War is End on Okinawa: In Search of Captain Robert Fowler

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

—The Duke of Wellington, 1815

FOR the past fifteen years, I have been collecting books about the battle of Okinawa and reading chapters about the fighting in longer histories of the Pacific war.¹ I have also heard many stories set among its ridges. From before the war and into the occupation, my father served as a combat infantry officer in the Marine Corps, commanding C Company, 1st Marines, through some of the worst campaigns, including Guadalcanal. Before the 1st Marine Regiment landed on Okinawa in 1945, however, he was "sent stateside," along with others who had fought in three earlier campaigns. But many of his stories about the war touch on Okinawa, where, in particular, his close friend Robert Fowler was killed, and many other 1st Marines were killed or wounded.

I have asked a number of C Company Marines about the fighting, receiving answers about the face of battle that suggest its portrait is best painted in the agonies brushed by Goya. "I saw one of my men fall," wrote John Wilkerson. "I missed him later that day and I never learned his fate." He also recalled a close encounter with the enemy: "We were about three feet apart. He looked me dead in the eyes for a split second. My first bullet hit him two inches above his right eye." Also serving with C Company, John Pido remembered: "I'm 75 now and 55 years ago, June 9, 1945, I was shot through the face, jaw, and neck while with the First Marine Division." Emil Buff spoke for many when he recalled randomly:

my mind is more a sea bag than a filing cabinet . . . as kamikaze pilots continued to introduce their god to our fleet, we who knew him would soon take refuge in ours . . . the lead teams, stretched far too thin for the ground they covered, were pinned and bleeding. . . . Smoke was thick, could find no one . . . the smoke drifted and stung eyes . . . trail now slick with mud . . . was on a hospital ship that night.

To see Okinawa for myself and to follow the last footsteps of my father's friend Robert Fowler, I flew to Naha, the capital, after a business trip to Hong Kong in autumn 2000. As the plane descended into Naha International Airport, it passed over Ie Shima, the small island where, several weeks into the campaign that began on 1 April 1945, the war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed. Before he was struck by a Japanese machine-gun bullet, he wrote: "In Europe, we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman or repulsive; the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice." The battle for Okinawa lasted for two months after Pyle was killed. During the eighty-two days of the fighting, an average of almost three thousand soldiers and civilians were killed daily.

The airport at Naha is inland from the blue waters of the East China Sea, where the largest naval task force in history landed an American army of almost six hundred thousand men. As a Marine in the invasion forces, Russell Davis, recalls: "We were going 'up' again . . . we were outbound for Okinawa by way of Ulithi," where he saw "the greatest gathering of ships in the history of the world. . . . In such an army, the great Spanish Armada would have been run over and never sighted." But despite the size and power of the American fleet, the seas turned red wherever the waves of kamikaze planes washed over the American bows.

One Quarter of Okinawa:
"a standing army"

Thanks to my friend George Feifer, whose book Tennozan is one of the best histories of the battle on Okinawa...