerial bombardment the chimneys had miraculously survived. If only I could get up there, I thought, I would know what was going on. I now know that was wrong. I would have seen the blackened ruins of Naha, still thickly toothed with Japs, to the southwest, and looking down on the line I would have had a stunning view of the fighting, emanating a sullen burning glow like a kitchen range. But the key features would have escaped me because their significance would have been invisible from the smokestacks. The whole history of war is a story of men moving closer and closer to the ground and then deeper and deeper in it. The anchor of the line, which Ushijima considered the key to it, was an undistinguished mound now known to history as Sugar Loaf Hill.

Sugar Loaf, which was actually shaped more like a bread loaf, was a height of coral and volcanic rock three hundred yards long and one hundred feet high. It was vital because it was almost impregnable. Not in itself; few summits are unscalable if attackers can reach their slopes. But this ugly hive was supported on the southeast by another mound, Half Moon Hill, and to the south by yet another, Horseshoe Ridge. Thus Sugar Loaf, a spear pointed at the advancing Sixth Marine Division, was merely the most visible feature of a triangular system connected by hidden galleries. Each of the three peaks could deliver murderous fire from heavy 15-centimeter guns on any other peak attacked by us. Moreover, a deep trough of ground within Horseshoe Ridge gave the Japanese mortar positions which could be reached only by grenades and small-arms fire, and our riflemen couldn't get that close because the three hummocks rose abruptly from a bare plain, providing no defilade. Assaulting troops charging one precipice would be cut down by converging interlocking fire from the rest of the triangle. In addition, the complex could be raked by Jap artillery, mortars, and machine guns emplaced in Shuri Hill, to the east, which had stopped the First Marine Division in its muddy tracks. Shuri was bigger, but it was the Sugar Loaf complex that cracked the whip of the Machinato Line. There the hills stood, piled in great, weighty, pressing, heaped, lethal masses, oppressive beyond words for us who studied the maps and knew that one way or another the peaks must be taken.

My first grasp of what the immediate future held for me, provided I had a future, came when my battalion relieved the battered Third Battalion, which had been fighting on a smaller mound called Charlie Hill. We were moving up in a coiling line, single file, as the Third, uncoiling, moved out. I was struck by the Third's faces: haggard, with jaws hanging open and the expressionless eyes of men who had left nowhere and were going nowhere. There was little conversation on either side, but in one of those lulls that come in any march, when there was no movement in either column, I found myself opposite John Baker. I knew Baker well. He was a former newspaperman, a cheerful, sturdy corporal whom I had never seen not chomping on an unlit cigar. In fact, I suspected it was always the same cigar. He had been stationed in San Diego at the time of Pearl Harbor, and his company had been detailed to dig trenches on the beaches because the Californians were convinced that an invasion armada was steaming toward them. I doubt that it disturbed him or even dislodged his cigar. He was a solid, imperturbable man, as steady as though he carried a binnacle in his chest. I had often wished I had him in my section, but he had remained in the Third Battalion, and now he was coming out of combat, and I asked him, “Baker, what's it like up there?”

I had thought he was looking at me. Now I realized that he was really looking through me in a thousand-yard stare. Slowly he focused on my face, removed the cigar, spat on the mud, replaced the cigar, and replied flatly: “You really want to know?” I turned away, and turned back. I noticed that this file was much shorter than ours. I asked him, “Where's the rest of your battalion?” In that same dull voice he said, “This isn't a battalion. These are the survivors of a battalion.”

The two lines of men began to move again. We rounded a bend, and suddenly I understood Baker. On the right side of the path lay about a hundred dead Marines. Each had been wrapped in his poncho, now his shroud. These had been secured with communications wire and then the bodies had been stacked as you would stack cordwood. You could see the boondockers jutting out; the rest of the bodies were covered by the ponchos. The stack was neatly made, as though ready to pass inspection. Probably I knew some of the men, but covered as they were I couldn't identify any. Every pair of boondockers looked like every other pair. I looked down at my own. They were the same.

The sounds of enemy artillery were becoming louder and louder; we were well within mortar range. Once we were in position, on the reverse slope of Charlie Hill, I set up the Raggedy Ass base in one of the little courtyards that led to the lyre-shaped tombs; every courtyard was encircled by a three-foot wall, with an entrance at one end of it and the tomb itself at the other end. Blue ceramic jars, containing the ashes of ancestors, stood on shelves within the tombs. At night we moved the ancestors out and ourselves in — these mini-mausoleums made superb bomb shelters — and in the morning we moved the vases back. During the battle we changed tombs several times, but for the time being we weren't going anywhere, because the battle wasn't moving. The Japanese still had us deadlocked here, and had even regained some ground on the left with a fifteen-thousand-man counterattack. By the end of that first week on the line, we had begun to understand the maze of hills. Sugar Loaf had changed hands fourteen times. Every time we took it, the tremendous firepower from Half Moon, Horseshoe, and Shuri drove us off. The Japs would retake it, and our artillery would do the same to them. But we couldn't see how they could be completely dislodged. They always had men on some part of the hill. And they had others
in
the hill, because their sappers, starting with foxholes, had dug deeper caves and tunnels, all in our direction.