Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [201]
On the flat the Marines ground forward, the 5th on the left, 4th on the right, and later the 3rd Division in the center. The Japanese resistance centered on a feature called the Motoyama Plateau, where their defense lines were particularly concentrated. Marine and naval air groups from the carriers flew close support missions: strafing, bombing, and dropping napalm—a jellied gasoline that clung to everything while it burned—within yards of the forward infantrymen. The second airfield was overrun and slowly the Japanese were confined to the northern end of the island. But just as the Americans had perfected their techniques of air and ground and naval coordination, so too the Japanese had worked on their defensive tactics. There were no more wasteful banzai charges that left the ground littered with Japanese dead and achieved little. Every soldier in every squad fought cannily and tried to take his enemy with him when he died. The Americans had estimated five days as necessary to secure the island; instead it took a month. During that time suicide planes hit the carrier Saratoga, putting her out of action for the rest of the war, and sank the escort carrier Bismarck Sea with a loss of 350 of her crew.
It was the end of March before the last opposition was finally hunted down. Of the 21,000 Japanese, about 200 were taken prisoner; the rest all died. The Marines and navy suffered 6,800 men killed and more than 18,000 wounded, the first island battle in which American casualties outnumbered those of the enemy. Twenty-six Medals of Honor were awarded, twelve of them posthumously. The island proved worth its cost. Even before the fighting stopped, crippled B-29s were sliding onto the landing strip, and by the end of the war more than 2,200 of them had landed there, carrying more than 24,000 crew members who had cause to bless the sailors and Marines who had taken Iwo. Yet in terms of the numbers involved, Iwo Jima was still the single bloodiest battle of the Pacific war; it was a grim portent of what lay ahead.
Some 850 miles west of the Bonins lies the beautiful island of Okinawa; the most important of the Ryukyus, it is almost exactly equidistant from Manila and Tokyo. It was the next American target, a narrow, irregularly shaped island about seventy miles long. Its position presented the Americans with considerable problems, but its taking was thought worth the effort. The chief difficulty lay in the fact that it was within reach of land-based aircraft from southern Japan, but beyond the range of similar American planes from the Philippines. Most of the air cover would have to be provided by carrier-borne planes, and that meant the carriers themselves must stay on station, especially vulnerable to suicide attacks. Intelligence reports estimated that there were about 75,000 Japanese troops on the island, so in that sense it was going to be a major fight; actually, counting impressed laborers and local defense forces, there were more than 100,000, so the Americans significantly underestimated what they were up against.
The advantages were that Okinawa was strategically located; it lay athwart all the lanes to the south. With its taking, Formosa would be isolated, and just as Japanese medium bombers could reach Okinawa from southern Japan, so American medium bombers could reach southern Japan from Okinawa. It was large enough to have several airfields and it had a number of good anchorages in its heavily indented coastline. Admiral Nimitz decided to sacrifice strategic surprise in favor of a campaign of isolating the island: the Japanese might know the Americans were coming; they would not be able to do anything about it.
The isolation of the components of the empire was already