American History Hit - The Battle of Okinawa

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Please note, this episode contains discussion of suicide.On 1 April 1945, as the Second World War in Europe was reaching its end, one of the bloodiest battles in the whole conflict commenced on a small island south of mainland Japan. It was the Battle of Okinawa.Saul David joined Dan Snow on our sister podcast, Dan Snow's History Hit, to provide a fascinating rundown of this truly horrific battle.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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April 6, 1945, more than 60,000 soldiers stormed ashore here in Okinawa. Now an armada of Allied ships waits offshore, supporting the invasion with firepower and supplies. The terrain for the men is tangled and rugged. They have been making only slow progress inland, trying to rest control of more and more of the island. Today, as the soldiers trudge onward, they hear a deep and distant thrum of plane engines, intensifying, then howling closer. These are soldiers who know the sounds of aerial attack too well. They spot a formation of Japanese flyers flying towards them and duck for cover, anticipating the impending rain of bullets.

But it never comes. No bullets, no attack. The planes fly on. Confused, relieved, the soldiers reemer. only to gaze out to sea and witness the unthinkable. Japanese planes diving straight at Allied ships and crashing into them. Boom, boom, boom. It is a horrific sight.

The planes, all manned by Japanese pilots, slam into one ship, then another, bursting into tremendous flames, twisted metal. It is the first wave of ten such attacks to come throughout the day. In the end, 355 kamikazis, part of an entirely new and desperate effort to shock the Allies into retreat. It won't work. But in the meantime, it is a new level of horror in what has been a year's long campaign rife with revulsion and terror. To hear more about Okinawa, our friend and colleague Dan Snow was joined by historian Saul David. Saul, good to have you on the show. You've been on once before, but I've never in person.

I know. It's good to talk to you in person. Good. So, monster campaign iconic in the States, not at all known about in the UK. Why do you decide to write Okinawa? For that reason. I mean, I knew very little about the Pacific War. I'd worked on a book that was published in America recently about special forces. And they touch on the Pacific War. They go to the Aleutian Islands, which is a kind of ghost campaign, because there's now actually fighting done on there. But it piqued my interest, I suppose. And I thought, well, what actually happened? It's so little known in Britain.

The Americans, of course, know a lot more about it. But even they, I think the main thrust of their interest is the D-Day and the Northwestern campaign after that. So both America and Britain, but particularly Britain, have concentrated really on the West. And this is the East, and I wanted to know what went on. And how did this story unfold? Because the fascinating thing about Okinawa is that it, from the start of the battle, it's just before the end of the war against Germany. end of the war in Europe. And it, of course, goes all the way to the end of the war in the Pacific. So it crosses those two boundaries. And lots of extraordinary things happening like the

death of Roosevelt halfway through the battle. And all these changes feed into what is an extraordinary moment in history. Right. Let's talk about how do we get to Okinawa. There's an island hopping strategy. What is island hopping? Yeah, island hopping. I mean, if we go all the way back to Pearl Harbor, you can see that Pearl Harbor, if you look at the Pacific, it's an enormous distance, thousands of miles, and Pearl Harbor is pretty much in the middle. And the Japanese have got all the way there. They've struck Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, brought the Americans into the war. And from that point onward, it's really the American's mission to get all the way across the rest of the Pacific to Japan. So how they're going to do that? Their strategy is twofold.

They're going to island hop through the Central Pacific, but also they're going to move from Australia up through New Guinea and the Philippines. So you've really got these two prime. And where those two prongs come together is the island of Okinawa. Okanawa is important because it is actually Japanese territory? It is Japanese territory. It's a prefecture of Japan with the 47th and most southerly prefecture. It, of course, had been taken over by the Japanese, maybe 60 or 70 years earlier. But it's now fully integrated into the Japanese political system.

And therefore, it's the first time the Allies get to a bit of Japanese soil proper. What's significant about the island of Okinaw is pretty big. It's 70 miles long, and it is really going to form a massive floating aircraft carrier for the Americans and the Allies. In fact, the British are there in decent numbers with the British Pacific Fleet. The biggest fleet we ever put together during the whole of the Second World War, and it's virtually unknown the story of the British Pacific Fleet. But they're going to use this island as a hopping point for the final attack on Japan. Lots of people have heard of Iwo Jima, which is a bit earlier. Is this, is it a Is Okinawa kind of another leap forward from Irojima? Just one step on. Ewo Jima's battle has taken place a couple of months earlier, a bloodbath. I mean, arguably the most brutal fight on the Pacific. Its casualties don't rank with Okinaw, which was the bloodiest fight of the Pacific in terms of numbers, because more soldiers are involved.

