Okinawa is a valley and a ridge, a valley and a ridge, all the way to the end of the island.
When I look at the map now, I see that we couldn’t have been more than ten miles from the southern tip. But the Japs were going to make us fight for every inch of those ten miles. They had set up a defense line about three miles long across the island from the capital at Naha through an ancient fortress called Shuri Castle to Nakagusuku Bay. Their headquarters were in a big tunnel system beneath the castle, and their soldiers had been ordered to defend Shuri with their last drop of blood. North of the Shuri line they had set up their defenses on a series of parallel ridges—Awacha, Dakeshi and finally Wana. For the rest of May and into June we would throw ourselves against these ridges one by one.
When the rain let up the morning of May 3, we faced the first of those ridges. Scotty met with the company’s commanders and then told me that the coming offensive would need the full support of our mortars. We got the section squared away and, as we fired out in front of them, K Company started across the valley. With that machine-gun nest cleared out, we made good progress. But the Japs stopped us short at the next ridgeline.
It was on this day, maybe the next, that two of my men were wounded. I was standing no more than ten feet away when the shell hit, and somehow I didn’t get a scratch. But when the smoke and dust settled, both T. L. Hudson and Jim Kornaizl were down. Hudson’s left arm was bloodied between the shoulder and elbow and he was holding it at an odd angle. Kornaizl was in the dirt, jerking from head to toe, his eyes rolled back. Our corpsman rushed over. A fragment had opened up the side of Kornaizl’s skull. We got him out of there fast, then started patching up Hudson, whose arm was hanging uselessly.
Both would survive. Hudson would become my neighbor back in Texas for a time after the war was over. But I wouldn’t see Kornaizl again for decades, and then I almost wouldn’t recognize him. When I did, he would unlock a flood of memories.
That night our company got a needed rest. All night long we could hear heavy fire on our left, where the Japs staged a big counterattack. Far to the right, we could see tracers arc out over the bay where the First Marines were firing at Japs who were attempting a surprise landing behind our lines. If they had succeeded they might have rolled up the whole line. But the First caught them when they were still in the water, killing them by the hundreds before they even got to shore. The few stragglers that made it were hunted down the next morning.
During the night we were warned to watch for enemy paratroopers, but they never appeared. The Jap counterattack failed, and over the next few days we slowly began to fight our way forward again, taking heavy casualties. Our objective was a distant plateau, Dakeshi Ridge, overlooking the Awa River. From this and other ridges, the Japs had been able to fire down on our forces as they moved up along the coast.
On May 6 it started raining again, and for two days it never let up. Mud gummed up weapons everywhere along the line. Often we were setting up our mortars in a couple inches of water. Each time we fired, they sank deeper into the muck. We shored them up as best we could with boards and stones.
On May 8 we learned that the war had ended in Europe. Germany’s surrender had come too late for J.D. and for a lot of other good men. But there were no signs the Japs would follow Germany’s lead. For most of us, the end of fighting half a world away meant very little, except that maybe the flow of supplies would pick up and we’d get some help. But the Navy celebrated with a monster barrage that seemed to cut loose every gun on every ship within range of the Japs. If it did any good, you couldn’t prove it by us. We were still catching hell.
The Sixth Marine Division moved in on our right and we moved farther in from the coast, to an area called the Awacha Pocket. Except for the rain and mud, the deep draws and steep hills reminded me of Peleliu. Once again the Japs had plenty of caves and dugouts to fire from. One position covered several others, and it was almost impossible to dig them out. The roads were impassable and even amtracs could not get through to where we were set up. So they dumped our supplies a couple hundred yards away on the far side of a shallow draw. If we wanted our supplies, we had to go get them.
The business of hauling ammo, rations and five-gallon water cans across that draw got to be almost more trouble than combat itself. It was all up-and-down work. The mud would build up on your boondockers, layer by layer, so if you weren’t sinking down or sliding back into it you were tripping over yourself. To add to our troubles the Japs had discovered what we were up to and set up a Nambu machine gun at the head of that draw. Every Marine who crossed it drew fire.
I didn’t see it, but at some point Redifer took it into his head to cover our men as they went across with smoke grenades. It didn’t keep the machine gunner from firing but it spoiled his aim, and Sledge and a number of others got across safely.
