RIPPLES OF BATTLE

CHAPTER 1

The Wages of Suicide: Okinawa,

April 1–July 2, 1945

Recipe for a Holocaust

Throughout the fall of 2001 and early 2002, the military referents in the West for the war against the Islamic fundamentalists were the fanatical kamikazes of Okinawa of the past—their letters published in newspapers, the Pacific war recounted by columnists, and veterans of the conflict interviewed on television. Suicide bombing by nature is at first horrifying, calling into doubt the notion of a shared human instinct for self-preservation. Suicide killers are purportedly of a creed not of this world, and thus instill despair that such enemies can ever be thwarted and that somehow theirs is a superior ideology by its singular ability to galvanize thousands to kill themselves for the cause. Yet Okinawa reminds us that there are plenty of far more frightening mechanisms to ensure that it fails. Contrary to our own popular doubts and fears, the horror of Okinawa entailed the frustration, not the success, of kamikazes. And with that result there ensued the lessons that suicide warriors are not always willing volunteers, much less superhuman, but themselves just as often unsure and full of doubt. Literature and culture were changed by Okinawa, but the ripples of that battle were also military; after September 11 they lap up as never before to remind us that there remains an array of tactics and long-term strategies by those who fight to live that will ensure failure to those trying to die.

The forces arrayed for the American invasion of Okinawa on April 1, 1945—Operation Iceberg—were gargantuan. The greatest armada of combined naval and land power in the history of the Pacific war was prepared to storm an island not much more than sixty miles in length. In terms of initial troops to be landed, firepower arrayed, and tonnage to be used, the American invasion was larger than the one seen at Normandy nearly a year earlier. Indeed, Okinawa was perhaps the most impressive sea and ground assault since Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480 B.C.—but then, both those earlier invasions had been directed against the continent of Europe, not an island in the Pacific.

Nearly 1,600 ships carried over a half million Americans toward Okinawa. A quarter million soldiers—infantry, support troops, airmen, and sailors in various branches of the military—eventually hoped to occupy the island. Sixty thousand Marines and army infantrymen of the newly formed 10th Army would embark on the first day alone, supported by bombs from some 40 aircraft carriers of various types and shells from 18 battleships and 150 destroyers. Some 183,000 actual infantry combatants from the army and the Marines were ready to join the fight on the island during the ninety-day campaign. Over 12,000 combat aircraft on the American side could, in theory, be thrown into the fight. The campaign was planned as a textbook American exercise in overwhelming material and numerical power that would simply bury even the most courageous adversaries.

Many of the invading Americans were hardened veterans of the bloodletting on Iwo Jima, Peleliu, Saipan, and Tarawa. If they were successful in capturing the linchpin of the Ryukyu Islands, the Japanese mainland would lie defenseless to American ships, troops, and planes, all to be based a mere 350 miles away. Indeed, after the battle and despite the horrific costs, the official military history of Okinawa declared that “the military value of Okinawa exceeded all hope” as a base for “an even more desperate struggle to come.”

But the Americans in their great confidence and careful preparation had also overlooked an essential but bitter truth about their proposed campaign. The enemy would fight this battle in a manner not entirely explicable by the strategic calculus involved in losing Okinawa. Nor did he much care about the Americans’ proven tactical and material superiority—much less about the age-old Western idea that the purpose of battle was largely to defeat the enemy, obtain his surrender, advise him of the futility of subsequent resistance, and therein achieve results that mere politics could not.

Indeed, the Japanese did not realistically hope militarily to defeat the invaders on Okinawa at all! Nor did they worry whether their own army, navy, and air forces would survive the conflict. And the defenders may even have accepted that after the fighting, Okinawa, for a time, would—at least for a few months or even years—become American and not Japanese. Col. Hiromichi Yahara, the brilliant architect of the Japanese defenses, wrote after the war that “the fact is that we never had a chance for victory on Okinawa.”

Instead, by mid-1945 the desperate Japanese military’s aims were quite different from all conventional war wisdom. And so their plans were also very simple: kill so many Americans, blow up or shoot down so many aircraft, and sink so many of their ships that the United States—both its stunned military and its grieving citizens back home—would never wish to undergo such an ordeal again. After the butchery to come on Okinawa, perhaps these rather affluent and soft Westerners would seek a negotiated armistice from Japan—and not tolerate another, greater cataclysm on the mainland in pursuit of an unnecessary unconditional surrender. Okinawa, then, was to offer a suicidal lesson to Americans to stop before they found themselves dying in the millions on the beaches of the Japanese motherland. In the words of the historian Joseph Alexander, the Japanese saw Okinawa as the “England of the Pacific”—a proximate island that would likewise serve as an enormous staging area and supply depot for the eventual foreign annexation of the sacred soil of Japan itself.

In that context, despite the Americans’ skill and overwhelming material preponderance, much of the advantage on the island still lay with the Japanese in this new phase of attrition. Because Okinawa was larger than many of the other Pacific atolls of the previous campaigns, because it was a home island of the Japanese empire, because of its unpredictable weather, coral rock, prepared fortifications, and dense vegetation, and because of the number, nature, and leadership of the Japanese defenders, nearly every combatant on the island in theory could resist to the death for a very long time. The commander of the island’s defenses, Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, had written a brief slogan to cheer on his troops that summed up the Japanese strategy: “One Plane for One Warship; One Boat for One Ship; One Man for Ten of the Enemy or One Tank.” As it turned out, instead, Americans would kill ten Japanese for every one they lost. Yet even to this day they still feel that something had gone terribly wrong during the campaign. And it had.

Even if, as the planners thought, Okinawa were merely to be conquered, Operation Iceberg had not made allowances for the attacker’s age-old and necessary edge in numerical superiority. There were only one and a half, not the requisite three, American invaders to match each Japanese defender. Yet to kill all the Japanese—110,000 soldiers and thousands more civilians who would resist at their sides, whether coerced or willing—how many American combatants would that gruesome task require? A million? A ten-to-one ratio of offense to defense? Just how many American infantrymen, bombers, and warships would be needed to blast out every Japanese in every cave of the island? And did the Americans realize that an entire army of over 100,000 men had become veritable subterranean and nocturnal terrorists—snipers, suicide bombers, and ambushers who would hide beneath coral at day and unleash artillery, mortar, and automatic weapons fire at night? If it cost 6,000 American dead to kill 23,000 Japanese on Iwo Jima, how many fatalities would be incurred in eliminating 110,000 more experienced troops on Okinawa?

In hindsight, Okinawa would prove not that the Americans had marshaled too few troops to take the island, but that its massive armada was in fact far too small to eliminate the enemy without suffering catastrophic losses in the process. American field artillery on the island itself would fire 1,104,630 105mm howitzer shells—and another 600,000 rounds of various calibers from 115mm to 75mm—during the course of the three-month campaign. Fifteen of such monstrous shells were fired for every Japanese death—and still such munitions could not save thousands of Americans from being killed. Before the battle was even half over, the Americans had already dropped thousands of tons of explosives on Ushijima’s soldiers, without achieving any clear weakening of the enemy’s will to resist.

Japanese tactics were for the most part well thought out—given the acceptance of the realities of war in mid-1945 when American bombers for weeks prior had incinerated many of the key factories on the mainland while surface ships and submarines made reinforcement and resupply anywhere in the Pacific island empire almost impossible. Generals Ushijima and Isamu Cho—the infamous rightist who in 1931 had once engaged in a terror campaign of assassination to hijack the Tokyo civilian government—along with the brilliant Colonel Yahara, planned to let the Americans land on the beaches unopposed. Then they would lure them into well-fortified Japanese positions in the southern part of the island before systematically grinding them up. By day there would hardly be a Japanese in sight; at night tens of thousands would shell and attack American lines—small teams infiltrating as often as possible to nullify American advantages in naval and ground gunfire. Although Okinawa is a huge island of several hundred square miles, the convergence of over 100,000 troops of the Imperial 32nd Army into the southern third of the island in a series of fortified lines meant that the Japanese, not the Americans, possessed the high ground and the greater concentration of force.

There, hidden wheeled artillery would pound the Americans, only to be drawn back on tracks into the safety of caves and fortifications. The southern Japanese defenses—a series of sequential barriers anchored by the two great so-called Machinao and Shuri fortified lines—had been diabolically adapted to the hills, gorges, and escarpments. Hundreds of camouflaged concrete bunkers and pillboxes allowed uninterrupted fields of fire, remained almost impenetrable from the air, and ensured mutual support and reinforcement through tunnels, telephone and radio communications, and hidden paths. Troops were dug in on the reverse slopes with the intention of luring Americans up to the crests—only to mow them down as they unknowingly exposed themselves on the ridges.

Other scattered infantry units would fight in almost invisible pockets, popping up to shoot Americans who passed by, slipping into their fortified positions at dark, and using snipers to target officers day and night. Meanwhile, as the Americans on the southern part of the island were being immobilized and slowly ground up, kamikaze planes and “suicide” boats—350 were captured and destroyed on the nearby Kerama Islands—would systematically wreck the American fleet off the coast, ensuring its withdrawal and thus the isolation of the land forces.

Then, without resupply, the fighting would degenerate into a sort of G?tterd?mmerung as Okinawa became a final inferno for friend and foe alike—as the Americans, like the Japanese, would have to make do only with what ammunition and supplies were left on the island itself. The more the kamikazes hit the American navy, the more the pressure would be on the land forces to make costly attacks on the entrenched Japanese, take the island frontally and rapidly, and so free vulnerable ships from the deadly range of suicide planes based nearby on the mainland. If there was no chance of escape from the island, then the only hope for Japanese salvation would be to kill so many Americans on land and at sea that they would exit and bypass the island, nursing wounds so grievous that they would not dare repeat the ordeal on the mainland.

The Americans, of course, had very different ideas. General Buckner, who commanded all land forces in the invasion under the rubric of the 10th Army, part of a larger joint expeditionary task force, looked not so much at the nature of the island—tragically so in retrospect—but rather at the unprecedented killing power of the U.S. fleet, the logistical capacity of the American army, and the deadly nature of his Marines who had never yet for very long given ground or failed to capture a fortified Japanese position, despite horrific carnage on Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Peleliu. In his view, the preliminary carrier bomber attacks of February and March would immobilize all Japanese airfields on the island, ensuring air superiority over Okinawa itself.

Then on the day of the landing, naval shelling and further saturation bombing could destroy the most formidable artillery and command emplacements—if they had not already been obliterated from continual aerial bombing since mid-February. That bombardment would allow a buildup of supplies—thousands of vehicles, millions of artillery shells, tons of gasoline, food, and small-arms ammunition—guaranteeing overwhelming American firepower against the finite and always dwindling material reserves of the isolated Japanese. In fact, on average the Americans unloaded about 200,000 tons of matériel on the Okinawa beaches almost every week of the campaign, as ships (458 in all) streamed in from the Philippines, the Marianas, Hawaii, and San Francisco almost daily.

Once on the island, armored columns—in the manner of successful head-on assaults practiced in the European theater—would plow through concentrations of lightly armed Japanese, as carrier fighters and bombers along with mobile artillery could be directed by radios to strafe and pound islands of resistance. In days the Americans should be able to herd the retreating Japanese into a final noose, where they would face surrender—or annihilation by combined aerial, ground, and naval bombardment. Or so the American generals, who knew nothing of coral, caves, and Japanese tactical genius, believed.

In hindsight, it would have been far wiser for General Buckner first to have pondered the challenges of steep gorges and nearly impassable terrain, the deadly nature of the kamikaze threat, and the frequency of cloudy and rainy weather over Okinawa. Constant rain especially prevented accurate reconnaissance; it hampered bombing and mired armor and infantry alike in knee-deep mud. Caution and better surveillance would have presented a chilling scenario of the true obstacles ahead: Okinawa was protected by 110,000 crack Japanese troops—five times the number found on Iwo Jima—not the preinvasion estimates of 65,000.

