Seabee History WWII

[Walt's Daughter]

130th N.C.B. - Okinawa, April 1, 1945

 

 

Our role in World War Two did not begin until we arrived on Saipan to join the Second Marine Division for the invasion of Okinawa. Finally, after five warm dusty weeks, and a squalid Christmas at Iroqouis point, we shipped to Saipan in two advance echelons aboard the freighters, USS Alexander and USS Japara, and the main body aboard the old luxury liner of the twenties, USS President Johnson. Onto Saipan in Mid January 1945, (six months after the Marines) Japanese still in the hills, dumped mortar shells into a crowded Seabee movie across from our camp. We dug our first foxholes, filled them with empty beer cans, for bombings were infrequent and uneventful for us, although the advance echelon had been shaved from a bombed gas tank. Saipan meant two more months waiting. While the docks of Tanapag Harbor commenced piling up with supplies to equip the Second Marine Division for an amphibious operation, we began to catch up with the war. Looming ahead were common dangers drawing the attention of a thousand men into common preparations. shots for bubonic plague, cholera, and typhus; lectures on climate, animal life, snakes, pests and diseases, clothing impregnated with DDT: gas masks and ordinance gear handled with new affection, final lectures on mines, mortars, sanitation and water purification all heard wih new ears. It was no secret we were on the threshold of action, the largest amphibious operation yet attempted on Japan's doorstep. A general court-martial threatened the man who revealed our destination, but the secret was poorly kept. Every private and seaman on Saipan told you that it was Okinawa on April 1. We sent 320 of our musclemen with Marines aboard transports to perform as shore party teams on Okinawa beaches. Other small details went with Marine combat troops to work on sanitation and mosquito control. The remainder of the men and equipment, about 600 hundred of us, were loaded aboard two LST's. We had tons of equipment aboard but everyone had his mind on the fifty tons of explosives, high test gasoline, tnt and ammunition. Dress rehearsal was for fours days off Tinian with the entire Second Marine Division and supporting convoy. We had moved dozens of times in the last eighteen months, had mobility down to a science, but this was our first big league game. While the 320 men in shore party teams quarreled with gyrenes over food and six hour relays in a 3-in-1 sack aboard the transports, life on the LST's was comfortable, food excellent, bunks strewn all over the decks, in and under mobil cargo. We had lots of company standing off Okinawa on Easter morning. The fleet laid offshore pounding beach emplacements with it's big guns; cruisers and battlewagons out near the transports like bulldogs barking their guns under the nose of the Japanese shore batteries. It was still dark when we had our first brush with the Jap Kamikaze (suicide planes) which we were later to know so well. Amid the noise of spasmodic booming of the Navy's big guns, suddenly we heard the warning come over the speakers " Enemy aircraft approaching" most of us saw nothing until the 20s and 40s opened up, throwing up, orange and red spurts across a narrow strip of water. Some saw that bat shaped splurge of denser blackness hurtle into the dark convoy, but if the guns that opened up found their mark, they were too late, That Jap pilot dove to meet honorable ancestors via two bulheads of the LST in the lane next to us. Hit just above the water line, gasoline from the Kamikaze spewing flame over decks, the LST lit up the dawn. We stood by to pick up survivors as "Abandoned Ship" became the order aboard the ill fated vessel. Everything was unreal to the spectator, only the man in the water appreciated and felt the crisis. Later, we began to feel and appreciate vicariously, the experience of burning Marines caught in a flaming compartment, or of one sailor who, both arms shot off, leaped from the burning ship to discover he needed arms to stay afloat. Some we took aboard were horribly burned. Weeks before, the hour of invasion had been set, at eight o'clock, and promptly on the appointed hour the morning sea was cut into white ribbons by LCVP's streaking for the beaches fromoutlying transports. Two planes laid a wide smokescreen on the beaches, while guns from the fleet continued to speak their piece. No Japanese battery replied, they conitnued to protect their gun positions with stubborn silence. It was a successful fake invasion. A few yards before the beach, LCVP's turned around under cover of smoke screen and like chicks, steamed for their mother transports. That night we pulled out, the next morning we came back to emphasize our fake invasion, by doing the same thing again. Harrowing was our part of the fake invasion of the southeastern beaches, our worst ours came in the nature of pure nervous tension while we roamed around and around in the company of other landing ships , waiting to be called to the beaches. Happy we were when four short words came over the loud speaker, "Wer'e going in" we wanted to free ourselves from that volatile cargo. With the liberating message in our ears, we headed for the Western beaches of Okinawa, which had fallen easily to our main forces. The mouth of the Bishi-Gawa was reached just before noon of the 12th, and we drove that gaping mouth of the LST across the coral reef, opened the passageway, and hurried bulldozers, loaded trucks, and construction equipment across the reef. Small boats came alongside to receive the high test gasoline from cranes. Unloading operations continued all afternoon until the beachmaster ordered us away for the night. That night the Japs came over with their second large air raid since L-day, and the sky was brilliant with tracers, some of us ashore, with unloaded equipment, squeezed under chasis and wheels, narrowly escaped the shrapnel which fell like rain. The rest of us rode our dynamite through that night of fireworks. The next day we got ashore where we could run away for it. Work during the first weeks ash ore was hurried and confused; living was rough. A foxhole was something you dug with care, it was just not a hole in the ground. You took into consideration the prevailing winds, the rain and drainage, and when it was completed, you stood off and reviewed it from the viewpoint of a quick approach. Rains came everyday, often at the rate of an inch per hour. Foxholes seldom dried out. Work was pressed through air raids, stopping only when fire commenced. trucks bogged down on the way to supply four Army and two Marine divisions at the fronts with critical materials. Roads had to be raised from the sea of mud. Coral pits hummed with shovels and trucks, and we stayed with our machines until the flak fell. Yontan airfield grew in spite of harrassing raids; we saw it change from a small gravel field into hard white coral strips, wide and long, where B-29's could land and get repairs among innumerable shop structures. The roads we built solved genuine difficulties of front line supply; a few thousand yards of coral, a Bailey-Bridge or two, and thousands of vehicle hours were saved from long waiting at points of congestion. At a Marine evacuation hospital, we built bomb-shelters for wounded veterans. One shelter was completed too late, on the night of a big raid, when shrapnel filled the air a tent ward of patients took a direct bomb hit, and fourteen were killed who might have been flown out the next day. We knew the stakes were high and worked around the clock, harder and with less sleep than ever before. No spot on earth during World War Two was subjected to as many air raids per week as we were on Okinawa. The Destroyer picket line sixty miles offshore took ceaseless punishment at considerable cost of lives and ships. In one day 168 Japanese planes were shot out of the Okinawa atmospere. Every day we saw Kamikaze planes striking for ship or shore instillation; Every day saw a few Japanese planes get through our outer air defenses to harrass men a n d machines at work. By the end of July, we had gone "Condition Red" one hundred sixty-six times. To harrassing air raids were added the whistling mortar shells of one sly Jap "Whistling Willie. holed up in a cave, who sent his missiles whining over our heads onto Kadena airfield. Five degrees of any nights sky would have made a breath taking "Fourth of July" back home. The island was secured July 21, after eighty two days of long, vicious expensive struggle. The entrenched Japanese guns were silenced. But our role was not ended, with the destruction of the enemy. Men in motion through a twenty four hour work shedule, took no holiday, went to no rest camp, they shifted to a shorter, eight instead of twelve hour work schedule and plunged into the work of reconstructing damaged installations and expanding a base of further operations against the Japanese.

 

Sent to me by John Ratomski "AKA" Thurman