Behind this noisy fire fight along Route 5, a large portion of the Japanese 1st Battalion, 32d Regiment, managed to infiltrate through the XXIV Corps line. The Japanese made their penetration at a point between Route 5 and Kochi. This route lay within the 77th Division sector but close to the divisional boundary between the 7th and 77th. About ninety of the infiltrating Japanese made their way into the command post of the 306th Infantry, but they did little damage and were killed during the following day. Most of the Japanese, numbering approximately 450, crossed the divisional boundary and reoccupied the town of Tanabaru and Tanabaru Ridge. The deepest penetration was more than a mile behind the Corps front.{365}
The town and ridge had constituted a strong point on the first Shuri defense line, dominating much of the adjacent area. This position had never actually been taken by American troops; the Japanese had abandoned it on the night of 23 April when the rest of the line cracked. The escarpment dropped abruptly in a steep coral cliff on the north. The town stretched along the southeast slope of the ridge and was divided by a road running south to Onaga and Kochi. The front-line battalions of the 17th Infantry, 7th Division, were supplied over this road. While the Japanese held at Tanabaru, this supply road was effectively cut.
Through field glasses sentries of the 17th Infantry could see in the moonlight a column of troops moving northwest against the skyline on Tanabaru Escarpment The 17th fired on some of the troops but was handicapped by fear of endangering friendly troops. Other Japanese columns apparently passed undetected. The enemy quickly located and cut the telephone wires between regimental headquarters and the three battalions, but the regiment was able to record enemy movements through its units in the rear areas. The Japanese also surrounded and attacked supply dumps at the base of the ridge and were barely prevented from destroying them.{366}
The job of cleaning out the infiltrating Japanese fell to Company E, which sent a patrol of platoon strength up the east slope of the escarpment. When the Japanese on the heights held up this patrol with fire, 1st Lt. Walter J. Sinkiewicz, commanding Company E, committed the rest of his unit. One platoon almost reached the top, but the enemy drove it back with mortar, machine-gun, and light-arms fire, killing two and wounding seven. A sharp fire fight developed, during which Sinkiewicz and his three platoon leaders were all wounded.
The Japanese were meanwhile making the most of their position. Their fire covered the 1st Battalion's supply dump and motor pool on the north side of the ridge, rendering them inaccessible to the Americans. Enemy groups in Tanabaru mined the supply road through the town and blanketed the road with machine-gun fire. A half-track carrying medical supplies was disabled by a mine, and a medical officer was killed as he tried to escape. The Japanese occupied the vehicle and converted it into a pillbox. An American patrol killed eleven Japanese in and around the vehicle. S/Sgt. Carl W. Johnson volunteered to retrieve the weapons in the half-track; he made three successful trips across exposed ground but was killed on the fourth.
By noon of 5 May there was apprehension at the regimental command post, which had not fully appreciated the strength of the infiltration. From a hill near the command post Lt. Col. Albert V. Hard, executive of the 17th Infantry, could plainly see several Japanese soldiers 600 yards away on Tanabaru Escarpment. The Japanese were in turn watching American activity. Lying on his stomach, Colonel Hard fired some shots from an M1 at the Japanese to "neutralize" them. While he was so engaged, a soldier ran up with a radio report that the German armies had surrendered. "Well now," Hard said, "if we just had the Japs off the escarpment we'd be all right, wouldn't we?"
With Company E stalled on the east slope of the escarpment, Company F attempted a broad flanking attack. Two of its platoons on the line, supported by tanks, pushed through Tanabaru and knocked out hastily established defenses. Beyond the town the company drew heavy fire from numerous caves, and it spent the rest of the day destroying the Japanese in these positions. Company E thereupon took over the burden of the attack, and by 1730 it had reached the top of Tanabaru Escarpment behind a mortar preparation. This move enabled the 1st Battalion to transfer its vehicles and supplies to a safer location, but the supply route was still blocked.
Early in the morning of 6 May a force of Japanese just below Company E pressed in on the Americans with grenades and satchel charges. After suffering sixteen casualties in half an hour, Company E retreated off the top to a protected ledge just below. Here the survivors formed a line and bombarded the top of the hill with grenades to deny it to the enemy. While some members of the company hauled new boxes of grenades up the steep trail, the others lobbed several hundred grenades on the Japanese, who withdrew from the exposed top at dawn.
