Okinawa

All posts tagged Okinawa

Today we continue letting the reader see some of the specific references behind the details in X-Day: Japan. These are not formal citations, as they are not all root sources and the book is not an academic volume. The use of real historical elements for X-Day: Japan serves to educate the reader about the time, add interest to the story, and honestly it just made the thing easier to write!

August 30, 1945
Purple heart orders and production,
Giangreco, Hell to Pay, p187-193 [hardcover, 2009]

September 10, 1945
Typhoon Ursula,
wikipedia.org

September 17, 1945
Typhoon Ida,
wikipedia.org
navsource.org

September 21, 1945
Antitank Rocket, Methods of Use,
youtube.com

October 10, 1945
Typhoon Louise,
history.navy.mil
danielborgstrom.blogspot.com
navsource.org
glynn.k12.ga.us

October 11, 1945
USS Laffey, destroyer DD-724 [MUSEUM SHIP at Patriot’s Point],
patriotspoint.org

October 28, 1945
Downfall operational plan, 5/28/45, Annex 3 – estimated lift requirements
theblackvault.com

November 6, 1945
Petition to make Ernie Pyle’s house a national landmark,
nps.gov

November 9, 1945
Men lined up waiting to use the head before an assault,
Sledge, With the Old Breed
Surrender rates of Japanese soldiers,
Frank, Downfall, p28-29 and p71-72 [Penguin paperback, 2001]

November 11, 1945
Diagrams of amphibious assault boats,
ww2gyrene.org

November 16, 1945
USS Charette, destroyer DD-581, which had a remarkable career with the Greeks as the Velos,
wikipedia.org
USS Montrose, attack transport APA-212,
nasflmuseum.com

November 17, 1945
Helicopter medevac,
olive-drab.com
airspacemag.com

November 19, 1945
Estimate of Japanese tank strength and tactics,
ibiblio.org/hyperwar

November 20, 1945
USS Sanctuary, hospital ship AH-17,
wikipedia.org
158th RCT, “Bushmasters”
ww2f.com
wikipedia.org

November 21, 1945
USS Athene, attack cargo ship AKA-22,
navsource.org
USS Kidd, destroyer DD-661 [MUSEUM SHIP],
usskidd.com
USS Chester, heavy cruiser CA-27,
ibiblio.org/hyperwar
USS Windham Bay, escort carrier CVE-92,
sites.google.com/site/windhambay
USS Comfort, hospital ship AH-6,
dorriehoward.info/comfort
Blood supply,
Giangreco, Hell to Pay, p139 [hardcover, 2009]
USS Firedrake, Mount Hood class,
wikipedia.org
ibiblio.org/hyperwar
USS Orleck, destroyer DD-886 [MUSEUM SHIP],
orleck.org
USS Guam, Alaska-class,
wikipedia.org
wikipedia.org

November 22, 1945
USS Heerman (DD-532), USS John C. Butler (DE-339), – legends of Taffy-3,
bosamar.com
wikipedia.org
navsource.org
“The outcome is doubtful, but we will do our duty.”
Rear Admiral Robert W. Copeland,
wikipedia.org

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[Tuttle and Major Lawless watched an engineer team practice installing a temporary bridge.]

At a whistle a gaggle of forty-some marginally uniformed men piled out of two trucks and spread out over the chosen work site. They ranged in age from teenage to forty-something. Another truck held sections of pre-fabricated frame work. One team of men got to work rigging sections to be lifted by a small tractor crane, which was then moving up into position between that truck and the planned span. The officers stood to one side pointing at nearby hills and depressions. The conversation I overheard was about what sort of security they would require to make a bridge here. Engineers are easy targets when up on the front line.

Two teams dug by hand to set the near side footers. Using the crane, the rigging team had laid out and connected the leading two ten foot long bridge sections and were rigging a third when the footer teams got their supports adjusted level with each other. By eye I figured they could cover this span with four sections, plus short on-off ramps. They could set the whole thing with two more lifts of the crane.

But then another whistle blew and everyone stopped to look. One of the officers jogged over to the crane and stepped up to the cab, telling the driver something over the sound of its compact diesel. The engine stopped as the officer stepped back down. The driver stood up, leaning out of the cab, with a dumb grin on his face. “This piece of equipment has been taken out of commission by ‘enemy action’. You fellahs are on your own!” The driver crawled out onto the front deck of his mechanical casualty and sat down to watch the show.

