The landing on Okinawa

At dawn on 1 April 1945, Easter Sunday, some 1,300 American warships and transports lay in the waters around Okinawa. At 8.30 a.m. the first waves of US Marines and Army infantry headed for the Hagushi beaches on the island’s west coast. The men, braced for a slaughter like the one the Marines had endured on Iwo Jima a few weeks earlier, came ashore with hardly any losses. Before noon they had taken two airfields, and by evening more than 60,000 men were on land. The day of the landing – “L-Day” (Love Day) in the American plans – also happened to be April Fools’ Day, which more than one soldier took as a grim joke of fate.

So began the main phase of Operation Iceberg – the Battle of Okinawa, the largest amphibious operation of the Pacific War and one of the bloodiest battles of the entire conflict. War chronologies record that the Americans “begin Operation Iceberg” and that the island was to serve as a springboard for the invasion of Japan. The second statement is accurate: Okinawa was taken precisely as a base for the planned landings on the Japanese Home Islands. The first needs qualifying – Operation Iceberg had begun several days earlier, on 26 March, with landings on the nearby Kerama Islands, and 1 April saw the landing on Okinawa itself.

Why Okinawa

Okinawa is the largest island of the Ryukyu archipelago, about 100 kilometres long and only a few kilometres wide at its narrowest point. It lies some 550 kilometres south of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands. For centuries it had been the centre of the Ryukyu Kingdom, bound to China by trade and tribute; in 1879 Japan abolished the kingdom and turned it into Okinawa Prefecture. The islanders had their own languages and customs, and for decades the authorities in Tokyo imposed Japanese language and culture on them and treated them with suspicion, as second-class citizens. In 1945, then, Okinawa was part of Japan – but a Japan of a particular kind.

The decision to land there was taken by the American Joint Chiefs of Staff in early October 1944. They abandoned the long-considered landing on Formosa (Taiwan): General Douglas MacArthur’s forces were to strike at Luzon, while Admiral Chester Nimitz’s were first to take Iwo Jima and then the Ryukyu Islands. As early as 10 October 1944 American carriers bombed Okinawa, destroying much of the island’s capital, Naha. The landing, originally set for 1 March, was postponed to 1 April because the fighting in the Philippines and on Iwo Jima lasted longer than expected.

Okinawa had what Iwo Jima lacked: spacious bays where a great fleet could anchor, and room for a dozen or more airfields for bombers and fighters. From the island Japan could be blockaded from the south and bombed at close range, and above all the invasion of Kyushu, planned for November 1945 as part of Operation Downfall, could be prepared. Both sides also understood that this would be the first battle fought in an area inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens.

Kerama and the preparations

The campaign opened with strikes in March by the carriers of Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58 against the airfields of Kyushu and the port of Kure, during which the Franklin was badly hit. From 23 March carrier aircraft, and from 24 March warships as well, bombarded Okinawa itself, while frogmen of the Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT) surveyed the reefs and cleared obstacles off the beaches.

On 26 March Major General Andrew Bruce’s 77th Infantry Division landed on the Kerama Islands, about 25 kilometres west of Okinawa. The group was to give the fleet a sheltered anchorage and a supply base. There the Americans found and destroyed several hundred motor boats hidden in the coves, intended to ram transports at night with explosive charges. The islands were taken within a few days at little cost. On 31 March the Marines occupied the islets of Keise without a fight, from where 155 mm guns could shell the southern part of Okinawa.

Kerama also saw the first tragedy of the civilian population. On the islands of Tokashiki, Zamami and Geruma hundreds of inhabitants took their own lives or killed their relatives – with grenades handed out by soldiers, with razors, sickles and stones. On Tokashiki alone, according to various sources, between more than 300 and nearly 400 people died in this way. In Japan these events were called “mass suicides” (shūdan jiketsu); today many historians, and the people of Okinawa themselves, prefer the term “compulsory mass deaths”, because these people acted under pressure from the army, which for months had drummed into them that American soldiers raped women and murdered children, and that captivity was a disgrace worse than death. The dispute over whether Japanese officers gave such orders continues to this day: between 2005 and 2011 a lawsuit was fought in Japan against the writer Kenzaburō Ōe, brought by the former commander of the Zamami garrison and relatives of the commander on Tokashiki, and an attempt to remove references to the army’s involvement from school textbooks provoked huge protests on Okinawa in 2007. The courts dismissed the case against Ōe, finding that the army had been deeply involved in these events.

