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AT DAWN on 1 April, Sunday, code-named “Love Day,” thousands of men of the two Marine and two army divisions which were to lead the assault on Okinawa crowded the decks of their ships, listening to distant automatic fire. Information about the landing beaches had been obtained from an eighty-year-old conchologist named Ditlev D. Thaanum, who collected shells there before the war, and possessed a collection of photographs. An almost equally elderly colleague of Thaanum named Daniel Boone Langford was flown to the Pacific to share his expertise with Turner’s 5th Amphibious Force. Langford described, for instance, the deadly habu snakes on the island. Every soldier and Marine was briefed about them, though there was no subsequent record of any man seeing one. When the U.S. armada began the bombardment of Okinawa in the days immediately preceding the landing, navy frogmen cleared debris and obstacles from the beaches under the eyes of Japanese outposts. The enemy made no attempt to intervene.

The invaders were to land across a six-mile front on the south-west coast. Wallowing in the big transports, most men anticipated the worst. Spotter planes circled above, directing the naval guns. Wariness was essential to their pilots to avoid being caught by shells, especially from the high-trajectory five-inch destroyer armament. On the ships a huge cast of spectators, so soon to become actors, saw a sudden burst of light in the sky as a plane was hit, then dropped blazing into the sea. “Everyone expected E Company715 to be literally destroyed,” wrote a 5th Marines corporal, James Johnston. At 0530, the drivers of Lt. Chris Donner’s unit went below to warm the engines of their amphibious tractors. The young 1st Marines’ forward artillery observer heard a lone, ironic voice singing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” Donner descended to the LST’s tank deck, and clambered aboard his vehicle, one among hundreds. They launched at 0630, dazzled by the brilliant sunshine after the darkness of the hold, deafened by the roar of aircraft and naval gunfire. Waves broke over the amtracs as they circled offshore, men sitting atop their craft and waving to neighbours with studied gaiety as they waited for the order to land. Sailors peering down from the steep side of a battleship called: “Give the bastards hell, Marines!” “Good luck!” Then the landing craft and tractors turned for the shore in serried ranks, their wakes whitening the water so that from the air it appeared that a host of sea slugs was approaching Okinawa.

“There was no chatter now,” wrote Donner. “Each man’s face was tight, teeth set. Even above the roar of the amph’s motors we began to hear the crackle of small arms…We hit with a jolt that tumbled us in a heap, ground up onto a coral shelf, then onto sand…I led the rush out.” There was no firing in their immediate area, but one squad heard voices from a cavern, and used an interpreter to shout word to come out and surrender. When no response came, Browning-automatic gunners sprayed the mouth. Inside, Marines found the prostrate forms of several civilians: two men, a woman and a three-year-old boy. Only the child was alive, covered with his mother’s blood. “They brought him back to us716,” wrote Chris Donner, “and Monahan washed the blood off the boy, who had ceased to cry. My team carried him on their shoulders all the rest of the afternoon…So this was Easter Sunday warfare. It sickened me.”

Corporal James Johnston ran up the beach nursing slender expectations for his own future: “I thought I might get to a pillbox717 and dump some grenades before they got me.” The invaders were disbelieving in the face of their own survival. They encountered only a shell-torn shoreline, a handful of dazed or dead peasants, negligible resistance. “I didn’t recognise anything I saw718,” said Lt. Marius Bressoud of the 3/7th Marines. “There were no pinned-down troops, no bodies.” The Americans fanned out north and south, seizing two airfields, advancing in hours across miles of ground for which they had expected to fight