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By Root 1184 0

foxholes. These offered pitiful protection against U.S. artillery fire, far heavier than anything Ushijima’s batteries could put down. Then they met their first American tanks. Like the rest of the Japanese army, the 32nd Regiment was pitifully equipped to deal with them, possessing just two anti-tank guns. These were destroyed within hours by shelling. Thereafter, Ito’s companies were forced to improvise, in the only fashion the Japanese army knew. Men were given a mine or shell, and ordered to detonate this against a tank as it approached. Ito tried to say personal farewells, solemnly shaking hands with each soldier designated for the task. Sgt. Kaoru Imai, an NCO whom the captain much liked, ran out after an American tank, clutching a mine, then suffered the humiliation of finding himself unable to catch it up. The turret traversed, the gun fired. Imai was gone.

The pace of attrition was dispiriting. Most of Ito’s men had known each other for years. Now, each hour they vanished by scores. “We took three hundred casualties in the first two days739,” said Ito. His second-in-command, Lieutenant Kashiki, made the dangerous circuit of their perimeter the first night, telling the men how well they had done. Yet all knew how desperate was their predicament. Ito reflected that his father had underestimated their enemy. One of his company commanders said ruefully down a telephone line to the command bunker: “You can’t treat these Americans lightly.”

The invaders achieved notable successes when defenders were rash enough to leave their positions and counter-attack. Again and again, Japanese efforts to regain ground or surprise the Americans were crushed by firepower. After early bloody failures, however, Ushijima became less obliging about exposing his units. He held them back in their deeply dug defences, leaving it to the Americans to pay the price for movement. Marines and soldiers alike found themselves trapped in an experience as hellish as any of the war. Word of the death of their president, Franklin Roosevelt, on 12 April seemed as remote as a dispatch from the moon. “The news came as a shock740,” wrote an infantry officer. “The word was passed down to the men, but each had his own problems at the moment, the most important being to keep his hide in one piece.” Only the few square yards of ground around them, the men in the next foxhole, possessed meaning. A new list of place-names entered the gazetteer of Pacific horrors: Sugarloaf Hill, Wana Draw, Awacha Gulch, Shuri Castle.

When Lt. Marius Bressoud’s Marine company was ordered to undertake a new assault on Wana Ridge, he experienced “an immediate sense of melancholy, as I realised this was my day to die. I had been very zealous about brushing my teeth every morning. I had no toothpaste, of course, but I faithfully hung onto the toothbrush, using it with plain water. Out of habit, I took it out that morning and then said to myself: ‘Why should I bother? I will be dead by nightfall.’ But I had a second thought: ‘Why not brush my teeth? I have time. I will do it, just in case I live.’” Bressoud indeed survived, but his unit’s attack failed. “It was not possible to assault entrenched Japanese troops carefully. What were needed were a few nuts who didn’t care whether they lived or died, and I Company’s level of commitment that day stopped short of madness.” One of Bressoud’s young Marines was left lying wounded on the hillside, crying, “Mother, mother.” The platoon’s corpsman gazed forward in bitter frustration. Bressoud told him not to try any heroics, that there was no purpose in having two men rather than one dead or wounded. Finally, however, the corpsman said: “I can’t stand it741. I’m going to go help him.” He scrambled forward. Like the wounded man, he was never seen again.

“Small-unit combat was a continuous stream of decisions that can be agonizing and immobilizing,” wrote Lt. Jeptha Carell of the 3/7th Marines. He started his own first action with a mistake. Advancing to attack, his platoon sergeant was shot in the stomach beside him, and a nearby corpsman fell