Sam Ciminnisi, 53 Eagle St., North East, Pa 16428
Sam served in the First Marine Division. He was drafted March 13, 1944. He was interviewed April 12, 1999, by Bill Welch and John Williams.
April 1945 on the island of Okinawa:
It nearly killed Sam Ciminnisi, not once but several times.
And before a piece of shrapnel pierced his leg to give him the "million-dollar wound" that was a ticket home, Ciminnisi -- ground down by the
horrors of war -- offered himself as a target to the Japanese. "Would one of you sons of bitches just shoot me," the desperate 25-year-old shouted to an unseen enemy.
Now, 54 years later, Ciminnisi
looks back at Okinawa and figures he used up seven of the nine lives of a cat.
When the First Marine Division landed on the west side of Okinawa April 1, 1945, in Operation Iceberg, it looked like this might not be so
bad after all. The amphibious landing by elements of two Marine and two Army divisions came up against very light opposition from the Japanese. This was Ciminnisi's first landing. In fact, even though
this division had seen action at Guadalcanal, New Britain and Pelileu, most of the men in his company had not seen action before. The few veterans were now noncommissioned officers -- sergeants and
corporals. "Except for the top guys, I don't remember any old-timers at all. Even our sergeant was new."
On the ride to the beach, "I didn't do much thinking, even when we went over
the side of the ship into the Higgins Boat. I was 25 then and gung ho. I wasn't scared then. I didn't know about shelling."
"It was sort of an easy landing. They had tricked the Japs
by making a lot of action on the other side of the island." The boat left them off in knee-deep water.
The first two days went smoothly. They moved mostly through forested country. There was
occasional light shelling from the enemy, but the main worry was from any mines that might have been planted or Japanese snipers that might be drawing a bead on them.
"We really didn't get pinned down any time
then. We moved inland pretty fast before we got shelled," Ciminnisi said.
By April 3, the division had advanced about eight miles from the beach and was now in largely open country. And it was inland where
the Japanese Army had prepared its defenses. Holes had been dug for snipers, for machine gun nests and for pre-sighted artillery. The farther the American forces tried to go, the more difficult, the more dangerous
they would find it.
Ciminnisi's company was ordered to take one hill, then another and another.
"There were some pretty good hills we had to take. And there was lots of coral. You could go out on the
highway and have as much chance digging in there as we did on the coral. We tried to dig in once. We didn't get far."
Taking the hills of Okinawa became a daily hell. As the Marines advanced,
the Japanese would fire away with machine guns, rifles and artillery. Most dangerous was the machine gun fire.
Holes just a couple feet in diameter had been dug. These led to complexes inside some of the hills
that were three stories high, Ciminnisi recalled. About the only way to neutralize them was to bring up a flamethrowing tank. The tankers first pumped unlit oil into the hole, letting the oil run down into
the lower levels. After enough had been pumped, the flamethrower would be lit. The entire complex would then burst into flame.
"It was a helluva way to go - with a flamethrower. I saw it.
But it was the only way to take those holes."
The heat from them was so intense that a Marine off to the side had to move back.
"They had women with them at some of these hills. Three times we found
them dead near the hills." It was as if the Japanese soldiers didn't want them around as the Americans neared, Ciminnisi theorized, so they sent the women away but shot them as they walked off.
Not only
Ciminnisi, but a Japanese soldier avoided death on another occasion. While advancing, he came upon the young soldier. Both faced each other, startled.
"I reached up with the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle)
and it misfired. I don't think he could move - he was frozen. He was young and he looked scared.
"I'm glad the BAR didn't fire. I would have been seeing him drop all these years. I would still
see that."
With his BAR jammed, Ciminnisi switched to a Thompson submachine gun.
As they approached a cave, a Japanese soldier fired at the Marines. One of the bullets was meant for Ciminnisi. It
would have hit him, too, but at the moment the bullet reached the spot he was in, he jumped into a hole. The bullet hit the earth right between his legs.
That shook him up. And it riled him. Ciminnisi aimed his
Thompson at the cave entrance and emptied a clip of .45 caliber ammunition into it. Not enough. He emptied a second clip. He stayed in a crouch, studying the cave. It was silent. Whether he hit
anyone or not, he didn't care. The main thing was that it was silent. No one was taking a pot shot at him anymore.
"I hope I just scared him. It didn't want to kill him."
Whether it was
the end of a Japanese soldier's life or not, it meant another one of Ciminnisi's nine lives was gone.
Later on that same advance, the Japanese opened up from one of the small, hidden holes. A bullet hit the
ground between his legs just as he was jumping into a ditch. He fired the Thompson submachine gun. "I emptied two clips into that cave. I hoped I just scared him. I didn't want to kill him,"
he said.
As they advanced, the Marine infantry would walk behind the flamethrowing tanks. That's where it was safest. One time, Ciminnisi forgot that simple rule and expended one of his nine lives.
An unseen
Japanese machine gun started firing. Ciminnisi was with a Marine from Ohio, a tall man named Cox. Immediately, the two of them jumped into an artillery shell crater. Cox landed on top of him.
"Whoever was working that machine gun was doing it in a circle. Bullets were going all around us in a circle but they didn't hit. We decided to get the hell out of there. When we did, I just
started shaking. You don't have a shaker in this country that was shaking as bad as I did."