It was a good show. Confusion reigned for just a moment, workmen not sure which tools they should be holding. The officers in this bunch knew what they were doing though, and they jumped straight into the job. All the interconnected pieces were broken down. Every man, officer and enlisted, took hold of a hot steel bar and they walked each piece to the river bank and onto the waiting supports. Beads of sweat and expressions of profanity flowed off the men as they forced their will upon the heavy steel.

There are integrated rollers in this bridge system, so each piece can be rolled out half way, the next piece attached, and the deck extended progressively. The anchor men waded across with their tools to work on the receiving side, coming back several times for more tools and bigger levers. The entire bridge would need to be manhandled once the free end of it got across to the other supports. Eventually two large driftwood logs were commandeered into service as pry bars, and the span was set and ready for a test run.

The young fellows looked overly happy running vehicles across. First one drove an empty jeep and soon groups were riding over on the truck with all their tools. They had completed a satisfying job. I didn’t dare to remind them that their next job would be to come back and break down all those practice bridges.

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[Tuttle met an aspiring new writer while waiting out the rain in an Okinawan mess hall.]

By virtue of being in one place for a while, even though they are taxed by regular field exercises, some men have got a good bit of reading and writing done. One regular in our little library came by today looking for me. He wanted to pitch me on a book idea, before he went to the trouble of writing the rest of it.

I suppose that’s a normal thing, getting an advance to write a book, for a known writer. I’m not sure if it will work for Marine Corps Sergeant David Carr. Here all the way from Philadelphia, Sergeant Carr has been getting a taste of home from Raymond Chandler novels. I’m just a newspaper man, working for a newspaper publisher, so I can’t book anybody for a novel.

So here’s what I said I’d do. The knockout intro to his new spy thriller follows. Publishers take note!

I knew she was trouble the minute she came into my office. My office is a tank. Address: Half a barrel of gas from where it was yesterday.

She was Korean, born to Japanese parents. Her father had been a big shot with some big shot company in some big shot business. She was an orphan now – and a spy.

The fighting to get here was fierce. At least they told me it was. We haven’t seen any of it. Our job is to get this little lady to a dot on the map, then ditch her and pull back.

The whole operation, battalion size from the look of it, plus air support and artillery, was just for this little job. There’s not an anthill of terrain in this sector that either side cares about.

We’re in cramped quarters, but it’s not her fault. She’s tiny. The G-2 man with her however is big and loud. It’s too bad he has to come back with us…

That’s all you get for now, dear editors. Should you want rights on the rest, write for Sergeant David Carr, care of the 1st Marine Division. I for one am dying to see how he gets on with the Korean femme fatale, in the future tense.

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[Tuttle got to watch a bazooka range session, followed by a demonstration from an expert team.]

Hoots went out and big grins shown all around when the first rockets hit home. Sparks, flame, noise, and not a few flying chunks of former U.S. Army tank, M4A2 Sherman (zero mm gun), met their final resting place. Not every rocket found home, of course, and those shooters who missed risked getting fresh nicknames during the march back.

With the tank put permanently out of action several times over, and each pair having done a live fire drill, the instructors found there were exactly four rounds left. A question was put to the instructees, “How fast do you think a good team can put four aimed rounds on target? When you need to shut up an enemy gun, you need to make sure of it to save your buddies. So how quick can you make it happen?” After some murmuring a few answers rang out, “Three minutes!” to open, then a run down to “60 seconds!” before no one would go any lower.

The senior sergeant took dollar bets on that one minute over/under and told his privates to watch closely as two corporals took those four rockets to the center firing pit. I was volunteered to keep time, as the professional impartial observer. On my mark a martial ballet played out at a startling pace. I don’t think anyone looked at the rounds hitting, as they were watching nonstop action in the gun pit.

The loader danced from tube side to ammo side of the gunner in nonstop motion, putting a firm hand on the gunner’s helmet between each pass as a signal. I stopped my watch at 37 seconds, which was probably a little long as I watched the last round hit and the final bits of hot tank fragment fall back to the ground.

The column of Marines marched back to camp, a little wiser and about twenty dollars poorer.

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[Another big storm hit Okinawa, much stronger than the previous. It was not to be the last, nor the worst.]

Many tents were either torn from their rope anchors or simply ripped apart in place. The reader should note, the tent stakes in use here are not like what a civilian hiker has in his or her backpack. These are serious steel posts, driven into the earth with two-fisted hammers. Also the canvas of the tents is a heavy weave, and doped with sealant. The tents are tied down with taut ropes as thick as an adult finger. These are not trivial shelters. Still, the wind made them seem little better than a child’s couch cushion fort.