The defenders had had nearly a year to craft impenetrable fortifications with multiple entries and exits. Nearly a half million native Okinawans were mixed in with the defenders, both as innocents and active combatants. There may not have been a single bulldozer on the island or any three-ton trucks, but nearly a quarter million laborers with shovels and picks had invested over a year in pouring cement, digging underground tunnels—eventually to comprise a vast latticework some sixty miles in extent—carving out coral redoubts, and then supplying the entire fortified maze with nearly unlimited supplies of water, food, and ammunition. Given the terrain, the absence of reliable roads, and the shortage of fuel, day laborers could in the long run be as efficient as fleets of earthmoving machines. Three of the most aggressive and experienced Japanese ground commanders in the Imperial Army were in charge of the opposition. Indeed, as it turned out, the Japanese had a far more accurate estimate of the size, nature, and timetable of the American invasion than the Americans did of the Japanese defenses.

Did the Americans really understand that, whereas their fleet was relatively stationary and well beyond the protection of their own land-based fighters and bombers, the Japanese had use of thousands of fighters less than four hundred miles away on the mainland? That the Japanese could lose their Okinawan airfields and still have plenty of homeland planes reach the American fleet from hundreds of bases in a little over two hours?

Had the American high command anticipated such resistance, then they might have bombed far longer, brought in even more troops, and once on the ground fought an entirely different war—surrounding and isolating but not storming Japanese positions, outflanking lines of resistance through amphibious landings to their rear, accepting a six-month battle of attrition rather than demanding three months of annihilation. But then that was not the Marine way—at least not after a string of Pacific island successes and at a time when American troops and supplies were arriving overseas in unheard-of numbers. How could an American army progress to the final showdown on the mainland after conceding that 110,000 enemy soldiers were to be bypassed out of fear of casualties? And so the Americans indeed pressed on to victory—in the end to be saved not only by their superior firepower, supplies, and know-how, but also through the innate courage and bloody sacrifice of what was probably the most unquestioning generation of Americans this nation has yet produced.

Somewhere in between General Buckner’s and General Ushijima’s ideal plans of war making, a quarter million people were to die—often a few inches from each other—in a mere ninety days. Yet for most of the first week the battle for Okinawa transpired almost exactly as each side had anticipated without much loss on either side. On the day of the landings, American ships laid down the greatest barrage in naval history—44,825 heavy, 33,000 rocket, and 22,500 mortar shells. Had each shot killed just one Japanese soldier, the battle would have ended before it started. Most of the shells, however, exploded harmlessly amid the concrete and coral. A few salvos brought death—but more often to civilians who lacked the protective entrenchments of their Japanese overseers.

The fleet’s gunnery was joined by waves of carrier planes that strafed and bombed the beach and immediate vicinity. When the Americans landed—again over 50,000 on the first day alone—they lost only 28 men killed and took the first four days’ planned objectives by nightfall. Two large enemy airfields were captured within hours. Scattered kamikaze attacks during the first few days had damaged only a half dozen ships, including the heavy cruiser Indianapolis, the battleship West Virginia, and the carrier Indefatigable. Otherwise the fleet was relatively safe. The invasion was making remarkable progress as Marines raced throughout the north and center of the island while the army headed for the enemy defensive lines to the south.

Buckner’s senior Marine commander, General Geiger, remarked of the rapid advancement and light casualties, “Don’t ask me why we haven’t had more opposition. I don’t understand it. But now we’re in a position to work over the Jap forces at our leisure at the least possible loss to ourselves.” Admiring the bombardment and the easy landings, Admiral Turner reported to Nimitz’s headquarters, “I may be crazy, but it looks like the Japanese have quit the war, at least in this sector.”

That initial optimism after the easy landings continued for a week in the north, as the 6th Marine Division with only occasional hard fighting crushed most of the Japanese resistance by April 12. By April 20 it and other Marine contingents had essentially subdued two-thirds of the island. But on the seas the tempo of the battle had already shifted dramatically on April 6, when an unforeseen and enormous flight of over 200 Japanese kamikazes descended on the American fleet. They sank four ships and damaged ten others—as the prelude to a failed one-way strike by the 70,000-ton battleship Yamato and its escort destroyers and cruisers. Then for the next ten weeks the Americans would fight off at least ten organized kamikaze sorties of hundreds of planes, and lose 5,000 sailors in the most costly of any single battle in the history of the United States Navy.

Meanwhile, on the southwestern part of the island, U.S. Army battalions at last reached the formidable defenses at the Kakazu Ridge—coral hills pitted with caves and passageways full of Japanese defenders of the 13th Infantry Battalion under the command of the gifted Colonel Hara. After failed assaults during April 9–12, the GIs suffered nearly 3,000 casualties, killed over 4,000 of Hara’s troops, but had still not taken the needed few hundred yards of coral. The Americans at last realized that they had marched into an enormous trap of waiting, dug-in Japanese armed with concealed heavy weapons. And from April 10 to 24, nearly the entire American army in the south made repeated but failed efforts to blast through the Japanese defenses.

The Americans inexplicably failed to modify their initial operational plan in light of the sudden and unexpected Japanese ferocity. Instead, they continued to plunge ahead. No enemy could have made more ingenious use of the naturally rugged landscape or fought harder than the Japanese. Unfortunately, they were opposed by an adversary whose overwhelming firepower and superior technology were not substitutes for martial courage and skill in hand-to-hand killing, but mere ancillaries. Despite Japanese bombardment by ghastly 320mm mortars and an array of 75mm and 150mm howitzers, 47mm antitank guns, hundreds of hidden machine guns, the sudden news of the death of President Roosevelt on April 12, and a massive counterattack on April 13, U.S. Army units regrouped and continued south to be joined eventually later in the month by Marines returning from their conquest of the northern Motobu Peninsula.

The first hills of the Shuri defenses began to fall by April 20. On April 25, General Ushijima had retreated to the even more formidable last bastions behind the Shuri line, where the fighting remained stalemated for much of May. The so-called “blowtorch and corkscrew” method, in which either gasoline was pumped into caves and ignited, or cave entrances were blown up by explosives—or both—ensured that the fighting was increasingly dirty and hand-to-hand. When some Japanese units proved nearly impregnable in their underground redoubts, smoke bombs, phosphorous grenades, and huge amounts of pumped gasoline were used to force their egress.

The struggle on Sugar Loaf Hill between May 12 and 19 was especially desperate as Marines tried to storm the slope in the manner of Japanese banzai attacks while the enemy in the American way relied on superior firepower from entrenched positions. Army brigades reinforced by Marines would slog through mud and rain for weeks on end but find no success until May 21, when Ushijima finally brought what was left of the Japanese 32nd Army back to the last redoubt on the southwest corner of the island. Yet fighting there would still rage on for the remainder of June. General Buckner himself was killed on June 18, the highest-ranking American officer to die in the Pacific theater during the Second World War. Ushijima and Cho would commit suicide a week later.

Okinawa was not considered officially secure until July 2. If the Japanese 32nd Army was annihilated, the American 10th Army was nearly ruined and would need months to reconstitute its shattered army and Marine divisions. Whether because of pleas from the navy to accelerate the offensive to save the fleet from nearly daily kamikaze attacks, or due to growing army frustration at gaining so little ground at such great costs, General Buckner poured in more men to continue the piecemeal frontal assaults and ignored his subordinates’ suggestions to starve, surround, or bypass the determined Japanese resistance. Maj. Gen. Andrew Bruce, commander of the army’s 77th Infantry Division, for example, argued vehemently for a southern landing behind the Shuri lines to force the Japanese to fight in both directions. He had his plans rejected on grounds that it would divert precious supplies from the main frontal assault and would only result in a double theater of attrition.

Likewise, the redeployment from the north of two Marine divisions in late April also would follow preexisting strategy, the divisions being used solely to replace battered army regiments—some with less than 40 percent combat efficiency and with shattered platoons of five or six men—rather than being employed in amphibious landings at the Japanese rear. The attackers would pay dearly for such orthodoxy for much of May. Postbellum interviews by surviving Japanese—especially the testimony of the brilliant Colonel Yahara—revealed that such additional landings would probably have cracked the tenuous Japanese lines of defense far earlier.

The result was that American ground and naval forces suffered 12,520 killed and another 33,631 wounded or missing in the three months between the invasion on April 1 and the official end of the Okinawa campaign on July 2. Although the naval air forces had fought gallantly in both attacking the island and the mainland, and defending the fleet, they nevertheless lost 763 planes in the air and on carriers in just ninety days—the Japanese purportedly losing five times that number. Besides the loss of eight patrolling planes every day, the American navy still suffered its worst damage in its then 170-year history—a staggering 36 ships sunk and 368 hit. For each week of the campaign, three craft went to the bottom and another 30 were bombed or crashed into by the enemy. Indeed, four ships from the fleet on average were hit by kamikazes every day for the duration of their deployment off Okinawa. The Japanese improbably claimed that nearly 10,000 naval planes—the vast majority of them conventional bombers and fighters—had taken some part in the battle between March and June.

The defenders were proud of such mayhem but themselves suffered far worse—at least 110,000 killed, or nearly ten soldiers lost for every American slain, at a sickening clip of fifty men dead every hour of the battle, nearly one per minute, nonstop for three months on end. Perhaps 100,000 civilians may have been killed—how many of them were active combatants is not known. Nor do we have any accurate idea of the number of wounded and missing Okinawans; some estimates put the number of soldiers and civilians who were sealed in caves at over 20,000. Fewer than 7,500 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner. All in all, nearly a quarter of a million people were killed or wounded in the fighting on Okinawa—over 2,500 humans dying every day, most in a confined area of a few square miles in the southern part of the island.

E. B. Sledge, a 1st Marine Division veteran of the fighting, wrote of the carnage on the Shuri line over thirty-five years later:

The mud was knee deep in some places, probably deeper in others if one dared venture there. For several feet around every corpse, maggots crawled about in the muck and then were washed away by the runoff of the rain. There wasn’t a tree or bush left. All was open country. Shells had torn up the turf so completely that ground cover was nonexistent. The rain poured down on us as evening approached. The scene was nothing but mud; shell fire; flooded craters with their silent, pathetic, rotting occupants; knocked-out tanks and amtracs; and discarded equipment—utter desolation. . . . We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war. . . . In the mud and driving rain before Shuri, we were surrounded by maggots and decay. Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.

And for what was all this carnage? Plenty of strategic reasons were advanced. Ostensibly the United States had now obtained an enormous base of 640 square miles within a mere 350 miles of the mainland, a staging and supply area for the final invasion to come, a deepwater anchorage for the entire American fleet, and dozens of air bases for both tactical fighters and strategic bombers. Just as important, the Americans felt that with the fall of Okinawa, the Japanese fleet and naval air forces in the Pacific theater for all practicality would cease to exist. The enemy’s best army divisions would be obliterated. A future invasion of Kyushu and Honshu (Operations Olympic and Coronet) would enjoy almost complete air superiority—without worry of naval attack and with the assurance that the many veteran Japanese land forces in the immediate area had been long ago wiped out.

To the Japanese generals and their staff who committed suicide in the final days of the battle, it was not altogether clear that they had failed. Colonel Yahara pointed out that the American supreme commander, General Buckner, had been killed by Japanese before any of his own ranking generals on the island died by their own hand. Even the American President had expired during the battle—perhaps in the Japanese view from the sheer shock of the mounting American fatalities. And the original Japanese purpose, after all, had never been to win or even survive, but to cause so much death and destruction that the Americans would think twice before repeating a similar assault on the homeland.

The Japanese might have been correct in thinking that such American losses could be replicated on Kyushu and Honshu, but they were dead wrong about the Americans not invading. The victory on Okinawa taught the Americans that thousands of their own would probably die in conquering Japan, but that the mainland could—and must—be conquered all the same. Fifty more Japanese combat divisions, millions more in the militias, and thousands of trained kamikazes purportedly waiting in arms could kill many, but not stop most, of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who would be determined to end the war off the shores of Japan itself.

Okinawa was not the first occasion for suicide attacks. Americans had seen them earlier on the ground and in the air both at Guadalcanal and Leyte Gulf. Nor for the first time did civilians jump off cliffs or kill themselves in caves. Such horror had also occurred earlier sporadically during the Marianas campaign at Marpi Point on Saipan. And we should remember that thousands of Americans had been killed on Iwo Jima as they wiped out nearly all of the Japanese who would not surrender. But Okinawa was the summation of all the macabre elements of a barbarous three years of island fighting. It was not just the last battle of the Pacific war, but the murderous aggregate of all that had gone on before.

