Iwo 26 charlie, p.5
Iwo, 26 Charlie, page 5
Commander Willson finally got on one of the spotter nets. In plain language he recommended Nevada fire Main Battery, danger close, all along the beachhead front line for ten minutes, which might give the infantry a chance to bolt off the beach and onto the harder airfield perimeter, opening up the beachhead to reinforcements. Using plain language meant that Japanese intercept stations would hear him, but by that time the situation was so bad that there was no point to using codes. At first there was no reply, and I half expected a sharp reprimand from the admiral controlling the gunline. Then an extremely agitated voice came up on the net and said: “Jesus God, Nevada, do it, do it, do it. Five hundred yards from the water line! We’ll recall the people in the gap.”
I personally set the plot and then ordered up Main Battery, full salvos, high-cap, danger close, commence firing!
The big dogs let fly and I could only hope and pray we weren’t dropping thousands of pounds of high explosive on our own guys’ heads. I glanced across at Willson, who’d been getting fall-of-shot reports from the Main-Battery director officer. He suddenly nodded his head vigorously. Go on, he mouthed. Go on. “Go on” was spotter language for: keep shooting—you’re right on target.
Dear God, I hope so, I thought. I brought the gun target line to the right two degrees after each ten-gun salvo until we’d traversed the entire one-mile-long landing zone. I was about to reverse the line of fire when Willson put up a hand and I ordered a check-fire. In my excitement I’d forgotten to listen to the radio nets. Apparently that entire Gordian knot of over three thousand Marines and their machines had finally been able to go over the top and were running en masse out onto the airfield and into new positions. Without opposition.
For about one minute.
We knew the lull wouldn’t last long—the Japanese recovered and opened back up from yet other artillery positions, but we’d broken up that lethal logjam down on the beach for just long enough.
And so it went, for the next ten hours. By dusk, the amphibious commander, aware now that anything sent into the beach was going to get stuck, closed the landing beaches. This slowed the slaughter, but it also shut off the flow of ammo and water to the Marines desperately trying to move forward out of that lethally designed killing zone. A frantic-sounding Marine spotter came up and said he could still see artillery gun flashes on Suribachi, about halfway up the slopes. Commander Willson jumped to the plot and drew a box on the eastern slopes of the volcano that contained the middle third of the mountain accessible to our guns.
“Saturation fires,” Willson ordered. “Clean ’em out.”
We never heard back from that spotter, but that wasn’t unusual—we’d learned that the spotters’ life expectancy could be really short if the Japanese were anywhere close to them. Sometimes they could make a call-for-fire, sometimes they had to just freeze in place. I felt that as long as we were punching fourteen-inch shells into Suribachi and all those caves and tunnels, we had to be doing some good. I finally had to just sit down; coffee could only sustain me for so long. Willson started sending the officers to the wardroom in relays; I made sure I brought a sandwich for him when I came back.
The phone from the bridge chirped. Willson listened and then called for another ammo inventory for the Main Battery. In the meantime, the five-inch guns began pumping illumination rounds out over the island. These would burst at about ten thousand feet, deploy a parachute, and then drift down while a magnesium flare suspended beneath the chute lit up everything within line-of-sight like a welding shop. This would go on all night as each of the fire-support ships, the big boys, the cruisers, and the destroyers, expended their allocated amount of flares. The eye-blistering light would give our Marines a chance to spot movement out in front of friendly front lines as the enemy came out of their spider holes with knives and swords to hunt down Marines in their foxholes and kill them silently.