Then Redifer spotted one of our tanks and ran after it. He got it stopped and pretty soon it came rumbling and clanking down into the draw, Redifer walking in front of it guiding it like one of those fellows that waves the planes into the ramp at the airport. He got the tank parked crossways in the draw, and our men resumed moving supplies across, crouching behind the tank as it rumbled back and forth. Redifer was directing all the way.
While this was going on First Lieutenant George Loveday showed up. Loveday had taken over from Legs, the lieutenant I had several clashes with. I got along a lot better with Loveday, but he wasn’t all that popular with the men. First, he just looked sloppy. His uniform never seemed to fit him right. Everything kind of hung out and dangled. A lot of the time he ran around wearing just his cloth cap, carrying his helmet tucked under his arm. When he got mad, which he did often, he’d rip off his cap and throw it down on the mud or dirt and stomp on it.
While Redifer was throwing smoke grenades, he had been standing on the side of the draw, out in the open. Loveday thought this made him an easy target, and he just reamed Redifer out, from one end to the other.
“You stupid son of a bitch,” he yelled. “Don’t you have any goddamn brains?”
Redifer just stood there in stunned silence. Then he walked off.
I don’t think Loveday had seen the whole thing. He hadn’t seen the trouble we were having getting supplies. I think what he saw was Redifer exposing himself to enemy fire without taking any precautions. It might have been a dumb way to do it. But he did get the job done.
None of this meant either man was a bad Marine. Redifer was one of those guys who wasn’t afraid of anything. He didn’t always think first. But he was solid. Loveday had his faults. He had a temper. But hell, we’ve all got our faults. He was a good man, and a good officer. After World War II, he went on for a tour of duty in Korea and then to Vietnam.
Another major push against Awacha Pocket was set for noon on May 9. The rain slacked off, the ground was drying out and our tanks were on the scene. We resupplied with ammo and registered our mortars.
Once again there was a big bombardment before we kicked off. Artillery alternated with waves of swooping Avenger dive-bombers and Corsairs firing rockets. We called the rockets “Holy Moses,” because we figured that’s what anyone on the receiving end would say when they saw them coming. I was out front, observing and directing fire. I watched our riflemen and tanks start across the valley, only to be brought up short again by Jap fire. They were using their 90mm mortars, with big shells that made a strange fluttering sound as they came tumbling down. I ordered the mortars to fire phosphorous shells to provide a smoke screen for the attack.
At the end of the day we had made maybe a few hundred yards. Our battalion was relieved and went into reserve, with orders to back up the Seventh Regiment, who were fighting on our right on Dakeshi Ridge. The Seventh hammered at that ridge all night long and just before dawn we got word that we might be needed after all. We’d picked up some intelligence that the Japs might pull a counterattack. So we pulled up stakes and moved west along the ridge to where the attack was expected. There we found a group from First and Second battalions who had fought through the night hand to hand with the Japs. Here and there, corpsmen were patching up wounded Marines. A few yards beyond their foxholes, dozens of Japs were sprawled out in the mud. We’d missed the fight.
Minutes later we were ordered to turn around and go back to our old position.
After the Seventh Marines took Dakeshi Ridge, we moved into what was left of a small village just behind the ridge. Most of the buildings were down. But the low stone walls still stood along the roads, where they provided good cover. They were well made, about three or four feet high with large stones and mortar. I ordered everyone to dig in along the north side of the walls, where we’d be sheltered from fire.
That same night I got a look at one of the new night-vision scopes the Army was using. It took two or three guys to man that thing, but they could set it up after dark and see Jap infiltrators as they moved in, before they did their dirty work. One man held the scope and the other fired a BAR at the target. I looked through it. Everything had a strange, greenish glow, but I could see like daylight. I could recognize individuals thirty to fifty yards away, actually tell who they were.
I thought, Man alive! If you had one of these things when they came at you in a banzai charge, you wouldn’t have to just fire into the dark and hope you’d hit one. You could pick them off like flies. I wondered how long until they were available for Marines.
About two o’clock in the morning, all hell broke loose over in one of our foxholes. I was only fifteen or twenty feet away and I recognized the voice. George Sarrett was yelling and thrashing around. I thought, God a-mighty! I’ve set us up where there’s a Jap cave. They’ve come out and one of them is in the foxhole with George.
I scrambled over, pulling out my KA-BAR just as Sarrett stood up, panting and sputtering.
