The World at War (69 page)

ROBERT SHERROD

War correspondent

The contrast between Tarawa and
Eniwetok [February 1944] is what you would expect after we had learned a great deal about amphibious warfare. At Tarawa we were just starting, it was our first action against a defended beach, and Eniwetok was fifteen weeks later. We had learned at Tarawa that three thousand tons of bombs was not enough, particularly when it's the wrong type, when it's fragmentation instead of explosive, for instance. By Eniwetok we had forty thousand tons of preliminary bombardment and bombing, and we didn't have there the problem of the coral reefs, because central Eniwetok is not a coral island so our landing boats could get ashore all right. We had new equipment such as the Army DUKWs, pronounced 'ducks', which are trucks rather than tractors, not treaded but running on rubber tyres. Marvellous machines, especially for bringing us material – equipment of various types, food, water and so on. So we were well prepared for Eniwetok, which was a different type of island. It was hilly, even mountainous in a small way, it was eight square miles instead of the half square mile we had at Tarawa, but we still did not realise the extent of the difficulty that we were going to have with it. They were awfully good at digging into those ravines, tunnels forty, fifty even one hundred feet long with a great many exits to them. They were hard to get out, you needed a number of weapons – the flame-thrower was always good for clearing caves. You used Bangalore torpedoes, hand grenades, you even used bulldozers. Not many people realise that the bulldozer was a weapon in World War Two. We armoured the bulldozers and used them, with cover from the air of course, to close up the vents in the caves. There must have been thousands of Japanese who suffocated to death across the Pacific because their caves were closed by bulldozers.

MARINE SERGEANT WILSON COOKE

Iwo Jima

We used everything available – demolition charges, flame-throwers and what not – but the Japanese were so well entrenched and had been there for so many months preparing the islands for defensive situations that if you blew one entrance another would open up, and they had tools inside with which to work themselves back to the surface. They had sliding doors to close off so that the flame-throwers wouldn't get them and exhaust the oxygen. So it meant simply that men went in, active men, and you killed them underground. It was just that rough.

MARINE LENLY COTTON

Okinawa.

Our platoon was – other than the one that could vote – they were all under twenty. Ninety per cent were nineteen or younger, there were as many below eighteen as above, five or six that were sixteen, including myself, and one that was fifteen that I know of personally.

ROBERT SHERROD

The decision on the approach to Japan, now that we knew the end of the war was approaching, was taken in July 1944 at a meeting in Pearl Harbor between President Roosevelt, General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz. This was the only time MacArthur left his own area during World War Two – actually he never came back to the mainland. MacArthur and Nimitz made their presentations without their staffs and at the end of it Roosevelt told MacArthur he accepted his version and therefore we would approach Japan by two routes – MacArthur's from the south-west Pacific up to Leyte, and Nimitz across the central Pacific – of course by then we were already in the Marianas – on up to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Their forces would converge at Okinawa and the invasion would take place from there. I think you have to say politics were involved. Roosevelt was having a difficult election in 1944, when he ran for his third term against Thomas Dewey, the Republican, and MacArthur was a threat to him, always. MacArthur had a great following among the common people in the United States, particularly among the right-wingers, and he of course was a Republican. So I'm sure you could speculate sensibly that Roosevelt let MacArthur have his way because it did eliminate him as a factor in the election of 1944.

MARIANAS TURKEY SHOOT
JUNE 1944

ENSIGN ROY 'BUTCH' VORIS

Fighter pilot on the USS
Enterprise

They'd picked them up on radar now and it was apparently a strike that we'd not had any intelligence on. It was a major wave and I would think it would be somewhere around two hundred to three hundred Japanese fighters and dive bombers and torpedo planes. They were somewhere between twenty-five and thirty thousand feet, that was way above our normal operating altitude in those days and so we climbed to intercept them and here we saw them coming and they had already started their run in and were heading downhill, picking up speed. And I remember the fighters criss-crossing over the dive bombers and the torpedo planes and we just went full throttle and came right on top of them, just a trail right on down. So were able to work the attack force for a period of about a hundred miles, one at a time, nibbling away at them and by the time they had traversed that last hundred miles I don't think more than a dozen of them, of the Japanese planes, ever reached our Task Force.

