• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1656 0

defenders – that is, 1 per cent of the original garrison – were still alive to surrender. Meanwhile, the US 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions had lost 6,891 dead and 18,070 wounded. Yet these terrible figures need to be placed beside the fact that by the end of the war 24,761 US airmen’s lives had been saved by American possession of the island, receiving the 2,251 B-29s that had to make emergency, and on occasion crash, landings on the only viable runway in the region for planes of that size.8 Yet even the bloodletting of Iwo Jima saw a fraction of the number of Japanese killed on Okinawa, the landings on which began only five days after Iwo Jima finally fell. Okinawa is the largest island of the Ryuku Islands group, midway between Formosa and Kyushu (Japan’s southernmost island). It was therefore a crucial springboard for the invasion of the mainland, and the Japanese resolved to defend it to the last. On Easter Sunday, 1 April 1945, no fewer than 1,300 Allied vessels took part in the invasion of Okinawa, landing 60,000 troops under a huge bombardment, the first part of Lieutenant-General Simon Bolivar Buckner’s Tenth Army, which was 180,000 strong (with more reserves available in New Caledonia), made up of XXIV Corps and III Marine Amphibious Corps. Although the Marines got ashore and established secure beach-heads on the first three days, the process of clearing the island of Japanese, which involved breaking through the strongly held Machinato and Shuri Lines of interlocking mountain-ridge defence systems, proved one of the epic tasks of America’s war. For Buckner’s opponent, Lieutenant-General Mitsuru Ushijima, commander of the Thirty-second Army, had around 135,000 well-armed and well-hidden men on the island.

Marine E. B. ‘Sledgehammer’ Sledge, a private in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment of the 1st Marine Division, wrote an excellent memoir of his time on Okinawa entitled With the Old Breed, in which he recalled the weeks of constant fighting. Of one typical attack he wrote:

As the seconds ticked slowly toward 09.00, our artillery and ships’ guns increased their rate of fire. The rain poured down, and the Japanese took up the challenge from our artillery. They started throwing more shells our way… The shells whistled, whined and rumbled overhead, ours bursting out in front of the ridge and the enemy’s exploding in our area and to the rear. The noise increased all along the line. Rain fell in torrents, and the soil became muddy and slippery wherever we hurried around the gun pit to break out and stack our ammo. I looked at my watch. It was 0900. I gulped and prayed for my buddies.9

Flung back by ‘a storm of enemy fire from our front and left back’, Sledge’s company ‘all wore wild-eyed, shocked expressions that showed only too vividly they were men who barely escaped chance’s strange arithmetic. They clung to their M1s, BARs [Browning automatic rifles], and Tommy guns and slumped to the mud to pant for breath before moving behind the ridge toward their former foxholes. The torrential rain made it all seem so much more unbelievable and terrible.’ Company K had already suffered 150 killed, wounded or missing taking the island of Peleliu the previous autumn, and many more were to perish on Okinawa.

Meanwhile, furious kamikaze attacks sank two destroyers and two ammunition ships and damaged twenty-four other vessels off the shore of Okinawa on 7 April, for the cost of 383 planes. Five days later the kamikaze returned, and over the next forty-eight hours they sank twenty-one ships, damaged twenty-three and put a further forty-three permanently out of action, albeit at the cost of 3,000 of their own lives.10 The Imperial Navy there suffered a near-mortal blow at 16.23 hours on 7 April when the 72,000-ton battleship Yamato, with its nine 18.1-inch guns, generally considered the most powerful battleship ever built, was sunk by 380 American aircraft, slipping beneath the waves along with 2,488 of her crew.11 In the same engagement a Japanese cruiser and four destroyers were also sunk, at a total loss of 3,655