It's a bigger island. They're more Japanese defenders. And the Japanese, to be truthful, are fighting tooth and nail because this is, as I say, part of Japan proper. But Iwo Jima was still pretty terrible. And the casualty rates on both sides were horrific. And it's one of the few battles where American casualties almost mirrored Japanese casualties. But just two months later, having now taken Iwo Jima, these two prongs finally meet on Okinawa. And if they can get Okinawa, really, they believe the end of the war is in sight. Why is that? Because of the ability to launch air, even greater volume of

attacks on the home islands or because it will be a jump off place for amphibious assault? Both things. It's only 400 miles from the southernmost home island of Japan. Kayushu, Honshu, which is where Tokyo is a little bit further north than that. But Honshu is only 400 miles away. A lot of air assets, a lot of Japanese air assets on Honshu, military bases on Honshu, if they can attack Honshu, which is the plan, there was a plan in place. They were going to put it into operation in November 1945. We'll come on to that bit of the story, I'm sure. But first, they need to take Okinaw. Once they've got Okinawa, they think they can launch this final assault. So what are we talking? What are the Japanese

defenders up to at this point? Are they cut off from supplies? Are they sort of starving garrison? Are they quite well supplied? They're pretty well supplied because they are still quite close. The Americans never sever the sea route until the battle actually starts. And the fifth, the US fifth fleet is there in force. So the Japanese are getting supplies to, both by ship and also by plane pretty much until the battle starts. Again, the distance from Honshu, the most sudden Japanese home island is important because 400 miles is very short for a flight. Operational flights over the island, they are going to use an enormous number of planes, many of them kamikazis to help defend the island, but they've also got a sizable garrison

on the island itself. And their orders are? Fight to the last man. I mean, this is the end game of the Second World War. The Japanese, interesting enough, haven't given up at this point. When you look at the documents relating to what's going on at the high command at the highest level in Japan, there's clearly a strategy. Whether you think, with the benefit of hindsight, the strategy had any chance of succeeding as another matter, but the strategy was to inflict such a crushing defeat on the Americans, particularly their fleet, that it'll force them to negotiating table and that the horror that is facing the Japanese regime and particularly the Japanese emperor, which is unconditional surrender, they'll manage to bat that away and they can negotiate

some kind of peace that will maybe they think even allow them to keep some of their colonial possessions. Meanwhile, the Americans are now bringing astonishing overwhelming force to bear. Can you give me a sense of their naval assets and the men that were all thrown into the battle? enormous numbers of planes, ships and men are involved in this. Half a million soldiers carried by 1,300 craft of various different sizes. The fleet in being that was there numbered 20 aircraft carriers alone, enormous numbers of battleships, cruisers. I mean, this is the biggest sea armada in terms of firepower that's ever been assembled. And it was all for one purpose, which is to land an army big enough on Okinawa to capture the island.

Clearly, that was going to happen. So the Japanese defenders, they knew it was going to happen. They knew the fleet was coming close. So their endgame is twofold. They're going to use their air assets to try, mainly kamikaze's, to try and deliver a crushing blow to the American fleet. But secondly, they're going to fight a defensive war of attrition on the island itself, which is going to bleed the Americans white.

This is very unusual tactics for the Japanese. They're very aggressive in their tactics, all their training in the 1930s is to fight, you know, wars of movement. Now they're going to hide themselves away in pre-constructed bunkers and very cleverly fortified systems, all of which with interlocking fire. And almost originally, I mean, almost uniquely for this type of fighting, if the Americans took one particular feature and they then looked over and there'd be another feature ahead. Normally, once you've got one feature, you're reasonably secure, and then you plan for the next attack. What happened on Okinawa is that the Japanese had created a killing ground, so that even when the Americans had taken one feature, the Japanese were inside it. So as soon as they went over the lip into the next valley, they would be shot from behind. So this brutal killing ground they created was going to cause the Americans a lot of trouble. It's just harrowing stuff. Now, also, you mentioned there, but we talk about the British Pacific Fleet, this gigantically powerful fleet in terms in British history terms, but it's still dwarfed

by the American allies. But tell me about the British fleet there. Well, it's huge. It's got, pretty much all of our serious sea assets at that point, a number of aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroys. I mean, it's a huge fleet in itself, but of course, as you say, it's dwarfed the American fleet. It comes under the direct orders of the American Fifth Fleet, but it is operating as an independent entity. You know, this kind of slupt, loose arrangement that the British have often had when they're fighting alongside the Americans. And partly, I think, to protect it from the most serious casualties that they were beginning to suspect, it's given a subsidiary role. Its job is not actually to assault Okinawa itself,

but to keep the Japanese quiet in a group of islands even further south than Okinawa, where there are a lot of Japanese air assets. So its job is really to knock out those airfields and to make sure that there's no attempt to reinforce. forcing Okanara from that direction. And no British ground troops take part. No British ground troops take part. You never know. One or two might have slipped in.

