The Final Storm (25 page)

There had been no more from the Japanese since the Marines were killed, since the sun had risen completely. The Marines had poured out their own anger in a storm of fire from the M-1s and BARs, a machine gun battery moving up as well, a half-dozen thirty calibers peppering anyplace where the Japanese might be. No one knew if there had been any effect from that, but the firing had released the anger, and when word came quickly that the Shermans were coming, the men had responded with cheers.

A gust of wind took the exhaust smoke away, and Adams could see the ground in front of them clearly now, the pine trees and low squat palms. One of the Shermans erupted in machine gun fire, blasting a cluster of palms. The men on foot gathered closer, no one sure what to do, no targets. The Sherman closest to Adams suddenly accelerated, the turret shifting to one side, its cannon cutting loose. The explosion burst into a clump of short trees, fire, smoke, and then three more tanks began to fire, ripping away at the strand of woods. The Marines were being left back, and no one ran to keep up, the tanks suddenly taking full command, turning, maneuvering, one crushing right through the palms, more machine gun fire, all of it from the Shermans.

Adams felt a hand on his shoulder, startled, turned, saw Ferucci, pointing back. He saw now, behind them, a row of amphtracs moving up, the vehicles that had carried some of them in from the ships. Now they were rolling on land, each one equipped with a heavy machine gun, a fifty caliber, the crews inside protected by the steel bulkheads. The first amphtrac rolled by, men looking out at the Marines, fists pumping the air, any cheers silenced by the belching roars of the engines. The amphibious machines moved up closer to the tanks, and around him the Marines were called forward as well, the lieutenants continuing the advance. But the M-1s were silent. The larger machines were doing the work. The battle seemed to spread out farther, the tanks fanning outward. Around him the Marines continued their advance through the trees, wood and grass fires boiling up around them, the stink of explosives, and beyond, the tree lines
gave way to upsloping ground, the larger hills. But the tree line had been cleared and the tanks stopped their advance, curled around, came together in a formation, keeping a safe distance between them, poised in a soft chugging of their engines, the amphtracs doing the same. Adams saw Porter waving him forward, heard pops of rifle fire, men shooting straight down into holes in the ground. He searched frantically, the words etched into his brain, the lieutenant’s description, spider holes. Close to one side an amphtrac had halted, lowered the wide steel door, six men pouring out, keeping together in pairs. Adams saw the fat tanks on the men’s backs, the strange weapon they carried, like a thin rifle, but it was no rifle at all. It was a flamethrower.

T
he battle had been brief and mostly one-sided. The Marines had found targets, but not many, and the work had been done mostly by the tankers and the flamethrowers, few Japanese soldiers willing to come up to the surface to fight on terms the fresher recruits had expected. For many there was little to do but wait and pick out targets as they emerged from the caves. Some came out as prisoners, but not many. The Japanese who emerged with their weapons did not live long enough to aim them, some holding grenades they never had a chance to throw. But those had been few as well. There was no way to know how many of the enemy were in the ground around them, and how many might still be alive. But Adams had watched with horrified fascination as the liquid flames shot deep into the small cavelike tunnels, and the one-man spider holes were either empty or held the body of a Japanese soldier too stubborn to run away.

With the fight drawing to a close, the artillery batteries had been brought closer, the distant hills now splattered in a cascade of fire, aided by the good work of the dive-bombers from the carriers offshore. The Marines were pulled back, Captain Bennett’s company regrouping on the flat ground above the beach, ground that was too familiar. To everyone’s relief, the bodies of the four Marines had been removed, and one of the foxholes had been filled in, marked by a trail of stained brown dirt that Adams had to guess was all that remained of the girl. Before the darkness came again, there were more officers, jeeps and amphtracs, command posts set up, aid stations for those few who had been wounded in the attack on the Japanese positions. As the men settled back into their makeshift encampment, there had been a shocking surprise, which not even the officers expected. Along
the beaches, small patrol boats moved in close, some of the Marines not even noticing them until the voices came, broadcast on loudspeakers. The men who worked at their foxholes were brought to a halt, no sergeants griping, no orders from the lieutenants. The loudspeakers carried a message, a solemn announcement that no one could ignore. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died.

Like most of those around him, Adams knew little of the man beyond what he had heard on the radio, or what the newsreels showed, a president who was more like a kindly grandfather than their commander in chief. After Pearl Harbor, it had been Roosevelt’s words that inspired Adams to join the Marines, inspiration shared by hundreds of thousands of young men across the country, including many of those who shared the foxholes above the beach. The announcement threw a strange cloud over the men, some of them reacting by not reacting at all, others invigorated to work harder, to dig the foxhole deeper, better. Some just sat and cried, as though they had truly lost a member of their family. No one interrupted that, there was no teasing, no embarrassment to anyone who had grown up knowing no other name who meant so much to the nation. After a time the emotions passed, replaced by a silent gloom, and there were few conversations, almost no one thinking about the new man in charge, most not even knowing that his name was
Truman
. With the fading daylight the Marines climbed down into their holes, awaiting the darkness again, staring at shadows, keeping watch against the infiltrators, fighting the panic and the nightmares that rolled through them all night long.