After their bloody victory in July 1945, the Americans searched for ways not to avoid another Okinawa, but rather to do what they had done to Okinawa in ways that did not exact similar costs. If anything, after defeating the suicide attackers of Okinawa, the Americans felt that they could survive—and do—anything. That was surely true, but in little over a month after the victory on Okinawa, what they came up with as the solution for avoiding another Pyrrhic victory in defeating kamikazes, armed and indistinguishable civilians, bomb-rigged soldiers, and banzai attacks would shock the world.

The Laboratory of Suicide

Fighters who deliberately seek death in battle—whether to end their own misery amid certain defeat, to undergo offensive missions that hold out no chance of their own survival, or as wounded and doomed in the last moments of life to kill the enemy without hope of escape—are ubiquitous in both history and myth. When nearly surrounded, King Leonidas of Sparta sent away thousands of his allied army from Thermopylae (480 B.C.). Then with his remaining 299 Spartans and a few hundred Thespians and Thebans, he prepared to leave the confines of the pass and charge out to fight amid a sea of thousands of Persian troops. “Fight with great courage,” the king purportedly told his Spartans hours before annihilation, “for today we will dine among the dead.”

During the failed Jewish revolt of A.D. 73, when the last enclave of the zealots at the citadel of Masada was surrounded and before the Roman besiegers could storm the stronghold, the rebels under Eleazar ben Yair killed themselves. By the historian Josephus’s count, all but seven of some 960 trapped men, women, and children perished. Hitler’s order in January 1943 for the encircled garrison at Stalingrad to shun both escape and surrender, but fight to the last man, was equivalent to suicide for thousands.

But the various elements of the Japanese death brigades were quite different from any fanatical suicides seen before in the long history of war. Thousands of Japanese were trained as suicide pilots. Even more suicide bombers commanded ramming-boats or as infantrymen organized death charges. Many foot soldiers fought with dynamite satchels or grenades strapped to their bodies. In all these cases the sole intention was to kill as many Americans as possible before meeting certain death. The acceptance of suicide was state-sanctioned—and very soon after its inception was to be not sporadic, but even planned and organized on a mass scale by the Japanese government. What, then, would make a modern nation turn to such apparently precivilized measures against the enemy?

Desperation in war, of course, is a human constant across time and space that can make the once inconceivable and repugnant act suddenly seem palatable. It is no surprise that the first organized suicide fighters made their appearance in autumn 1944 during the defense of the Philippines. Then most of the Japanese air force and navy was either in retreat or nearly destroyed—and there was little optimism about stopping the American juggernaut through traditional means as it neared the Japanese homeland. What would have been considered foolish and unnecessary on December 8, 1941, was not seen as such in October 1944, as the last defensive line of the once impenetrable Co-Prosperity Sphere was breached. Indeed, Japanese commanders who sent two-man midget-submarine crews into Pearl Harbor on December 7 had gained permission from Admiral Yamamoto for the daring missions only on the assurance that there was at least some chance of rescuing the crews.

But by April 1, 1945, when the Americans landed on Okinawa, Japan was confronted with the most powerful fleet in the history of warfare with no conventional mechanism for either sinking such an armada or turning it away. Japan’s best pilots were long dead. Its once legendary Zero was now outclassed by a variety of American fighters; and its capital ships were mostly sunk, in drydock, or without sufficient fuel. More important, with the beginning of the American B-29 fire raids in March 1945, the militarists could make the believable argument to both soldiers and civilians that the enemy meant not to defeat the Japanese armed forces but rather to destroy its very people.

Still, the cornered Japanese military of 1944–45 was hardly unique in its hopelessness. The nature of civilized war in the past three millennia is replete with examples of doomed armies that quietly surrendered or were massacred without their commanders first inaugurating well-organized suicide squads—whether at Cannae, Constantinople, or Tannenberg. Rather, ideology and a fanaticism of sorts are also requisite if a nation is going to embrace the idea of sending its youth on missions of no return. In the case of Japan, well before the Pacific war began to deteriorate, there were long-standing elements within its militarized society of the 1930s and 1940s that could prove conducive to suicide—should the need ever arise for the wholesale adoption of such ultimate sacrifice.

Japanese culture until the nineteenth century was unusually feudal and hierarchical, run by assorted shoguns and their lesser lords, or daimyo, who held power through the employment of samurai warriors. The glue that held together the entire tribal system was a shame culture based on a variety of protocols that ensured absolute obedience to those in power—and a willingness of subordinates to die as part of their sworn fealty.

The samurai code was not eccentric, but rather drew on a number of more traditional Japanese religious beliefs. Confucianism had always inculcated a need for strict loyalty and obedience to authority. Shintoism reminded soldiers that they were, in fact, offspring of divinities. If proven brave in battle, after death they would return to their godly existence. Even more mainstream Buddhism taught that life is tenuous. Death is not the end—merely a manifestation of a new and different sort of existence.

Still, deep-seated confidence in authority, transcendence, and moral sanction, even when coupled with an absence of a Christian repugnance for suicide, by themselves are not incentives enough to create cadres of kamikazes—as the relatively traditional and humane behavior of Japanese soldiers in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and the First World War attest. To enlist thousands of suicide pilots it takes more than the absence of democracy, confidence in the afterlife, and few taboos against killing oneself.

The destruction of a brief constitutional government in Japan during the 1930s by militarists, of course, also had provided a necessary ingredient for contemplating such drastic measures. The plotters were not merely thugs who wanted power. Instead, the more extreme men like the fiery Isamu Cho of the “Cherry Society” (Sakura-kai)—a prominent butcher in the Nanking Massacre to come—were far more systematic and sinister revolutionaries who sought to craft an entirely new Japanese identity cast in reactionary terms.

In this vein, the armed forces’ nationalist ideology added a novel wrinkle to traditionally conservative Japanese culture. The generals now preached that Western technology, when married to spiritual purity, could create a Japanese warrior far superior to his more decadent European or American counterpart—pampered Occidentals who relied on material wealth and machines rather than the primacy of innate courage. This “spiritual mobilization” (Seishin Kyoiku)—fed by the resentments of nearby colonialism and nursed by the old slights of racist Western condescension—was then grafted by the new ultranationalists onto traditional emperor worship (kodo). The result was an entire citizenry indoctrinated in the belief in racial purity and national destiny that demanded the absolute allegiance of every Japanese.

Youth in schools were now taught by rote—in eerie forerunners to the present-day fundamentalist Islamic madrassas that now turn out suicide murderers in the Middle East—that they must make sacrifices in their daily lives for their emperor, the personification of the divine destiny of a racially superior Japanese people. An increasing emphasis was put on the glories of dying in combat—especially the avoidance of surrender and killing enemy soldiers in the bargain. In early 1941, General Tojo issued an official military “code of ethics” that called upon every Japanese soldier not “to fear to die for the cause of everlasting justice. Do not stay alive in dishonor. Do not die in such a way as to leave a bad name behind you.” Such sacrifice would ensure that Japanese warriors would become divine, and perhaps live an eternal spiritual existence at “The Patriots’ Shrine” (the Yasukuni Temple on Kudan Hill in Tokyo), which had been founded in 1868 as home for the heroic souls of dead veterans.

In this multifaceted context of past Japanese cultural practice, the desperation of 1944–45, and the propaganda of the authoritarian generals in Tokyo, the conditions for suicide attacks on a grand scale arose that would have been impossible in the democratic West or among the totalitarian murderers of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Yet even with all that, the kamikazes might well have been a passing phenomenon. The final ingredient was some sporadic success in sinking or damaging American ships during their first haphazard attacks in autumn 1944 at the battle of Leyte Gulf. Suicide bombing in any era continues only because it is for a time deemed tactically or strategically effective.

Just as important as their actual results, both the zeal and the successes of the kamikazes were always exaggerated. In a society with a state-controlled media and an effective propaganda ministry, Japanese planners could argue to the masses that suicide tactics alone promised salvation from the Americans—or at more bleak times deny their presence altogether. Had the truth of the enormous losses been told, coupled with the reality that not a single American battleship or carrier was ever sunk by kamikazes alone, problems of morale might have thinned the suicide-pilot ranks from the very beginning in 1944.

After all, suicide attacks in any context would soon have ceased if the architects of such special corps had learned that their bombers were doing little long-term harm to the enemy, whether material, psychological, or political. Instead, there were at least some early reports that the kamikazes were achieving results in a way traditional aerial bombing attacks had not. Moreover, the steady attrition in army and naval aircraft by summer 1944 far outweighed the Japanese government’s ability to replace planes or train new pilots. So the apprehension grew that if some new tactic was not discovered rather quickly, the dwindling arsenal of resistance was soon to be obliterated altogether. If a pilot was going to be shot down anyway, why not instead take some of the enemy with him—especially since being captured as a prisoner-of-war was a worse disgrace than simply dying without killing the enemy?

Once it crossed the Rubicon of accepting state-organized suicide as a legitimate military tactic, the Japanese command learned that it might well regain some of its lost ability to strike the Americans and perhaps stave off an unconditional surrender. Its frontline bombers and fighters were, of course, too few and outclassed by 1945 to mix it up against the air combat patrols of new Hellcats and Corsairs in conventional attacks on American ships and bombers. And aviation fuel was in such short supply that the inflight training necessary to prepare capable pilots was nearly impossible. But Japan nevertheless still possessed thousands of antiquated Zeros and dive- and torpedo-bombers—26,000 produced in 1944 alone—as well as apparently thousands more eager and patriotic conscripts.

How then might they even the odds? In conventional practice it could take a year to train an effective pilot—two or three more still to produce in large numbers any of the new prototype aircraft that Japan hoped could at least match the latest American designs in conventional dogfights. Thus, the trick was to find a tactic in the here and now of late 1944 and early 1945 to impart to thousands of outmoded planes and green pilots the ability to destroy the most sophisticated military in the world. Suicide bombers seemed to have solved the dilemma quite well. The Zero, after all, was still a relatively reliable plane. If it could no longer be flown by seasoned pilots to even the odds against more advanced Grumman F6F-5 Hellcats, it might nevertheless make a deadly cruise missile—especially in headlong dives from high altitudes in which there was no worry about pulling out. And when Zeros were not available, anything that flew, from lumbering trainers to obsolete dive-bombers, at least would be put to better use in killing Americans than in sitting unused and discarded in hangars, especially when employed in mass attacks—again, as long as the life of the pilot was no longer a paramount concern.

If a man did not plan to live through his attack, then worries about full gas tanks, clear weather on the way home, radio contact with his base, sophisticated aerial tactics, and the top performance of his plane began to fade. By strapping a young zealot to the seat of a bomb-carrying plane, the Japanese had in effect nullified a two- or three-year American edge in technology: what the delivery vehicle lacked in speed and performance, it now gained in near superhuman accuracy. The kamikaze pilot was an early smart bomb—and its guidance system was far more sophisticated than any computer in its ability to hunt down and find a mobile enemy.

Since kamikazes cared only to target the enemy and destroy him, a man’s brain was concerned with using all its skill to hit a ship or large bomber—not to protect friends, evade fire, return home, or save his plane. And out of that single-minded concentration on death, the Japanese in their eleventh hour for a time found a mechanism to transform second-rate planes and third-rate pilots into first-rate guided missiles far more effective than German V-1 rockets or any missile weapons in either the American or British arsenal that could not alter their trajectory or general course once launched.

The use of kamikazes in the last months of World War II would result in real but unforeseen ripples both short-term and with us still. As we shall see, the astounding damage they inflicted against the American fleet between April and June 1945 purportedly taught students of conflict that death cadres could be great equalizers for any power that had access to technology and was willing to marry it to an ideology—or religion—that could tolerate or even foster suicide.