There might be the odd Britain actually serving an American uniform. I suspect there probably was. But no, no official formed units take part. And talked about the landings. I mean, are they opposed landings right from the first minute of the campaign? No, it's very interesting. The landings take place on the 1st of April, April Fool's Day, 1945, Love Day, as it was called.

Love, of course, being the code word for the landing day. A lot of the Marines in particular who are fighting there, the first Marine Division, which has been fighting all the way through the Pacific War, I mean, they've been in one horrific fight after another. The most recent for them being at Pelaloo, they weren't at Iwojima. There was different Marines then, but they were an island called Pelaloo, which was an opposed landing and an absolute bloodbath. And there were bodies and knocked out landing craft all over the beach. And pretty much to a man, understandably, the Americans expected the same thing to happen at Okina. what actually happens is the landings unopposed. Now, Bukner, Simon Buckner, the American general commanding the American 10th Army at Okinawa, thinks he's hoodwink, the Japanese, thinks he's got one over them. And he writes in his diary, you know, they've made a big mistake. We've landed unopposed. Now they've really got it. Now they've really got trouble. In reality, this was the Japanese strategy. We're not going to fight them on the beaches. We're going to wait in these pre-prepared positions, which they won't be expecting. And when they

finally come onto them, we're going to cause a lot of casualties, which is exactly what happened. And so we have to think of it as just a small unit, attritional, grinding, almost like Passiondale in 1917, just fighting over bunkers and little tiny features. I mean, it's a terrifying way of making war. Yeah, and so you've got various things that do bear similarity to the Western Front, actually. You've got these incredibly strong defensive positions that you have to, you have to fight, as you say, tooth and nail for to get through. The Japanese are even, the fortifications were even more sophisticated than they were on the Western Front in the sense that they're actually dug into mountain sides. And the only way you can get into them is literally by fighting your way

in. I mean, at one stage, the American troops were literally pouring gasoline into bunkers. They were using flamethrowers. They were using explosive charges. They were burning the Japanese defenders out. And the Japanese, of course, had orders to fight to the last man. And that's pretty much what they did. So very few Japanese surrendering. About 7,000 out of the original garrison of 110,000 surrender at the end, but almost all of them, interestingly enough, were Okinawans. That is, conscripted into the Japanese army. The Japanese soldiers fought pretty much to the last man, including the commander, Ushajima, who committed ritual suicide with his chief of staff, and that pretty much sum things up. Now, this would be bad enough, Dan, telling this tale, and certainly

researching. It was a pretty harrowing experience, I have to say. I've read some pretty bad first-hand accounts over the years in the course of writing military history books. But none of them compared to this. And the single worst accounts were the accounts that concern the civilians. Because what's unique about Okinauer in the Pacific War is the fact that the civilian population is pretty much intact. On Iwo Jima, they've been cleared out. Some of the other islands, there are some population, but nothing like the size.

So if we think of an island with a population of about 375,000 civilians, a third of them perish in the fighting. And a lot of those people die, not because they are victims of the fighting per se, but because the Japanese have convinced them by propaganda and other means that the Americans are going to rape and burn and pillage and that they might as well commit suicide. And an enormous number of them do that. And it's absolutely harrowing. I remember reading one diary account by a 15-year-old Okinawan boy who survives.

he is convinced by Japanese soldiers that the Americans are going to do them all in and that they might as well commit suicide. And he's convinced, he's encouraged to kill his own family. And he describes the moment he's killing his mother and he said, she was crying and I was crying too. I mean, it's as bad as it gets. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. What was the key to American victory?

