To The End of the Earth: A Glimpse into the Tenth Army’s Cave Fighting in Okinawa in 1945

An adapted excerpt from To the End of the Earth by John C. McManus

All Image Credits: Penguin Random House

In 1945, Tenth Army inelegantly bulled ahead, struggling for mastery over southern Okinawa’s endless ridges and crags, in fighting that was faintly reminiscent of the Western Front in World War I. At various times the battle involved both Marine divisions and all four Army divisions, with no real difference in the way the two services fought. “They seem to be following the same techniques,” wrote one combat historian who observed frontline actions of both Marines and soldiers, “advancing slowly, ferreting out the Japanese positions, using combined weapons against the positions, moving up more men and supporting weapons, and repeating [this] on the next hill.” With no sign of another invasion, Japan’s Ushijima fed in reserves from the southern coast.

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The average enemy soldier fought with a ferociousness that prompted one rifle company commander in the 96th to assess, with a sense of vexed, horrified admiration common to almost all Americans on Okinawa, that “the courage of the individual Japanese soldier is unquestioned. Their complete disregard for their own lives was the height of fanatical stupidity. In fire discipline and camouflage, they were undoubtedly better trained than our own men.” General Buckner told reporters during a press conference that the only way to defeat the enemy defenses and gain ground was by employing a “corkscrew and blowtorch” approach of total annihilation. He knew of what he spoke. He visited the front lines incessantly, almost every day, a consistent, courageous presence who, in the estimation of one admiring soldier, “was familiar with every nook and cranny of Okinawa.” A crack shot, Buckner enjoyed sniping at the Japanese with rifles he borrowed from frontline troops. “He lay there on the ground shooting for ten or fifteen minutes,” Private Herman Buffington, a 96th Division rifleman who once lent his weapon to the general, later recalled. “I could see that the ‘old fellow’ was shooting really well.”

The complex Japanese defenses reflected a studied erudition on their part. They had noticed that the Americans tended to relax after ascending to the crest of a hill on the assumption that making it to the highest ground automatically meant control of the entire hill. In response, the Japanese dug deeply into the reverse slopes of hills, where they heavily camouflaged themselves. This put them in perfect position to devastate the Americans when they appeared on the crests or, even better when they descended the reverse slopes. Dugouts, holes, tunnels, reinforced concrete pillboxes, caves, and the like bristled with Nambu machine guns, knee mortars, 47-millimeter antitank guns, and artillery pieces of varying calibers. “Each hill was prepared for defense by a complete network of caves and tunnels,” wrote Captain Joseph Vering, a rifle company commander in the 96th Division. “These were, in most cases, large enough to provide living and storage space for the occupying troops. Mole-like digging turned the hills into fortresses providing cover, concealment, and completely safe routes through which troops could move to mass their fires on any attack from any direction. Hundreds of firing positions for all types of weapons were provided by openings leading into the tunnels on several levels in all directions.” The proliferation of so many mutually supporting caves and tunnels, with few blind spots, only added to the deadliness of these cobweb-like networks, as did the fact that many were underground and provided impervious shelter to enemy soldiers.

The Japanese understood, perhaps better than did the Americans, that since the war’s migration north of the equator, jungle had now given way to caves as the war’s key characteristic, defensible terrain.

The only antidote for this powerful bottleneck of defenses was the almost symphonically coordinated application of combined arms firepower over the course of protracted daily, even hourly attacks. The Americans wielded their ordnance like a cudgel to bludgeon the Japanese into lifeless pulp under the weight of unrelenting blows. Each attacking infantry regiment was partnered with a fire support ship, generally ranging in size from a destroyer to a battleship. Every division and the two corps also enjoyed support from their own designated ships. Each day, Buckner’s forces were supported on average by 3 battleships, 3 heavy cruisers, 1 light cruiser, and 5 destroyers, plus smaller vessels. Highly trained Army‑Navy Joint Assault Signal Companies masterfully coordinated the immense naval firepower. In the course of the fighting, the ships fired an incredible 448,997 shells, ranging in caliber from 5 inches to 16 inches. To riflemen like PFC Martin Allday of the 96th Division, the big shells zooming overhead “sounded like a freight train.” In the evenings, the ships shot another 66,653 star shells that illuminated much of the front and limited the concealment of enemy infiltrators.