The ostensible lesson of the suicides on Okinawa was that a willingness to die might result in military parity for a time against a technologically superior foe; and that Western sophistication in arms—whether that be self-sealing gas tanks, onboard radio and radar communications, armor plating, ejection seats and parachutes, or elaborate sea search-and-rescue infrastructures—was in large part designed to protect the combatant as much as to injure the enemy. But if the life of the warrior was to be sacrificed in the moment of his attack, then much of what was deemed progress in war was rendered instantly superfluous.

Thus it is no accident that well after the defeat of the Japanese off Okinawa, the basic principles of suicide attack are still with us today—giving hope to any militarily backward and technologically inferior foe that with the proper propaganda, ideology, or religion to indoctrinate a cadre of suicide bombers, the supposedly sophisticated and advanced infrastructure of the West could still be vulnerable. If one lacks an F-16 or B-52, a hijacked and fuel-laden jet airliner might be just as effective—as long as the pilot and his accomplices have every intention of steering the plane and themselves into its target. In turn, those who seek to live can be deemed weak by those determined to die in killing them. And better quality weapons that are designed to protect the user as well as kill the target can be neutralized by inferior models employed only to destroy, not survive the ordeal.

What were the long-term lessons of the response to the suicides at Okinawa? As we shall also discover, at Okinawa the use of kamikazes and an entire array of death bombers unshackled the Americans in both their thinking and practice of war. What the Japanese started, the Americans had even more terrifying ways of finishing—then and now.

Divine Wind

A divine wind (kamikaze) twice, in 1274 and 1281, had blown away Kublai Khan’s Mongol armada—sudden and unexpected typhoons that saved Japan from sure invasion by an overwhelmingly superior foreigner. Nearly seven hundred years later, man and machine would purportedly do again for Japan against the Americans what nature apparently this time would not.

Throughout the earlier part of World War II, some soldiers and pilots in the Japanese military were prone to near-suicidal tactics in confronting the greater numbers and material edge of the Americans. During the savage fighting on Guadalcanal (summer and fall 1942) and on the Aleutians (May 1943), hundreds of desperate Japanese soldiers rushed heedlessly into entrenched American artillery and machine gun positions in human-wave or so-called “banzai charges.” In all cases the sacrifices led to horrendous casualities without changing the course of battle. Japanese pilots—when wounded or on the verge of crashing—sometimes steered their planes into American ships. Such desperate attacks, for example, may have helped sink the aircraft carrier Hornet off Guadalcanal in October 1942.

Yet the first organized and successful large-scale kamikaze missions did not take place until the desperate defense of the Philippines as part of the Sho (“Victor”) plan of integrated air, sea, and ground counterattacks against the American invasion. Vice Adm. Takijiro Onishi purportedly crafted the first successful kamikaze assault of his newly created Yamato and Shikishima units on October 25, when they damaged a number of American ships and sank the escort carrier St. Lo. Just as important, the Japanese felt that the newly formed kamikazes could serve as a frightening terror weapon: once enemy sailors realized that approaching planes meant to crash into their ships and that brave Japanese pilots were willing to die in order to kill them, the Americans would become unnerved and lose heart at fighting such audacious and desperate enemies who would do what they themselves could not. Rikihei Inoguchi and Tadashi Nakajima, who helped command the kamikaze attacks, remarked of the generally held Japanese belief that such corps were absolutely unique:

History provides many cases of individual soldiers who fought under certain-death circumstances, but never before was such a program carried out so systematically and over such a long period of time. In the case of do-or-die action, however great the risk involved, there is always a chance of survival. But the kamikaze attack could be carried out only by killing himself. The attack and death were one and the same thing.

From October 25, 1944, until the April 1945 sorties against Okinawa, the Japanese made a series of suicide attacks on American shipping as they sought to refine their weapons and tactics—the most practicable weapon emerging as a Zero carrying a five-hundred-pound bomb. Sometimes a plane skimmed the waves in order to avoid radar and crashed into the vulnerable waterline of a ship. More often they came in at high altitudes and dived from nearly twenty thousand feet to lessen their window of vulnerability to antiaircraft fire and enemy fighters. Dawn and sunset were the preferred times to launch the attacks—as the rising and setting sun allowed better identification of enemy vessels than was possible during the night, without the vulnerability of flying in full daylight. In addition, ritual funerals, public ceremony, and occasional media attention romanticized the kamikazes in hopes of increasing recruitment and gaining acceptance among an initially wary Japanese high command and skeptical citizenry at large. Close group interaction, discussion, and constant indoctrination were critical in preventing any faint-hearts from having second thoughts about killing themselves. The result was that during the autumn and winter of 1944 off the Philippines, the kamikazes damaged and sank more American ships than in any three-month period of the entire war since Pearl Harbor. And by early 1945, increased numbers of suicide bombers attacked the Americans off Formosa and Iwo Jima, again damaging dozens of destroyers and light carriers.

Unlike conventional attacks, the destructive power of desperate Zeros involved more than the dropping of bombs. In addition to the power of a five-hundred-pound explosive device, the weight, density, and size of the plane coming in at speeds of up to 300 miles per hour could easily tear apart wooden carrier decks and even their steel superstructures. Then gallons of aviation fuel, in the manner of napalm, would be ignited on impact, spreading fire beyond the explosion. Finally, the architects of suicide felt that terror was an ally as well: they figured (erroneously as it turned out) that American sailors might quickly become disheartened when they learned that their new enemies were not merely bombs and bullets, but entire planes and their pilots as well.

The real test, however, would be Okinawa itself. There the army under the veteran General Ushijima and the fanatical General Cho were resolved to die with their entire commands as the price of killing thousands of Americans. By March hundreds of kamikazes, based on the mainland at Kyushu, organized the so-called kikusui force or “floating chrysanthemums,” named for the traditional pure flower that would symbolize the combined air-and-sea operation. At Okinawa the Japanese felt that they had much better opportunities to destroy American ships than was true at either the Philippines or Iwo Jima. The island was too far distant for land-based American aircraft to attack. Until bases could be established on the newly conquered island, almost all American air support for the amphibious assault had to come from the carriers themselves—whose limited numbers of floating wooden runways in theory could be put out of commission for days by just a few kamikazes.

In other words, the American fleet more or less was stationary and posted permanently off Okinawa, without the umbrella of the Army Air Force, all the while in easy range of thousands of enemy planes from the mainland. Normally that extended deployment would not have troubled American planners, who were confident that their new carrier fighters and highly trained pilots would make short work of both conventional and occasional suicide attacks.

But the Japanese were planning something on a scale entirely unforeseen in preparing some 4,000 planes for suicide attacks, commencing their sorties immediately after the initial landings. In all there would be roughly ten mass kikusui attacks. The most dramatic was perhaps the first on April 6, when for the entire day and early evening some 223 planes dived on Task Force 58, the American invasion fleet stationed off the landing beaches, and various radar picket destroyers northeast of Okinawa. Despite inadequate cover from Zero fighters and poorly trained pilots, the unprecedented number of planes allowed the kamikazes to hit at least fourteen ships. The Americans had never seen anything quite like it.

More important, 15 percent of the original force inflicted some damage—a far higher figure than obtained by past traditional Japanese naval aviators. The only consolation to the Americans was that the bulk of the planes bombed distant destroyers acting as radar pickets. Perhaps the suicide planes deliberately wished to disrupt early warnings to the core of the American fleet; or they were satisfied that they could at least sink a smaller destroyer with one crash; or the Japanese pilots realized they would probably be shot down venturing over the cruisers and battleships on their way to the carriers in the middle of the armada and so attacked the first targets in sight. Although in this first attack the Japanese had hit only the fleet carrier Hancock and the light carrier San Jacinto, the Americans immediately realized that should they lose their picket destroyers, minesweepers, and supply craft at such an alarming rate, eventually their capital ships could fall prey as well.

The kamikazes returned on April 12 in even greater numbers. Some 350 bombers and fighters took off from Kyushu. They were intermingled with escort fighters and a few more experienced and valuable pilots who planned to make conventional attacks. This time the Japanese dropped “chaff” (thin foil strips) to confuse radar, attacked near dusk, and came in at all altitudes and directions. The Zeros heavily damaged some of the largest ships in the fleet—the carriers Enterprise and Essex, the battleships Missouri, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Idaho, and the cruiser Oakland as well as dozens of ancillary destroyers, gunboats, and minesweepers.

Shocked American sailors tried everything to prevent such unforeseen mayhem. They bombed the Japanese bases in Kyushu where camouflaged and scattered planes proved difficult to detect. They tried redirecting carrier planes from sorties over Okinawa to fleet defense, and added dozens of antiaircraft batteries to escort ships—eventually naval gunfire would down 70 percent of the attackers. And still the kamikazes came with a third large attack of 155 planes on April 16. Once again they managed to hit a carrier, the Intrepid, as well as more destroyers, minesweepers, and tankers. Then for the next three weeks the Japanese were diving continuously, damaging and sinking American ships almost daily before sending another massive concentrated flight on May 3 and 4, when 305 planes—at least 280 were lost—damaged nearly a dozen of the picket destroyers and support ships.

Finally the Americans appeared to be tiring from the daily barrage. On May 11 the Japanese hit Admiral Mitscher’s flagship itself, the carrier Bunker Hill, and left it a burning wreck, and also hit again the battleship New Mexico. American officers by the end of May calculated that if the kamikazes continued to score at the present rates, the entire fleet would have to withdraw by the middle of June—or acknowledge that some of their key capital ships would be crippled and the majority of their destroyers sunk or damaged, and thousands of sailors killed and wounded at an unsustainable rate. American navy personnel by now had been fighting daily kamikaze attacks for nearly two months. They had seen their best vessels hit and their friends blown apart and still were without any sure method of stopping the attackers. Given the nature of the kamikazes’ determination, even a smaller sortie of some 30 or 40 planes—otherwise hardly a threat as conventional fighters and bombers—could spell catastrophe.

Perhaps the most disheartening air attack came late in the battle on June 5, nearly sixty-five days after the initial invasion and at a time when the Americans were beginning to believe the enemy had lost his initiative. First kamikazes hit the battleship Mississippi, the cruiser Louisville, and assorted destroyers and minesweepers. Then later on, an enormous storm caught the recoiling Americans, further damaging carriers and battleships, wrecking 142 planes, and sending dozens of ships back to the United States for major repairs—even as the suicides returned the next day to augment the toll from the weather damage. Fortunately, by mid-June the near capitulation of Okinawa, the destruction of hundreds of Japanese planes in the air and at their bases in Japan, and the first signs of some pilot reluctance in pressing home the attacks caused the suicide bombers to taper off.

Altogether, the combined kikusui campaign had sunk eleven destroyers, one minesweeper, and assorted other auxiliary craft, but damaged—and in some cases disabled for the rest of the war—four fleet carriers, three light carriers, ten battleships, five cruisers, sixty-one destroyers, and countless other support ships. Based on exaggerated reports and propaganda, the Japanese high command reported losses ten times the actual American numbers, which had the effect for a time of neutralizing the growing doubt among new squadrons of pilots that they were being arbitrarily recruited to die for a lost cause.

The record of the size and number of actual kamikaze attacks at Okinawa remains somewhat unclear as Japanese and American figures are not in agreement on either the number of planes involved or the precise figure of damaged and destroyed targets. We should assume, however, that at least 2,000 Japanese pilots were lost in sorties that killed almost 5,000 American sailors. The Americans, in fact, believed that they had shot down over 7,000 planes. To obtain some idea of the deadly nature of the kamikazes, contrast the inverse ratio of fatalities of their suicidal army counterparts on Okinawa, who sacrificed 100,000 men to kill 7,000 Americans—2 dead Japanese pilots for every 5 American sailors versus 100 imperial infantrymen needed to kill 7 Marines and GIs. Since prior to the inauguration of kamikaze tactics, neither the Japanese navy nor air force in 1945 had been able to inflict any major damage on the American fleet, the kamikazes represented a counterassault well beyond the expectations of even the most optimistic supporters of the new squadrons. And when the attacks ceased on June 22, a battered American fleet realized that there were supposedly thousands more of such weapons less than four hundred miles away on the mainland ready to renew their attacks.

