Ripples of Battle Read online

  The fleet’s gunnery was joined by waves of carrier planes that strafed and bombed the beach and immediate vicinity. When the Americans landed—again over 50,000 on the first day alone—they lost only 28 men killed and took the first four days’ planned objectives by nightfall. Two large enemy airfields were captured within hours. Scattered kamikaze attacks during the first few days had damaged only a half dozen ships, including the heavy cruiser Indianapolis, the battleship West Virginia, and the carrier Indefatigable. Otherwise the fleet was relatively safe. The invasion was making remarkable progress as Marines raced throughout the north and center of the island while the army headed for the enemy defensive lines to the south.

  Buckner’s senior Marine commander, General Geiger, remarked of the rapid advancement and light casualties, “Don’t ask me why we haven’t had more opposition. I don’t understand it. But now we’re in a position to work over the Jap forces at our leisure at the least possible loss to ourselves.” Admiring the bombardment and the easy landings, Admiral Turner reported to Nimitz’s headquarters, “I may be crazy, but it looks like the Japanese have quit the war, at least in this sector.”

  That initial optimism after the easy landings continued for a week in the north, as the 6th Marine Division with only occasional hard fighting crushed most of the Japanese resistance by April 12. By April 20 it and other Marine contingents had essentially subdued two-thirds of the island. But on the seas the tempo of the battle had already shifted dramatically on April 6, when an unforeseen and enormous flight of over 200 Japanese kamikazes descended on the American fleet. They sank four ships and damaged ten others—as the prelude to a failed one-way strike by the 70,000-ton battleship Yamato and its escort destroyers and cruisers. Then for the next ten weeks the Americans would fight off at least ten organized kamikaze sorties of hundreds of planes, and lose 5,000 sailors in the most costly of any single battle in the history of the United States Navy.

  Meanwhile, on the southwestern part of the island, U.S. Army battalions at last reached the formidable defenses at the Kakazu Ridge—coral hills pitted with caves and passageways full of Japanese defenders of the 13th Infantry Battalion under the command of the gifted Colonel Hara. After failed assaults during April 9–12, the GIs suffered nearly 3,000 casualties, killed over 4,000 of Hara’s troops, but had still not taken the needed few hundred yards of coral. The Americans at last realized that they had marched into an enormous trap of waiting, dug-in Japanese armed with concealed heavy weapons. And from April 10 to 24, nearly the entire American army in the south made repeated but failed efforts to blast through the Japanese defenses.

  The Americans inexplicably failed to modify their initial operational plan in light of the sudden and unexpected Japanese ferocity. Instead, they continued to plunge ahead. No enemy could have made more ingenious use of the naturally rugged landscape or fought harder than the Japanese. Unfortunately, they were opposed by an adversary whose overwhelming firepower and superior technology were not substitutes for martial courage and skill in hand-to-hand killing, but mere ancillaries. Despite Japanese bombardment by ghastly 320mm mortars and an array of 75mm and 150mm howitzers, 47mm antitank guns, hundreds of hidden machine guns, the sudden news of the death of President Roosevelt on April 12, and a massive counterattack on April 13, U.S. Army units regrouped and continued south to be joined eventually later in the month by Marines returning from their conquest of the northern Motobu Peninsula.

  The first hills of the Shuri defenses began to fall by April 20. On April 25, General Ushijima had retreated to the even more formidable last bastions behind the Shuri line, where the fighting remained stalemated for much of May. The so-called “blowtorch and corkscrew” method, in which either gasoline was pumped into caves and ignited, or cave entrances were blown up by explosives—or both—ensured that the fighting was increasingly dirty and hand-to-hand. When some Japanese units proved nearly impregnable in their underground redoubts, smoke bombs, phosphorous grenades, and huge amounts of pumped gasoline were used to force their egress.

