Amphibious Capstones (Okinawa to V-J Day)

Amphibious Capstones (Okinawa to V-J Day)

The Marines had seized Iwo Jima to enhance the strategic air campaign against Japan. But Okinawa would provide the essential springboard for the final invasion of the Home Islands.

Except for the kamikazes, Okinawa would be the only major “unopposed” landing of the war for the Marines – but it was a dubious distinction. Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, commanding the 100,000-man Thirty-Second Army, intended to wage the bloodiest possible defensive battle to buy time for the massed kamikazes to savage the American fleet.

Given seven months to prepare his defenses, Ushijima wisely forfeited the upper two thirds of the island, the obvious landing beaches at Hagushi, and the nearby airfields at Kadena and Yontan.

The American landing would be unopposed only temporarily.

Like Tarawa and so many other Central Pacific islands, Okinawa enjoyed the protection of a barrier coral reef. Unlike Tarawa, the reef made no difference to the Marines.

Fourteen hundred new-model LVTs were on hand to land the assault elements of the Tenth Army – four divisions landing abreast, Marines to the north, Army to the south – covering eight miles of the Hagushi beaches.

Leading the way were hundreds of LVT-As, armored amphibians, the developmental grand-progeny of the long-ago Christie tank, firing on the move from their snub-nosed 75mm turrets.

And behind all the LVT-As and LVTs could be seen waves of 700 DUKWs bearing the first of the direct support artillery battalions. The amphibious assault plan was clicking on all cylinders.

While kamikazes had been encountered before, there was a special horror in the massed kamikaze attacks during the invasion of Okinawa. Kamikazi Attack, Okinawa, Sgt. Richard M. Gibney, USMC, ca. 1991-1992, oil on canvas.

Image Courtesy of Marine Corps Historical Center

So great was the momentum of this invasion force, so well-oiled the mechanics of launching a massive assault from the sea, that the Tenth Army rammed 16,000 combat troops ashore in the first hour.

The 1st Marine Division seized the Katchin Peninsula on the third day, effectively cutting the island in two. Meanwhile, General Shepherd’s 6th Marine Division swung north and engaged in a campaign of high mobility against what seemed to be a fleeing enemy. Troops rode tanks and self-propelled guns at breakneck speeds along country roads, having the time of their lives.

By April 7, the division had seized Nago, the largest town in northern Okinawa, and the Navy obliged by opening the port with minesweepers and UDT swimmers to bring in rations and ammo.

The 22d Marines continued up the spine of the island, reaching the northernmost point, Hedo Misaki, on April 13, having covered fifty-five miles through largely broken country since landing over the Hagushi beaches.

Abruptly, the honeymoon ended for the 6th Marine Division.

Their elusive foe, Colonel Takesiko Udo and his Kunigami regiment, finally went to ground in prepared positions in a six-square-mile area around 1,200-foot Mount Yae Take on the Motobu Peninsula, a few miles beyond Nago.

The five-day battle for Mount Yae Take was a demanding crucible for the 4th and 29th Marines.

Colonel Udo and his troops indeed fought to the death, and in doing so they bloodied the new division with nearly 1,000 casualties, including over 200 killed.

[Meanwhile, farther south, The] Old Breed began relieving the shot-up 27th Division on April 30, exuding a certain amount of disdain for the exhausted soldiers in the process. “It’s hell in there, Marine,” said one passing soldier to Private First Class [Eugene] Sledge, who replied saltily, “I know – I fought at Peleliu!”

Such was the Old Breed’s introduction to the Shuri defensive network, against which they would pound and scratch, one bloody yard at a time, for the longest month these veterans would ever experience.

General [Mitsuru] Ushijima’s hidden network of caves, bunkers, and tunnels extended across the island, but the battlefield was extremely compressed.

For now, it was the Old Breed on the right, or west coast, with two Army divisions on their left. Their first objective: the deadly Awacha Pocket, a broken country of rocky hills dotted with enemy caves and reeking with the bodies of the U.S. soldiers who had died in the first two weeks’ attempt to punch through.

The 5th Marines paid dearly for every cave and bunker they conquered in the Pocket.

And every night without fail came fresh Japanese infiltrators, looking for throats to cut, foxholes to grenade. Few Marines slept, despite their proven buddy systems.

At this point General Ushijima foolishly made things easier for the Americans.

Yielding to his hotheaded subordinates, he agreed to launch a massive counterattack, even agreed to expose much of his field artillery from its subterranean positions to provide mass preassault fires.

But the U.S. Army veterans of the fighting at Leyte and the Old Breed veterans of Cape Gloucester and Peleliu simply leaned into their weapons, called for illumination, directed the firing of preregistered naval gunfire, artillery, and mortar barrages, and calmly shot the attacking Japanese to pieces.

