Islands of the Damned (26 page)

Most of the time we were going out on patrol, sealing caves and trying to find pockets of Jap stragglers. The Japs had been squeezed into an area maybe three miles long by four miles wide, their backs were to the coastline. There was no place else to go.

We’d been warned not to go into the caves, but I got curious. I put a Sterno can on the end of a stick, like a candle, and felt my way down into one cave we had come across. You couldn’t see three feet in front of you. Some distance inside I came upon a cot. I put my hand down to feel it and it was still warm.

I stopped, listening. Somewhere close by I could hear a clock ticking. I thought, Burgin, get the hell out of here. When you’re in a cave looking out, you can see anything between you and the opening as plain as day. But if you’re looking in, you can’t see a thing, even holding a little Sterno candle in front of you. So I started backing out very slowly. Thank God, I didn’t get killed. When I got outside, I called the demolition people, and they sealed up the whole thing with a satchel charge.

I’m sure to this day there was a Jap inside there, because that cot was warm. Why didn’t he shoot me? Maybe he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Maybe he thought he could sneak out at night and do more damage than by just killing one Marine. I don’t know. He sure as hell had the opportunity.

I swore then and there that I’d never go into another cave.

There were caves everywhere, most of them full of Japs. The First and Seventh Marines had fought their way to the top of the last ridge before the coast, Kunishi Ridge. But the Japs were inside, fighting from caves, and the men on top were cut off from supplies and reinforcements. We knew both regiments were suffering heavy losses. On June 14 we were ordered to square away our equipment and get ready to move south the next morning. None of us was very happy about this development, but it was the only way.

Along with tanks and amtracs, we moved out single file on both sides of a dusty road. The noise of the battle grew louder and we saw more and more ambulance jeeps headed north full of wounded Marines, not a good sign. We came to a broad, open area of rice paddies with a long, steep ridge rising up beyond. For those of us who had fought on Peleliu, it reminded us of Bloody Nose Ridge, where we’d been exposed to such devastating fire from above.

We dug in for the night alongside the road and the next morning started toward a hill a mile or so to our left. We were moving along in a column when I heard the
snap
of a Jap rifle and felt a bullet pass by my ear. It was so close I could literally feel the heat. I didn’t stop, I didn’t pause, I didn’t even duck. I just kept walking at the same pace, thinking, Those sons of bitches are still trying to kill me.

Somebody else back in the line might have seen the shooter and picked him off. Maybe he didn’t fire again. I don’t know. By then I think I was pretty much running on automatic pilot.

We knew Kunishi Ridge would be our last big fight. Mostly it was a rifleman’s fight, up the slope cave by cave and sniper by sniper. The Japs fired back with everything they had. Corpsmen started bringing our wounded down almost immediately. Because our men were working their way up the ridge, we couldn’t risk mortar fire, so the section was posted at the bottom to watch for infiltrators who might try to work their way around and come in from the east. When needed, we acted as stretcher bearers.

The worst of it was June 18. A sniper shot Tex Cummings, one of the two ammo carriers I’d picked up for the squad on Pavuvu. The bullet hit him in the back and passed clean through, collapsing his lung. We called in an amtrac and loaded him on board as quick as we could. Then a grenade from a knee mortar went off beside Harry Bender, our BAR man. We carried him out with fragments in both legs, his back and his head. That same day we got word that Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of the entire invasion, had been killed by a Jap artillery shell while he was observing the Eighth Marines on the far west end of the line. Buckner was the son of a Confederate general and the highest ranking U.S. military officer killed during World War II. One of our own, Lieutenant General Roy Geiger, took over the Tenth Army. Geiger had been with us on Peleliu. It was the first time ever that a Marine general was placed in command of a standing army.

In the two days of fighting on Kunishi Ridge, K Company lost thirty-three men, five of them killed. Every casualty now was a painful reminder that even though the Japs were down to their last caves and the battle for Okinawa was almost over, any one of us could still go home wounded or crippled for life, or in a coffin. We were all thinking the same thing: If Okinawa was this bad, how bloody was it going to be fighting the Japs on their home ground? We knew we would soon have that to face.

Late on June 18, the Eighth Marines relieved us and we came off the ridge. The Eighth had fought on Tarawa and Saipan, and looked fit and fresh. As we moved off south along the road, Jap artillery was still raining down on our tanks and amtracs, and occasionally knocking one out. But more and more their fire came from isolated positions. By the afternoon of June 20 we could finally look out over the sea. Whatever Japs were left by now were dug in behind us. It was only a matter of rooting them out of their hiding places. And they still prowled by night. Some of them got through our lines and we could see them wading out in the surf, where they made excellent targets.

The next day, whoever made such decisions declared Okinawa officially secured. Our mail caught up with us and with it was a packet of letters from Florence. She hadn’t heard from me since I had been wounded, and she was worried. I sat down to reassure her right away.

I told her I was out of the hospital, feeling “fine and dandy.”

“Guess what, Darling? The Navy just gave us an orange and four eggs apiece. Boy do they look good after looking at C rations ever since April the first.”

Then I got down to what had been on my mind.

“I wish that we would have got married when I was there, and now you would be going to the States this month. . . . Why didn’t you drag me to the altar when I was there and marry me? Darling, I sure hope it won’t be long until you can come to me & the war is over so we can cuddle in a little home of our own.”

I was pretty sure that I would soon be heading home. Florence had been working on her end at getting all the papers she would need to move to the States. I would soon start filling out the necessary paperwork on my end. I promised to cable her as soon as I had any news.