The ammo report came back. Yes, we needed to go re-arm. The cruisers and destroyers could leave the island and find an ammunition ship offshore, go alongside, pass shells and powder cans by highline, and come right back. We could do that for the five-inch, but not for the big stuff. Once we got to Guam, we would anchor alongside an ammunition ship and use her booms and tackle to move the huge shells and pallets of powder cans from her holds to our main deck. From there they’d be passed down elevators and scuttles to the deep magazines. They had to send three destroyers with us for protection against submarines and even air attack during the transit. During the transfer process in the harbor, where there’d be hundreds of men exposed out on deck, humping massive shells by hand to the magazine elevator hatches, shore-based Army anti-aircraft guns would stand ready to deal with any long-range Japanese bombers. The whole process reminded all of us that to go “just down the road” in the Pacific usually meant a one-thousand-mile trip at twenty knots. Since we’d left station anyway, we took the opportunity to refuel, re-provision, and enjoy some mail while we were there. Two other battleships remained on station, so the Marines never lacked for support.
We got back on L-Day +10. The generals and the admirals had predicted a quick victory on this tiny island, but it was turning out to be anything but. Ten days into the operation, the Marines were taking such heavy casualties that the outcome was actually in doubt. Even with three light aircraft carriers and two battlewagons in support, daily progress was being measured in feet. Willson reminded us that the Japanese had had a few years to prepare Iwo for invasion, and they had probably honeycombed the entire island with miles of tunnels, hundreds of fortified positions, extensive minefields, overlapping fields of artillery fire, and caches of ammo, water, and food. Mount Suribachi, as we were learning to our sorrow, rose 550 feet above sea level, and was a porous cinder cone filled like an African termite mound with soldiers, stores, water, guns, and firing positions.
A Marine team came aboard when we got back to give us an update on the situation. Simply put, the Marines were getting nowhere and dying by the hundreds. We resumed our station as the on-call fire-support battleship, while Colorado finally departed the line. Colorado had been taught a severe lesson three days before the Marines went ashore. She and some of the other offshore fire-support forces had closed in to the island in order to put some point-blank sixteen-inch into the flanks of Suribachi. There had been no return fire. We now knew that the Japanese had been just laying low in order not to reveal where their big artillery pieces were. Colorado went into 2,500 yards, just over a mile offshore.
Apparently, one of the enemy artillery commanders just couldn’t resist and turned loose with three eight-inch casemated guns. The first salvo blew one of the scouting aircraft off its catapult rail on Colorado’s port quarter. The second put two eight-inch rounds into her pilothouse, killing the entire bridge crew and the ship’s executive officer. The captain survived only because he had elected to step into the armored conning tower, whose sides were six-inch thick steel, to retrieve his personal binoculars seconds before. She took more hits along her armored sides, which bounced off, but others landed in the densely clustered 20mm gun tubs on the 01 level and two even penetrated the ship’s sides just above the armor belt, starting fires and killing more crewmen down on the forward mess decks. She was leaving for a fuel stop at Guam, and then all the way back to Pearl for repairs.
Our director officer had called down that he could just make out where the incoming was originating, so Nevada had turned her Main Battery loose on those casemates using direct fire, controlled from the Main-Battery director. Marty actually got to see one of the artillery pieces get blown out of its cave into the air and then there had been a truly satisfying secondary explosion when the gun’s ready-service ammo went up inside the mountain. After that, Suribachi went silent. All the wanna-be sightseers maneuvered to open a respectful distance from the volcano. And then some kamikaze aircraft appeared out of nowhere and one of them struck Colorado, inflicting even more casualties. She was never in danger of sinking, but so many of her crew had been wounded or killed that she probably wouldn’t be back. Another formation of kamikazes had attacked the light-carrier formation, crashed one of them, starting a hangar deck fire that eventually required them to abandon ship. Two of our destroyers had had to torpedo her to finish it.
I went back down to Plot after the Marine briefing, which had been truly sobering. One of the phone talkers waved me over to take a call. He said there was a First Lieutenant Bart Martin, USMC, who’d just been brought aboard from the beach for medical treatment. The corpsman making the call said he was badly injured and was asking for me.
I was bowled over. Bart? Here? Bart Martin had been a classmate and close friend at Georgia Tech. His mother and my mother had been sorority sisters. His daddy had been a peanut farmer’s son who’d gotten rich in the farm fuels and chemical business in south Georgia. Their plantation was not too far away from ours. We’d grown up in similar circumstances—in large antebellum houses, hunting, fishing, horses, football, cars, and drinking. Bart had become a serious drinker; I’d tried to keep up with him but failed whiskey drinking, much like I failed cigarette smoking. Bart, on the other hand, had adopted Tech’s fight song as his modus operandi while at the university. He was a first-class “rambling wreck from Georgia Tech.”
