The World at War (70 page)

MARINE SERGEANT COOKE

Iwo is volcanic, as the world knows, I'm sure. Well, with the bombardment that occurred on this particular island the entire vegetation was gone, gone completely, and you'd waken in the morning before the shooting would start and you'd look out across this expanse of no man's land and it was bubbling and seething with steam coming out of the ground. In fact we had to use cardboard from the ration packs to put down in the foxhole so that your ass wouldn't burn up when you were using the hole to protect yourself. Now my reaction was that if there's a hell I'm living through it now so I don't have to worry about going to hell any time in the future – I've been there.

CORPSMAN RABECK

The ash was almost like quicksand and in fact when I finally got hit they had to dig me out by shovelling with their hands, because it covers you that fast. It would just cover you right up and just drift in. That's the way the ash actually was – it moved, it was alive, and if you didn't move fast enough it covered you up.

MARINE SERGEANT COOKE

We had lost so many people, my CO he just came round and said, 'Cooke, you're company commander. We'll talk about commissioning you later.' So with that I accepted responsibilities I'd not had before and it started to get rough because I saw more of the picture than you could on a platoon front. From platoon front to company front you got about four or five hundred more yards, so the realisation came to me that we could have taken a licking then, a bad licking. We came very near to doing that particular thing, we found out – of course much later.

MARINE STEARN

I was on the island a total of six days and it seemed like six thousand years. I couldn't differentiate between night and day because everything kept going, the fear that was always there, the shelling that was always there, there was no place to really go back and relax a bit and then come back forward and say OK we're going back into it again. You were always in it, wherever the heck you went you were always in it.

CORPSMAN RABECK

This was about the fifth day and I was standing on board the ship completely taped up. I had practically a straightjacket on to keep me from bending because I couldn't support my torso, but I was up on top and one of the boys started to holler, 'There goes the flag,' and I don't care where you were on the island, you could see right up to Suribachi and the
flag was raised and everybody started to howl because we figured the island was secure. It was far from secure – we had a long way to go yet – but it was nice to see the flag up there anyway.

MARINE JOHN GREET

Most of the time we had to use flame-throwers to get them out, they were buried so deep. Very few of them came out on their own and when they did, usually the one in front he'd come out with his hands up and the one behind he'd come out with a grenade.

MARINE C S AXTELL

We were heavily attacked that night and some measure of the infiltration is that there were twenty dead enemy within ten yards of the colonel's foxhole. As the morning sun came up we started to pull out of our foxholes and relax a bit and one of the West Virginia boys – he was a tall gangly fellow, very dry humour – he was sitting against a stone wall with his knees up under his helmet as we used to sit quite often, when one of the enemy ran out on top of the stone wall and held a small explosive charge to his abdomen. A chunk of his torso went spiralling into the air and came down on John's knees with the absolute posterior devoid of any clothes staring him right in the face. And he looked at that and he says, 'God, have I been hit that bad?' And that was the trigger that released the tensions of the previous night and there were several of us that were perfectly useless for as much as an hour – we just lay there on the ground in convulsions.

MARINE GREET

Sometimes we got them out by coaxing, if we got one that could speak English. We found quite a few of them over there and they'd lead the rest of them out. But they were very sceptical, they'd got the idea that we were going to torture them, like they did to our boys I guess. We saw some pretty terrible sights over there.

MARINE SLATTERY

One thing we found out about the Japanese throughout the war was something that couldn't be written about during the war, which was that once a man had surrendered he had sort of written himself off. If you see what I mean, he was disgraced anyway so he was likely to tell you everything he knew. It was quite unlike interrogating prisoners in any other war that I ever heard of.

MARINE RICHARD COLEMAN

I was always taught to hate them, to detest them, that they were the animals and we were the men. By the same token we were taught that they would die for the Emperor and we weren't taught to die for our President. To come up against an individual who wants to die, or who doesn't care about dying, is a tough thing to combat in your mind. We wanted to live, we wanted to kill him and survive.

OKINAWA
APRIL–JUNE 1945

LIEUTENANT COMMANDER DONALD GARY

Fleet carrier USS
Franklin,
19 March 1945

By the time I got back to my battle station and then further aft the lights were dimming and smoke was pouring through the ventilation system, and everyone it seemed was going toward a given compartment that had a light and it's like moths where they go to the light – you were groping in the dark so you go where the light is, and that's what I did and that's what about two hundred and eighty-five other fellows did. There we found ourselves reasonably smoke free but with only one little cup of ventilation through the skin of the ship. So there we were, all of us afraid and just stood by while the terrific explosions from the topside just rocked the ship. There were explosions from the seventy-two other planes on deck and they were blowing up. It was our own bombs that at that time made us more afraid of what the eventual outcome was going to be. We were trapped for about an hour and a half and during that time the list on the ship grew greater and all in all everyone was just waiting to die, it was that bad. But suddenly something stirred in my mind and I knew a way out. I stood up and declared myself, told them I knew a way out and if I could get there I'd get back for the rest of them. Five times 1 went back, I got them all out too.
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CAPTAIN NAKAJIMA

At the beginning we were able to select from the large number of people who volunteered. But as the war situation deteriorated and when the attack planes had to take off from Japan proper, when Japan itself was under threat of attack, we needed a large number of Special Attack Force pilots. And then it could be that not all of them were volunteers but may have included those who did not actually desire to volunteer and those who were sort of dragged in by their comrades and persuaded to volunteer.

