Inferno - Max Hastings [405]
By the time Okinawa was declared secure on 22 June, eighty-two days after Buckner’s initial landing, the army and the marines had lost 7,503 killed and 36,613 wounded, in addition to 36,000 nonbattle casualties, most of them combat-fatigue cases. Additionally the U.S. 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.
Other 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, U.S. 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 Sgt. 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 U.S. 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 of Malaya. There were many sour jokes among men fighting in the East on hearing news of VE-Day. A dispatch rider handed a signal bearing the news to the senior staff officer of a division in Burma. This dignitary called to his sergeant, “I’ve got a message here: the war in Europe is over.” The NCO turned to his men and said, “The war in Europe is over. Five-minute break.” Maj. John Randle, who had been fighting on the Burma front since April 1942, said of the mood in the summer of 1945, “We thought we would go on and on. We were wearing a bit thin by then. If my CO had said, ‘You have earned a rest,’ even before we went back [into Burma] in early ’45, I would have taken it. But I would never have asked for it; you couldn’t put your hand up and say ‘I’ve had enough.’ ”
To the dismay of many senior Americans, MacArthur was designated supreme commander for Olympic, the invasion of Japan scheduled to commence in November with a landing on Kyushu. Meanwhile, LeMay’s bombers continued to incinerate the enemy’s cities, and Japanese industrial production approached collapse. On 10 July