Islands of the Damned (24 page)

Our easy days on Okinawa were at an end. That’s for sure.

Everybody sobered up now. Even Snafu Shelton turned serious. I would still have my differences with Scotty, even some serious differences. But our lieutenant seemed to mature as we went along. He lost his college kid silliness, and there was no more bragging about what he’d do to the Japs, no more pranks.

When I thought about it, I counted myself lucky to be serving with these men. We’d solidified into a unit. We worked well together. We had each other’s backs.

I also counted myself lucky because I hadn’t lost a man yet. Except for Redifer and Leslie Porter, who’d been nicked by that grenade at the pillbox on Ngesebus, my mortar squad hadn’t even had anyone wounded. I felt lucky about myself. I had made six landings—Cape Gloucester, Talasea, Peleliu, Ngesebus, Okinawa, and Takabanare—and so far so good. Not that it couldn’t happen to me. I saw guys around me all the time blown up, shot, cut down by shrapnel. I knew my time might come any minute.

It’s just that it hadn’t, so far.

Okinawa is a valley and a ridge, a valley and a ridge, all the way to the end of the island.

When I look at the map now, I see that we couldn’t have been more than ten miles from the southern tip. But the Japs were going to make us fight for every inch of those ten miles. They had set up a defense line about three miles long across the island from the capital at Naha through an ancient fortress called Shuri Castle to Nakagusuku Bay. Their headquarters were in a big tunnel system beneath the castle, and their soldiers had been ordered to defend Shuri with their last drop of blood. North of the Shuri line they had set up their defenses on a series of parallel ridges—Awacha, Dakeshi and finally Wana. For the rest of May and into June we would throw ourselves against these ridges one by one.

When the rain let up the morning of May 3, we faced the first of those ridges. Scotty met with the company’s commanders and then told me that the coming offensive would need the full support of our mortars. We got the section squared away and, as we fired out in front of them, K Company started across the valley. With that machine-gun nest cleared out, we made good progress. But the Japs stopped us short at the next ridgeline.

It was on this day, maybe the next, that two of my men were wounded. I was standing no more than ten feet away when the shell hit, and somehow I didn’t get a scratch. But when the smoke and dust settled, both T. L. Hudson and Jim Kornaizl were down. Hudson’s left arm was bloodied between the shoulder and elbow and he was holding it at an odd angle. Kornaizl was in the dirt, jerking from head to toe, his eyes rolled back. Our corpsman rushed over. A fragment had opened up the side of Kornaizl’s skull. We got him out of there fast, then started patching up Hudson, whose arm was hanging uselessly.

Both would survive. Hudson would become my neighbor back in Texas for a time after the war was over. But I wouldn’t see Kornaizl again for decades, and then I almost wouldn’t recognize him. When I did, he would unlock a flood of memories.

That night our company got a needed rest. All night long we could hear heavy fire on our left, where the Japs staged a big counterattack. Far to the right, we could see tracers arc out over the bay where the First Marines were firing at Japs who were attempting a surprise landing behind our lines. If they had succeeded they might have rolled up the whole line. But the First caught them when they were still in the water, killing them by the hundreds before they even got to shore. The few stragglers that made it were hunted down the next morning.

During the night we were warned to watch for enemy paratroopers, but they never appeared. The Jap counterattack failed, and over the next few days we slowly began to fight our way forward again, taking heavy casualties. Our objective was a distant plateau, Dakeshi Ridge, overlooking the Awa River. From this and other ridges, the Japs had been able to fire down on our forces as they moved up along the coast.

On May 6 it started raining again, and for two days it never let up. Mud gummed up weapons everywhere along the line. Often we were setting up our mortars in a couple inches of water. Each time we fired, they sank deeper into the muck. We shored them up as best we could with boards and stones.

On May 8 we learned that the war had ended in Europe. Germany’s surrender had come too late for J.D. and for a lot of other good men. But there were no signs the Japs would follow Germany’s lead. For most of us, the end of fighting half a world away meant very little, except that maybe the flow of supplies would pick up and we’d get some help. But the Navy celebrated with a monster barrage that seemed to cut loose every gun on every ship within range of the Japs. If it did any good, you couldn’t prove it by us. We were still catching hell.

