The death of Admiral Ōta

During the night of 12–13 June 1945, in an underground command post dug into a hill above Oroku airfield on the southern edge of Naha, Rear Admiral Minoru Ōta, commander of the Japanese naval forces on Okinawa, took his own life. According to Japanese sources, he shot himself at about one o’clock in the morning of 13 June; several officers of his staff died with him. On the Oroku Peninsula a ten-day battle was just coming to an end, in which the US 6th Marine Division destroyed the last units of the Japanese navy holding out on the island.

Many war chronologies state under 13 June that “Japanese Admiral Ōta Minoru, together with thousands of soldiers of his surrounded naval brigade, committed ritual suicide because he had failed to defend Okinawa”. This needs several qualifications. Ōta was a rear admiral and was promoted to vice admiral only posthumously; he commanded not a brigade but the Okinawa Naval Base Force – a medley of the fleet’s ground, technical and air units. Suicide was committed by him and his staff, and by some of the men in the last hours of the fighting; most of the nearly 10,000 men at his disposal at the start of the battle, however, had already been killed in combat – at Shuri and on the Oroku Peninsula itself – and about two hundred surrendered. Finally, Ōta was not responsible for the defence of Okinawa as a whole: that was in the hands of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, to whom the navy was subordinate.

Sailors as infantry

Ōta, a native of Chiba Prefecture and a 1913 graduate of the Naval Academy, was one of the few Japanese admirals with experience of fighting on land. He had commanded a battalion of the Special Naval Landing Forces – Japan’s naval infantry – during the Shanghai Incident of 1932, had taken part in the capture of Hainan in 1939, and in 1942 was to have led the landing on Midway Atoll, which was called off after the defeat of the Japanese carriers in the Battle of Midway. In 1943 his 8th Combined Special Naval Landing Force defended New Georgia. He took command on Okinawa on 20 January 1945.

The forces he found there resembled an army in name only. According to the American official history (Roy Appleman and co-authors, Okinawa: The Last Battle), the naval units on the island initially numbered nearly 10,000 men, but fewer than a third were regular sailors; the rest were newly conscripted civilian labourers and local home guard. Barely two or three hundred had been trained for ground combat. They included the crews of coastal batteries, the ground staff of Oroku airfield – the largest the Japanese built on Okinawa – a construction battalion, a midget submarine unit and torpedo workshops. What the sailors did have was an enormous quantity of automatic weapons: cannon and machine guns removed from damaged aircraft and set up in camouflaged shelters among the hills of the peninsula.

Ōta’s main headquarters was a system of tunnels dug in 1944 by a naval construction battalion in a hill above the airfield, in what is now the city of Tomigusuku. About 450 metres of passages linked an operations room, a cipher room – from which, according to Japanese figures, some 2,900 signals were sent during the battle – a medical room and quarters for the men; on the worst days up to 4,000 people are said to have crowded into them.

The retreat that never was

For the first month of the battle, which began with the American landing on 1 April, Ōta’s sailors took no part in the fighting at the front. Meanwhile the fleet was sending its own ships to their deaths – the Yamato was sunk on 7 April on her way to Okinawa – along with hundreds of kamikaze aircraft. From the Thirty-Second Army’s counter-attack of 4 May, however, Ushijima began to throw naval battalion after naval battalion into the Shuri line, where they suffered appalling losses; one torpedo unit went into battle with three times as many men as rifles.

When at the end of May the Thirty-Second Army abandoned Shuri Castle and withdrew to the southern tip of the island, the navy was to join it in a designated area in the south. As a result of an ambiguous order – and, according to Japanese accounts, also because the navy was informed of the decision to withdraw late – Ōta’s units destroyed the heavy weapons and stores they could not carry and set off on 26 May, two days ahead of schedule. The new positions proved useless, young officers begged to be allowed “to die where we built our positions”, and on the night of 28–29 May about two thousand sailors returned to Oroku – by now without most of their heavy weapons, and some without rifles. Versions of this episode differ: Hiromichi Yahara, the Thirty-Second Army’s operations officer, wrote of a misunderstanding at headquarters, while Appleman writes of an unauthorised decision by Ōta taken without consulting the army. When on 2 June Ushijima repeated the order to withdraw south, Ōta did not carry it out; it is not known whether by choice or because the Americans were already cutting the road.

The landing on Oroku

The commander of the Tenth Army, General Simon Bolivar Buckner, and the commander of III Amphibious Corps, General Roy Geiger, decided to destroy the naval forces rather than merely cut them off. Since the roads, washed out by the rains, were of only limited use, the commander of the 6th Marine Division, General Lemuel Shepherd, chose an amphibious assault across Naha harbour. At 4.45 a.m. on 4 June the artillery began an hour-long preparation in which some 4,300 shells fell on the hills above the beaches; a few minutes before 6 a.m. the first units of the 4th Marines, carried in amphibious tractors from the mouth of the Asato River, came ashore on the northern tip of the peninsula. Before noon the 29th Marines landed, and a reconnaissance company seized an islet in the middle of the harbour, across which a pontoon bridge was soon laid.

