The Second World War (137 page)
North of Suri, the 7th Infantry Division took seven days to advance about six kilometres. The 96th needed three days to take Cactus Ridge. Afterwards, it managed to seize Kakazu Ridge beyond in a surprise attack before dawn, but it was forced back when the Japanese artillery, which had registered the ridgeline, concentrated all its fire upon it. After nine days of fighting, both divisions were blocked and had lost 2,500 men altogether.
General Simon Bolivar Buckner, the commander of the Tenth Army, at least had encouraging news from the marines advancing north. They had almost reached the northern tip of the island through the pine forests, which smelled so good after the rotting stench of jungle-fighting. Colonel Udo’s force had gone to ground. The 29th Marine Regiment, encountering some well-disposed Okinawans who spoke English, discovered where Udo’s base was. He had selected a peak called Yae-dake deep in the forest overlooking a river. On 14 April, the 29th and the 4th Marine Regiment attacked from opposite sides. After a two-day battle and having suffered heavy casualties, they took Yae-dake. Colonel Udo, they found, had slipped through them with some of his men to pursue the fight from elsewhere in the forest.
On 19 April, an impatient General Buckner ordered an intense bombardment of the Japanese lines and Shuri citadel, using all the artillery, navy aircraft and big guns of the fleet, in preparation for a three-division attack. The assault on the ridges right across the island failed. On 23 April, Admiral Nimitz flew to Okinawa. He was deeply worried by the losses inflicted on his ships offshore and wanted the seizure of Okinawa completed rapidly. It was suggested to Buckner that another amphibious landing should be made on the south coast by the 2nd Marine Division. Buckner firmly rejected the idea. He feared that the marines would be trapped in a beachhead and it would be difficult to supply them. Nimitz did not argue, but made it clear that the conquest of the island must be completed quickly, otherwise Buckner would be replaced.
That night the Japanese pulled back from their first line of defence, covered by a thick mist and a bombardment by their own artillery. But the next defence line on the Urasoe-Mura Escarpment, with its cliffs, was not an easy prospect. Replacements being blooded in battle often froze when they saw a Japanese soldier for the first time. Some even shouted for someone else to shoot him, forgetting to use their own weapon. The 307th Regiment of the 77th Division held off a Japanese counter-attack almost entirely with grenades. Men were ‘
tossing grenades as fast
as they could pull the pins’, a platoon leader said. To keep them supplied, a human chain behind was passing fresh crates of them forward.
At the end of the month, Buckner brought the two Marine divisions down from the north of the island. Then, on 3 May, Ushijima made his one great mistake. Persuaded by the passionate advice of his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Cho Isamu, he launched a counter-attack. Cho, an extreme militarist, responsible for the orders which led to the massacres and rapes at Nanking in 1937, advocated an attack combined with amphibious landings behind the American lines. The boatloads of soldiers were spotted by US Navy patrol boats, and a massacre ensued at sea and on the beaches. The attack by land was also a disaster. Ushijima was mortified and apologized to the one staff officer who had opposed the whole mad plan.
On 8 May, when news of Germany’s surrender reached the rifle companies of the 1st Marine Division, the most usual reaction was ‘
So what
?’ It was another war on another planet, as far as they were concerned. They were exhausted and filthy, and everything around them stank. The concentration of troops on Okinawa was abnormally dense. A battalion front extended less than 550 metres. ‘
The sewage of course was appalling
,’ wrote William Manchester, a marine sergeant on Okinawa. ‘You could smell the front line long before you saw it; it was one vast cesspool.’
On 10 May Buckner ordered a general offensive against the Shuri Line with five divisions. It was a terrible battle. Only a combination of
conventional Sherman tanks and those converted to flamethrowers could deal with some of the cave defences. One small hill called Sugar Loaf took the marines ten days of fighting, and cost them 2,662 casualties. Even some of the toughest marines faced nervous collapse, mainly due to the accuracy of the Japanese mortar and artillery fire. Everyone suffered from thudding headaches caused by the noise of the guns and explosions. At night the Japanese would try to infiltrate their lines, so starshells or flares were fired continuously into the sky lighting up the nightmare terrain with a dead, greenish glow. Sentries needed to note the position of every corpse to their front because any Japanese soldier creeping forward during the night would freeze and lie still, feigning death.
