Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [261]
Tiny consolations meant much to men who lived as did those of Tenth Army on Okinawa. “Dear Mom and Dad,” wrote twenty-year-old gunner Joseph Kohn to his family in New Jersey on 14 May, “every once in a while743 you come across a fellow who is really a swell Joe. A fellow who is in tanks just happened to start talking and before I knew it he invited me down. Somehow or other he had flour and baking powder, and before you knew it he was making pancakes for me and the rest of the fellows.”
Comradeship, love between men, is the only force that makes such circumstances endurable. Marine lieutenant Richard Kennard wrote to his parents on 13 May: “As the weeks go by I have grown to be very fond of my enlisted friend Jack Adamson, raised on a farm in north Wisconsin. He is a perfect Christian and in my eyes the most ideal American boy I have ever known. I have lived very close to him and so know just what I am saying. Jack is the cleanest, most meticulous lad I have ever seen. He is completely unselfish, and always thinks about his buddies in the gun section first. He has worked ever since he could walk. He doesn’t smoke, drink or swear. You know a good Christian will always have many friends and yet be little appreciated because there are so few people today who understand what it is like.” Kennard had a girlfriend back home named Marilyn, a successful model. If he himself was killed, Kennard asked his parents to see that Jack Adamson got whatever cash he had: “Marilyn won’t need it.” The claims of intimacy with a man beside whom he shared mortal peril seemed more pressing than those of a girl half a world away.
BUCKNER’S headlong assaults on the Shuri Line rekindled familiar inter-service animosities. Marines thought soldiers lacked skill, drive, grit. “The Marines and the army744 don’t like each other,” wrote corpsman Bill Jenkins. “…We thought they were a bunch of scaredycats.” Marines relieving the army’s 27th Division mocked the depth of their foxholes. A soldier said sourly: “You won’t be laughing when ‘whistling willy’ comes in.” Sure enough, within a few hours the Marines were digging even harder for themselves. “We were permitted, if not encouraged745, to believe that Army progress was slow because their troops weren’t as courageous, capable and well trained as we were,” wrote Marine lieutenant Marius Bressoud. “It was only when we ourselves came up against the Shuri bastion that we developed a proper respect for our fellow footsoldiers.”
Marine senior officers, however, continued to believe that Buckner’s generalship was unimaginative, almost sure to continue to fail, and absolutely sure to cost a lot of lives. They favoured a new amphibious landing in the Japanese rear, for which a reserve division still afloat was available. On 18 April, O. P. Smith told Vice-Admiral Turner that he thought Buckner much too optimistic about the ability of artillery to batter a breakthrough. The admiral agreed, but declared that it was impossible to intervene. “God bless you,” Turner said to Smith, his customary farewell. God did nothing to bless Tenth Army, or its tactics, through the weeks which followed. Smith recorded his contempt for Buckner’s lack of combat experience. The general, he said, spurned Marine experience of the value of creeping shellfire up to enemy positions, rather than bracketing them. Smith criticised army practice of holding positions as much as eight hundred yards from the nearest Japanese. Marines considered one to two hundred yards more appropriate.
Smith described a visit with Tenth Army’s commander to the 27th Division, a formation no one thought much of: “The division was beaten down