WWII vet recalls first-wave attack in Okinawa

“Over here, Joe! Over here, Joe! You gettin’ sick of that, Joe? ” Japanese soldiers yelled in thick accents.

They patroled the jungles of Okinawa Island at night in the hopes of catching American soldiers hiding in the shadows, as World War II was coming to a close in 1945. Army Cpl. Dominick Gualtieri hid in his tank, alongside two other soldiers. They waited until the Japanese retreated to escape the blazing heat and cramped quarters of the tank.

The Japanese, though, were sneaky. They hid in trees. “They were up there for two hours one time,” recalled Gualtieri, who now lives in Merrick. “So I pointed my gun up at the trees and started shooting at them. How many rounds I shot, I don’t remember. But they were still in the trees. They really knew how to hold us up for hours. So we finally knocked some trees down.”

They had tied themselves to the trees.

Gualtieri was a Sherman tank gunner with the 767th Tank Battalion, 7th Division in the Pacific Theatre of Operations. As part of a first-wave landing at Okinawa Island on Easter Sunday, April 1,1945, Gualtieri and several squads were assigned to clear the area before infantrymen landed on the island. Japanese ambushes weren’t the only obstacles that American soldiers faced on Okinawa, though.

‘Okinawa was the worst’

Two mighty typhoons, with wind gusts of 190 miles per hour, threatened Gualtieri and his fellow soldiers during their time on Okinawa Island from April to December 1945. Never having experienced strong gusts before, the men asked their lieutenant what to do. “He told us to tie ourselves to the trees,” Gualtieri laughed. “But the winds were so strong that it blew everything away, even the trees. I only had what I was wearing. It blew my barracks bag away.”

The men sheltered in a cave. Once the typhoon passed, the damage was clear. It killed nearly 600 Navy men stationed at the coast of the island. “We saw them all floating in the water,” Gualtieri said.