On the coast along the right flank of the 1st Marine Division’s sector, the 1st Marines and the 3d Armored Amphibian Battalion intercepted an enemy amphibious envelopment attempt, shooting down 700 men before they even touched dry land.

Ushijima’s blunder cost him 6,000 first-line troops and fiftynine invaluable artillery pieces. He also lost real estate.

Marine air was in this fight big time.

A strange flip-flop ensued. Each dawn Marine Corsairs would take off from Okinawa to go fight Japanese pilots over the East China Sea, while a horde of Navy Hellcat pilots arrived from the carriers to provide close air support to the ground troops.

Colonel Ward Dickey’s MAG- 33 led the way with 214 confirmed kills. More than half of these came at the cool hands of Major George Axtell and his VMF-323 “Death Rattlers.” Axtell himself became an instant ace, downing five Japanese raiders in one whirlwind thirtyminute melee.

Back on the ground, the 1st Marine Division took a week to hammer through the Awacha Pocket, losing 1,400 men in the process. But ahead lay even tougher concentrations of Japanese defenses: Dakeshi Ridge, Wana Ridge, and the hell-to-pay Wana Draw.

Geiger saw that the Old Breed was spread too thin. He offered to deploy Shepherd’s 6th Marine Division into the lines if [U.S. Army Lieutenant General Simon] Buckner would reassign the 1st Division back to his III Amphibious Corps. Buckner agreed.

Shepherd’s 6th Division had their collective eye on the prize port of Naha but found themselves abruptly yanked to a halt by a complex of three unimposing hills under observed fire from not-too-distant Shuri Castle. The hills formed a triangle with its apex, Sugar Loaf, facing north toward the approaching Marines, while the flanks were superbly covered by fire from the two outlying hills, Half Moon and Horseshoe.

Colonel Seiko Mita and his 15th Independent Mixed Regiment defended the complex. An assault on one hill would subject the attackers to shredding bands of cross fire from the other two. Heavy mortars blanketed all approaches from well-sited reverse slope positions. The 6th Marine Division’s own week of hell was about to begin.

Lumpy Sugar Loaf, rising steeply but only fifty feet above the plain, was no Mount Suribachi, but it effectively blocked the advance on Naha. Too small a target for big naval guns, the hump-shouldered hill also precluded an assault by anything larger than a rifle company. A half-dozen companies from the 22d and 29th Marines would be mangled in desperate fighting.

General Ushijima funneled fresh troops and more ammo into the Sugar Loaf complex each night. The Japanese gunners always seemed primed to unload on the next Marine assault.

Sugar Loaf would not fall until the eighteenth of May. By then, both the 22d and 29th Marines were badly shot up. Shepherd brought in Colonel Alan Shapley’s fresher 4th Marines to seize and defend the outlying hills, enduring a vicious 700-man counterattack on Horseshoe in the process.

The Battle for Sugar Loaf, then and now, gets the most attention from military historians, but the simultaneous Battle for Wana Draw by the 1st Marine Division was its equal in desperate fighting and high drama.

Sherman tank-borne infantry moving up to take the town of Ghuta, Okinawa, before the Japanese can occupy it. The men are members of the 29th Marines.

National Archives photo by Pfc. Robert L. Keller USMC

Wana Draw resembled the prototypical “Apache Pass” of B-grade movies: steep cliffs pocked with cave openings towering over a twisted, brushy streambed. The Japanese 62d Infantry Division had strewn every possible approach with mines. From hidden observation posts in the cliffs they directed deadly cross fires from a hundred machine guns.

The division’s operational summary for May 18 reflects the agonizing pace of the struggle for Wana Draw: “Gains were measured by yards won, lost, then won again.”

The 7th Marines, which lost 700 men taking Dakeshi Ridge, lost 500 more the first five days at Wana.

In a single day during this battle the 1st Tank Battalion fired 5,000 75mm cannon shells, 173,000 .30-caliber machine gun bullets, and 600 gallons of napalm.

By such measures the Old Breed finally wiped out the Japanese defending Wana Draw and struggled southward in the heavy rains.

The rain and mud slowed the pursuit by the Tenth Army of the retreating Japanese. General Buckner’s propensity for preceding each movement with massive artillery prep fires further slowed the advance. By the time the Marines approached the Kiyamu Peninsula, the southernmost five miles of the island, they found the Japanese as well dug in as ever along “a series of cross ridges that stick out like bones from the spines of a fish.”

On the right flank, General Shepherd examined the looming Oroku Peninsula that blocked his final approach to Naha airfield.

Maybe Shepherd could skin the cat by executing a division-sized amphibious landing across the estuary, catching the defenders by surprise in the flank. Maybe.

K-Day for the Oroku Peninsula assault came on June 4 and produced a little jewel of an amphibious assault.