Company F returned to Tanabaru the same morning for a second sweep through the town and killed eight Japanese. Supported by mortar fire and aided by small-arms fire from Company E, Company F initially made rapid progress on the slope but then ran into a series of coral outcroppings. With portable flame throwers, mortar fire, and quantities of grenades, the troops eliminated all resistance on the slope by evening.
On the following day, Company F attacked the crest of Tanabaru Escarpment from the west behind mortar fire and quickly gained the top. Trenches were littered with Japanese dead, most of them killed by 81-mm. mortar fire. The amount of Japanese and American equipment found on the escarpment explained the ability of the enemy to hold out so tenaciously. Enemy equipment included one 75-mm. pack howitzer with ammunition, 2 heavy machine guns, 6 light machine guns, 2 knee mortars, 3 magnetic mines, and a large quantity of ammunition. Their American weapons consisted of 2 light machine gun, 2 BAR's, 3 carbines, and 3 Tommy guns. A total of 462 Japanese were killed in the area of Tanabaru during the 3-day battle, most of them on the escarpment and others as they tried to make their way back to their lines.{367}
By midnight of 5 May it was clear to General Ushijima that the offensive had failed. He had suffered tremendous casualties and had made no headway except in the Tanabaru area. Even there his troops were being compressed. General Ushijima realized that he must revert to defensive warfare. "The Army will temporarily halt its offensive," he ordered, "because of the opportunity offered by the painful blows against the enemy....The battle plan in the Shuri area sector will be an attrition of enemy strength until he has lost his endurance. The 24th Division...will shift to a holding basis."{368}
Despite Ushijima's bravado, 32d Army Headquarters was sunk in gloom over the failure of the offensive. During the day Ushijima called Colonel Yahara to his office and declared with tears in his eyes that henceforth he would be guided by Yahara's opinions. Yahara felt that the battle had been the decisive event of the campaign. Even General Cho, who was considered by many officers to be the incarnation of the fighting will of the Japanese Army, gave up hope for victory and said that defeat was only a matter of time. This pessimism was reflected down the line. One Japanese lieutenant wrote in his diary, "We realized that we were doomed when we heard of the failure of the 24th Division."{369}
The Japanese lost in the attack approximately 5,000 troops, including those killed in the counterlandings. The 24th Divisionwas greatly reduced in strength. On 5 May the combat strength of its 32d Regiment was down to 30 percent; two battalions of the 32d were at 15 percent. The 27th Tank Regiment never fought as a mobile unit again; its six remaining medium tanks were converted to stationary artillery and pillboxes northwest of Shuri. Japanese artillery and shipping engineers also went into decline. The 44th Independent Mixed Brigade was still intact, however, for it had not been committed after it became apparent that the 24th Division would be unable to break through.{370}
American casualties during the enemy offensive were heavy. On 4th May 335 were killed or wounded, excluding 352 casualties of the 1st Marine Division, which was not involved in the enemy ground attack. On 5 May the two divisions hit hardest by the counterattack and penetration, the 7th and 77th, suffered 379 casualties. These losses are comparable to those previously incurred during the heaviest fighting in the Kakazu Ridge struggles and in the first few days of the general attack starting 19 April.{371}
Notwithstanding their heavy losses during the Japanese offensive, the Americans, in general, suffered less from Cho's aggressive tactics than from Yahara's defensive methods. The 1st Marine Division, for example, which was barely touched by the Japanese offensive on 4 May, had more casualties on that date than the two other divisions of the Corps combined; most of the losses had been suffered in making an attack west of Machinato airfield against strong enemy defenses. Colonel Yahara had hoped to exact such losses for every small advance by the Americans across the entire line week after week. The Japanese counter-offensive of 4-5 May showed the superiority of Yahara's tactics to Cho's. Overambitiously conceived and ineptly executed, the offensive was a colossal blunder.
