The Pacific (76 page)

These easy days of living in a pup tent and accompanying the occasional patrol had a somewhat unreal quality to them, since none of the veterans ever doubted that the Japanese were going to fight for their homeland. Word of the fighting down south--the army divisions down there had run into stiff opposition--reached the mortar squad. They could hear the distant thunder and flash of artillery, see the planes going over, or look offshore and see spotlights searching the sky. Not everyone took the hint. It seemed to the veterans that every night, "all the new kids said, 'Come on, you guys keep telling us about the war. This is a picnic.' " To which the vets replied, "Yea, wait, wait, wait, wait!"
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News of the death of President Roosevelt arrived in King's camp at Inubi on April 13. Sledge, who had never cared for him, hoped that Vice President Truman could be installed "without a lot of political bickering." Mail also began making it through, now that some of the logjams had been worked out with regard to supplies. Eugene's parents sent him the clipping of his brother Edward's Bronze Star and the news that Ed had been wounded a third time. Sid sent a letter and some photos. Eugene went to a Red Cross station to get some stationery and had begun some letters when, on April 15, the military dropped its censorship of mail. The enlisted men were free to write what they chose, since it no longer mattered. The next stop after Okinawa was Honshu and the other islands of Japan.

Freed from restrictions, Sledge still avoided topics in his letters that might upset his family. He described the Okinawans and their customs and asked for a "cheap box camera" so that he could capture some of what he saw. He wrote about listening to the radio broadcast by Tokyo Rose, who played popular music to get the marines' attention, and intercut it with propaganda. On April 17 Tokyo Rose made wild claims as to the number of casualties the United States had sustained thus far and launched into a denunciation of "American Imperialism." The charge made Gene laugh.

Duties were so light that his friend Jay de l'Eau came to visit him. Jay had been with King on Peleliu and had been moved to the special weapons platoon of Headquarters Company, commanded by Lieutenant Duke Ellington. Jay now carried a bazooka. He and Gene had similar tastes in music and books. Unlike Eugene, Jay and his squad did not think much of Lieutenant Ellington. The visit was a rare treat for the two friends, even though companies of 3rd Battalion camped close to one another. Jay had to help out around the battalion CP, while Gene went on patrols.

The patrols through the countryside yielded little. One afternoon, Gene's squad saw an elderly Okinawan man walking toward them, a hoe balanced on one shoulder. "Sledgehammer," someone said, "you know these people's language. Ask this old man where a geisha house is." Gene liked the idea of showing the guys how he was "mastering this language." He addressed the Okinawan and attempted to ask him. "No," the old man replied in perfect English, "I don't know of any geisha house now. There was one in Naha but I'm sure that it's been bombed."
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While shock registered on Sledge's face, "everybody was cartwheeling all over the ground, laughing at Sledgehammer for speaking Okinawan to this old fella who spoke perfect English."
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Gene being Gene, he had to ask the man how he had learned English.

"I went to California one time and was down in the agricultural fields on a passport for about two years."

"Why didn't you go to Japan to work?"

"Well, the Japanese are so cruel to Okinawans it was better to go to the States."

Rumors that the islands just off Okinawa's eastern shore needed to be checked became a mission for King and Item companies in late April. Amtracs would land them on the northern beach of Takabanare. Preparing for this shore-to-shore amphibious assault quickly became another case of "hurry up and wait," as everybody just stood around, until Burgin heard the spoon fly off of a hand grenade. He'd heard it too many times to mistake that sound, which meant a grenade had been armed. His body instinctively reacted, his pulse jumping madly, but instead of an explosion, "it just went pop." Someone had removed the explosive charge so only the detonator fired. It was a joke. Burgin hollered, "Who's the stupid son of a bitch that pulled that . . . ?" In front of his mortar platoon, Lieutenant Robert MacKenzie admitted, "I did. It didn't have any powder in it." Burgin let out a "How damn stupid can you get for crying out loud?!"
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The outburst shocked E. B. Sledge, who would not dream of speaking to a superior officer in that manner.
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The ride to Takabanare took almost three hours. The two companies rolled through the center of the island and its main village by day's end. Patrolling the island turned out to be more of the same, only it seemed to Burgin that there were more civilians. After a long day of searching houses, he and Lieutenant MacKenzie, who had been given the nickname "Scotty," pulled some rugs out into a secluded spot and lay down for the night. Burgin happened to notice his lieutenant's .45.

"Scotty, your safety is off on that pistol."

"What?"

"Your safety is not on. It's off," Burgin repeated. Scotty looked at it and said, "Well I'll be damned." Scotty explained that he had taken the safety off that morning, when they had searched the first house, and so it had probably been off all day. "Oh shit," Burgin thought, "you're going to get somebody killed or kill yourself." For behavior like that, some of the guys started referring to Lieutenant MacKenzie behind his back as "Mad Mack."
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Even the veteran sergeant, however, struggled a bit with this strange world of war without combat. One afternoon, Burgin became so intent on his search that he forgot about where he was. After checking the house, he went out to search the barn by himself. Inside in the dim light he walked around hoping to find perhaps a chicken and was rooting around with both arms engaged when a man stepped out from his hiding place. A rush of adrenaline coursed through Burgin. His right hand reached for his pistol and he felt safer when he had it up and aimed. Another moment passed. This man had only been hiding. There was no danger. Had there been, Burgin knew he would have been killed by his mistakes: he had been alone, unarmed and inattentive.

