Okinawa My Battle

OKINAWA, THE BATTLE FOR, 1944

When we got back on Saipan, we got involved in a campaign of cleaning out the caves and other hiding places. Then we got busy training. Somebody built us a very nice school tent. It was about 16’ X 30’. It had a table down the center and benches for seats one each side of it. We practiced everything about communication there. Morse code by the hour; Semaphore, blinker. We had chemical warfare school. We trained on nomenclature of many weapons, on hand to hand combat. We boxed, we wrestled. We had bayonet training. We had new people. We had reveille at 5:00 every morning and all went for a pretty good run. Then we did calisthenics. We had great food. We got healthy. We gained some weight. But we got dengue. This was a disease much like malaria.
Every Saturday morning we had a battalion inspection and parade. We had a band and I loved to march to the March music. We had a reviewing area where eight of us stood and watched the marching groups. In the group was the Battalion staff officers, (Colonel Jones and three of his staff.) What was memorable for me was that four staff NCO’s including me stood with them.
Many of us got medals of one kind or other. I got a Bronze Star. We got some pictures made. I still have one of me with my Bronze Star. Also we made a picture of all the personnel who were still in the outfit that had begun the battle on Guadalcanal. There were only about 8 of us. Me, Berger, Borman, Carrington, Vrogindewey, Colonel Jones, Captain Calkins. This was out of over 1000 who started. I still have that picture, too.
On one of these Saturday mornings, we were in the company street when we saw two Jap Zeroes coming south along our beach about two miles north of us. A little back there were two of our P47’s trying to catch up with the zeroes. Then suddenly we saw two P 38’s coming behind the 47’s. They climbed over the two P 47’s, came down over the Zero’s and casually shot both of them down. Then they headed straight up in the skies and headed back where they had come from. I really never knew where they were based. It was nice to see that our side had the best planes now. It had been a different story on Guadalcanal when the Zeroes were much better thn our P 40’s and SBD’s!
Another story from those days :
As I was the top NCO in our platoon of 56 men, I really had a lot of responsibilities. We had a lot of inspections and two of our naval corpsmen were in the last tent on the second row. When we had inspections they were supposed to be in just as shipshape as the rest of us. But they didn’t seem to want to cooperate. They were always late. One Saturday Reveille blew; we fell out and I was to report that all the platoon was “present and accounted for, Sir”. The darned corpsmen weren’t there. I was furious. I went down to their tent and rolled them out of their sacks. They didn’t like it much, but they got with it.
We had a good inspection and it was all over about 11:30. I was up by the Lister bag when a bullet whizzed by me and continued on its way. I immediately thought of the two corpsmen. “I must have been a little harder on them than they liked”.
Things like happened. I found that the shot had come from Division Headquarters about a quarter of a mile away. It wasn’t the corpsmen at all, and I never had any trouble with them after this.
It was in this period that I got drunk for the only time in my life. I don’t know what the occasion for celebrating was but Lt. Walsh who my boss asked me to dome over to his tent to talk. Lt. Walsh was a drinker and couldn’t handle his liquor very well. When I got up there, he broke out a bottle of gin. He asked me to take a drink with him. I tried to beg out of it but he insisted. “This is not much more powerful than a Coke; it is mixed with pineapple juice. You will like it.” I took a glass and began sipping on it. He liked to talk and he told me all about his troubles. He had been a newspaper reporter and was well educated, but he didn’t please the Colonel very well. He talked about his family and about wars in general and military strategy. I liked him so I listened until about 11:30 PM.
He refilled my glass a time or two. I didn’t really like it. The pineapple juice made it too sweet and the gin gave it an alcoholic taste that I have never liked, but it was something to do.
I went on back down to my tent and went to bed. In about two hours I got sick as a dog and got rid of the gin and pineapple juice. To this day I remember that night when I eat pineapple! (I should add that Walsh became a favorite of Jones after the war and he called upon him for information for some articles he wrote.)

About this time I began wondering if I would make it alive through the war. I had been through so
much and had seen so many men killed, I began to think that I probably wouldn’t make it through another battle. Tough ones were ahead of us.
I made out my will and put it away in my seabag so it would be found if I were killed.
Sgt Lorne (Ham) Berger had a little game. When we got ready for a battle we would put a bottle of Budweiser beer in our seabag. The seabag would be kept in the rear echelon. We went aboard ship to battle with the two parts of our packs and a bedroll and didn’t see our seabags until the battle was over and we got back into a rest area. The arrangement was that if one of us were killed the survivor would get to drink the unlucky one’s beer. It never happened. We both survived, much to our disappointment. We always griped when we found that we didn’t get to drink the other guy’s beer!
In October we heard and saw the largest airplane we had ever seen in our lives. The big B-29 came into sight and ever so slowly, it approached and made its landing on Tinian. More and more of them came in. I went over to Tinian to see one of my men (Eddie Grieco)in the big general hospital there. There were scores of the big planes on the strip there. They began bombing Tokyo and other large Japanese cities. The Japanese had lost the war but we still had to win it.
I did my best to make my peace with God. I felt that I probably not make it through another battle. I didn’t pray to God to let me live through it. I thought that since I had seen so many men die that I couldn’t expect to come through unharmed.
We went through some changes in our position in the war. We were incorporated into the Third Amphibious Corps and the Third Corps was placed into the Tenth Army under General Simon Buckner.
On April 1st, 1945, the Tenth Army invaded the island of Okinawa. This was 1200 miles closer to Japan and was a logical site for a nearer airfield for our bombers and it would make a good jumping off place for us to invade Japan proper.
We were briefed on Okinawa after we got aboard ship and warned about the snakes there. The whole army only saw one snake while it was there.
We (the 2nd Division) were to be the Army reserve but we were to be the first troops in action. We were to make a diversionary feint landing on “Love Day”. We had been in on this same thing on Tinian and still saw plenty of action. We didn’t mind at all making our feint and then going in on a beachhead that had already been secured. We thought it would be nice to have an early breakfast, get into our landing boats, head for the beach, turn around and come back to the transport for a nice nap!

We were up at about 3:30 and had some breakfast. As we got in position for our feint landing, we began to hear the roar of many airplanes. At first I thought they were ours. I soon found they were enemies. There were hordes of them. I began to think we were going to be bombed and then I thought about torpedoes. But these Japanese pilots were not bombers or torpedo planes. They were “Kamikaze” pilots who were on one way trips. The sea was covered with around 1600 of our ships. You couldn’t see the end of them. The air was filled with black shellbursts where our navy was trying to bring down the kamikaze before they could get to our transports. One explosion could have caused more casualties than days of battle. They were pretty effective. It is hard to bring down a pilot who doesn’t intend to come back alive. Several of them plunged into ships and the sea near us. I thought that maybe this was where I would die. One of them found an LST in which some of our second regiment people were sailing and caused it to finally have to be abandoned.
Our feint was very successful in that a lot of the Japanese came down to cover us. The First and Sixth Divisions of Marines landed on further north without losing a man. We had not even made a landing and had been the only units to have casualties.
The second day we made another feint landing. This one didn’t make much difference. We stayed aboard our transport ship another day while the Army and Marines on shore routed the Japanese. Our work was strenuous but not real dangerous. Our main danger was that we were sitting around the area with hundreds of men in a perilous position if we should get any more Kamikaze attacks. A decision had to be made either to commit us or to send us home. The decision was made to send us back to Saipan.
The battle was rough for many, even costing General Buckner his life, but for me it was just like maneuvers. We got back to camp, looked in our seabags, drank our bottle of Budweiser and began training for Japan. I didn’t know it then but my war was over.