The Old Breed

Chapter 60

Shuri Castle, Okinawa

May 29th, 1945

The fight through Shuri City went on practically until we had made it to the lines of Able Company, 5th Marines. We went wall to wall, hut to hut, wiping out any resistance we found until there was no one left brave enough to oppose us if any were left alive in the first place. Flamethrower sand shotguns were particularly good at clearing spider holes and huts, and it was easy to tell where we had moved from the black oily smoke that poured forth from every flammable material we had come across. Overall the fight through this part of the city was a success, over a dozen enemy confirmed kills for three Marine casualties. It was scary though to know that it only took a dozen or so Japs to bog down a whole company of U.S. Marines for almost an hour. But, as we had quickly learned, guerilla tactics were deathly efficient. But our in depth training and tactics overpowered their defenses in the long run, as seen through the statistics of our other battles. The enemy usually had almost 20,000 more men killed than we did in each battle. That would be more comforting if we didn't happen to see Marine bodies wherever we went.

When we made it to the outskirts of the Shuri Castle, we were able to finally beat back the last stragglers of Jap resistance with the added firepower of another Marine company. There was a wide entrance flanked by thick walls into the castle and we used that to get in, a machine gun team provided cover as we ducked inside. The walls, nearly three feet thick, opened up into a wide rolling courtyard. My first impression was that it would be a very pretty place pre-war, the place reclusive, the walls blotting out a lot of the noise of the surrounding city, a few delicate plants and colorful flowers remaining around the walls. In the middle was a small tidal pool, a red wooden footbridge crossing it. I could imagine birds singing in the few trees that still poked upwards from the ground, bees buzzing between what must have been an amazing assortment of shrubs and plant life. But the reality of the courtyard brought back the truth of this destructive war. The grass was gone now, chewed up and mixed into thick mud by artillery attacks, any plant life left trampled under the feet of many Japanese soldiers and Marines. The tidal pool was almost completely empty, the water probably used up by the Japanese defenders who littered this castle and the miles of tunnels underneath. The small puddles that did remain were dark brown with mud and whatever other ungodly materials had found their way in there. The trees, less than a dozen left, were barely there at all, most just stumps, the tops messes of shriveled wood shards and spikes. Three were left almost intact, the trunks blackened from fire damage, the leaves gone. There were a few mortar pits scattered about, evident by the sandbags encircling neatly dug holes, shattered equipment and, in some cases, bodies, filling them. A few more Jap bodies were lying in their twisted, grotesque forms, left in their original state from where they had fallen, just early this morning. Already, hordes of maggots and black flies attacked the corpses hungrily. The sight would be sickening if I hadn't already seen the same scenes so many times over already.

Past the courtyard, the ground rose and fell in large rolling hills, the hulks of burned out wooden buildings standing atop them. The foundations of several of the buildings were enormous, massive compared to the small huts we had become used to seeing, and I tried to picture what the castle would have looked like before we had arrived. The structures would have risen two, maybe three stories tall in places, the wood carved eloquently to embrace the royalty of the place, the roofs in the same red-tiled, wide, sloping style of the Okinawans and Japanese. It would have been a place of glory with many beautiful gardens, wide courtyards, gates, and shrines. Would.

The castle I saw now was, well, not a castle. According to scuttlebutt, in the last week, the castle had been shelled for three days by the U.S.S. Mississippi, and had burned mostly down on the 27th. And that was without the constant bombardments by Army and Marine artillery. It amazed me anything was left at all. The fire had burned all the wooden structures down, only a few scattered parts of walls left blackened and poking up from the ground as tribute to flame's destruction. The artillery and naval shells had smashed and ground anything that remained into a pulp, consumed by the mud. Nothing above a man's height remained standing. Nothing. The whole castle had been reduced to a few large, muddy, debris-covered hills. Hot damn.