With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [153]
We never knew why Duke held the little critique that night, whether he was ordered to do so or not. I suspect he did it on his own. He realized we wanted to know and understand our role in the overall plan.
It was a historic time, and we were participating in events of key importance to the American effort on Okinawa. All eyes were on Shuri. My buddies and I were key participants at a critical juncture in one of the epic land battles of World War II, and we were having our tiny role in that battle explained. Duke asked if there were any questions. A few were asked, which he answered clearly. I maintained my condition of near stupefaction through it all. Then we slowly climbed back up the filthy ridge after he dismissed us.
That night the rain came down in torrents. It was without exaggeration the most terrific deluge I've ever seen. The wind blew fiercely, slashing the rain horizontally across the crest of the ridge and stinging our faces and hands. The star shells burst but gave little illumination because they were snatched away immediately by the unseen hand of the gale. Visibility was limited to about six feet. We couldn't see our buddies in their foxholes on either side of us. What a terrible night to grapple with Japanese infiltrators or a counterattack, I thought to myself all night long.
Considerable machine-gun fire, bursts of rifle fire, and grenade explosions erupted throughout the night a short way down the line to our left. But all was mercifully quiet, albeit tense, in our immediate area. Next morning I realized why we weren't molested by the enemy as the men to our left had been. For a considerable distance to our right and left, the ridge fell away almost perpendicularly to the valley below. The Japanese simply couldn't crawl up the slick surface.
In the latter days of May while the Japanese held on to the center of their line around Shuri, the U.S. Army divisions to the east and the 6th Marine Division to the west (around Naha) finally made progress to the south. Their combined movements threatened to envelop the main Japanese defense forces in the center. Thus the enemy had to withdraw. By dawn on 30 May most of the Japanese Thirty-second Armyhad departed the Shuri line, leaving only rear guards to cover their retreat.
In the sixty-one days of fighting on Okinawa after D day, an estimated 62,548 Japanese soldiers had lost their lives and 465 had been captured. American dead numbered 5,309; 23,909 had been wounded; and 346 were missing in action. It wasn't over yet.
* After the campaign on Okinawa ended, a battalion surgeon told me the sores on my hands were probably caused by malnutrition, the filth we lived in, or both. The festering sores that developed on my hands in late May didn't heal until nearly five months after we came out of combat.
*Sassoon, Siegfried, “Suicide in Trenches” in Collected Poems, Viking Press, N.Y. 1949.
*K/⅗ landed at full strength of 235 officers and men on 1 April 1945. The company joined 250 replacements during the campaign for a total of 485 serving. Of the fifty men left at the end of the campaign, only twenty-six had made the landing.
* The flat, muddy, cratered landscape to the west of Half Moon Hill was a no-man's-land to the railroad and beyond to the Horse Shoe and Sugar Loaf Hill, where the left flank of the 6th Marine Division was located. At no time did I see any Americans in that low, flooded ground astride the railroad. Thus a gap of considerable size existed between the 1st and 6th Marine Divisions.
An officer told me that machine guns and strongpoints to the right rear covered the area. He said the low flat terrain was so vulnerable to Japanese fire from the heights of Shuri that extending the lines to meet on that flooded ground would have sentenced the men involved to sure death. At night star shells illuminated the area so that the enemy couldn't infiltrate across it.
* A five-by-seven-inch