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Stories From Okinawa

Two Capable Subordinates

General Ushijima was supported by two capable subordinates on Okinawa.

Lieutenant General Ushijima heavily depended upon two staff officers who, although differing in temperament, formed along with the general as effective a commanding trio as the Marines faced in the Pacific.

Lieutenant General Isamu Cho, his chief of staff, was the antithesis of Ushijima. The 51-year-old loved fine liquor and beautiful women almost as much as he enjoyed his participation in murky military plots. In 1930, Cho joined a secret Japanese Army clique called the Sakurakai, or Cherry Society, an avid patriotic organization with a deep-seated hatred for Western influences upon Japan. One year later Cho helped devise a plot to murder the prime minister. After it dissolved in the initial stages, Cho developed a second plan calling for aircraft to bomb the prime minister's residence. Fanaticism proved his undoing when the Kempei, the Japanese military police, arrested Cho for boasting he would personally stab the Emperor if that was what it took to make the operation succeed.

Cho played a major role in the infamous "Rape of Nanking" in 1937. On Cho's orders, thousands of Chinese prisoners perished. The next year, he inflamed already sensitive relations with the Soviet Union when he attacked a Soviet force without orders. Once ensconced on Qkinawa, Cho dared the United States to invade the island. The fiery Cho brought a fervor to his post that complemented the more sedate Ushijima.

The second staff officer advising Ushijima, 42-year-old Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, had traveled more extensively than his two cohorts and thus understood the Western world. After graduating from the Japanese Military Academy in 1923, Yahara attended the Japanese War College before spending 10 months at Fort MouItrie in the United States. Stints in successful campaigns in China, Thailand, Malaya. and Burma honed Yahara's knowledge of strategy and tactics; and he arrived on Okinawa with a reputation as a superb tactician and thinker. He provided Ushijima with the calculated intelligence that the tempestuous Cho lacked.

click image to enlarge The hard-won island of Okinawa was the end of the island-by-island approach to Japan. The next objective would be Japan itself. Okinawa, only 400 miles away, was to have been the main base for the invasion of Japan. The atom bomb made that invasion unneccessary.

Battle Fatigue

Even veteran fighting men sometimes suffered battle fatigue at Okinawa.

Because of the severe conditions at Sugar loaf and elsewhere on Okinawa, the fighting produced an alarmingly high number of battle fatigue cases, Constant vigilance against nighttime infiltrators, cold, rain, the unbelievable mud, and most importantly, the prolonged volume and accuracy of Japanese artillery taxed the Marines to such a point that some went beyond their endurance level. A special field hospital set up at the end of April to treat battle fatigue cases quickly became inundated with more than 3,000 patients.

Private First Class Eugene Sledge watched one Marine, a veteran of the bitter fighting at Peleliu, dissolve under the strain of combat at Okinawa. The Marine lapsed into sullen silence for about an hour, then burst out yelling that he was going to charge a nearby Japanese machinegun nest and kill every occupant. He rose to start his sprint, but Sledge and a sergeant, realizing the man was embarking on a suicidal attempt; tripped him up. After the Marine collapsed, he wet his pants and cried uncontrollably. The broken Marine still sobbed as a corpsman gently led him away. "We had just seen a brave man crack up completely and lose all control of himself, even to the point of losing his desire to live," wrote Sledge after the war.

Some men doubted the validity of battle fatigue, instead questioning the soldier's manhood, Brig, Gen. Oliver P. Smith, Marine deputy chief of staff for theTenth Army, at first dismissed most battle fatigue cases as "a good chance to get a five-day rest if your conscience was not too active." He contended that Marines knew that once they were behind the lines they could enjoy rest, hot food, and hot baths.

In May, however, General Smith investigated a psychiatric hospital where physicians allowed him to observe their treatment to learn more about the issue. One man was brought in who had been recommended for a Silver Star for remaining at his machine gun during one particularly fierce enemy counterattack. After the action ended, Japanese bodies lay on all sides of his post. The man, still trembling even though resting in a hospital, felt such horrid guilt over killing so many humans that he snapped. Doctors told a moved General Smith that the man simply needed a respite from the battlefield and would most likely return to duty in a few days.

