THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 1, 1995 TAG: 9504010240
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHARLENE CASON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 147 lines
The first time Sam T. Barfield went to Okinawa, he swam there - underwater, in the dark, with an 18-inch hollowed-out reed to breathe through.
He and 80 other Marine demolition experts worked quietly, laying charges to prepare the island beach for an invasion the next morning - Easter Sunday.
Barfield returned at daybreak with thousands of troops.
``There was no sound. Just the ramps dropping down to let us off the landing ships,'' said Barfield, now 77 and Norfolk's commissioner of revenue.
``The beach was silent, except for a little yellow bird, like a parakeet, sitting on a broken palm, singing. Our guys started whooping and hollering, saying, `They must've heard we were coming, and they've all gone home.'
``But six hours later,'' Barfield said, ``all hell broke loose.''
What followed on April 1, 1945, was the beginning of a campaign that many historians call the biggest land-sea-air battle of all time. It would drag on for three months, the last important American engagement before the atom bomb helped end World War II that August.
Okinawa cost the Americans about 12,000 men - more than 7,000 of them ground troops who were killed in the first three days.
Many of the others died in the ferocious air-sea fight, at the hands of desperate kamikazes.
One aviator who survived was William W. Patterson of Suffolk, a graduate of Maury High School in Norfolk who became a torpedobomber pilot at 21. Fifty years later, Patterson recalls clearly one small but ferocious piece of the fight, against the biggest battleship the world had ever seen.
``It was a mighty attack that only lasted a couple of hours,'' Patterson said. ``During that time, we sunk nearly the entire battle group, including the Yamato, which exploded in a gigantic fireball.''
Coming on the heels of the Iwo Jima invasion, Okinawa was the next-to-the-last stop on the U.S. military's island-hopping campaign in the Pacific.
The last island was to be Japan.
At each point along the way, the Japanese had refused to give up even when they were clearly beaten. Great numbers of Americans died with them.
Before the battle for Okinawa ended, the American casualty count - dead and wounded - reached 50,000.
Nearly 100,000 Japanese died, along with 80,000 Okinawan civilians, many of them farmers.
About 50,000 troops from the 2nd Marine Division and the 10th Army established a beachhead on Okinawa's southwest coast in the first days of the invasion.
They soon found out that the Japanese had not - as Barfield's invasion force had hoped - gone home.
Instead, they had foregone a defense of the long shoreline and withdrawn to positions to await the attackers.
The job of blasting them out of their bunkers, trenches and caves fell to units such as the 2nd Marines, Lt. Sam Barfield's group.
``They filled caves with rolling guns, that they'd pull back in, to hide from bombardment,'' Barfield said.
``We'd get up there and plant charges around the entrances and blow them in. We had interpreters with us, and we tried to get them to come out, but they wouldn't, so we just had to seal them in there.
``There must be thousands of Japanese still sealed up in those caves today.''
Barfield, who graduated from Maury High seven years before Patterson, fought in the Pacific campaign from 1942 to 1945. Four Barfield brothers, all raised in Norfolk's Bayview section, fought in the war. All survived.
In spring 1945, after Okinawa had been secured, Sam had a reunion on the island with his younger brother, Herman Eugene, an Army Air Corps pilot. They hadn't seen each other in five years.
``We had a case of Japanese saki, and we tried to drink the whole thing to celebrate, but we couldn't manage it,'' Barfield said with a chuckle.
He described the Pacific campaign as a fight between fanatics and brave men.
``The Japanese were fanatics because they thought it was an honor to die. Our men were brave because they didn't want to die, but they did.''
Patterson saw the fanaticism firsthand, facing the kamikazes - suicide fliers who took their name from a mythical 13th century wind said to have blown away a Mongol invasion fleet. Beginning in March 1945, the kamikazes flew day and night against the Allies.
Patterson was stationed aboard the carrier Yorktown, one of 1,200 American ships that encircled Okinawa.
An outer ring of destroyers set up to warn of kamikaze attacks provided little protection for the fleet. Thirty-six ships were sunk, another 368 damaged.
Patterson's run at the Yamato battle group came within a week of the Okinawa invasion, on April 7, 1945. The gun-laden ship appeared on the horizon that day with a cruiser and 10 Japanese destroyers, sent to bombard Allied troops on shore while engaging the U.S. fleet.
``One of our subs was alerted that they were coming from Japan,'' Patterson said. ``So we flew out to meet them.''
It was the last meeting Yamato would ever have. Patterson, who received the Navy Cross for heroism in that brief air-sea battle, sank the accompanying cruiser by firing one of the two torpedoes that split the ship in half.
Patterson was afraid every moment he was in the air at Okinawa. It didn't help that the tail had been shot off his plane and he struggled nearly two hours to reach a carrier for a crippled landing.
He refused a suggestion from the ship that he bail out - he had seen many pilots lost at sea.
``We sometimes flew in so low we could see riflemen on the ground shooting at us. We flew every day, and I used to hope and pray I'd come back every night. . . .
``When we stood in the chow line back on the carrier at night, we were a serious, silent bunch. We were all scared, but people back home were counting on us.''
Okinawa left a lifelong mark on Patterson. After the war, his fear turned to depression and he drifted. He joined the naval reserves and later became a civil engineer.
Barfield said he, too, was never the same after Okinawa.
``War is so inhuman, and dehumanizing - the most unnatural, obscene thing ever created. The average, sane person can't relate to killing someone else, to murder.
``I tell you,'' Barfield said, ``war just sears your soul.'' ILLUSTRATION: JOHN H. SHEALLY II
Staff
Marine Lt. Sam T. Barfield, left, and his younger brother, Herman
Eugene Barfield, an Army Air Corps pilot, had not seen each other
for five years before their reunion on Okinawa in 1945.
JOHN H. SHEALLY II
Staff
William W. Patterson of Suffolk, a Maury High School graduate,
became a torpedo-bomber pilot in the Army Air Corps at 21. He
received the Navy Cross for heroism flying a torpedo-bomber, like
the model in this picture, over the Pacific.
Map
AP
by CNB