The Battle of Okinawa by George Feifer

Author:George Feifer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780762762545
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2014-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

The sergeant knew Klingenhagen's very first action as a replacement on Sugar Loaf three days earlier had put him in a kind of shock. A mortar barrage killed his lieutenant and so ravaged his squad that only four men were able to withdraw. One of the four was badly wounded; another lasted only until he reached the bottom of the hill, when he fell dead at Klingenhagen's feet with a bullet hole in his chest. Yet although the eighteen-year-old private “sure hoped” it wouldn't happen, he also knew he'd go up again if ordered.

A seasoned military maxim posits that a combat unit that has taken casualties of 30 percent or more can't sustain its fighting spirit. Many frontline units on Okinawa went far above that, Whitaker's 29th Regiment to 82 percent. However true it was (as many Japanese survivors later saw it) that Americans won their assured victory largely by applying their greatly superior resources, it's thus also true that those at the killing edge behaved exceptionally. Another old adage that war is 90 percent logistics didn't diminish their record of surpassing courage and esprit de corps.

Dick Whitaker was among the majority to whom it never occurred not to obey every order, and his wounds had been relatively trifling so far. Two days after his charge up Sugar Loaf on May 14, he and his platoon's other survivors were on the back slope of a little rise a hundred yards north. Exhausted and numb, they'd lost all their machine guns on the hill. Whitaker knew the wasted platoon would be ordered up again soon—but maybe not now, maybe not until tomorrow. That was all the future they could contemplate.

Whitaker dug his foxhole deeper and stuck his shovel in the mud to light a cigarette. He leaned down toward a buddy's match, his left hand remaining on the shovel's handle. A sniper's bullet caught it there, exactly where his heart had been a second earlier.

He made his own way to his battalion aid station, about half a mile to the rear. Cleaned and dressed, his wound seemed less serious than when the bullet struck. Three days later, a doctor pronounced him fit for duty, and he returned to his unit, which was even smaller because it had charged Sugar Loaf again in his absence. (A month to the day after Whitaker was hit, Marine Corps headquarters in Washington wrote his parents that he'd been wounded in action against the enemy on—this was mistaken by two days—May 18. “Your anxiety is realized and you may be sure that any additional details or information received will be forwarded to you at the earliest possible moment.” That moment came more than a month later, when the campaign was over and Whitaker was back on Guam. The new note informed that he'd been returned to duty on May 20.)

Two weeks later, the 4th and 29th Marine Regiments attacked the Oroku Peninsula, site of Naha Airfield and of the tunnels of the Naval Base Force and Captain Kojo's regimental headquarters.

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