The Twilight Warriors (37 page)

Lt. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, commander of the IJA 32nd Army, believed that if he prolonged the battle for Okinawa, Japan might still be spared. (
CHIRAN KAMIKAZE PEACE MUSEUM
)

24
A RIDGE CALLED KAKAZU

HAGUSHI ANCHORAGE, OKINAWA
APRIL 7, 1945

T
he honeymoon was over.

To Lt. Gen. Simon Buckner, the report came as no surprise. It was the news he’d been expecting since Love Day. He no longer had to wonder where the Japanese were. His Tenth Army had found them, and they were putting up a hell of a fight.

In the south of the island, XXIV Corps had slammed into the enemy line drawn across the narrow isthmus leading to the southern peninsula of Chinen. The heavily fortified line was protected by pillboxes with steel doors impervious to the new weapon introduced at Iwo Jima, flamethrowers.

Meanwhile in the north, the 6th Marine Division had moved so fast up the isthmus that their supporting artillery had trouble keeping up. Eight days after the Love Day amphibious landings, Marines were standing on the rocky outcropping of Hedo Misaki, the northern tip of Okinawa. Their last objective was Motobu Peninsula, a knob-shaped protuberance on the northwest coast of Okinawa where the Japanese had constructed a fortified line of defense.

Though Buckner still kept his command post aboard Turner’s flagship
Eldorado
, he spent most of each day ashore conferring with his commanders, Marine major general Roy Geiger and Army major general John Hodge. The
Eldorado
still afforded the best communications with Spruance and Mitscher, as well as with the units driving in opposite directions on the island.

What
did
surprise Buckner and his division commanders was the Japanese artillery. Effective artillery support had been an Achilles’ heel of the Japanese army during most of the previous island battles.
Here at Okinawa, the Japanese 32nd Army had the heaviest concentration of field guns of any battle in the Pacific war, and it was clear that they had learned how to use them. A steady barrage of shells was descending on the U.S. XXIV Corps as they approached the high ground near Shuri. In a single twenty-four-hour session, fourteen thousand Japanese shells rained down on the Americans.

Though casualties were light, the barrage had the effect of halting the U.S. advance. The Japanese guns were well enough concealed that even the big shipboard batteries offshore hadn’t been able to silence them.

The soldiers and Marines in the front line were finding Okinawa to be a strange and disconcerting battleground. No other island battle had been fought in the presence of so many civilians. Most of the population was crammed into the south, and their villages were now combat zones. Most young Okinawan men had been conscripted into the local Japanese defense force. The remaining elders, women, and children were terrified of the Americans, having been told by the Japanese that the invaders would murder and rape.

Wary GIs, for their part, were unsure whether the Okinawans were hostile or not. Mistakes were made, and tragedies happened with numbing suddenness. Civilians were mowed down in deadly cross fire. Mortar shells were lobbed onto huts and other dwellings occupied by natives. Soldiers hurled grenades into caves and tunnels only to find inside the shattered bodies of women and children.

One of the men slogging across the island was war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Pyle had spent the first two days of the invasion with the headquarters of a Marine regiment, then joined an infantry company, moving with the grunts into the shattered countryside of Okinawa.

This was where Pyle was most comfortable, in the company of the foot soldiers, young GIs from the heartland of America with whom he shared foxholes, rations, and the danger of combat.
When they called him “sir” or “Mr. Pyle,” he corrected them: the name was Ernie.

Pyle listened to their stories and wrote about what happened to them. “
I was back again at the kind of life I had known so long,” he wrote in a dispatch. “It was the old familiar pattern, unchanged by distance or time … a pattern so imbedded in my soul that it seemed I’d never known anything else in my life.”

L
t. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima peered through his field glasses at the oncoming Americans. From Ushijima’s observation point at Shuri Castle, the enemy looked like ants, moving in long columns, pausing every few hundred yards to reconnoiter and await their support vehicles.

Ushijima’s staff had come up with a battle slogan to bolster the spirits of the Japanese 32nd Army at Okinawa:

For sure, the Americans would be protected by tanks. The trick was to separate the troops from their tanks, first with artillery, then at close range with special teams of tank-killers who would throw satchel charges and bundles of flaming rags beneath the armored vehicles. As tank crewmen tried to escape their burning vehicles, they would be shot or bayoneted. Without the covering fire of the tanks, the troops assaulting the slopes would be exposed and annihilated.

Ushijima knew that his garrison ultimately could not prevail over the Americans, but he didn’t intend to waste the lives of his soldiers for nothing. He counseled his soldiers, “Do your utmost. The victory of the century lies in this battle.”

In preparation for the massive bombardment that was surely coming, Ushijima had ordered the construction of a labyrinth of
tunnels and underground spaces, some large enough to contain an entire company of infantry. For his own headquarters, a 150-foot-long tunnel was burrowed beneath Shuri Castle. This subterranean network allowed Ushijima to move troops where they were most urgently needed, and it afforded protection from the incessant pounding of ship and field gunfire.

