In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Memories of Okinawa
  • Warner Berthoff (bio)

For members of the allegedly “greatest” generation one’s date of birth could make a considerable difference when it came to service in World War ii. Sixteen when Pearl Harbor was attacked, I turned eighteen early in 1943. To escape summons by the army, I enlisted in the navy and got myself assigned to the V-12 officer-training program. Happily the navy, as months passed, was not taking casualties at worst-case projections, and I remained in Harvard’s V-12 unit for two winters, taking regular college courses. Training, so-called, turned out to be a matter of once-a-week close-order drill exercises.

Samuel Hynes, whose Flights of Passage tells a different story, is only seven or eight months older than I; yet in April 1945, when I was little more than halfway through Midshipman’s School, Sam was flying combat missions over the Ryukyus, with the battle for Okinawa raging below. Though I was soon commissioned an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve, my only time at sea would consist of a weeklong sail from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor aboard a top-heavy escort carrier—a converted merchant ship with nothing much in the hold—when the 7,000-mile-long gentle Pacific swells abruptly defeated my claim to be immune to mal de mer; and then a two-week return voyage from the Pacific in the late summer of 1946 on an overcrowded troopship outrunning a typhoon and then befogged for two days off the Aleutians.

At the start of Midshipman’s School we were asked which branch of service we might prefer when commissioned: navigation, communications, regular deck duty, or, for a limited number, the Japanese language program. Just then the war in Europe was clearly nearing an end. But, with the fight for Iwo Jima just beginning and with Okinawa still a place few of us had heard of, the Pacific war seemed likely to go on a lot longer. The mantra then was “Golden Gate by ’48.” So I signed on for the fourteen-month Japanese program, surviving an awkward interview conducted in halting French (to test language proficiency) with an officer we later identified as “Arigato go-Hindmarsh.”

By the time of commissioning in early June—in a ceremony held in New York’s St. John the Divine, where, as a member of the midshipmen’s choir, I got to raise my voice in that acoustically splendid surround—the fighting on Okinawa was close to ending. And six weeks into studying Japanese—twelve [End Page 144] hours a day, four for the spoken language, the rest for memorizing and writing the kanji and kana characters—the atomic bombs were dropped and the Japanese surrendered. Twenty of us fledgling ensigns promptly decided that we didn’t want to spend a full year more learning Japanese, especially if we must remain in the adjunct language school the navy in its wisdom had lodged in the dryness, both meteorological and alcoholic, of Stillwater, Oklahoma. For our pains, after a long stretch waiting for orders in San Francisco and Pearl Harbor, we were sent off to join the U.S. Naval Military Government of Okinawa, replacing an older cadre of officers who had been in training for two or three years but now had enough “points” to go home.

So it was off to Okinawa, flying by short stages aboard a lumbering navy cargo plane, airspeed 170 knots: Johnston Island, where scarily the airstrip extended beyond the tiny island itself; Kwajalein; Guam; and finally Iwo Jima, the bleakest, most forbidding piece of real estate I’ve ever seen. You wondered how any of our marines survived the landing. Many did not. On Okinawa I was posted first at a military government camp in Koza village, just north of where the main fighting had taken place. Our work was chiefly disaster relief, making up as well as we could for the losses in goods and arable terrain the Koza villagers had suffered.

As 1945 turned into 1946, American military units were pulling up stakes, leaving salvageable supplies behind. With the indispensable help of an experienced chief petty...

pdf

Share