Okinawa (24 page)

There was nothing left for Ushijima and Cho, save the satisfying news the next day that the American who had insulted them with a surrender offer was himself dead.

 

Simon Bolivar Buckner had come down to Mezado Ridge to see the fresh Eighth Marine Regiment enter battle. The Eighth had come to Okinawa on June 15, after seizing Admiral Turner’s radar outposts, and was attached to the First Division. As had happened in the beginning at Guadalcanal, when another regiment of the Second Division was attached to the First, so it was happening in the end at Okinawa.

Colonel Clarence Wallace sent the Eighth Marines in at Kunishi Ridge. They were to attack in columns of battalions to seize a road, to split the enemy in two, to carry out General del Valle’s plans for a decisive thrust to the sea. Lieutenant General Buckner joined Colonel Wallace on Mezado Ridge at noon. He watched the Marines for about an hour. They moved swiftly on their objective. Buckner said:

“Things are going so well here, I think I’ll move on to another unit.”

Five Japanese shells struck Mezado Ridge. They exploded and filled the air with flying coral. A shard pierced General Buckner’s chest and he died within ten minutes—knowing, at least, that his Tenth Army was winning.

Command went to Roy Geiger, senior officer and about to be promoted to lieutenant general. The grizzled white bear who had been at Guadalcanal in the beginning was leading at the end on Okinawa.

That came three days later.

On June 21 a patrol from the Sixth Marine Division reached a small mound atop a spiky coral cliff. It was the tip of Ara Point. Beneath them were the mingling waters of the Pacific Ocean and the East China Sea.

 

A few more days of skirmishing and a reverse mop-up drive to the north remained. When these were over, and the last of the
kamikaze
had been shot down, the Japanese Thirty-second Army was no more, with roughly 100,000 dead, and, surprisingly, another 10,000 captured. American casualties totaled 49,151, with Marine losses at 2,938 dead or missing and 13,708 wounded; the Army’s at 4,675 and 18,099; and the Navy’s at 4,907 and 4,824. There was little left of Japanese airpower after losses of about 3,000 planes
⁸
—about 1,900 of them
kamikaze
—against 763 for the Americans; and the sinking of
Yamato
and 15 other ships meant the end of Nippon’s Navy. Though the United States Navy had been staggered with 36 ships sunk and another 368 damaged, there were still plenty left to mount the fall invasion of Kyushu from Okinawa.

So the Great Loo Choo fell to the Americans after eighty-three days of fighting. A few hours after the Marine patrol reached Ara Point, Major General Geiger declared organized resistance to be at an end.

On the night of June 21—the day General Geiger declared the American victory on Okinawa—Ushijima and Cho realized in their headquarters under Hill 95 near the Pacific Ocean that the end had come. Soldiers of Colonel John Finn’s Thirty-second Infantry of the Seventh Division were still dropping hand grenades through a vertical air shaft from the top of the hill. The explosives had already killed or wounded ten officers. Neither Ushijima nor Cho wished to meet a similar fate at the hands of the American devils. They would take their own lives in the accepted
Samurai
ceremony.

Colonel Yahara had desired to join them in
hara-kiri,
but Ushijima had decreed that his planning officer, with his excellent memory and habit of straightforward reporting, should be the only man to attempt to escape to Tokyo with a full account of what had happened on Okinawa. Unfortunately, in his physique and bearing, Hiromichi Yahara was also the worst possible choice. No matter how he sought to disguise himself, this tall and patrician officer would stand out among the diminutive Okinawan population like a green tree in a petrified forest—and he was quickly captured. Being a
Samurai,
he had probably asked for a bayonet with which to make the act of expiation like so many other captured
Samurai
before him. If he had, he certainly would have been laughingly refused.

