No discussion of Hiroshima, then, is intellectually legitimate without careful consideration of the events that transpired on Okinawa. In this regard, George Feifer’s incisive analysis of the relationship between Hiroshima and Okinawa must remain the last word:
Okinawa’s caves, killing grounds, and anguish ought to be remembered. It ought to be suggested, at least for the sake of the ambivalent human record, that the first atomic bombs probably prevented the homicidal equivalent of over two hundred more of the same: the twenty million Japanese deaths if invasion had been necessary, in addition to all the other deaths, Western and Asian.
It is difficult to comprehend such figures and to remember the strains of 1945. Focusing on the bomb is easier. But if a symbol is needed to help preserve the memory of the Pacific War, Okinawa is the more fitting one.
The American military and public also came away from Okinawa with a number of perceptions about land warfare in Asia, some of them accurate, some racist, a few entirely erroneous—but all fundamental in forming the American way of war in Korea and Vietnam in the next thirty years. After the startling array of suicides on Okinawa, Americans were convinced that Asians in general did not value life—theirs or anyone else’s—in the same manner as Westerners, and when faced with overwhelming military power and sure defeat would nevertheless continue to fight hard in their efforts to kill Americans. Because territory was not really as important on Okinawa as body counts—the fight would end not with the capture per se of strategic ground but rather only with the complete annihilation of the enemy who was trapped on the island—Americans developed a particular mentality that would come to haunt them in both the Korean peninsula and Southeast Asia.
The Japanese quit on Okinawa when they were killed off, not when the fall of a particular ridge or line of defenses forecast eventual tactical defeat. Indeed, even when the Americans reached the southernmost tip of the island and routed the Japanese, they were ordered to spread back out over previously “conquered” territory to root out snipers and pockets of resistance—killing 8,975 more Japanese soldiers in the purported “mop-up.” Former lieutenants and captains of the Pacific war, when later promoted to American generals in Korea and Vietnam, assumed again that real estate was not as important as simply killing as many fanatical Asian troops as possible—through bombing, shelling, and frontal assaults. War ended when the enemy was exterminated or faced with certain annihilation. It did not necessarily stop when the Japanese were encircled, outmaneuvered, or shorn of supplies. The caves and night assaults of Okinawa prefigured the tunnels and ambushes of Vietnam—in each case nullifying massive American bombing and artillery barrages. Every Japanese dead or captured, not the fall of the Shuri line, meant a quicker end to the war—just as “body counts” in Vietnam, not the capture of Hanoi, were seen as the key to ending that conflict.
Because Okinawa was the major engagement in the Pacific where civilians sometimes fought on the side of the enemy, Americans experienced the dilemma of determining which woman, child, or old man was harmless, friendly, or a killer. And because Okinawa was out of view, little reported on, and fought against a supposedly repugnant and fascist enemy, Americans left the island with the assurance that when stranded in such a hell, they should blast indiscriminately any civilian in their proximity on suspicion of aiding the enemy—also with disastrous consequences to come in the suddenly televised fighting of the 1960s and 1970s when victory hinged not on enemy body counts alone, but also in winning the hearts and minds of supposedly noncombatant civilian populations in an arena broadcast live around the world. Japanese veterans of the rape of Nanking might murder thousands of Okinawan civilians—40,000 adult males alone were shanghaied into the imperial army. But in such a messy battle, jaded American GIs—as purportedly more liberal Westerners—who either mistakenly or by intent shot a few hundred would incur far greater moral condemnation both at home and abroad.
Similarly, commanding officers came away from Okinawa believing that the American public could stomach the loss of fifty thousand casualties in an Asian theater—failing to grasp that Okinawa was not a typical, but an aberrant, event of the highest order. The end of the war in Europe, the death of President Roosevelt, the news that a Japanese collapse was imminent, all that and more took attention away from the bloodletting on Okinawa itself. Only after the battle was over and the war concluded did it sink into Americans that thousands of their best were slaughtered a few weeks before the armistice by an enemy that was surrounded and cut off.
