The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [59]
It was the same with the Japanese troop positions. All along the low mountain ridges that ran to the northern tip of the island, recon showed troops in motion, but only glimpses. There were no large-scale troop movements, no great masses of trenches where the Japanese seemed prepared to make a stand. The senior commanders could only vent their frustration at the intelligence officers, since no one could accurately count just how many enemy troops were on the northern half of the island. And even when people were located, there was never complete certainty that they weren’t just Okinawan civilians, working their fields, tending to what remained of the normalcy of their everyday lives. As had happened around the airbases inland from the landing beaches, it appeared that most of the carefully constructed defensive works had been blasted to rubble and splinters by naval and air force bombardment. Driving northward, some of the Marines stumbled into pockets of resistance, a carefully hidden enemy who could emerge from uncountable holes in the brush and rocky hillsides. The fights were often brief, but the Japanese had every advantage. All the Marines could do was what their commanders insisted: keep going, shoving the Japanese back until the enemy had no choice but to give up that part of the island.
They spent their second day expanding their beachhead, and then expanding it again. Every road became a line of march, the Marines making dusty treks through scrub brush and rocky fields. The fears had begun to subside, the attacks from Japanese snipers or the occasional machine gun nest surprisingly rare. There had been casualties, of course, Adams hearing the manic call for a corpsman from up in front of them, two men wounded as they slipped through a gap in the cover. Others had found enemy soldiers in the small villages, the Japanese troops scampering away at the approach of the men in the green uniforms. Shots were exchanged, outbursts of fire that accomplished little for either side. As the second day drew to a close, Adams began to wonder if the Japanese were looking for a fight at all. The fatigue of the daylong march brought weary, dreamlike exhaustion, Adams fighting the sweat in his eyes, the canteens emptying more quickly than anyone wanted. They stayed mostly on the roads, keeping to the ditches, hundreds of men who followed the lines on a map that someone else had drawn. They were far ahead of the schedule for the assault, and if the Marines didn’t know much about that, the men back on the ships did. On the beaches where the men had come ashore, the heavy equipment had followed, continued to follow. The tanks and artillery pieces were already lining the roadways away from the beaches, jeeps and amphtracs ferrying officers inland to their newly established field headquarters. Radio tents had gone up, kitchens and mess stations created, while the heavy equipment of the Seabees was already at work repairing and lengthening the runways on the abandoned airfields that would soon serve the fleets of B-29s and their fighter escorts.
With the second night approaching, the Marines knew the routine, and the shovels had come out once more, the holes dug in the brutal rockiness. While the Japanese had not shown their intentions, the officers who led the Marines had grown more itchy by the hour. There had been too much intel, too much recon, and too many reports of just how valuable this island was to the Japanese and their military. As Adams worked his shovel into the cracking coral, he had questions of his own. It had come to him on the march, aching legs supporting tired bodies, dreamy gazes where the hillsides opened up toward the strands of beaches to the west, soft surf, dotted only by the vast armada of American ships that lay offshore. The