Everything clicked. Naval guns and aircraft provided magnificent support in spite of a looming typhoon. The thrust against his exposed flank surprised the hell out of Admiral Ota. As he reacted like a wounded tiger to confront the 4th and 29th Marines to his rear, Ota experienced another spearpoint when General Shepherd unbridled the 22d Marines to attack across the Kokuba. The three regiments converged.

Admiral Ota’s sailors took a particularly heavy toll of General Shepherd’s tanks, obliterating at least two with pointblank fire from a hidden eight-inch naval cannon. But the 6th Marine Division was now a well-oiled killing machine in its own right. Ably supported by naval gunfire from both flanks, Shepherd advanced ruthlessly against Ota on three fronts.

The old rikusentai sent one final message to Ushijima: “Enemy tank forces are now attacking our cave headquarters; the Naval Guard Brigade is dying gloriously.” With that, he donned his dress uniform and committed suicide.

The 6th Division now had the peninsula and soon Naha itself.

The ten-day operation had cost 1,608 Marine casualties and thirty tanks, but Shepherd’s men had killed 5,000 of Ota’s men and captured another 200. Nobody knew it at the time, but this would be the final opposed amphibious landing of the war.

For their part, the 1st Marine Division now faced the 32d Infantry Regiment defending Kunishi Ridge, a steep escarpment of coral and rock, which dominated the low-lying rice paddies. The ridge, much higher and longer than Sugar Loaf, was honeycombed with Japanese bunkers. Taking it by storm would be exorbitantly costly. General [Pedro] del Valle’s commanders sought alternatives.

Colonel Edward Snedeker, commanding the 7th Marines, hitched a ride in an observation Bird Dog and formulated a different scheme.

“I saw we would never capture Kunishi in daytime. But a night attack might be successful,” Snedeker said.

Snedeker sent a pair of battalions against Kunishi Ridge at 0330 the next morning. It worked. The lead companies swarmed over the crest 90 minutes later, surprising the Japanese at their breakfast.

Now came the bad part. The Marines still lacked the numbers to ferret out the Japanese from their subterranean bunkers. All they could do was set up a 360-degree circle and wait for the next counterattack to come bubbling out of the rocks.

The fight for Kunishi chewed up all three regiments of the 1st Marine Division.

[When Japanese gunners killed General Buckner near the end of the battle, Command of the Tenth Army evolved to General Geiger.] Fittingly, Roy Geiger, the laid-back, highly competent, unconventional battle leader, became the only Marine, and the only aviator of any service, to command a field army.

The Battle of Okinawa officially ended on June 22, leaving the island a virtual charnel house. While exact numbers may never be known, estimates of Japanese deaths have ranged as high as 100,000 and of Okinawans as many as 150,000. [Marine Corps casualties overall - ground, air, ships’ detachements - exceeded 19,500]. An additional 560 members of the Navy Medical Corps attached to Marine units became casualties.

Ten Marines and three Navy corpsmen received the Medal of Honor. Eleven of the thirteen awards were posthumous.

For several worrisome weeks the Marines prepared for Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands. The reward for the thinly spread Marine and Army infantry division in the Pacific seemed funereal: Those who survived Leyte and Iwo Jima would get to assault Kyushu; the invasion of the Tokyo plain awaited the Luzon and Okinawa survivors.

A Marine of the 1st Marine Division draws a bead on a Japanese sniper with his Thompson as his companion ducks for cover on Okinawa. The division was working to take Wana Ridge before the town of Shuri.

National Archives photo by SSgt. Walter F. Kleine, USMC

News of the atomic bombs and the unconditional surrender of Japan brought all planning to a standstill and the Marines to their knees in prayerful gratitude.

The Marine Corps had reached an undreamed-of peak strength of 476,709 in mid-1945 – a seventeen-fold increase over the prewar Corps of July 1940. The figure included 116,000 aviation Marines. Nineteen thousand women Marines served billets ranging from stenographers to motor mechanics, cryptologists to parachute riggers.

The Marine Corps sustained nearly 92,000 combat casualties in World War II. Those who paid the ultimate sacrifice (killed in action, died of wounds, missing presumed dead) numbered 19,215. In addition, 518 of the 2,220 Marine Corps POWs in the Pacific did not survive captivity – about one in every four. The Marines, who comprised less than 5 percent of all Americans who served in the armed forces in World War II, suffered 10 percent of all the nation’s casualties.

An average of 73 percent of all members of the armed forces served overseas in the war. Ninety percent of all Marines did so. A quarter of a million Marines were serving in the Pacific Theater at the war’s end.

Eighty Marines received the Congressional Medal of Honor in the war – forty-eight posthumously. [Delayed Medals of Honor for valor] went to Guadalcanal machine gunner Anthony Casamento in 1980 [and Sugar Loaf Hill rifleman James Day in 1998].

The war in the Pacific was girt with a special horror, but the Marines who fought there brought home a distinctive sense of achievement, an 8,000-mile, four-year campaign against a savage and relentless foe under some of the worst conditions imaginable.