Yet wrongly interpreting such temporary public acquiescence as solid support for their strategy of annihilation, the military thought that if Americans could kill far more than they lost, defeat the enemy militarily, and gain the stated objective, then the public back home would support its sacrifice of the nation’s youth in any similar future Pacific engagement. In fact, had the battle taken place earlier and during a lull in the European theater, outrage over the costs of Okinawa—far greater than either Peleliu or Tarawa, whose tolls of dead stunned Americans—may have been seen as a national scandal and marked the last battle in which Americans would be sent to fight hand-to-hand in Asia against an enemy whose only hope of victory lay in killing GIs in any manner possible.
The American military wanted Okinawa as a closer home for the B-29s and numerous tactical fighters wings, in addition to a deepwater port. But the generals also realized that even had they skipped it, ignoring its value as an air and naval base, 100,000 Japanese would never have surrendered unless they were nearly obliterated—or learned that enough Japanese elsewhere in the empire were annihilated to cause their emperor to concede. So again, corpses, not mere acres, became the rationale of the campaign.
In that same way of thinking, later in both Korea and Vietnam, the occupation of territory—whether the capture and control of Pyongyang or Hanoi—became less the focus of victory than simply killing the enemy. Unfortunately the analogies did not hold. Korea and Vietnam were not islands of conventional troops cut off from supply, but rather proxy wars, in which neighboring communist and nuclear powers had instigated civil strife with every intention of daily resupplying their nearby surrogate insurrectionists.
But not all errors in thinking were to be on the American side. Okinawa also sent to the world other military ripples, mixed signals about the use of suicide attacks that would prove grievous to any who learned the wrong lessons from the battle. The Japanese proved that a militarily inferior and outnumbered force—should it commit thousands of its combatants to suicide tactics—could inflict enormous damage on its more powerful foe. Technological superiority purportedly could be nullified by less sophisticated weapons that made no allowance for the safety or survival of the attacker. Fanatical personal bravery and suicidal group devotion to a cause were supposed to trump massive firepower and the skilled men who enjoyed such calculated material superiority. And since Western military ingenuity presupposed the sanctity of the combatant, a great deal of resources went into defenses, communications, and search-and-rescue missions to preserve the assailant rather than merely kill the enemy. Whether al-Qaeda terrorists, Palestinian suicide bombers, or Iraqi paramilitaries, some overmatched fighters have surmised from the savagery of battles like Okinawa that Western military forces—such as the sophisticated American Air Force of 2001 or the homeland forces of Israel—could be circumvented by even poorly trained pilots and teenagers with bombs strapped to their bodies. Or so they thought.
But careful analysis of Okinawa offers a quite different and far more chilling lesson. For all the bravado of the Japanese bombers, they failed utterly to stop the Americans—indeed, failed to sink a single major capital ship. True, some large carriers like the Franklin were nearly destroyed—over seven hundred dead—and forced to sail home. The loss of their planes in the Okinawa campaign was, of course, important. But even such spectacular short-term successes were tempered by two stark realizations. The Franklin steamed away under its own power unassisted and could be repaired and refitted
. More important, unlike 1942 when even the temporary loss of a fleet carrier spelled near disaster, the United States now had over sixteen fleet carriers in the Pacific, with more planned. If the kamikazes were to have any long-term effect in curtailing American tactical airpower against Okinawa or the mainland, then they had to sink, not damage, flattops and destroy ten or fifteen, not damage two or three.
Five thousand dead sailors is a horrendous figure, but for the Japanese it had to be seen in the context of an enemy that had a million-man navy and sixteen fleet carriers intact after the greatest suicide attack in history. Marine divisions were shattered on Okinawa; yet more Marines were ready to invade Japan after the battle than before. As both a weapon of terror and a conventional means to destroy enemy assets, the Japanese suicide attackers had no long-term strategic success.