The Sixth Marine Division moved in on our right and we moved farther in from the coast, to an area called the Awacha Pocket. Except for the rain and mud, the deep draws and steep hills reminded me of Peleliu. Once again the Japs had plenty of caves and dugouts to fire from. One position covered several others, and it was almost impossible to dig them out. The roads were impassable and even amtracs could not get through to where we were set up. So they dumped our supplies a couple hundred yards away on the far side of a shallow draw. If we wanted our supplies, we had to go get them.

The business of hauling ammo, rations and five-gallon water cans across that draw got to be almost more trouble than combat itself. It was all up-and-down work. The mud would build up on your boondockers, layer by layer, so if you weren’t sinking down or sliding back into it you were tripping over yourself. To add to our troubles the Japs had discovered what we were up to and set up a Nambu machine gun at the head of that draw. Every Marine who crossed it drew fire.

I didn’t see it, but at some point Redifer took it into his head to cover our men as they went across with smoke grenades. It didn’t keep the machine gunner from firing but it spoiled his aim, and Sledge and a number of others got across safely.

Then Redifer spotted one of our tanks and ran after it. He got it stopped and pretty soon it came rumbling and clanking down into the draw, Redifer walking in front of it guiding it like one of those fellows that waves the planes into the ramp at the airport. He got the tank parked crossways in the draw, and our men resumed moving supplies across, crouching behind the tank as it rumbled back and forth. Redifer was directing all the way.

While this was going on First Lieutenant George Loveday showed up. Loveday had taken over from Legs, the lieutenant I had several clashes with. I got along a lot better with Loveday, but he wasn’t all that popular with the men. First, he just looked sloppy. His uniform never seemed to fit him right. Everything kind of hung out and dangled. A lot of the time he ran around wearing just his cloth cap, carrying his helmet tucked under his arm. When he got mad, which he did often, he’d rip off his cap and throw it down on the mud or dirt and stomp on it.

While Redifer was throwing smoke grenades, he had been standing on the side of the draw, out in the open. Loveday thought this made him an easy target, and he just reamed Redifer out, from one end to the other.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” he yelled. “Don’t you have any goddamn brains?”

Redifer just stood there in stunned silence. Then he walked off.

I don’t think Loveday had seen the whole thing. He hadn’t seen the trouble we were having getting supplies. I think what he saw was Redifer exposing himself to enemy fire without taking any precautions. It might have been a dumb way to do it. But he did get the job done.

None of this meant either man was a bad Marine. Redifer was one of those guys who wasn’t afraid of anything. He didn’t always think first. But he was solid. Loveday had his faults. He had a temper. But hell, we’ve all got our faults. He was a good man, and a good officer. After World War II, he went on for a tour of duty in Korea and then to Vietnam.

Another major push against Awacha Pocket was set for noon on May 9. The rain slacked off, the ground was drying out and our tanks were on the scene. We resupplied with ammo and registered our mortars.

Once again there was a big bombardment before we kicked off. Artillery alternated with waves of swooping Avenger dive-bombers and Corsairs firing rockets. We called the rockets “Holy Moses,” because we figured that’s what anyone on the receiving end would say when they saw them coming. I was out front, observing and directing fire. I watched our riflemen and tanks start across the valley, only to be brought up short again by Jap fire. They were using their 90mm mortars, with big shells that made a strange fluttering sound as they came tumbling down. I ordered the mortars to fire phosphorous shells to provide a smoke screen for the attack.

At the end of the day we had made maybe a few hundred yards. Our battalion was relieved and went into reserve, with orders to back up the Seventh Regiment, who were fighting on our right on Dakeshi Ridge. The Seventh hammered at that ridge all night long and just before dawn we got word that we might be needed after all. We’d picked up some intelligence that the Japs might pull a counterattack. So we pulled up stakes and moved west along the ridge to where the attack was expected. There we found a group from First and Second battalions who had fought through the night hand to hand with the Japs. Here and there, corpsmen were patching up wounded Marines. A few yards beyond their foxholes, dozens of Japs were sprawled out in the mud. We’d missed the fight.

