With the Old Breed_ At Peleliu and Okinawa - E. B. Sledge [5]
In fact, neither of Sledge's two battles, despite their ferocity and the brutal eventual American victories—being in obscure, distant places and in the so-called second theater— garnered the public attention of Normandy Beach or the Battle of the Bulge. In the case of Okinawa, the savagery was overshadowed, first, by the near simultaneous death of Franklin Roosevelt on April 12, and the May 8 German surrender in Europe; and then later by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9), just over five weeks after the island was declared finally secured on July 2.
Sandwiched in between these momentous events, tens of thousands of Americans in obscurity slowly ground their way down the island. They accepted that they might have to kill everyone in most of the last crack Japanese units, led by the most accomplished officers in the Japanese military, the brilliant but infamous generals Mitsuru Ushijima and Isamu Cho and the gifted tactician Col. Hiromichi Yahara.
When the battle was over, the U.S. Navy had suffered its worst single-battle losses in its history. The newly formed 6th Marine Division and Sledge's veteran 1st Marine Division were wrecked, with almost half their original strength either killed or wounded. The commander of all U.S. ground forces on Okinawa, Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., became the highest-ranking soldier to die in combat in World War II. The destructive potential of thousands of kamikaze suicide bombers, together with the faulty prebattle intelligence that had sorely underestimated the size, armament, and ferocity of the island resistance, created a dread about the upcoming November 1 scheduled assault on the Japanese mainland (Operation Olympic).
Controversy still rages over the morality of dropping the two atomic bombs that ended the war before the American invasions of Kyushu and Honshu. But we forget that President Truman's decision was largely predicated on avoiding the nightmare that Marines like E. B. Sledge had just endured on Peleliu and Okinawa. If today Americans in the leisure of a long peace wonder whether our grandfathers were too hasty in their decision to resort to atomic weapons, they forget that many veterans of the Pacific wondered why they had to suffer through an Okinawa when the successful test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16 came just a few days after the island was declared secure. Surely the carnage on Okinawa could have been delayed till late summer to let such envisioned weapons convince the Japanese of the futility of prolonging the war.
There are fine memoirs of Okinawa and narrative accounts of the battle's role in the American victory over Japan, most notably William Manchester's beautifully written Goodbye, Darkness, and George Feifer's comprehensive Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb. But E. B. Sledge's harrowing story remains unmatched, told in a prose that is dignified, without obscenities or even much slang—all the more memorable since the author was not a formal stylist nor given to easy revelations of his own strong passions. John Keegan, Paul Fussel, and Studs Turkel have all praised Sledge's honesty, especially his explicit acknowledgment that he experienced the same hatred, but fought daily against the barbarity that drove others to nearly match the atrocities of their Japanese enemies.
Unlike the case of many postwar memoirs, the accuracy of Sledge's facts has never been called into question. He does not magnify his own achievements or those of his own Company K. Sledge sometimes uses a few footnotes of explication at the bottom of the page. Often they are heartbreaking asterisks that apprise the reader that the wonderful officer Sledge has just described in the text was later shot or blown up on Peleliu or Okinawa. He reminds his readers that his Marines, being as human as any other soldiers, were capable of great cruelty—“a passionate hatred for the Japanese burned through all Marines I knew.” But that being said, Sledge's own moral