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Show Ernie Pyle With the Navy: Marines Land on Okinawa Without Battle Casualties Leathernecks Show Nervous Tension as Zero Hour Nears By Ernie Pyle OFF THE OKINAWA BEACHHEAD (By navy radio). This is the last column before the invasion. It is written aboard a troop transport the evening before we storm onto Okinawa. We are nervous. Anybody with any sense is nervous on the night before D-Day. You feel weak and you try to think of things, but your mind stubbornly drifts back to the awful image of tomorrow. It drags on your soul and you have nightmares. But those fears do not mean any lack of confidence. We will take Okinawa. Nobody has any doubt about that. But we know we will have to pay for it. Some on this ship will not be alive 24 hours from now. We are in convoy. Many, many big ships are lined up in columns with our war- ships escort on Tu '4?,$?$$$ the outsides. We , f? , are an impres- f''l:k' sive sight yet we -. ;i'yt' are only one of many similar S convoys. : Y'Jlfi ' We left from , feT'Jr many different V places. We have U :-y--.S'y' U been on our way many days. We Ernie Pyle are the biggest. strongest force ever to sail in the Pacific. Pa-cific. We are going into what we expect to be the biggest battle so far in the Pacific. Our ship is an APA, or assault transport. The ship itself Is a war veteran. She wears five stars on her service ribbon Africa, Sicily, Italy. Normandy and Southern France. She wears the Purple Heart, Bronze Star and Legion of Merit Silver Star. She has fared well on the other side. We hope her luck holds out in the Pacific. We are carrying marines. Some of them are going into combat for the first time. Others are veterans from as far back as Guadalcanal. They are a rough, unshaven, competent compe-tent bunch of Americans. I am landing land-ing with them. I feel I am in good hands. I've shared a cabin with Marine Maj. Reed Taylor of Kensington.. Md. He is a Guadal vet and he jokingly belittles newcomers who weren't through "Green Hell." The major and I are sort of two of a etripe-and we get along fine. - We have the nicest cabin either of us ever had at sea. And we've taken advantage of it by sleeping away almost the whole trip. We've slept day and night. So have many others. There is a daily argument on ship whether or not you can store up slop and energy for the ordeal ahead. The doctor says it's nonsensethat non-sensethat you can't store up sleep. Life on Ship Found Rather Dull En Route Our trip has been fairly smooth and not many of the troops were seasick. sea-sick. Down in the holds the marines ma-rines sleep on racks four tiers high. It isn't a nice way to travel. But I've never heard anybody complain. com-plain. They come up on deck on nice days to sun and to rest and to wash clothes, or lie and read or play cards. We don't have movies. The ship is darkened at sunset and after that there are only dim lights. The food Is good. We get news every morn-. morn-. . ing in a mimeographed paper and once or twice a day the ship's officers of-ficers broadcast the latest news over the loudspeaker. They've kept us Informed daily of the progress of the Okinawa bombardment bom-bardment that preceded our landing. land-ing. Every little bit of good news cheers us. Meetings are held daily among the officers to iron out last minute details de-tails of the landing. Day by day, the marine troops are fully briefed on what they are to do. Everything we read about Okinawa Okina-wa stresses that the place is lousy with snakes. It's amazing the number num-ber of people who are afraid of snakes. Okinawa "snake-talk" crops into every conversation. On the last day we changed our money into newly manufactured "invasion "in-vasion yen," drew two days K rations, ra-tions, took a last bath, and packed our kits before supper. We had a huge turkey dinner and, say, we have steak and eggs for breakfast. "Fattening us up for the kill," the boys laughingly say. At three o'clock on the last afternoon after-noon there was a celebration of the Lord's Supper. It was the afternoon before Easter Sunday. A lot of us could not help but feel the tragic irony of it, knowing about tomorrow's tomor-row's battle. v You wouldn't believe it And we don't either. It just can't be true. And yet it is true. The regiment of marines that I am with landed this morning on the beaches of Okinawa and were absolutely abso-lutely unopposed, which is indeed an odd experience for a marine. Nobody among us had dreamed of such a thing. We all thought there would be slaughter on the beaches. There was some opposition to the right and to the left of us. but on our beach, nothing, absolutely nothing. noth-ing. We don't expect this to continue, of course. A marine doesn't fool himself like that. Certainly there will be hard fighting ahead and we all have our fingers crossed. But to get the firm foothold we have, with most of our men ashore and our supplies rolling in, is a gift for which we are grateful. ' This is Easter Sunday morning. It is a beautiful one. One of the marines, after spending months in the tropics, remarked a while ago, "This weather feels more like American weather than anything since I left home." It is sunshiny and very warm. We had heard it would be cold and many of the boys wore heavy underwear. un-derwear. Now we are sweating and regretting. I wore two pairs of pants, but I am about to take off one of them. Marines Equipped for Every Eventuality We are dressed in green herringbone herring-bone combat uniforms. Everybody made the trip in khaki and changed this morning aboard ship. The men left their old khaki lying on their bunks and they'll be collected by the navy, cleaned and used to clothe prisoners and our own casualties who have lost their clothes. On our ship we were up at 4 a. m. We had done our final packing of gear last night We brought ashore only what we could carry on our backs. When we put on our new green fatigues, one marine remarked, re-marked, "The latest Easter style-herringbone style-herringbone twill." a m My schedule for landing was an early one. I was ashore a short time after the first wave. Correspondents Corre-spondents were forbidden to go before be-fore the fifth wave. I was on the seventh. I had dreaded the sight of the beach littered with mangled bodies. My first look up and down the beach was a reluctant one. And then like a man in the movies who looks and looks away and then suddenly looks j back unbelieving, I realized there , were no bodies anywhere and no wounded. What a wonderful feeling! feel-ing! In fact our entire regiment came ashore with only two casualties. One was a marine who hurt his foot getting get-ting out of an amphibious truck. And the other was, of all things, a case of heat prostration! And to fulfil the picnic atmosphere, at-mosphere, listen to this Aboard ship we had turkey dinner last night. So this morning they fixed me up with a big sack of turkey tur-key wings, bread, oranges and apples. ap-ples. So instead of grabbing a hasty bile of K rations our first meal ashore, we sat and lunched on turkey tur-key wings and oranges. There are low chalky cliffs on this island. In these cliffs are caves. In the caves are brick colored urns a couple of feet high. And in these urns are the ashes of many honorable honor-able ancestors. Our bombardment had shattered many of these burial vaults. What our guns missed, the soldiers and marines took a precautionary look into by prying off the stone slabs at the entrances. In front, looking out to sea, stands our mighty fleet with scores of little black lines extending to shore our thousands and thousands of landing land-ing craft bringing more men and big guns and supplies. And behind me, not two feet away, is a cave full of ex-Japanese. Which is just the way it should be. What a nice Easter Sunday after all. |