As Yahara’s narrative noted, several thousand perished in suicides or futile last-ditch attacks in a literal battle-to-the-death inside the navy base entrenchments on the Oroku Peninsula near Naha Port. Worst of all were the civilian deaths. Thousands of Okinawan civilians, and as many women and children as men, were ordered to stay in caves with Japanese troops who were preparing a last-ditch “defense.” The flower of the island’s youth—teenage girl nurses’ aides as well as boeitai boy-soldiers—was sacrificed to the directives of the Japanese army command. In many cases they were forced to hurl themselves from the low southern cliffs into the sea, so they, too, could “die for the Emperor.”
Much is made of the unusually “large” number of Japanese prisoners taken on Okinawa—over 7,000 from some 110,000 combatants—as if the presence of any surrendering soldiers marked a radical break in past practice for the Japanese military. True, there were more prisoners on Okinawa than taken elsewhere in the Pacific—but then there also were far more Japanese soldiers to begin with than had been present on Saipan, Peleliu, or Iwo Jima. Still, a mere 7 percent of all Japanese soldiers gave themselves up—tens of thousands either dying or killing themselves in caves below. On June 18, Generals Cho and Ushijima both committed seppuku—ritual disembowelment—before being beheaded by trusty aides, a fate shared by an unknown number of fellow Japanese officers when approaching American Marines were known to be only a few hundred yards distant. Most enlisted men, however, had neither the appurtenances nor the attendants for such rituals and so often blew themselves up by simply putting a grenade to their bodies.
What was the effect on Americans of seeing the sheer variety of suicides among civilians and soldiers alike, which were aimed first at killing GIs and then, in defeat, ending their own lives? At first, confusion and perplexity spread. Up until Okinawa, the invading Americans had fought in two general scenarios—either on islands like Iwo Jima, where there were essentially no civilians, or in places such as the Philippines, where the local inhabitants were clearly friendly and welcomed liberation. After Okinawa, no one had any illusions about a third and more difficult situation to come on the mainland itself—where rumor had it that 30 million Japanese elderly, women, and children were arming themselves with guns, spears, and explosives to join in the resistance alongside both regular troops and militias.
In earlier situations there had been little ambiguity in the nature of friend and foe—there were either no locals at all, friendly civilians, or clearly hostile noncombatants. But Okinawa was different even from the less populous Saipan. Okinawans themselves had always been resentful of their treatment by the Japanese, enjoying both a distinct culture and spiritual and material separation from the mainland. The result was that while they were likely to fight alongside Japanese or at least openly aid and abet imperial soldiers, they were also eager to flee or become neutrals once the doomed nature of the Japanese resistance was made clear. The trick, then, for Marines was to determine exactly the changing state of mind of each noncombatant they discovered in caves and redoubts in the instant before they themselves might be attacked. Junkyo Isa, an Okinawan native, relates how life and death hung in the balance when she and her family were rooted out of their hiding place:
That evening three American soldiers brandishing weapons arrived and forced us out of our hiding place. “Dete koi!” (Get out of there!) they called out in Japanese. They pointed their guns right at us, straight toward our chests! I couldn’t believe how big these guys were. All I remember thinking was, “Oh, my goodness, this is the enemy!” Can you imagine how I felt being lifted up by one of them and taken away in a truck? I couldn’t speak or understand English, so I had to tell them with hand gestures that I couldn’t walk. They nodded and prepared two bamboo baskets, one for carrying me, and the other for my baby brother.
Were those thousands of civilians trapped in caves determined suicide bombers, stunned noncombatants, or the terrified defeated resolved to kill themselves in solitude? And should Americans then prevent suicides, encourage them, or simply ignore those who wished to go off alone to kill themselves? Did this desire for death arise out of irrational fear—or trepidation grounded in the fact that they had killed Americans? All such baffling questions were new to the American combatants, but had the general effect of at least reminding them that they were up against an entirely novel enemy, of a type unseen even in Hitler’s Europe.
Much has been written about the grudging admiration that the American soldier held for the kamikazes and even the suicidal bravery of doomed infantry units. But beneath that wonderment at such a determined foe there remained a deep-seated disgust with suicidal tactics that were never seen as rational, but rather insane—hence the renaming by Americans of the “exploding cherry blossoms” to “idiot bombs.” As the battle dragged on, Americans became hardened to the realities that thousands of the enemy wished to kill them more than to save their own lives. That grim knowledge alone resulted in a general feeling toward prisoners and at times noncombatants that could be summed up by something like “Why should we respect their lives, when they don’t even respect their own?”
Because the effectiveness of American countermeasures—increased radar, picket destroyers, expanded fighter cover at sea, flamethrowers, dynamite, and night watches on land—neutralized most Japanese suicide attacks, rendering them serious and deadly annoyances rather than decisive tactical moves that might have lost the Americans the island, there arose a disdain and then implacable anger at the continuing assaults. Since the suicide bombers could not overturn the verdict of the battlefield, it became clear that they simply wanted to kill as many Americans as possible, not retake ground or sink capital ships.