“Get him off me!” he yelled. “God, I hate those things!”
I looked down, expecting to find a bloodied Jap crumpled in the bottom of Sarrett’s foxhole. Instead, there was a land crab that had tumbled in sometime during the night.
That crab gave us the first laugh we’d had in many weeks.
Beyond Dakeshi village we got held up at one particularly long, low ridge. Twice our men had made it almost to the top, only to be thrown back and pinned down in the valley. Each morning before they moved out, our artillery would raise hell, firing shell after shell over the crest. It wasn’t doing a damn bit of good.
I watched from my forward position, directing the mortars, trying to figure out why artillery wasn’t doing the job. It was passing over the ridgetop and exploding on the far side. It should be catching the Japs.
Something had to be running just beyond the crest that was sheltering them, something like a gully or a trench. The Japs could lay up in there protected from our artillery, then pop out and start firing when we moved up the slope.
The difference between artillery and mortar fire, as every Marine learns in boot camp, is that mortar fire drops down at a steep angle. You can’t hide from it in a hole or a trench.
I called back to the mortars and explained to the men what I wanted.
“Register one gun to fire from right to left, the second to fire left to right, and the third to fire all along the crest of the ridge.” Sledge, Shelton, Santos, Redifer, Sarrett and the others instantly got what I had in mind.
Scotty did not.
He came on the phone from the gun pits. “You can’t do that!” he said. “We don’t have enough ammo.”
I’d had differences with Scotty before on setting up the mortars. I would be out on the line somewhere, and when I came back he would have them set up where they were subject to rifle fire from any angle. I’d have the guys move the guns to where at least they had some protection.
Then they’d have to re-dig all the foxholes. They didn’t mind, because they knew that’s where they should have set up to begin with. But nobody wanted to question Scotty’s decisions. I had been through this a couple times already on Okinawa. Now I had to do it again.
I needed twenty rounds per gun, sixty shells in all, that I could throw at that thing. I knew damn well there had to be something there. I had them covered.
Scotty and I had a pretty good powwow over the phone. I tried to explain the situation and why my plan would work, but he didn’t see it. Finally I thought, This is getting us nowhere. I called the company command post and explained what I wanted to do. “Can you spare us the ammo?” I asked.
“No problem,” they said.
Scotty was back on the line, fuming. “I order you not to fire,” he yelled.
I ignored him.
“Mortar section, fire on my command! Commence firing!”
Whatever Scotty had to say was drowned out in the bump-bump-bump of mortar fire.
Bill Sloan wrote in his book The Ultimate Battle that I told Scotty to go to hell. I want to clarify that. What I said was, “Scotty, if you’re going to be so damned observing, get your ass up here on the front line where you can see what’s going on.”
That’s exactly what I told him. But I didn’t tell him to go to hell. He was my lieutenant.
K Company took the ridge without further trouble, and I didn’t hear any more from Scotty. But when I got to the top I took a few minutes to look around. Sure enough, there was a narrow gully running right behind the crest. And laid out in the gully, almost side by side, I counted the bodies of more than fifty Japs.
We moved on, ridge to ridge, until we hardly knew anymore which was which. After days of shelling they were all as bare as plucked chickens. We moved along a narrow road between stone walls, always five paces apart. Keep moving! Don’t bunch up! All the time we were working our way closer to Wana, the last ridge before Shuri Castle.
We were to relieve the First Marines, who had cut around the west end of the ridge and had been working their way east up Wana Draw. Three times they had been forced back under intense fire from the heights. Now they were exhausted. While the Seventh Marines concentrated on the ridge itself, to our left, we started fighting our way back up the draw, supported by tanks. The walls of that thing were two hundred feet high in places, and we saw more of the strange, horseshoe-shaped tombs the Okinawans carved out of solid rock. Whole families were buried in them, going back generations. The Okinawans considered them sacred ground. But the Japs fortified them and set up their antitank guns and mortars to fire down on us. They quickly knocked out two of our tanks and forced us back, but not before we were able to call in fire on two of their positions from the battleship Colorado.
Our Second Battalion managed to get a foothold on Hill 55, which anchored the west end of the draw. On the next morning, May 20, we started up Wana Draw again, making progress.