  The struggle on Sugar Loaf Hill between May 12 and 19 was especially desperate as Marines tried to storm the slope in the manner of Japanese banzai attacks while the enemy in the American way relied on superior firepower from entrenched positions. Army brigades reinforced by Marines would slog through mud and rain for weeks on end but find no success until May 21, when Ushijima finally brought what was left of the Japanese 32nd Army back to the last redoubt on the southwest corner of the island. Yet fighting there would still rage on for the remainder of June. General Buckner himself was killed on June 18, the highest-ranking American officer to die in the Pacific theater during the Second World War. Ushijima and Cho would commit suicide a week later.

  Okinawa was not considered officially secure until July 2. If the Japanese 32nd Army was annihilated, the American 10th Army was nearly ruined and would need months to reconstitute its shattered army and Marine divisions. Whether because of pleas from the navy to accelerate the offensive to save the fleet from nearly daily kamikaze attacks, or due to growing army frustration at gaining so little ground at such great costs, General Buckner poured in more men to continue the piecemeal frontal assaults and ignored his subordinates’ suggestions to starve, surround, or bypass the determined Japanese resistance. Maj. Gen. Andrew Bruce, commander of the army’s 77th Infantry Division, for example, argued vehemently for a southern landing behind the Shuri lines to force the Japanese to fight in both directions. He had his plans rejected on grounds that it would divert precious supplies from the main frontal assault and would only result in a double theater of attrition.

  Likewise, the redeployment from the north of two Marine divisions in late April also would follow preexisting strategy, the divisions being used solely to replace battered army regiments—some with less than 40 percent combat efficiency and with shattered platoons of five or six men—rather than being employed in amphibious landings at the Japanese rear. The attackers would pay dearly for such orthodoxy for much of May. Postbellum interviews by surviving Japanese—especially the testimony of the brilliant Colonel Yahara—revealed that such additional landings would probably have cracked the tenuous Japanese lines of defense far earlier.

  The result was that American ground and naval forces suffered 12,520 killed and another 33,631 wounded or missing in the three months between the invasion on April 1 and the official end of the Okinawa campaign on July 2. Although the naval air forces had fought gallantly in both attacking the island and the mainland, and defending the fleet, they nevertheless lost 763 planes in the air and on carriers in just ninety days—the Japanese purportedly losing five times that number. Besides the loss of eight patrolling planes every day, the American navy still suffered its worst damage in its then 170-year history—a staggering 36 ships sunk and 368 hit. For each week of the campaign, three craft went to the bottom and another 30 were bombed or crashed into by the enemy. Indeed, four ships from the fleet on average were hit by kamikazes every day for the duration of their deployment off Okinawa. The Japanese improbably claimed that nearly 10,000 naval planes—the vast majority of them conventional bombers and fighters—had taken some part in the battle between March and June.

  The defenders were proud of such mayhem but themselves suffered far worse—at least 110,000 killed, or nearly ten soldiers lost for every American slain, at a sickening clip of fifty men dead every hour of the battle, nearly one per minute, nonstop for three months on end. Perhaps 100,000 civilians may have been killed—how many of them were active combatants is not known. Nor do we have any accurate idea of the number of wounded and missing Okinawans; some estimates put the number of soldiers and civilians who were sealed in caves at over 20,000. Fewer than 7,500 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner. All in all, nearly a quarter of a million people were killed or wounded in the fighting on Okinawa—over 2,500 humans dying every day, most in a confined area of a few square miles in the southern part of the island.

  E. B. Sledge, a 1st Marine Divi
sion veteran of the fighting, wrote of the carnage on the Shuri line over thirty-five years later:

  The mud was knee deep in some places, probably deeper in others if one dared venture there. For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the muck and then were washed away by the runoff of the rain. There wasn’t a tree or bush left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely that ground cover was nonexistent. The rain poured down on us as evening approached. The scene was nothing but mud; shell fire; flooded craters with their silent, pathetic, rotting occupants; knocked-out tanks and amtracs; and discarded equipment—utter desolation. . . . We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war. . . . In the mud and driving rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.

