War’s End Was Life’s Beginning

April 1, 1945, was Easter Sunday. And for the half-million Americans - soldiers, sailors and Marines - arriving at Okinawa that morning, it was the dawn of the last great land-seaair battle of World War II. It was “Love Day.”

Amphibious campaigns normally use the letter “D” for that first day over the beach. But both Iwo Jima and Okinawa were planned at the same time, so Iwo’s landing was on D-Day and Okinawa’s was on “L” (for landing) Day.

In the phonetic alphabet of the time, “L” was “love,” hence Love Day. And for the first few days ashore, that almost seemed appropriate. The landing on the beach was virtually unopposed. Optimism soared, too soon.

The landing troops encountered little resistance, saw few Japanese or defenses and suffered few casualties. The island, 60 miles long, was shaped like an alligator, seen from above, with a skinny waist and a fat tail.

Two of the Marine divisions, the 1st and 6th, landed near the waist, quickly crossed the island and turned north toward the tail. Two veteran Army divisions, the 7th and 96th, hit the beach and turned south toward the chest of the alligator.

Then their world exploded. There they ran headon into the first of three fortified mountain ridges running east to west, centered at the ancient Shuri Castle. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima and his 130,000 veterans were dug in and well-equipped with artillery.

Like the garrisons at Peleliu and Iwo, they had abandoned the mass “banzai” charge and no longer depended on “spiritual power” to overcome firepower. Instead, they fought tenaciously from a skillfully designed defense to buy time, kill as many Americans as possible and, above all, keep the huge American fleet in place offshore for months rather than days.

The Japanese, from emperor to private, were thrilled with a new and, they thought, war-winning weapon especially suited to their culture - the kamikaze. In the Leyte battle, the local Japanese commanders had sent well-trained regular pilots to crash into U.S. ships.

But Japan’s warlords decided it was wasteful to use their best planes and pilots for suicide missions. So they gave thousands of youths just out of high school a shot at glory, taught them to fly just well enough to get to the U.S. fleet, and sent them out to dive into ships.

The planes were clapped-out old models, stripped down - even instruments were removed - and loaded with explosives. The result was a guided missile, with that most sophisticated of guidance systems, the human brain.

So the grand design was for General Ushijima’s veterans to sell their lives for time, while thousands of “hopped up kids and stripped down planes” sank the American fleet. To American minds, it was repulsively organized madness, but it worked well enough to make our fleet at sea and our troops ashore suffer the worst casualty cost of the Pacific war.

The Marine divisions took the northern half of the island, then came south to join the soldiers in the assaults on the Shuri defense lines ordered by the 10th Army’s commander, Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner. When the battle heated up, the Army’s 77th and the 27th divisions landed and moved south to join the battle, as did some troops of the 2nd Marine Division.

Casualties mounted. The Japanese were there to die. The Americans, though prepared to do that too, if necessary, were fighting desperately to live. The collision was a bloody, three-month horror, a longer Iwo Jima on a larger scale.

Teamwork between Army and Marine units was superb. And at sea, the Navy fought the costliest, most savage fight of its history. At general quarters constantly, crews ate sandwiches at their guns between attacks and slept when they could. Out on the radar picket line, the destroyers fought off wave after wave of suicide planes. More sailors died, nearly 5,000, than in the bloodied Marine or Army divisions ashore.

The land, sea and air slaughter between Love Day and July cost U.S. forces nearly 50,000 casualties, including General Buckner. His opponent, General Ushijima, also died in the final days, joining more than 100,000 of his troops in death. And 10,000 Japanese surrendered, a huge number for that army. The Japanese also lost 7,800 planes and the last of their great battleships, the Yamato.

But the U.S. fleet came to stay and did. The young Americans - who went ashore talking about the newly passed GI Bill and the postwar world - gave their lives when they had to and took the fortress island. And when the noise and the fire and the dying were done, those still alive were grimly training to attack Japan itself in November.

Then the Enola Gay flew its mission to Hiroshima, and in a few days the war was over. Hundreds of thousands of the young Americans at Okinawa would live to come home, enjoy that postwar world and use the GI Bill to become the best-educated generation in history.

The PC curators of the Smithsonian who recently tried to paint that Hiroshima mission as a senseless, racist atrocity of vengeance would have got short shrift from the men who won Iwo and Okinawa and were facing worse beachheads in the fall.

Those young Americans of 1945 were more than just survivors of a war started by Japan’s warlords. They were the victors.