Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [202]
The landings on Okinawa went well; the fighting less so. At the end of March, the U. S. 10th Army, under General Simon Bolivar Buckner, seized several islands offshore to serve as close support bases. They then landed early in April on the southwest-central part of Okinawa. The landings were not heavily resisted by the Japanese, and the Americans had soon cut the island in half. Marine units then swung left, to the north, and moved up the island, while army units wheeled south and right. The Marines met little more than token opposition until they got as far north as the Motobu Peninsula, which they secured by mid-April after a hard fight.
In the south, however, the Japanese put up their battle. General Mitsuru Ushijima had been ordered to hold on until the kamikaze planes had driven off or sunk the American amphibious support ships; when that had been accomplished, he was to counterattack and drive the invaders back into the sea. To help himself hold out, he had built three successive fortified lines across the bottom of the island. The first of these was called the Machinato Line; then came the main Shuri Line, its high point around the old Shuri Castle which dominated the whole area; and finally there was a last-ditch position at the bottom of the island, across the Naha Plain, around the Yaeju Dake Escarpment.
The Americans were totally ignorant of these before they reached them, and they got a nasty surprise when they hit the Machinato Line on April 7. It took six days of very hard fighting, with heavy casualties on both sides, before Ushijima abandoned the first line and fell back to the second. His losses had been worse than he had anticipated, and the American fleet was still obviously offshore. But the Shuri Line was even stronger than its predecessor; once more the order was to hold on at all costs.
This the Japanese did. The Americans butted against the line, the strongest they had yet encountered in the Pacific war, time and time again, but could make little headway. Some of Buckner’s subordinates asked to be employed on an amphibious end-run, but any possible landing places were open to Japanese artillery fire, and in the end there was nothing to do but fight it out. Ushijima had trouble with his juniors, too, and early in May he succumbed to their desire for an offensive. It was a costly mistake, to the matter of about 5,000 casualties, and its result was to exhaust the last Japanese reserve. Both sides were left pounding each other, like two tired fighters, and it took another two weeks for the American to pound the harder. On the 21st, Ushijima gave up the Shuri Line and carefully pulled his troops back to their last position. He tried to hold the Okinawan capital city of Naha, and it took two Marine divisions fighting house by house to clear it.
Not until mid-June did the army units break the position on the escarpment, after which it was a matter of time. Split up into segments, the Japanese were overrun in another week. Buckner was killed by an artillery shell three days before the battle ended; the Japanese commander committed suicide, and so did thousands of his soldiers and the civilians of the island. A decade after the war ended, huge piles of bleached bones could still be seen at the bottom of the cliffs in the southern part of the island.
The main object of the Japanese defense, of course, had been less the destruction of the American soldiers than their ships. While Ushijima’s men bought time with their lives, the American fleet was tied to the island. They had expected this