Once I’d graduated, while I was still thinking about going into the Navy, Bart had already signed up with the Marines. Being an engineer, he’d ended up in the artillery branch, just in time for Saipan and then Iwo. He’d been assigned to the Marine Third division, Thirteenth artillery regiment, first as an officer in the JASCO, which stood for Joint Assault Signal Companies, who technically coordinated calls-for-fire from front line Marine and Army spotters with the Navy ships offshore and any close air support ships or units. A second-lieutenant in the field would call in a request for naval gunfire to regimental headquarters via field telephone or radio. The JASCO’s job was to assign the fire mission either to organic Marine artillery or to offshore naval gunfire or air support. If the decision was made to assign naval gunfire to the problem, he also had to translate the spotter’s actual location and where the target was into coordinates that a ship offshore could use to compute a firing solution.
It was a cumbersome process, and it often meant that the front line spotter’s urgent request for artillery support, Marine or naval, was delayed, sometimes for hours. A spotter up on the front lines needed rounds on target now, not hours from now. The solution, of course, was to assign each naval gunfire support ship its own dedicated spotter. The problem was that the Marines in the field didn’t have many radios that could talk directly to the ships. A naval gunfire support warship, like Nevada, had unlimited and stable electric power, air-conditioned plotting rooms, and an entire compartment filled with radios, operators, plotters, computers, and message recorders. The Marine spotter up on the front lines crouched in a stinking hole in the ground, surrounded by the chaos of infantry battle, with one Marine next to him hand-cranking hard on a field portable generator that fed erratic voltage to a radio harnessed to yet another Marine’s back, while the spotter himself tried to focus oversized binoculars on the enemy position that desperately needed to die, and all this while knowing that Japanese sniper teams were actively hunting for him. On Saipan, and Peleliu before it, a shavetail lieutenant front line spotter had about a three-day life expectancy unless he was well protected.
And now Bart was here in Nevada’s sick bay? I asked Commander Willson if I could go see him, and he quickly gave me permission. The forward battle dressing station was just forward of the senior officer wardroom. I had to go up two decks, through a series of watertight doors, through the wardroom, and only then into the medical station. The first thing that struck me was the smell: it was awful. I realized that it was coming from a pile of blood-soaked Marine uniforms piled up around the three triage tables. The second thing was that the station was full of casualties. I hadn’t known that Marine wounded were being brought out to warships—I’d seen hospital ships offshore and assumed that’s where the wounded would go, once, and if, they made it off the beach. I learned that the hospital ships had been overwhelmed after the second day and now any ship with doctors and a decent-sized sick bay, such as cruisers and even some destroyers, had been pressed into emergency medical service.
A harried-looking chief corpsman asked me what I wanted. I told him. He ordered a young petty officer to take me over to the triage holding area. This consisted of six movable beds in one corner of the compartment, where corpsmen were tending to a half-dozen motionless shapes covered in bloody medical drapes. A lieutenant commander, whom I assumed was a doctor, was hands-deep into the wounds of one man, his rubber gloves bright red. I saw Bart on one of the beds. His face was ghastly: pale, almost blue-white, his eyes frantic and his lips moving soundlessly. A young corpsman was wiping his face and giving him tiny sips of ice water, which dribbled down his chin into a soggy mass of bandages on his chest. The rest of the station was a subdued tangle of docs and corpsmen tending to wounds, doing ad hoc surgery, and stabbing ampules of morphine into bloody bodies. The corner in which I was standing was much less active, and that’s when I realized these were the cases that the triage docs had deemed beyond saving. I felt sick to my stomach. To make matters worse, Bart already stank of dead flesh. The whole compartment reeked of it. Gangrene must be rampant over here.