I felt a little uneasy that morning. It wasn’t a feeling I could describe. As I said, I never for a moment believed I wouldn’t come home from the war. But I was no fool. I knew that I could come home wounded or crippled.
The Japs started firing at us from the left, with a 150mm gun up on the ridge. Jim Burke and I were up front observing, and when those big shells started landing around us we thought we’d better get the hell out of Dodge. We ran down the slope to where there were a couple shell holes and Jim jumped into one and I tumbled into another. Just as I hit the bottom, there was a terrific crack just behind me, on the edge of that thing. I felt that force go right through me, and then dirt and rock come raining down. For a moment I couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t breathe. I was buried. I clawed my way out, caked with dirt, bruised and sputtering. I don’t remember being relieved, thinking I’d had a close call. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember much from the rest of that morning.
That afternoon about two o’clock we were sitting somewhere nearby, out in the open. That big ridge was still right in front of us and Marine and Navy planes were working it over, strafing and dropping bombs. Artillery was going on both sides. We were in the middle of it.
For some reason our new corpsman, Wesley Katz, took it into his head at that moment to start praying. Doc Caswell, who had been with us since Peleliu, had been wounded a couple days earlier, during the push up Wana Draw with the tanks.
I had nothing against prayer. I’d prayed myself from time to time, always quickly and silently. But Doc Katz was praying loudly. You could hear him over the roar of the airplanes and the rattle of shells. I reached over and patted him on the shoulder and said, in a soft voice, “Let’s just have a silent prayer here, son. It’s not doing the other troops any good.”
He bowed his head and finished his prayer in silence.
A short time later I was sitting on my helmet eating ham and lima beans from a can when a big shell smacked down maybe fifty or a hundred yards away. Just a flash and a crack! The impact knocked me off my helmet and at the same time I felt something sting the back of my neck.
I sat on the ground for a moment, then reached up to brush away whatever was on my neck. I felt something hard and sharp, and this chunk of metal fell on the ground. It was about as long and as big around as my finger, tapered and real jagged. I reached down to pick it up but it was hot and I dropped it. I waited a second and picked it up again. I looked at it and put it into my pocket. I felt blood trickle down my neck.
Katz was at my side. He started dressing the wound. It had been numb but now it was starting to really hurt. Three or four minutes had gone by. Doc poked me with a syrette. I stood up and turned my neck just to make sure everything still worked. Nothing was broken.
“Do you think you can walk?” Katz asked.
I felt a little light-headed, but I thought I knew where I was. I nodded and he pointed the way to the first aid station, a few hundred yards off. I stumbled in that direction with the battle still going on all around me, bullets singing and shells falling. I don’t know how the heck I made it, but I did.
I stayed at the first aid station until it started to get dark. Then a jeep ambulance came and took several of us to the forward field hospital. I remember on the ambulance holding a plasma bottle for a guy who really was in a bad way, but I don’t remember much else. I’m sure he was dying.
The field hospital was little more than a big tent with stretchers on the bare ground. They brought me in and I lay down on one of the stretchers. An Army medic eventually came by and gave me a couple of shots. I thought, That’s good. That’s for the pain and for tetanus. After a while, another corpsman came by and gave me another shot. A little while later, I got one more shot.
When I looked up again, there was another medic standing there. He said he was going to give me a shot.
“Hell, I’ve already had three shots,” I said. “What’s going on?”
He stared at me. “You’ve had three shots already?”
“Hell, yes. I’ve already had three. And now you’re wanting to give me a fourth.”
He stood there a moment. Then he shook his head and walked away.
The next morning they picked me up on a stretcher and put me in an ambulance and took me to another hospital, farther from the front. It was a tent, but it had a floor and real doctors and nurses. I was lying in a bed. For some reason my whole abdomen hurt. A nurse came by and said she was going to give me a sponge bath. I told her about the pain.
“Let’s see what the problem is.”
She pulled back the covers and started to sponge me gently. My stomach was so sore I could hardly stand to be touched.
“Have you been close to an exploding shell?” she asked.
I remembered diving into the crater just as the 150mm shell went off, and being buried in dirt.
“Yes, ma’am. Artillery shell yesterday morning, just about as close as you can get and still be here.”
“You’ve had a concussion,” she said. “That’s your problem. A couple days will take care of it.”