BATTLE OF SAMAR, LEYTE GULF
OCTOBER 1944

SEAMAN GEORGE SMITH

Flight-deck crewman on escort carrier USS
White Plains

Someone yelled at me, 'You'd better get your helmet and your Mae West on, because here come the Japs,' and at about that time I heard an explosion on the fantail. First I thought it was one of our own planes exploding back there and I looked up and saw all this tin foil falling, this tin foil to jam our radar and of course it was general quarters and everybody manned their battle stations and then they started shooting, trying to get our range. Our skipper turned the ship where the shells landed, he was zigzagging, then we started to lay down smoke but they pulled in pretty fast on us, they caught one of the carriers back there [USS
Kitkun Bay]
and they sank it. They got so close we could see the Japanese flag flying. This was a running battle of about two hours and we were going between these two islands and the Japanese thought it was leading to a trap so they broke off the engagement.

CAPTAIN TADASHI NAKAJIMA

Commander Mabalacat base, the Philippines, organiser of first Special Attack Unit (Kamikaze)

The first attacks took place against the American carriers in Leyte Gulf. The reason why this development took place was that if the Americans succeeded in landing on Leyte and then set up air bases then they would cut us off completely from oil supplies and the United States would force Japan to its knees. Now, why were fighter planes used in these Special Attack forces? The reason was that Japan had fewer and fewer bombing planes, attack planes, and we had to rely on fighter planes. However, of course, fighter pilots were not trained in bombing attacks and therefore it was felt that the only way to solve this was to have these fighter pilots ram themselves, plane and body together, into the enemy ships.

SEAMAN SMITH

At about two o'clock that afternoon we were still at battle stations in a formation of four carriers because they'd sunk one in the morning and at the time we didn't know it but we were attacked by kamikazes. We thought they was dropping bombs on us because one of the carriers off the port side there
[USS
St Lô
] took a direct hit and after that we saw a plane come down and hit them and we knew we was under attack by suicide bombers. They hit this carrier dead centre and as we went by men were abandoning ship and as we got beyond it the whole ship seemed to explode and there was nothing there. And at about that time on our own ship a kamikaze came in on us and went in just like a regular landing. I guess he was trying to sneak up on us like one of our own planes coming in. As he started to drop in the skipper seen what he was doing and turned the ship hard port. Well, the men on the starboard side they swung their guns around and shot across the flight deck, hitting the kamikaze, and he winged over and dropped on the other side of the catwalk into the water and exploded with debris showering up on to the flight deck.

LIEUTENANT FRANK MANSON

Crew on Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer USS
Laffey

I was on the bridge of our destroyer in a bay in the Philippines and these shiny planes appeared over us and they dived on two of the destroyers and hit them. I turned to my skipper, who was a veteran of the South Pacific, and said, 'Captain, did you ever see anything like this in the South Pacific?' He said, 'Hell, no, I've never seen anything like it,' and he put on flank speed and we started to turn in a tight circle – he thought that was the best manoeuvre.

IWO JIMA
FEBRUARY–MARCH 1945

MARINE JACK STEARN

We didn't expect much opposition because there was going to be a tremendous bombardment by the Fleet and the Air Force. The Air Corps had been bombing continually for over a month. When we began to get close to the island it was during the night and I came up on deck to watch the excitement. It was a beautiful sight to see these different ships of war firing at the beaches, the flashes, the roar, the tremendous power that seemed to overpower the island. Then it began to get late so I went below to get myself some sleep before we had to land. And coming up for the landing the firing was still going on and you could see the flash – well, it was day by this time but you could still see the flashes from the gunships, the battleships and cruisers and destroyers, and you also could see the strikes of the rounds of artillery on the beach, a lot of flames and a lot of dust.
^*69