Minutes later we were ordered to turn around and go back to our old position.

After the Seventh Marines took Dakeshi Ridge, we moved into what was left of a small village just behind the ridge. Most of the buildings were down. But the low stone walls still stood along the roads, where they provided good cover. They were well made, about three or four feet high with large stones and mortar. I ordered everyone to dig in along the north side of the walls, where we’d be sheltered from fire.

That same night I got a look at one of the new night-vision scopes the Army was using. It took two or three guys to man that thing, but they could set it up after dark and see Jap infiltrators as they moved in, before they did their dirty work. One man held the scope and the other fired a BAR at the target. I looked through it. Everything had a strange, greenish glow, but I could see like daylight. I could recognize individuals thirty to fifty yards away, actually tell who they were.

I thought, Man alive! If you had one of these things when they came at you in a banzai charge, you wouldn’t have to just fire into the dark and hope you’d hit one. You could pick them off like flies. I wondered how long until they were available for Marines.

About two o’clock in the morning, all hell broke loose over in one of our foxholes. I was only fifteen or twenty feet away and I recognized the voice. George Sarrett was yelling and thrashing around. I thought, God a-mighty! I’ve set us up where there’s a Jap cave. They’ve come out and one of them is in the foxhole with George.

I scrambled over, pulling out my KA-BAR just as Sarrett stood up, panting and sputtering.

“Get him off me!” he yelled. “God, I hate those things!”

I looked down, expecting to find a bloodied Jap crumpled in the bottom of Sarrett’s foxhole. Instead, there was a land crab that had tumbled in sometime during the night.

That crab gave us the first laugh we’d had in many weeks.

Beyond Dakeshi village we got held up at one particularly long, low ridge. Twice our men had made it almost to the top, only to be thrown back and pinned down in the valley. Each morning before they moved out, our artillery would raise hell, firing shell after shell over the crest. It wasn’t doing a damn bit of good.

I watched from my forward position, directing the mortars, trying to figure out why artillery wasn’t doing the job. It was passing over the ridgetop and exploding on the far side. It should be catching the Japs.

Something had to be running just beyond the crest that was sheltering them, something like a gully or a trench. The Japs could lay up in there protected from our artillery, then pop out and start firing when we moved up the slope.

The difference between artillery and mortar fire, as every Marine learns in boot camp, is that mortar fire drops down at a steep angle. You can’t hide from it in a hole or a trench.

I called back to the mortars and explained to the men what I wanted.

“Register one gun to fire from right to left, the second to fire left to right, and the third to fire all along the crest of the ridge.” Sledge, Shelton, Santos, Redifer, Sarrett and the others instantly got what I had in mind.

Scotty did not.

He came on the phone from the gun pits. “You can’t do that!” he said. “We don’t have enough ammo.”

I’d had differences with Scotty before on setting up the mortars. I would be out on the line somewhere, and when I came back he would have them set up where they were subject to rifle fire from any angle. I’d have the guys move the guns to where at least they had some protection.

Then they’d have to re-dig all the foxholes. They didn’t mind, because they knew that’s where they should have set up to begin with. But nobody wanted to question Scotty’s decisions. I had been through this a couple times already on Okinawa. Now I had to do it again.

I needed twenty rounds per gun, sixty shells in all, that I could throw at that thing. I knew damn well there had to be something there. I had them covered.

Scotty and I had a pretty good powwow over the phone. I tried to explain the situation and why my plan would work, but he didn’t see it. Finally I thought, This is getting us nowhere. I called the company command post and explained what I wanted to do. “Can you spare us the ammo?” I asked.

“No problem,” they said.

Scotty was back on the line, fuming. “I
order
you not to fire,” he yelled.