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By the spring of 1945, Ito had become a battalion commander. His unit was better equipped than most of those deployed on Okinawa, having brought a full inventory of weapons from Manchuria. There was still some debate in command messes about whether the Americans would assault their island or Formosa, further south, but the 77,000 defenders recognised the likelihood that they would fight a great battle. The young officer Ito understood that the war was going badly: “After Saipan fell, I realised that we could lose.” His regiment had left behind in Manchuria one-third of its complement of Hokkaidans. Like other units, it was now made up to strength with locally recruited Okinawans, who inspired little confidence, but added 20,000 unwilling conscripts to the garrison’s strength. Ito took comfort from his father’s judgement. The old sailor had seen something of Americans during convoy escort service in World War I, and asserted scornfully, “They have no idea of discipline.” His son said: “I understood that the U.S. possessed enormous industrial resources, but I did not believe that in combat their soldiers could match the resolution of our men.” After five years as a mere spectator of the war, the ambitious young warrior was eager to fight: “It seemed good to have a chance to take part in a real showdown with the enemy.”

At last came a March morning when they awoke to behold on the sea before them a squadron of American warships, which soon began to bombard their positions. “Well, now we know,” they said to each other. “It’s us.” Through the hours and days which followed, they sat passive in their caves while the earth shook with relentless concussions. The Americans were shelling everywhere, to sustain uncertainty about their intended landing place. As the Japanese grew accustomed to the barrage, Ito periodically emerged from his headquarters bunker into the dust-clouded daylight. Having never before been under fire, he wanted to test himself. When his unit joined battle, he was determined not to be seen to flinch. He was pleased with his own resolution, and waited confidently for the Americans to venture ashore.

AFTER D-DAY in Normandy, American landings on Okinawa represented the greatest amphibious operation of the war. More than 1,200 vessels transported 170,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines of Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner’s Tenth Army, with 120,000 more providing logistics and technical support. The island’s seizure was to be a navy-run operation, under Nimitz’s auspices, though soldiers were playing a substantial role. Four divisions would make the initial assault, with three more in reserve. Vice-Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner’s 5th Amphibious Force was supported by Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet, mustering more than forty carriers, eighteen battleships and almost two hundred destroyers. “We bombarded all day long714,” wrote James Hutchinson of the battleship Colorado on 31 March. “We fired the sixteen-inch main battery about every three or four minutes all that time. It really gets to be a strain on a person’s nerves after a while.” Meanwhile, American units set about seizing several small offshore islands, preliminaries to the main assault.

On one of these, Tokashiki, twenty-two-year-old Lt. Yoshihiro Minamoto waited with his Shinyo suicide-boat unit. Minamoto was one of 2,200 cadets who graduated from Zama military academy in July 1944. As an engineer, he had completed three years’ training—much more than American and British officers received at that time. Yet the most curious aspect of his ceremonial passing-out parade was the distribution of assignments which followed. Many newly minted lieutenants were promptly ticketed not merely for the possibility of death, but for its certainty. Some 450 were dispatched to train as kamikaze aircrew. Minamoto was among a further eighty posted to a seaborne special operations unit, whose mission was also explicitly suicidal. They were to man small boats laden with explosives, deployed to meet American amphibious