On 21 May, just as the Americans broke through to an area where they could use their tanks, the rains came, bogging down vehicles and grounding aircraft. Everyone and everything was covered in liquid clay. For the infantry and the marines carrying ammunition, slipping and sliding in the mud, was an utterly exhausting task. Living in foxholes filled with water and with decomposing bodies all around in shellholes was even worse. Corpses in the open and partially buried were crawling with maggots.
Under the cover of the heavy rain, Ushijima’s forces began to pull back to final defence positions across the southern tip of Okinawa. Ushijima knew that the Shuri Line could not hold, and with an American tank breakthrough his forces risked encirclement. He left behind a strong rear-guard, but eventually a battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment occupied the citadel of Shuri. It found that it had only a Confederate flag with it, so to the embarrassment of some officers the Stars and Bars were raised until they could be replaced with the Stars and Stripes.
On 26 May the clouds parted, and aircraft from the carriers spotted vehicles moving south from Shuri. Local Okinawans, terrified by Japanese propaganda about the Americans, insisted on fleeing with the troops even though Ushijima had directed them to seek shelter in another direction. American commanders felt compelled to open fire on the column, and the cruiser USS
New Orleans
began a bombardment of the road with its eight-inch guns. Some 15,000 civilians died along with the retreating soldiers.
After the withdrawal, Ushijima’s force was reduced to less than 30,000 men, but hard battles still lay ahead, even if the end was in sight. On 18 June, General Buckner himself was killed by shell splinters when watching an attack by the 2nd Marine Division. Four days later, General Ushijima and Lieutenant General Cho, by then beleaguered in their command bunker, made their preparations for ritual suicide by self-disembowelment and simultaneous beheading by their respectful aides. The body count of their soldiers came to 107,539, but many others had been buried beforehand or sealed in destroyed caves.
Marine and army formations had suffered 7,613 killed, 31,807 wounded and 26,211 ‘other injuries’, most of which consisted of psychological breakdown. Some 42,000 Okinawan civilians are said to have died, but the true figure may have been much higher. Apart from those killed by naval gunfire, many were buried alive in caves hit by artillery fire from both sides. In any case it prompted the question of how many Japanese civilians would die in the invasion of the home islands which was already being planned. The capture of Okinawa may not have hastened the end of the war. Its prime aim was to serve as a base for the invasion of Japan, but the suicidal nature of its defence certainly concentrated minds in Washington on the next steps to consider.
FEBRUARY–APRIL 1945
A
t the end of January 1945, while the fighting in Budapest reached its peak and Soviet armies arrived at the River Oder, the three Allied leaders were preparing to meet in Yalta to decide the fate of the post-war world. Stalin, who was afraid of flying, insisted on holding the conference at Yalta in the Crimea, where he could travel by train in his green Tsarist coach.
Roosevelt had been sworn in as president for the fourth time on 20 January. In his short inaugural address, he looked towards the peace which he would not live to see. Three days later, amid unprecedented security precautions, he embarked in secret aboard the heavy cruiser USS
Quincy
. Eleven days later the
Quincy
and her escorting warships reached Malta, where Churchill awaited him eagerly. But Roosevelt, with a smokescreen of charm and hospitality, managed to avoid discussing what they should say at Yalta. He again did not want Stalin to think that they were ‘ganging up’ on him. He clearly wanted a free hand without an agreed strategy. The British delegation became increasingly uneasy. Stalin knew exactly what he wanted, and he would play them off against each other. Roosevelt wanted above all to secure Soviet support for a United Nations Organization, while the top British priority was to obtain guarantees that Poland would be genuinely free and independent.
The two delegations flew overnight from Malta to the Black Sea, and landed at Saki on 3 February. Their long journey over the Crimean Mountains and along the coast took them past many areas laid waste by war. The delegations were installed in Tsarist summer palaces. Roosevelt and the Americans stayed in the Livadia Palace, where the meetings would take place.