She sponged me gently, and the dirt and dead skin came rolling off. You never realize in combat just how filthy you get. But I won’t ever forget her tenderness and kindness. She gave me some pills for the pain, and three or four days later it eased up, just as she said.
As soon as I was able I got some Red Cross stationery and wrote to Florence.
“Just a few lines to let you know I was hit Sunday May 20th, but don’t worry, Darling, I am not suffering & haven’t been at all.”
I told her I’d just been scratched, no serious damage done, which was mostly true.
Now that I was out of combat, I found myself thinking about her almost all the time.
“I sure wish I had you here, Darling, to change the bandages & give me about a million sweet kisses a day or more. I am sleeping on nice white sheets with the softest pillow. It sure beats a wet foxhole.”
They showed a movie to some of us who could get around, In Old Oklahoma, with John Wayne and Gabby Hayes. I was able to relax and enjoy it.
I don’t remember that they ever stitched me up. I think they just let the skin grow back over the wound. There was no infection. I had been lucky.
A doctor came in every morning to make his rounds. My cot was the second or third one on the right. After he’d seen everybody else, he’d stop and sit on my bunk and we’d talk for ten or fifteen minutes. It turned out he was from San Antonio, so we hit it off right away. All through the war, it was that way whenever I ran into someone from Texas, an instant bond. We were buddies.
Doc Moore was his name. He told me I had been very lucky.
“Why is that?”
“If that fragment had gone any deeper it would have hit your thyroid.”
“Would that be bad?”
He showed me where my thyroid gland was located, right behind the voice box, and explained how the thyroid affected everything from digestion to energy level. A damaged thyroid could affect me in several ways, he said.
“You might become real, real thin. Or you could become grossly obese. Either way, it would have messed you up for life.”
So I guessed I was luckier than I thought.
Pretty soon I started feeling restless and eager to get back to K Company. I had written Florence a couple more letters, but I didn’t get any replies. In fact, I hadn’t received mail from anybody while I was in the hospital, so I figured the mail system had screwed up and lost track of me. On June 9 Doc Moore gave me a clean bill of health and the hospital turned me loose. It had been twenty days since I’d been wounded. I asked around if anybody knew the location of Third Battalion’s K Company, and the next day I hitched rides on Army trucks headed south toward the front.
In my pocket I still carried the shell fragment that had cost me so much trouble.
Gene Sledge described the fight for Shuri Castle as a time of “mud and maggots.” The rains started up again the day after I was wounded and went on for the next ten days without a letup. I could hear them drumming on the roof of the hospital, but I had no idea how bad it was out on the battle line.
For K Company these were some of the worst days of the war. The fighting was so intense that neither side had time to gather its dead, which were left to rot in the mud on the battlefield. Maggots were everywhere. If a man slipped in the mud, he stood up covered with maggots. They filled his pockets. The Japs were shelling anything that moved, and the sheer noise and force of the explosions left men dazed and deaf. Stumpy Stanley, our company commander, came down with malaria. He was so delirious he refused to leave his command post until a corpsman dragged him to a first aid station. Lieutenant Loveday took his place.
On May 29, while I was on the road to recovery, Companies L, K, and I captured the area around Shuri Castle and flew a Confederate flag from the ramparts. Most of the Japs fled south. First Regiment relieved the Fifth Marines on June 4. The next day the rains ended.
I found my old company several miles south of where I’d left them. We were in a bad way. We’d lost thirty-six men in the fighting around Shuri Castle and we were down to about a hundred enlisted men and three or four officers. The word was that the Fifth Regiment would not be sent into combat again.
Because the rains had gummed up the roads, the Navy had been air-dropping food, water and ammo from TBM Avenger dive-bombers. Somebody found a cache of Jap rations. Everything was in cans. I ate some of their tuna fish and mandarins, little orange sections. It wasn’t too bad. We ran across saki quite often. A lot of the guys drank it. I couldn’t stand the taste.
Most of the time we were going out on patrol, sealing caves and trying to find pockets of Jap stragglers. The Japs had been squeezed into an area maybe three miles long by four miles wide, their backs were to the coastline. There was no place else to go.
We’d been warned not to go into the caves, but I got curious. I put a Sterno can on the end of a stick, like a candle, and felt my way down into one cave we had come across. You couldn’t see three feet in front of you. Some distance inside I came upon a cot. I put my hand down to feel it and it was still warm.
