On May 11, the Tenth Army threw four divisions at the Japanese. The Ninety-Sixth took the extreme left side of the attack and the Seventy-Seventh went to the right. Into this action, the US Marine Corps sent in their First and Sixth divisions. The Ninety-Sixth charged for the high ground that guarded the town of Shuri. The main thrust went to the 382nd against the entire Shuri area. The high ground around Shuri had to be taken for us to make real progress. The charge was on.
Not much has been said so far about the marines because I didn’t have much contact with them, but they were out there doing their regular outstanding job big-time. Some of the stories of their success filtered back through the lines. One of the Marine Raiders was a guy named PFC Ollie Faye O’Dell who was rumored to be one tough son of a gun. His buddies called him Digger O’Dell.
O’Dell and another marine had been dispatched across an open field covered with high grass. They’d gotten about halfway across when they realized they were surrounded by Japanese hiding in the grass. The two men had walked into a trap. PFC O’Dell instantly shoved his buddy down on the ground to avoid his being hit. Swinging in every direction, O’Dell’s automatic tommy gun fired like a machine gun. O’Dell kept blasting while he put one boot on his buddy’s back to keep him from getting up. When he quit shooting, O’Dell had killed fifteen Japanese and saved the other man’s life. That’s a pretty accurate picture of the kind of men the marines were. Tough bunch of guys!
The road to Shuri took the 382nd through new terrain. The sheer rocky escarpment had blocked any forward advance because the caves and superior position of the cliffs gave the Japanese leverage. Cleaning out tunnels and winding escape routes had been an arduous task. My artillery howitzer cannons had shelled the cliff face constantly, but had often made little more than a dent in the rock. Only by pouring oil and explosives down those holes in the escarpment had we been able to dislodge the enemy.
Our path to Shuri was on much flatter land. Ahead of our advance were clay hills and ridges with caves. Trees dotted the slopes. Two major hills with the code names Dick and Oboe stood ahead on either side of our path. The commanding officer of the 382nd Infantry, Colonel Macey Dill, figured that these hills would make an excellent jumping-off location for the big push to finish the Japanese war machine. They had to be taken. But first we had to get there, taking smaller hills as we went.
When the men moved out, the First Battalion launched a mortar that knocked out the machine-gun nest sitting on the top of a hill and made it much easier to advance. Unfortunately, B Company tried to reach a draw between hills and got pinned down by heavy fire. They couldn’t see any way out.
That’s when Lieutenant Seymour Terry went into action. Before the war, the lieutenant had been an executive in a dairy in Little Rock, Arkansas. An ordinary American guy, Terry had extraordinary courage. He could see a cave and a trench at the other end of a draw, and realized that’s where the Japanese were shooting our soldiers from. Grabbing a phosphorous grenade, he hurled the explosive into the cave. When phosphorous sprayed the cave, the enemy had to come out. Terry stood there with his rifle picking them off when they rushed out. He threw more grenades in another cave, but the Japanese started tossing them back. Grabbing satchel charges, he crawled near the entrance and threw the explosives in. The blast finished off the resistance.
But there was more. Terry found five additional caves filled with Japanese armed to the teeth. Inching his way from cave to cave, he kept slinging the satchels. Eventually, Lieutenant Terry wiped out the entire enemy squad. He had killed at least thirty Japanese through nothing more than courageous effort.
He didn’t stop there. For the next three days, the lieutenant continued to exhibit fierce courage. His daring attacks cleaned out resistance to our forward progress. Finally, Terry paid the ultimate price and fell on the battlefield. What he had accomplished proved to be so significant that when the war was over, Lieutenant Seymour Terry was posthumously award the Medal of Honor, the highest honor given by the country.
The Japanese were anything but happy about our progress. From one of the few caves they still held, the enemy dragged out a 75mm artillery piece ready to wipe us out. Fortunately, one of our companies saw the cannon being positioned for action and knocked it out. The Japanese mounted a counterattack in virtually every direction open to them. Firing continued through the entire afternoon. By eight o’clock that night, the soldiers had killed 122 Japanese with only twelve of our men deceased.
While this assault unfolded, I Company fought another ferocious battle coming up the east slope. A rain of fire poured down on them. No one was sure which way to turn. Finally, Sergeant James Mason confronted the Japanese head-on.
Mason yelled to give him a grenade and shouted that the bastards were right in front of him.
A soldier crawled over and handed him one.
Mason screamed and slung the explosive.
The grenade exploded, but the Japanese hurled another one back at him. The sergeant grabbed it and threw it straight back at them. The explosion was deafening.
The soldier lying next to Mason asked how far they were from the enemy.
The answer was about a hundred feet: the enemy were on top of them. Mason hurled another grenade.
Once more the Japanese answered with a return grenade. Shrapnel flew everywhere.
Mason stood up and hurled one more grenade. The ground shook.
Machine-gun fire opened up, forcing Sergeant Mason to roll next to a boulder sticking up out of the ground. Mason listened carefully. The machine gun kept firing, but it revealed a location. Mason pulled a pin, counted to three, and hurled another grenade directly at the roaring sound. Once the blast and smoke from the explosion died out, it was clear he had hit the gunners.
The exchange continued for the next thirty minutes and then ended. Sergeant Mason had wiped out the Japanese.
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By the end of the afternoon, the 382nd had put in a good day’s work. They had greatly improved their position and stabilized their situation. The sacrifices and bravery from men like Lieutenant Terry and Sergeant Mason, as well as from all the units, had pushed the Japanese back. However, the problem was that the enemy had set up on hills Oboe and Dick and had unimpaired observation of what we were doing and where our troops were moving. Oboe was the highest hill in the Shuri area, once again giving them a superior position to fire at us. A critical survey of the situation demanded tanks. They were necessary to first knock off a hill called Zebra.
C Company started around the west end of Zebra and nearly had the area contained, but the going continued to be rough. PFC George Ault recognized that the Japanese had a machine-gun nest that had to be wiped out if any more progress was to be made. Moreover, they were taking out too many of our men and something decisive had to be done immediately. Ault jumped up and knocked out two Japanese in the first foxhole he came to. Not far ahead had to be the pocket of machine gunners. George rushed at them and leaped into a trench where eight Japanese had three machine guns. Before the enemy knew what hit them, Ault wiped out the entire unit. His extraordinary action cleared the way for the rest of the soldiers to surge forward even if a few caves remained occupied by the enemy.
Still, the deadly fire didn’t stop, and good men were getting wounded. Smoke bombs were dropped that allowed the tanks to move forward. The situation demanded that the tanks start evacuating the large number of wounded soldiers. Two tanks kept roaring through the smoke and picking up our guys, but C Company kept taking it on the chin. Sergeant Bill Ballard, who had been leading the charge, got hit in the leg and went down. Even with this injury Ballard wouldn’t allow himself to be rescued until all the other men were out. Finally, PFC John MacKennis Jr. had to take command. No noncommissioned officers were left.
On the morning of May 11, the tanks returned to clear a path, but mines were everywhere and soon two were disabled. By the end of the day, six tanks had been hit. The battle went back and forth, and artillery screamed through the air. The battlefield felt like a hurricane season of bullets leveling everything and everybody in sight. The enemy had become well entrenched and weren’t giving up or retreating easily. Not much ground was taken, but by the end of the day almost 150 Japanese had been killed and a large number of caves sealed. Their position had been seriously weakened.