Minoru Ōta

Minoru Ōta was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy who devoted almost his entire career to fighting on land. He commanded a battalion of sailors in Shanghai in 1932, a landing force on Hainan in 1939, the force that was to seize Midway Atoll, and the defence of New Georgia in the Solomon Islands. In January 1945 he took command of the naval forces on Okinawa, and in June he died together with his staff in an underground headquarters on the Oroku Peninsula. He has gone down in history, however, not as a commander but as the author of a cable of 6 June 1945 in which – instead of the customary acclamations of the Emperor – he described the suffering of the island’s inhabitants and asked that they be given special consideration in the future. On Okinawa his words are still invoked today.

Chiba and Etajima

Minoru Ōta was born on 7 April 1891 in Nagara in Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo. He finished the prefectural middle school in Chiba and, according to his Japanese biographers, passed the entrance examinations both for the Army Academy and for the Naval Academy. He chose the navy: in 1910 he entered the academy at Etajima as a member of its 41st class, graduating in December 1913 ranked 64th of 118. His classmates included the future chief of staff of the Combined Fleet, Ryūnosuke Kusaka, and Raizō Tanaka, commander of the “Tokyo Express” off Guadalcanal.

As a cadet he made a training cruise in 1914 aboard the armoured cruiser Azuma to Honolulu and the ports of the west coast of North America. He then served in the battleships Kawachi and Fusō, and after promotion to lieutenant in 1916 was sent to the naval gunnery school. At the end of 1917 he fell ill with tuberculosis (PL) and spent almost a year out of service. On his return he completed courses at the torpedo school and the advanced gunnery course, served in the battlecruiser Hiei and again in Fusō, and in the second half of the 1920s taught at naval schools. He specialised in a field that the fleet regarded as second-rate: land-warfare tactics, which he taught to sailors at Yokosuka and at the gunnery school.

Landing-force specialist

The Japanese navy had no separate marine corps. Instead it raised landing battalions from the sailors of its various bases, known from the late 1920s as the Special Naval Landing Forces (Kaigun Tokubetsu Rikusentai). At the end of 1928 Ōta joined the staff of the 1st Expeditionary Fleet, which was protecting Japanese settlers in Shandong province after the Jinan incident.

His real baptism of fire came in 1932. When fighting broke out in Shanghai at the end of January, Ōta took command of the 5th Battalion of the Shanghai landing force and fought with it until April. The Shanghai incident was the first major battle fought on land by Japanese sailors and also a hard lesson: the Chinese 19th Route Army resisted so stubbornly that the navy had to call in army divisions to help. In December 1932 Ōta was promoted to commander. According to Japanese sources, in February 1936, during the young officers’ revolt in Tokyo, he commanded one of the sailors’ battalions brought into the capital when the navy – three of whose admirals had been attacked by the conspirators – came down firmly against the rebels.

The war in China

Ōta did not, however, abandon his seagoing career, without which he could not have been promoted. In 1936 he became executive officer of the battleship Yamashiro, and in October 1937 he received his first independent command, the fleet oiler Tsurumi. In December that year he was promoted to captain. When the war with China spread along the whole coast, the navy drew on his landing experience: in 1938 he worked on the Naval General Staff on the plan to seize Hainan, and in February 1939, as commander of the Kure 6th Special Naval Landing Force, he landed on the island and took the port of Sanya at its southern tip.

In the spring of 1939 Ōta returned to Japan as deputy commander of the sailors’ training division at Kure. In the autumn of 1941 he was sent to China again, to head the navy’s special office in Hankou on the middle Yangtze, where the fleet maintained its river base.

Midway and New Georgia

In January 1942 Ōta returned home, and on 1 May he took command of the 2nd Combined Special Naval Landing Force. It was earmarked for a task meant to crown Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s plan: after the American carriers had been destroyed and the islands bombarded, Ōta’s sailors, together with Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki’s army detachment, were to land on Midway Atoll and occupy it. The transports carrying the landing force sailed from Saipan at the end of May, but the Battle of Midway decided their fate before they came near their objective: on 4 June the Japanese lost three carriers, and a fourth the next day, and Yamamoto called off the operation. The landing force never went ashore, and in July Ōta’s unit was disbanded. Ichiki’s detachment was almost entirely wiped out on Guadalcanal in August 1942.

On 1 November 1942 Ōta was promoted to rear admiral, and at the end of the month he took command of the 8th Combined Special Naval Landing Force in the central Solomon Islands. His sailors defended New Georgia and the airfield at Munda. When the Americans began the New Georgia campaign at the end of June 1943, overall command of the defence passed on 2 July to Major General Noboru Sasaki of the army, and Ōta’s forces were placed under him. According to American accounts some of his sailors fought against Marine raider battalions. After Munda fell at the beginning of August, Ōta withdrew with the rest of his men to neighbouring Kolombangara, from where, in the autumn of 1943, when the fighting for New Georgia came to an end, the Japanese evacuated further north.

In December 1943 Ōta took over the 14th Naval Base Force at Kavieng on New Ireland, near Rabaul, and in 1944 he returned to Japan, where he commanded guard and training units at the Sasebo naval base.

Okinawa

On 20 January 1945 Ōta became commander of the Okinawa Naval Base Force (Okinawa Hōmen Konkyochitai) and the senior naval officer on the island. His headquarters lay in a system of tunnels dug in the autumn of 1944 by some 3,000 men of a naval construction unit into a hill above Oroku airfield (today Naha Airport), on the boundary between Naha and Tomigusuku. The passages were about 450 metres long in all.