What, then, is the legacy of the kamikazes—a brilliant and malevolent tactic of neutralizing the edge in material power and technology of the Americans, or a resounding Japanese defeat that only helped prompt a murderous response in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The answer is ambiguous, since the kamikazes in a sense succeeded and failed—by inflicting unimagined damage in their inability either to save Okinawa, destroy the American fleet, or break the will of their enemies. After all, while the Americans suffered dreadful naval losses, not a single fleet carrier or battleship was sunk. Planes continued to attack Okinawa daily despite kamikaze targeting of their home carriers. If anything, the Americans proved that they could beat off the suicides, repair damaged craft, and replace their lost ships faster than the Japanese could make up their own losses in planes and fanatical pilots. So the ever more shrill boasts of tens of thousands of suicide killers waiting to attack in planes, boats, and submarines would finally prove hollow—both because of a shortage of delivery systems and the reality that there were fewer suicide volunteers and eager draftees than publicly proclaimed.

The ripples of the “Floating Chrysanthemums,” then, were more psychological and ideological—and so remain today as such across time and space. The metaphysics of air suicide attacks only confirmed in the Western mind the fanaticism of the imperial military, making it clear that extreme measures would be necessary to break their hold on the citizens of Japan. If a foe wished to crash himself in order to kill—and had plenty more planes and pilots to come—why worry about the magnitude of the retaliatory response? The American navy left Okinawa convinced that warfare in the Pacific had to continue to be far more harsh and terrible than what had transpired in Europe. They concluded that Asians in their caves, holes, and suicide ships and planes were a different—usually thought to be a more fanatical—foe than Germans or Italians, and so were deserving of even more extreme treatment. And that conjecture would have consequences in American thinking in the decades to come in the bombing campaigns ahead in Korea and especially Vietnam, where massive caves and underground fortifications were eerily reminiscent of Okinawa and likewise virtually impregnable to occasionally mindless American carpet bombing.

But more important, the sacrifice of some 3,913 American-documented successful kamikaze attacks during the war set a paradigm of asymmetrical warfare whose antidotes are also with us still. Airplanes are not merely the carriers of bombs, missiles, and guns, but if piloted by suicides can become forces of sheer destruction themselves. The kamikazes naturally resonated with the terrorists of September 11—and will continue to hold out false hope for future guerrillas to come, by offering to those with less power the specter of destroying enormous assets of American power, whether large ships or urban skyscrapers.

But again, what those who crash airplanes in the past and present alike failed to grasp was also the nature of the deadly repercussions that arose from their explosions. Suicide bombings strike at the very psyche of the Western mind that is repelled by the religious fanaticism and the authoritarianism, or perhaps the despair, of such enemies—confirming that wars are not just misunderstandings over policy or the reckless actions of a deranged leader, but accurate reflections of fundamental differences in culture and society. In precisely the same way as kamikazes off Okinawa led to A-bombs, so too jumbo jets exploding at the World Trade Center were the logical precursors to daisy-cutters, bunker-busters, and thermobaric bombs in Afghanistan—as an unleashed America resounded with a terrible fury not seen or anticipated since 1945. The Western world publicly objected to the Israeli plunge into the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002 and its purported destruction of the civilian infrastructure—but much of it also privately sighed, “Such are the wages for suicide-murderers who blow up children in Tel Aviv.” If it is true that moral pretensions at restraint are the ultimate brakes on the murderous Western way of war, it is also accurate to suggest that such ethical restrictions erode considerably when the enemy employs suicide bombers.

The Japanese also had an array of other suicide plans of attack by sea and air that were astounding both in their variety and desperation. As the campaign wore on, the Americans discovered literally dozens of new Japanese suicide weapons, specialized death battalions, and a generally shared commitment among former civilians and draftees to fight to the death. The most sophisticated of the one-way weapons was the so-called Okha (“exploding cherry blossom”) flying bomb. With the capture of the Mariana Islands in June and July 1944 and the accompanying slaughter of hundreds of Japanese bombers and fighters—445 planes shot down—imperial planners realized that their once unrivaled planes were now too slow, their pilots too inexperienced, and their bombs too light to destroy the American fleet. Out of that desperation arose the Okha (called a Baka, or “idiot,” bomb by the Americans), a one-way piloted rocket that in theory could neutralize all of the Americans’ advantages in naval defense.

The missile-planes were cheap to build, constructed of low-quality metal and wood, simply designed, and only twenty feet long, with stubby wings and two vertical stabilizers. The nose cone was filled with an armor-coated charge of 2,640 pounds of TNT, over five times more destructive power as that which was carried in most kamikaze suicide planes. Five small rockets—adapted from German designs—gave a nine-second propellant burst that thrust the descending gliders to speeds of 600 mph.

The rocket planes were dropped a safe distance from their targets by twin-engine Betty bombers at an altitude of twenty thousand feet, ensuring that the Okhas roared out of the sky unannounced at unbelievable speeds—while in theory at least requiring little skill to aim them at the large and relatively slow-moving American ships. Without many worries about taking off, landing, or missing such large targets—in these respects the thinking was similar to that of the unskilled pilots who rammed jumbo jets into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—the so-called “Thunder Gods” who navigated the Okhas could be trained quickly and cheaply.

Still, operational and tactical problems emerged immediately—besides premature explosions, crashes of the bombers, and an inability to transport the rockets to their bases due to American bombing. The short-ranged Okhas had to be dropped fairly close to the American fleet. But such requisite proximity ensured that the slow-moving and encumbered mother Betty bombers—that scarcely managed 150 knots when loaded—were then themselves easy targets. Although 56 of the Thunder Gods were killed, 372 Betty bomber crewmen perished just in nearing the American ships. And once sent off, the rocket bombs proved nearly impossible to control with any precision. Altogether only one American destroyer was sunk and another five were damaged—despite the launching of some 185 Okhas in the battle for Okinawa alone.

Besides the rocket bombers, the Japanese built a series of suicide midget submarines, one-way motorboats, and human torpedoes—precursors of the suicide boat that nearly sank the USS Cole in Yemen on October 12, 2000. Yet the combined results of all such special weapons were the sinking of less than a half dozen American landing craft, oilers, and destroyers. Perhaps the most famous and least successful of all suicide missions was the final voyage of the world’s largest battleship, the famed Yamato that steamed out of Kure naval harbor on March 28, 1945, on a mission of no return. Along with its escort ships, the Yamato planned to plow into the American fleet off Okinawa in hopes that its massive 18.1-inch guns could blast away the thin-skinned carriers before it was spotted and sunk—or at least draw off enemy carrier-based planes so that simultaneous kamikaze attacks might more easily hit their targets. In fact, the Yamato never got close to Okinawa. It was blasted apart by American carrier planes on April 7—taking over two thousand crewmen to the bottom scarcely halfway to its target.

But suicide was no stranger to the actual land battle itself on Okinawa and usually occurred on the island in a variety of guises. As had been true of earlier fighting in the Pacific, there were a number of sudden death charges by hundreds of Japanese. In this regard General Cho especially bristled at the continual defensive tactics of Colonel Yahara and was finally given the go-ahead for an offensive on May 4 to coincide with kamikaze attacks on the fleet and proposed amphibious landings behind American lines. Some fifteen thousand of the Japanese 32nd Army struck out at the Americans at daybreak, small units carrying food and ammunition for ten days of independent operation with orders “to kill one American devil for every Japanese.” Convinced that the temporary halt of the Americans at the Shuri line signaled weakness, the Japanese abandoned the very tactics that had brought them success and thereby helped accelerate their own defeat.

By midnight of the next day the offensive was proving to be a tactical disaster. Not only did the Japanese lose five thousand soldiers and over nineteen key heavy artillery pieces, they inflicted just over a thousand casualties on the American XXIV Corps. Throughout the two-day attack there were impromptu banzai charges, their aim simply to kill Americans. At other times infantrymen volunteered to infiltrate into American lines at night to slit Marine throats—even though such stealthy actions usually meant death by alert American lookouts.

Other suicide attackers adopted a different and more dangerous tactic of carrying satchel charges and grenades—or even wiring such explosives to their bodies—so that they might get close enough to American soldiers, trucks, tanks, jeeps, and almost anything imaginable and blow themselves up, taking dozens with them. Two Japanese soldiers, on one occasion, strapped explosives to their backs and blew up a footbridge that had been built to allow the 22nd Marines to cross the Asa River. Such suicide bombing rapidly became the only possible way of fulfilling General Ushijima’s initial boast of one man for each tank.

As in the case of the kamikazes, zeal could in theory often make up for both the dearth of heavy weapons and the inadequacy of lethal antitank rockets, in effect creating the 1945 equivalent of laser-guided artillery projectiles. A suicide bomber can be every bit as effective as a “smart” shell, using his senses and intelligence to zero in on the target—with the added advantage of not being wed to a predetermined trajectory. How many of the some seven thousand American infantrymen killed on the island itself fell to suicide attackers is unknown, but the discipline and firepower of Marine units usually meant that such exposed suicidal charges were in fact often to be welcomed over more lethal sniper attacks and shelling from well-fortified caves.

Sometimes Japanese soldiers deliberately holed up in subterranean chambers, hoping that the attacking Americans would have to descend in small groups of twos and threes and then be blown up as the defenders killed themselves. In response, the Americans learned to torch such strongholds first and ask for surrender later. In five days, for example, between June 13 and 17, the flame-shooting tanks of the 713th Armored Flamethrower Battalion poured 37,000 gallons of gasoline into Japanese caves and bunkers.

Col. Hiromichi Yahara, who had designed much of the Japanese resistance and was often at odds with his more fiery superiors, recalled after the war a conversation with another officer about the dramatic—but also self-serving—efforts of the militarists to sacrifice thousands of Japanese soldiers:

I then explained the all-out suicide attack plan in which our soldiers would charge down the hill to Mabuni. The generals would witness this scene just before they died peacefully on the hilltop. I was glad to hear Sunano add, “Our artillery can’t contribute much to such a finale, but somehow we should move some guns to Odo village. From there they can contribute to the scene, by firing guns like fireworks. It will be spectacular.” I was heartened to hear his plan. We went on to discuss Japan’s future, about which we were deeply concerned. It was clear that Japan would inevitably fall after Okinawa. Our leaders had chosen this path to destruction. They did not care that hundreds of thousands of soldiers would die. They seemed to care only about the preservation of their own status, prestige, and honor.

Equally disturbing to Americans, however, were the occasional suicides of Okinawan civilians, who were told by the Japanese that conquering GIs and Marines would torture and kill them upon capture—in the very manner that veterans themselves of the 32nd Army had mutilated Chinese civilians for years in Manchuria. Junkyo Isa, who was treated humanely after falling into American hands, recalls that Japanese soldiers had told her earlier that “women who’d been captured in the central areas of the island were being raped by American soldiers and that these Americans were killing children by ripping them apart at the crotch. Of course these were just tall tales meant to scare us and convince us not to let ourselves be captured by the enemy. But I was still afraid to be caught.”

During the capture of the Kerama Islands off the coast of Okinawa, dozens of Japanese civilians killed themselves rather than fall into American hands. The official history of Okinawa records a ghastly scene of when army troops came upon a small valley:

In the morning they found a small valley littered with more than 150 dead and dying Japanese, most of them civilians. Fathers had systematically throttled each member of their families and then disemboweled themselves with knives and hand grenades. Under one blanket lay a father, two small children, a grandfather, and a grandmother, all strangled by cloth ropes. Soldiers and medics did what they could. The natives, who had been told that the invading “barbarians” would kill and rape, watched in amazement as the Americans provided food and medical care; an old man who had killed his daughter wept in bitter remorse.

No tallies exist of the actual numbers of civilian suicides on Okinawa proper during the three-month ordeal; but anecdotal accounts suggest that thousands may have taken their lives. Even so-called civilians remained a danger after capture; one veteran, Thomas Hannaher, remarked, “In the later stages of the campaign, I was assigned to guard a large compound of prisoners. It was boring duty. The inmates were behind barbed wire. Most were civilians but it was hard to tell. One of them blew himself up with a hand grenade.” Frank Gibney, an intelligence officer on Okinawa, who wrote a commentary on Colonel Yahara’s postwar memoirs, concluded:

As Yahara’s narrative noted, several thousand perished in suicides or futile last-ditch attacks in a literal battle-to-the-death inside the navy base entrenchments on the Oroku Peninsula near Naha Port. Worst of all were the civilian deaths. Thousands of Okinawan civilians, and as many women and children as men, were ordered to stay in caves with Japanese troops who were preparing a last-ditch “defense.” The flower of the island’s youth—teenage girl nurses’ aides as well as boeitai boy-soldiers—was sacrificed to the directives of the Japanese army command. In many cases they were forced to hurl themselves from the low southern cliffs into the sea, so they, too, could “die for the Emperor.”

