Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [256]
Yet through the first week of the invaders’ residence ashore, Okinawa appeared a deceptively innocent, strikingly beautiful tourist destination. For every American save those who had fought on Saipan, this was a first glimpse of the enemy’s land and its people, unlike other battlefields they had experienced. There was no jungle, instead subtropical vegetation. Pines were the commonest trees—Nimitz asked for saplings to be shipped to Guam. There were large, bright, almost tasteless wild raspberries. Every inch of cultivable soil was tilled, hills laboriously terraced. Staff officers amused themselves by shooting pigeons. Units advanced in almost carnival mood, some men riding looted bicycles. One company captured two horses. A Marine broke an ankle falling off one, which in view of subsequent events probably saved his life. Soldiers made Japanese flags out of parachute flare silk, shooting holes in them to sell to sailors for $50 apiece.
Small boys emerged from peasant huts to beg matches, imitating the action of striking them. Marine general O. P. Smith was moved by the sight of an elderly Okinawan woman at the seaside, tearing a piece of paper into shreds then allowing the fragments to flutter away into the water. This was a local superstition: the paper represented a prayer, the force of which was supposed to double each time a fragment turned in the air before its immersion. New Yorker correspondent John Lardner was fascinated by the tombs which studded every hillside, the relative tranquillity punctuated by desultory encounters with the enemy: “The roads were narrow and dusty, the villages poor and dingy, but the green island between them was a fine thing to see. Some ridges were so thickly terraced for planting that it was checkered with rice paddies and green squares of sugarcane. Potatoes, beans, garlic, onions, radishes, grew everywhere. The civilians, who were now feeling easier, were walking along the roads and saluting us.” Lardner met a truck in which five Americans were sitting with a young Okinawan civilian wounded that morning. A good-natured Marine stuck a cigarette between the teenager’s lips. After one puff, the Japanese shuddered and pulled back. Another man said: “What do you want to treat a Jap719 so good for?”
“Why not?” demanded the cigarette donor.
“Well, why don’t they send some of them back to tell those other Japs how good we treat them? Then maybe they would treat us good.”
Tenth Army’s commander shared Admiral Turner’s surprise at the initial Japanese lack of resistance. Marines moving north overcame sporadic opposition without much difficulty. General Buckner was fearful that anticlimax might deprive him of the battle he was keenly expectant to fight. He had been at Kiska in the Aleutians “when the army troops had landed and to their embarrassment had found no Japanese,” wrote O. P. Smith scornfully. “He did not want to be involved720 in another Kiska.” Spruance and Turner had wanted Holland Smith of the Marines to command Okinawa. They were overruled by Nimitz, because Smith had made himself violently unpopular among soldiers by sacking an army divisional commander on Saipan.
The substitute choice for command, however, inspired less than universal confidence. Simon Bolivar Buckner was fifty-eight, son of a Civil War Confederate general, “ruddy, heavy-set721, but with considerable spring in his step, snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes. His fetish was physical conditioning.” During the preparations for Okinawa, the general’s enthusiasm for PT had cost his staff sprained ankles, some broken arms and collarbones. He had spent the First World War training fliers, and thereafter filled mostly staff appointments. Smith wrote: “Buckner had surprisingly little troops’ duty722. His methods and judgements were somewhat inflexible.” This grudging view was shared by other