It's not during the action that shaking like that happens, but afterward, when you have the time to think of what
just happened and what might have happened. So Ciminnisi just shook.
The lieutenant told him he could stop shaking, even brought over a crate for him to sit on, but he couldn't.
One night, the men were
dug in. Their foxholes were spread apart. In the dark of the night, some Japanese infiltrated, creeping into the foxhole being used by one of the sergeants just one foxhole away.
"They knifed
him. I could hear him crying out, 'Help me, you guys!' I couldn't see him. We fired flares and saw two men running away. I threw two grenades at them. They got away."
Another life used up for Ciminnisi.
Another life was chalked up by a near miss.
Ciminnisi was behind cover with one of his buddies.
"He was a little Italian guy. We were shooting at the Japanese when a
bullet hit my helmet." The bullet came at an angle so that it entered the front and exited on the side without hitting his head.
"My buddy said, 'Did he get you, Sam? I'll get that son of a bitch!'"
And then he started to climb out with the full intention of going after whatever Japanese soldier had had the nerve to fire at his
friend. The enemy was only about 50 yards away, but couldn't be seen.
Ciminnisi smiled as he recalled the moment. "I pulled him back, but he was ready to right out there and let 'em have it."
Near miss after close call after deadly frights. Ciminnisi was getting strung out.
"One time we took a hill and came down the other side. The Japanese had cut down the trees. What remained were
three-foot stumps. I just sat down on one, put down my weapon and folded my arms. I yelled out, 'Would one of you sons of bitches shoot me?' I even took my helmet off. I actually wanted someone
to shoot me."
The Okinawa campaign had been grinding on day after day. Little rest at night, even nighttime patrols, they had taken their toll. After a bit, he got up and moved on. Even so, Ciminnisi
knows that the Japanese easily could have obliged his desperate wish.
"I can still see that stump."
The million-dollar wound
A couple nights later, with no place to dig in, seven men in Ciminnisi's
platoon decided to light a fire to warm themselves. They were just a few feet away from where he was trying to get some rest.
"I went over and said, 'C'mon boys, break it up. Their artillery is going
to hit this.' So they broke up. And just a few minutes later a shell landed almost right on that spot and got me right above the knee."
There were low cement walls running parallel there hardly three feet
apart. They seemed like ideal cover from artillery. Ciminnisi had already hunkered down between the walls -- his head resting against one and his legs pushing against the other. That way, only a shell making the
unlikely landing between the walls would hurt him. And one did.
The piece of shrapnel went through Ciminnisi's right thigh and into his left one. It hit an artery. Blood spurted out in a stream as
think as his finger. Ciminnisi stuck his finger into the hole to slow the bleeding. "I was bleeding all over."
A corpsman came over, gave him a shot of morphine and put a tourniquet on the
leg. Ciminnisi would survive this wound. Another of his nine lives had been expended.
He should have been relatively safe at this point, but another life would be spent just getting him to a field
hospital. Placed on a litter, Ciminnisi was carried to a DUKW, an amphibious vehicle that could travel on land and sea. Racks had been set up on the DUKW to take the wounded and dead back to the beach.
In his case, two dead Marines were laid at the bottom of the DUKW while Ciminnisi was placed on the top rack, the rack that stuck above the walls of the DUKW, the rack that would be exposed to enemy fire -- from snipers
or artillery.
The wounded Marine was scared to death.
He had been on Okinawa long enough to know that being exposed to enemy fire -- even for the single ride back to the beach -- could be fatal. "I
didn't think I would make it back alive," he said.
Making it worse, on one rough part of terrain, the DUKW had to make two tries to get up and over an obstacle. Surely, Ciminnisi would be hit then.
"When we got to the field hospital, the doc chewed them out good. 'What'd you put him up there for when you have these dead guys below?'"
After he was treated at the field hospital, Ciminnisi was loaded
aboard a hospital ship which took him to Hawaii. From there he was flown to a military hospital at San Diego where he sayed until discharged in July 1945. During his recuperation, his leg muscles
tightened up. "Nurses had to teach me how to walk all over again.
"If I had had any sense, I never would have learned do they would just have to keep teaching me," he joked.
That leg
wound would leave Ciminnisi partially disabled for life. He has collected disability payments from the Veterans Administration for years. Even now, the leg remains sensitive to just the lightest touch.
He
is on a 70 percent disability pension from the Veterans Administration.
The food
Like the rest of the ground troops of world War II, Ciminnisi fed on K-rations when in the field. "When you're going, you
don't think about what you're eating. When you ate those and then drank water, it filled you right up."
The bad news
While on Okinawa, about a week before he was wounded, Ciminnisi got bad news. A
superior came up to him in his foxhole. The American Red Cross had just passed the word to his company that his brother had died.
"They gave me the word, said they were sorry and that I had their
condolences and that was it. I just stood there. I was stunned." His brother, ????, had died from a heart attack.
Until letters from home caught up with him in Hawaii, the Marine had no idea what had
caused his brother's death.
After his discharge, Ciminnisi went home to North East. His wife, the former Josephine Hawrylin of Erie, and their daughter, Patricia awaited him there.
They lived for a time next to his parents' house.
