Okinawa 1946
Mrx Wylie
Military historians write of war and preparations for war. As "Operation Downfall"the invasion of Japantook shape, Okinawa shone bright. From bases there, air raids and ground logistics would support Downfall, to be launched November 1, 1945, with the invasion of Kyushu by fourteen combat divisions. An assault on Honshu by twenty-two divisions would follow. President Truman, in approving this plan, knew that our fatalities in Japan would likely exceed a million men. Compare this to 12,000 American dead in the conquest of Okinawa, the "Iron Typhoon" of April through June.
After the atomic erasure of Hiroshima and Nagasakia secret possibility known only to a few, none of them ground commandersJapan's surrender followed on August fifteenth. The vast buildup on Okinawa, that had required 1,600 ships making 40-day voyages across 7,000 miles, suddenly became a purposeless burden for which no Plan B existed. The lamp of history winked out, too. Thousands of noncombatant military would now wait over a year for repatriation. A "point system" determined your standing, the higher the better, 90 the max. If young, a draftee and single, you faced a long wait. Battle veterans got early transport home. Absent a foe, they'd be a discipline problem.
What follows is a memoir of my own Okinawa experience, from troopship embarkation in late June 1945 to a lucky flight home a year later. Since the Navy had trained me as a photographer, I freshen my recollections with pictures of Okinawa, then Shanghai in early 1946. Even better, letters I'd written in that overseas year were lovingly saved. This story, then, though "anchored" by 80-year-old me, is mostly based on letters from 19-year-old me, who signed himself "Mud & Blisters" during the first months on Okinawa. If the child is father to the man, this kid is senior, though I outlast him.
I've also located perhaps the only book-length personal memoir of then-Okinawa. The vivid account of one William P. Simpson, then a cargo-managing Navy First Lieutenant, "Island 'X'Okinawa" was issued by the Christopher Publishing House of Hanover, Mass. Prewar, Simpson had worked seven years for Matson Navigation Co. as a dock manager in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Australia. His nickname "Digger" surely comes from the Anzac sojourn. The Australian Dictionary of Biography characterizes a Digger as "independent, witty, warm-hearted, happy to be indolent at times and careless of dress." Simpson, commissioned in early 1942, served four years. I put his 1945 age at just this side of 30. Strong on operational matters, Digger disdained autobiography.
His traits other than Digger-ness include a strong yet easy leadership style, an ability to improvise materials-handling methods 7,000 miles from Matson backup, and a tactful but relentless aversion to the Regular Navy and its "stateside" style. His immediate nemesis was an Annapolis-bred Captain he privately called "Blimp." Where Digger would form workgroups according to who knew what skills, the Blimp insisted that Navy hierarchy prevail. But a stateside style wasn't right for hard and dangerous work, made more so by heat, mud, and storms. A few avoidable deaths persuaded the brass to leave Digger alone.
Fascinated by supply chain complexity, like a time-and-motion engineer he examines the inefficiency of multiple loadings, re-loadings and unloadings of cargo, striving to speed the flow. From a hypothetical factory in St. Louis, he estimates how many times a pallet of, say, cement bags must be reloaded before reaching his 600-man Advanced Materials Handling Base on Okinawa. A minimum of thirteen, he writes, as many as eighteen.
Here's an example of a brutal work situation that might have been avoided. Bags of cement weighing 96 pounds, stacked on wooden pallets, are crane-loaded dockside onto trucks to be driven inland. On arrival, it's discovered that the sacks, owing to rough roads through hilly terrain, have been jostled off their pallets and must now be unloaded by hand. This slowdown takes two men: one to lift each sack to the tailgate, the other to lift it down, stacking it on others no higher than a man can lift, that is, four high. A crane, which can stack eight high, stands idle. The heat is 112 degrees, mosquitoes are festive, it starts to rain hard, and the work must continue into the night as trucks keep arriving.
Another aspect of the chain he enjoys is its inexorability. Even after the surrender, ships keep arriving, their now-useless cargoes still to be unloaded, delivered and stacked. Three factors determine this inertia. The production and shipping contracts must first be aborted. Then allow about ten days from factory to dock, and another 40 in a vessel making less than 11 knots per hour, the top speed of a wartime-built Liberty Ship.
Digger also has a mind attuned to irony. From aerial photos of Okinawa, he writes, a bay had been chosen to become a major anchorage and pier facility. Floating pile-drivers start work. After 40-foot piles fail to hit bottom, 60-footers are tried, then 80-footers. Finally, a 90-foot pile too is driven out of sight. The site proves to be bottomless mud!
