After the
capture of Iwo Jima in March, 1945, General
Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander
of the Southwest Pacific Area, turned his attentions to the island
of Okinawa. Lying just 563km (350 miles) from the Japanese mainland,
it offered excellent harbour, airfield and troop-staging facilities.
It was a perfect base from which to launch a major assault on Japan,
consequently it was well-defended, with 120,000 troops under General
Mitsuru Ushijima. The Japanese also
committed some 10,000 aircraft to defending the island.
After a
four day bombardment the 1,300 ship invasion forced moved into position
off the west coast of Okinawa on 1st April 1945. The landing force,
under the leadership of Lieutenant-General Simon
Buckner, initially totalled 155,000. However, by the time the
battle finished, more than 300,000 soldiers were involved in the fighting.
This made it comparable to the Normandy
landing in mainland Europe in June, 1944.
Ushijima
decided not to put his men on the coast where they would be subjected
to US Naval heavy bombardment. Instead they were positioned at the
southern end of the 60 mile long island on the volcanic mountain of
Shuri.
On the
first day 60,000 troops were put ashore against little opposition
at Haguushi. The following day two airfields were captured by the
Americans. However when the soldiers reached Shuri they came under
heavy fire and suffered heavy casualties.
Reinforced
by the 3rd Amphibious Corps and the 6th Marine Division the Americans
were able to repel a ferocious counter-attack by General Mitsuru
Ushijima on 4th May. At sea off Okinawa a 700 plane kamikaze
raid on
6th April sunk and damaged 13 US destroyers. The giant battleship,
Yamato, lacking sufficient fuel
for a return journey, was also sent out on a suicide mission and was
sunk on 7th May.
On 11th
May, Lieutenant-General Simon Buckner,
ordered another offensive on the Shuri defences, and the Japanese
were finally forced to withdraw. Buckner was killed on 18th June and
three days later his replacement, General Roy
Geiger, announced that the island had finally been taken. When
it was clear that he had been defeated, Mitsuru
Ushijima committed ritual suicide (hari-kiri).
The capture
of Okinawa cost
the Americans 49,000 in casualties of whom 12,520 died. More than
110,000 Japanese were killed on the island.
While the
island was being prepared for the invasion of Japan,
a B-29 Superfortress
bomber dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima
on 6th August 1945. Japan did not surrender immediately and a second
bomb was dropped on Nagasaki
three days later. On 10th August the Japanese surrendered and the
Second World War was over.
(1)
Bonnie Wiley, Associated Press report
(7th July, 1945)
This is a tour of the Okinawa battlefield after the guns have fallen
silent-a battlefield where many valorous young Americans fell but
carried with them into eternity an even greater number of Japanese.
The jeep bumps along -
moving slowly through the dust clouds to keep from running down Okinawans
- past the ruined and deserted villages into the rubble heap of what
was once Naha, the capital of Okinawa.
Then up the hill to Shuri
Castle, where the Japanese had their headquarters until the shells
and bombs pulverized the walls, five feet thick.
There was Chocolate Drop Hill, where the wreckage of 15 American tanks
stopped by Japanese shells are mute monuments to the valor of the
men who fell in the battle to conquer it.
It is peaceful now on Conical
Hill, where the Americans fought up and were driven back and finally
went up to stay.
Not far away is a cemetery
where many of those who fought on Conical Hill lie buried. Helmeted
soldiers are painting white crosses.
In the center of one cemetery
was a low picket fence around the grave of Lieut. Gen. Simon Bolivar
Buckner, Jr., commander of the U.S. Tenth Army, who fell just as final
victory was in view.
The sporadic fire of Japanese
snipers from distant Hill 89 reminds the visitor that men still are
falling although the campaign has long since ended.
(2)
Studs
Terkel interviewed John
Garcia about his experiences in Okinawa for his book, The Good
War (1985)
We buried General Ushijima and his men inside a cave. This was the
worst part of the war, which I didn't like about Okinawa. They were
hiding in caves all the time, women, children, soldiers. We'd get
up on the cliff and lower down barrels of gasoline and then shoot
at it. It would explode and just bury them to death.
I personally shot one
Japanese woman because she was coming across a field at night. We
kept dropping leaflets not to cross the field at night because we
couldn't tell if they were soldiers. We set up a perimeter. Anything
in front, we'd shoot at. This one night I shot and when it came daylight,
it was a woman there and a baby tied to her back. The bullet had all
gone through her and out the baby's back.
(3)
Samuel Tso, Navajo Code Talker, interviewed
by the Arizona Republic newspaper about the invasion of Okinawa
(9th June 2002)
When I ran across that
Death Valley, I ran into a whole bunch of Marines who got shot down
trying to cross that valley. Some were still alive, and they reached
out to us to ask for help. But the sergeant was right behind us and
said, "You're not supposed to do that kind of duty, you're supposed
to locate the machine-gun nests and report back. That is your mission."
So we didn't have time to help anybody out, we just kept going and
we located a couple of them (enemy positions).
Just to keep the machine
guns silent, we threw some hand grenades close by the machine-gun
nest. And we found out it's not an open nest, it's an enclosed nest,
and there's just a slit where they were firing from. Even though we
hit the enclosed nest, the hand grenade bounced off and exploded outside.
But then that was just to keep their heads down until we crossed back
across the valley and report, and we did report, and that's when one
of the Navajo Code Talkers sent a message and ordered artillery fire,
mortar fire and rockets.
While he was sending over
there, and I was over on the other side, the sergeant chewed me out.
Oh, he really got after two of us who stopped and tried to help those
wounded Marines. And when they finished sending the message, within
about five minutes, they started shelling and (dropping) all that
bombardment on that machine-gun area, they just literally blew everything
up. I don't know how many minutes it took them.
When they stopped firing,
they ordered the Marines to cross it, and the Marines just walked
across that valley. So those machine guns were all knocked out. That
was toward the end of the Iwo Jima operation."
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