On Okinawa today, Flag Day will be observed with an extraordinary ceremony: Two groups of elderly men, one Japanese, the other American, will gather for a solemn rite. They could scarcely have less in common.
Their motives are mirror images; each group honors the memory of men who tried to slay the men honored by those opposite them. But theirs is a common grief. After 42 years the ache is still there. They are really united by death, the one great victor in modern war.
They have come to Okinawa to dedicate a lovely monument in remembrance of the Americans, Japanese and Okinawans killed there in the last and bloodiest battle of the Pacific war. More than 200,000 perished in the 82-day struggle
–twice the number of Japanese lost at Hiroshima and more American blood than had been shed at Gettysburg. My own regiment–I was a sergeant in the 29th Marines–lost more than 80 percent of the men who landed on April 1, 1945. Before the battle was over, both the Japanese and American commanding generals lay in shallow graves.
Okinawa lies 330 miles southwest of the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu; before the war, it was Japanese soil. Had there been no atom bombs
–and at that time the most powerful Americans, in Washington and at the Pentagon, doubted that the device would work–the invasion of the Nipponese homeland would have been staged from Okinawa, beginning with a landing on Kyushu to take place Nov. 1. The six Marine divisions, storming ashore abreast, would lead the way. President Harry Truman asked Gen. Douglas MacArthur, whose estimates of casualties on the eve of battles had proved uncannily accurate, about Kyushu. The general predicted a million Americans would die in that first phase.
Given the assumption that nuclear weapons would contribute nothing to victory, the battle of Okinawa had to be fought. No one doubted the need to bring Japan to its knees. But some Americans came to hate the things we had to do, even when convinced that doing them was absolutely necessary; they had never understood the bestial, monstrous and vile means required to reach the objective–an unconditional Japanese surrender. As for me, I could not reconcile the romanticized view of war that runs like a red streak through our literature–and the glowing aura of selfless patriotism that had led us to put our lives at forfeit–with the wet, green hell from which I had barely escaped. Today, I understand. I was there, and was twice wounded. This is the story of what I knew and when I knew it.
To our astonishment, the Marine landing on April 1 was uncontested. The enemy had set a trap. Japanese strategy called first for kamikazes to destroy our fleet, cutting us off from supply ships; then Japanese troops would methodically annihilate the men stranded ashore by using the trench-warfare tactics of World War I–cutting the Americans down as they charged heavily fortified positions. One hundred and ten thousand Japanese soldiers were waiting on the southern tip of the island. Intricate entrenchments, connected by tunnels, formed the enemy`s defense line, which ran across the waist of Okinawa from the Pacific Ocean to the East China Sea.
By May 8, after more than five weeks of fighting, it became clear that the anchor of this line was a knoll of coral and volcanic ash, which the Marines christened Sugar Loaf Hill. My role in mastering it–the crest changed hands more than 11 times–was the central experience of my youth.
The struggle for Sugar Loaf lasted 10 days; we fought under the worst possible conditions–a driving rain that never seemed to slacken, day or night.
Newsweek called Sugar Loaf ”the most critical local battle of the war.” Time described a company of Marines–270 men–assaulting the hill. They failed; fewer than 30 returned. Fletcher Pratt, the military historian, wrote that the battle was unmatched in the Pacific war for ”closeness and desperation.” Casualties were almost unbelievable. In the 22d and 29th Marine regiments, two out of every three men fell. The struggle for the dominance of Sugar Loaf was probably the costliest engagement in the history of the Marine Corps. But by early evening on May 18, as night thickened over the embattled armies, the 29th Marines had taken Sugar Loaf, this time for keeps.
It may be said that the history of war is one of men packed together, getting closer and closer to the ground and then deeper and deeper into it. In the densest combat of World War I, battalion frontage–the length of the line into which the 1,000-odd men were squeezed–had been 800 yards. On Okinawa, on the Japanese fortified line, it was less than 600 yards–about 18 inches per man. We were there and deadlocked for more than a week in the relentless rain. During those weeks we lost nearly 4,000 men.
And now it is time to set down what this modern battlefield was like.
All greenery had vanished; as far as one could see, heavy shellfire had denuded the scene of shrubbery. What was left resembled a cratered moonscape. But the craters were vanishing, because the rain had transformed the earth into a thin porridge–too thin even to dig foxholes. At night you lay on a poncho as a precaution against drowning during the barrages. All night, every night, shells erupted close enough to shake the mud beneath you at the rate of five or six a minute. You could hear the cries of the dying but could do nothing.