I value Digger's stories, partly because his experiences help to explain mine, partly because he sees clearly the immensity of the Okinawa challenge. Being such a tiny cog in its unfolding, I can merely sense it.
I'll introduce myself now, since the rest of the story is mine, whether told by today's 80-year-old or the 19-year-old alter ego who shaped me. I grew up sheltered, with servants. Though I don't remember feeling lonely as a child, why else would I have believed that the visible world was just a stage-set whose backsides I could never see? Riding in a car, I'd strain to catch the workmen quickly rearranging the scenery as we sped by.
A familiar of country clubs and private schools, I was drafted into the U.S. Navy in June 1944, just having turned eighteen. Since we lived in Winnetka, a lakeside suburb of Chicago, I learned Navy ways at Great Lakes Naval Training Center a few leagues north. The transition seemed easy. I don't remember being homesick, and I liked the Appalachian boys who were a large fraction of the inductees. Burgess Howard of Bear Paw, North Carolina, abandoned roadside by his mother as a child, became my best friend. He taught me songs like "Great Speckled Bird" and "Take That Night Train to Memphis," sung in a high, nasal tenor, a tuneful change from the string quartets my mother would drag me to. I recall the loneliness of an unseen boy calling out one dusky evening among the barracks, "Anybody here from Bell (bail) County?" That would be Eastern Kentucky.
Being musicalflute lessons starting at eightI became platoon drummer, paraddidling us through drills. I was also given time off to play Sousa marches with the tiny brass band of fellow recruits enlivening the weekly graduation reviews. And there were Saturday afternoon rowing races on the lake attended by officers and their parasoled ladies. Rowing at summer camp fitted me to join one of the teams. I was learning that break-out opportunities in the Navy were indeed possible! In Okinawa, these blossomed.
Black sailors too trained at Great Lakes, but separately. One day I enviously watched a close-order drill where the black leader shouted, "Double to the rear (ree-uh)with a slight (slaat) hesitationmarch (motch)!" Our white drill masters stuck to a barely intelligible "Hut-two-three-four!"
Since the Navy had to fill skilled positions from the recruit pool, we were shown films (like "Sonar Man!") about jobs to apply for. Photography having been a passion since age ten, I was assigned to the Navy Photographic School at Pensacola. My closest friend there was some years older, Ken Amon of Lincoln, Nebraska. A class assignment was to plan and photograph a poster. Whereas other teams chose projects like "Loose Lips Sink Ships," Kenhaggard, on crutches, with a finger pointed in warningposed for a picture we titled, "She Was Beautiful But Dangerous."
The Navy threw me a curve at graduation. I was held back because of a missing 4x5 magazine, a film container one slipped into the cumbersome Speed Graphics we were trained to use. Had I not returned it from my locker? I remained for several idle weeks awaiting a deck court martial. The trial officer, who had not understood what a "magazine" was, dismissed the case when he discovered its triviality. He had expected my crime to be serious, like making off with a top-secret periodical.
This embarkation area is the original Dachau, surrounded by high barbed wire fences and guards. We aren't issued mattresses, and nobody brought any, so we've been sleeping on sheets of canvas laid across bed springs. I woke this morning looking and feeling like an underdone waffle.
The flute came in handy yesterday. Someone was playing the trumpet (he used to be professional). I asked if a flute could be heard through the blatant tones of a trumpet, and he was delighted with the idea. I fitted in well, and we rendered a St. Louis Blues that rolled everybody in the aisles. We also sounded hot on Darktown Strutters Ball, especially when a guitar joined us. A determined clarinetist came up and argued for passage of his own candidates which were on the order of Three Blind Mice. The jazz players got together again after supper in the clothes drying room. There, sitting on pails, surrounded by a hanging garden of clean socks, underwear, sheets and uniforms, it was very pleasant to discover there are people who will get together like this, anywhere, anytime, just to play music, no matter what kind. These are my last few hours before going on ship, so you won't get another letter soon.
A moment to remember: nine PM, June 26. That's when we departed. It's now July 18. This has been one of the swiftest months I've ever spent, and I expected it to be the slowest that ever was! I feel sorry for anyone who doesn't like to read. That's all I do, except talk a little to keep the spark of society alive. Right now I'm reading a low-brow mystery novel called "The Nature and Destiny of Man" by Reinhold Niebuhr. Not yet able to understand it, I won't comment. I get embarrassed hauling something like that in front of everybody, because most deride book-learning. It's easier to explain Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" because I can say it's about a Georgia chain gang.
c80f0f1006