Was it just throwing more and more body? forward, as you say, losing gasoline, small arms, or were they able to use air or naval gunfire to their advantage? They used everything they had. They used napalm from the air. I mean, interestingly enough, you know, I don't know why, but I was, I'd convinced myself that napalm certainly didn't come in before Korea, but actually it was used at Okinawa. They use an enormous number of ordnance from artillery fire, from ship firing from ships. They also have a lot of ground attack aircraft on Okinau once they've taken a couple of airfields at the beginning. But despite all of that, pretty much most of the tough fighting is done by the infantry. So you've got some very good troops on

Okinaw. You've got a lot of the marine divisions, which are veterans of the fighting for the previous couple of years. But you've also got some very good army troops. And what's interesting about the 10th Army is it's a combination of a Marine Corps and an Army Corps. And there's no question there's a lot competition between them to make the greatest gains. And you know, you might be led to believe that the Marines were far and away the best troops the Americans had in the Pacific and they were good, but actually the army were very good on Okinawa too. But it was a brutal fight that resulted in the heaviest American casualties of the Pacific War and some of the heaviest in their history. What kind of numbers are we talking to?

12,500,000 killed, another 37,000 or so wounded. And here's the kick-up. 26,000 battle fatigue casualties, that is people with PTSD, people who simply couldn't go on, and that will give you a kind of sense of the brutality of the fighting. I mean, that percentage compared to overall casualties, I've never seen it that high before. So it was, well, in that case, suggest it was among the most harrowing battlefields that humans have ever found themselves on it. Yeah, I mean, one of the, you know, from a historian's point of view, if you can take the emotion out of it, which, of course, you have to try and do, it.

it has some of the finest first-hand accounts written of the whole war, I think, and certainly of the Pacific War. And one of the reasons the writing is so moving is because of the experience of some of these soldiers. So you've got a man like Eugene Sledge, who's very well known in America today because of the first-hand account the book he wrote about his experiences during the war. And some of his descriptions of the battlefield and what he had to go through, and men like him had to go through. And what's clear about Sledge, and he admits this himself,

is the reason he wrote the book is to try in some way to deal with the issues, the nightmares, the after effect of what he'd gone through, that he was still suffering from 40 years after the end of the war. Is it the fact that Okinawa wouldn't be, well, perhaps it is in America, but it's not as well-known as celebrated as your D-Day and you're bouncing the ride.

and taking Germany. Do you think that that, do they get home and feel that the sacrifice wasn't being honoured in someone? I think, you know, you mentioned the First World War earlier, and I think there is some similarity here. We, of course, do commemorate the First World War, and Okinawa, I'm sure, will be commemorated in America. But it's not a battle that's looked on with any fondness for a lot of the reasons I've already explained. It was a meat grinder operation in which the American commander, who was fighting his first battle with Simon Buckner, I think he was a bad appointment. He used very little imagination. It was corkscrew and burn, as they termed it, which is literally frontal assaults, again like First World War, when he was being encouraged to use amphibious

assaults, and he had, of course, some good amphibious troops with him to land behind the Japanese front line so that they would have opened up a second front, and he refused to do that. He insisted that logistically it wasn't going to be possible. They couldn't get enough supplies off the beach, but all excuses in my view. He was a cautious, generally. He was a cautious, fighting his first battle, and as a result, the Americans probably took many more casualties than they needed to. But because it wasn't a well-fought battle and because there were so many casualties, I think he is not remembered with any fondness. And yet, nevertheless, it is a hugely significant fight. Not only the last major battle of the Second World War, but a battle that ultimately led

to and encourage the American High Command and American politicians to use atomic weapons. Because it was so bloody, they couldn't bear the thought of doing it again on Japanese homeland. Exactly. They knew what was coming. This was a foretaste of what was going to happen when they landed, Operation Olympic planned for November 1945 and an even bigger landing. So that was just Honshu. That's the southernmost island in November 1945. Move forward a few months to March 1946. They're going to land even more troops, probably two, maybe three million soldiers are going to land on those two islands. And they are facing a Japanese army that's at least two million strong, maybe three million. They were expecting casualties of a minimum of a million people, and a good chunk of those would have died. So you can see when you get into this sort of numbers game, and also when you understand how harrowing the experience was for a lot of the soldiers, many of whom are going to have to go on and fight in Japan, the use of atomic weapons, if it could end the war at a stroke, was going to be an easy decision to make.

And I think, you know, Truman talks about when he talks at the time and afterwards about the decision to use the nuclear weapons, it wasn't just a question of saving American lives. It was a question of saving Japanese lives, too. We should come back to the Kamakazi, the effect, the Japanese plan of any marriage at all. I mean, they didn't know about the atomic weapons. In a way, I suppose it did dissuade the Americans from launching an invasion of the home islands. And what about the effect on the fleet? Did they manage to, was there any attritional action on the US fleet?

