A Captain of the Gate Read online

  02

  THE EARTH MY HELL

  The invasion was never going to be a surprise. Operation Olympic, the Allied attack on Kyushu, five months earlier, had not caught the Japanese unaware. They had known it was coming for more than a year, and had prepared as best they could. Indeed, they had prepared a much more formidable defence than anyone on Douglas MacArthur’s staff had thought likely. While the Japanese could only guess at the forces that would come upon them, they were intimately familiar with the terrain upon which battle would be joined, in southern Kyushu, below the line of the central ranges. The gaijin were constrained in their choice of landing site, almost certainly having to come ashore at Miyazaki and Ariake Bay, and more than likely on the Satsuma Peninsula near the town of Kushikino as well.

  The Japanese had known that the Allies would amass the greatest fleet ever seen, far larger even than the armada that accompanied the D-Day landings in 1944. And so it had been. On November 1, 1945, more than 500 warships had appeared over the horizon to the south of the home islands, among them forty-two aircraft carriers, twenty-four battleships and hundreds of cruisers and destroyers. Behind them came even more vessels, troop transports and supply ships. Thousands of aircraft filled the skies, flying from bases in the Ryukus. British Bombers, protected by Australian fighters, pounded dozens of hastily constructed airstrips all over Kyushu. US Navy Corsairs flew in dense blue swarms above the slow moving fleet, ready to throw themselves at the waves of sacrificial kamikaze that the Allied high command knew would form a lynchpin of the defense.

  And still the losses had been horrific. Eleven carriers sunk, including the venerable Enterprise, and that had been the least of the damage. Eighty-nine troop transports had been struck by suicide bombers. Nearly 43,000 men had died without setting foot on Japanese soil. When the landing had been forced, those losses spiralled up to 100,000 inside two weeks. The optimists on MacArthur’s staff had argued that there were unlikely to be more than eight divisions opposing the lodgement. The pessimists thought ten. In the end, there were fourteen, all of them fighting to the death. Of the 140,000 Japanese soldiers massed in these divisions, only 1902 were captured, almost all of them rendered incapable of resistance by their wounds or shell shock. Every other man gave his life for the Emperor.

  The American soldiers and marines who fought on the beaches and across the plains of southern Kyushu drank from a deep well of horror which even their comrades who had liberated the Nazis’ concentration camps had not known. For not only did they fight against the men of the Imperial Japanese Army, but every step of their advance was resisted by the Japanese people themselves. An 80-year-old farmer, a small schoolboy, a pregnant woman, any one of them might suddenly spring at you from the door of a hut armed with nothing more than a sharpened stick, or a farming implement. The official history of the campaign, published in 1954, listed Staff Sergeant Tom Rilke as the first recorded casualty of just such a ‘non-combatant’ attack. After a firefight in a small hamlet outside of Kushikino, Rilke had been trying to lure a schoolroom full of frightened children out into the open with an offer of chocolate, when he was set upon and inexpertly beheaded by their teacher, a nineteen-year-old girl wielding an awl. After hundreds of such attacks General Walter Kreuger, commandant of the US 6th Army, sought and received presidential approval for one of the most controversial orders in American military history. As of March 13, all civilians in the Kyushu theatre of operations were deemed to be combatants unless they immediately surrendered upon being challenged to do so. Entire villages were razed by artillery and aerial bombardment when the occupants refused to show themselves.1 By the end of major combat operations more than a million Japanese, both civilian and military, were dead. American losses stood at nearly one hundred and twenty thousand killed in action. The second half of Operation Downfall, the invasion of Honshu, was infinitely worse.