Field artillery provided even more firepower. With the possible exception of the Red Army, no other military organization on earth could begin to challenge the supremacy of American artillery. On Okinawa, every infantry division’s order of battle contained four battalions of organic artillery, and this total did not even include the self-propelled and antitank guns of Army infantry regiments. Corps artillery added yet more tubes to the equation. The 7th Infantry Division alone consumed 286,757 shells in the course of the campaign, roughly four and a half times the number of projectiles it brought to the island, necessitating a complete resupply of ordnance every two weeks just to maintain normal operations—one can only imagine the immensely strained logistical efforts that underpinned these generous expenditures. Buckner’s gunners fired a truly staggering total of 1.75 million shells in the course of the fighting, comprising 130 million pounds of ordnance. By contrast, even though the Japanese mobilized their maximum artillery effort of any island battle, their output amounted to roughly 100,000 shells or just 6 percent of the American expenditure. Heavy mortar crews poured even more steel onto the enemy. In a little over a week of combat, a single 81‑millimeter mortar platoon from the 77th Division lobbed 19,000 shells in support of attacking riflemen. “In every sense of the word, the 81mm mortars were the battalion commander’s own artillery,” Lieutenant Lawrence Fawcett, a mortar platoon leader, avowed.

The Japanese were so well entrenched that, incredibly, the massive firepower did not do much more than restrict their mobility and shatter their communications network. By the estimate of one captured Japanese officer, his unit needed a full six hours just to transmit a fire mission request to an artillery battery farther to the rear. Air strikes by fighters added to the constant pounding, if not necessarily its lethality.

The mass firepower masked the disquieting reality of intimate small unit actions that raged for weeks from cave to cave, hill to hill, and ridge to ridge. A grizzled rifle platoon sergeant commented brusquely, “I have no faith at all in this artillery, naval, and air fire getting them out of their caves. The infantryman has got to dig them out.” Another hard-fighting combat soldier added that “the only solution was assault by small infantry units who could work up to the entrances by fire and movement and either clear or seal the caves. The necessity for the assault infantryman to know demolitions became very evident.” The patches of high ground they attempted to capture were named either for their height in meters, such as Hills 95 and 178, or, owing to the American predilection for nicknames, they were assigned individual monikers like Conical Hill, Sugar Loaf Hill, Item Hill, Tombstone Ridge, Kochi Ridge, Dakeshi Ridge, Zebra Hill, Chocolate Drop Hill, Dorothy Hill, and many other terrible death grounds. “This . . . is a slow, inch‑by‑inch fight,” General Bruce bemoaned of the struggle in a letter to Admiral Nimitz.

For the assault troops who were enmeshed in this daily meat grinder, the primary motivation to keep going was, in the recollection of one rifleman, “other guys moving forward. You saw your buddy moving forward, and you moved forward too.” Self-propelled guns and tanks hosed down any suspected cave or pillbox in the hopes of exposing entrances and covering the advance of riflemen, demolition teams, and flamethrower operators who mercilessly shot, blasted, or roasted enemy soldiers. A 96th Division after-action report described this process as “slow, systematic destruction.” Liberal use of smoke grenades obscured the vision of the defenders and revealed previously unseen caves or holes. “Each of these openings was then spotted and additional demolition crews sent forward with satchel charges to destroy the emplacements. It was usually found that a 20‑pound satchel charge with a 30 to 45‑second fuse would effectively seal most caves and emplacements.” Division records claimed 273 caves sealed and another 317 pillboxes or other emplacements destroyed. Riflemen expended enormous quantities of bullets, debunking the ratio‑of‑fire myth that no more than 15–20 percent of soldiers fired their weapons in combat during World War II. The 7th Division alone fired 1,685,040 M1 Garand 30.06‑caliber bullets— an average of about 481 bullets fired per rifleman!

In a few instances, engineers pumped hundreds of gallons of gasoline into caves and ignited it with tracer bullets or white phosphorous grenades, burning the Japanese to death in showers of flaming fuel. A 7th Division private commenting with chilling brevity on the prevailing zero-sum attitude. “I did not consider the enemy as a person.” Close-quarters fighting, even sometimes hand‑to‑hand, was anything but uncommon. The desperate fight for survival left little room for mercy. The GIs killed or they died. “This may be a shocking statement . . . but at one time in my life, I was a hardened killer,” Herman Buffington, a 96th Division rifleman, wrote soberly years after the war. “I probably killed more human beings on Okinawa in three months than have been murdered in Jackson County [Georgia], where I live, in the past 10 or 15 years. I am not proud of this but I do know it was a necessary part of my job.”

From “To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945” by John C. McManus with permission from Dutton Caliber, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by John C. McManus

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