Okinawa (13 page)

 

 

Even before the failure at Kakazu became known at Ninety-sixth Division headquarters, Brigadier Claudius Easley, assistant commander of the Ninety-sixth, had prepared a second much more massive assault under his personal command. This “powerhouse attack” with no attempt at surprise was to be spearheaded by four battalions of infantry—about three thousand soldiers—supported by eight battalions of 105 and 155 mm artillery, together with air strikes and bombardment from the sea led by the battleship
New York.
There would be no tanks once again, for that gorge below the ridge was still impassable.

At 7:15 A.M. on April 10 the assault began. Furious as the preliminary bombardment had been, it in no way depleted Ushijima’s troop strength. When the bombardment lifted, his men—safe and invisible within his steel-and-coral fortress—would reply with small arms, machine guns, mortars, and occasionally one of those huge 624-pound mortar shells. Once again the Ninety-sixth fought gallantly, but flesh-and-blood advancing in the open, no matter how valiantly, simply cannot overcome an unseen enemy firing from within underground fortifications of steel and coral. It was almost as though the Japanese and the Americans had exchanged battle doctrines: the defenders relying upon firepower and the invaders on spiritual power, with the inevitable consequence: The Americans were stopped. Fortunately for them, a heavy rain—the forerunner of drenching downpours soon to come—squelched the battle, or their casualties might have been greater.

It required two more days of hideous combat to convince General Easley that Kakazu was simply too formidable for the Ninety-sixth to conquer alone. On April 11 Colonel John Cassidy’s battalion of the 381st Regiment made its second attempt to seize the top of the ridge and was again driven back. That night the Japanese began bombarding the Americans pinned down in the gorge with their 320 mm spigot mortars. One of these huge projectiles, woefully inaccurate and fired so haphazardly, seemingly did strike harmlessly on the ground—but with enough force to start a landslide that buried a cave being used as an aid station, killing thirteen Americans and wounding nine.

On the morning of the twelfth, Easley ordered another attack by Cassidy’s battalion, supported by heavy air strikes. When the Ninety-sixth moved out, there fell upon them a shower of mortar shells so thick that they came down at the rate of better than sixty a minute. Forty-five men were lost, and that was the end of the Kakazu debacle of April 9-12.

 

During the failed April 9-12 assaults the only appreciable gains made by the Twenty-fourth Corps was by the veteran Seventh Infantry Division on the left or eastern flank of the Ninety-sixth. From Triangulation Hill to Ouki on Nakagusuku Bay, the Seventh drove forward one thousand yards. Ouki fell to the Thirty-second Infantry on April 11, but the Americans were promptly evicted. By the night of April 12 all of the Seventh’s formations were halted in front of Hill 178, a towering crag in roughly the center-east of Ushijima’s line, which was also a Japanese artillery observation point. Farther east the Ninety-sixth’s 382nd Regiment had been stopped cold at Tombstone Ridge, where on April 11 it went into defensive positions. Tombstone may have been every bit as tough as Kakazu, but no assault was planned until General Hodge and his division commanders could assess the situation.

Casualties in the Seventh and Ninety-sixth divisions had been 451 dead, with 241 missing and presumed dead and 2,198 wounded, for a total of 2,890. Enemy losses were estimated at 5,750—all killed—although this was almost certainly exaggerated. A truer figure more likely would be about 4,000. Most of these men were killed by bombardment, for during April 9-12 the American invaders had hurled a massive weight of metal from land, sea, and air upon the defending Japanese. The fact that Kakazu, Tombstone, and Ouki remained in enemy hands demonstrated to the American commanders that the key to success on Okinawa lay in possession of the reverse slopes of all those ridges from Kakazu to Shuri Castle. Seizing the forward slopes, though difficult, could be done—but any attempt to drive past them would bring upon the attackers that dreadful rain of enemy fire.

What was needed, it seemed to General Hodge, was even heavier bombardments—and there was not yet enough ammunition ashore. The loss of those two ammunition ships to the
kamikaze,
deemed not critical at first, was now one of the chief causes of delay. Kakazu would have to wait until enough 105 and 155 mm shells had come across the beaches to make sustained daily shelling a reality. Already, after only about nine days of battle, it had become apparent that the Okinawa campaign would depend upon supply as much as battle.