  McKinnon missed Kyushu. He arrived in Japan as the lieutenant in charge of the second platoon, A Company, 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry Division. It is a truism of popular fiction that all lieutenants are gangly, thin-limbed, and wet behind the ears, barely able to find their own asses with a good map in a small, well-lit room. Their men merely tolerate them, grizzled non-coms work around them, and they almost inevitably die in the first ten seconds of any engagement, leaving the real men to get on with the business of war. It works well as a dramatic device, but if it held true as often in real life as it does in Hollywood, all battles would quickly devolve into chaos and madness as any semblance of command disappeared. Branch McKinnon was not a green officer, wet behind the ears, and awestruck in the presence of his senior NCOs. He had been promoted from the ranks. Fighting with the 3rd Battalion through the Indonesian archipelago, in the Philippines at Breakneck Ridge where he won a Silver Star and his third stripe, and on Luzon where he was commissioned in the field after the savage hand-to-hand combat at Zig Zag Pass.

  The men he led into battle on the Kanto Plain were likewise, for the most part, survivors and veterans of MacArthur’s island hopping campaign that took the Allies from their last bastion in Australia all the way to the inner sanctum of Emperor Hirohito’s Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The Battalion, McKinnon’s home for the previous three years, had suffered close to 4000% casualties in that time. Indeed, it is likely McKinnon would have stepped onto the Kanto Plain as a company commander or possibly even a battalion level officer had he not spent at least 18 months of those three years recuperating in hospital from his various wounds. It is also possible, of course, that had he not been out of action for so long and so often, his name would have been etched into the Battalion’s honor roll as yet another of the glorious dead.

  We know from McKinnon’s own unfinished autobiography that he was not a commander who played favorites with his men. Although there were three men in the second platoon with whom he had fought since the Battalion’s first operations in New Guinea, he was no more mindful of their safety or care that he was of the freshly minted privates who had joined the platoon straight out of basic training, two days before the Division shipped out for Downfall. In a letter written to his mother on the eve of the invasion, McKinnon worried more about his untested charges and what might befall them in the meat grinder of Tokyo.

  ‘It would be such a terrible shame, Mom,’ he wrote, ‘if anything were to happen to those kids this late in the game. I just don’t know that I could forgive myself.’2

  Given the much greater casualty toll of the first phase of Downfall, everyone involved in Coronet, the second half of the operation, from President Truman to the humblest foot soldier, had reason to fear what was waiting for them on Honshu. The geography of the island virtually wrote the operational concept for the Allied planners. That same geography could be read by its Japanese defenders, of course. Estimates varied on both sides with, for instance, British and Australian military authorities advising their respective War Cabinets to expect Allied casualties of nearly 2,000,000, and Japanese casualties of a staggering 10 to 15,000,000, depending on the extent to which strategic bombing and unconventional weapons such as gas and germ bombs were deployed, an option the new British Labour Party government ruled out within a week of being elected. It remains a matter for conjecture how the following sixty years may have played out had Churchill’s conservative government retained office in 1945. Declassified documents from the Imperial war office (see appendix 1) indicate that Sir Winston was solidly behind a USAF plan to carpet bomb the urban area of greater Tokyo with a mix of incendiary, high explosive, biological and chemical warheads. A War Cabinet memo from February 1945 went so far as to authorize Bomber Command to begin planning to shift strategic assets to the Pacific Theatre in August 1945 with this very plan in mind.

  At that stage, of course, nobody outside the very highest councils of the Allied command had any idea of the failure of the Manhattan Project. It was not until 1964, nearly a full decade after the first successful atomic test was carried out in New Mexico, that the US government released any informat
ion related to the Allies’ wartime atomic program. While Truman’s frustration with the lack of progress at Los Alamos has been well-documented by his biographer, StephenF. Murphy, he was not the only American, or indeed the only person on the Allied side, praying for deliverance via the agency of a miracle weapon. The archives of all the victors contained many examples of correspondence from private soldiers and junior officers such as McKinnon, fervently hoping that an invasion of the Home Islands might be made unnecessary by the unveiling of some super weapon. McKinnon himself made reference more than once to news articles he had read about the German rocket program and how rumors had spread through his platoon that the Navy had developed massive ‘rocket barges as big as aircraft carriers’ but carrying no planes, only hundreds of V2-style missiles.