That night under Hill 95 Lieutenant Generals Ushijima and Cho, together with their ranking officers, consumed a farewell dinner prepared for them by the commander’s cook, Tetsuo Nakamuta. It began with bean-curd soup, and then proceeded to a bountiful repast of rice, canned meats, potatoes, fried fish cakes, fresh cabbage, and a dessert of canned pineapple.
Sake
flowed as freely as the lively conversation. At the meal’s end Isamo Cho produced from his large stock of liquors a bottle of Black and White scotch, with which he and his chief solemnly toasted each other. It was agreed that nothing should be allowed to interfere with the ritual suicide of Ushijima and Cho.

Thus, in the early morning hours just before moonrise, the officers and men of Thirty-second Army Headquarters would deliver the last Banzai of World War II: a climbing charge up Hill 95, and after that, if there were any survivors, the town of Mabuni.

At about 3 A.M. of June 22, 1945, with a glowing white moon polishing the gleaming black waters of the Pacific—and with Ushijima’s staff singing
“Umi.Yukaba”—
the members of the last Banzai began climbing the cliff.

Behind them at his desk Ushijima wrote his last message to Tokyo: “Our strategy, tactics and techniques all were used to the utmost. We fought valiantly, but it was as nothing before the material strength of the enemy.” Cho wrote: “22nd day, 6th month, 20th year of the Showa Era. I depart without regret, fear, shame or obligations. Army Chief of Staff Cho; Army Lieutenant General Cho, Isamu, age of departure 52 years. At this time and place I hereby certify the foregoing.”

Bowing to his chief, Cho said: “Well, Commanding General Ushijima, as the way may be dark, I, Cho, will lead the way.”

Returning the bow, Ushijima replied: “Please do so, I will take along my fan since it is getting warm.”

An hour later Ushijima and Cho stepped through a fissure in the cliff face overlooking the ocean.
⁹
It was about six feet high and six feet wide, opening upon a small ledge above the water. Both wore their dress uniforms, complete with medals and saber. A white quilt and a white sheet symbolizing death were laid over the ledge. Above them the moon had begun its descent.

They strolled out to the ledge, Ushijima calmly fanning himself. They bowed in reverence to the eastern sky, the customary obeisance to the emperor, and sat together on the white sheet and quilt. Only a hundred feet behind them were the approaching American soldiers. Having heard voices, they began hurling grenades, unaware that the Japanese generals were so close to them.

First Ushijima and then Cho bared their bellies to the upward thrust of the ceremonial knives in their hands. Upon the sight of blood the adjutant standing by with unsheathed saber delivered the coup de grace.

Two shouts, two saber flashes—and it was done. And the moon began sinking into an obsidian sea.

Truth trying to overtake falsehood is like the sound of an explosion seeking to catch up with the flash, and this seems to be especially true of that greatest myth of World War II: the belief that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945 compelled Japan to surrender.

There is no question that these dreadful fireballs ushering in the Age of the Mushroom Cloud had much to do with Emperor Hirohito’s decision to order his Imperial Conference to accept the Allied surrender offer. But before they were dropped—as has been suggested at the beginning of this narrative—Japan was already a defeated and demoralized nation, deeply divided between the diehards fiercely determined to continue the conflict regardless of the costs, and those timid members of the peace party who realized that the end had come but who still feared to risk the wrath of the firebrands. The atomic bombings, then, brought Hirohito to their side and encouraged them to defy the War Lords. But the fact remains that
before then,
before Okinawa, Japan was already beaten.

This was the conclusion of the most authoritative voice on the subject, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey created by President Harry Truman to assess the effects of Allied bombing in World War II. It declared: “Based on a detailed investigation of surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31st December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1st November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered, even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” No judgment could be more unequivocal. Why, then, were the bombs dropped?