Much is made of the unusually “large” number of Japanese prisoners taken on Okinawa—over 7,000 from some 110,000 combatants—as if the presence of any surrendering soldiers marked a radical break in past practice for the Japanese military. True, there were more prisoners on Okinawa than taken elsewhere in the Pacific—but then there also were far more Japanese soldiers to begin with than had been present on Saipan, Peleliu, or Iwo Jima. Still, a mere 7 percent of all Japanese soldiers gave themselves up—tens of thousands either dying or killing themselves in caves below. On June 18, Generals Cho and Ushijima both committed seppuku—ritual disembowelment—before being beheaded by trusty aides, a fate shared by an unknown number of fellow Japanese officers when approaching American Marines were known to be only a few hundred yards distant. Most enlisted men, however, had neither the appurtenances nor the attendants for such rituals and so often blew themselves up by simply putting a grenade to their bodies.

What was the effect on Americans of seeing the sheer variety of suicides among civilians and soldiers alike, which were aimed first at killing GIs and then, in defeat, ending their own lives? At first, confusion and perplexity spread. Up until Okinawa, the invading Americans had fought in two general scenarios—either on islands like Iwo Jima, where there were essentially no civilians, or in places such as the Philippines, where the local inhabitants were clearly friendly and welcomed liberation. After Okinawa, no one had any illusions about a third and more difficult situation to come on the mainland itself—where rumor had it that 30 million Japanese elderly, women, and children were arming themselves with guns, spears, and explosives to join in the resistance alongside both regular troops and militias.

In earlier situations there had been little ambiguity in the nature of friend and foe—there were either no locals at all, friendly civilians, or clearly hostile noncombatants. But Okinawa was different even from the less populous Saipan. Okinawans themselves had always been resentful of their treatment by the Japanese, enjoying both a distinct culture and spiritual and material separation from the mainland. The result was that while they were likely to fight alongside Japanese or at least openly aid and abet imperial soldiers, they were also eager to flee or become neutrals once the doomed nature of the Japanese resistance was made clear. The trick, then, for Marines was to determine exactly the changing state of mind of each noncombatant they discovered in caves and redoubts in the instant before they themselves might be attacked. Junkyo Isa, an Okinawan native, relates how life and death hung in the balance when she and her family were rooted out of their hiding place:

That evening three American soldiers brandishing weapons arrived and forced us out of our hiding place. “Dete koi!” (Get out of there!) they called out in Japanese. They pointed their guns right at us, straight toward our chests! I couldn’t believe how big these guys were. All I remember thinking was, “Oh, my goodness, this is the enemy!” Can you imagine how I felt being lifted up by one of them and taken away in a truck? I couldn’t speak or understand English, so I had to tell them with hand gestures that I couldn’t walk. They nodded and prepared two bamboo baskets, one for carrying me, and the other for my baby brother.

Were those thousands of civilians trapped in caves determined suicide bombers, stunned noncombatants, or the terrified defeated resolved to kill themselves in solitude? And should Americans then prevent suicides, encourage them, or simply ignore those who wished to go off alone to kill themselves? Did this desire for death arise out of irrational fear—or trepidation grounded in the fact that they had killed Americans? All such baffling questions were new to the American combatants, but had the general effect of at least reminding them that they were up against an entirely novel enemy, of a type unseen even in Hitler’s Europe.

Much has been written about the grudging admiration that the American soldier held for the kamikazes and even the suicidal bravery of doomed infantry units. But beneath that wonderment at such a determined foe there remained a deep-seated disgust with suicidal tactics that were never seen as rational, but rather insane—hence the renaming by Americans of the “exploding cherry blossoms” to “idiot bombs.” As the battle dragged on, Americans became hardened to the realities that thousands of the enemy wished to kill them more than to save their own lives. That grim knowledge alone resulted in a general feeling toward prisoners and at times noncombatants that could be summed up by something like “Why should we respect their lives, when they don’t even respect their own?”

Because the effectiveness of American countermeasures—increased radar, picket destroyers, expanded fighter cover at sea, flamethrowers, dynamite, and night watches on land—neutralized most Japanese suicide attacks, rendering them serious and deadly annoyances rather than decisive tactical moves that might have lost the Americans the island, there arose a disdain and then implacable anger at the continuing assaults. Since the suicide bombers could not overturn the verdict of the battlefield, it became clear that they simply wanted to kill as many Americans as possible, not retake ground or sink capital ships.

The Americans also learned that the defeat of suicide bombers did not require new exotic weapons—albeit flamethrowers against those in caves were critical—as much as a renewed reliance on traditional Western discipline and firepower. So they turned to bombing distant kamikaze bases, coordinating well-trained antiaircraft batteries at sea, and sending out superior Hellcats with better pilots miles from the fleet to shoot down outclassed Zeros. On the island itself tough leathernecks using mortars, machine guns, and grenades learned how to blast apart recalcitrant pockets as the American counterassault was fueled by a steady reinforcement of soldiers, guns, ships, and planes at a rate far greater than they were lost.

So Okinawa proved to the American military that no matter what new weapon or specialized unit the Japanese threw at them—many of them quite out of Dante’s Inferno in their ingenuity at inflicting terror—it could be defeated through greater firepower, numbers, and training. The only variable in the equation was the number of casualities that the Americans were willing to accept. Otherwise, the eventual result of the ensuing conflict was never in doubt. The Japanese wished for something far greater, far deadlier than Okinawa in the struggle to come on the mainland—suicidal attacks by boats, planes, submarines, torpedoes, rockets, and mass waves of charging infantry in the tens of thousands. The Americans were ready to oblige them—but first contemplated ways of repeating the holocaust of Okinawa, but ensuring that the next time it would be purely a Japanese rather than a shared American nightmare. And so it was.

The Military Lessons

In high school textbooks, Okinawa is now rarely mentioned. Hiroshima, the internment of Japanese in the western United States, the racial segregation of the American military during the war, and the rape of Nanking—all warrant more attention. Even the recent Oxford Companion to Military History has no entry for the battle—though articles appear on Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and an array of far lesser engagements in addition to entries as diverse as “homosexuality and the armed forces,” “women in the military,” and “African-American troops.” Other than the concerns of a new military scholarship that seeks to address the past sins of homophobia, sexism, and racism by diverting emphasis away from tactics, strategy, and pitched battles, what accounts for this relative neglect of the most powerful amphibious assault in history and, indeed, the single most deadly campaign in the history of the United States Navy? For all its ghastliness, was Okinawa really of so little historical consequence? Was Winston Churchill alone cognizant of the battle’s epic importance, remarking in its immediate aftermath that the skill of American fighting men and the determination and ferocity of the Japanese placed “this battle among the most intense and famous in military history”?

The inattention to the battle perhaps goes back to 1945 itself, when American soldiers complained that few back home knew about their ongoing sacrifice. April and May marked the last days of the Third Reich as most in the United States turned their thoughts to triumphant armies of liberation who raced through a collapsing Germany, capturing thousands of prisoners, grabbing huge chunks of territory, and suffering few casualties in their lightning advances. Okinawa in contrast represented another bloody mess like Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, where there would be lots of horrors but little maneuver, fluidity, or opportunity for swashbuckling Pattonesque armor.

Because there was no chance of escape for the Japanese from the island, since their fleet and air force were essentially destroyed, the ultimate outcome was foreordained. That reality meant for Americans back home that the battle was not a question of if, but when and at what cost Okinawa would fall. Despite the lethality of the kamikazes and the murderous record of the Japanese 32nd Army, few really believed the massive American fleet would be either sunk or forced to withdraw, leaving the Americans unsupplied and at the mercy of the entrenched enemy. Perhaps there is something both anticlimatic and macabre in knowing that the suspense of battle lies only in the butcher’s bill to come, not in its ultimate verdict.

What Americans did learn led only to greater denial and then later apathy. Both the horrific nature of the fighting and the mud and stench of the battlefield environment made grim reading back home. The tragic death of General Buckner just days before the island was declared secure also cast a pall over postbellum commemoration and analysis. Had he lived, there may well have been careful and critical scrutiny of his generalship as planners preparing for the mainland invasions were already questioning the wisdom of Marine and army head-on assaults against a doomed enemy. Such censure of American tactics still today leads to larger and unanswered strategic questions: could Okinawa have been cut off and bypassed altogether, allowing an unsupplied 110,000 Japanese soldiers to die on the vine while Americans looked for other forward bases in Formosa to launch their planned assaults on the mainland? The answer surely is yes—had the Americans wished to prolong the war for a year or two while trading time for lives.

Furthermore, the denouement of the Pacific war cast a further shadow over the importance of Okinawa. Most critics later looked at the battle from the hindsight of Hiroshima, not realizing that in April 1945 it was not at all clear that the Americans would—or should—use some new weapon to prevent a costly invasion of the mainland. Instead, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, far from regretting the decision, it was more likely that citizens asked in retrospect whether Okinawa had been necessary at all. If atomic weapons had precluded a holocaust in Japan, surely a few months earlier planners could have held off from Okinawa until such super bombs were brought to the front? All in all, Okinawa’s great cost, its brutality, and lingering questions about its very necessity weeks before the surrender made it a battle Americans would prefer to forget—and largely ignore to this day. Again, something clearly went quite wrong at Okinawa.

Yet, for all the formal neglect by the media and historians alike, what happened on Okinawa may have changed Americans more than any other battle in their history. The most obvious ripple is, of course, the decision to use the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Skeptics have argued for a half century over the pretext for the nuclear attack—given the successful fire raids that had already leveled the major Japanese cities. Many claim that the decision to drop was really based on everything from a purported desire to signal to the Russians both American power and its will to use it, to a grisly desire to try out such an expensive weapon on a live target—or simple racist hatred against the Japanese people. But ultimately the reasons for Hiroshima were surely strategic, and again are inexplicable without remembrance of Okinawa.

The Americans had seen from April 1 to July 2 the damage that a cornered Japanese military—shorn of its navy, air force, and intermingled with civilians—could inflict on Americans. They clearly wanted no more Okinawas. Had the Americans not invaded Okinawa, it is more, not less, likely that they would have landed on the Japanese mainland in late summer and thereby suffered far greater casualties.

Veteran of the nightmare of Okinawa and fated to invade Japan with what was left of his Marine division, E. B. Sledge sat in his base camp on the island dumbfounded at the news of Hiroshima and the subsequent surrender. “We received the news with quiet disbelief coupled with an indescribable sense of relief. We thought the Japanese would never surrender. Many refused to believe it. Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead. So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.”

More precisely, at the beginning of July there were roughly 6,150 combat-ready Japanese planes, with nearly 8,000 pilots trained enough to fly them into targets; those were official postbellum accounts, and the actual number available in August 1945 may well have been far more. The Japanese army bragged that it had available 2,350,000 regular troops, but predicted in its death throes that it could impress up to 30 million to form an enormous citizen militia. The plan of homeland defense (ketsu-go) was predicated on the idea that every Japanese civilian and soldier alike would kill as many Americans as possible—resulting in either a fitting genocide for a still unconquered and unoccupied people or such mayhem for the enemy that the Americans, not the Japanese, would seek negotiations.