Reports of the Battle of Kakazu Ridge were received by Lieutenant General Isamu Cho (he had received another star) and Colonel Hiromichi Yahara with predictable reactions. Although neither knew the exact number of enemy fallen or even their own losses, Yahara was eminently pleased with the result. The Americans had been dealt a bloody repulse exactly as he had planned in his defense-in-depth tactics, and soon the rate of attrition among them would so whittle the Tenth Army that the Americans would cancel their offensive so that not only the homeland would be saved, but Okinawa as well.

To General Cho it appeared that the enemy had suffered grievously and was so rocked back on their heels that the time had come for a full-scale offensive of the Thirty-second Army. Since his humiliation in the earlier showdown between him and Yahara, when General Ushijima had sided with his planning chief, the fiery Cho had not ceased to press for a counter-attack. But even his friend and mentor Ushijima remained unmoved, until an order from Imperial Headquarters was received urging the Thirty-second Army to overrun Yontan and Kadena Airfields. This was probably the result of a Japanese intelligence warning that Marine Corsairs would soon arrive at these airfields in strength and would make the mission of the various
kikusui
more difficult than ever. Cho seized on this directive to persuade Ushijima on April 6 to order an attack prepared for April 8. But the ever-alert Yahara pounced upon the appearance of a 110-ship convoy offshore of the Urasoe-Mura Escarpment on April 7 as proof that the Americans were going to strike the Sixty-second Division on its flank. Alarmed, Ushijima for the second time canceled a Cho-sponsored assault.

But then both the American failure at Kakazu Ridge and the “remarkable” destruction wrought upon the enemy fleet by the first of the
kikusui
convinced Ushijima and Cho that the time to strike had indeed come. This misconception was strengthened by “a stirring telegraph order” from Naval Headquarters claiming that
Ten-Go
had been “very successful.” “There are signs of uneasiness among enemy forces and odds are seven to three in our favor.” Everyone involved in the Okinawa defense should unite in “a general pursuit operation.”

Isamu Cho, though not as rational as his rival Yahara, was at least as clever. Everywhere he seemed to see signs of enemy weakness, among them slackening aerial activity on April 10, as well as a Navy report of a reduction in the number of American ships in the Hagushi Anchorage. The calculating Yahara could have explained the first as a result of the same cloudy, rainy weather that discomfited everyone on the island—Cho included —and the second as caused by the visible stream of unloaded enemy ships sailing back to base for reloading and return. But Cho was then at his argumentative best, and over the precise but uninspiring protests of the unhappy Yahara, General Ushijima ordered a “powerful” counter-attack for the night of April 12-13.

Cho’s plan was for massive infiltration of almost the entire east-west front of the U.S. Seventh and Ninety-sixth Divisions. Three battalions of the Japanese Twenty-fourth Division would strike the Seventh on the east (or right of the American line), while three more from the Sixty-second Division would assault the battered Ninety-sixth. They would, of course, attack at night, a Japanese preference born of a desire to negate that dreaded American artillery. Breaking through the advance American units, the troops would then spread out in the rear area to a point four miles below Kadena Airfield. There they would take refuge in known caves and tombs. On the morning of April 13 they would emerge to slaughter Tenth Army’s rear-echelon troops, usually technical, headquarters, supply, and soldiers armed with nothing more lethal than a pencil. In the mêlée that would ensue, troops of both sides would be so hopelessly intermixed that the enemy would not dare to bring his artillery, air, and naval gunfire to bear. Meanwhile, other battalions remaining in place opposite the Seventh and Ninety-sixth would launch a furious attack intended to compel the Yankees to retreat, perhaps in such panic that they would be included in the general slaughter of the enemy’s rear echelon. Cho did not specify what would happen next, whether he intended actually to overrun the airfields as Imperial Headquarters had suggested, destroying installations and aircraft at will, or would be content merely with unnerving Buckner and disorganizing his two forward divisions.

With troops marching in drenching rain to their jump-off positions on April 12, Hiromichi Yahara became so apprehensive that he committed an act of insubordination so incredible that in any Western army it could not have ended otherwise than in a court-martial and dismissal—or perhaps worse. He went to Lieutenant General Takeo Fujioka, commander of the Sixty-second Division, and Lieutenant General Tatsumi Amamiya, commander of the Twenty-fourth, and actually persuaded them not to use three battalions each in the forthcoming operation, but only two. Not six, but four battalions would march to the plan of Isamu Cho.