On paper Ōta had some 10,000 men under him, but they were more a scratch collection than an army. About half were labourers and local inhabitants mobilised on the spot with minimal training; the rest were airfield personnel, gunners from the coastal batteries and sailors without ships who did not know how to fight as infantry. The defence of the whole island was commanded by Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, commander of the 32nd Army, to whom Ōta was subordinate.

After the American landing on 1 April the brunt of the fighting fell on the army holding the Shuri line, while Ōta’s sailors remained on the Oroku Peninsula for nearly two months under fire from the sea and the air. The crisis came at the end of May. On 22 May the 32nd Army staff decided to abandon Shuri and withdraw to the southern tip of the island, and – according to Japanese accounts – the naval command was informed of this late. Ōta took the order to mean a complete withdrawal: he destroyed his heavy weapons and ammunition stocks and around 26 May set off south. It then turned out that the navy was only supposed to cover the army’s withdrawal; on 28 May its units returned to Oroku, but now without most of their heavy armament. Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, head of the 32nd Army’s operations section, later described the affair as a disastrous misunderstanding in the transmission of orders. When on 2 June the navy was again ordered to move south, Ōta no longer moved. It is not known whether he ignored the order deliberately or simply no longer had a line of retreat.

The Oroku Peninsula

On 4 June 1945 the 6th Marine Division landed on the northern coast of the Oroku Peninsula. The Americans expected 1,200–1,500 defenders and instead encountered several thousand sailors in fortified caves, armed with machine guns and cannon taken from aircraft. The fighting lasted ten days. According to the Marine Corps history, almost 5,000 Japanese were killed and nearly 200 taken prisoner – an unusual number at the time; the Marines lost 1,608 killed and wounded.

On the evening of 6 June, as the ring was closing, Ōta sent a farewell cable with a farewell poem, and at 8.16 p.m. that day a second one, addressed to the Vice-Minister of the Navy, Takeo Tada. It is this second cable that secured his place in history. It lacked the formulas obligatory in such reports – the acclamations of the Emperor and wishes for the prosperity of the empire. Ōta noted that the situation of the population ought to be reported by the governor, but the prefectural authorities had lost communications. He described the men called up for the defence; the women, children and elderly crowded into cramped shelters under fire; homes and belongings burnt; girls working as nurses and cooks; the population driven from place to place as the army’s plans changed; an island turned into ruins on which “not a tree, not a blade of grass” was left; and food that would run out at the end of June. He closed with words that in translation run roughly as follows: “This is how the people of Okinawa Prefecture fought. I ask that in future they be given special consideration.”

The text has survived with gaps where it is illegible, and its versions differ in detail. Some Japanese researchers believe that its content may have been prepared by the Governor of Okinawa, Akira Shimada, with whom Ōta was in close contact, and that the admiral merely passed it on through naval channels. The Americans also intercepted the cable; their translation survives in their archives.

Death in the underground headquarters

On 10 and 11 June the Americans hemmed the sailors into an ever tighter pocket around the hill with the headquarters. Ōta sent his last reports – according to the Marine Corps history, he reported that American tanks were attacking his cave and that his forces were “dying gloriously” – and on 12 June he sent a farewell cable to the 32nd Army staff. In the last days, according to the museum, up to 4,000 people crowded into the tunnels; some of them went out on final attacks, and many committed suicide. Ōta took his own life on the night of 12–13 June 1945; according to Japanese sources he shot himself, and the officers of his staff killed themselves with him. Accounts give slightly different dates for his death; Japanese documents record 13 June. The American military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported on 19 June that Marines who reached a hidden, flooded passage a few days after the hill was taken found in it the bodies of the admiral and five officers. Admiral Ōta’s death ended organised resistance on Oroku. He was posthumously promoted to vice admiral.

On the wall of his room in the tunnel there survives a poem written with a brush, which Ōta often repeated and which is regarded as his farewell poem. It says that only death under the Emperor’s banner gives meaning to having been born a man. Nine days later the whole Battle of Okinawa came to an end: on 22 June (23 June according to some sources) Ushijima and his chief of staff took their own lives at Mabuni, and the Americans announced the capture of the island. Estimates of the number of Okinawan civilians killed in the battle range from about 40,000 to more than 90,000 – the same people of whom Ōta had written in his cable.

Memory

In 1953 former sailors who had survived the battle found the entrance to the tunnels collapsed and the passages flooded; the remains of more than 800 people, including the admiral, were recovered, and more in the years that followed. In 1970 a restored part of the underground headquarters was opened to visitors as a museum, and the surrounding area was laid out as a park. The marks of the grenades with which the officers took their own lives can still be seen in the staff room.

The cable of 6 June became one of the most frequently quoted documents of the battle. It stands out among other reports by Japanese commanders of the time in that it speaks of the harm done to the population rather than of the glory of the fallen, and, as one of the few voices from the Japanese military, admits that the army and navy had had no time to look after the island’s inhabitants. That does not alter the fact that Ōta helped to organise a defence that brought catastrophe upon that population, and many Okinawans judge the conduct of the Japanese military on the island very harshly. Yet the words about “special consideration” for the prefecture are still invoked today both by islanders and by Japanese politicians in disputes over the post-war burdens borne by Okinawa, above all the American military bases.

Ōta had eleven children. His eldest son, Hideo, became a teacher and peace activist. His third son, Taosa Ochiai, served in the Maritime Self-Defense Force and in 1991, after the Gulf War, commanded the minesweeping group sent there – the first overseas mission of the Japanese armed forces since 1945.