We were sent out on burial details, shoveling dirt over enemy dead, and gathering up spent brass from the battlefield. We went hunting for Japs still holed up in caves and large Okinawan family tombs. A few of them were even surrendering, which was something we’d never seen before. I watched one small group creep out of a cave, no more than three or four of them. They were wearing only their jock straps, and one was carrying a white flag.

When they wouldn’t surrender, we’d call up flamethrower tanks or have the demolition men blast the entrance shut. Many of their officers, we heard, committed ritual suicide. On the morning of June 22 after an all-night banquet with their staff, the Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, and his aide, Major General Isamu Cho, killed themselves on a ledge overlooking the ocean. They had ordered their soldiers to carry on the fight to the last man, which for some of our troops meant at least another month of fighting. But the Fifth Marines were to be sent north, out of the battle at last.

We needed a rest. We’d been on Okinawa now for three months, in combat continuously for two months. Everybody’s nerves were shot. Everybody was on edge.

They had set up a mess hall in a tent. You stood up to eat, at tables that were about four feet high. One day we were having soup for lunch. Private First Class David Burton Augustus Salsby was standing straight across from me. The table wasn’t that wide, maybe two feet.

Salsby was from Idaho, a little guy about five feet four, and he had that Little Man Syndrome. He’d been wounded and returned to duty, and he was cocky. He thought no harm could come to him. He was also tough. He could do anything anyone else could do.

Each time he raised his spoon to his mouth he’d slurp. Real loud.
Slurp! Slurp!

“Salsby, don’t do that,” I finally said. “That just rakes my nerves over when you do that.”

He looked up at me.

“Burgin, you can tell me what to do when we’re on duty. But whenever I’m off duty I’ll do as I damn please.”

I reached across and grabbed his lapels and lifted him right off the floor and pulled him up close to my face.

“You little son of a bitch! If you do that one more time I’ll knock your damn teeth out. Do we understand each other?”

I set him down. He didn’t slurp anymore. It shows the frame of mind we were all in by then.

Okinawa had one more little surprise for us, before we headed north.

I was sitting there when something caused me to look up. I saw the ground rolling toward me like an ocean wave. The wave just lifted me and then went on by and that was that. While it was happening the strangest feeling came over me. Like nothing in the world was steady or solid. It was over with that quick, but I’ll never forget that feeling. We had had a little earthquake, the first I’d ever experienced.

The trucks picked us up early in July and we rode north through a landscape that we could hardly recognize. The Seabees and construction crews were at work everywhere. Roads were being surfaced with crushed coral, huge stockpiles of supplies were being built up. Planes were flying in and out of the airfields constantly. Okinawa was being transformed into a base for the invasion of Japan.

The enlisted men settled into a camp on Motubu, a large peninsula just north of the beaches where we had landed on April 1. NCOs were driven farther north almost to the tip of the island, where a camp was already set up. Tents were in place, roads surfaced. A short runway for the spotter planes ran through the center of the camp.

It’s a funny thing, but I don’t remember much about that camp. I can’t remember where the chow hall was, where the heads were. The two most important places in camp. I can remember where the doctor’s office was. But there’s just so many things that I can’t recall. I guess I was just wiped out by then. I think from thirty months of combat, from losing men from my platoon, guys that I had known since Melbourne, guys that were gone. Hillbilly Jones, Captain Haldane, and the others. I was pretty stressed out, no doubt. Just flat numb.

I slept with Florence’s picture under my pillow, and thought of the days when we would have a home of our own, and children to call us Mother and Dad. I was sure I had accumulated enough points to be rotated back to the States. The problem was, Florence was in Melbourne. Our plans were to make a home together in Texas, and I was trying to work it out. Thousands of American servicemen had married Australians. When travel was possible again, wives with children would get first priority to go to the States. After that would come wives without children. Only after they’d been accommodated would fiancées be allowed to travel.

“I just talked to my company commander about the papers,” I wrote her in mid-July, “and he is going to see about them in the morning. I hope I can get them fixed up before I go home. Oh how I hope & pray I can. I want to have your name on the list, knowing it won’t be too long before you can come home to me forever, Darling, & I do mean forever.”

Some of the guys were being married by proxy, and Florence and I had talked about it in our letters. But when it came down to it, I didn’t want to get married that way. I wanted a real wedding in a church and a real life again.

We hadn’t seen each other in almost two years. I could tell from her letters she was as anxious as I was. And she still worried about my wound.

“Really, Darling, it didn’t hurt me,” I wrote her. “I hardly have a scar to show for it. I have been hurt a lot worse in a football game, and never stopped playing.”

I have no memory of hearing about the atomic bomb. I guess I heard about it on Armed Forces Radio. Of course, I didn’t know what an atomic bomb was, so it didn’t mean a whole lot to me. They said it did terrible damage, but that’s about all we knew. A week or so later we got word that the Japs had surrendered. It was over, and that was a good feeling. We knew we’d be going home, though we didn’t know when. But there wasn’t a lot of hooting and hollering, no big celebration. The folks back in the States probably celebrated more than we did.

I did see one Marine celebrate. The day the war ended or the next, a Corsair came buzzing down our little runway, upside down all the way. The pilot could have opened his canopy, stuck out his hand and dragged his fingers along the ground. That’s how low he was. I just knew he was going to crash, but he flew on down the runway, pointed the nose of that Corsair up and flew straight up into the air. Then he turned around, did a nosedive, flipped that plane over again and made the trip back down the runway in the opposite direction, upside down all the way again. He pulled up and ended with several rolls, then flew off.