Inferno - Max Hastings [402]
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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 the 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 The Japanese had learned the lessons of earlier island battles and withdrawn beyond range of the naval bombardment; only after a week of skirmishing inland did advancing U.S. troops meet fierce machine-gun and artillery fire.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 U.S. XXIV 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 during the weeks that followed. Heavy rain set in, churning the battlefield into a sea of mud. Again and again, U.S. soldiers and marines thrust forward—and were repulsed. Their generals demanded that they should try harder: on 6 May a U.S. 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, however, 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 the 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 U.S. Navy urged people to take a vacation on the west coast and visit the dockyards where lay crippled and blackened warships brought back from Okinawa. But the American Red Cross found itself struggling to muster volunteers to prepare surgical dressings, and there was a chronic shortage of manpower to work in weapons plants. War weariness was a dignified phrase to describe the American domestic mood: it might instead have been categorised as boredom, the disease of democracies, whose patience is always scarce.
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 the Tenth Army was the unimaginative Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr. 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