In the seventy-two hours before Love Day, the naval bombardment group rained high-explosive projectiles down on the landing beaches, which lay along Hagushi Bay on the island’s west coast, 11 miles north of Naha. As in previous amphibious landings, the workhorses of this fire support mission were the venerable “OBBs”—the “old battleships”—several of which had been knocked out of action in the raid on Pearl Harbor, and later salvaged and rebuilt. Too slow to operate with the carrier task forces, but still packing a tremendous punch, they were commanded by Rear Admiral Morton L. Deyo, whose fire support group included nine cruisers, twenty-three destroyers, and 117 LCI gunboats armed with rockets and mortars. As the minesweepers cleared the waters near the beaches, the smaller craft moved closer to the coast. In the last twenty-four hours before the landings, Deyo’s ships fired 3,800 tons of naval shells at targets on Okinawa. They kept it up day and night, systematically and relentlessly, sometimes not aiming at any target in particular, but simply firing into randomly chosen zones. A destroyerman who wondered why it was necessary to keep up this scattershot bombardment all night long was told “it was to keep the Japs awake.”20 Those ashore, suffering under the immense barrage, called it the “typhoon of steel.”
In hindsight, much of the effort was wasted. Nearly every village in the southern part of Okinawa was flattened in the onslaught, and the airfields inland of the landing beaches had been converted into a barren moonscape—fresh craters on top of older craters on top of even older craters—even though they had been abandoned by the Japanese, and were no longer working at all.
The assault troops had been briefed to expect a savage reception on the landing beaches. According to the Tenth Army operations plan, the Japanese had prepared field fortifications for one regiment in the landing zone, and enemy reinforcements could be brought into the area quickly. The first wave of U.S. landing craft would come under heavy artillery, machine gun, and mortar fire. Just above the high tide mark on the beach stood a 6-foot seawall. The attackers would have to climb over it using wooden ladders. On the other side, they would run into pillboxes and covered trenches with “intense machine-gun fire.”21 Love Day at Okinawa, which happened to fall on both Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day, was expected to be a heartbreaker. Men in the 1st Marine Division were told to expect 80–85 percent casualties on the beach.22
A separate fire group and assault division (the 2nd Marine Division) was sent around to the southeast coast of the island, as part of a sham “demonstration”—a simulated landing intended to dupe the Japanese into moving reinforcements to that part of the island. It was the largest and most realistic feint of its kind in the entire Pacific War, a feat made possible by the unprecedented wealth of transports and landing craft now deployed in the theater. The Japanese commanders apparently bought the ruse, because they subsequently reported that they had repelled a major landing attempt on that part of the coast.
Before dawn on the 1st, the landing troops rose from their bunks and began their familiar D-Day routines—squaring away their packs, carbines, ammunition, canteens, and other gear, oiling rifles, sharpening knives, standing in line at the heads, and bolting down their traditional “condemned men’s breakfast” of steak and eggs. Each unit, army and marines alike, was a blend of new rookie replacement troops and combat veterans. Virtually all of the NCOs had fought in at least one previous amphibious invasion, and many had two or more under their belts. They knew what to expect, and they shared their knowledge with the novices. The big guns of the heavy warships were plastering the area behind the beaches, including the Yontan and Kadena airfields. Even the old hands were awed by the epic bombardment. Despite what they had seen in previous operations, they wondered whether any living creature could survive such monstrous violence. They gaped at the seemingly infinite number of ships in the offing, to the horizon and beyond in every seaward direction. A marine remarked, “The immensity of our fleet gave me courage.”23
It was a mild day, with partially cloudy skies, northeasterly breezes, and gentle swells. The temperature was 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Troops who had fought in the tropical heat and humidity of the South Pacific welcomed the cooler weather. While en route from Ulithi on their troop transports, stargazers had watched the Southern Cross sink toward the southern horizon night after night, until it had finally vanished. (The constellation was featured on the shoulder patches of the 1st Marine Division.) The landing troops had been issued wool-lined field jackets with zippers, an article of battle dress that would have been worthless in the Solomons or the Palaus.
As the first traces of dawn were seen over the island to their east, the assault troops went down the rope nets into the waiting Higgins boats, each man taking a seat on a bench snug against his neighbor. The coxswains maneuvered the loaded boats into an area seaward of the line of departure, engines rumbling in idle, exhaust fumes drifting over the sea. With the craft sitting low in the sea, swells broke against the gunwales and sometimes into the boats. Carrier planes patrolled overhead. The landing troops marveled at the scale and balletic sophistication of the operation.