I stopped, listening. Somewhere close by I could hear a clock ticking. I thought, Burgin, get the hell out of here. When you’re in a cave looking out, you can see anything between you and the opening as plain as day. But if you’re looking in, you can’t see a thing, even holding a little Sterno candle in front of you. So I started backing out very slowly. Thank God, I didn’t get killed. When I got outside, I called the demolition people, and they sealed up the whole thing with a satchel charge.
I’m sure to this day there was a Jap inside there, because that cot was warm. Why didn’t he shoot me? Maybe he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Maybe he thought he could sneak out at night and do more damage than by just killing one Marine. I don’t know. He sure as hell had the opportunity.
I swore then and there that I’d never go into another cave.
There were caves everywhere, most of them full of Japs. The First and Seventh Marines had fought their way to the top of the last ridge before the coast, Kunishi Ridge. But the Japs were inside, fighting from caves, and the men on top were cut off from supplies and reinforcements. We knew both regiments were suffering heavy losses. On June 14 we were ordered to square away our equipment and get ready to move south the next morning. None of us was very happy about this development, but it was the only way.
Along with tanks and amtracs, we moved out single file on both sides of a dusty road. The noise of the battle grew louder and we saw more and more ambulance jeeps headed north full of wounded Marines, not a good sign. We came to a broad, open area of rice paddies with a long, steep ridge rising up beyond. For those of us who had fought on Peleliu, it reminded us of Bloody Nose Ridge, where we’d been exposed to such devastating fire from above.
We dug in for the night alongside the road and the next morning started toward a hill a mile or so to our left. We were moving along in a column when I heard the snap of a Jap rifle and felt a bullet pass by my ear. It was so close I could literally feel the heat. I didn’t stop, I didn’t pause, I didn’t even duck. I just kept walking at the same pace, thinking, Those sons of bitches are still trying to kill me.
Somebody else back in the line might have seen the shooter and picked him off. Maybe he didn’t fire again. I don’t know. By then I think I was pretty much running on automatic pilot.
We knew Kunishi Ridge would be our last big fight. Mostly it was a rifleman’s fight, up the slope cave by cave and sniper by sniper. The Japs fired back with everything they had. Corpsmen started bringing our wounded down almost immediately. Because our men were working their way up the ridge, we couldn’t risk mortar fire, so the section was posted at the bottom to watch for infiltrators who might try to work their way around and come in from the east. When needed, we acted as stretcher bearers.
The worst of it was June 18. A sniper shot Tex Cummings, one of the two ammo carriers I’d picked up for the squad on Pavuvu. The bullet hit him in the back and passed clean through, collapsing his lung. We called in an amtrac and loaded him on board as quick as we could. Then a grenade from a knee mortar went off beside Harry Bender, our BAR man. We carried him out with fragments in both legs, his back and his head. That same day we got word that Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of the entire invasion, had been killed by a Jap artillery shell while he was observing the Eighth Marines on the far west end of the line. Buckner was the son of a Confederate general and the highest ranking U.S. military officer killed during World War II. One of our own, Lieutenant General Roy Geiger, took over the Tenth Army. Geiger had been with us on Peleliu. It was the first time ever that a Marine general was placed in command of a standing army.
In the two days of fighting on Kunishi Ridge, K Company lost thirty-three men, five of them killed. Every casualty now was a painful reminder that even though the Japs were down to their last caves and the battle for Okinawa was almost over, any one of us could still go home wounded or crippled for life, or in a coffin. We were all thinking the same thing: If Okinawa was this bad, how bloody was it going to be fighting the Japs on their home ground? We knew we would soon have that to face.
Late on June 18, the Eighth Marines relieved us and we came off the ridge. The Eighth had fought on Tarawa and Saipan, and looked fit and fresh. As we moved off south along the road, Jap artillery was still raining down on our tanks and amtracs, and occasionally knocking one out. But more and more their fire came from isolated positions. By the afternoon of June 20 we could finally look out over the sea. Whatever Japs were left by now were dug in behind us. It was only a matter of rooting them out of their hiding places. And they still prowled by night. Some of them got through our lines and we could see them wading out in the surf, where they made excellent targets.
The next day, whoever made such decisions declared Okinawa officially secured. Our mail caught up with us and with it was a packet of letters from Florence. She hadn’t heard from me since I had been wounded, and she was worried. I sat down to reassure her right away.