The approaches to the hills were seeded with land mines and tank traps. At the foot of the slopes were trenches for machine gunners and mortar batteries. Further up were heavier machine gun nests, and on the reverse slopes more mortars and light artillery. Spotters were positioned on the high ground to call in artillery fire from Ushijima’s big guns to the south of the lines.

At least that was the plan. Not until April 9 would Ushijima’s plan be put to a test. That was the day the U.S. 96th Infantry Division arrived at a 1,000-yard-long outcropping on the western flank called Kakazu Ridge.

C
ol. Ed May, commander of the 383rd Regiment, studied the features of the pocked terrain 1,200 yards away. Kakazu Ridge didn’t look all that formidable. It rose only about 300 feet and wasn’t particularly steep. May’s regiment was part of the 96th Division, which had just come to a grinding halt against the Japanese line. Taking the ridge would put the division in position to assault the more formidable objective, the Urasoe-Mura escarpment, about a thousand yards further south of Kakazu.

It looked to May as if he could take it with no more than four rifle companies. He’d keep two more in reserve and back them up with another full battalion. The only obstacle would be the deep gorge that ran the full length of the base of the ridge. The gorge was a natural tank trap, filled with trees and brush, which meant that May’s troops would make the assault without covering armor.

Still not a problem, May concluded. Attacking before first light, they’d have the advantage of surprise, particularly if they went without preliminary artillery bombardment or air strikes. It
would be a classic frontal assault, quick and efficient. May wasn’t worried.

He should have been. Even through the lenses of his high-resolution binoculars, May wasn’t seeing the true picture. What neither he nor the XXIV Corps commander, Maj. Gen. John Hodge, realized was that Kakazu Ridge and the adjoining hill, called Kakazu West, were honeycombed with tunnels and fortifications. An intricate network of overlapping mortar and artillery was buried in concrete-fortified positions, all part of the extensive underground defenses the 32nd Army commander, Lt. Gen. Ushijima, had ordered to be constructed weeks before the invasion. The reverse slopes of Kakazu Ridge were festooned with gun emplacements and tunnels that concealed the battle-toughened Japanese 13th Independent Infantry Battalion.

But Ed May was an optimistic—and ambitious—soldier. With the American advance halted against the Japanese line, May and his regiment would be the first to crack a key sector in the line. It was an opportunity he couldn’t resist.

May launched the assault before dawn on April 9. Still in darkness, two rifle companies stormed up the slope of Kakazu Ridge, and two more ascended Kakazu West. Their only opposition was a few sentries, who were quickly bayoneted. As the first light of dawn hit the slope, May’s troops were on both crests.

There was no time to celebrate. Almost immediately the length of the ridge erupted in a thunderous artillery barrage. A wave of Japanese soldiers emerged from tunnels and spider holes, charging directly through their own artillery fire. The newly arrived Americans found themselves in desperate hand-to-hand combat. Falling back to pockets, saddlebacks, and gullies, they tried to fight off the Japanese. Reinforcements headed up the hill but were pinned down by enfilading Japanese fire. Company commanders radioed urgent requests for covering fire so they could withdraw.

Colonel May wasn’t ready to give up the high ground he had just won. Worried that he’d lose more men in a withdrawal, he
gave the order to “hold the ridge at all costs.” The fight dragged on into the afternoon. One by one, May’s company officers were killed or wounded. Finally, beneath an artillery barrage and the smoke from a chemical-mortar battery, the battered soldiers made an agonizing retreat from Kakazu Ridge.

It was during the withdrawal that a twenty-three-year-old private first class named Ed Moskala earned the regiment’s first Medal of Honor—posthumously. Moskala wiped out two enemy machine gun nests on the crest of the ridge. Fighting a rearguard action while his unit withdrew, the young soldier mowed down two dozen Japanese attackers. He returned to the crest of the ridge to drag wounded men back, then went back for more. On his second trip, he was cut down by machine gun fire.

The failed mission cost the 383rd Regiment 326 casualties. The next day, April 10, the unit was joined by the 381st Regiment in another assault on the ridge. This attack was preceded by heavy air strikes, an artillery barrage, and a bombardment by the heavy guns of the battleship
New York
.

None of it dislodged the Japanese. From the reverse slope of Kakazu Ridge, mortar shells continued to rain down on the advancing Americans, sometimes at the rate of one a second. The American commanders were perplexed. None had ever before seen the Japanese employ mortar and artillery with such deadly accuracy. The bitter battle lasted all that day and into the next until, once again, the bloodied American troops were forced to withdraw.

It was the same story up and down the line. The 96th Division was stalemated on the western end of Kakazu Ridge, and the Army 7th Division was making no better progress to the east. The Japanese defensive positions seemed impregnable to the heaviest naval bombardment or to the bombs and rockets of the close air support aircraft from the carriers.