All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [400]
The men fighting on Okinawa shared the American people’s frustration. They demanded: why not stage an amphibious assault to outflank the defences? Why not use poison gas? Why fight this war, in its last phase before inevitable victory, in a fashion that suited Japanese suicidalists? None of these questions was satisfactorily answered. The officer commanding Tenth Army was the unimaginative Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner. For more than two months he conducted a campaign which seemed to its participants close kin to those of the First World War in Flanders. He launched repeated frontal attacks on fixed positions which slowly gained ground, but cost heavy casualties. The US Marine Corps fared no better on Okinawa than the army units to which it liked to condescend. For once, MacArthur was probably right when he argued that the best course would be to seal off the Japanese garrison in the south of the island, leaving it to rot while US forces addressed mainland Japan.
The Japanese never supposed that their stand on the island would achieve decisive results. They placed faith, instead, on an air assault of devastating intensity against the US fleet, in which the key role was played by kamikazes. Suicide planes had been used with some success in the Philippines since October 1944. Though the Allies found this method of war-making repugnant, from their enemies’ standpoint it was entirely rational. A post-war Japanese historian commented impatiently: ‘There have been innumerable Japanese critics of the kamikaze attacks. Most of them, however, seem to have been made by uninformed people who were content to be mere spectators of the great crisis which their nation faced.’
Against overwhelming US air power, poorly trained Japanese pilots employing conventional tactics suffered punitive losses. By planning for their deaths as a certainty rather than a mere probability, fuel loads could be halved and destructive accuracy much increased. The resultant air campaign off Okinawa inflicted heavier losses on the US Navy than had been contrived by the capital ships of the Combined Fleet at any moment of the war. In its closing months, Spruance’s ships were obliged to fight some of their toughest and most prolonged actions.
Cmdr. Fitzhugh Lee, executive officer of Essex, described his experience of monitoring the Japanese bomb and torpedo strikes from the huge carrier’s Combat Information Centre:
I can remember spending many unhappy hours in CIC watching these blips coming at us, knowing what they were doing, and hoping that our guns would shoot them down, seeing them turn around on the radar screen, and then knowing that the torpedoes were in the water and on their way to you. Those minutes seemed like years, when you are sitting there waiting to see whether you’re going to get hit. CIC was not a happy place to be. It was interesting psychologically … my first experience of real fear – being in the face of what you thought might be death at any moment … Here you sat around these radar screens and watched these things happen with young seamen who were eighteen or nineteen years old, just off the farm or out of the shoestore … Their reactions were for the most part wonderful. Every once in a while you’d find one that couldn’t take it … I found that I could spot when somebody was getting a little hysterical … If he got very emotional, it would spread so you had to think of something quick – get him out … We had a few who lost control of themselves and started weeping, crying, praying.
The image of Japan’s kamikazes taking off to face death with exuberant