As the news of Sergeant Art McQuiston’s death spread through the 361st, men fell silent. You never get used to death, but in a war, you know that it is going to happen. After the grueling struggle we had endured on Okinawa, some men distanced themselves and avoided making friends. The pain becomes too great when guys you have shared your life with are suddenly killed. Many soldiers just did their job, curled up in a ball at night, and said little to the other men.
I had really come to care about my sergeant. Men like Bill Arnold, Goins, Morris, and Lewis were fixtures in my life. McQuiston had led the parade and now he was gone. With the end of the war in sight, his death felt too personal and tragic to reflect on. No one wanted to talk about it.
He was gone.
* * *
A few towns were left that had to be taken. Aragachi and Medeera turned out to be more of a task than one would have expected. Leaders of platoons and commanders sometimes fell. The enemy weren’t throwing in the towel just because we came rolling over them. The village of Ozato turned into a hamlet from hell. Whatever the Japanese had told the residents had apparently soaked in before we came marching through. When they saw us coming, the locals started committing suicide. A wave of death swept through the town. One of our units discovered a dozen women and their children had holed up in a lair in the ground. As our soldiers forced them to come out, they began falling on the ground. Later examination by a military doctor revealed they had taken strychnine. Our medical team had their hands full trying to save whomever they could. Some survived, but many didn’t.
Ozato started to be overrun with civilians. Japanese citizens seemed to be coming in from who knows where and converging on this city. Even though the town was in ruins, they kept coming. These civilians became more and more of a problem. Of course, they were Japanese, but the human nature of the American boys was to care for them regardless. The doughboys felt compassion for these poor civilians who had not received good treatment from the Japanese army and were pushed around like stray cattle. Caught between their army and our artillery, many had fallen.
The 305th Infantry of the Seventy-Seventh Division kept rolling and crossed the Yuza Ridge. Pockets of resistance appeared and were wiped out. The army had to fight its way across these areas. Even though they were defeated, the Japanese didn’t capitulate. Often, they committed hara-kiri but no one surrendered.
On June 18, we ran into another of those experiences that will forever stay in everyone’s mind. General Claudius Easley had been the eyes and ears of General Bradley. Easley’s routine was to maneuver back and forth up and down the front line, watching everything that happened. His acute sense of observation in battle settings made him an invaluable forward observer. On this day he had crawled to the summit of a small hill to direct artillery fire on the enemy. Somewhere out there, a Japanese machine gunner had taken aim on that particular hill and already downed an important aide. When General Easley looked out over the edge of the hill, the gunner shot him in the head and instantly killed him.
Claudius Easley had been the spark plug of the division, and his death shocked the entire unit. His demise proved to be a staggering blow to the Ninety-Sixth. The men built a monument to mark where General Easley had so tragically fallen.
As the month of June wound down, our soldiers finished cleaning out any remaining enemy troops. I knew that the Japanese officers would not surrender. On June 11, American airplanes dropped surrender invitations on the Japanese command center.
Of course, they were ignored. Five days later I took Swinging Bill Arnold with me and found an observation post from which we could follow the final act in the drama. We were watching with binoculars as the curtain came down on the Japanese war effort. Military officers stood at attention waiting for General Ushijima and his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Isamu Cho, to come out of their tents.
Swinging Bill leaned over. “Think anybody can see us up here?”
I shook my head. “Before I started up, I checked with Command. All that’s left is finding the Japanese that are hiding in caves. They know their army is finished.”
“I don’t want to end up like Sergeant McQuiston did with a Halloween-style surprise.”
I only nodded. I didn’t want to talk about it. I pulled up my binoculars and focused on the scene.
Ushijima and Cho came out at almost the same time. The two generals faced each other and bowed. With an aide armed with a samurai sword at each man’s side and white gloves on their hands, they looked like something out of a textbook. Both men wore the tropical uniform with their white shirt outside the uniform’s high collar. A red-sash belt had been wrapped around the waist. The traditional belief was that the sash brought good luck and immunity to bullets. Fat chance that was true. The uniform was a light-green khaki color, probably because of the hot weather. The three-quarter-length trousers came to the knee. Each general wore a green tropical tunic with a shin gunto, a small sword hanging at his side that was both a weapon and a badge of rank.
“What’s the scoop on what these guys are doing?” Arnold asked.
“Hara-kiri is an ancient form of the ultimate surrender in the Japanese art of war,” I said. “They fight to the death, and rather than be captured, they kill themselves. Goes way back.”
“Hmm,” Swinging Bill mused. “You mean these two jokers down there are going to kill themselves in front of all those soldiers?”
“Afraid so. They’ll probably stab themselves in the belly and then draw the blade upward. Something like that. It’s a form of having honor even in defeat.”
“I think I’d prefer our way of being considered a nice guy.”
“I imagine Ushijima and Cho are going to take the big sleep because of the defeat of their army in this struggle, but that’s just a guess.”
“Look!” Bill pointed. “Can’t believe my eyes!”
With a quick swing of his arm, one of the generals plunged the dagger into his own stomach. For a moment, he wavered back and forth and then fell to his knees. The soldier behind him abruptly swung his samurai sword like a baseball bat, lopping off the general’s head with one swipe. The other general followed suit and did the same. The man’s head bounced a couple of times and rolled to one side.
“Oh, my God!” Arnold gasped. “Awful.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Awful like this whole war.”
We slipped away from our observation area and started back. We didn’t say much. We’d seen enough.
* * *
When the final calculations were made, the totals said that the Deadeyes had killed 37,763 of the enemy. The 361st Field Artillery Battalion had played a crucial part in knocking off a well-entrenched foe. Some pockets of resistance remained, and they had to be cleaned out, but the Japanese knew they were beaten and the war was over for them.
The code the Japanese followed remained a “to the death” resolution. While many of the soldiers would have probably given up by then, officers like General Amamiya forced the survivors to stay behind. The result was that many of the caves where they were hiding had to be blown up and sealed shut. At night, Japanese survivors tried to escape in the dark and board the underground railroad hurrying north. They didn’t get far.
By July 1, the struggle was finished. The bitterest and most significant battle of the Pacific was over.