Snapshots of Post-war Okinawa

[In this entry, my father captures scenes — on the road, at the beach and in camp —  of life on Okinawa in the days soon after the war’s end.]

September 23, 1945 (Okinawa, Japan)

Snapshots along the road to the beach:

A two-and-a-half ton truck jammed with Jap prisoners of war, many of them giving us toothy grins, roars past us. – Our three-quarter-ton stops short , and a six-by behind us swings out, barely missing the rear corner where I’m sitting. One of the boys leaps out and retrieves a brand new pith helmet from the side of the road. – A native donkey cart going up the hill, holding up traffic. The little old duffer leading it flashes us a grin as we go by. – Two nurses riding with two officers in the jeep just ahead of us. The one in the rear seat has on a white kerchief, and the guy’s arm is around her. A GI driver, coming past them, leans halfway out of his cab, eyes wide open, and lets out a Yeeow! – We pass a truck of bouncing , laughing Okinawan girls, who wave at us and throw things. A big green lime hits Budwick smack in the eye. – Giant bulldozers and scrapers and crushers pushing forward the coral rock and read earth for a new stretch of road. – A long stretch of lush green valley, a muddy stream running along its bottom, green terraced hills, rising on the other side, rolling cumulus clouds, standing above them. – The tumbled remains of thatched-roof native huts, surrounded with dense shrubbery, their massive foundation beams and wooden frames splattered with dried yellow mud. – A tall thin MP directing traffic where route 16 crosses route 13. The spot is as busy as a Manhattan intersection, but the vehicles are all GI, muddy and battered, but plenty of life in them. The nearest thing to a battleship coming down the road is a bulky “duck,” one of the amphibious trucks.

Snapshots at the beach:

A bunch of Negro fellows running a broad jump contest beside a rusted steel dock which has been beached just above the high water mark. – The rank brown seaweed piled in great windrows along the beach after the typhoon. – The broken bodies of five Navy PBM’s [the Martin PBM Mariner, a patrol bomber] and PBY’s [the Consolidated PBY Catalina, a “flying boat”] rammed up against the coral ledges south of the beach. They were looted first, and now are being torn apart by Navy salvage crews. – The desecrated tombs, with burial urns smashed, and disinterred bones lying around the entrance. Near one of them is a frail wooden box containing a body not completely decomposed. The story is that these bodies are treated and cared for during a 33-year process of burial. – Four Navy fighter planes and one Lightning dogfighting many thousands of feet above the bay, looking like small black crosses against the gray cloud cover. – Two GI’s paddling out to sea in a gaudy yellow and black-striped life raft. – the endless line of fellows going through the Red Cross canteen for coffee. – Sign on bulletin board in canteen: “Sgt. Anders: You are flying home at 1300 today. Leave from in front of Building A-2. Report immediately. M. Johnson, 1st Sergeant.” – A long line of native women, about fifty in all, walking in single file along the edge of the sea cliff. They’re carrying large bundles of salvage lumber on their heads, and have made pads of long grass to protect the tops of their heads. At the rear of the procession is a young native man riding a pony. – Old native men, brown and grizzled, carrying tokes across their shoulders, from both ends of which are suspended heavy bundles of wood and field produce. The men are barefoot, and paddle along with a short, mincing gait.

Snapshots around the camp area:

Three fellows struggling down the road with a small home-made trailer which is loaded precariously with 9 five-gallon water cans. – A couple hundred fellows sitting around on piles of unpacked crates, eating chow. – Improvised clothes lines sagging with the daily washing. – The SIAM theater with an overflow crowd to see the evening movie. The benches are packed, guys are ranged solid along the bunks on either side, and standing on the trucks which are parked in the rear. The fellows had got hold of a couple of 16 mm. reels showing girls taking off their clothes. They show them before the regular feature. “Fellows, these films were made for art instruction. How many artists in the audience?” Howls and shrieks and groans greet the disrobing girls.