And the next night, they would do it all again.

F
or the next several days, the fights rolled northward, the Japanese making their stands in a way that only invited defeat. Rather than attack the Americans with guile and sound tactics, the Japanese mostly held their ground, and were overwhelmed by the crushing superiority of the Marine tanks, artillery, and naval aircraft. Each night the infiltrators would come, small-scale strikes against the dug-in Marines, rattling the nerves and trigger fingers of the men who were suffering mostly from heat and the lack of sleep. But the Japanese seemed content to wage a piecemeal war, rather than the massed horror of the banzai assaults, the chaotic slaughter that so many of the veterans had seen before.

As the Japanese withdrew or were crushed by sheer strength of arms, the Marines continued to exceed their own timetables, pushing toward the northern tip of Okinawa far ahead of schedule. To the Marine commanders, who had feared the kind of casualty counts that had come on Iwo Jima, the lack of a stout Japanese effort was welcome.

On the Motobu Peninsula the job for the Fourth and Twenty-ninth Marine regiments had been costly. The enemy had seemed far more willing to offer a sharp struggle on a piece of land that was subject to ongoing bombardments from air and sea, as well as the relentless push by the Marines. The casualty counts had been somewhat severe, but by April 20 the peninsula was declared secure. The combat units who had taken punishment
were allowed some rest and refitting, while the remainder of the Sixth Division and the bulk of the First continued driving north. Up the spine of the island, the Marines did their job, made a relentless push into whatever enemy they could find, or whatever resistance was thrown up in their paths.

Despite ongoing mop-up operations, the success in securing the Motobu Peninsula allowed General Buckner an opportunity to crow about a victory, and so crow he did. But the news that reached Nimitz was not all good. To the south the first two army divisions had been bolstered by their reserves, but all three were becoming bogged down against a far stronger Japanese effort. Though no one in the American command had been able to predict exactly what the Japanese strategy would be, it was increasingly apparent that General Ushijima had positioned his greatest defensive strength in the south, along the line that ran from Shuri Castle westward to the Okinawan coast. General Buckner painted an optimistic portrait, but Nimitz was hearing something very different from the naval commanders, particularly Admiral Turner, whose ships were bearing the brunt of the increasingly destructive kamikaze attacks. With the army’s casualties mounting on land, and Turner’s sailors beginning to absorb a horrifying pounding offshore, Nimitz could no longer accept Buckner’s assurances that everything was going according to Buckner’s planning. With obvious friction growing between army and navy commanders, Nimitz knew the time had come to see the situation for himself. He would go to Okinawa.

T
he kamikaze attacks had come continuously, though some were small in scale, sometimes a single aircraft. But it had become clear that there was a method to the Japanese tactics. Every seven to eight days now the attacks were launched toward the American fleet in a massive wave, hundreds of aircraft of every imaginable type ramming their way through the American defenses. The destruction was becoming astonishing, both on board the ships and to the Japanese pilots, almost none of whom survived. Throughout the war, naval casualties had been comparably light, even during the most brutal battles in the Coral Sea and at Leyte Gulf. But now the navy was absorbing losses they had never experienced, and though the most prized targets, the battleships and carriers, had taken some hits, it was the smaller escort and supply ships that were receiving the worst punishment. Dozens of American ships were being sent to the bottom,
along with far too many crewmen. The losses were doubly horrifying because they had been so unexpected, and yet the Americans continued to be baffled by Japanese logic. If Tokyo had any expectation that their planes would either destroy the American fleet or drive them away from Okinawa, the tactics being used seemed gruesomely absurd. Radar and lookout stations monitored the incoming waves of Japanese planes, allowing gunners on board the American ships to prepare for the onslaught. The carrier aircraft could combat the incoming Japanese waves before the kamikaze pilots could even see their targets. With Japanese losses in aircraft numbering in the hundreds, the Americans had to wonder just how much more of this kind of attack the Japanese could mount. The loss in pilots alone had to mean that the planes were being flown by men with minimal training, whose sole mission was to end their lives by a desperate gamble that Americans would die in the process. The number of aircraft the Japanese were losing added to the mystery. How many more planes could the Japanese air force sacrifice before they simply ran out?