By day, the mud was hip-deep; no vehicles could reach us. As you moved up the slope of the hill, artillery and mortar shells were bursting all around you, and, if you were fortunate enough to reach the top, you encountered the Japanese defenders, almost face to face, a few feet away. To me, they looked like badly wrapped brown paper parcels someone had soaked in a tub. Their eyes seemed glazed. So, I suppose, did ours.
Japanese bayonets were fixed; ours weren`t. We used the knives or, in my case, a .45 revolver and M1 carbine. The mud beneath our feet was deeply veined with blood. It was slippery. Blood is very slippery. So you skidded around, in deep shock, fighting as best you could until one side outnumbered the other. The outnumbered side would withdraw for reinforcements and then counterattack.
During those 10 days I ate half a candy bar. I couldn`t keep anything down. Everyone had dysentery. We were fighting and sleeping in one vast cesspool. Mingled with that stench was another–the corrupt and corrupting odor of rotting human flesh.
My luck ran out on June 5, more than two weeks after we had taken Sugar Loaf Hill and killed the 7,000 Japanese soldiers defending it. I had suffered a slight gunshot wound above the right knee on June 2 and had rejoined my regiment to make an amphibious landing on Oroku Peninsula behind enemy lines. The next morning several of us were standing in a stone enclosure outside some Okinawan tombs when a 6-inch rocket mortar shell landed among us.
The best man in my section was blown to pieces, and the slime of his viscera enveloped me. His body had cushioned the blow, saving my life; I still carry a piece of his shinbone in my chest. But I collapsed and was left for dead. Hours later corpsmen found me still breathing, though blind and deaf, with my back and chest a junkyard of iron fragments–including, besides the piece of shinbone, four pieces of shrapnel too close to the heart to be removed. (They were not dangerous, a Navy surgeon assured me, but they still set off the metal detector at the Buffalo airport.)
Between June and November I underwent four major operations and was discharged as 100 percent disabled. But the young have strong recuperative powers. The blindness was caused by shock, and my vision returned. My hearing came back. In three years I was physically fit. The invisible wounds remain.
And so we weren`t macho. Yet we never doubted the justice of our cause. If we had failed–if we had lost Guadalcanal, and the Navy`s pilots had lost the Battle of Midway–the Japanese would have invaded Australia and Hawaii, and California would have been in grave danger. In 1942 the possibility of an Axis victory was very real. It is possible for me to loathe war–and with reason–yet still honor the brave men, many of them boys, really, who fought with me and died beside me. I have been haunted by their loss these 42 years, and I shall mourn them until my own death releases me. It does not seem too much to ask that they be remembered on one day each year. After all, they sacrificed their futures that you might have yours.
Yet I will not be on Okinawa for the dedication today. I would enjoy being with Marines; the ceremony will be moving, and we would be solemn, remembering our youth and the beloved friends who died there.
Few, if any, of the Japanese survivors agreed to attend the ceremony. However, Edward L. Fox, chairman of the Okinawa Memorial Shrine Committee, capped almost six years` campaigning for a monument when he heard about a former Japanese naval officer, Yoshio Yazaki–a meteorologist who had belonged to a 4,000-man force led by Rear Adm. Minoru Ota–and persuaded him to attend. On March 31, 1945, Yazaki had been recalled to Tokyo and thus missed the battle of Okinawa. Ten weeks later–exactly 42 years ago today–Adm. Ota and his men committed seppuku, killing themselves rather than face surrender. Ever since then Yazaki has been tormented by the thought that his comrades have joined their ancestors and he is here, not there.
Finding Yazaki was a great stroke of luck for Fox, for whom an Okinawa memorial had become an obsession. His own division commander tried to discourage him. The Japanese could hardly be expected to back a memorial on the site of their last great military defeat. But Yazaki made a solution possible.
If Yazaki can attend, why can`t I? I played a role in the early stages of Buzz Fox`s campaign and helped write the tribute to the Marines that is engraved on the monument. But when I learned that Japanese were also participating, I quietly withdrew. There are too many graves between us, too much gore, too many memories of too many atrocities.
I set this down in neither pride nor shame. The fact is that some wounds never heal. Yazaki, unlike Fox, is dreading the ceremony. He does not expect to be shriven of his guilt. He knows he must be there but can`t say why. Men are irrational, he explains, and adds that he feels very sad.
So do I, Yazaki, so do I.
William Manchester is the author of 15 books, including ”American Caesar,” ”Goodbye Darkness” and ”Visions of Glory,” the first volume of
”The Last Lion,” his continuing biography of Winston Churchill.
