• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1385 0

youthful facetiousness, every member of the 330th Bomb Group was presented with a certificate declaring that he, ‘having visited the Japanese emperor a total of … times to pay his respects with H.E., incendiaries and C-ration cans, having helped to clear the Tokyo slums and having aided in the spring plowing is hereby inducted into the royal and rugged order of EMPIRE BUSTERS’. In the fourteen months of the USAAF bombing campaign against Japan, 170,000 tons of bombs were dropped, most of them in the last six months; 414 B-29s were lost and 3,015 crew killed; about a hundred Japanese died for each American flier, and sixty-five Japanese cities were reduced to ashes. The 1944–45 air offensive took place chiefly because the B-29, conceived in the very different circumstances of 1942, had been created to carry it out – the Superfortress programme cost $4 billion, against $3 billion for the Manhattan Project. America’s airmen were determined to demonstrate their ability to make a decisive contribution to victory. The fire-raising attacks did not match the impact on Japan’s economy of the submarine blockade, because they took place when industry had already been crippled by lack of fuel and raw materials; but they convinced all but the intractable militarists in the Tokyo leadership that the war was lost. LeMay’s role in punishing Japan for launching a war of aggression was more significant than his contribution to enforcing its surrender.

The American landing on Okinawa was designed to pave the way for what threatened to be the bloodiest battle of the Asian war – invasion of the Japanese mainland. The island, a sixty-mile sliver of fields and mountains, lay midway between Luzon and Kyushu. Okinawa was inhabited by 150,000 people who had Japanese nationality, though they were culturally distinct. The assault that began on 1 April, Easter Sunday, after days of intense bombardment, was under Nimitz’s overall command. More than 1,200 vessels offloaded 170,000 soldiers and Marines of Tenth Army, while a vast covering fleet of aircraft carriers, battleships and lesser warships cruised offshore. To the Americans’ surprise, the initial assault was unopposed. The Japanese had learned the lessons of earlier island battles, and withdrawn beyond range of the naval bombardment; only after a week of skirmishing inland did advancing US troops meet fierce machine-gun and artillery fire. The south of Okinawa had been transformed into a fortress, successive lines of positions deeply dug on high ground. In the first twenty-four hours thereafter, the US XXIVth Corps received 14,000 incoming shells.

At the point of collision between the rival armies, the island was only three miles wide. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima had concentrated his 77,000 Japanese and 24,000 Okinawan auxiliaries where they were almost impregnable to frontal attack, as the Americans discovered in the weeks that followed. Heavy rain set in, churning the battlefield into a sea of mud. Again and again, US soldiers and Marines thrust forward – and were repulsed. Their generals demanded that they try harder: on 6 May a corps commander visited a divisional command post and said he noted its units had suffered fewer casualties than any other formation. Officers interpreted this as a compliment until he added, ‘To me, that means just one thing – you’re not pushing.’ In its first twenty-four days on Okinawa, the division had advanced 25,000 yards and reckoned to have killed almost 5,000 Japanese; in the succeeding sixteen days,, it gained only 2,500 yards.

With the war in Europe coming to an end and the power of the United States everywhere triumphant, it seemed to Americans at home intolerable that their boys should die in thousands to wrest from fanatics a remote and meaningless piece of real estate: there was intense public anger, directed less against the enemy than towards their own commanders. By May 1945, with Hitler vanquished, Americans took for granted impending victory in the Pacific, and were increasingly cynical about the war. To prick public complacency, the US Navy urged