The Battle for Okinawa
Copyright © 2006, Henry J. Sage
The battle for Okinawa was the largest battle in the Pacific in World War II, and the landings on the island were supported by the most powerful fleet ever assembled. The invasion of Okinawa was set for April 1, 1945, and pre-invasion bombings from Saipan had been going on for weeks.
The island of Okinawa itself is larger than many of the islands which had previously been attacked. It is shaped something like a large combination banana and hourglass, with thick, uninhabited tropical jungle in the northern half and a heavily populated built-up area in the south, at the center of which is the capital city of Naha, which lies below a mountain topped by Shuri Castle. The population of Okinawa in 1945 was approximately half a million Okinawan natives, mostly civilians, who, although Okinawa was part of Japan, were separate race from the Japanese.
Given the size of the island the invasion force was large, consisting of three Marine divisions and four U.S. Army infantry divisions with a fifth U.S. infantry division in reserve, in all approximately 300,000 combat and support troops. Marine Lt. General Roy Geiger and Army. Lt. General Simon Bolivar Buckner, who commanded the Army divisions, were both experienced combat commanders and got a long quite well, in contrast to the friction that had occurred during some previous Army and Marine joint operations. The supporting fleet for the battle of Okinawa consisted of 40 large and small aircraft carriers, 18 battleships and hundreds of destroyers and cruisers.
There were several airfields on the island and the Americans anticipated that they would be fiercely defended by the 100,000 troops in the Okinawa Garrison. The Japanese plan was to let the Americans get ashore and then lure them into situations in which they could not be well supported by naval gunfire. The low mountains and gullies, in which natural and artificial caves protected had been prepared for defending troops and headquarters, made such a plan practical. The Japanese had also learned the lesson that defending against landings in close proximity to the beach areas was extremely costly.
The initial landings near the center of the island were virtually unopposed, and by the evening of the first day 50,000 troops were safely ashore. During the first few days of the invasion the resistance remained light. Within a matter of hours Americans had captured two of the airfields at Yonton and Kadena. But by the end of the first week the Army troops ran into fierce resistance north of the city of Naha. For days the American soldiers and Marines hammered at the heart of the Japanese defenses, and fierce Japanese counterattacks were repulsed with heavy casualties among the Japanese, but the defenses around the Shuri Castle mountain remained extremely strong.
While the fighting went on ashore, the Navy had to deal with the latest wave of Japanese defensive tactics, that of the fanatical kamikaze aircraft. Hundreds of kamikaze pilots flew their planes directly into the American ships, causing heavy casualties, especially among the ring of destroyers on picket duty around the invasion force. In addition to the kamikaze attacks the Japanese sent the giant battleship Yamato against the Americans in a last desperate attempt to protect the island which lay only a few hundred miles from Japan.
The fighting on land continued throughout May and into the middle of June until the Army and Marines finally secured the islands. By the 21st of June 7,000 US soldiers and Marines had been killed, including General Buckner. Five thousand sailors died in the kamikaze attacks and thousands more were wounded. On the islands 70,000 Japanese soldiers had died as well as 80,000 Okinawan civilians. An entire Japanese army had been destroyed and hundreds of planes and the battleship Yamato had been lost, but there was little sense of relief because the battle had been one of the most costly of the war.
Now that the Philippines had been secured the Central Pacific forces under Admiral Nimitz and the Southwest Pacific forces under General MacArthur were converging on a joint objective: the invasion of Japan. Tensions would grow between Army and Navy staffs, both of which had developed their own strategic, tactical and supply methods during the course of the war. With guidance from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, however, the staffs of Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur began to plan for an invasion of Japan.
Meanwhile B-29 bombers from the island of Saipan continued to rain destruction on the Japanese homeland. Although the Japanese still had an army of hundreds of thousands on the Chinese mainland, the Japanese Navy had been reduced to the point where any chance of moving soldiers back to the Japan itself would hardly have been possible. Although the invasion of Japan never took place, the initial assaults on the southern island of Kyushu would have involved over 700,000 men and casualties were expected to be in excess of 200,000.
The first operation against Japan was scheduled for November 1945, and the main invasion of the large island of Honshu for February or March 1946. The two operations combined would have involved over one million men. The Japanese were prepared to defend their homeland by all means available, including the employment of “all able-bodied Japanese regardless of sex.” Every Japanese citizen was commanded to be prepared to sacrifice his or her life in suicide attacks against the invaders, and explosives such as Molotov cocktails and other improvised weapons were being prepared.
But as the invasion of Okinawa was being wrapped up, final preparations were underway in Alamogordo, New Mexico, for the testing of the first atomic bomb.