Another Marine had been evacuated to the hospital, babbling and trembling after a mortar shell exploded in his foxhole. When he finally stopped shaking after several days, doctors, convinced that something deeper than the mortar shell lay behind the man's inability to function, attempted to expose the reason. After injecting a solution into his arm that, while leaving him conscious, removed his inhibitions about talking, a physician asked questions that gradually took the man back to the time of the shelling. As they spoke, the doctor suddenly stamped his feet, smacked the wall with his fists, and screamed, "Mortar! Mortar! Mortar!" The patient instantly began shouting, "Dig deeper! Dig deeper!" fell to his knees, and acted as if he were digging a hole in the corner of the room.

When the Marine finally calmed down, the doctor asked if he read the Bible and whether he knew what the Bible said about killing. The man replied that the Bible condemned killing. The doctor wondered if that included Japanese, whereupon the Marine ground his teeth and muttered, "Kill 'em all." He told the doctor that the Japanese had killed his buddies and so he had to kill them. The doctor later estimated that this Marine faced a 50 percent chance of recovery. General Smith, once hardcore in his reaction to battle fatigue cases, departed with an increased compassion for such men.

Father And Son

The encounter of a father and son on Okinawa produced two poignant moments during the brutal campaign.

One of the most heart wrenching moments to occur on Okinawa involved a family with a proud Marine heritage. Colonel Francis I. Fenton enlisted in the Marine Corps in August 1917. He gradually rose through the ranks until he became division engineer officer of the 1st Marine Division in July 1944. With this unit, Fenton won a Bronze Star for duty at Peleliu before landing on Okinawa.

While Colonel Fenton advanced to higher command, his younger son, Michael, enlisted in the Marine Corps on August 17, 1943, and joined B Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division - the same division in which his father commanded the engineers. Reportedly turning down a commission so he could fight at the front, Michael served as a scout-sniper at Okinawa.

Father and son met once during the fighting when their paths crossed at a partially destroyed Okinawan farmhouse. After exchanging news from home, including information on Michael's older brother, Francis, Jr., who had been commissioned a Marine officer in 1941, the two family members returned to their work.

They would never talk again. On May 7, 1945, while beating back a Japanese counterattack not far from Sugar Loaf, 19-year-old Pfc. Michael Fenton was killed. When his father received the bitter news, he traveled to the site of his son's death and knelt down to pray over the flagdraped body, a scene that produced one of the Pacific war's most touching photographs. Upon arising, Colonel Fenton stared at the bodies of other Marine dead and said, "Those poor souls.They didn't have their fathers here."

After the burial, Colonel Fenton returned to his headquarters and wrote a brief note to his wife, Mary, in San Diego.The soldier then resurfaced. Fenton fixed his attention on a large map hanging in his headquarters, studied it closely for a time, then said to his subordinate, "We'd better double the guard around No. 5 bridge. The Nips may try to blow it.” The war was back on.

Mary Fenton learned of her son's death before receiving her husband's letter. In fact, she experienced a bittersweet two days when, on Wednesday, a telegram arrived from the Marine Corps commandant informing her of Michael's death.The very next day came news that her husband had been awarded a second Bronze Star.

Mrs. Fenton told reporters she was proud that Michael had done his duty as a Marine. She quoted a recent letter from him in which the youth wrote that he "dedicated my life to my country" and that he was "prepared to die." Both Colonel Fenton and his older son survived the war. Colonel Fenton died on July 3, 1978.

John Wukovits is the author of Pacific Alamo, the story of the battle for Wake Island. Survival At Sugar Loaf. WWII History. May 2006.

Devotion to Duty One of the unsung heroes of World War II, Clifton Sprague turned an almost inevitable American defeat at Leyte Gulf into a dramatic and important victory that shortened the war. This study draws on rich primary source materials to give us the first full-fledged biography of the admiral.

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