Posted on 04/01/2018 8:30:33 PM PDT by BBell
As we celebrate Easter Sunday and the Jewish Passover, we should keep in our prayers and remembrances the many Americans who fought and sacrificed during that same time 73 years ago in the Battle of Okinawa.
The event was Operation Iceberg. It was the bloodiest battle and the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific Theater of World War II.
On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, the Navy’s Fifth Fleet under Admiral Raymond Spruance attacked the Japanese-held island. They were joined by a British, Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian naval task force and more than 180,000 Army soldiers and Marines. This was the final push toward invading mainland Japan and putting an end to the war.
Military planners considered the capture of Okinawa and its airfields to be a crucial and necessary precondition for the invasion of the Japanese mainland.
Were the U.S. to invade Japan, estimates of potential American casualties were upward of 1.7 to 4 million, with between 400,000 and 800,000 deaths. The Battle of Okinawa only served to raise those estimates, as had the recent brutal battle for Iwo Jima, where U.S. casualties numbered 26,000 over five weeks of fighting. Only a few hundred Japanese had been captured out of the 21,000 troops who fought to the death.
Those expected casualties were the major reason for President Harry Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb.
The Japanese military knew that Okinawa was their last stand in the Pacific. As a result, they fixed 77,000 troops on the island under the command of Lt. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, along with a 20,000-strong Okinawan militia. The Japanese forces even included 1,800 middle school boys conscripted into the “Blood and Iron Corps.”
The American invasion started with a massive seven-day naval bombardment of the landing beaches, where heavy resistance from the Japanese forces was expected. That prelanding bombardment included tens of thousands of artillery shells, rockets, mortar shells, and napalm attacks.
The Japanese allowed American troops to land unopposed on Easter Sunday and to move inland with nominal resistance. Japanese troops had been ordered not to fire on the American landing because Ushijima wanted to lure the American forces into a trap he had laid for them in what became known as the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru Defense Line in southern Okinawa, a rugged terrain riddled with fortified pillboxes, gun emplacements, tunnels, and caves.
The Japanese also sent the battleship Yamato on a one-way suicide mission to Okinawa, but it was spotted by Allied submarines and sunk (along with a cruiser and four enemy destroyers) by American pilots, downing nearly the entire crew of over 2,300.
The far more dangerous attacks on the Allied fleet were by dense waves of suicide Kamikazes diving their planes into ships. The Fifth Fleet lost 36 ships in the Battle of Okinawa and suffered damage to another 368 ships. Almost 5,000 U.S. sailors and pilots were killed and almost as many were wounded, with over 700 Allied planes being shot down. It was the biggest naval loss of the war.
On Okinawa, Americans fought ferocious battles on almost every defended hilltop. Torrential rains turned the island into a sea of mud that bogged down tanks, trucks, and other heavy equipment.
The most infamous hilltop was Hacksaw Ridge, a 400-foot cliff on the Maeda Escarpment that was depicted in a 2016 movie about Cpl. Desmond T. Doss. Doss was a Seventh-Day Adventist and conscientious objector who became a combat medic. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for rescuing 75 wounded soldiers at Hacksaw Ridge.
In almost every fight on Okinawa, American troops fought for every foot of ground in hand-to-hand combat against fanatical Japanese troops who often took their own lives rather than surrendering. That eventually included Ushijima and his chief of staff who committed seppuku on June 22. It was Ushijima who had ordered his troops to “fight to the death.”
With his suicide, the Battle of Okinawa was effectively over.
The Battle of Okinawa was the deadliest fight of the Pacific island campaign. The Japanese knew they could not win. Their purpose was simply to make the battle as costly as possible to the Americans and to hold them off as long as possible, allowing Japan to prepare for the defense of their home islands. Thus, Japanese commanders considered all their forces and the residents of Okinawa totally expendable.
Americans incurred almost 50,000 casualties on Okinawa, including over 12,000 dead. Those killed included the American commander, Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, who was killed by enemy artillery fire just four days before the battle ended, making him the highest-ranking U.S. officer killed during the entire war.
Ernie Pyle, the famous war correspondent, was also killed when he was shot by a sniper on a small island northwest of Okinawa. In addition to Doss, six other Americans who fought in the battle received the Medal of Honor, our nation’s highest award for bravery under fire.
But the Japanese losses were much greater. Only 7,400 Japanese soldiers survived—90 percent of Japanese troops on the island fought to the death. Almost 150,000 Okinawan civilians were killed, amounting to one-third of the prewar population. Many were used as human shields by Japanese troops. Others threw themselves and their families off cliffs on the southern part of Okinawa in mass suicides after the Japanese convinced them that the Americans would kill or rape anyone they captured.
Ironically enough, it was Japanese troops who engaged in mass rapes of Okinawan women during the battle.
The bloody, ferocious battle for Okinawa lasted 82 days and left the island a “vast field of mud, lead, decay, and maggots” according to Ted Tsukiyama’s “Battle of Okinawa.” Almost every building on the island was destroyed.
Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August ended the war and all Japanese resistance, thereby preventing the enormous American casualties that would have resulted from a land invasion of Japan.
On Easter Sunday, American Christians will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which marks the triumph of good over evil, sin, and death. At the same time during Passover, Jewish Americans will celebrate their liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt. Those celebrations are profound and deeply significant.
But we should also pause to remember the Americans and their allies who, 73 years ago, fought and died during Easter and Passover to preserve our freedom and end a brutal war started by a ruthless military dictatorship intent on enslaving the people it conquered.
We and the world owe them more than we can ever repay.
The Japanese are pretty resourceful. They have that whole group think going. A blockade would likely have taken years to work.
Would have been less costly in Allied lives, but it would have killed every occupant of the islands of Japan, to the last man, woman and child.
War is hell after all. Embargo would have cost lives, but how many hundreds of thousands would have died as the battle raged all over the home islands? Would the blockade have cost more?
But in the savings of how many thousands of lives? And I assume the air campaign would still have kept going on.
To put it bluntly, those two bombs saved the lives of literally tens of millions of Japanese.
Army Brat.
Likely outcome of an invasion of Japan described here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20091101051918/http://www.webwizpro.com/1945InvasionofJapan.html
Tojo wanted to kill Hirohito and proclaim he was a “Martyr” to keep the war going.
My Dad was on an Escort there.
Like most he hardly talked about his war service. But once we were talking about Kamikazes and I said that they must not have worried him since they were supposed to go for the big ships.
LOL! I was very young but I still remember that look he gave me.
God bless him.
Sounds like another McElroy/Skidmore Mo. situation that just got so untenable that the local Islanders had to take matters into their own hands and deal with the scumbags. I see no reason why any of them should feel guilty at all!
Good old Skidmore...
Same here. Class of '53, Fort Ord, California.
I read a book about events leading up to Pearl Harbor that had an epilogue called (IIRC) After The Bomb.
One of our diplomats was talking with his Japanese equivalent and the guy said they had to surrender for fear of more bombs. Our guy said we only had two. The Japanese said "If we had known that . . ." and let it drop, but it gives you an idea about how suicidal their leaders were.
[sidebar] I wrote this before but it seems appropriate here. Early 1950s some liberal outfit sent reporters around Asia, asking their opinion about the atomic bombing of Japan. (There was a big "Lay a Guilt Trip on America" then,)
They got some 'tsks tsks" from those who weren't involved, but they cut the trip short when they started asking those who suffered under Japanese occupation. Their reply was "Why did you drop only two?"
As I and other Freepers have contended over my 20 years here, Truman's decision to drop the Atomic Bomb on Nagasaki and then Hiroshima SAVED LIVES. On both the American and Japanese sides.
It's not popular to say it, however it's TRUE.
2000 bombers loaded with incendiary bombs flying unopposed against cities built mainly of bamboo and wood.
Yes, the atomic bombs were a godsend for the general population of Japan.
Crazy how the Japanese army wanted to keep fighting. Absolute idiots who believed their own propaganda.
And they want us to apologise for not completely destroying their island.
At this time a third atomic bomb was expected to be ready by the end of August. Eight bombs were scheduled to have been completed by November, and General George Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, was advocating that they be reserved for use against tactical targets in support of the planned invasion rather than be dropped on cities.
That used to be common knowledge but in our age of PC it no longer is.
Someone here at FR, perhaps yourself, posted a great summary of how the Soviets transported tens of thousands of their troops from the Eastern front to Manchuria, etc and surprised the Japanese forces there, decisively defeating them.
I was referring to other Japanese armies (full divisions) further into the Chinese Mainland. Don’t have a good source on how many but it was significant. Remember the Japanese literally got into India and had taken-over much of Burma, Thailand, and some of Vietnam.
If these armies decided to put up a suicidal last stand, then our casualties and those of our Allies coming in from India/Burma and fighting across the mainland would have been horrible.
Remember, Mao kept most of his Red Army in reserve, letting the Nationalists do most of the fighting and dying in great numbers (millions) against the Japanese. Mao intended to use them against the remnants of the Kuomintang forces after the defeat of Japan, and that is exactly what he did.
If anyone has an Order of Battle for mainland China Japanese forces, please list it or give us a source. A little known theater of combat that really does need to be learned.
PS: One of my late friends, Gen. Bernie Yoh, Kuomintang guerrilla forces leader, becamethe youngest of their generals for his heroic and smart defeat of a major Japanese force where he used his head instead of guns to drive them out of a major ammunition depot/city. See “SACO: Sino-American Combined Operations” book. There is a full chapter on Bernie, who later fought in So. Vietnam under Gen. Ed Lansdale’s command.
Also, remember, Kuomintang forces defeated a major Japanese drive in Burma that would have opened the way to a major invasion of India. Our Air Force, perhaps the Flying Tigers or reinforced 8th AF under Chennault provided the air attack, but the Chinese on the ground took on and defeated a major Japanese army.
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