MARINE SERGEANT COOKE

It had been bombed for seventy-odd days by the Air Corps and prior to going in we shelled it for two days and we'd found this normally suppressed anything on the beach from former operations, that is Saipan in the Marshalls, etc. I went in on Blue Beach with the 24th Marines and when we hit the beach we moved about – oh, possibly three hundred yards in – just as far as they, meaning the Japanese, decided for us to go and then they turned loose with everything they had, so they pinned us on the beach itself. So we spent the first night, we meaning my company, spent the first night on the beach. We did not go in – we could not go in, we tried an attack and it did not work. The next morning at daybreak my company, that was Charlie Company – and Bravo Company, which was in front of us was shot off the hill, unfortunately by some of our planes and a hell of a lot of Japanese – we relieved Bravo. We were committed and we stayed committed for twenty-six days after that. I have a picture taken on Iwo of my company. There's sixteen of us left out of two hundred and seventy that went in.

MARINE CORPSMAN HERMAN RABECK

The other islands were just normal islands but this thing looked like something out of godforsaken. As you hit the island it was – if there's ever been hell, this was it. There wasn't a living thing anywhere in sight. I would say that forty to fifty per cent of the men I got close to were dead. I was actually hopping over bodies and you never could tell who was alive and who wasn't because everybody hit the ground and stayed there. There was a little incline and everybody clung to the incline because the fire was that heavy and everything that hit the beach was blasted out of the water as fast as it hit it. In fact our own men were blasting ships out of the water to make room for more guys to get in, it was that bad. The whole line of the shores was just one mess of debris, of LSTs and LCTs [Landing Craft Tanks] and God knows what else that tried to get up on the beach, stopped at that point and couldn't get back. They just blew them right out of the water's edge so we couldn't get any wounded off the island. It was just one of the biggest messes I have ever seen. I don't know who the beach master was but he had the roughest job of any man I've heard of because there was absolutely no way of getting boats in or out without blasting your way in, one way or another.

ROBERT SHERROD

I remember walking along the beach and seeing how many people had been killed during the night, and the splattered arms and legs and guts and blood you found all along. The casualties were horrible. I described one battalion that was commanded by a captain because all the other officers had been killed or wounded. Several battalions had over one hundred per cent casualties, that is counting the reinforcements that came in against the original baseline, of course, and you'd find such things as not a single officer remaining in a regiment, except perhaps one, with the rank of major or higher. It's the only battle in the Pacific War when our casualties were the same as the Japanese, although the Japanese were all dead except a few hundred that surrendered, and ours included dead and wounded.
^*70

CORPSMAN RABECK

Our own shells were pretty accurate – we had no problems on this particular island with our own shells, we had enough to contend with the Japanese shells. They were too damned accurate, they were unbelievably accurate, they just lobbed in like clockwork, rhythmically patterned, one after another, just bounced right in there and they didn't miss anything that was in sight. That spotter up on Mount Suribachi had everybody in his line, couldn't miss, we were sucked in beautifully.

MARINE LIEUTENANT CLAYTON EASTON

The thirty-first day was just as bad as the first one. They could reach us any time with anything they had. Their fire-control plots, their gun cables, their gun controls were blocked off to where they could fire at any inch of the island at any time. It was just a fact that you put two and two third divisions of marines in, and then put the Japanese there, if a bullet hit the island anywhere it had to hit somebody.

MARINE GEORGE SLATTERY

One thing that impressed me about Iwo was the underground noise, the rumbling that used to go on under the ground. You'd hear this rumbling all through the night and the ground was warm – you see, this was a volcanic island. We heard this noise underneath and there were people, marine officers, who were convinced that the Japanese were digging underneath us and were going to blow up the whole island or that something awful was going to happen.