  ‘I don’t believe it for a minute myself,’ he wrote to his sister on Christmas Eve 1945, ‘but the boys have been very excited this week by talk that the whole show might be called off because Halsey and Nimitz are planning to steal MacArthur’s thunder by parking hundreds of these things offshore and just raining them down on top of Tokyo until there’s not enough of the nips left to scrape up and put in a bucket.’

  Unfortunately for Second Platoon there would be no deliverance from above. A Company were lucky to avoid the fate that befell the first wave of attackers on Honshu, where casualties in some units topped out at 90%. By the time McKinnon and his men came ashore on March 3, 1946, fatigued and seasick from having sat in the heaving, untidy swell and cross chop of Sagami Bay for two days, the lead elements of the Eighth Army had pushed the beachhead in six miles. The dreadful wrack and ruin of modern industrial-scale slaughter had not been cleared away, however, and the platoon were greeted upon stepping ashore with a hellish mound of disembodied arms, legs, heads, torsos and various slabs and chunks of unidentifiable human refuse piled into a huge funeral mound for burning by the Army Corps of Engineers later that day. McKinnon’s platoon sergeant, Elmore Greaves of Flagstaff, Arizona, one of those three men who had been with the young officer from the very first days of the war, roared abuse at anybody who stopped to stare, but was himself delayed on the beach by having to take a minute to vomit up the remains of the tinned fruit he had had for breakfast on the armored landing craft.

  The Battalion history records the first casualty as occurring less than 15 minutes later when Pvt. Forster was killed by a ‘Jumping Jack’ style mine a few hundred yards in from the high water mark. Forster receives just that one line acknowledgment in the official documentation, but McKinnon recorded the incident in some detail in his notebook later that day, expanding on it at some length in the manuscript of his unpublished memoirs3 a few years later.

  ‘We could clearly hear the rumble and thunder of the frontline a few miles away,’ he wrote.

  ‘The Navy was still sitting close in shore, hundreds of destroyers and cruisers and even a couple of big battle wagons like the Missouri and Tennessee punching giant 15-inch shells twenty miles inland. They screeched overhead like birds of prey and landed only God knew where somewhere up ahead, probably in the middle of some Tokyo suburb. Planes roared overhead constantly, fleets of heavy bombers, British Lancasters by the look of them, US and Canadian Liberators and Flying Fortresses, and hundreds, maybe thousands of small buzzing fighters. Australian Spitfires. US Corsairs and Mustangs, some of them loaded out with rockets and bombs under their wings for ground attack missions and close support.

  ‘Perhaps there was too much going on. There was so much traffic in the landing zone, so many thousands of men moving to and fro. Trucks and jeeps and tanks everywhere. Sergeants bellowing at privates, officers yelling at each other. For some of the boys in my platoon it was overwhelming. They just didn’t have their mind in the game. But I should have, and I didn’t, and Forster died because of that. We were walking in single file up a steep valley that had been clearly marked out with white stakes by the engineers. As long as you stayed between the stakes you were safe. But, as Elmer told me later, Forster wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy gazing up into the heavens, hypnotized by the vapor trails which crosshatched the sky like thousands of woolen threads. I was leading from the front of the column, trying to get a signal back to Battalion on our new radio. It was on the fritz of course. Damn thing seemed to be out of action more often than not. I had assigned each of the new guys a buddy from one of the older hands in his squad, and Forster was supposed to be teamed up with Bob Whitelock, who’d been with us for over a year. Unfortunately, Bob had the sea sickness something terrible and at the very moment Forster wandered off the marked trail, his buddy was bent over about 25 yards back, up chucking into the sand.