Bart focused bloodshot eyes on me and I saw recognition bloom. “Lee-boy,” he croaked. “They done got me.”
“Y’all be still, Bart,” I said. “What the hell happened?”
“I was at the regimental JASCO,” he whispered. “Then I had to go out and spot.”
To my horror, each time he spoke tiny red bubbles escaped from his bruised lips. One of his eyes kept closing and opening, almost as if it was in time with his heartbeat. If that was the case, it was much too slow. “Knew you were here on this big boy. Even heard your voice sometimes.”
“Goddamn, Bart, I’m so sorry. But they’ll get you fixed up, I promise. We’ve got good docs on this ship.”
He flashed me a familiar “you’ve got to be shitting me” look. I pretended not to recognize it.
“Lee-boy,” he whispered, “we done stepped in it over there on that fucking island. Those bastards were ready and waiting. The gin-rals said it’d be a one, maybe two-week deal. They was wrong, Old Son. They killin’ us, sure as hell. An’ they themselves don’t care about dyin’. They want to die. Goddamned nightmares rising up out of the dark, with swords, for Chrissake, screaming shit, and cuttin’ guys’ heads off.”
He gasped with the effort of speaking. I grabbed one of his hands and told him, easy, easy, catch your breath, Bart, easy, now.
His eyes widened. “You don’t know, Lee-boy. Ain’t nobody knows what’s happening over there. It’s—it’s—”
“We’re trying to help, Bart. We’re shooting, day and night. Ran clean out of ammo, even.”
“Ain’t workin’, my brother. You just movin’ black sand around. They’s deep. They’s in the ground, deep. You gotta start using AP, from a long way away. Make it come straight down, not sideways.”
And then he took a breath, or tried to. He couldn’t find it. His face contorted as he tried and tried to get that breath, and then a gout of bright red blood erupted noisily out of his mouth and nose while his eyes rolled back up into their sockets and he went rigid before suddenly going limp, his entire body relaxing into the peace of the grave.
The chief corpsman appeared. He closed Bart’s eyes. “He’s gone, Lieutenant,” he said. “He really wanted to see you. Kept insisting you were onboard. There was no chance he was gonna make it. I’m sorry, sir. But I’m damn glad you came.”
It was my turn to take a deep breath. Bart was dead. My brother in arms. My hunting buddy. My drinking buddy. My girl-chasing accomplice. Lee-boy, he called me. Just like old times. My teenage soulmate. I was speechless. Unabashed, I wept.
Then I heard the Main Battery cutting loose topside. The fourteen-inch guns were speaking. I wanted to stay there, to hold his hand, to speak comforting words, to remember all those good times, but those colossal thumps told me I was needed elsewhere.
God Dammit. God Dammit!
SEVEN
Things had changed when I got back to Plot. First, the ship had moved away from Iwo, all the way out to fifteen miles. Thirty thousand yards, to be precise. Just about maximum effective range for our fourteen-inch guns. Someone on Admiral Oldendorf’s staff had pointed out that direct high-cap fire, however impressive, was obviously not penetrating to where the enemy really was—deep underground. The solution to that was twofold: get out to extreme ranges, which meant that our heavy shells would be coming straight down and not just blowing volcanic sand dunes all over the place but going deep. The second part was that we were going to start using armor-piercing ammunition instead of high-cap.
Not for long, I thought. If you stood in the magazine, as I had done many times, the differences between an AP round and a high-cap projectile were obvious. Both projectiles had body diameters of fourteen inches. The high-capacity round weighed about 1,700 pounds and carried half a ton of filler, meaning almost the entire body of the projectile was filled with high explosive. The armor-piercing rounds were even longer than the high-cap rounds, and weighed almost 2,300 pounds, but only about half their length was actual, explosive-filled projectile. The forward half of the round was the so-called cap, made of brittle steel. A high-capacity round went off when both its nose and base fuzes sensed that the projectile had gone from a velocity of 2,600 feet per second to zero in a single microsecond.
