The War Memorials

After the largest naval build-up in history congregated off Okinawa, American troops, supported by an immense naval bombardment, landed on Okinawa's beaches on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945. Thus began the bloodiest battle of the Pacific campaign—a battle that would last 82 days, during which time America's President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would die and Germany would officially surrender. The battle claimed more lives than the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The numbers are staggering: more than 12,000 Americans dead and 38,000 wounded; more than 107,000 Japanese conscripts dead and an estimated 100,000 civilians (many pressed into some sort of military duty) dead.

The fighting got heavier as the battle wore on. The initial landing found surprisingly light resistance. The Japanese army had fortified the interior of the island in ringed formations, stationed in caves and trenches in order to draw out the action and wear the American forces down. Fierce fighting would gain the Americans tiny increments of land, and the battle began to take on the characteristics of the trench warfare of World War 1. In late May the rains began, turning battlefields into muddy pits of waste and dead bodies. Some 26,000 Americans succumbed to combat stress, otherwise known as shell shock, and were removed from the front lines during the fight.

As the battle marched into June, Japanese forces began retreating south to the Kiyamu Peninsula. The Japanese soldiers were commanded to fight to the death. Rather than face capture, many blew themselves up with hand grenades. Only 465 Japanese troops were captured by early June, whereas 62,548 had been killed. Many Japanese soldiers, along with civilians, died in collapsed caves blown apart by the Americans and sometimes themselves. Even after the main Japanese forces had been thoroughly defeated, and the Japanese General Ushijima, likening himself to a samurai, stabbed himself in ritual suicide on June 22, brutal fighting continued against pockets of Japanese fighters for two more weeks.