A check in the base hospital shows that there were injuries, some of them serious. Two dozen or so beds are freshly occupied, in a facility serving about 10,000 men, and I have reports of similar results elsewhere. There is no word yet on fatalities, but it is still early and there are piles of debris to sort through.

I didn’t have to go anywhere to observe damage to the fleet. From our battered tent camp (my particular shelter was one of the lucky ones), one can look directly down on Buckner Bay. Multiple transport and service ships are beached on the shore. A few have damage apparent even from this distance. I did go down to the bay to get better word. A tug captain tells me they’re going to start surveying the damaged ships and pulling the relatively healthy ones back out in the water. He won’t be the one doing it as his boat was smashed against a pier before being tossed ashore upside down.

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[Tuttle had a grandstand view for every manner of amusement, some of it put on by devious pranksters.]

…It is also not unusual to see a bridge drive by. Not a truck carrying bridge sections, but an actual self-propelled self-deploying bridge. It can drive up to a river bank, fold itself out over the span, and be driven right over.

Oh, there are people here besides the engineers. The bombers and long range fighters make some racket as they sortie and return. Ships come and go, taking supplies and liberty, heading back out into the fight or to bring us even more stuff.

The ground combat units here, who mostly just stayed on after conquering the place, are the 1st Marine Division, the 7th Infantry Division, and the 27th Infantry Division. The Army and Marine Corps units are camped generally on their respective sides of the island. They are refitting and retraining, as you might expect, but the pace of it leaves some of them restless.

Pranks are to be expected. Inter-service pranks especially. Add in the presence of a hundred thousand technical specialists, and the jokes can get intricate.

Colored smoke grenades are a favorite booby trap device so far. A delay mechanism is set in some way, so a machine will get along a ways before green or red smoke billows out from the engine compartment – or fills the driver’s cab. One group of on-looking Seabees thought it was hilarious to see an Army crane run straight over a jeep, the driver blinded by a well timed smoke bomb, until it turned out that it was the personal jeep of a Navy captain, who only got out a minute before.

Those Seabees kept the Navy officers’ latrines spic and span for the duration of their stay.

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[Tuttle observed the highly efficient rumor mill in the American military camps, and took one chance to float his own tidbit through it.]

“Look here! The Navy just bought another 125,000 purple heart medals . Forget what they said about Japan keeling over before we get there!” He had a point in that – whatever the Navy said, it would have to buy hardware to go with what it really thought.

Seeing my opportunity to add a marker to the story, a tag for me to watch it run around, I interjected something else I’d learned. On a tour of the Philadelphia mint just a few months before, they showed me how the medals were being made of molded plastic instead of more precious materials. It had as much to do with holding the thing together as conserving war materials, but I didn’t include that part.

I hung out near the mess tent coffee urns for the rest of the day. Within hours the Navy order had jumped to a quarter million. The Army got in on the act for another 400,000 . No one really knew what a purple heart medal was made of in the first place, so quickly there were critical shortages of: brass, copper, silver, or even purple paint. The best story had a German spy try to blow up Fort Knox, causing a run on gold.

Satisfied that the rumor mill here was working at full efficiency, I took a walk through Naha in the warm setting sun. I wondered if when the sun came up again there wouldn’t be a story about crates of medals being air dropped to us, ‘just in case.’

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It must be emphasized that X-Day: Japan is not an academic work. Still, we’re proud of the research and detail that went into it. Some readers have asked for more information about certain details, or for a longer list of references than in the bibliography.

In the margins of the main manuscript can be found links to many of the little facts that decorate the novel. We’ve compiled them into a list, sorted by the Tuttle journal dates in which each was found. A bunch of them are given below. The list will be completed in later installments.

July 16, 1945
FM 30-26 Regulations for Correspondents Accompanying U.S Army Forces in the Field,
archive.org

July 19, 1945
Macarthur’s personal plane, and his assistants,
donmooreswartales.com
ozatwar.com
Flying across the Pacific in a hurry,
wikipedia.org
wikipedia.org
uswarplanes.net

July 22, 1945
USO,
archive.org
Hawaii – it’s history, economy, defenses, and outlook – as of late 1940,
fortune.com
Prostitution in Hawaii,
library.manoa.hawaii.edu
Actual USO show,
gvnews.com
abebooks.com

July 23, 1945
Training on Hawaii up in Camp Tarawa,
Chuck Tatum, Red Blood, Black Sand
DE’s by class and commissioning year,
ibiblio.org/hyperwar/