I told her I was out of the hospital, feeling “fine and dandy.”
“Guess what, Darling? The Navy just gave us an orange and four eggs apiece. Boy do they look good after looking at C rations ever since April the first.”
Then I got down to what had been on my mind.
“I wish that we would have got married when I was there, and now you would be going to the States this month…. Why didn’t you drag me to the altar when I was there and marry me? Darling, I sure hope it won’t be long until you can come to me & the war is over so we can cuddle in a little home of our own.”
I was pretty sure that I would soon be heading home. Florence had been working on her end at getting all the papers she would need to move to the States. I would soon start filling out the necessary paperwork on my end. I promised to cable her as soon as I had any news.
We were sent out on burial details, shoveling dirt over enemy dead, and gathering up spent brass from the battlefield. We went hunting for Japs still holed up in caves and large Okinawan family tombs. A few of them were even surrendering, which was something we’d never seen before. I watched one small group creep out of a cave, no more than three or four of them. They were wearing only their jock straps, and one was carrying a white flag.
When they wouldn’t surrender, we’d call up flamethrower tanks or have the demolition men blast the entrance shut. Many of their officers, we heard, committed ritual suicide. On the morning of June 22 after an all-night banquet with their staff, the Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, and his aide, Major General Isamu Cho, killed themselves on a ledge overlooking the ocean. They had ordered their soldiers to carry on the fight to the last man, which for some of our troops meant at least another month of fighting. But the Fifth Marines were to be sent north, out of the battle at last.
We needed a rest. We’d been on Okinawa now for three months, in combat continuously for two months. Everybody’s nerves were shot. Everybody was on edge.
They had set up a mess hall in a tent. You stood up to eat, at tables that were about four feet high. One day we were having soup for lunch. Private First Class David Burton Augustus Salsby was standing straight across from me. The table wasn’t that wide, maybe two feet.
Salsby was from Idaho, a little guy about five feet four, and he had that Little Man Syndrome. He’d been wounded and returned to duty, and he was cocky. He thought no harm could come to him. He was also tough. He could do anything anyone else could do.
Each time he raised his spoon to his mouth he’d slurp. Real loud. Slurp! Slurp!
“Salsby, don’t do that,” I finally said. “That just rakes my nerves over when you do that.”
He looked up at me.
“Burgin, you can tell me what to do when we’re on duty. But whenever I’m off duty I’ll do as I damn please.”
I reached across and grabbed his lapels and lifted him right off the floor and pulled him up close to my face.
“You little son of a bitch! If you do that one more time I’ll knock your damn teeth out. Do we understand each other?”
I set him down. He didn’t slurp anymore. It shows the frame of mind we were all in by then.
Okinawa had one more little surprise for us, before we headed north.
I was sitting there when something caused me to look up. I saw the ground rolling toward me like an ocean wave. The wave just lifted me and then went on by and that was that. While it was happening the strangest feeling came over me. Like nothing in the world was steady or solid. It was over with that quick, but I’ll never forget that feeling. We had had a little earthquake, the first I’d ever experienced.
The trucks picked us up early in July and we rode north through a landscape that we could hardly recognize. The Seabees and construction crews were at work everywhere. Roads were being surfaced with crushed coral, huge stockpiles of supplies were being built up. Planes were flying in and out of the airfields constantly. Okinawa was being transformed into a base for the invasion of Japan.
The enlisted men settled into a camp on Motubu, a large peninsula just north of the beaches where we had landed on April 1. NCOs were driven farther north almost to the tip of the island, where a camp was already set up. Tents were in place, roads surfaced. A short runway for the spotter planes ran through the center of the camp.
It’s a funny thing, but I don’t remember much about that camp. I can’t remember where the chow hall was, where the heads were. The two most important places in camp. I can remember where the doctor’s office was. But there’s just so many things that I can’t recall. I guess I was just wiped out by then. I think from thirty months of combat, from losing men from my platoon, guys that I had known since Melbourne, guys that were gone. Hillbilly Jones, Captain Haldane, and the others. I was pretty stressed out, no doubt. Just flat numb.