Why is this so? Human nature explains much, for the pool of those who wish to kill themselves in service to a lost cause is finite, despite professed fanaticism. There really was only a limited supply of a few thousand kamikaze pilots among millions of Japanese, as large-scale attacks ceased altogether by July. Even by the end of the Okinawa campaign, pilots were being assigned and were no longer exclusively volunteers. Rumors spread that science students were given preferential treatment and were being saved for research duties, while others in liberal, social, and legal studies were drafted for the suicide schools. Some pilots ditched or turned back. Others were intoxicated to the point of stupor. Hatsuho Naito, who wrote a history of the Okha squadrons, concluded: “The young men who were actually called on to make mass suicide attacks had nothing to do with the organized insanity. They experienced terrors and trauma that are beyond the imagination of anyone else. I do not believe that any of them shouted, ‘Long Live the Emperor’ as they dived their bomb-filled planes into the enemy.”
There was no disguising the fact that the vast majority of the pilots, like contemporary suicide bombers in Palestine, were between 18 and 24, of lower rank, and ordered on their missions by older and more senior officers. Resentment of the inequity in determining suicide duty, and wonder whether other Japanese were willing to make similar sacrifices, were widespread even among the most fervent kamikaze pilots. After writing in his diary, “What is the duty today? It is to fight. What is the duty tomorrow? It is to win. What is the daily duty? It is to die. We die in battle without complaint,” twenty-two-year-old ensign Heiichi Okabe nevertheless added, “I wonder if others, like scientists, who pursue the war effort on their own fronts, would die as we do without complaint. Only then will the unity of Japan be such that she can have any prospect of winning the war.”
Heiichi Okabe’s officers rarely, if at all, led the suicide attacks in person—and oftentimes survived the war. Again, in the case of the special Okha squadrons, tension mounted between petty and reserve officers to such a degree that fistfights broke out on occasion. Even some of the pilots of the mother planes who launched the suicide rockets protested. Not uncommon were the remarks of one bomber pilot, Goro Nonaka: “Do you really think we can do such a thing? Our men, the ones we have been living with, are being escorted to their deaths in the bloodiest and most cold-hearted way possible. Do you think we can leave them and return again and again?” Thus it was no surprise that the organizer of the Okha rocket squadrons, Shoichi Ota, went into hiding after the surrender and purportedly lived under an assumed name for years after the war ended.
We shall never know what would have transpired had the United States invaded Japanese home soil, but for some five weeks after Okinawa the American fleet was still in range of land-based enemy planes and thousands of aircraft still remained on the homeland—and yet kamikaze attacks were more or less nonexistent. After Okinawa was declared secure on July 2, only five more suicide attacks were reported before the surrender. Were the Japanese simply out of willing pilots, saving their reserve kamikazes for the final assault, or perplexed that there were no volunteers to strike the massive American fleet until and unless it landed invading troops on the mainland?
There was a similar chain of events after the terrible autumn of 2001. The West was told that thousands of Islamic fundamentalists were ready to bomb America, Europe, and Israel. In truth, there were only a few hundred from an angry society of hundreds of millions willing to blow themselves up to kill Americans. Romantics may have remembered the kamikazes; realists recalled how they were dealt with. Quite simply, there has never arisen a military culture quite like the West, in its terrifying ability to draw on innate values such as secular rationalism, free inquiry, and consensual government to create frightening weapons of destruction and the protocols and disciplined soldiers to use them to deadly effect—a firepower and material onslaught that can overwhelm the most fanatical and deadly of warriors, whether they be Apaches, kamikazes, or al-Qaeda terrorists.
Much of the collapse of the kamikazes, then, had to do with the American counterresponse. The terror of suicide brought out the greater terror of the Western way of war. Americans not merely devised immediate countermeasures to the kamikazes and suicide banzai charges—everything from picket destroyers to flame-shooting tanks—but also left the island with a changed mentality about the nature of war itself: from now on fanaticism of the human will would be repaid in kind with the fanaticism of industrial and technological power. Okinawa taught the world that the chief horror of war is not the random use of suicide bombers, but the response that they incur from Western powers whose self-imposed restraint upon their ingenuity for killing usually rests only with their own sense of moral reluctance—a brake that suicidal attack seems to strip away entirely.
