Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [203]
At the same time that the suicide attacks were launched, the Imperial Navy made its last challenge. Admiral Seiichi Ito gathered up what fuel he could find in the home islands—enough for a one-way trip—and sailed from the Inland Sea. He flew his flag in the great superbattleship Yamato—80,000 tons and armed with eighteen-inch guns—but all he could bring with him besides her was a cruiser and eight destroyers. There were no illusions about chances for survival as they put to sea. American submarines reported their presence before they were out of sight of land. At noon on April 7, carrier planes caught them halfway to Okinawa, hitting them so fiercely that the great Yamato soon went down. The cruiser and three destroyers went with her, and there was nothing left for the remainder to do but head back to Japan. They had just enough fuel to get there.
The kamikazes fared better. In the two months that the fleet stood off Okinawa they flew 1,900 missions, in addition to about 3,700 conventional aircraft sorties. They hit the radar pickets especially hard, and altogether they sank thirty-six American vessels, most of them smaller types. Four American carriers were damaged; so were three British, for with the tailing off of the naval war against Germany, a British Far Eastern Fleet had appeared under the command of Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser. Ten battleships were hit, as well as thirteen other smaller carriers, five cruisers, sixty-seven destroyers, and a large number of amphibious vessels. About 5,000 sailors were killed. Yet the Japanese did not dislodge “the fleet that came to stay,” and in the end, both Okinawa and the waters around it were secure.
The cost was high: nearly 50,000 American and Allied casualties, more than 12,000 of them killed. Japanese casualties were even higher: 117,000, of whom 110,000 were killed. Nearly 8,000 aircraft were lost. If they still wanted to fight, the Japanese were going to be hard pressed to find much material with which to do it.
By summer of 1945 the entire ramshackle empire was coming apart at the seams. In the eastern part of the East Indies, Australian troops under General Sir Thomas Blarney were operating in Borneo, pushing the dispirited Japanese garrisons back into the middle of the island. In the western Indies, British units were striking at will against oil refineries and other enemy-held targets. Troops of the Netherlands East Indies Army were once more appearing on the scene. In Burma the British were pushing steadily south. Mandalay had fallen in March, and early in June an amphibious landing retook the capital of Rangoon. Those forces that were not isolated by the speed of the British advance were falling back toward the Thai border in disarray, and the long painful war in Burma was all but over.
In China too the tide had turned at last. The Japanese were still able to mount offensives early in 1945, and they also seized full control of Indochina from the residual French garrisons that had lived a shadow life for all these long years. But by early May their last offensives had petered out. Their troops were low on both morale and matériel—their best troops either used up or long ago drafted off to more-active theaters—before the submarines isolated them. By mid-May, they were pulling out of southern China and seeking to reinforce Manchuria, conscious that the Russians had won their war and were now hungrily eyeing territory in Mongolia and Manchuria. There were still hundreds of thousands—millions—of Japanese soldiers under arms, but with the heart of the empire being steadily gnawed away, the limbs were increasingly powerless to affect its fate.
The