At 8:30 a.m., flags went up on the control boats, and the coxswains of the first-wave landing craft opened their throttles. Passing around the battleships and cruisers, the boats steadied into straight, narrow lanes, separated by about 100 feet from beam to beam, each boat following in the wake of the one ahead. Gunboats led the way, firing rockets and 3-inch bow guns. Next came the guide boats, flying colored banners corresponding to different sectors of the landing beach. Their long white wakes were exactly parallel, like the teeth of a comb. An observer noted that the first wave “possessed something of the color and pageantry of medieval warfare, advancing relentlessly with their banners flying. In the calm sunlight of the morning, it was indeed an impressive spectacle.”24 Samuel Eliot Morison, watching from the deck of the Tennessee, described the 40mm tracer fire as “clusters of white-hot balls, which looked as if they would fall among the boats, but their flat trajectory carries them clear to the beach.”25
Sixteen separate assault landing zones had been designated along a seven-and-a-half-mile stretch of the coast. Large coral reefs stood between the amphibious fleet and the beaches, but the landing had been timed to coincide with high tide, and the underwater demolition teams (UDTs) had cleared navigable channels through the coral. As the first boats came ashore, the assault troops set up large colored banners to mark each zone. The marines landed north of the mouth of the Bisha River, the army to the south.
Even before the first boats hit the beaches, the boat crews and assault troops noticed that they were taking scarcely any enemy fire. A spike of whitewater shot up here or there, signifying the fall of a mortar or artillery round—but compared to previous amphibious assaults, these were few and far between. A single Japanese machine gun was quickly knocked out by the big guns of the ships offshore. A trickle of mortar fire was traced to a firing position near the mouth of the Bisha River, but that weapon was also quickly silenced. The first wave boats had carried wooden ladders, to be used in climbing the seawall they had been told to expect at the top of the beaches. But as the boats came ashore, the soldiers and marines saw that the wall was much smaller than advertised—no higher than 3 feet in most places—and the naval bombardment had mostly flattened it. The assault forces had braced for small arms fire and long-range artillery fire, but there was none. Hagushi Bay was weirdly peaceful. The landing was virtually unopposed.
As the second wave came ashore, the troops walked up the beach upright, not even bothering to crouch. On Yellow Beach, north of the river, the assault battalions of the 1st Marine Division crept inland, weapons at the ready, but encountered no hostile fire at all. They found nothing resembling the fearsome defensive fortifications described in their shipboard briefings. An hour after the first wave had landed, 16,000 U.S. troops were ashore on Okinawa, advancing against weak and scattered resistance. The area was mostly deserted. The Japanese did not even put up a fight to defend the two critica
l airfields of Yontan and Kadena, and both were captured by noon.
The landing forces gave thanks for their unexpected stay of execution. An hour after coming ashore, a soldier of the 7th Division remarked: “I’ve already lived longer than I thought I would.”26 Gene Sledge of the 1st Marine Division called it “the most pleasant surprise of the war.”27 The New Yorker correspondent John Lardner, landing with the 6th Marine Division, compared the invasion to a “fierce, bold rush by cops, hunting gunmen, into a house that suddenly turned out to be only haunted.”28 After the first hour, the assault troops were stepping gingerly from the landing craft, hopping over the surf to avoid soaking their boots, and strolling up the beach as if on a weekend outing. The regimental and division command echelons went in earlier than scheduled, and set up temporary CPs on the beach. Bulldozers were already leveling the sand dunes at the top of the beaches in order to clear paths inland to the airfields and supply dumps. At the medical aid stations, the corpsmen were squatting on their heels, chatting aimlessly; they had nothing to do. A few Okinawan civilians were found among the fishermen’s shacks along the beaches. They bowed deeply and displayed their native Okinawan tattoos, explaining, “No Nippon.” They were not Japanese, and they wanted the Americans to know it.
At sunset on Love Day, the landing forces possessed a beachhead more than 8 miles long, reaching inland to a maximum distance of 3 miles, and encompassing the two airfields. Fifty thousand American troops were ashore. Casualties were mercifully light—28 killed, 104 wounded, and 27 missing.29
ON A GREEN HILLTOP 12 MILES SOUTH OF HAGUSHI, Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima and a group of staff officers watched the American forces come ashore. The men smoked, talked, and took turns studying the amphibious panorama through a pair of binoculars. Observing the intense naval bombardment of the largely deserted area above the beaches, they took pleasure in the sight of so much wasted enemy ammunition. But the sheer size and scale of the invasion was awesome and alarming. One thought it was “as if the sea itself were advancing with a great roar.”30
As on Iwo Jima and Peleliu, the Japanese had chosen a defense-in-depth strategy, concentrating their major forces in high rocky terrain well back from the beachhead, and digging deep into the earth against superior U.S. airpower and offshore naval gunfire. The defenders planned to concede the initial landing, and wait patiently for the Americans in ground of their own choosing. Unlike on Iwo Jima or Peleliu, however, the Japanese on Okinawa would not bring their own heavy artillery into action until the invaders had advanced well inland, into the main zones of ground combat. Keeping their powder dry, and their guns concealed in the mouths of caves or under camouflage netting, they would conserve ammunition until it could be employed to best effect.