Debate still rages over whether or not Japan should have been so ravaged. Harry Truman to his dying day insisted that he “never had any doubt” about the necessity of striking Nippon with atomic weapons. However, recent examination of his private papers produced a letter to his sister in which he wrote: “It was a terrible decision.” Some critics claim that Japan was chosen rather than Germany because it was an Oriental nation—ignoring the fact that the Nazis had been destroyed in May, two months before the “Fat Boy” on its tower at Alamogordo flashed upward with a light not of this world—or that the thickening mood of savage revenge that had seized the American public had to be satisfied. Apart from such emotional conclusions, it should be obvious that the atomic bomb kept Stalin out of Western Europe and forced him to walk softly in Asia. This was indeed a strategic consideration of the highest order, one that no sincere statesman could refuse to balance against the hideous loss of life and property that would ensue under the mushroom cloud; together with the certainty that American declarations of desiring peace and prosperity for all peoples would henceforth have to be read in the light of those terrible fireballs. Nevertheless, the atomic bombs did indeed keep the Soviet Union out of Western Europe and curtailed its ambitions in the Far East, even though they also presented the Soviets with a powerful psychological stick with which to beat the United States and its Free World allies.

To these considerations must be added the convictions of many high-ranking naval and air commanders—none of them members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—that Japan could be bombed, shelled, and blockaded into submission. This is probably true, but can never be proved. At best such a policy would indubitably have saved many American lives, even though it would almost certainly have caused horrible and unimaginable suffering in Japan. Because it would have taken so much longer, it would have given the insatiably land-hungry Stalin the opportunity to enter the war for a much longer period than his actual six-day contribution, and thus cloak him in the customary mane of the lion roaring for his “rightful” share of the spoils. Hiroshima, then, did save Japan from the brutal and selfish policies of her War Lords determined that the nation must die like a dutiful
Samurai.
But Nagasaki was absolutely unnecessary, coming only three days after Hiroshima and thus too close to influence any decision. Probably it was dropped to show Japan that the United States possessed more than one bomb—actually it had only two—and presumably could produce many more.

From all this speculation only two probabilities seem to emerge: one, that Japan was already beaten and would have surrendered before the monster Operation Olympic invasion began three months later; two, that Harry Truman dropped both bombs as much to frighten Stalin as to finish off Japan.

Where, then, does this leave Okinawa?

 

A corollary of the myth of the atomic bombs is the other though less widespread misconception of Okinawa as an unnecessary battle. Here is one more instance of that cart-before-the-horse thinking common to those facile minds so well described by Aristotle: “Contemplating little, they have no difficulty deciding.” The Battle for Okinawa was begun on April 1, 1945, more than 4 months before the bombing of Hiroshima and 3½ months before the first bomb was exploded at Alamogordo. The Americans wanted Okinawa for a staging area only 375 miles from Kyushu, the Japanese hoped through its
kamikaze
corps either to cripple or destroy the enemy sea power that had brought the Americans so close to Japan proper.

Because Imperial General Headquarters had not the slightest suspicion that the Americans were close to producing an atomic bomb, General Ushijima and his Thirty-second Army expected to defend Okinawa with conventional weapons, while General Buckner intended to seize the Great Loo Choo with the same instruments of war. Not until just before Hiroshima were Fleet Admiral Nimitz and General of the Armies MacArthur—the officers who would command the invasion of Japan—informed that their country now possessed atomic weapons. By then, of course, Okinawa had fallen—and when it did, it so shocked Emperor Hirohito that he could echo what Fleet Admiral Osami Nagano, his personal naval advisor, had cried when he learned of the loss of Saipan: “Hell is on us!”

Until Okinawa, Hirohito had been an accomplice of the War Lords; if not a willing one, then, in the words of MacArthur, who came to know him better than any other Westerner: “a figurehead, but not quite a stooge.” After its fall, he was ready to challenge them, and the atomic bombs gave him that opportunity.

So Okinawa was indeed decisive, for if the Japanese had won in this biggest battle of the Pacific War, the hold of the War Lords upon the nation of Nippon would have been so strengthened that even the influence of Hirohito could not have persuaded the Imperial Conference to accept the Allied surrender offer. Thus, the war would have been prolonged—hopelessly for Japan, of course—and only the production and use of more atomic bombs would have avoided that titanic clash of arms upon the Tokyo Plain.