LIEUTENANT MANSON

When the five-inch guns opened the plane is out about maybe five or six miles, that's when you see the big puffs, and then when the forties open you see smaller puffs and they're getting within maybe one mile or two miles and then when the twenties open they're less than a mile and you know there's an explosion imminent and you just hope it's not against your ship. But you really don't know because you can't tell what the pilot's going to do at the last minute, whether he's going to veer off, what his judgement is going to be like, whether he's going to try to hit the water-line, whether he's going to try to hit the bridge, or whether he's going to hit your ship or one close by. But it's a human bomb, that's what it is, and it's got a man's brain in it.

CAPTAIN NAKAJIMA

When the Special Attack pilots' cause was set up and if time was available then we did have special ceremonies. But, in general, the feeling was that it was natural for these pilots to take off and attack the enemy and there was no special, no important ceremony put on.

LIEUTENANT MANSON

USS
Laffey,
16 April 1945

The first four planes we were able to shoot down but I believe it was the fifth plane that hit us coming in from the stern, and once they'd hit us and made a ball of fire and a lot of smoke, why of course they had something to aim at from up there and from that point forward we had a holocaust on that destroyer, fire and explosions and shrapnel. This attack went on for seventy to ninety minutes and was the most sustained and continuous attack against a single ship of World War Two. There were twenty-six planes that made suicide attacks against our ship and seven of the planes were shot down by our gunners and fifteen managed to miss the ship and we were actually hit, direct hit, by four. We had two that grazed the ship and did some damage but there were four that plunged right into the after part of the ship.
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MOMOKO YONAHA

Okinawan girl conscripted, into medical service with the Japanese Army

It was at dawn on 19th June that I finally reached the Yamashiro mountain. I hid in the mountain all day but from the air the American bombers kept bombing us and we were also subjected to strafing attacks and also heavy bombardment from the warships lying offshore. Many who were beside me died. I somehow survived and when night came I was afraid to stay any longer in the mountain and I walked down towards the coast. I was walking along the beach and met other people until finally nine of us formed a group. All around us the soldiers and the inhabitants were running helter-skelter, here and there, obviously confused. We got into a small air-raid shelter more to get out of the rain than anything; we found four soldiers who had taken shelter there. From the beach we could hear the US Army calling on us through loudspeakers, they kept shouting, 'Come out, come out.' Whoever it was spoke a very beautiful Japanese. They were telling us, 'We will not inflict any harm on women and children and old people, so please come out,' but we had always been taught that we cannot ever become prisoners of war so we did not lend our ears to the invitations. I had already decided to the and one of the soldiers had a hand grenade and he said, 'Let's all commit suicide,' and we all agreed. And once we had made that decision I felt a great relief and calmness came over me. Just while I was waiting for the soldier to pull the pin, suddenly one of the soldiers took out a sword and started waving it around. 'You women and children get out,' he said, 'you shouldn't die here.' We were quite taken aback by this, by the sudden, loud shouting, so we stood up and stepped backward. Of course the air-raid shelter in which we were hiding was very small so one step back and we were outside. We looked up and there we saw a US soldier pointing a pistol to us, gesturing with his pistol to come out. This is how I managed to survive.

MARINE COTTON

I hear crying and there's a dead Japanese woman with a baby with sores all over him and so I give him some water and some K-rations and wanted to take care of the baby, and at about that time I see a head pop up out of the ground and I see it's a woman and child and they're down this cave. Well, I'm not too happy about crawling down into a cave where there's probably a huge complex of them. At that time a tank comes round and sees that I've got a cave and I'm trying to have this Japanese talk these people out of there. Anyway, these people don't want to come up and the tank wants to throw a round down there and all. With women and children down there, there's no reason to do this and if there are some soldiers down there let Military Police or what's coming behind take care of them. There was four of us and I don't recall whether it was five or six prisoners we'd got. They were down to their loin-cloths, they just wanted to be taken prisoner. Fortunately the word was out to try to show kindness and so we gave them all our water and whatever we could. There must have been a thousand eyes watching us, because when they seen this here comes soldiers piling out of every nook and cranny, and the next thing you know there's four of us and we have hundreds of prisoners. And a few of them, thinking about their honour, start using the grenades on themselves, just committing suicide.

ROBERT SHERROD

It was right at the end of the battle. These were people who had been indoctrinated with the fear that they would be killed or tortured by Americans and so they chose suicide – jumping off these high cliffs at the southern end of the island. I don't know if anybody tried to count them but there were hundreds of them because of the bodies we found days afterwards around the island. These bodies marching along in the water, it was a horrible sight to see. It was the great crowning horror of all the sights, something we never believed could happen even though we'd seen suicide attacks before. But the useless destruction of babies and children – some people threw their children over the cliff and then jumped after them – was something that was horrid for the Western mind to comprehend.

LIEUTENANT MANSON

There were a number of individual experiences aboard ship that you can't get out of your mind, and you remember them every time you think about the kamikaze days. One man, he was in a forty-millimetre mount and he had been fighting against quite a number of planes that had come in, but we had been hit in his area also two or three times, and all of a sudden, with nobody understanding why, he just yelled out, 'It's hot today' and jumped over the side, and that's the last we saw of him. Had he stayed on board he might have survived but of course we couldn't find his body or anything after that. But it was an unusual type of reaction. He stayed with it just as long as he could until he broke, and then that was the end of his fighting. Every man has his breaking point and the kamikaze, I would estimate, probably tests that breaking point more than any other form of combat.

CHAPTER 28
RETURN TO BURMA