On the first day the Marines advanced a kilometre and a half; then the attack stalled. The valleys between the hills, planted with sugar cane, were thickly mined and swept by fire from machine guns and 20 mm and 40 mm cannon in concealed embrasures; tanks sank into the mud or halted in front of minefields. Hill 57 in the middle of the peninsula fell only on 7 June. On the same day the 1st Marine Division reached the sea at the base of the peninsula, enclosing Ōta’s sailors in a ring, and Shepherd committed the 22nd Marines, which attacked from the south. By 10 June the Japanese were crowded into an area of about one kilometre by two around the hills near the village of Tomigusuku; during the night they launched a series of desperate counter-attacks, after which the Americans counted about two hundred dead in front of their lines.

On the morning of 11 June eight Marine battalions, supported by tanks, launched the final assault. That day Ōta sent Ushijima his last report: “Enemy tank groups are now attacking our cave headquarters. The Naval Base Force is dying gloriously at this moment… We are grateful for your past kindnesses and pray for the success of the Army” (as quoted in the official history of the Marine Corps). On 12 June the Japanese defence collapsed. The men driven from the hills onto the coastal marshes were seized by panic; some fought to the end, some blew themselves up with grenades or lay down on explosive charges, and on 12 and 13 June 159 men surrendered – the first such large group of Japanese prisoners in the battle. On the afternoon of 13 June Shepherd reported to Geiger that organised resistance on Oroku had ceased; mopping-up of the peninsula continued until 14 June.

Death in the tunnels

According to Japanese records, Ōta shot himself in his room in the tunnels at about one o’clock during the night of 12–13 June. The marks of the grenades with which his officers took their own lives can still be seen on the wall of the staff room. The Marines reached the cave a few days later: according to Appleman, on 15 June they found the bodies of the admiral and five officers of his staff laid out on a raised platform in one of the passages, and nearly two hundred other bodies around them. Accounts differ as to the manner of death – the American official history speaks of cut throats, Japanese sources of a pistol shot; news of the discovery of the bodies was reported on 19 June by the soldiers’ newspaper Stars and Stripes. Ōta was posthumously promoted to vice admiral.

According to the official history of the Marine Corps, the toll of the ten days of fighting was almost 5,000 Japanese killed, nearly two hundred prisoners, 30 American tanks put out of action and 1,608 Marines killed or wounded. Appleman notes that, in proportion to the enemy’s strength, the fighting against the half-trained sailors cost the Americans more than the assault on the Shuri line, defended by regular infantry.

The telegram of 6 June

Ōta went down in history not for the defence of Oroku but for the signal he sent at 8.16 p.m. on 6 June to the Vice-Minister of the Navy, Vice Admiral Takeo Tada. Instead of the customary farewell formulas – cheers for the Emperor and wishes for the prosperity of the empire – he described in it the fate of the people of Okinawa. He noted that this report should have been made by the prefectural governor, but the civil administration had lost communications and the Thirty-Second Army staff was occupied with its own traffic. He wrote that the army, absorbed in fighting, had had no time to look after the population; that the men had been drafted into the defence, while women, children and the elderly were hiding in shelters exposed to shellfire and rain; that girls were nursing the wounded and carrying ammunition; that people without transport were wandering at night in the downpour in search of food, and that supplies would run out by the end of June. “There are no trees, there is no grass; everything has been burned down to the bare earth,” one translation reads. The signal closed with a sentence that almost everyone on Okinawa knows today: “This is how the people of Okinawa Prefecture fought. I ask that special consideration be given to them in the future.”

Some researchers believe that the prefectural governor, Akira Shimada, with whom Ōta was in close contact, may have had a hand in drafting the text – this is a supposition, not an established fact. The telegram is one of the rare voices from the Japanese command that recognised the suffering of civilians. That does not change the fact that on Okinawa, according to estimates, between about 40,000 (American figures) and about 94,000 (figures of Okinawa Prefecture) civilians died, and, together with mobilised Okinawans, according to the prefecture more than 120,000 of the island’s inhabitants; some of them lost their lives at the hands of Japanese soldiers or in coerced mass suicides.

What came next

The fall of Oroku deprived the Thirty-Second Army of its last organised force outside the Yaeju-dake and Yuza-dake ridges in the south of the island, where Ushijima was fighting his last battle. His army outlived Ōta by only nine days: Ushijima and his chief of staff, Isamu Chō, took their own lives on 22 June (23 June according to some sources), and the fighting on Okinawa came to an end. The mass surrender of Japanese soldiers that began on Oroku was repeated in the south on an even larger scale.

After the war the naval headquarters tunnels became a place of remembrance. In 1953 former sailors recovered from the collapsed passages the remains of more than 800 people, including the admiral, and in 1958 a further 1,500; in 1970 a restored section of the tunnels about 300 metres long was opened to visitors, and two years later a park was laid out around it. The words of the telegram of 6 June were invoked in post-war disputes over the fate of Okinawa, which remained under American administration until 1972, and Japanese politicians still quote them today when speaking of the debt the country owes to the island’s inhabitants.