Sunday, April 1, 2018

Ernie Pyle, Robert Sherrod, and the Battle of Okinawa

On April 9, 1945, while covering the American invasion of Okinawa, located only 330 miles from Japan, two war correspondents, one a veteran of the Pacific War and the other a newcomer to the theater, were busy writing stories about the battle in a room aboard the USS Panamint, a McKinley-class command ship that served as the flagship of Rear Admiral Lawrence F. Reifsnider. As the clacking of their typewriter keys slackened, the two men—Time magazine’s Robert L. Sherrod and Scripps-Howard News Service columnist Ernie Pyle, who both had been firsthand observers of fighting during the war, discussed how they had grown tired of the grind of combat and were looking forward to going home.

In fact, Sherrod planned to leave for the United States in a couple of days. “I’m getting too old to stay in combat with these kids,” Pyle told Sherrod, “and I’m going to go home, too, in about a month. I think I’ll stay back around the airfields with the Seabees and engineers in the meantime and write some stories about them.” (Pyle had written a U.S. Navy public relations officer he knew that he had a “spooky feeling that I’ve been spared once more and that it would be asking for it to tempt Fate again.”)

As he prepared to leave the Panamint, Sherrod could not find the ship’s mess treasurer, to whom he owed $2.50 for two days’ meals. Pyle agreed to pay the bill for his colleague, and asked Sherrod to see about forwarding his mail when he made it to the American base on Guam. From there, Sherrod began his long voyage home, traveling to Pearl Harbor, San Francisco, and, finally, New York.

The encounter on the Panamint marked the last time Sherrod saw Pyle alive, as the Time correspondent left Okinawa on April 11. While in Hawaii, Sherrod heard the news of Pyle’s death from Japanese gunfire on April 18 while on a mission with the U.S. Army’s Seventy-Seventh Infantry Division. “I never learned which doughboy of the Seventy-Seventh Division persuaded Ernie to change his mind and go on the Ie Shima invasion off the west coast of Okinawa,” said Sherrod. “But Ernie rarely refused a request from a doughboy, or any other friend.” The death of Pyle, who Sherrod praised as being better than anyone else at registering the feeling of the average man about the war, made national and international headlines, but he was just one of many on Okinawa, American and Japanese, who lost their lives in some of the costliest fighting of the war.

By the time major combat operations for Operation Iceberg ceased near the end of June, more than 12,000 Americans had been killed along with approximately 110,000 of the Japanese military and anywhere from 40,000 to 150,000 civilians. Offshore, the U.S. Navy had thirty-six ships sunk and 368 damaged due to relentless Japanese kamikaze attacks. The landscape on Okinawa’s southern line resembled that of a World War I–era battlefield, with more than 300,000 soldiers and civilians jammed into an area about the distance between Capitol Hill and Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., noted William Manchester, who served as a sergeant with the Marine Corps and fought on the island. “You could smell the front long before you saw it; it was one vast cesspool,” recalled Manchester. “The two great armies, squatting opposite one another in mud and smoke, were locked together in unimaginable agony.” Eugene B. Sledge of Company K, Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, remembered that he and his buddies fought in an “environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.” Sherrod could only reflect on what he had heard during a pre-invasion intelligence briefing, when an officer said U.S. soldiers and marines should “expect resistance to be most fanatical.” It was.

Sherrod’s coverage of the last battle in the Pacific war began with a sober final intelligence briefing on the Panamint, after which “nobody could have felt overconfident.” After hearing from invasion planners that the Okinawa landings were expected to be “horrendous—worse than Iwo,” according to Sherrod, Pyle said to him, “‘What I need now is a great big drink.’ We did have a drink. Many of them.” Ulithi’s jovial commander, Commodore Oliver Owen “Scrappy” Kessing, had arranged a farewell party at the officers’ club (the Black Widow) on Asor Island for the correspondents and high-ranking officers from the navy and First and Sixth Marine Divisions. The party included a band and, “miraculously,” women—about seventy nurses from the six hospital ships in the anchorage, plus two women radio operators from a Norwegian ship. “Everybody got drunk . . . as people always do the last night ashore,” Sherrod recalled.

The next morning, as the approximately forty reporters and photographers left Asor for their assigned ships, Kessing had an African American band on the dock playing its own “boogie-woogie” version of sad farewell music. Also on hand to see them off was a Seabee lieutenant whose detachment had built most of the base and a special guest, Coast Guard Commander Jack Dempsey, the former boxing champion. Someone in the crowd on the dock shouted out a warning to Pyle—famous for his columns focusing on the average GIs in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France—to be sure to keep his head down on Okinawa. “Listen, you bastards,” Pyle joked to his colleagues, “I’ll take a drink over every one of your graves.” Then, he turned to Dempsey, who, Sherrod noted, weighed about twice as much as the rail-thin reporter, put up his fists in mock belligerence, and asked the former boxer, “Want to fight?” It all made for a pleasant trip for Sherrod who, along with Jay Eyerman, a photographer from Life magazine, had been assigned to the Coast Guard transport USS Cambria, home also to the headquarters of the Sixth Marine Division. “This is the smoothest working staff I’ve ever seen,” Commodore Herbert Knowles said of the marines on the Cambria. “They know what they want; they know how to load a ship. They don’t have to ask the general every time a decision has to be made.”

