Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [258]
En route to Okinawa, army lieutenant Don Siebert found himself sharing a C-47 “Gooney Bird” with a party of nurses. The girls kidded the young replacements somewhat unkindly, saying that they would see them again on a casevac flight in a couple of days. “Of course this was very, very comforting728,” wrote Siebert, “but we were too gung-ho to heed the warning, and exacted their assurances that they would give us special care.” He himself was troubled, like most newcomers to war, about his own fitness for command: “Would the men accept my leadership? Would I have a problem getting to them?” He read field manuals assiduously all the way to the front, where he joined the 382nd Infantry on line outside Shuri Castle. To Siebert’s disappointment, he was assigned to become assistant regimental adjutant and gas officer. He provoked amazement by requesting instead a posting with a line battalion, and was rewarded with a platoon of Fox Company.
The newcomer trudged through heavy rain to take over his woefully under-strength little command, just sixteen strong: “They were strange faces—dirty, drawn, tired, yet the men appeared to have high morale.” He was plunged into combat, to see his platoon sergeant immediately evacuated after being wounded by mortar fragments. When another man was killed, Siebert felt ashamed that he had not yet discovered the soldier’s name. A young lieutenant, Magrath, clambered out on a rock to take a look at his first battlefield. “Get your ass down!” shouted a sergeant, too late. A bullet hit Magrath in the throat. As he was carried away, he kept asking earnestly whether he would still be able to play his trumpet in a dance band.
In Siebert’s first encounter with the Japanese, he was shocked to see an enemy soldier keep running at him, despite being hit repeatedly by carbine bullets. Siebert discarded his carbine in favour of an M1 rifle. “One of the weaknesses of the American army729 in combat,” he wrote, “was night operations. We did little fighting at night, almost no movement…The Japs, on the other hand, used the darkness. They fought, moved and resupplied in it.” Darkness caused every American soldier, huddled under a poncho to mask the glow of a cigarette, to become acutely sensitive to the risk of surprise. One night in the positions of the infantry company accompanied by gunner Chris Donner, a man panicked when he heard an unexpected noise. He began firing, and killed five of his fellow Marines before somebody shot him down. The company commander, wrote Donner, was thereafter “embittered over this needless loss730. The entire outfit moved heavily.”
Wandering animals and civilians prompted alerts. White goats were mistaken for infiltrators. Don Siebert’s men were dug in at the edge of a big field one night, when they heard rustling and movement. Flares revealed nothing, but there was certainly something out there. The lieutenant told his men to shoot, prompting moans and the squalling of a baby. Siebert was still fearful of Japanese soldiers trying to lure the Americans from their foxholes: “Much against my instincts731, I ordered the platoon to open fire; we must have killed the youngster, because there were no more cries. This truly depressed me. However, I believed that it was necessary to protect the lives of my men.” And so perhaps it was.
“With afternoon came the order732 to advance,” wrote Chris Donner. “A short round from another artillery shoot so jolted Captain Sweet that he had to be removed…As the units, each no more than twenty-five strong, converged on the brushy knoll to our front there was no firing of any kind. Then, walking erect, and only a few yards from the bushes, they were suddenly met by blazing light machine-gun fire, and mortars began raining upon them. There was no cover. They fell, squirmed, and were hit again. A handful managed to get back, including a lieutenant who trembled and shook with terrific