By Eugene Gross as told to R. Cantù
1945 was a heck of a year. Not just for me, a twenty-two year old sailor in the dangerous waters of the Pacific, but for the USA and the rest of the world.
While I was at sea, part of a vast fleet dedicated to defeating Hirohito’s boys,
Hitler’s Master Race was getting its Aryan butt kicked all across Europe.
But even though the Nazi dream was rapidly turning into a nightmare for Der Fuehrer and his sidekicks, with their troops surrendering by the thousands, the Japanese military was still determined to fight to the last man.
Thanks to a newspaper printed and distributed to everyone in the fleet we were aware of the ferocity of the struggles being waged by the army and Marines on the islands controlled by the Japanese. As a yeoman aboard the Destroyer Escort Waterman, I was also in on much of the general scuttlebutt about what was happening in the rest of the war as well.
I knew that the battles that had been slowly won all over the Pacific had cost the sweat and blood of countless American lives and that the enemy was fanatical in its devotion to the emperor and their homeland.
They were cruel to their captives, as shown by their cold-blooded execution of nearly a hundred POWs on Wake Island, and their treatment of prisoners everywhere they were. Surrender was dishonorable to them, the idea pounded into the troops by their warlords, who had adopted the old codes of the samurai. Just how vicious they actually were was revealed later after the war.
But nobody fighting them could say that they were not formidable opponents. Their high command knew that every island lost to them meant that we were one step closer to the Japanese mainland, so their plan was to make every inch of dirt taken by our troops be extremely painful. Japanese soldiers were ordered to fight to the death and that suicide was expected of them instead of surrender.
I’d say I was pretty lucky to be where I was, out at sea instead of hitting the beaches, even though life aboard ship was no picnic. Quarters were cramped, which most of us got used to eventually, but the chow was tolerable enough and at least we didn’t have to worry about being ambushed by well camouflaged guys intent on putting holes in our bodies.
We had shore leave every three weeks or so for a few hours at places won from the Japanese. Since I was the one in charge of writing passes I made sure I was on the R&R runs, of course. There were games and stuff, although I recall once in Guam where the Red Cross made us buy the coffee and donuts. That made me so mad I never again contributed a penny to them. It just didn’t seem right to me.
Back aboard ship what we did have to worry about were submarines. If any of them got through to our ships it would be pretty rough going. But if any got through to the tankers it would be disastrous, as the fleet ran on oil. No oil, no go.
We knew our job was absolutely vital to making sure those guys sacrificing their youth, sweat, and blood had what they needed to do their jobs, all the while keeping our eyes peeled for the dangers that could come at the fleet from out of the sky as well as from under the sea.
Zeros were to be feared, but our Navy fighters did a great job of handling them most of the time. But then the enemy started new tactics in the Leyte Gulf. They were called kamikazis and old Black Jack told people later that they were the only weapons he feared during the war. “Black Jack “was our code name for Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, who had been put in command of the Pacific forces in 1942 by President Franklin Roosevelt.
Those suicide bombers were really frightening as they were relentless in accomplishing their missions. A few of those doomed fellows did have second thoughts on their death dives and fell short of their targets, maybe hoping for softer landings in the sea. Didn’t happen, though, and they’d go down into watery graves. The ones that did hit our vessels caused a lot of damage and we all hoped we would never be in their sights.
I was assigned to a machine gun during general quarters and got pretty good at it. Fortunately for me, I never had to face the banzai charges our troops encountered in places I had never before heard of but never after forgot. Our guys got pretty chewed up in places like Wake, Corregidor, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima and others now forever part of history, but in the end, they gave better than they got and we continued on our way to the Japanese homeland.
After Saipan and Tinian fell there was one more big battle before the planned invasion to the heart of Japan itself – Okinawa.
Vice Admiral Fischer had sent out nearly two thousand sorties six months before the start of the real battle to soften up the enemy and map the terrain. Naha, the biggest city on the island was flattened but cloud cover prevented accurate photos for analysis.
