All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [402]
The US Navy found the experience of combating the kamikazes among the bloodiest and most painful of its war. Japanese airmen carried out almost 1,700 sorties to Okinawa between 11 March and the end of June 1945. Day after day, ships’ crews manned their guns to mount continuous barrages against diving, twisting attackers. Most of the pilots perished under the American fire, but a few always got through to immolate themselves on the flight decks and superstructures of the warships, with devastating effect as gasoline ignited, munitions exploded and sailors protected only by anti-flash hoods and gauntlets found themselves caught in blazing infernos. On 12 April, almost all of 185 attackers were destroyed – but the Americans lost two ships sunk and fourteen damaged, including two battleships. On the 16th, the carrier Intrepid was hit. On 4 May, five ships were sunk and eleven damaged. Between the 11th and 14th, three flagships were badly damaged, including the carriers Bunker Hill and Enterprise. From 6 April to 22 June, throughout the theatre of war there were ten major suicide attacks by day and night involving 1,465 aircraft, plus a further 4,800 conventional sorties. Kamikazes sank twenty-seven ships and damaged 164, while bombers sank one and damaged sixty-three. About 20 per cent of kamikaze assaults scored hits – ten times the success rate for conventional attacks. Only the overwhelming strength of the US Navy enabled it to withstand such punishment.
By the time Okinawa was declared secure on 22 June, eighty-two days after Buckner’s initial landing, the army and Marines had lost 7,503 killed and 36,613 wounded, in addition to 36,000 non-battle casualties, most of them combat-fatigue cases. Additionally the US Navy suffered 4,907 dead and more than 8,000 wounded. Almost the entire defending force ashore perished, together with many thousands of native Okinawans, some of whom were incited by the army to commit suicide. The Japanese were largely successful in achieving their purpose: America’s losses persuaded the nation’s leadership that an invasion of mainland Japan would prove immensely costly. The consequences, however, proved very different from those Tokyo intended.
Minor ground operations continued through the weeks that followed: Australian forces landed on Borneo at MacArthur’s behest, and fought a bloody little campaign to secure its coastal regions; in the Philippines, US troops pushed back Yamashita’s shrunken perimeter in the mountains, and conducted a series of amphibious landings to liberate islands in the vast archipelago. Dogged efforts persisted to persuade Japanese stragglers to surrender: one prisoner, twenty-nine-year-old Sergeant Kiyoshi Ito, in civilian life a salesman from Nagoya, was persuaded to sign a leaflet for distribution by American troops:
My comrades! You, who valiantly decided to resist to the end …
PLEASE PAUSE A WHILE BEFORE DYING AND THINK!
OFFICERS, NCOs AND MEN!
… I need not tell you the plight we are in, when our isolated homeland is fighting against the whole world. Is it not only a matter of time? Please try to think reasonably. Leave it to Fate to decide the war. Come what may the Japanese people, with their glorious history of 3,000 years, will never be exterminated. Comrades, why not consider your past and live anew to rebuild Japan? Throw away your weapons and come out of your positions. Take off your shirts and wave them over your heads and approach the US positions in daylight, using the main roads. Then your worries will be over and you will receive humane treatment.
I STRONGLY BELIEVE THAT THIS IS THE ONLY WAY AND THE BEST WAY LEFT TO SERVE OUR COUNTRY!
An NCO of the Japanese Army, now a prisoner of war.
Such appeals were almost entirely ignored until August 1945 and beyond, as they were also in Burma, where Slim’s Fourteenth Army was still mopping up Japanese remnants and preparing for Operation Zipper, an invasion