The XXIV Corps now resumed its attack, which in several sectors of the front had hardly been interrupted by the Japanese offensive. Because the Japanese had used almost all their fresh reserves in the counterattack, General Buckner could feel confident of the launching sometime in May of a general attack on the Shuri defenses. On 7 May General Hodge ordered that preparatory to this coordinated Tenth Army attack the advance was to continue to the Asa-Dakeshi-Gaja line, to be seized by the evening of 8 May. Upon reaching this line, "a bare minimum," the attack was to continue in order to gain as much ground as possible for later offensive action.{372}
Map No. 39: Advance 3-10 May 1945
After the failure of their offensive, the Japanese turned all their energies toward waging a prolonged battle of attrition. Their losses did not impair immediately their defensive capacities; thus the XXIV Corps found no weak point in the Shuri defenses resulting from the ill-starred offensive. By throwing fresh troops into the attack of 4 May Ushijima had been able to maintain his strength all along the line. Nor was there any breakdown in his command and staff operation. Front-line units were reorganized without seeming loss of effectiveness; available reinforcements were carefully allotted to existing regiments; local counterattacks were timed for maximum effect.{373}
General Ushijima's chief task now was to keep sufficient combat troops at the front to man his Shuri defenses. It was apparent by 7 May that the strength of the remaining regular infantry was not great enough for this task. Consequently, Ushijima converted service units into infantry combat groups. By mixing service troops with the "regulars," he exacted from them their maximum combat effectiveness. "One man in ten will continue with his rear-echelon duties. The remaining nine men will devote themselves to antitank combat training," one order stated.{374}
The reorganization of the 32d Regiment, 24th Division, was typical of the resourcefulness of the Japanese. The regimental headquarters received 5 men from the 24th Transport Regiment. The 1st Battalion kept its own surviving members and was allotted all the survivors of the 2d Battalion, 20 men from the 7th Shipping Depot, 90 from the 24th Transport Regiment, and y from the 26th Sea Raiding Squadron. The 2d Battalion was totally reconstituted from the 29th Independent Infantry Battalion and other units. The 3d Battalion was reorganized in a manner similar to that used with the 1st. It was by this process of piecing units together that the 32d Army was able to stay intact long after the original combat units had been virtually destroyed—a capability which at the time American intelligence officers found "baffling."{375}
After his offensive failed, the enemy formed a line in which the relative position of the major units was to remain roughly the same until the end of the battle. On the east the 24th Division,reinforced by two independent battalions, held the line as far as Shuri, with its 89th Regiment on the east, its 22d in the center, and its 32d on the west. The remnants of the battered 62d Division were stretched from a point north of Shuri almost to the west coast, holding about one-third of the line. Along the Asa River estuary was a battalion of the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade.{376}
The Japanese husbanded their remaining heavy weapons, especially their artillery, as carefully as they meted out their manpower. On 6 May the Japanese 5th Artillery Command directed its units to "revert to the [defensive] situation which held prior to the attack situation of 3 May." Once again the protection of individual pieces was a cardinal feature of enemy operations. Artillery units were ordered to "use ammunition with the utmost economy" and to "wait and fire for effect against vital targets."{377}
Turning east to seize the high ground that dominated the Asa River estuary, the 1st Marines on 6 May drove toward Hill 60, a small hump one-half mile southeast of Yafusu. (See Map No. 39.) The mission was an extremely difficult one. Hill 60 was commanded by Japanese fire from Dakeshi Plateau and Ridge, Wana Ridge, and high ground south of the Asa River. Moreover, Nan Hill, a hillock 200 yards north of Hill 60 from which the attack was to be supported, was not yet wholly in Marine hands. In a classic demonstration of reverse-slope tactics, the Japanese had relinquished the crest and northern slope of Nan to the Americans but still held numerous caves on the southern slope as well as tunnels underground. Men of the 2d Battalion, 1st Marines, had to ward off incessant forays on Nan during the night; some of them were bayoneted or knifed to death in their foxholes.{378}
The 2d Battalion attacked Hill 60 at 1000 on 6 May, supported by mortar, artillery, and naval fire. The Japanese dug in on the reverse slope of Nan opened up on the attackers from their flank and rear. The Marine platoons quickly lost contact with one another and left a trail of casualties in their wake. Tanks met Japanese mortar and 47-mm. fire as soon as they moved onto open ground; two were destroyed and left burning and another disabled, after receiving a total of ten hits. One platoon reached the crest of Hill 60, only to come under a holocaust of grenades, satchel charges, white phosphorus shells, and knee mortar shells. Marines on Nan Hill were unable to move off to support the attack because of the Japanese just below them. At 1227, after the marines on Hill 60 had suffered thirty-five casualties without consolidating their position, the 2d Battalion commander ordered them to withdraw.
ATTACKS ON HILL 60 by marines developed into a tank, flame, and demolitions battle. Above, tank infantry team attacks northwest slope of hill 60, Below, marines await result of a blasting charge, prepared to pick off any Japanese who might attempt escape.