The Americans also learned that the defeat of suicide bombers did not require new exotic weapons—albeit flamethrowers against those in caves were critical—as much as a renewed reliance on traditional Western discipline and firepower. So they turned to bombing distant kamikaze bases, coordinating well-trained antiaircraft batteries at sea, and sending out superior Hellcats with better pilots miles from the fleet to shoot down outclassed Zeros. On the island itself tough leathernecks using mortars, machine guns, and grenades learned how to blast apart recalcitrant pockets as the American counterassault was fueled by a steady reinforcement of soldiers, guns, ships, and planes at a rate far greater than they were lost.
So Okinawa proved to the American military that no matter what new weapon or specialized unit the Japanese threw at them—many of them quite out of Dante’s Inferno in their ingenuity at inflicting terror—it could be defeated through greater firepower, numbers, and training. The only variable in the equation was the number of casualities that the Americans were willing to accept. Otherwise, the eventual result of the ensuing conflict was never in doubt. The Japanese wished for something far greater, far deadlier than Okinawa in the struggle to come on the mainland—suicidal attacks by boats, planes, submarines, torpedoes, rockets, and mass waves of charging infantry in the tens of thousands. The Americans were ready to oblige them—but first contemplated ways of repeating the holocaust of Okinawa, but ensuring that the next time it would be purely a Japanese rather than a shared American nightmare. And so it was.
The Military Lessons
In high school textbooks, Okinawa is now rarely mentioned. Hiroshima, the internment of Japanese in the western United States, the racial segregation of the American military during the war, and the rape of Nanking—all warrant more attention. Even the recent Oxford Companion to Military History has no entry for the battle—though articles appear on Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and an array of far lesser engagements in addition to entries as diverse as “homosexuality and the armed forces,” “women in the military,” and “African-American troops.” Other than the concerns of a new military scholarship that seeks to address the past sins of homophobia, sexism, and racism by diverting emphasis away from tactics, strategy, and pitched battles, what accounts for this relative neglect of the most powerful amphibious assault i
n history and, indeed, the single most deadly campaign in the history of the United States Navy? For all its ghastliness, was Okinawa really of so little historical consequence? Was Winston Churchill alone cognizant of the battle’s epic importance, remarking in its immediate aftermath that the skill of American fighting men and the determination and ferocity of the Japanese placed “this battle among the most intense and famous in military history”?
The inattention to the battle perhaps goes back to 1945 itself, when American soldiers complained that few back home knew about their ongoing sacrifice. April and May marked the last days of the Third Reich as most in the United States turned their thoughts to triumphant armies of liberation who raced through a collapsing Germany, capturing thousands of prisoners, grabbing huge chunks of territory, and suffering few casualties in their lightning advances. Okinawa in contrast represented another bloody mess like Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, where there would be lots of horrors but little maneuver, fluidity, or opportunity for swashbuckling Pattonesque armor.
Because there was no chance of escape for the Japanese from the island, since their fleet and air force were essentially destroyed, the ultimate outcome was foreordained. That reality meant for Americans back home that the battle was not a question of if, but when and at what cost Okinawa would fall. Despite the lethality of the kamikazes and the murderous record of the Japanese 32nd Army, few really believed the massive American fleet would be either sunk or forced to withdraw, leaving the Americans unsupplied and at the mercy of the entrenched enemy. Perhaps there is something both anticlimatic and macabre in knowing that the suspense of battle lies only in the butcher’s bill to come, not in its ultimate verdict.
What Americans did learn led only to greater denial and then later apathy. Both the horrific nature of the fighting and the mud and stench of the battlefield environment made grim reading back home. The tragic death of General Buckner just days before the island was declared secure also cast a pall over postbellum commemoration and analysis. Had he lived, there may well have been careful and critical scrutiny of his generalship as planners preparing for the mainland invasions were already questioning the wisdom of Marine and army head-on assaults against a doomed enemy. Such censure of American tactics still today leads to larger and unanswered strategic questions: could Okinawa have been cut off and bypassed altogether, allowing an unsupplied 110,000 Japanese soldiers to die on the vine while Americans looked for other forward bases in Formosa to launch their planned assaults on the mainland? The answer surely is yes—had the Americans wished to prolong the war for a year or two while trading time for lives.
Furthermore, the denouement of the Pacific war cast a further shadow over the importance of Okinawa. Most critics later looked at the battle from the hindsight of Hiroshima, not realizing that in April 1945 it was not at all clear that the Americans would—or should—use some new weapon to prevent a costly invasion of the mainland. Instead, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, far from regretting the decision, it was more likely that citizens asked in retrospect whether Okinawa had been necessary at all. If atomic weapons had precluded a holocaust in Japan, surely a few months earlier planners could have held off from Okinawa until such super bombs were brought to the front? All in all, Okinawa’s great cost, its brutality, and lingering questions about its very necessity weeks before the surrender made it a battle Americans would prefer to forget—and largely ignore to this day. Again, something clearly went quite wrong at Okinawa.
