Crucible of Hell

2

Operation Iceberg

“Directive received deferring our project,” noted Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. in his diary on October 4, 1944. He added: “Took physical exam. Blood pressure 120/76. Dr. said he could find nothing wrong except danger from Japs.”¹

The forced humor masked Buckner’s understandable nervousness about what lay ahead: not only his first test as a field commander, but in a battle of any kind. It may not have helped that he was the son of a famous Confederate general—named after the Venezuelan soldier and statesman Simón Bolívar, then at the height of his fame as the “Liberator” of South America—who, after a shaky start, won laurels at the battles of Perryville and Chickamauga. He became, as it happened, both the first Confederate commander to surrender an army, and also the last. He was 63 when his son Simon Bolivar Jr. was born in Munfordville, Kentucky, in 1886. A year later, standing as a Democrat, Buckner Sr. became the state’s thirtieth governor.

Though he later failed as the vice-presidential nominee of the “Gold Democrats” in 1896, the elder Buckner was a hard act to follow. His young son made a start by graduating from the U.S. Army’s military academy at West Point in 1908. But thereafter his career was largely uneventful as he completed two tours of the Philippines, saw no combat in the First World War and spent much of the interwar period as a student or instructor at various military schools, including a final spell as commandant of cadets at West Point. In the latter appointment he was remembered as a martinet, a stern disciplinarian who allowed his cadets few luxuries. “Buckner forgets,” commented one aspiring officer’s parent, “cadets are born not quarried.”²

Lacking field experience, Buckner clung to U.S. Army doctrine that artillery played the decisive role in combat. Infantry were needed to find and hold the enemy; but only artillery could destroy it. After war came a second time in December 1941, he was eager to put this theory into practice. But by then he was commanding the army’s Alaska Defense Command, a relative backwater that saw only limited action. In 1943, for example, when amphibious landings recovered the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska from the Japanese, both operations had been navy-led. A frustrated Buckner clashed repeatedly with both the naval commander for the northern Pacific and the civilian authorities in Alaska, the latter objecting to his illegal hunting of walruses.³

Salvation came in the summer of 1944 when Buckner was appointed commander of the new U.S. Tenth Army in Hawaii, a joint army–Marines formation that was intended for the invasion of Formosa. Worried about resupply, he was relieved when the objective was switched from Formosa to the smaller Okinawa; but that still required a completely new plan of assault. Fortunately Buckner had an excellent staff to take care of that, led by Brigadier General E. D. Post who had served with him since West Point. Their relationship, noted a colleague, was “very close, almost that of father and son.” It helped that Post had a “pleasing personality and a very even temper,” and was a man “it would have been hard not to get along with.”⁴

Under Post were two deputy chiefs of staff: one for the U.S. Army, Brigadier General Lawrence E. Schick; and one for the U.S. Navy/Marines, Brigadier General Oliver P. Smith. Like Post, Schick had served with Buckner in Alaska, and was one of Buck’s boys. Smith was an outsider, joining the Tenth Army’s staff on Hawaii only in early November 1944 after combat stints with the 1st Marine Division on Cape Gloucester (as colonel of the 5th Marines) and Peleliu (assistant division commander). The new job was not one he was looking forward to. “It is hard to come back from an operation,” he wrote, “and start over again the whole tedious process of training for a new operation. What is needed is new blood.”⁵

Smith had grown up in northern California where he attended the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the wartime Marine Corps as a second lieutenant in 1917. He later matriculated from the École supérieure de guerre in France, the first Marine to do so, and returned to teach at the Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, Virginia, where he was known as “the Professor” and an expert in amphibious warfare. Intelligent, easygoing and with valuable combat experience, he was the perfect choice as Buckner’s Marine deputy chief of staff. Not least because army–Marine relations were then at a low ebb, following the sacking of Major General Ralph Smith as commander of the U.S. Army’s 27th Division by his Marine superior, Lieutenant General Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith—the so-called Smith vs Smith controversy—during the Saipan campaign in July 1944. Already ill disposed to the 27th Division for a perceived lack of aggression in a previous battle, Holland Smith accused its men of failing to attack on time and costing Marine lives. Ralph Smith was relieved of his command and ordered off the island, a humiliation that his senior army colleagues—including U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall—found hard to forgive.