  And for what was all this carnage? Plenty of strategic reasons were advanced. Ostensibly the United States had now obtained an enormous base of 640 square miles within a mere 350 miles of the mainland, a staging and supply area for the final invasion to come, a deepwater anchorage for the entire American fleet, and dozens of air bases for both tactical fighters and strategic bombers. Just as important, the Americans felt that with the fall of Okinawa, the Japanese fleet and naval air forces in the Pacific theater for all practicality would cease to exist. The enemy’s best army divisions would be obliterated. A future invasion of Kyushu and Honshu (Operations Olympic and Coronet) would enjoy almost complete air superiority—without worry of naval attack and with the assurance that the many veteran Japanese land forces in the immediate area had been long ago wiped out.

  To the Japanese generals and their staff who committed suicide in the final days of the battle, it was not altogether clear that they had failed. Colonel Yahara pointed out that the American supreme commander, General Buckner, had been killed by Japanese before any of his own ranking generals on the island died by their own hand. Even the American President had expired during the battle—perhaps in the Japanese view from the sheer shock of the mounting American fatalities. And the original Japanese purpose, after all, had never been to win or even survive, but to cause so much death and destruction that the Americans would think twice before repeating a similar assault on the homeland.

  The Japanese might have been correct in thinking that such American losses could be replicated on Kyushu and Honshu, but they were dead wrong about the Americans not invading. The victory on Okinawa taught the Americans that thousands of their own would probably die in conquering Japan, but that the mainland could—and must—be conquered all the same. Fifty more Japanese combat divisions, millions more in the militias, and thousands of trained kamikazes purportedly waiting in arms could kill many, but not stop most, of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who would be determined to end the war off the shores of Japan itself.

  Okinawa was not the first occasion for suicide attacks. Americans had seen them earlier on the ground and in the air both at Guadalcanal and Leyte Gulf. Nor for the first time did civilians jump off cliffs or kill themselves in caves. Such horror had also occurred earlier sporadically during the Marianas campaign at Marpi Point on Saipan. And we should remember that thousands of Americans had been killed on Iwo Jima as they wiped out nearly all of the Japanese who would not surrender. But Okinawa was the summation of all the macabre elements of a barbarous three years of island fighting. It was not just the last battle of the Pacific war, but the murderous aggregate of all that had gone on before.

  After their bloody victory in July 1945, the Americans searched for ways not to avoid another Okinawa, but rather to do what they had done to Okinawa in ways that did not exact similar costs. If anything, after defeating the suicide attackers of Okinawa, the Americans felt that they could survive—and do—anything. That was surely true, but in little over a month after the victory on Okinawa, what they came up with as the solution for avoiding another Pyrrhic victory in defeating kamikazes, armed and indistinguishable civilians, bomb-rigged soldiers, and banzai attacks would shock the world.

  The Laboratory of Suicide

  Fighters who deliberately seek death in battle—whether to end their own misery amid certain defeat, to undergo offensive missions that hold out no chance of their own survival, or as wounded and doomed in the last moments of life to kill the enemy without hope of escape—are ubiquitous in both history and myth. When nearly surrounded, King Leonidas of Sparta sent away thousands of his allied army from Thermopylae (480 B.C.). Then with his remaining 299 Spartans and a few hundred Thespians and Thebans, he prepared to leave the confines of the pass and charge out to fight amid a sea of thousands of Persian troops. “Fight with great courage,” the king purportedly told his Spartans hours before annihilation, “for today we will dine among the dead.”

  During the failed Jewish revolt of A.D. 73, when the last enclave of the zealots at the citadel of Masada was surrounded and before the Roman besiegers could storm the stronghold, the rebels under Eleazar ben Yair killed themselves. By the historian Josephus’s count, all but seven of some 960 trapped men, women, and children perished. Hitler’s order in January 1943 for the encircled garrison at Stalingrad to shun both escape and surrender, but fight to the last man, was equivalent to suicide for thousands.