C
OMMAND
P
OST
, T
ENTH
A
RMY
, O
KINAWA
A
PRIL
23, 1945

He climbed from the jeep, returned the salutes, waited as Vandegrift slid out the other side. The Marines who stood guard seemed to recognize their highest-ranking commander, most of them showing a little more starch in their salutes toward Vandegrift, a little more enthusiasm than they had for Nimitz. Nimitz smiled to himself, had no objections to that at all. Vandegrift had just received his fourth star, the first Marine general to ever reach that rank.

In an active war zone, a gathering of high-ranking commanders usually did little more than annoy the men on the ground who were trying to do their jobs. Nimitz had suggested to Vandegrift that the Marine Corps commander spend more of his time visiting his battle-weary divisions, the Fourth in particular, who had been badly mauled at Iwo Jima. Vandegrift had obliged him with a barely disguised anger, the general expecting to be allowed free rein over his units no matter where they might be stationed. After several days with the Fourth in Hawaii, Vandegrift had visited the exhausted Third Division, which held station on the newly secured Iwo Jima. By the time the Marine commander returned to Nimitz’s headquarters on Guam, Nimitz could see that the exposure to the tattered remains of two of his best divisions had worn a hole in Vandegrift’s patience.
Nimitz realized that, annoyance or not, if Nimitz was going to Okinawa, he had no right to prevent Vandegrift from accompanying him. To Vandegrift’s obvious delight, Nimitz had conceded that there was probably no one in the entire Pacific theater who had earned a greater right to visit his troops, no matter where they might be.

Alexander Vandegrift was two years Nimitz’s junior, bore himself with that distinctive straight-backed demeanor that Nimitz always respected. He was a Virginian, the descendant of a survivor of Pickett’s Charge, and surprised no one by his desire to pursue a military career. But the number of influential Virginians who pushed for appointments to the military academies had left Vandegrift behind, and instead he began his own path by attending the Virginia Military Institute. Rather than the army, Vandegrift chose the Marine Corps, serving in the First Division. At Guadalcanal in 1942, Vandegrift commanded that division, and his heroics there caught the attention of Admiral King in Washington. In a short time, Vandegrift’s star rose considerably, and by early 1945 he had become commandant of the Marine Corps. But office politics and a fat desk had not tamed the man known by his officers as “Sunny Jim.” On the long flight to Okinawa, Nimitz had already chastised himself repeatedly for ever assuming Vandegrift would be a pain to anybody.

Across the open ground, Nimitz could see tents and hastily built metal and wood huts, scattered through a smattering of low-slung palm trees. Anti-aircraft guns ringed the entire compound, the gunners closest to him curious, mostly with their eyes on Vandegrift.

Nimitz had seen the same kinds of faces on board the USS
New Mexico
the night before, where he had dined with Fleet Admiral Spruance. The gunners on board the great battleship were nervous, angry men, who focused much more of their attention on the skies than on a parade of brass who strode along their decks. It had surprised Nimitz that little effort had been made on the battleship to hide the stacks of cots, other than to shove them into any nook where they wouldn’t be in the way. It was a clear sign that most of the sailors were using the open deck for sleeping. Even on those days when the rains came, the extraordinary heat prevented anyone from sleeping in the stifling misery of their quarters belowdecks. Nimitz focused now on the faces closest to him, as he had on the ship. He saw the same faces he had seen at sea, fatigued, sad eyes, men going about their jobs with automatic movements, no joking, no laughter. Low morale was as obvious here on the island as it had been on the ship. It was not a surprise.
Nimitz knew that the loss of President Roosevelt had certainly cast a heavy dose of gloom among the troops everywhere, but then, there had been one more dreadful surprise, news of a completely unexpected tragedy. Nimitz received the word, as had every commander in the theater, that on April 18 newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle had been killed while accompanying a patrol of the Seventy-seventh Infantry Division on one of the smaller islands offshore. Nimitz knew that the president’s death would have a far more profound effect on the conduct of the war. But the loss of Ernie Pyle would have a devastating effect on the men in the ranks. Of all the reporters who had accompanied the troops in all theaters of the war, Pyle was by far the most beloved. From North Africa to Europe and now to the Pacific, the columns Pyle sent back home had humanized the troops by telling their stories directly, experiences comical, absurd, and tragic. He gave the troops their own voice, when most other reporters were far more interested in snuggling up to the brass. By naming them and offering a nod to their hometowns, Pyle had sent a reassuring hand back to relatives who might otherwise never know of the fate of their own, since mail service took far longer than Pyle’s own dispatches. Everywhere he went, Pyle obliged as many of the troops as he could, moving among the men with his trademark typewriter slung over his shoulder, offering good cheer and an eagerness to listen that the average GI had found nowhere else.