• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Nimitz was right, of course, to have dismissed local commanders’ initial bubble of euphoria. After a week of cautious advances, army units in the south of the island were suddenly checked in their tracks by artillery and machine-gun fire. They had reached the first of the immensely powerful concentric lines with which the Japanese had fortified the southernmost six miles of Okinawa. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, commanding 32nd Army, charged with defence of the island, allowed himself to be persuaded that he could not stop the Americans on the beaches. Instead, he adopted the plan of his operations officer, Col. Hiromichi Yahara, for “sleeping tactics.” One force was concentrated on the northern Mobutu Peninsula, where it offered stubborn resistance from 8 to 20 April. The principal Japanese positions lay in the south, around the capital, Naha, where Ushijima’s men had created a chain of fortresses, the so-called Shuri Line. Including local militiamen, 97,000 Japanese were deployed there, crowded into one of the narrowest perimeters of the war.

Through more than two months that followed, U.S. soldiers and Marines assaulted Ushijima’s bunkers and trenches, paying with flesh for every yard they gained. The struggle proved more intense than any which U.S. forces had hitherto experienced in the Pacific. As usual, the Japanese had chosen their positions well. They possessed observation points on high ground, hidden machine guns, mines, and defences almost impregnable to frontal attack. Above all, they had guns and plenty of ammunition. The Japanese army, often short of fire support, on Okinawa possessed this in abundance. “The enemy tactic which impressed us723 most deeply was the intensity and effectiveness of artillery,” wrote Marine captain Levi Burcham, “and the fact that this fire covered not only our front line area but also (an experience new to many) well back into rear areas, quartermaster dumps and the like.”

The U.S. XXIV Corps once received724 14,000 incoming Japanese shells in twenty-four hours. The invaders’ advantage of numbers counted for almost nothing, where the enemy could concentrate his forces to hold a front nowhere more than three miles wide, the breadth of the island. Buckner perceived no alternative to launching repeated frontal attacks, which resulted in repeated bloody failures. As heavy rain set in, tens of thousands of men competed for possession of a few score yards of mud. Shellfire churned human body parts, debris and excrement into a ghastly compound from which the stench drifted far to the rear. These were scenes more familiar to veterans of the First World War than those of the Second. After the first weeks, press accounts of the horrors of Okinawa inspired anger and bitter criticism back home in the United States. It seemed incomprehensible that with Germany collapsing, U.S. power triumphant almost everywhere in the world, young Americans should be suffering such an ordeal. How could it be that all the might of U.S. armies, navies and air forces was being set at naught in such a fashion?

The parents of a man killed on Hector Hill wrote a savage letter, branding his officers as murderers for abandoning their son. There was speculation in his unit about what some soldier must have written home to cause the dead man’s people to harbour such bitterness. Another letter, from the father of a wounded man725, excoriated the army for having put his son into combat without adequate training. Lt. Jeptha Carell of the 3/7th Marines came to believe that married men with children should not be allowed to serve in the front line: “The loss of the father is not only a reason for the family to grieve, it is an economic disaster.” When one of his platoon was killed by an American rocket that fell short, Carell wrote to the man’s widow, who responded with a pathetic letter saying that she now had five children to care for. The widow ended: “I hope you’re satisfied!726” James Johnston wrote: “Oh! to see the folks727—and snow and city