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Air Show Over Okinawa

[Upon arriving on Okinawa, post V-J Day, my father — a member of a Signal Information and Monitoring Company — found that his skills as a high-speed Morse code operator weren’t much needed. He worked for a short time as a switchboard operator on the island, but, upon reenlisting for another year of Army service, was relieved of that duty and found himself waiting several weeks with the other reenlisting men for a priority return to the States. While on Okinawa, he spent a fair amount of time exploring the island and learning its history, and even gave thought to creating a guidebook for soldiers. This short entry gives some sense of the military presence on Okinawa — in this case, the warplanes.]

September 20, 1945 (Okinawa, Japan)

… Every day we look at one of the biggest air shows in the world. We see every type of modern American warplane, from the tremendous B-29’s and B-32’s down to the saucy little Cub liaisons. A single B-29 came overhead out of the east late yesterday afternoon. Directly overheat, it flashed a brilliant silver against the deep blue sky. As it swept on relentlessly into the sun, it became a black pencil-line silhouette. Another 29 circled low to the south of us with a B-26 on its tail. The Marauder isn’t a small plane. But it looked like a midget beside the mighty Superfort.

A formation of 15 P-38 Lightnings glides through the clouds several thousand feet overhead, like silver fish in a stream. The A-26 medium bombers, along with their close cousins the Mitchells and Marauders, are the most businesslike plane in the air. They usually slug straight ahead at top speed, making a terrific racket. The fat C-47 and C-54 transports are the most graceful, sweeping across the sky like handsome atrons. The Navy Hellcats rocket along like carefree young scamps.

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Deployment to Okinawa after Japan’s Surrender

[In late August, 1945, my father left Seattle on the troopship U.S.S. Haskell, headed for Okinawa, Japan. The timing of this deployment was anticlimactic. The U.S. had won control Okinawa that spring after an 82-day battle that cost the Allied troops more than 50,000 killed and wounded, and resulted in more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers killed or captured. Tens of thousands of Okinawan civilians were also killed, wounded or committed suicide during the battle.

Less than two months after the Battle of Okinawa concluded, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). Japan announced its surrender eight days later, on August 15, 1945. The timing of this surrender wasn’t soon enough to alter the Army’s existing plans to transport and base thousands of soldiers on Okinawa, which had initially been captured as a staging point for attacks on the main Japanese islands about 350 miles to the north.

My father was based on Okinawa for only about three months before being shipped back to the States. Almost all of his journal entries during this period are descriptive of life aboard the troopships to and from the island, and on Okinawa itself. Although these entries don’t generally include the type of social and political commentary that I’m highlighting on this blog, I’m posting several of these Okinawan entries because they provide an interesting window into life on the island in the immediate aftermath of the Pacific war.]

September 12, 1945 (Aboard troopship U.S.S. Haskell)

“There it is, almost dead ahead,” we said as we leaned out over the rail on the weather deck and pointed out beyond the bow to the horizon. “That’s land!” There were some skeptics – and Tom Pearson was one of them – who wouldn’t believe it. We were in morning chow line on the port side, and the sun, less than two hours over the horizon, was already hot. Its blazing light cut a swatch clean out of the horizon, the meeting line of sea and sky completely lost in the blinding golden glare. But it was almost in the opposite direction, westward, that we claimed to see our speck of land, a low gray-blue promontory just a shade darker than the sky. “That’s it, for sure,” we said with the proper sagacity of old salts. But Tom, unconverted landlubber, refused to be convinced. “Naw,” he said in a flat New England disavowal. “That’s not land. It’s too soon.”

But when we came up from chow, there was no doubt about it. It was land, a long low stretch of it now, with a white fringe of surf, and furthermore, it was quite plain that we were not the first to set eyes on it. In fact, it soon appeared that we were latecomers to this strand. Suddenly we saw three, four, five, six ships standing off that strand. After near two weeks of isolation on the eternally rolling Pacific, during which we’d seen only three or four other ships, and all save one of them mere specks trailing smoke along the horizon, we began to feel rather crowded.

