The Twilight Warriors (53 page)

For the three commanders—Spruance, Mitscher, Turner—it was an unfulfilling end to the task they had begun back in March. None of them would have predicted then that two months later their forces would still be fighting for the last few square miles of Okinawa.

I
n the last week of May, the rain arrived. It came in torrents, dumping inches of water every day, turning gullies into rushing streams, making the landscape a sodden quagmire. Tanks mushed to a stop, their tracks clogged with mud. With no vehicles able to navigate the terrain, logistics ground to a halt. Not even amphibious tractors could shuttle supplies through the swampy terrain. Everything—ammunition, food, litters of wounded soldiers—had to be carried on the backs of weary troops through ankle-deep muck. The pelting rain and boot-sucking mud compounded the melancholy of the grunts in the foxholes.

The battle was still stalemated at the Shuri Line. Shuri had been pounded incessantly with naval gunfire, close air strikes, and artillery bombardment. The Japanese still showed no inclination
to yield the ground. Simon Buckner and his division commanders were convinced that Shuri was where the Japanese would make their last stand.

They were wrong. In the bunker beneath the shattered ruins of Shuri Castle, their adversary was already making his next move.

37
RITUAL OF DEATH

SHURI LINE, SOUTHERN OKINAWA
MAY 27, 1945

C
arrying his folding fan, General Ushijima led his soldiers into the darkness outside his headquarters. Flashes of artillery fire were glimmering off the low clouds, illuminating the landscape with a strobing yellow light.

The withdrawal from the Shuri Line had begun. Ushijima could only hope that the foul weather would last long enough for his army to reach its new positions on the southern end of the island before the enemy could cut them off

On the winding path to the south, they stumbled across bodies of fallen Japanese soldiers. Shattered field guns and vehicles were strewn like discarded junk. Every few yards they had to take shelter from incoming artillery or mortar rounds. Star shells from offshore destroyers burst over their heads, making them feel like rats caught in a spotlight. Mercifully, the low visibility prevented enemy airplanes from coming to strafe them, bomb them, and incinerate them with napalm, the deadliest new weapon in the Americans’ arsenal.

Leading the next group out of the headquarters was Lt. Gen. Isamu Cho, Ushijima’s second in command. Cho had stopped his strident talk about offensives or even of holding the Shuri Line. Both flanks were crumbling. It was just a matter of hours before the redoubt at Shuri Castle was surrounded and cut off. If Ushijima’s force were trapped there, the Battle of Okinawa would be over.

With Ushijima on the darkened trail was Col. Hiromichi Yahara, who had given the withdrawal a quaint label: “
offensive retreat.” Ushijima liked the euphemism. In some small measure it dulled the bitter taste of defeat. In the nearly two months since
the Americans landed at Hagushi, Ushijima had lost over 60,000 men, more than half his fighting force. His once formidable artillery group had been pounded into a small portion of its original strength. Ushijima knew that they were retreating into what would be a final trap for them all.

So be it. Ushijima was buying time. His life and career were now distilled to a single unwavering duty: to prolong the battle for Okinawa. If he succeeded, Japan might still be spared.

T
he withdrawal succeeded. On the morning of May 28, when Marines of A Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, stormed into the courtyard of Shuri Castle, they met almost no resistance. The town of Shuri, at the base of the ancient castle and once the home of 17,500 Okinawans, was obliterated. So was the castle, and so was every man-made object in view. The labyrinth beneath the castle that had been the headquarters of General Ushijima’s 32nd Army was deserted.

The enemy had gotten away.

It was the same story on each flank, skeleton Japanese units fighting holding actions while the bulk of the army slipped southward. Realizing what was happening, Buckner ordered his forces to converge to the south of Shuri to isolate whatever remained of the Japanese 32nd Army around Shuri Castle.

He was too late. The same mud that had slowed the Americans’ advance up the Shuri Line now hindered their pursuit of the retreating Japanese. Most of Ushijima’s forces were already settling into their new positions four miles to the south where a pair of hill masses called Yuza-Dake and Yaeju-Dake formed a jagged wall across the southern tip of Okinawa.

Buckner tried to put a positive spin on the situation. “Ushijima missed the boat on his withdrawal from the Shuri Line,” he told his subordinates on May 31. “
It’s all over now but cleaning pockets of resistance. This doesn’t mean there won’t be stiff fighting but the Japs won’t be able to organize another line.”

No one believed it, of course, especially the weary soldiers and Marines who were mad as hell that the enemy had been allowed to slip away from the Shuri Line. It meant that all the suffering and sacrifice they’d endured trying to dislodge the Japanese from Shuri would have to be repeated on the next ridge to the south.

Criticism of Simon Buckner’s generalship was swelling both on Okinawa and on the home front. Now that the war was over in Europe, military reporters in the United States were turning their attention to Okinawa. The appalling casualty figures were getting front-page coverage. Journalists and armchair generals were comparing Buckner’s strategy to the attritional battles of World War I, where generals flung entire armies at each other in frontal assaults.

One of the noisiest critics was Homer Bigart of the
New York Herald Tribune
, who had been at the Anzio and Salerno landings. Bigart was scathing about Buckner’s refusal to conduct amphibious landings behind the Japanese line. “Our tactics were ultra-conservative,” Bigart wrote. “Instead of an end-run, we persisted in frontal attacks. It was hey-diddle-diddle straight down the middle. Our intention to commit the entire force in a general assault was apparently so obvious that the Japanese quickly disposed their troops in such a way as most effectively to block our advance.”

In his syndicated column, “Today in Washington,” David Lawrence took an even harsher line. “Why is the truth about the military fiasco at Okinawa being hushed up?” Lawrence postulated that the stalemate was due to an Army–Marine Corps dispute over strategy, implying that Buckner and his Army generals didn’t “understand the dynamics of island warfare.”