I slept with Florence’s picture under my pillow, and thought of the days when we would have a home of our own, and children to call us Mother and Dad. I was sure I had accumulated enough points to be rotated back to the States. The problem was, Florence was in Melbourne. Our plans were to make a home together in Texas, and I was trying to work it out. Thousands of American servicemen had married Australians. When travel was possible again, wives with children would get first priority to go to the States. After that would come wives without children. Only after they’d been accommodated would fiancées be allowed to travel.
“I just talked to my company commander about the papers,” I wrote her in mid-July, “and he is going to see about them in the morning. I hope I can get them fixed up before I go home. Oh how I hope & pray I can. I want to have your name on the list, knowing it won’t be too long before you can come home to me forever, Darling, & I do mean forever.”
Some of the guys were being married by proxy, and Florence and I had talked about it in our letters. But when it came down to it, I didn’t want to get married that way. I wanted a real wedding in a church and a real life again.
We hadn’t seen each other in almost two years. I could tell from her letters she was as anxious as I was. And she still worried about my wound.
“Really, Darling, it didn’t hurt me,” I wrote her. “I hardly have a scar to show for it. I have been hurt a lot worse in a football game, and never stopped playing.”
I have no memory of hearing about the atomic bomb. I guess I heard about it on Armed Forces Radio. Of course, I didn’t know what an atomic bomb was, so it didn’t mean a whole lot to me. They said it did terrible damage, but that’s about all we knew. A week or so later we got word that the Japs had surrendered. It was over, and that was a good feeling. We knew we’d be going home, though we didn’t know when. But there wasn’t a lot of hooting and hollering, no big celebration. The folks back in the States probably celebrated more than we did.
I did see one Marine celebrate. The day the war ended or the next, a Corsair came buzzing down our little runway, upside down all the way. The pilot could have opened his canopy, stuck out his hand and dragged his fingers along the ground. That’s how low he was. I just knew he was going to crash, but he flew on down the runway, pointed the nose of that Corsair up and flew straight up into the air. Then he turned around, did a nosedive, flipped that plane over again and made the trip back down the runway in the opposite direction, upside down all the way again. He pulled up and ended with several rolls, then flew off.
I stood there gawking, as I had back in boot camp when those fighters came roaring off the runway at North Island. I thought, You crazy son of a bitch. You’re going to crash. Those Marine pilots, they were good. They were something else.
I had nothing to do now but wait. The sergeants were all bunking together. I was still in charge of the mortar section, but they were bunking down the street. If I needed anybody to do anything, I just hollered. I was tired, but my wound had healed. Then one day I suddenly felt a chill. Within minutes I was shivering violently. I couldn’t seem to get warm. The feeling passed but a short time later I started sweating. I was burning up with fever. I went down to the camp doctor’s office, my knees so wobbly I could hardly walk.
I knew very well what it was. I’d seen it often enough in others. Like so many Marines, I’d come down with malaria. The doctor started me on quinine and increased the Atabrine tablets I’d been taking, like everyone else. I went back to my tent to lie down, alternately shivering and sweating for the rest of the day. All week I lay in my cot or, when I felt strong enough, got up and wandered around a bit. The fevers and chills gradually lessened. But the truth of it is, you never really get over malaria. The symptoms go away. But months and even years later they can come back. Malaria was to be an off-and-on presence in my life for some time to come.
It was September 14 before I finally learned I was being shipped back to the States. The rest of the First Marine Division were going to China. The next day I went down to the enlisted men’s camp and looked for my old buddies. I spent most of the day going from tent to tent saying my good-byes. Some were already on board ship. Late in the month the First Marine Division left Okinawa for China. Jim Burke, Sledgehammer, Hank Boyes, Snafu Shelton, Sarrett, Santos—the guys I’d fought alongside, all my old buddies—were gone. I was on my own.
In the weeks afterward I moved from the NCO camp to another camp, where I sat through a raging typhoon. When it was safe to go outside the first thing I saw was a cargo ship blown right up onto dry land. It was a foretaste of what the sea can do. After the typhoon I moved closer to the harbor, with the Eleventh Artillery Regiment, where I bunked until it was time to ship out.
The eighty-two-day battle for Okinawa had taken more than twelve thousand American lives, and left more than thirty-eight thousand wounded. Nobody has ever been able to calculate exactly how many Japanese soldiers and Okinawan civilians died in that campaign. Even after the surrender, small pockets of Japs went on fighting, just as they had on Peleliu.