After four days on Takabanare, K Company moved back to the regimental base around Inubi. A few quiet days passed; then they were called into formation and told: "Get ready, we're leaving tomorrow, we're going south."
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While some of his friends went hunting for a cow to get some fresh meat, Eugene sat down to write on April 30, a "cool clear day with high wind," as King prepared to march to the sound of the guns. He sounded hopeful. The war might end soon, he had had a chance to send his mother the kimono, and the knitted wool cap he had requested had arrived and was proving "just the thing for the nights." Mrs. Phillips, Sid's mom, had sent lilies to his mother, a connection that delighted him. Even without the censorship, Eugene knew better than to betray the awful fear churning inside of him. In the one paragraph of sadness, he reacted to the recent news of his dog Deacon's death by recalling the day he had gotten him as a puppy, the details of that day still fresh in his mind. Deacon, he concluded, "is in dog heaven."

BY MID-APRIL, LIEUTENANT COLONEL SHOFNER AND THE OTHER OFFICIALS OF the military government had a firm grasp of the situation. The number of civilians greatly exceeded the amount anticipated.
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The vast majority of refugees, it was clear, posed no threat. In a few instances, Japanese soldiers dressed in civilian clothing, armed civilians, or civilians forced to be human shields for soldiers--the distinctions were not at all clear--clashed with U.S. forces. The Okinawans also had an unfortunate penchant for moving at night. They might move toward the camps for refuge or they might try to get back to their homes and farms. This could not continue because marines fired at anything that moved at night. The refugees needed to be collected in one spot in order to facilitate medical care and food distribution. Virtually every civilian had become a refugee because the war completely dislocated life on the island.

The MG staff, however, had no manpower with which to handle these difficult problems. They had asserted the right to give orders to Provost Marshal Austin Shofner's MPs and continued to attempt to do so. The MGs needed the MPs to bring order. Shifty would have none of it. His men answered to him and him alone.

The commander of the 3/5, Shifty's former battalion, came to see him. Colonel Miller complained that Okinawans were "destroying their passes and . . . roaming about freely." Miller assumed that these people were in contact with the enemy.
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Faced with shortages of everything and the needs of tens of thousands of refugees, Shofner made a decision without consulting any of the military government specialists. The long peninsula extending east into the ocean would make a perfect camp. All it needed was a fence where it connected to Okinawa. Shifty chose some of the most able- bodied Okinawans and had them build a wire fence across the narrow neck of the Katchin Peninsula. He had his MPs, assisted by some riflemen from his division, move the civilians into the area, over the protests of the other MG staff.
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In short order, more than twenty- five thousand Okinawans were on the peninsula. The military government men had to admit his solution "did cause the night incidences practically to cease."
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Needing more help to care for all of these people, Shofner personally met with all of the able-bodied male Okinawans. The translators had an easier time with some younger men, who had been forced to learn to speak Japanese. Those men Shofner judged problematic he sent to the POW camps, as ordered. He identified 204 men, though, whom he considered healthy enough and cooperative. These he dubbed the "Okinawan Seabees" and he put them to work. They erected tents, filled sandbags, and built air raid shelters. The lawyers of the MG staff "urged the provost marshal to discontinue this method because it raised questions as to the treatment of civilians and represented usurpation of military government function." The Okinawan Seabees were, however, "so useful and the method of handling was so efficient" that the 1st Division HQ authorized Shifty to continue.

The briefings Shofner received at division HQ would have made it clear that Okinawa had become the battle everyone feared. The 6th Marine Division had borrowed some battalions from the 1st Division to help it clear out the northern end. The area to the south, though, contained the bulk of the IJA. Advancing south, several divisions of the U.S. Army faced a system of ridges and hills all connected to the ancient Okinawan seat of power known as Shuri Castle. The IJA had fortified its network with more heavy artillery than the U.S. military had ever faced and the toll it was taking was astounding. Shofner's commanding officer, General Pedro del Valle, had a lot to worry about and was pleased that his provost marshal had taken one of those problems off his hands. When the general praised him, Shofner made sure to remind his CO that he was "an infantryman, if he needed anyone with that talent."

The process of creating a rudimentary government in Shofner's camp on the peninsula moved forward toward the end of April, with the MG officers' oversight. Headmen were selected and native police appointed. The headmen were put in charge of overseeing the distribution and rationing of food. Work parties of civilians went out with guards to search for clothing and to carry back provisions. The challenges continued as the numbers in the eight main camps on the island swelled past a hundred thousand. The crisis, however, had passed. On April 27 the Tenth Army HQ alerted the 1st Division to prepare to head south and into combat. One of the army divisions that had been in combat arrived and began to assume the MP duties. In due course, the Civil Affairs officers in the military government credited Lieutenant Colonel Austin Shofner. "The provost marshal during the first phase was an active, aggressive officer, who was eager to do at least his full share, if not more, with respect to the civilian problem. He did an extraordinarily effective job of collecting and moving civilians in large numbers to segregation areas, to a degree to which any military government unit would be hard put to it to equal."
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As Shofner put it himself, he "did not like the Japanese," nor did he wish to be the provost marshal. He had, though, "understood the necessity to care for the prisoners and the refugees."

K/3/5 DEPARTED THE VILLAGE OF INUBI BY TRUCK AT SIX THIRTY A.M. ON MAY 1.
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Aside from the streams of Okinawans going in the opposite direction, the ride south resembled going ashore in a Higgins boat: they rode slowly toward the sound of the guns. The temperature had dropped and the occasional rain shower passed over. As King Company neared their destination, they would have passed battery after battery of big artillery--105s and 155s. Hearing their great eruptions, feeling those concussions, made stomachs tighten; some new marines discovered an unpleasant, metallic taste in their mouths. By the time they climbed down from the trucks off Highway 5 and heard the enemy shells coming in, they all knew they were scared.
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