Even the imperious MacArthur weighed in. Without naming names, he accused the Okinawa commanders of “
sacrificing thousands of American soldiers.” Instead of the frontal assault, MacArthur thought they should have done as he did in the southwestern Pacific, leapfrogging Japanese strongholds, isolating them from the rest of the war. With most of Okinawa already in American hands, the Japanese could have been contained on their southern
tip of land while the United States had free use of the airfields and harbors for the coming invasion of Japan. The saving in American lives would have been immense.

MacArthur, of course, was biased. Buckner had become a “Navy general” by virtue of serving under MacArthur’s chief rival in the Pacific, Adm. Chester Nimitz. In a Manila meeting with Lt. Gen. Joseph Stilwell, MacArthur let it be known that in the coming invasion of Japan, he would see to it that Buckner would not play a role.

Nimitz, who had already invested his own credibility in Buckner’s leadership, defended the general against Lawrence’s accusations. “The article, which has been widely reprinted, shows that the author has been badly misinformed, so badly as to give the impression that he has been made use of for purposes which are not in the best interest of the United States.”

For the diplomatic Nimitz, it was a blunt statement. No one could be sure, though, whether he was defending his designated ground commander or just heading off another Army-Navy turf war.

Simon Buckner, for his part, wasn’t a general who took fire without firing back. He called a special press conference at his Okinawa headquarters on June 15. “
If we’d scattered our forces,” he told reporters, “we might have got licked, or it might have unduly prolonged the campaign; or we might have been forced to call on additional troops, which we did not want to do.”

The journalists dutifully reported Buckner’s statement, but it didn’t stop the criticism. The controversy, like the battle itself, continued to fester like an open wound. The end was in sight, and at this point no one in Washington or in Pacific Fleet headquarters was willing to change strategies or commanders on Okinawa. Buckner would stay until the end. Or so everyone thought.

B
y the morning of June 18, Simon Buckner had every reason to be upbeat. The heady scent of victory was in the air. The general flashed his confident, white-toothed grin for the photographers
as he made his way up to the observation post at the Kunishi ridge-line. Against the advice of his staff, he was headed for the front line to observe an assault by the 2nd Marine Division against an enemy holdout. It would be one of the last actions of the long battle, and he was determined to observe it close up. As was his habit, he carried his own compact camera to capture the moment for his personal archives.

Escorting Buckner was the regimental commander, Col. Clarence Wallace, whose Marines were making the assault. Buckner settled himself into the observation post, which was sheltered on either side by boulders. He focused his attention on the battle unfolding in front of him, unaware of the events on the adjoining ridge.

F
rom the concealed entrance of their cave, the Japanese gunners observed the scene. The men in the American observation post appeared to be high-ranking officers, judging by the deference being shown them. The gunners’ artillery battery had been reduced to one remaining 47-millimeter mobile gun. They had been waiting for an opportunity to use the gun before it was destroyed or captured.

Here was such an opportunity. They hurried to ready the weapon. They knew they would have one tiny window in which to fire before the fury of a hundred American artillery shells came crashing down on them.

They fired the first round. The loaders crammed fresh shells into the breech, and in quick succession they pumped out four more rounds. Then they whirled and retreated back inside their cave.

B
uckner was pleased. He’d gotten what he came for—a look at what might be the last assault of the Okinawa campaign, some shots on film, and some goodwill points with the Marines. It was 1315, time to move on to the next outpost. Buckner was
shaking hands all around, saying goodbye to his hosts, when the first shell exploded.

It wasn’t a direct hit. Nor were the next rounds, which landed so close, one behind the other, that they seemed almost to arrive in salvo. One of the rounds exploded into the massive coral boulder that protected the observation post. Debris slashed like a cleaver across the narrow space, missing all the men standing in the observation post.

All except Simon Buckner.

Before anyone could fathom what had happened, Buckner was down. His chest and abdomen were punctured by the pieces of shrapnel. Corpsmen rushed to his side, trying to stanch the flow of blood. Semiconscious, the general lay on the ground while the life ebbed from him. Despite the efforts of the corpsmen, his wounds were too severe. Buckner was dead in ten minutes.

The news stunned both sides. To the Americans in the foxholes and on the sprawling, muddy landscape of Okinawa, it was incomprehensible that the man who had led them to within two miles and a few hours of final victory was no longer with them. To Buckner’s critics in the press and in the military establishment, it seemed a profound irony. The general they accused of needlessly expending American lives had just joined the twelve thousand men lost at Okinawa.

To Buckner’s enemies still clinging to the southern tip of Okinawa, it meant something else.

H
uddled in their cave beneath Hill 89 near the village of Mabuni, the staff officers of the Japanese 32nd Army could hardly believe their good fortune. They had killed the American commander! Their army was almost annihilated, but even as they approached their own deaths, they had won this symbolic victory. Gen. Isamu Cho, the fire-eating samurai who had argued against this slow battle of attrition, was beside himself with joy. So were most of the other headquarters officers.

There was one exception. Mitsuru Ushijima, the courtly general who had been Buckner’s chief antagonist these past three months, was not rejoicing. “He looked grim,” recalled Colonel Yahara, “as if mourning Buckner’s death. Ushijima never spoke ill of others. I had always felt he was a great man, and now I admired him more than ever.”

The day before, Ushijima had received a message from Buckner. “I believe that you understand as clearly as I,” wrote Buckner, “that the destruction of all Japanese resistance on the island is merely a matter of days.” Buckner urged Ushijima to surrender to avoid “the necessity of my destroying the vast majority of your remaining troops.”