The Sixth Marines needed able commanders if they were to survive what awaited them on Okinawa, an island sixty miles long and three to ten miles wide and well within range of bases from which Japanese kamikaze planes could reach the more than 1,300 U.S. ships involved in the invasion. Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of the Tenth Army, devised a plan in which two marine divisions (the Sixth and First) and two army divisions (the Seventh and Ninety-Sixth) would land on west-central beaches near the village of Hagushi. The island’s topography, especially its mountainous regions on its southern end near the ancient castle town of Shuri, made it ideal for Japanese forces of the Thirty-Second Army under the command of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima to construct fortifications in caves and bunkers that could rain destruction upon the advancing enemy. 

The Japanese planned on letting the Americans land unopposed, then isolate them ashore to be annihilated in a “decisive battle” once the fleet had been destroyed by kamikaze attacks from both the sea and air. After the fighting ended, U.S. troops discovered that in just one sector of the enemy’s defenses they had faced sixteen grenade launchers, eighty-three light machine guns, forty-one heavy machine guns, seven 47-mm antitank guns, six field guns, two mortars, and two 70-mm howitzers. The Japanese soldiers on Okinawa took as their motto: “One plane for one warship, one boat for one ship, one man for ten of the enemy or one tank.” Okinawa itself stood as a formidable obstacle to a successful invasion, noted Sherrod. “The island abounded in flies, mosquitoes, mites, rats, and poisonous snakes,” he said.

While awaiting the invasion on his transport, Sherrod spent several hours listening to propaganda broadcasts from Radio Tokyo, a station he had first come across while at sea with the U.S. Third Fleet before the invasion of Iwo Jima. Radio Tokyo’s broadcasts were made in English every hour on the hour, usually in the afternoon, and featured commentaries on Japanese achievements in science and newscasts slanted toward home consumption, as well as providing “aging popular music” and messages from American and British prisoners of war made under pressure. “Anyone listening exclusively to Radiotokyo could only conclude that Japan is winning the war,” said Sherrod. “Radiotoyko permits no admissions of death or of retreat such as even [Nazi propaganda minister Joseph] Goebbels must sometimes make.” 

Even before the U.S. fleet reached Okinawa, Radio Tokyo claimed that its forces had sunk an American battleship, six cruisers, seven destroyers, and a minesweeper. The broadcasters for the “Zero Hour” program Sherrod listened to on the Cambria interspersed their wild reports of success with banter and music. Before playing a song titled “Going Home,” one of the broadcasters introduced the tune as a “little juke-box music for the boys and make it hot, because the boys are going to catch hell soon, and they might as well get used to the heat.” The Japanese broadcasters failed in their attempt to strike fear into the hearts of their audience. Sherod noted that the few sailors who sat around the communication room on the transport listening to Radio Tokyo “acted as bored as men who had seen a Grade B movie three times.”

Sherrod could never have anticipated what awaited the marines and soldiers when they landed on Okinawa on April 1, Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day. It proved to be quite an April Fool’s prank by the Japanese. Early on, it looked like the reception on the beaches would be hot, as kamikazes were active seven hours before the start of the invasion. “Many times before daylight the sky around us was pierced by anti-aircraft tracer bullets, but no enemy planes got within shooting distance of the Cambria,” said Sherrod. The suicide planes did cause some damage to the transport USS Hinsdale and two Landing Ships, Tank (LSTs) carrying troops of the Second Marine Division making a diversionary demonstration south of Okinawa. The U.S. troops who landed ashore on L-Day (Love-Day in the voice signal alphabet), however, “stepped ashore with slightly more opposition than they would have had in maneuvers off the coast of California. To say merely that they were bewildered is to gild the lily of understatement,” Sherrod observed.

Missing from the landing beaches on the west coast from north of Kadena southward halfway to Naha was the usual deadly rain of withering machine-gun fire, nine-inch rockets, and 320-mm mortars. Within three hours, the First Marine Division had taken Yontan Airfield against only a few shots from isolated snipers at a cost of two killed and nine wounded. At 10:00 a.m. Sherrod wrote in his notebook: “This is hard to believe.” The news was the same for the soldiers, with the Seventh Division stepping from their amtracs onto a seawall “as easily as if they had been on a pleasant fishing trip,” noted the correspondent. The soldiers moved on to capture Katena Airfield after disposing of a solitary machine-gun position. 

On Okinawa, Sherrod discovered half-heartedly constructed pillboxes, most of which seemed to have been abandoned long ago. “Only a few [mortar] bursts were fired at the landing amtracs, and none of them caused any casualties,” he said. A relieved Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner radioed a message to Admiral Chester Nimitz in Hawaii that read: “I may be crazy but it looks like the Japanese have quit the war, at least in this sector.” The more realistic Nimitz responded: “Delete all after ‘crazy.”

Sherrod, too, expected stiffer opposition to come, realizing that the Japanese had “given up their beaches above Naha and moved farther south.” What nobody could foresee on the invasion’s first day, or in the two weeks that followed, was that the enemy “would have the strength to fight as fiercely as they finally did—else why had they let us ashore so easily?” he asked. A marine officer proved to be prophetic when he said to Sherrod: “This is the finest Easter present we could have received. But we’ll get a bellyful of fighting before this thing is over.”

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