South of Okinawa, meanwhile, Task Force 57 was in action – the core of the British Pacific Fleet, under Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser and commanded at sea by Vice Admiral Bernard Rawlings. From 26 March its four carriers attacked the airfields on the Sakishima Islands, between Okinawa and Formosa, so that Japanese aircraft could not use them to strike at the invasion fleet. This was the Royal Navy’s largest contribution to the Pacific War. The Japanese air arm did not stay idle: on 31 March a kamikaze hit the heavy cruiser Indianapolis, flagship of Admiral Raymond Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet, who had to shift his flag to the battleship New Mexico.

Ushijima’s plan

Okinawa was defended by the Japanese Thirty-Second Army under Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, who had taken command in August 1944. His chief of staff was General Isamu Chō, an advocate of attack, and his operations officer Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, a cool-headed strategist who persuaded his commander to fight a battle of attrition. At the end of 1944 Imperial General Headquarters took one of the army’s best divisions, the 9th, off the island and moved it to Formosa. Ushijima kept the 24th and 62nd Infantry Divisions and the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade; from the crews of the suicide boats and from rear-area formations he raised additional infantry battalions. Estimates of the army’s strength range from 67,000 to 77,000 men; to these must be added some 9,000 sailors under Rear Admiral Minoru Ōta on the Oroku Peninsula, mostly untrained for land combat, and tens of thousands of Okinawans called up into an auxiliary militia (Bōeitai) and for construction work. Secondary-school pupils were also pressed into service: boys into the Blood and Iron Imperial Corps (Tekketsu Kinnōtai), girls as nurses.

Knowing he could not stand up to American naval gunfire on the beaches, Ushijima chose not to defend them. At the Hagushi beaches and the Kadena and Yomitan airfields he left only weak detachments, concentrating his main forces in the south of the island, on a belt of hills and ridges running across it from bay to bay. In the stony slopes, old Okinawan tombs and caves his soldiers carved out a network of bunkers and tunnels. The heart of the defence was the Shuri Line, named after the kingdom’s old capital; the Thirty-Second Army’s headquarters lay underground beneath Shuri Castle. The aim was not to repel the landing but to tie the Americans down on the island for as long as possible and inflict the heaviest possible losses – buying the time Japan needed to prepare the defence of the Home Islands, in the hope that its air force and navy would meanwhile destroy the American fleet.

That second task belonged to the Ten-gō plan, adopted by Imperial General Headquarters in the first months of 1945. It envisaged massed attacks by army and navy aircraft – to a large extent kamikaze aircraft – on the invasion fleet off the Ryukyus. The main striking force was Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki’s Fifth Air Fleet on Kyushu. Japanese intelligence correctly predicted where the Americans would land: the Thirty-Second Army expected a landing precisely on the Hagushi beaches, by six to ten divisions.

L-Day

The landing was carried out by the American Tenth Army under Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., son of a Confederate general, who had earlier commanded the defence of Alaska. At the start of the battle it numbered some 183,000 men. Transport and cover were the responsibility of Task Force 51 under Vice Admiral Richmond Turner, a veteran of landings from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima. On the northern stretch of beaches landed Major General Roy Geiger’s III Amphibious Corps of Marines (the 6th and 1st Marine Divisions); on the southern, Major General John Hodge’s Army XXIV Corps (the 7th and 96th Infantry Divisions). The boundary between the corps was the mouth of the Bishi River.

The day was fine and the sea calm. At 4.06 a.m. Turner gave the signal “Land the landing force”. At 5.30 a.m. ten battleships, nine cruisers, 23 destroyers and 177 gunboats opened fire on the coast. According to the US Army’s official history, 44,825 shells of 5-inch (127 mm) calibre and above, 33,000 rockets and 22,500 mortar rounds were fired that morning – the heaviest concentration of naval gunfire ever to support a landing. Carrier aircraft circled over the beaches, bombing and strafing the shore.

At 8 a.m. amphibious tanks set off from the line of departure, some 3.5 kilometres offshore, followed by waves of amphibious tractors carrying infantry. The coral reef did not stop the tracked vehicles, although the landing craft of later waves had trouble with it. The first units came ashore at around 8.30 a.m. and were astonished to find that nobody was shooting at them. Instead of fire from bunkers they found cultivated fields, stone walls and Okinawan tombs scattered over the slopes. Among the Marines who went ashore with the 1st Division was the war correspondent Ernie Pyle, known for his reporting from North Africa, Italy and France; in his dispatches from those days he described soldiers who could not believe their own luck.

The advance moved quickly. At around 10 a.m. patrols of the 7th Division reached Kadena airfield, which turned out to be deserted, and at 11.30 a.m. Marines of the 6th Division took the larger airfield near Yomitan (“Yontan” in American documents). Both were littered with wrecked Japanese aircraft and abandoned stores. By evening the beachhead was some 14 kilometres long and up to 4.5 kilometres deep in places, and – according to the US Army’s official history – more than 60,000 troops were ashore, including the reserve regiments of the assault divisions, all the divisional artillery and numerous tanks. Losses on the first day were surprisingly light – the ground forces lost a few dozen killed.