So the holocaust on Okinawa led to the dropping of the bombs, which led to a surrender rather than a greater carnage for both sides. We should remember that not only were millions poised to battle each other in the streets and countryside of Japan, but the always deadly inventive Gen. Curtis LeMay was ready on his own to use airpower in radically new ways to avoid American casualties. In response to the horrific losses on Okinawa, he was carefully assembling a monstrous fleet of B-29s—perhaps eventually 5,000 in number—to be augmented by over 5,000 B-24s and B-17s transferred from the European theater, with the possibility that over a thousand British Lancaster bombers and their seasoned crews would join the armada as well! That rain of napalm to come from a nightmarish fleet of 10,000 or more bombers on short missions from Okinawa would have made both atomic bombs seem child’s play in comparison. The fire raids on March 11, 1945, alone killed more than died at Hiroshima, and were followed by far more destruction—perhaps 500,000 incinerated in all by the subsequent bombing—than occurred at Nagasaki.

LeMay had every intention of carpet-bombing the Japanese countryside in order to reduce the number of American ground-troop casualties on the mainland. So to avoid something one hundred times worse than Okinawa on the mainland, and in the name of saving both Japanese and American casualties on the battlefield, LeMay might well have been willing to inflict something ten times more deadly than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the disturbing fact is that LeMay still might have saved more lives than would have been lost on both sides from a land invasion of the homeland.

In addition, hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Japanese were dying in conventional land battles in the last months of the war, a slaughter that was showing no signs of cessation at the time of Okinawa. In that regard the two A-bombs that broke the control of the militarists also saved thousands in China. In only a week of fighting in early August, the Soviets killed some 80,000 Japanese and captured over 500,000—many never to return alive from labor camps. In turn, 8,000 Russians were lost and another 20,000 wounded. Had the war continued for another year, the bloodiest theater of the entire war might well have been Manchuria, where altogether 1,600,000 invading Russian soldiers confronted over a million Japanese defenders. Both sides were battle-hardened veterans and prepared to give no quarter.

Only the ghastly consequences of atomic weapons gave ammunition to the Japanese critics of the imperial government—who could now point to the dramatic annihilation of their own civilians brought on by futile efforts to continue the war to oblivion. So the horrific sacrifices of Okinawa precluded far greater slaughter to come in China and Japan in the fighting envisioned for late 1945 and 1946—not to mention the fate of some 350,000 Allied prisoners who may well have been executed by the Japanese on news that their homeland had been stormed.

If Okinawa had led Americans to concede that something more dreadful than conventional arms would be necessary to avoid a greater bloodbath on the mainland, the sacrifices in vain by kamikazes were having a similar effect on Japanese back home. The abrupt end of the war led to a public backlash against the militarists and especially the architects of suicide—even earlier a few Japanese had begun to question the use of such extreme tactics that failed to halt the Americans on Okinawa. Ensign Teruo Yamaguchi, a naval kamikaze, wrote his parents that “it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I think of the deceits being played on innocent civilians by some of our wily politicians. But I am willing to take orders from the high command, and even from the politicians, because I believe in the polity of Japan.” Literally millions of Japanese civilians and soldiers were willing to die to defend their mainland from an American invasion, both as conventional and suicide attackers, and with full knowledge by 1945 that their militarist government was fraudulent and dishonest.

No discussion of Hiroshima, then, is intellectually legitimate without careful consideration of the events that transpired on Okinawa. In this regard, George Feifer’s incisive analysis of the relationship between Hiroshima and Okinawa must remain the last word:

Okinawa’s caves, killing grounds, and anguish ought to be remembered. It ought to be suggested, at least for the sake of the ambivalent human record, that the first atomic bombs probably prevented the homicidal equivalent of over two hundred more of the same: the twenty million Japanese deaths if invasion had been necessary, in addition to all the other deaths, Western and Asian.

It is difficult to comprehend such figures and to remember the strains of 1945. Focusing on the bomb is easier. But if a symbol is needed to help preserve the memory of the Pacific War, Okinawa is the more fitting one.

The American military and public also came away from Okinawa with a number of perceptions about land warfare in Asia, some of them accurate, some racist, a few entirely erroneous—but all fundamental in forming the American way of war in Korea and Vietnam in the next thirty years. After the startling array of suicides on Okinawa, Americans were convinced that Asians in general did not value life—theirs or anyone else’s—in the same manner as Westerners, and when faced with overwhelming military power and sure defeat would nevertheless continue to fight hard in their efforts to kill Americans. Because territory was not really as important on Okinawa as body counts—the fight would end not with the capture per se of strategic ground but rather only with the complete annihilation of the enemy who was trapped on the island—Americans developed a particular mentality that would come to haunt them in both the Korean peninsula and Southeast Asia.

The Japanese quit on Okinawa when they were killed off, not when the fall of a particular ridge or line of defenses forecast eventual tactical defeat. Indeed, even when the Americans reached the southernmost tip of the island and routed the Japanese, they were ordered to spread back out over previously “conquered” territory to root out snipers and pockets of resistance—killing 8,975 more Japanese soldiers in the purported “mop-up.” Former lieutenants and captains of the Pacific war, when later promoted to American generals in Korea and Vietnam, assumed again that real estate was not as important as simply killing as many fanatical Asian troops as possible—through bombing, shelling, and frontal assaults. War ended when the enemy was exterminated or faced with certain annihilation. It did not necessarily stop when the Japanese were encircled, outmaneuvered, or shorn of supplies. The caves and night assaults of Okinawa prefigured the tunnels and ambushes of Vietnam—in each case nullifying massive American bombing and artillery barrages. Every Japanese dead or captured, not the fall of the Shuri line, meant a quicker end to the war—just as “body counts” in Vietnam, not the capture of Hanoi, were seen as the key to ending that conflict.

Because Okinawa was the major engagement in the Pacific where civilians sometimes fought on the side of the enemy, Americans experienced the dilemma of determining which woman, child, or old man was harmless, friendly, or a killer. And because Okinawa was out of view, little reported on, and fought against a supposedly repugnant and fascist enemy, Americans left the island with the assurance that when stranded in such a hell, they should blast indiscriminately any civilian in their proximity on suspicion of aiding the enemy—also with disastrous consequences to come in the suddenly televised fighting of the 1960s and 1970s when victory hinged not on enemy body counts alone, but also in winning the hearts and minds of supposedly noncombatant civilian populations in an arena broadcast live around the world. Japanese veterans of the rape of Nanking might murder thousands of Okinawan civilians—40,000 adult males alone were shanghaied into the imperial army. But in such a messy battle, jaded American GIs—as purportedly more liberal Westerners—who either mistakenly or by intent shot a few hundred would incur far greater moral condemnation both at home and abroad.

Similarly, commanding officers came away from Okinawa believing that the American public could stomach the loss of fifty thousand casualties in an Asian theater—failing to grasp that Okinawa was not a typical, but an aberrant, event of the highest order. The end of the war in Europe, the death of President Roosevelt, the news that a Japanese collapse was imminent, all that and more took attention away from the bloodletting on Okinawa itself. Only after the battle was over and the war concluded did it sink into Americans that thousands of their best were slaughtered a few weeks before the armistice by an enemy that was surrounded and cut off.

Yet wrongly interpreting such temporary public acquiescence as solid support for their strategy of annihilation, the military thought that if Americans could kill far more than they lost, defeat the enemy militarily, and gain the stated objective, then the public back home would support its sacrifice of the nation’s youth in any similar future Pacific engagement. In fact, had the battle taken place earlier and during a lull in the European theater, outrage over the costs of Okinawa—far greater than either Peleliu or Tarawa, whose tolls of dead stunned Americans—may have been seen as a national scandal and marked the last battle in which Americans would be sent to fight hand-to-hand in Asia against an enemy whose only hope of victory lay in killing GIs in any manner possible.

The American military wanted Okinawa as a closer home for the B-29s and numerous tactical fighters wings, in addition to a deepwater port. But the generals also realized that even had they skipped it, ignoring its value as an air and naval base, 100,000 Japanese would never have surrendered unless they were nearly obliterated—or learned that enough Japanese elsewhere in the empire were annihilated to cause their emperor to concede. So again, corpses, not mere acres, became the rationale of the campaign.

In that same way of thinking, later in both Korea and Vietnam, the occupation of territory—whether the capture and control of Pyongyang or Hanoi—became less the focus of victory than simply killing the enemy. Unfortunately the analogies did not hold. Korea and Vietnam were not islands of conventional troops cut off from supply, but rather proxy wars, in which neighboring communist and nuclear powers had instigated civil strife with every intention of daily resupplying their nearby surrogate insurrectionists.

But not all errors in thinking were to be on the American side. Okinawa also sent to the world other military ripples, mixed signals about the use of suicide attacks that would prove grievous to any who learned the wrong lessons from the battle. The Japanese proved that a militarily inferior and outnumbered force—should it commit thousands of its combatants to suicide tactics—could inflict enormous damage on its more powerful foe. Technological superiority purportedly could be nullified by less sophisticated weapons that made no allowance for the safety or survival of the attacker. Fanatical personal bravery and suicidal group devotion to a cause were supposed to trump massive firepower and the skilled men who enjoyed such calculated material superiority. And since Western military ingenuity presupposed the sanctity of the combatant, a great deal of resources went into defenses, communications, and search-and-rescue missions to preserve the assailant rather than merely kill the enemy. Whether al-Qaeda terrorists, Palestinian suicide bombers, or Iraqi paramilitaries, some overmatched fighters have surmised from the savagery of battles like Okinawa that Western military forces—such as the sophisticated American Air Force of 2001 or the homeland forces of Israel—could be circumvented by even poorly trained pilots and teenagers with bombs strapped to their bodies. Or so they thought.

But careful analysis of Okinawa offers a quite different and far more chilling lesson. For all the bravado of the Japanese bombers, they failed utterly to stop the Americans—indeed, failed to sink a single major capital ship. True, some large carriers like the Franklin were nearly destroyed—over seven hundred dead—and forced to sail home. The loss of their planes in the Okinawa campaign was, of course, important. But even such spectacular short-term successes were tempered by two stark realizations. The Franklin steamed away under its own power unassisted and could be repaired and refitted. More important, unlike 1942 when even the temporary loss of a fleet carrier spelled near disaster, the United States now had over sixteen fleet carriers in the Pacific, with more planned. If the kamikazes were to have any long-term effect in curtailing American tactical airpower against Okinawa or the mainland, then they had to sink, not damage, flattops and destroy ten or fifteen, not damage two or three.

Five thousand dead sailors is a horrendous figure, but for the Japanese it had to be seen in the context of an enemy that had a million-man navy and sixteen fleet carriers intact after the greatest suicide attack in history. Marine divisions were shattered on Okinawa; yet more Marines were ready to invade Japan after the battle than before. As both a weapon of terror and a conventional means to destroy enemy assets, the Japanese suicide attackers had no long-term strategic success.

Why is this so? Human nature explains much, for the pool of those who wish to kill themselves in service to a lost cause is finite, despite professed fanaticism. There really was only a limited supply of a few thousand kamikaze pilots among millions of Japanese, as large-scale attacks ceased altogether by July. Even by the end of the Okinawa campaign, pilots were being assigned and were no longer exclusively volunteers. Rumors spread that science students were given preferential treatment and were being saved for research duties, while others in liberal, social, and legal studies were drafted for the suicide schools. Some pilots ditched or turned back. Others were intoxicated to the point of stupor. Hatsuho Naito, who wrote a history of the Okha squadrons, concluded: “The young men who were actually called on to make mass suicide attacks had nothing to do with the organized insanity. They experienced terrors and trauma that are beyond the imagination of anyone else. I do not believe that any of them shouted, ‘Long Live the Emperor’ as they dived their bomb-filled planes into the enemy.”

There was no disguising the fact that the vast majority of the pilots, like contemporary suicide bombers in Palestine, were between 18 and 24, of lower rank, and ordered on their missions by older and more senior officers. Resentment of the inequity in determining suicide duty, and wonder whether other Japanese were willing to make similar sacrifices, were widespread even among the most fervent kamikaze pilots. After writing in his diary, “What is the duty today? It is to fight. What is the duty tomorrow? It is to win. What is the daily duty? It is to die. We die in battle without complaint,” twenty-two-year-old ensign Heiichi Okabe nevertheless added, “I wonder if others, like scientists, who pursue the war effort on their own fronts, would die as we do without complaint. Only then will the unity of Japan be such that she can have any prospect of winning the war.”

