THREE ON OKINAWA: MUD, BLOOD, VICTORY

The enemy waited patiently, heavily dug in. Okinawa was like the trench warfare of World War I, but worse.

By Walter R. Borneman

The Wall Street Journal
April 17, 2020

Seventy-five years ago, on Easter Sunday 1945, the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific war landed on the beaches of the Japanese island of Okinawa. Driving ashore, Sgt. Bob Dick steered his Sherman tank up a dirt road behind the beachhead and expected to be pummeled by enemy fire. Instead, up and down the landing zone there was no opposition. “The lack of any enemy,” Dick remembered, “seemed almost scary.” It would prove to be the calm before the storm.

American commanders, who viewed long and narrow Okinawa as a critical staging area for a likely invasion of Japan’s home islands, were pulling no punches. Although the invasion force involved some 1.5 million men and 1,500 ships, the brunt of the fighting ashore would be borne by Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr.’s Tenth Army, comprising four Army infantry divisions and three Marine divisions, totaling in excess of 180,000 combat troops.

Sgt. Dick’s 96th Infantry Division, nicknamed “the Deadeyes,” turned south from the beachhead and, with another division, quickly reached the opposite coast, cutting the 65-mile-long island roughly in half. Meanwhile, two Marine divisions struck northward. They were all ahead of schedule, but “these first four days,” Marine Pfc. E.B. Sledge later remembered, “had been too easy for us.” Three recent books chronicle the hell that followed.

In “Crucible of Hell” (Hachette, 448 pages, $30), Saul David, whose previous books cover a wide swath of British military history, relies heavily on Gen. Buckner’s diary and the papers of his deputy chief of staff, Marine Brig. Gen. Oliver P. Smith. The first days of quiet on Okinawa ended with the realization that the Japanese were waiting patiently, heavily dug in and determined to fight to the death. Confronting what he termed “the strongest position yet encountered in the Pacific,” Buckner confided that his troops faced “a slow tedious grind with flamethrowers, explosives placed by hand and the closest of teamwork to dislodge them without very heavy losses.”

But heavy losses there would be, in large part because, as Joseph Wheelan underscores in “Bloody Okinawa” (Hachette, 419 pages, $30), the “defense in depth” tactics employed by the Japanese were unique to the Pacific war. “The Japanese had transformed 20 square miles of ridges, escarpments, valleys, and gorges into a chain of linked underground positions carved out of the area’s jumbled terrain.” It was as if the Americans were fighting the trench warfare of World War I, but worse. The so-called Shuri Line, Mr. Wheelan asserts, would become over 10 days of fighting “a goulash of mud, blood, and dismembered corpses.”

As this horror played out on land, there was equal hell at sea. Both authors devote chapters to the naval battles in the waters surrounding Okinawa and the toll of ships and sailors extracted by Kamikaze attacks. The mantra of these suicide pilots was “One plane for one ship.” If not for premature explosions and faulty navigation, American losses might have been higher.

Both books emphasize the suffering of the 450,000 civilians who were caught up in the carnage, surrounded by tragedy and consumed by fear. A third of them perished. American views of their Japanese opponents were heavily tinged with racism and an abiding animosity stemming from Pearl Harbor. The Japanese, particularly civilians, had been indoctrinated to dread a murderous horde of invaders.

In “Bloody Okinawa,” Mr. Wheelan, the author of “Midnight in the Pacific” (2017), about Guadalcanal, presents a barrage of statistics, detailing numbers of bombs, artillery pieces, units and combatants. “Crucible of Hell” tends toward deeper background on the veterans who are quoted, but Mr. David also digresses into chapters heavy with the development of the atomic bomb, Franklin Roosevelt’s death and correspondent Ernie Pyle’s loss at the front.

Both writers not only mine oral-history interviews and unit histories but also give attention to prominent memoirs of the campaign. Mr. Wheelan turns to E.B. Sledge’s 1981 memoir, “With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa.” In Mr. David’s case, it is “Goodbye, Darkness” (1980), William Manchester’s account of his time as a Marine throughout the Pacific. Art Shaw offers another perspective.

At the time of the Okinawa battle, Shaw was a 25-year-old Army major in command of a field artillery unit. “We all started out,” he remembers, “as average young guys growing up in average American towns doing average things like playing baseball or tormenting the girls.” Shaw, who died a month ago at 99, describes the hell they all came to experience in “82 Days on Okinawa” (Morrow, 348 pages $28.99), with collaborator Robert L. Wise.

His is a gritty, first-person account remembered from the vantage point of 75 years later. One can hear Shaw’s voice as if he were sitting beside you reminiscing through misty eyes about the defining moments of his youth. When the campaign was finally over, “every single person who had survived the battle,” he says, “knew they were lucky to still be alive.”

By the time Japanese resistance on Okinawa ended in mid-June 1945, 82 days after the first landings, names like Hacksaw Ridge, Sugar Loaf Hill and Kunishi Ridge—what some Marines called “one ridge too many”—were written in blood. Among those lost in the final hours was Gen. Buckner, struck down by shrapnel as he visited a frontline observation post.

Mr. David in particular details Buckner’s last day as well as the charge that Buckner should have conducted a secondary landing in the rear of the enemy’s defenses. The general himself maintained that the maze of honeycombed defenses had no soft side. A veteran of the action agreed: “Infantry, old fashioned and direct and bloody and full of casualties [was] the only way to overrun them.”

While all three books are worthy additions to the literature of the Okinawa campaign, the most informed history may still be “Okinawa: The Last Battle,” the official U.S. Army history by Roy E. Appleman et al., published in 1948. From the Japanese side, there is “The Battle for Okinawa” by Hiromichi Yahara, architect of the strategy to build interior defenses in depth and not defend the beaches.

How much the bitter struggle on Okinawa—suggesting similar horrors if the U.S. invaded Japan’s home islands—influenced the decision to drop the atomic bomb in August continues to be debated. For the men who survived Okinawa, indeed for the men who fought throughout the Pacific, one thought was paramount: They were alive, and they were going home.

EDITOR'S NOTE: With the new military technology, American soldiers are not likely to ever face the fiercely horrifying fighting they experienced in WW2, Korea and Vietnam.

This article was of particular interest to me because for a short period of time I was on Okinawa.

It's a good thing we had the A-bombs and that Truman had them dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in the immediate surrender of the Japs. If we had invaded Japan itself, we would have been faced with the same type of resistance, leading to uncountable deaths on both sides.