The bad blood probably cost the abrasive Holland Smith the command of the Tenth Army. “I found out later,” wrote Oliver Smith, “that both Admiral Spruance and Admiral Turner had recommended that General Holland Smith be given the Okinawa job, but they were overruled by Admiral Nimitz.”⁶ It was handed instead to the untried Buckner who, in a second snub to Holland Smith, was put in charge of the all-army board of inquiry into Ralph Smith’s sacking. The board eventually—and predictably—ruled in favor of the dismissed officer, though he would never command troops in action again. “Saw Holland Smith at Adm[iral] Nimitz’s conference,” noted Buckner in late August 1944, “and he greeted me without much enthusiasm. (He has probably seen my board report to the effect that Ralph Smith’s relief from command was not justified.)”⁷

It was into this potentially poisonous atmosphere on Hawaii that Oliver Smith arrived on November 7. Fortunately Admiral Nimitz had helped to clear the air a month earlier by sounding out Buckner on his attitude to the Smith vs Smith controversy. “Finding,” wrote Buckner, “that I deplored the whole matter and harbored no inter-service ill feeling,” Nimitz “announced that I would command the ‘new joint project.’”⁸

Smith’s early impressions of his new boss, after they met at army headquarters in Schofield Barracks on November 8, were mostly positive. “He was,” noted Smith, “in excellent physical condition: ruddy, heavy-set, but with considerable spring in his step. He had snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes: the eyes were almost hard.” Though he had “surprisingly little troop duty” and “limited” experience in amphibious operations, he did not lack for “character” and Smith had “no reason to feel he would not continue to operate well in a joint undertaking [with the navy].” While Buckner’s “methods and judgments were somewhat inflexible,” wrote Smith, “you always knew where you stood.”

It helped that Smith thought highly of Buckner’s right-hand men, Post and Schick, describing the latter—“a small, wiry man, quick of speech and action”—as the “finest staff officer with whom I have ever had the pleasure of serving.” But not every aspect of life at Schofield Barracks, sited on a picturesque red-soiled plateau 900 feet above sea level, was to Smith’s liking. He particularly resented Buckner’s “fetish” for “physical conditioning,” and his insistence that all his staff officers, many of whom were over fifty, took part. “For the older officers,” noted Smith, “the program resulted in broken collarbones, broken arms, sprained ankles and charley horses [cramps in the leg muscles]. Included in the required conditioning were the running of the Combat Course (for which Lieutenant General Buckner held the record), firing all infantry hand and shoulder weapons, soft ball and conditioning hikes.” One of the latter was eight and a half miles in length, with a climb and descent of 2,000 feet. Recently back from Peleliu, Smith gave it a miss. “What I needed was food and relaxation.”

Yet there were limits to even that, and the vibrant social life at Schofield Barracks was not, in Smith’s opinion, “an appropriate one for troops preparing for combat.” He added: “It is true there were no families present, but there were dances every Wednesday and Saturday evening which were not stag affairs; there were plenty of WACs [Women’s Army Corps], nurses and Red Cross workers. There were dinner parties, beach parties and cocktail parties. At some… the women wore evening gowns. You had the feeling you were half in the war and half out of it.”⁹

Buckner’s diary backs up Smith’s concern. Hardly a day goes by without him mentioning his attendance at a dinner party or dance, usually in the company of an attractive young woman. One name keeps cropping up: “Missy” Keleher, the wife of a naval officer on duty in the Pacific. A typical entry (for November 21) reads: “Took Missy Keleher… to dinner at Chinese restaurant. Missy wangled a photo of myself and asked me to autograph it with an appropriate message. I did. ‘To Missy with misgivings.’”

On another occasion, not long before he departed Hawaii for the theater of war, Buckner took Missy to a dinner and dance at the Wheeler Field Officers’ Club, and then for a nightcap at a fellow officer’s quarters. It was 2:00 a.m. by the time he got home. “Moral: Don’t take girls to parties who live too far away if you want any sleep.” Undoubtedly flattered by Missy’s attention, Buckner’s behavior toward her might have been, as far as we know, entirely honorable. But the number of evenings he spent in her and other women’s company—often for tête-à-tête dinners—would surely not have gone down well with Adele Buckner, his wife of almost thirty years, and the mother of their three children, if she had known.¹⁰