  But the various elements of the Japanese death brigades were quite different from any fanatical suicides seen before in the long history of war. Thousands of Japanese were trained as suicide pilots. Even more suicide bombers commanded ramming-boats or as infantrymen organized death charges. Many foot soldiers fought with dynamite satchels or grenades strapped to their bodies. In all these cases the sole intention was to kill as many Americans as possible before meeting certain death. The acceptance of suicide was state-sanctioned—and very soon after its inception was to be not sporadic, but even planned and organized on a mass scale by the Japanese government. What, then, would make a modern nation turn to such apparently precivilized measures against the enemy?

  Desperation in war, of course, is a human constant across time and space that can make the once inconceivable and repugnant act suddenly seem palatable. It is no surprise that the first organized suicide fighters made their appearance in autumn 1944 during the defense of the Philippines. Then most of the Japanese air force and navy was either in retreat or nearly destroyed—and there was little optimism about stopping the American juggernaut through traditional means as it neared the Japanese homeland. What would have been considered foolish and unnecessary on December 8, 1941, was not seen as such in October 1944, as the last defensive line of the once impenetrable Co-Prosperity Sphere was breached. Indeed, Japanese commanders who sent two-man midget-submarine crews into Pearl Harbor on December 7 had gained permission from Admiral Yamamoto for the daring missions only on the assurance that there was at least some chance of rescuing the crews.

  But by April 1, 1945, when the Americans landed on Okinawa, Japan was confronted with the most powerful fleet in the history of warfare with no conventional mechanism for either sinking such an armada or turning it away. Japan’s best pilots were long dead. Its once legendary Zero was now outclassed by a variety of American fighters; and its capital ships were mostly sunk, in drydock, or without sufficient fuel. More important, with the beginning of the American B-29 fire raids in March 1945, the militarists could make the believable argument to both soldiers and civilians that the enemy meant not to defeat the Japanese armed forces but rather to destroy its very people.

  Still, the cornered Japanese military of 1944–45 was hardly unique in its hopelessness. The nature of civilized war in the past three millennia is replete with examples of doomed armies that quietly surrendered or were massacred without their commanders first inaugurating well-organized suicide squads—whether at Cannae, Constantinople, or Tannenberg. Rather, ideology and a fanaticism of sorts are also requisite if a nation is going to embrace the idea of sending its youth on missions of no return. In the case of Japan, well before
the Pacific war began to deteriorate, there were long-standing elements within its militarized society of the 1930s and 1940s that could prove conducive to suicide—should the need ever arise for the wholesale adoption of such ultimate sacrifice.

  Japanese culture until the nineteenth century was unusually feudal and hierarchical, run by assorted shoguns and their lesser lords, or daimyo, who held power through the employment of samurai warriors. The glue that held together the entire tribal system was a shame culture based on a variety of protocols that ensured absolute obedience to those in power—and a willingness of subordinates to die as part of their sworn fealty.

  The samurai code was not eccentric, but rather drew on a number of more traditional Japanese religious beliefs. Confucianism had always inculcated a need for strict loyalty and obedience to authority. Shintoism reminded soldiers that they were, in fact, offspring of divinities. If proven brave in battle, after death they would return to their godly existence. Even more mainstream Buddhism taught that life is tenuous. Death is not the end—merely a manifestation of a new and different sort of existence.

  Still, deep-seated confidence in authority, transcendence, and moral sanction, even when coupled with an absence of a Christian repugnance for suicide, by themselves are not incentives enough to create cadres of kamikazes—as the relatively traditional and humane behavior of Japanese soldiers in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and the First World War attest. To enlist thousands of suicide pilots it takes more than the absence of democracy, confidence in the afterlife, and few taboos against killing oneself.