For Stalin, the main purpose of the Yalta conference was to force acceptance of Soviet control of central Europe and the Balkans. He was so confident of his position that he felt able to torment Churchill in a preliminary meeting, by suggesting an offensive through the Ljubljana Gap. He knew perfectly well that Churchill’s pet project to pre-empt the Red Army had been consistently opposed by the Americans. And now with Soviet armies north-west of Budapest, the British were far too late. In any case, the Americans had just insisted on the transfer of more divisions from Italy to
the western front. Churchill must have been deeply irked as Stalin twisted the knife with mock sincerity.
Roosevelt, still hoping to give the impression that the western Allies were not ganging up, refused to see Churchill before the real business started. This precaution was wasted since the Soviet delegation had assumed that he and Churchill in Malta had already discussed their strategy. Just before the opening session, Stalin visited Roosevelt, who immediately tried to win his trust by undermining Churchill. He spoke of their disagreements over strategy and even referred back approvingly to Stalin’s toast at Teheran suggesting the massacre of 50,000 German officers, a comment which had made Churchill walk out in disgust.
Remarking that the British wanted to ‘have their cake and eat it too’, he brought up his complaint that the British would occupy northern Germany, which he had wanted for the United States but had failed to mention until it was much too late. He was prepared, however, to support Churchill’s plea that the French should have their own area of occupation in the south-west, but even that was delivered in a disparaging way, with digs against the British and de Gaulle.
When the first session began in the ballroom of the Livadia Palace on the late afternoon of 4 February, Stalin invited Roosevelt to open the proceedings. Over the next few days, they discussed the military situation and strategy, the possible dismemberment of Germany, the occupation zones and also reparations, a subject of the greatest interest to Stalin. Churchill was horrified when Roosevelt announced that the American people would not let him keep their troops in Europe much longer. American commanders especially were keen to wash their hands of Europe and finish the war with Japan. But Churchill rightly saw it as a terrible blunder in their negotiations. Stalin was immensely encouraged. He remarked afterwards to Beria that ‘
the weakness of the democracies
lay in the fact that the people did not delegate permanent rights such as the Soviet government possessed’.
On 6 February, Roosevelt’s great dream of a United Nations Organization was the subject of long and tortuous discussions. When it came to the composition of the security council and qualifications for countries to be members of the general assembly, Stalin suspected that the Americans and British had cooked up a trap. He had not forgotten the League of Nations vote condemning the Soviet invasion of Finland in the winter of 1939.
Stalin was deft and assured. He spoke with a quiet authority and played a winning hand just as cleverly as at the conference in Teheran fourteen months before, which had created the strategy to give him dominance over half of Europe. He also had the advantage of knowing from Beria’s British spies the negotiating positions of the western Allies. The other two members of the Big Three could not hope to match him. Roosevelt, looking
old and frail, with his mouth hanging open most of the time, sometimes did not appear to follow what was going on. Churchill, always likely to be carried away by his own emotional rhetoric rather than focusing on hard facts, clearly did not grasp the vital aspects of certain key discussions. This was particularly true on the question of Poland, which was so close to his heart. He seems to have missed Stalin’s subtle yet clear signals on the subject.
For Churchill, the key test of the Soviet Union’s good intentions would be how it would treat Poland. But Stalin saw no reason to compromise. The Red Army and the NKVD were now in complete control of the whole country. ‘
On Poland Iosef Vissarionovich
has not moved one inch,’ Beria told his son Sergo in Yalta. (Sergo Beria was in charge of bugging all the rooms and even of placing directional microphones to pick up Roosevelt’s conversations outside.)
Churchill had sensed he was on his own. ‘
The Americans are profoundly ignorant
of the Polish problem,’ he had told Eden and Lord Moran, his doctor. ‘At Malta I mentioned to them the independence of Poland and was met with the retort: “But surely that isn’t at stake.”’ In fact, Edward Stettinius, the secretary of state, had agreed with Eden, but Roosevelt wanted to avoid a breach with Stalin on Poland, especially if it would hinder agreement on the United Nations.