It was bloodier at sea. On the south-east coast, near Minatoga, the 2nd Marine Division staged a feint landing to pin Japanese reserves there: boats full of troops ran in towards the beach and turned back at the last moment. It was this demonstration group that became the target of kamikazes, which damaged a transport and a tank landing ship. According to some accounts, the feint group lost more men that day than the divisions landing on the Hagushi beaches. Suicide aircraft also hit the battleship West Virginia, a veteran of Pearl Harbor, and several other vessels. To the south a kamikaze struck the base of the island of the British carrier Indefatigable; thanks to her armoured flight deck the ship was operating aircraft again that same day.

The islanders

Okinawa was the first place where the Americans fought among so large a Japanese civilian population. Several hundred thousand people lived on the island before the battle. After the fall of Saipan the authorities ordered the evacuation of some of the elderly, women and children to Kyushu and Formosa, but only a few tens of thousands were taken away, and the evacuation was undermined by the tragedy of the Tsushima Maru, sunk in August 1944 by an American submarine with hundreds of schoolchildren on board. Most of the inhabitants stayed on the island; many from the south were moved to the sparsely populated, mountainous north.

For months propaganda and the army had told them that the Americans were beasts and that death was the only honourable way out. When the warships opened fire on 1 April, thousands of people from the area around the Hagushi beaches took refuge in caves, known on Okinawa as gama. Their fates showed how much depended on who was inside. In Chibichiri cave near Yomitan, which the Americans reached on 2 April, more than 80 people, most of them women and children, died in a mass suicide urged on by, among others, men who had seen the war in China at first hand and spoke of the atrocities committed there by soldiers. In the nearby Shimuku cave some 1,000 people survived because two men who had once worked in Hawaii and knew Americans persuaded them to come out and surrender.

Civilians who found themselves in areas taken by the Americans came under military government. At first they were held in fenced camps, later moved to surviving villages, where they received food and medical care. The worst was still to come: in the south of the island, where the heaviest fighting took place, civilians died in artillery fire, from hunger, at the hands of soldiers of both sides and in further compulsory mass suicides. The Okinawans called the battle the “typhoon of steel” (tetsu no bōfū).

What came next

The rapid progress of the first days did not last. On 2 April the 7th Division reached Nakagusuku Bay on the east coast, cutting the island in two. The 6th Marine Division pushed north and on 13 April reached the northern tip of Okinawa, but still had to take the Japanese-held mountains of the Motobu Peninsula. The divisions of XXIV Corps turned south and after a few days ran into the first fortifications of the Shuri Line; from 9 April bloody fighting raged for Kakazu Ridge.

At sea, 6 April saw the first of the massed kamikaze operations known as kikusui (“floating chrysanthemums”, after the crest of the 14th-century hero Masashige Kusunoki). Several hundred aircraft from Kyushu attacked the radar picket destroyers and the ships off the island. At the same time the battleship Yamato and her escort sailed from the Inland Sea towards Okinawa as part of Operation Ten-Go – on a voyage from which she was not to return. By the end of June the Japanese had carried out ten such massed attacks and many smaller ones.

The battle lasted almost three months. General Buckner was killed by an artillery shell on 18 June, a few days before the fighting ended; Ushijima and Chō committed suicide at the end of June, as organised resistance in the south of the island was collapsing. According to American figures some 12,500 Americans died, including nearly 5,000 sailors – more than the US Navy lost in any other campaign. Thirty-six ships and vessels were sunk and several hundred damaged. Japanese military losses are estimated at 77,000–110,000 killed. The highest price was paid by the islanders: estimates of civilian dead range from about 40,000 (American figures) to about 94,000 (Okinawa Prefecture figures), and together with the Okinawans conscripted into the army, frequent estimates put the dead at about a quarter of the island’s pre-war population.

Okinawa became what it was meant to be – a great air and naval base on Japan’s doorstep. The invasion of Kyushu it was to serve, however, never took place: the war ended in August 1945 after the dropping of the atomic bombs and the Soviet Union’s entry into the war against Japan. The losses suffered on Okinawa – as earlier on Iwo Jima – nevertheless weighed on American estimates of the cost of landing on the Home Islands and on the decisions that ended the war. The island remained under American administration until 1972, and American bases, Kadena foremost among them, are still there today. In 1995 the Cornerstone of Peace memorial was unveiled at Mabuni in the south of the island, inscribed with the names of all the battle’s known victims – civilians and soldiers, Japanese, Okinawans, Koreans and Americans.