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I don’t know if it was this documentary or perhaps another (I will watch it and find out!) but one day, my Dad(RIP) was watching an Okinawa documentary on the History Channel and he saw HIMSELF piloting the Landing Craft up to the beach! He recognized not only himself, but others on the craft and its designation numbers clearly on the bow. He yelled for my mom and she came running in, but she missed it.

I will watch this and see if it is the one.

I recently watched the HBO series the Pacific which is based on personal accounts of Marines. The episode dramatizing the fighting on Okinawa was especially moving. The savagery of the fighting and Japanese forces using cizivians as human shields must have been horrendous for the young Marines. I doubt many of the precious snowflakes of our current generation of young people who have been saved from any offensive speech and bathed in political correctness would survive in a similar situation.

From about 20:00 to 33:00 the documentary deals with the fighting on Sugar Loaf Hill on May 12, then jumps forward to May 22. My father was wounded on Sugar Loaf on the night of May 14/15. Owen Stebbins and Dale Bair are mentioned—my father kept in touch with them for many years after the war.

70 years ago today - my grandfather was damage control officer, among other duties:

USS Bunker Hill (CV-17)

On the morning of 11 May 1945, while supporting the invasion of Okinawa, Bunker Hill was struck and severely damaged by two Japanese kamikaze planes. An A6M Zero fighter plane piloted by Lieutenant Junior Grade Seizō Yasunori emerged from low cloud cover, dove toward the flight deck and dropped a 550-pound (250 kilogram) bomb that penetrated the flight deck and exited from the side of the ship at gallery deck level before exploding in the ocean.[3] The Zero next crashed onto the carrier's flight deck, destroying parked warplanes full of aviation fuel and ammunition, causing a large fire. The remains of the Zero went over the deck and dropped into the sea. Then, a short 30 seconds later, a second Zero, piloted by Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa, plunged into its suicide dive. The Zero went through the antiaircraft fire, dropped a 550-pound bomb, and then crashed into the flight deck near the carrier's "island", as kamikazes were trained to aim for the island superstructure. The bomb penetrated the flight deck and exploded. Gasoline fires flamed up and several explosions took place. Bunker Hill lost a total of 346 sailors and airmen killed, 43 more missing (and never found), and 264 wounded. She was heavily damaged and was sent to the Bremerton Naval Shipyard for repairs. She was still in the shipyard when the war ended in mid-August 1945.

This was the reason why the decision was made to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. If the invasion of Okinawa had such a gigantic human toll on both sides, what would have happened when first part of Operation Downfall, code named OLYMPIC, started with the invasion of the southern end of the island of Kyushu? (Indeed, the Japanese military commanders guessed correctly we would invade the south end of Kyushu first and was moving massive amounts of men and materiel to defend the area at the time of Japan's surrender.)