The official military history of Okinawa quite succinctly summed up the typical confident American attitude to the nightmare of a campaign gone terribly wrong: “The high cost of the victory was due to the fact that the battle had been fought against a capably led Japanese army of greater strength than anticipated, over difficult terrain heavily and expertly fortified, and thousands of miles from home. The campaign had lasted considerably longer than was expected. But Americans had demonstrated again on Okinawa that they could, ultimately, wrest from the Japanese whatever ground they wanted.”
The terrorists of September 11 should have learned that lesson of “whatever ground they wanted” from Okinawa. At least in the matter of dealing with suicide bombers and banzai attacks, Japan’s enemies surely did have the last word. It was not surprising, but entirely predictable that a nation that sixty years ago produced napalm, flamethrowers—and eventually A-bombs—to combat thousands of suicidal warriors would retain the organization and willpower to incinerate a few hundred suicide bombers and their enclaves of support.
Epilogue: The Men of Okinawa
The consequences of any one battle are far more than the mere political or cultural fallout. As many as a quarter million people died on Okinawa. Yet we have no idea of the aggregate effect of that sudden destruction of energy and young talent on either Japan or America—or the human race. Nor can we appreciate the consequences that those sudden deaths had on a million more of their close family members and friends.
So military history is brutal for reasons other than what it tells us about the grim nature of the fighting. It is callous also in what it does not touch on—the hundreds of thousands of battle dead who are never recalled or commemorated as individuals, whose stories and counterfactual suppositions are never indulged in other than by a few family members themselves without access to publication or wider enlightenment. In that regard, we learn little about what was or what might have been of the Okinawa dead.
By April 1945, Ernie Pyle was not merely America’s best-known war correspondent, but the country’s most widely read columnist as well. Well before the beginning of the war, as a roving reporter between 1935 and 1941, Pyle had developed a readership of millions through syndicated daily columns that chronicled the average lives of Americans coping with the Great Depression. When the war broke out, he was a natural choice to assume a role as America’s premier war
correspondent, and his subsequent ground-level dispatches from Europe served as the country’s most direct link with the men in the field.
Ernie Pyle, America’s journalistic icon, was killed in a so-called safe zone behind the lines on the small island of Ie Shima off Okinawa on April 18, 1945. Reporting on the fighting of the 77th Infantry Division, Pyle was traveling in a Jeep that was forced off the road by machine gun fire from a pocket of Japanese holdouts hidden in the coral slopes. Pyle and a regimental commander scurried to safety in a nearby ditch; but after a few moments the correspondent mistakenly thought the danger was past, raised his head, and received a burst in the temple a few inches below the rim of his helmet.
Enemy machine gunners were not supposed to be behind American lines shooting at traffic. Soldiers usually did not stick their heads out of holes unless they were sure that the coast was clear; and the head itself is a small target, the vulnerable temple and face below the steel helmet smaller still. Yet Pyle died from a head wound from a single Japanese gunner in a secured area, and was buried with the inscription “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.” While Pyle’s death did not suddenly galvanize attention to the horrific nature of the mostly ignored fighting on Okinawa, his loss nevertheless stunned the nation.
Yet it is rarely noted that Pyle’s sudden death in combat in some sense ensured that his own work and populist reputation would achieve a timelessness that his survival might well have otherwise nullified. After years of war in Europe, Pyle himself admitted that he could hardly face combat again. He reported on the eve of the invasion that he simply could not talk, in terrible mute anticipation of mangled bodies and carnage on the invasion beaches. Even after the relief of the deceptively easy American landing—“What a wonderful feeling”—for most of the early part of the Okinawa campaign he stayed to the rear or at sea. Pyle was coping with an increasing drinking problem, his marriage nearly over, with a wife on the verge of suicide. Unfair criticism was arising that he had lost his edge while younger, more reckless reporters were sending back more realistic combat dispatches.
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