Yet, for all the formal neglect by the media and historians alike, what happened on Okinawa may have changed Americans more than any other battle in their history. The most obvious ripple is, of course, the decision to use the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Skeptics have argued for a half century over the pretext for the nuclear attack—given the successful fire raids that had already leveled the major Japanese cities. Many claim that the decision to drop was really based on everything from a purported desire to signal to the Russians both American power and its will to use it, to a grisly desire to try out such an expensive weapon on a live target—or simple racist hatred against the Japanese people. But ultimately the reasons for Hiroshima were surely strategic, and again are inexplicable without remembrance of Okinawa.
The Americans had seen from April 1 to July 2 the damage that a cornered Japanese military—shorn of its navy, air force, and intermingled with civilians—could inflict on Americans. They clearly wanted no more Okinawas. Had the Americans not invaded Okinawa, it is more, not less, likely that they would have landed on the Japanese mainland in late summer and thereby suffered far greater casualties.
Veteran of the nightmare of Okinawa and fated to invade Japan with what was left of his Marine division, E. B. Sledge sat in his base camp on the island dumbfounded at the news of Hiroshima and the subsequent surrender. “We received the news with quiet disbelief coupled with an indescribable sense of relief. We thought the Japanese would never surrender. Many refused to believe it. Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.”
More precisely, at the beginning of July there were roughly 6,150 combat-ready Japanese planes, with nearly 8,000 pilots trained enough to fly them into targets; those were official postbellum accounts, and the actual number available in August 1945 may well have been far more. The Japanese army bragged that it had available 2,350,000 regular troops, but predicted in its death throes that it could impress up to 30 million to form an enormous citizen militia. The plan of homeland defense (ketsu-go) was predicated on the idea that every Japanese civilian and soldier alike would kill as many Americans as possible—resulting in either a fitting genocide for a still unconquered and unoccupied people or such mayhem for the enemy that the Americans, not the Japanese, would seek negotiations.
So the holocaust on Okinawa led to the dropping of the bombs, which led to a surrender rather than a greater carnage for both sides. We should remember that not only were millions poised to battle each other in the streets and countryside of Japan, but the always deadly inventive Gen. Curtis LeMay was ready on his own to use airpower in radically new ways to avoid American casualties. In response to the horrific losses on Okinawa, he was carefully assembling a monstrous fleet of B-29s—perhaps eventually 5,000 in number—to be augmented by over 5,000 B-24s and B-17s transferred from the European theater, with the possibility that over a thousand British Lancaster bombers and their seasoned crews would join the armada as well! That rain of napalm to come from a nightmarish fleet of 10,000 or more bombers on short missions from Okinawa would have made both atomic bombs seem child’s play in comparison. The fire raids on March 11, 1945, alone killed more than died at Hiroshima, and were followed by far more destruction—perhaps 500,000 incinerated in all by the subsequent bombing—than occurred at Nagasaki.
LeMay had every intention of carpet-bombing the Japanese countryside in order to reduce the number of American ground-troop casualties on the mainland. So to avoid something one hundred times worse than Okinawa on the mainland, and in the name of saving both Japanese and American casualties on the battlefield, LeMay might well have been willing to inflict something ten times more deadly than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the disturbing fact is that LeMay still might have saved more lives than would have been lost on both sides from a land invasion of the homeland.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Japanese were dying in conventional land battles in the last months of the war, a slaughter that was showing no signs of cessation at the time of Okinawa. In that regard the two A-bombs that broke the control of the militarists also saved thousands in China. In only a week of fighting in early August, the Soviets killed some 80,000 Japanese and captured over 500,000—many never to return alive from labor camps. In turn, 8,000 Russians were lost and another 20,000 wounded. Had the war continued for another year, the bloodiest theater of the entire war might well have been Manchuria, where altogether 1,600,000 invading Russian soldiers confron
ted over a million Japanese defenders. Both sides were battle-hardened veterans and prepared to give no quarter.
Only the ghastly consequences of atomic weapons gave ammunition to the Japanese critics of the imperial government—who could now point to the dramatic annihilation of their own civilians brought on by futile efforts to continue the war to oblivion. So the horrific sacrifices of Okinawa precluded far greater slaughter to come in China and Japan in the fighting envisioned for late 1945 and 1946—not to mention the fate of some 350,000 Allied prisoners who may well have been executed by the Japanese on news that their homeland had been stormed.
If Okinawa had led Americans to concede that something more dreadful than conventional arms would be necessary to avoid a greater bloodbath on the mainland, the sacrifices in vain by kamikazes were having a similar effect on Japanese back home. The abrupt end of the war led to a public backlash against the militarists and especially the architects of suicide—even earlier a few Japanese had begun to question the use of such extreme tactics that failed to halt the Americans on Okinawa. Ensign Teruo Yamaguchi, a naval kamikaze, wrote his parents that “it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I think of the deceits being played on innocent civilians by some of our wily politicians. But I am willing to take orders from the high command, and even from the politicians, because I believe in the polity of Japan.” Literally millions of Japanese civilians and soldiers were willing to die to defend their mainland from an American invasion, both as conventional and suicide attackers, and with full knowledge by 1945 that their militarist government was fraudulent and dishonest.
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