By that time the Japanese knew they were in bad shape, but tenaciously committed to try and keep us off their actual doorsteps. American High Command figured it would take about ten days for Okinawa to fall. Man, were they wrong.
While the enemy tactic before had been the banzai suicide charges against our fellows right at the beachheads, in Okinawa a new strategy emerged. Taking advantage of the caves that honeycombed the place, along with ancient tombs, they dug in and waited to decimate our boys in crossfire, while making it near impossible for our ordnance to penetrate their defenses.
So what appeared to be a cakewalk on April 1st, 1945 as the US Army and Marines came on shore as part of the largest invasion fleet ever assembled in history – including Normandy – after about ten days turned into a slaughterhouse.
We pounded them with a torrent of artillery from battleships far off shore as well as tons of bombs from countless planes to little avail. There was more deadly tonnage dropped on the place than ever had been in any war, which made life miserable not only for their fighting troops but also for the poor Okinawan civilians who were, in truth, caught in the middle. Only our troops on the ground could grind out an eventual victory.
A quarter of a million people died during the nearly three months of desperate warring under conditions difficult to imagine. This included over fourteen thousand young American lives, almost 5,000 of those were sailors killed by the dreaded kamikazis. Civilian losses were guessed to be near 150 thousand.
We knew nothing of what was happening on tiny Tinian on August 6th, nor could we guess what the result would be. But on that morning a lone B-29, accompanied only by two small escorts, took off on the way to the teeming city of Hiroshima.
As the first atomic bomb ever used in war dropped, a radio command signaled a trigger of uranium to hurl into the main bulk of purified U235 and created a critical mass that built until the weapon was about 1,500 feet above the center of the condemned city.
A few days later another one was released over the city of Nagasaki.
Sometime later - couple of weeks maybe - the exact time escapes me these 70 years later, my ship, along with some others was sent to Hiroshima.
There was nothing left. A few shipmates and I went wandering through the ruins hoping to find souvenirs. As young fellows are, we were full of bravado, searching for ‘war trophies’, I guess. I stopped at one point to bargain with a Japanese soldier over a watch or something as my companions continued walking along. I soon noticed that I was alone, surrounded by enemy soldiers, still carrying their weapons!
I hightailed it out there to catch up with my guys, I can tell you that. I did manage to find a “Rising Sun” flag, but it disappeared from my basement a few years ago.
Although Hiroshima was completely demolished we did find about fifty of our guys who had been taken prisoner at Bataan. How these fellows managed to survive the POW camps and all they endured is beyond me. The SS Waterman and another ship each took about twenty-five of these men and treated them like royalty, as far as was possible.
My son-in-law last summer asked me what Hiroshima looked like when I first saw it. “Beautiful,” I replied. I saw the confusion on his face – how could such a terrible thing be beautiful, he must have thought.
It was not beautiful, of course. Looking back now I am aware that many thousands of people died and beautiful cities destroyed by a force almost too huge to imagine. But I’ve heard that those bombs, horrible as they were, actually saved a lot of lives. The estimate of losses expected if we would have had to invade the Japanese mainland was going to cost about 250,000 American casualties. The Japanese would lose five to six million dead or wounded, according to planners in the High Command.
The reason for such heavy losses was because of the determination of the Japanese warlords to fight to the bitter end. Even women and children trained with sharpened bamboo sticks and many were prepared to take their own lives in the face of an American victory. Enemy propaganda had pounded into them that we would be monsters who would treat them to terrible fates. They knew no better and were convinced death was preferable to capture or dishonorable surrender.
Sailing into Yokohama harbor after the peace was signed I saw how heavily defended it was. White cloth had been hung over the artillery placements that seemed to be everywhere and I realized we would have had a heck of a time surviving under the blaze of those guns.
As a young warrior, having seen and heard of the cruelty of a merciless enemy, the total victory achieved by the dropping of two mighty bombs was wonderful. It meant that we could go home, that our families, friends and our country were safe from the depredations of a committed enemy.
After so much misery, blood, death, and suffering, to see that enemy vanquished, completely and for good, was at that moment to me, nothing less than beautiful. Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder, right? Later, my son-in-law said he understood.