There was. If it hadn't been such an enormous fleet, it may have actually served its purpose. 36 ships sunk. More than 200 badly damaged, including a number of aircraft carriers. I mean, interesting enough, no aircraft carriers were sunk, which was the jewel in the crown and the chief target for the-metric. The Japanese kamikaze. Actually, interesting enough, the Americans have set up a very clever system, a really

a necklace of a defensive system around Okinawa and round the fleet, an early warning system that enabled them to put up a lot of planes in the air and take out a lot of these kamikazis. But you couldn't take all of them out, and a lot of them did get through. Yes, they cause a lot of trouble with the fleet, but never enough sinkings, really, to deter the battle and to force the fleet to withdraw, and certainly never enough to encourage the Americans to the peace table. So it was optimistic, but of course it was desperation times towards the end of the war. interesting is how many Japanese servicemen were prepared to sacrifice themselves for their nation.

And we can get into a whole new topic here, Dan, but the mindset of a Japanese, certainly then, possibly still today, is that to actually devote yourself to the service of the state is a completely understandable thing. Of course, there are lots of reasons for that, partly religious, partly the Bushido Sister Warrior Code of Honor, in which you would subsume individual. to the greater good of the Japanese Empire, of course, as it was at that time. So, you know, we might imagine that people had to be moved at gunpoint to these planes. Not a bit of it. There were an enormous number of people prepared to volunteer to do that. Are you able to match the richness of the US sources with the Japanese sources?

You know, because if very few people are surviving, do we know what it was like for the Japanese defenders fighting a totally hopeless battle, which then was just followed by their own suicide? There are some, believe it or not, there are some, believe it or not, there are still some incredibly rich sources. The Americans, much for their credit, immediately after the war, tracked down, I mean, most of them were in their custody anyway, anyone senior in a senior position, both in the High Command in Tokyo, but also any senior military man, all the way down to sort of colonel and major rank, and interrogated them or question them for historical purposes. Of course, they wanted intelligence at the time, but this is an absolute gold mine for historians,

which is in the American records. You also get an awful lot of first-hand accounts by the Japanese themselves. The Okinawans on the island, I mean, I wouldn't say it's 50-50 in terms of the sources I use for obvious reasons, but a big chunk of the book is the battle from the perspective of the Japanese and the Okinawans. And I was very lucky actually to travel to Okinawanao to see the location, but also to find a lot of wonderful sources out there that had been written by Okinawans, who'd survived the battle. And they, you know, the one I've already quoted, they were among the most harrowing sources of the whole project. But how long does the battle last?

82 days, so just under three months. Starts in the 1st of April and ends on the 22nd of June 1945. And when is the decision made to drop the nuclear bomb? I mean, the two are linked. The two are linked? The key meeting is on the 18th of June. Truman, who's only been president for a couple of months since Roosevelt's untimely death in April, just after the battle has started, asked his senior commanders. He wasn't aware of the Manhattan Project. He didn't even know there was a nuclear weapon. And he, of course, was the vice president, which says a lot about American politics, if you ask me. But in any case, towards the end of the Battle of Ocanauer, they know that the next stage is to launch the invasion. And he asks his senior military people,

is there any alternative? What are we going to do next? And is there any alternative? And interesting enough, it's one of the more junior people at the meeting, a guy called McCloy, who was assistant secretary of state at the time, who said, well, actually, we're developing this weapon. Now, by this point, Truman was aware of the weapon, but the real caveat at this stage is, will it work? So the agreement made at the end of that meeting is we're going to launch the invasion. We're going to prepare for the invasion on the 1st of November, but we're going to keep an eye on this new, this fantastical new weapon. And if, when it's trialed, it works, we'll consider using it. And the Battle O'Kanara is key context for that decision. It's absolutely key context. They talk about it in that meeting. They talk about it in that meeting. Churchill mentions it when he discusses that crucial moment during the Potsdam conference where Truman receives word from America that the first test has worked.

Those two coincide. He then tells Churchill what he's planning to do. And Churchill, of course, gives him his blessing. To Churchill, it was a, you know, it was a done deal. There was no question that they would be any moral, qualms is to use this weapon. He called it a gleam of sunshine, if we can use this weapon to stop the war and save not only in his view up to a million American lives, but also half a million British lives. What we forget is that an awful lot of British soldiers are going to take part in

the assault on Japan. Then they should do it. And that's, of course, what happens. Thank you very much. Saul, David. The book is called Crucible of Hell and then the subtitle Ocan Hour. Thank you very much. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements

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