It was near 0830 now, and a great puffy cloud had dropped a shadow over our section of the ocean. Just now our ship’s bow swung to the north, and brought to view quick as a curtain dropped before our eyes a long stretch of beach no more than a mile distant. Our cloud’s shadow reached only about the half-way mark to shore, and left a margin of pale blue-green water capped by brilliant white sand. A long tall ship stood in close to shore – a tanker, we surmised, tied to a pier still hidden from our eyes. For many feet above the water line it was painted an angry copper red – strange color, we thought. Every few minutes a long roller would slap it broadsides, and send a spume of
white spray curling lazily above the deck.

It was only when we came close astern of the old ship that we saw its true fate. It had been beached there at the eastern tip of the atoll to serve out its lonely old age as a breakwater. The copper read was simply raw rusted metal. Perhaps it was an old Jap tanker, dealt a mortal blow while the atoll was still in the hands of the enemy. There was no way we could tell now; no name or sign remained on her dead sides. But, whatever her nationality, there was something lonely and pitiful about her now, melancholy even in the bright sunlight. For the rightful grave of old ships is deep beneath ocean which is their natural home, while this unfortunate derelict was consigned to rust away naked on the beach.

Just a passing sigh for her, though. Things are happening too fast now. A signal light flashes at us from atop a black spider of a tower on this tip of land. A trim little harbor boat which has been coming at us slantways from the inside of the lagoon makes a graceful turn, for all its bouncing on the choppy water, pulls up alongside, and a tanned sailor in blue pants and white cap tosses a message roll up to our bridge. As the boat pulls away, a little brown mongrel dog bounces up from its interior and barks a greeting to us.

Now, at last, we’re inside Eniwetok lagoon. Most of us are jampacked on our narrow section of deck to see something new in our world. Hundreds of us are standing shoulder to shoulder there, drinking it all in. The sailors, who have jobs to do, have a tough time bullying a passage through our ranks. No one talks much – just a light buzz of conversation: “Look at those Navy planes” – “Isn’t that a carrier way off over there?” – “Goddam, there’s an awful lot of ships in here.” But mostly we don’t talk – just stand and watch as our ship glides slowly and deeply into the great lagoon. What do we think of? Lots of things, no doubt. A few, perhaps, remember the American fellows who not so many months ago swarmed ashore here through the enemy’s lead and fire. Lashed on our ship are the same assault boats they used. But, because they came first, and did a good job, we’ll never have to use them ourselves. Not the way they did, anyway. A couple thousand miles further on across the ocean, in Tokyo Bay, the Jap bigwigs this same day are signing the harsh terms of their unconditional surrender.

A whole fleet of fat Navy seaplanes, 50 or more by rough count, are nuzzling in to the calm water out there in front of us. Beyond them, the land, a little patch of green here and there, but mostly what appears from here a tenuously slender barrier against the pounding sea on the other side. Except for a few Quonset huts, the buildings are squat, rectangular, and camouflaged.

Our anchorage is at the far end of the other side of the lagoon, and it takes us half an hour at our slackened speed to get there. We’re getting pretty close to that carrier now, and we can see that it’s a baby flat-top, with its planes lined up on the flight deck, looking disproportionately large. All of the other ships – and we see that there are more than imagined, more than 50, for sure – are merchant ships, tankers or troopships like our own. All but two or three are riding at anchor. And soon our own ship faces around into the wind and stops stock still. Underfoot we feel and hear the rattle of the anchor chain paying out, a stretch at a time. We see the oil slick on the water lapping at our side, we catch the harbor smell in our nostrils. Home we are, in a sense, after our long voyage, even if it is just a first step in an immense trip which most of us hope will bring us round about, before too many months, to that real home, now six, eight, and nine thousand miles away.

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