_A bereaved father prays for his dead son: Col Francis I. Fenton, 1st
Marine Division engineer, kneels at the foot of the stretcher holding
the body of PFC Michael Fenton, as division staff members mourn. Col
Fenton said that the other dead Marines were not as fortunate as his
son, who had his father there to pray for him._]
The infantry slogged southward, cussing the weather but glad to be
beyond the Shuri Line. Yet every advance exacted a price. A Japanese
sniper killed Lieutenant Colonel Horatio C. Woodhouse, Jr., the
competent commander of 2/22, as he led his battalion towards the
Kokuba Estuary. General Shepherd, grieving privately at the loss of
his younger cousin, replaced him in command with the battalion exec,
Lieutenant Colonel John G. Johnson.
As the IIIAC troops advanced further south, the Marines began to
encounter a series of east-west ridges dominating the open farmlands in
their midst. “The southern part of Okinawa,” reported Colonel Snedeker,
“consists primarily of cross ridges sticking out like bones from the
spine of a fish.” Meanwhile, the Army divisions of XXIV Corps warily
approached two towering escarpments in their zone, Yuza Dake and Yaeju
Dake. The Japanese had obviously gone to ground along these ridges and
peaks and lay waiting for the American advance.
[Illustration: _This self-propelled M-7 105mm gun was completely bogged
down in the heavy rains which fell on Okinawa in the last weeks in
May. It replaced the half-track-mounted 75mm gun as the regimental
commander’s artillery in Operation Iceberg._
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 123438
]
Rain and mud continued to plague the combatants. One survivor of this
segment of the campaign described the battlefields as “a five-mile
sea of mud.” As Private First Class Sledge recorded in the margins of
his sodden New Testament, “Mud in camp on Pavuvu was a nuisance....
But mud on the battlefield is misery beyond description.” The 96th
Division wearily reported the results of one day’s efforts under these
conditions: “those on forward slope slid down; those on reverse slope
slid back; otherwise no change.”
The Marines began to chafe at the heavy-handed controls of the Tenth
Army, which seemed to stall with each encounter with a fresh Japanese
outpost. General Buckner favored a massive application of firepower on
every obstacle before committing troops in the open. Colonel Shapley,
commanding the 4th Marines, took a different view. “I’m not too sure
that sometimes when they whittle you away, 10-12 men a day, then maybe
it would be better to take 100 losses a day if you could get out
sooner.” Colonel Wilburt S. “Big Foot” Brown, a veteran artilleryman
commanding the 11th Marines, and a legend in his own time, believed the
Tenth Army relied too heavily on firepower. “We poured a tremendous
amount of metal into those positions,” he said. “It seemed nothing
could be living in that churning mass where the shells were falling
and roaring, but when we next advanced the Japs would still be there
and madder than ever.” Brown also lamented the overuse of star shells
for night illumination: “I felt like we were the children of Israel in
the wilderness--living under a pillar of fire by night and a cloud of
smoke by day.”
[Illustration: