The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [73]
On Okinawa, word quickly reached Ushijima of the catastrophic naval battle. The particulars told him what he had suspected all along, that the navy had used the Yamato as a grand sacrifice, another show of glory for Japan’s legacy. It was a poorly guarded secret that the Yamato had not been given enough precious fuel for the round trip that would return her to her home port. Ushijima already understood what the others in Tokyo had to accept. The great attack against the American fleet was planned as a one-way trip.
What the Japanese commanders could not know was that this most crushing of defeats had come at a cost to the Americans of only twelve pilots.
11. ADAMS
On April 1, the initial landings for the Sixth Marine Division had been staged by the Fourth and Twenty-second regiments, while the Twenty-ninth Regiment had been held back, to jump into the fray should major problems arise. With the invasion so strangely uncontested, the Twenty-ninth had come ashore ahead of schedule, and now, alongside the Fourth, they had been given the task of sweeping enemy resistance off the Motobu Peninsula. Some units of the Twenty-second were sent in as a backup, mainly to perform mop-up operations, tackling those stubborn pockets of Japanese resistance that always seemed to escape detection. Other companies of the Twenty-second were sent farther north, their original mission to confront and then clear out any Japanese resistance, all the way to Okinawa’s northern tip.
They marched as before, the beaches below them to the left, gentle hillsides of low, fat palm trees, the road undulating with the curves of the rolling countryside. The farms were still there, but not as many, and as they moved farther north the villages grew smaller. But they were no longer ghost towns. With the fighting so sporadic, civilians had begun to emerge, many of them old, some younger mothers with small children. Though the Marines obeyed the order to be as unthreatening as they could, offering food and an open hand, the Okinawans were mostly terrified. But hungry civilians had gradually accepted the handouts from the Americans, mainly the packages of food sent forward by the supply teams on the ships that had prepared for exactly this kind of operation. With the food came medical care, teams of corpsmen and doctors establishing aid stations, offering safe haven for the sick and injured far behind the lines of combat. To those Okinawans willing to accept American hospitality, special Marine and naval units trained in civilian relations sought to communicate that the Americans were in fact liberators, and not the enemy. Though some Okinawans still reacted to the advance of the Marines by retreating in a mad scamper back into the hills, many more were too hungry, too injured, or too fed up with the abuse from the Japanese. As more of the civilians found shelter with the Americans, the smiles appeared, and even though they were held in wire enclosures close to the airfields and beaches, many of the Okinawans seemed happy to accept the Americans as liberators. At the very least, they were much more content to be fed and cared for than ordered about.
With the doctors and corpsmen came interpreters, and to make matters easier, many of the Okinawans spoke English. The debriefings were useful, some of the Okinawans explaining where their rabid fear had come from. Japanese officers had taken great pains to portray the approaching Americans