July 26, 1945
NATS,
wikipedia.org
vpnavy.org
FDR’s line crossing ceremony,
ww2db.com

July 27, 1945
Marpi Airfield, Saipan,
airfields-freeman.com

July 28, 1945
SB2C Helldiver,
wikipedia.org
Marine close air support,
ibiblio.org

July 29, 1945
Facilities and engineers in the Marianas,
ibiblio.org
Floating dry-dock example,
navsource.org
navsource.org
Log of bombing missions from one group,
39th.org

July 30, 1945
458th Squadron, 33th Bomb Group,
rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ny330bg/
mission log including radio report from Ray Clark,
rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ny330bg/

August 3, 1945
Baseball in wartime,
baseballinwartime.com
Navy reports on typhoon of June 1945 (Connie),
history.navy.mil
USS Red Oak Victory, cargo ship AK-235 [MUSEUM SHIP],
navsource.org
navy.memorieshop.com
richmondmuseum.org
Shortage of loading berths at Okinawa,
Nimitz Gray Books [multiple references]

August 6, 1945
Yonabaru Naval Air Station,
rememberingokinawa.com
Buckner Bay and Navy HQ buildings,
rememberingokinawa.com
Sinking of the USS Indianapolis,
history.com

August 9, 1945
Trial of Captain McVay of the Indianapolis,
ussindianapolis.org

August 10, 1945
Active airfields on Okinawa, 1945,
wikimedia.org

August 16, 1945
USO show on Okinawa,
rememberingokinawa.com
Betty Hutton,
bettyhuttonestate.com

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[Fighting the elements on Okinawa with the bivouacked troops was the USO, working hard to keep spirits up.]

Among the list of #1 priorities for the engineers here, and all their jobs are #1 priorities when making up a whole functioning civilization from practically nothing, was theater areas. They have multiple uses, not just entertainment, but today this one was dedicated to fun.

Curving rows of stout benches, most with straight board backs, run in semicircles up a terraced curving hill side. They arc almost 180 degrees around a tall Quonset-hut-style building at the bottom of the strategically chosen hill. A stage platform extends twenty feet out from the building about four feet off the ground. Everyone has a good view when the performers come out.

My companions took over a block of bench space about twenty rows back from the front. The rain took a break just then and most men took off their ponchos before settling in. Down front the usual “bald headed row” of high ranking officers and VIPs showed themselves true to form, reflecting some of the bright gray sky in the middle of a sea of olive green. I kept my own hat on as I walked down to the stage.

Most of the performers tonight were the friends I made back in Honolulu, crossing paths again with them on Guam. I pulled rank to get back stage, showing my press ID, and got to catch up with them again before their second show of the day.

For my money, not that I was spending any, the centerpiece of the show was pianist Arthur Zepp. He supported every act in the show, and in the middle took center stage for a couple solo pieces. The troops heard comedy from Dell Chain and songs from Emma Lou Welch. Virginia Carroll also sang, but what got the troops to sit up and lean in was her acrobatic act. The headliner was the surprisingly funny Betty Hutton. She sang until they drug her off stage, and I had a side stage view of all of it.

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[Tuttle and all the troops had time to kill during prolonged bouts of summer rain on Okinawa.]

People who don’t have to be outside are cooped up and getting restless. Poker games with well-worn decks are running continuously in the usual tents, campaign currency and paper IOUs moving around fluidly. No one has much stomach for setting up pranks in this depressing weather. Most write letters or sit and read in their off hours.

One well-worn bit of reading material is a copy of Yank magazine from back in June. The big cover story is a piece that directly asks the question, “How Long Will We Have to Fight the Jap War?” It’s the standard question here, and it has a lot of standard answers. Answers run from confident predictions to uncertain humor like “Golden Gate in ’48!” to more somber reflections that other soldiers don’t want to hear.

The piece in Yank gives a summary of the situation, and plenty of stats, but nothing in the way of any predictions. It ends with an admonition from the war department that however tough it gets, we have to keep up the pace or it will only get tougher. “The War Department plan calls for redeploying men from the ETO and the States so fast that the Japs will not have time to build up defenses or assemble reinforcements at spots where the Japs may figure the next invasions will come. ‘Speed is essential, for it is vitally important that we do not give the enemy time either to rest or reorganize his defenses.’”

Last I looked, there still weren’t any units from Europe in the Pacific. I suspect the boys already here will carry on with what they have for at least the next big job.

Pinup reading Yank by warbirdphotographer at deviantart.com

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