Okinawa was to hold out as long as possible to make the supporting American fleet a target as long as possible.
This was the order which Major General Isamu Cho took down to Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima in January of 1945.
They had served together in Burma, Ushijima as an infantry group commander, Cho as chief of staff of the Southern Army. They had returned to Japan together, Ushijima to become Commandant of the Japanese Military Academy, Cho to serve on the General Military Affairs Bureau. They had come to Okinawa together, Ushijima to command the Japanese 32nd Army, Cho to be his chief of staff. And they were as unlike as two men could be.
Lieutenant General Ushijima, graying, a senior officer in line for full general, was a man of great presence and serenity, capable of inspiring his subordinates, capable of seeing his own incapacities. To fill these he had chosen Major General Cho, a firebrand of fifty-one years, already in line for his second star, a planner and an organizer, strict but resourceful, aggressive, and so invincible in argument as to be unpopular.
Since August of 1944, when Ushijima had taken command on Okinawa, the two men had been anticipating Tokyo’s orders to fight the kind of battle which would bleed the Americans white. Their plans were reflected in the 32nd Army’s battle slogans:
Fulfillment of the first slogan was up to the kamikaze, for General Ushijima had little air power based on Okinawa’s five airfields.
The second would be handled by nautical Divine Winds of the Sea Raiding Squadrons. They were enlisted youths fresh out of high school, trained to ram explosive-stuffed motor-boats into American ships. There were about 700 suicide boats hidden in the Ryukyus, and about 350 were only about 15 miles west of southern Okinawa in the islets of the Kerama Retto.
The third stricture was left to a force of about 100,000 men, of whom about a fifth were conscripted from an Okinawan population of nearly half a million people. The great bulk of these men were concentrated in the southern third of Okinawa’s 485 square miles, where a fantasia of cliffs and caves made formidable defensive terrain.
Here Ushijima began to build a line facing north like a broad arrowhead. Its point rested on the heights surrounding Shuri and Shuri Castle, the city and citadel of Okinawa’s ancient kings. Its flanks swept back to the sea on either side, through a jungle of ridges to the chief city of Naha on the west or left, through similar hills back to Yonabaru Airfield on the right. It was the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line. It held the bulk of Ushijima’s fighting men—the 62nd Division which had served in China, the 24th Division, and the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade. To its left on Oroku Peninsula jutting into the sea west of Naha were about 3,500 Japanese sailors and 7,000 Japanese civilians under Vice Admiral Minoru Ota. Roughly 3,000 soliders of the 2nd Infantry Unit under Colonel Takehiko Udo held the wild, uninhabited northern half of Okinawa—that part which Ushijima under the urging of Cho had chosen not to defend. Nor would Ushijima attempt to defend the Hagushi Beaches in west central Okinawa. He would defend the Minatoga Beaches to the south because they were in the rear of his Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line, but he would defend almost nothing north of that line, except, of course, its approaches. He would not even defend Yontan and Kadena Airfields to the east of the Hagushi Beaches. These would be wrecked the moment the Americans appeared by a special force drawn from the
There was indeed little to love about the Great Loo Choo, as Okinawa was called when Chinese influence was great enough to give the entire chain its original name of the Loo Choos or “bubbles floating on water.” Japanese military power and Japanese difficulty in pronouncing the letter L changed it to Ryukyus in 1875, but even the Divine Emperor could do nothing about those floating bubbles. Neither Eritrea nor the Belgian Congo is more humid than Okinawa, and the Great Loo Choo’s skies are capable of pouring out 11 inches of rainfall in a single day. Its people, of mixed Chinese, Malayan and Ainu blood, are among the most docile in the world.
The Okinawans have no history of war. They neither make nor carry arms, a fact which filled Napoleon with enraged incredulity in the early nineteenth century, and which, in the mid-twentieth, led the Japanese to regard the Okinawans as an inferior race. Apart from those schoolteachers trained in Japan, Okinawans were disdained as good for nothing but farming their tiny plots of sweet potatoes, sugar cane or rice. So spurned, they resented their masters and clung doggedly to their Chinese culture.
“The houses and customs here resemble those of China,” a Japanese private wrote in his diary. “They remind one of a Chinese town.”
Christ, Allah and Buddha had been to Okinawa with venturesome European and Malay sailors, with Chinese culture—but the people still practiced a primitive animism while worshipping the bones of their ancestors. These were placed in urns kept within lyre-shaped tombs sprinkled over plains and low hillsides. Many tombs within the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line had also been fitted with machine guns and cannon, and strengthened by those diggers and drillers of Ushijima’s unwilling
Conscription of the
“I cannot bear having just a cup of rice for a meal with no side dishes at all,” a soldier wrote. “Our health will be ruined.”
The lament was raised frequently elsewhere, and Ushijima took account of it by urging his men to “display a more firm and resolute spirit, hold to the belief of positive victory, and always remember the spirit of martyrdom and of dying for the good of the country.”
By way of consolation, the general issued each man a pint and a half of sweet-potato brandy, proclaimed a temporary amnesty for drunkards and promised another issue on April 13, when the Emperor Hirohito would become forty-four years old. That had been in January, just before General Ushijima dispatched General Cho to Tokyo on a flying visit.
Cho came back in late January. He reported that Ushijima’s defense plans dovetailed with Imperial Headquarters strategy and that he had been able to dispel some doubts about the decision not to defend the Hagushi Beaches. Cho was also elated by a secret report on the
“The brave ruddy-faced warriors with white silken scarves tied about their heads, at peace in their favorite planes, dash out spiritedly to the attack. The skies are slowly brightening.”
But the skies were rather darkening with the airplanes of the American Fast Carrier Forces which began striking the Great Loo Choo late that month. After the raid of January 22, a Japanese superior private wrote in his diary:
While some of the planes fly overhead and strafe, the big bastards fly over the airfield and drop bombs. The ferocity of the bombing is terrific. It really makes me furious. It is past three o’clock and the raid is still on. At six the last two planes brought the raid to a close. What the hell kind of bastards are they? Bomb from six to six!
They were “hard-nosed bastards,” these Americans, and there were more and bigger ones coming—both at the Ryukyus and Japan, both by air and by sea. Naha was being pounded to rubble and the wolf packs of the American submarine service were littering the floor of the China Sea with sunken cargo vessels and drowned soldiers.
“The enemy,” wrote another private, “is brazenly planning to destroy completely every last ship, cut our supply lines and attack us.”
