Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [262]
Fighting in the midst of civilians is always repugnant, never more so than on Okinawa. “On the ground746,” Chris Donner recorded one day, “lay the body of a young Okinawan, a girl who had been fifteen or sixteen, and probably very pretty. She was nude, lying on her back with arms outstretched and knees drawn up, but spread apart. The poor girl had been shot through the left breast and evidently violently raped.” It seemed unlikely that this was the work of Japanese soldiers. Not long after, several men of the infantry unit which Donner was accompanying fell to fire from unseen enemies on a clifftop. Suddenly, the Americans saw a Japanese woman clutching a baby. Convinced that she was spotting for enemy soldiers, some shouted: “Shoot the bitch, shoot the Jap woman!” There was a burst of fire. The woman fell, then struggled to her feet and staggered towards her baby. After more shots, she went down again and lay still. Donner wrote: “None of the men would own up747 to having fired…the ridge was a stinking mess, compounded of half-empty ration tins, dead Japs and human faeces, all covered with hot flies…One corporal was dragged back and given a transfusion. His foot was gone at the ankle. When they could bring up a stretcher and start off with the man, he began to smoke a cigarette someone had given him. Then with his face drawn with pain he waved to us and shouted, ‘Got mine, fellows. Gonna have liberty now. Good luck to you.’” Marine Eugene Sledge was struck by the sight of a Japanese machine-gunner still sitting at his post, lacking the top of his head. Overnight rain had collected in the open skull. As their unit sat nearby waiting to be relieved, one of Sledge’s buddies idly flicked fragments of coral into this receptacle, prompting a splash each time one landed right.
In a rear-area hospital, O. P. Smith inspected combat fatigue cases, of which Okinawa generated thousands. He watched a doctor treating a Marine in whose foxhole a mortar round had landed. “No man could have portrayed fear as this man did. He kept gurgling ‘Mortar, mortar, mortar.’ The doctor asked him what he was going to do now. He replied: ‘Dig deeper. Dig deeper.’ The doctor told him to go ahead and dig. The man got down on his knees and went through frantic motions of digging in the corner of the room.” Another man, who had been recommended for a Silver Star, was overcome by guilt about killing so many Japanese. There were others occupying beds, however, for whom the Marine general evinced less sympathy. “I am afraid…there are many748 cases of so-called combat fatigue where the man should not have gotten back to the hospitals.” What would Smith have said to a man like medic Bill Jenkins, whose platoon went through double its original strength before the navy man went to his sergeant, removed his pistol belt and said: “You can take this war and shove it749, I quit”? The NCO gave Jenkins a mug of coffee and without protest tagged him as suffering from a “psychoneurosis anxiety state.” He was evacuated to Saipan.
After their first two days in action, Japanese captain Kouichi Ito’s battalion received only ration bread to sustain them. On 2 May they were ordered to participate in a major counter-offensive against two hills held by the American XXIV Corps. At terrible cost, and almost without artillery support, they gained one summit, having driven a mile behind the American front. “We had done our part—but we wondered where everybody else was,” said Ito, echoing the sentiments of many soldiers in many battles. Their neighbouring unit failed to capture the second hill. The consequence