 

 

Three flares burst over Kakazu Ridge during the early darkness of April 12. Two were red, the first signaling, “Commence artillery fire,” and the other, “We are attacking with full strength tonight”; and the third, shaped like a dragon, was for “Make all-out attack.” Almost instantly, at about 7 P.M., there fell on the Americans the heaviest Japanese artillery concentration of the war. On the sector of the battered Ninety-sixth alone about twenty-two hundred rounds exploded, while within five minutes another two hundred rocked the Seventh’s zone. Fortunately these Yankees with their painfully acquired battle savvy had dug their holes so “dry and deep” that few casualties resulted.

First to strike the Americans was the Twenty-second Infantry Regiment, which had marched for two days in pouring rain from its base on Oroku Peninsula just south of Naha. Loaded down with 110-pound packs and bags of food—an immense burden for these normally small soldiers—they had been told by their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Masaru Yoshida, to move in “a sinuous eel line,” and they did indeed feel more like fish than flesh as they lay huddled and shivering in cane fields to escape detection by enemy air. By nightfall they were already dispirited and bewildered, moving over unfamiliar terrain and with no precise plan. Instead of attacking en masse, they sought to infiltrate the Seventh Division’s sector in twos or threes or a squad or two, but got nowhere. One massed attack of about a hundred Japanese was riddled by GIs firing rifles and machine guns, killing about a third of them, wounding another third, and compelling all survivors to take refuge in a cave.

The assault on the Ninety-sixth Division’s front, however, was much heavier, better organized, and of longer duration—personally directed as it was by General Fujioka. Guileful and stealthy as always, a long column of Japanese sought to penetrate the Ninety-sixth’s position by pretending to be GIs marching openly down Highway 5 in a column of twos. Twenty of them slipped past scrutiny until the Americans, realizing that they were not friendly troops on their flank, opened fire with all weapons. Those who survived scurried for cover in caves and tombs, but fifty-eight of their comrades were left dead on the field. Two more attacks were mounted against the Ninety-sixth, but both failed with heavy loss.

General Fujioka next tried to roll up his enemy with two companies following an artillery barrage against Kakazu Ridge. A small force staged a diversion around the western flank of Kakazu West while the main body tried to overrun the draw between that point and Kakazu Ridge. First to meet them was Pfc. William Daily at the trigger of a heavy machine gun in the draw. Unable to depress his gun enough to strike the approaching enemy below him, Daily began tossing grenades. Their explosions alerted Staff Sergeant Beauford “Snuffy” Anderson, holed up in a tomb with his light mortar section. Anderson left the tomb to hurl all of his grenades at the Japanese, and then emptied his carbine. Glancing about him, his eye fell on a dud enemy mortar. Seizing it he spiraled it football-style into the draw and was rewarded by an explosion and screams. Rushing back into the tomb he collected his own mortars, wrenched them from their casings, yanked out the safety pins, slamming the shell against a rock to release the setback pin, and spiraled this heavier and more lethal “football” into the draw. Again an explosion and screams ... With this impromptu “passing attack,” Anderson sent all of his fifteen lethal footballs spinning into the darkness below, and by this effective exercise in Yankee battle ingenuity he stopped an entire enemy platoon. In the morning he counted twenty-five enemy bodies, plus seven abandoned knee mortars and four machine guns. For his bravery and quickness of thought, Anderson received the Medal of Honor.

Other Japanese who had infiltrated Kakazu West met the same end. When an enemy officer approached a BAR man and asked him if he were Japanese, the GI snorted, “No!”—and shot him dead, along with ten of his men following in single file. Soldiers of a company command post under attack in a tomb sallied forth to kill twenty Japanese. On the western slope of Kakazu West a single American machine gunner mowed down twenty-three more sons of Nippon.

Another enemy force nearly broke through the draw, until they were illuminated by star shells fired over the battlefield by American warships offshore, a technique developed at Peleliu and so successful that night actually could be turned into day. Silhouetted against the dark, the enemy was easily riddled and their attack broken in blood. Dawn revealed a draw covered with sprawling corpses.