  ‘Even with all that noise and chaos on the beach, I recognized the click click sound off one of the Jumping Jack mines the Japanese had developed from the famous German “Betty” design. I was already dropping to the ground with the words “take cover” at the back of my throat when it detonated. The blast seemed louder than I remembered, but then I hadn’t been in action for a few months. The ringing in my ears faded after a few seconds and all I could hear was Forster screaming that his legs were gone. He screamed for less than a minute until Doc Waters got the morphine into him and put him to sleep. That was the only thing for it unfortunately. It wasn’t just his legs he lost. Half of his innards had splashed out over the rest of the platoon. He had no chance …’

  The platoon was delayed between the sand dunes for all of ten minutes before the demands of their timetable saw them leave the mortally wounded soldier behind in the care of two Navy corpsmen. McKinnon’s men met up with their sister platoons at the rendezvous point a mile inland, at the site of what had been a small fishing village. First Platoon had been sniped on the way in, but without casualties. Their radio was working fine and they called in close air support from a pair of P-51 Mustangs which unloaded a volley of rocket and cannon fire on the small hill from which the fire was judged to have come. Third Platoon, by way of contrast, came up five minutes behind McKinnon and reported no incidents at all.

  With the Company gathered together at its first staging point, McKinnon and the other platoon commanders wanted to press on, but had to wait for orders from Battalion HQ before they could move any further inland. The situation across the southern reaches of Honshu was still in violent flux. In contrast with the operation at Normandy, which involved twelve divisions, the invasion of the main Japanese island required twenty-five divisions, two separate US armies, the Eighth and the First, and a Commonwealth Corps made up of forces from Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand under the command of Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead. The British Empire forces, in-line with a strong recommendation from Gen. Douglas MacArthur, had trained in the United States for six months before the operation and deployed using only US equipment and logistics. They came ashore with the US First Army at Kujukuri Beach on the Boso Peninsula. Even so, there were significant and occasionally calamitous breakdowns of communication between the armies.

  Over one million Allied troops were ashore and engaged with the enemy by the time McKinnon’s platoon disembarked from their armored landing craft. Opposing them were 800,000 Japanese soldiers, many brought home from the occupation of China in the previous six months. Allied planning had allowed for an opposing force of up to 600,000 men, up to half of whom were expected to be low-quality personnel from home defense units. The disparity in these numbers was one of the great intelligence failures of the Second World War and as a direct consequence the casualty figures for Operation Coronet skewed wildly towards the upper limit of the worst-case scenarios, in spite of all the lessons learned on Kyushu.

  Complicating matters at a tactical level were hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians who abandoned their noncombatant status. As before, they were not organized in any sense that a military mind would recognize. No poorly trained, poorly equipped regiments of home defense troops or civilian militia joined their uniformed colleagues on the frontline. Rather thousands of Allied soldiers died at
the hands of women, children, the old and infirm who had been wired up with explosives and left behind as human bombs. After the Allies changed tactics on Kyushu and began engaging any civilian who did not immediately surrender, the enemy responded by having its civilian kamikaze do just that, before blowing themselves up as their surrender was taken.

  Of course not every civilian was ‘booby-trapped’ in that way, but the uncertainty created a tactical nightmare for the advancing Allies, who never knew whether the small child or aged refugee crying out for assistance with their hands held high was swathed in a bomb belt, packed with ball bearings, rusty nails, scrap metal and even handfuls of gravel. Every single human being they encountered thus became a potentially lethal adversary. Add to that the efforts of the main force Japanese military, which included not only the Army units returned from China, but thousands upon thousands of ‘special units’ trained and equipped for more ‘conventional’ kamikaze operations, and the utter chaos and insensate savagery of those first days of combat become a little clearer. Ten thousand Allied Naval personnel alone died as Japanese pilots, their fragile, obsolete aircraft packed with high explosive, threw themselves on the invasion fleet. Over a dozen capital ships, including three aircraft carriers, succumbed to attacks by ‘suicide submarines’.

  ‘Thou camest on earth to make the earth my hell,’ quoted Admiral Fraser, Commander of the British Pacific Fleet, as he witnessed near simultaneous detonations of underwater kamikaze beneath the keel of the USS Iowa at the very moment that Lieutenant Branch McKinnon back on shore ordered Sergeant Greaves to gather the men and prepare for a double-time march to the frontline where the Battalion was urgently needed to bulk up a collapsing flank.