Ushijima’s plan of campaign was controversial. It had been implemented only recently, at the end of 1944, after feisty debates between staff officers and unit commanders, and against the wishes of higher command echelons in Formosa and Tokyo. Earlier plans had emphasized an air defense, relying on strong and well-supplied airfields and a steady flow of airplanes flying in from nearby Kyushu. For the first ten months of 1944, the military construction program on Okinawa had been devoted to expanding and improving the island’s airfields. At one point, work was proceeding simultaneously on eighteen separate airfields on Okinawa and smaller adjacent islands. The Imperial General Headquarters had envisioned Okinawa as a 60-mile-long “unsinkable aircraft carrier.” But the high command never came to grips with the obvious flaws and contradictions in this concept. How could this network of island airfields be defended against the relentless American naval-air-amphibious juggernaut, which had never failed to capture any island it had targeted, and which was growing steadily larger, stronger, and more proficient with each passing month? The U.S. carrier task forces would take control of the sky over the airfields. The flat, low-lying terrain was impossible to defend against superior ground forces, especially when they were supported by overwhelming naval gunfire from offshore. Investment of manpower and construction materials in improving airfields would only raise their value for the Allies, who would inevitably capture them and turn them against the Japanese. As one of General Ushijima’s staff planners concluded: “It was as if our ground forces had sweated and strained to construct airfields as a gift for the enemy.”31
Japanese ground forces on the island fought under the banner of the Thirty-Second Army, commanded by Ushijima from an elaborate underground command bunker under Shuri Castle, an ancient stone edifice in the hills east of Naha. It included the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division, the Sixty-Second Infantry Division, the Forty-Fourth Independent Mixed Brigade, the Twenty-Seventh Tank Regiment, and the Fifth Artillery Command. The Thirty-Second Army headquarters force included many independent and elite units specializing in artillery, mortars, antiaircraft fire, and antitank guns. Approximately 9,000 naval base troops were stationed on the Oroku peninsula, just south of Naha; they operated independently of the Thirty-Second Army until the American invasion on April 1, at which point (by prior agreement) they fell under Ushijima’s command. With miscellaneous other units and personnel, total regular Japanese troop strength on the island amounted to about 76,000. Local Okinawan militias and draftees, some trained for combat and others mainly for labor, raised the total number of uniformed troops on the island to about 100,000.
In late 1944, as Allied power grew and an invasion seemed more likely, leading officers on the Thirty-Second Army staff pushed for a basic revision to operational plans. Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, the senior operations officer, argued that the Thirty-Second Army did not have the strength to defend the beaches, the plains, and the airfields as Tokyo wanted. He preferred to fight a battle of attrition in Okinawa’s more defensible southern hills. Major General Isamu Cho, the chief of staff, supported Yahara’s proposal and passed it up the chain to Ushijima, who gave it his peremptory approval. The revised operational plan was distributed on November 26, 1944, even though it had not been authorized by IGHQ. This defiant act bordered on insubordination, but a mutinous spirit seems to have spread through the ranks of the army on Okinawa. Among soldiers in the line, as well as elite staff officers in Ushijima’s command bunker, one heard angry muttering against their higher-ups in Tokyo, who remained cosseted in their comfortable offices, too afraid of American airplanes and submarines to risk traveling to Okinawa to inspect the situation for themselves. Or perhaps they had no reason to come, as one officer commented sardonically, because Naha’s red-light district had been burned down in American carrier bombing raids.32
The bulk of all available labor and materials was redirected to southern Okinawa. There, in the rugged country east of Naha, an ambitious program of building and excavations set out to create a huge system of interconnected tunnels, bunkers, pillboxes, trenches, tank traps, artillery emplacements, and spider holes. The fortifications spanned the island in a continuous line, coast to coast, across a forbidding landscape of ridges, ravines, and sheer escarpments. The region was honeycombed with natural limestone caves, which were expanded and interlinked by tunnels, so that nearly the entire Thirty-Second Army could hunker down in subterranean shelters, with their weapons, ammunition, provisions, and freshwater cisterns, impervious to bombing, strafing, or shelling by even the largest caliber guns of the American battleships offshore. The heart of this natural citadel was at Shuri, the ancient seat of Ryukyuan kings, where the old stone castle and walls stood on a rocky promontory, looming over the remains of a bombed-out town. The entrance to General Ushijima’s underground headquarters was on the reverse slope of a ridge near the castle. Around Shuri in three directions lay concentric rings of heavy fortifications, placed on high ground with sweeping fields of fire on all possible approaches, and interconnected with covered trenches and tunnels. It was a Pacific Verdun.
Each unit of the Japanese army was assigned responsibility for digging and preparing its own part of the line. Grasping that their efforts provided the key to surviving intense naval and air bo
mbardment, soldiers on the line poured their energy into the backbreaking toil. Their slogan, promulgated by the Thirty-Second Army headquarters, was “Confidence in victory will be born from strong fortifications.”33 As on Iwo Jima, the army lacked mechanized tunneling equipment or demolitions, so the troops were obliged to do the job with picks and shovels. They also lacked cement, or the equipment to make it, so the tunnels had to be shored up with raw pine timber. Much of it was lumbered in the forests of northern Okinawa, and shipped south along the coast in small native craft. The heavy artillery of the Fifth Artillery Command was concentrated near the center of the defensive lines, so that the guns could be directed to whatever position was heavily engaged. The firing embrasures were well camouflaged, and the wheeled guns could be retracted into caves and moved through tunnels to other firing positions, limiting their exposure to counterbattery fire. The artillerists on Okinawa were among the best-trained and most experienced in the Japanese army.
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