Heiichi Okabe’s officers rarely, if at all, led the suicide attacks in person—and oftentimes survived the war. Again, in the case of the special Okha squadrons, tension mounted between petty and reserve officers to such a degree that fistfights broke out on occasion. Even some of the pilots of the mother planes who launched the suicide rockets protested. Not uncommon were the remarks of one bomber pilot, Goro Nonaka: “Do you really think we can do such a thing? Our men, the ones we have been living with, are being escorted to their deaths in the bloodiest and most cold-hearted way possible. Do you think we can leave them and return again and again?” Thus it was no surprise that the organizer of the Okha rocket squadrons, Shoichi Ota, went into hiding after the surrender and purportedly lived under an assumed name for years after the war ended.

We shall never know what would have transpired had the United States invaded Japanese home soil, but for some five weeks after Okinawa the American fleet was still in range of land-based enemy planes and thousands of aircraft still remained on the homeland—and yet kamikaze attacks were more or less nonexistent. After Okinawa was declared secure on July 2, only five more suicide attacks were reported before the surrender. Were the Japanese simply out of willing pilots, saving their reserve kamikazes for the final assault, or perplexed that there were no volunteers to strike the massive American fleet until and unless it landed invading troops on the mainland?

There was a similar chain of events after the terrible autumn of 2001. The West was told that thousands of Islamic fundamentalists were ready to bomb America, Europe, and Israel. In truth, there were only a few hundred from an angry society of hundreds of millions willing to blow themselves up to kill Americans. Romantics may have remembered the kamikazes; realists recalled how they were dealt with. Quite simply, there has never arisen a military culture quite like the West, in its terrifying ability to draw on innate values such as secular rationalism, free inquiry, and consensual government to create frightening weapons of destruction and the protocols and disciplined soldiers to use them to deadly effect—a firepower and material onslaught that can overwhelm the most fanatical and deadly of warriors, whether they be Apaches, kamikazes, or al-Qaeda terrorists.

Much of the collapse of the kamikazes, then, had to do with the American counterresponse. The terror of suicide brought out the greater terror of the Western way of war. Americans not merely devised immediate countermeasures to the kamikazes and suicide banzai charges—everything from picket destroyers to flame-shooting tanks—but also left the island with a changed mentality about the nature of war itself: from now on fanaticism of the human will would be repaid in kind with the fanaticism of industrial and technological power. Okinawa taught the world that the chief horror of war is not the random use of suicide bombers, but the response that they incur from Western powers whose self-imposed restraint upon their ingenuity for killing usually rests only with their own sense of moral reluctance—a brake that suicidal attack seems to strip away entirely.

The official military history of Okinawa quite succinctly summed up the typical confident American attitude to the nightmare of a campaign gone terribly wrong: “The high cost of the victory was due to the fact that the battle had been fought against a capably led Japanese army of greater strength than anticipated, over difficult terrain heavily and expertly fortified, and thousands of miles from home. The campaign had lasted considerably longer than was expected. But Americans had demonstrated again on Okinawa that they could, ultimately, wrest from the Japanese whatever ground they wanted.”

The terrorists of September 11 should have learned that lesson of “whatever ground they wanted” from Okinawa. At least in the matter of dealing with suicide bombers and banzai attacks, Japan’s enemies surely did have the last word. It was not surprising, but entirely predictable that a nation that sixty years ago produced napalm, flamethrowers—and eventually A-bombs—to combat thousands of suicidal warriors would retain the organization and willpower to incinerate a few hundred suicide bombers and their enclaves of support.

Epilogue: The Men of Okinawa

The consequences of any one battle are far more than the mere political or cultural fallout. As many as a quarter million people died on Okinawa. Yet we have no idea of the aggregate effect of that sudden destruction of energy and young talent on either Japan or America—or the human race. Nor can we appreciate the consequences that those sudden deaths had on a million more of their close family members and friends.

So military history is brutal for reasons other than what it tells us about the grim nature of the fighting. It is callous also in what it does not touch on—the hundreds of thousands of battle dead who are never recalled or commemorated as individuals, whose stories and counterfactual suppositions are never indulged in other than by a few family members themselves without access to publication or wider enlightenment. In that regard, we learn little about what was or what might have been of the Okinawa dead.

By April 1945, Ernie Pyle was not merely America’s best-known war correspondent, but the country’s most widely read columnist as well. Well before the beginning of the war, as a roving reporter between 1935 and 1941, Pyle had developed a readership of millions through syndicated daily columns that chronicled the average lives of Americans coping with the Great Depression. When the war broke out, he was a natural choice to assume a role as America’s premier war correspondent, and his subsequent ground-level dispatches from Europe served as the country’s most direct link with the men in the field.

Ernie Pyle, America’s journalistic icon, was killed in a so-called safe zone behind the lines on the small island of Ie Shima off Okinawa on April 18, 1945. Reporting on the fighting of the 77th Infantry Division, Pyle was traveling in a Jeep that was forced off the road by machine gun fire from a pocket of Japanese holdouts hidden in the coral slopes. Pyle and a regimental commander scurried to safety in a nearby ditch; but after a few moments the correspondent mistakenly thought the danger was past, raised his head, and received a burst in the temple a few inches below the rim of his helmet.

Enemy machine gunners were not supposed to be behind American lines shooting at traffic. Soldiers usually did not stick their heads out of holes unless they were sure that the coast was clear; and the head itself is a small target, the vulnerable temple and face below the steel helmet smaller still. Yet Pyle died from a head wound from a single Japanese gunner in a secured area, and was buried with the inscription “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.” While Pyle’s death did not suddenly galvanize attention to the horrific nature of the mostly ignored fighting on Okinawa, his loss nevertheless stunned the nation.

Yet it is rarely noted that Pyle’s sudden death in combat in some sense ensured that his own work and populist reputation would achieve a timelessness that his survival might well have otherwise nullified. After years of war in Europe, Pyle himself admitted that he could hardly face combat again. He reported on the eve of the invasion that he simply could not talk, in terrible mute anticipation of mangled bodies and carnage on the invasion beaches. Even after the relief of the deceptively easy American landing—“What a wonderful feeling”—for most of the early part of the Okinawa campaign he stayed to the rear or at sea. Pyle was coping with an increasing drinking problem, his marriage nearly over, with a wife on the verge of suicide. Unfair criticism was arising that he had lost his edge while younger, more reckless reporters were sending back more realistic combat dispatches.

It is a capricious and terrible thing to speculate that a good and decent man’s sudden and unearned death has often enhanced his reputation in a way that his continued career might not have. Surely the Lincoln we now venerate is at least in part the man who was saved from the mess of Reconstruction that ruined the administrations of Johnson and Grant. Furies were chasing John Fitzgerald Kennedy when he fell on November 22, 1963—a tough reelection, a dismal record of legislative accomplishment, a reckless personal life whose embarrassing disclosures rested only on the sobriety and ephemeral goodwill of a growing and restless circle of reporters. Pyle, who became famous by sending back dispatches from the frontline fighting in Europe, was forever immortalized on Okinawa as dying pencil in hand during the heat of combat—not embittered and worn out after witnessing too many deaths and so at last content in the last weeks of his life mostly to report on it all from the rear.

In some sense, like Pyle’s death, the sudden and equally capricious—indeed, flukelike—death of the fifty-eight-year-old Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner saved the commanding officer from embarrassing questions and perhaps a military inquiry itself. On June 18, as the battle wound down, Buckner was visiting the Mezado Ridge to see a final advance by the 8th Marine Regiment. After he had observed the assault for about an hour, a sudden Japanese artillery salvo—from a single surviving gun of a decimated battery—zeroed in on the high-ranking Americans. A shell hit a nearby boulder and the flying shards struck Buckner in the chest. The general bled to death in minutes. None of the surrounding officers suffered a scratch.

Thus just days before the fighting was over and the Generals Ushijima and Cho committed suicide, Buckner fell on the front lines—the highest-ranking American officer to be killed by enemy fire in the entire Pacific war. With his tragic death, in an instant the old lingering questions about Buckner’s generalship on Okinawa likewise disappeared. Why did the veteran 1st and recently formed 6th Marine Divisions remain nearly idle for weeks in the north while Buckner’s beloved army divisions were being annihilated at the Naha-Shuri line? Why did Buckner refuse Maj. Gen. Andrew Bruce’s suggestion to land the 77th Division to the rear of Ushijima at Minatoa Beach—or similar and even more imaginative requests by scores of veteran Marine officers concerned at the carnage growing out of Buckner’s head-on assaults? Why were not Maj. Gen. Lemuel Shepherd and Gen. Alexander Vandegrift listened to when they proposed taking their Marine divisions around rather than through the Japanese positions? Why instead did Buckner feed piecemeal into the inferno a stream of manpower, in unimaginative corkscrew-and-blowtorch tactics that simply allowed the Japanese to retreat from one fortified ridge to another? After mid-May, when the Japanese were cut off, could not the Americans have established fortified lines of encirclement, pounded Ushijima’s positions through bombing and artillery, and thus forgone the final hand-to-hand fighting necessary to kill every enemy soldier?

Later General MacArthur himself would argue just that—and complain that Buckner’s tactics had sacrificed “thousands of American soldiers” in a needless desire to drive all the Japanese off the island when they could have been bypassed. Well before Buckner’s death, a host of newspaper reporters, fed by angry Marine and navy officers, were openly criticizing his unimaginative tactics that were tailor-made to the Japanese plan of defense, freely employing pejoratives like “ultraconservative,” “fiasco,” and “a worse example of military incompetence than Pearl Harbor.”

But there was to be no postbellum inquiry that would have besmirched the reputation of a good soldier and a beloved general. His worst critics sighed that he had paid the ultimate price for a battle plan that probably unnecessarily sacrificed the lives of thousands of others. His supporters pointed out that no more could be asked of a general than to die at the front with his men after achieving an undeniably critical military victory. Buckner’s tragic and nonsensical death then ended criticism of his costly generalship, and thereby helps explain why there has been no comprehensive reexamination of his tactics on Okinawa to this day—a battle that led to twenty times as many casualties as Pearl Harbor when America was not weak and surprised, but enormously powerful and nearing complete victory.

But the survival, not the death, of Allied soldiers on Okinawa also affected the lives of thousands of Americans who decades later would first read about the battle and gain some idea of what the fighting had been like—and what it had been for. There are two landmark memoirs of the American combat experience in World War II. Both not surprisingly focus on the savagery of the Pacific theater and culminate with the dreadfulness of Okinawa. If the tactics and strategic importance of the battle were forgotten after the war, the awfulness and the horror-induced courage displayed there could not be—and so would resurface later to teach thousands of readers what war and Americans at war were about. William Manchester’s Goodbye, Darkness and E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed are not merely graphic narratives of combat, but works of literature in their own right comparable to Xenophon’s Anabasis, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That.

Unlike most battle narratives of the twentieth century, both Goodbye, Darkness and With the Old Breed achieve transcendence in connecting the absurdity of Okinawa with the not so absurd idea of fighting for something quite antithetical to and far better than Japanese militarism. More than just graphic, often sickening accounts of the stupidities and senselessness of war—although they are all that and more—both books convey a rare sense that men really do fight for more than just their colleagues on the battlefield. So, for example, E. B. Sledge ends his account of Okinawa with news of Hiroshima and the war’s end. After acknowledging that “War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste,” and that “Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it,” he nevertheless ends with, “Until the millennium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one’s responsibilities and to be willing to make sacrifices for one’s country—as my comrades did.” Note his key phrase, “and countries cease trying to enslave others.”

William Manchester attempted to explain to a subsequent generation the near-mythical world for which his fellow Marines had once fought so ferociously: “Debt was ignoble. Courage was a virtue. Mothers were beloved. Marriage was a sacrament. Divorce was disgraceful. . . . All these and ‘God Bless America’ and Christmas or Hanukkah and the certitude that victory in the war would assure their continuance into perpetuity—all this led you into battle, and sustained you as you fought, and comforted you if you fell, and, if it came to that, justified your death to all who loved you as you had loved them.”

After finishing with a description of the horrors of Okinawa, Manchester then concluded of such lost values of a lost age, “Later the rules would change. But we didn’t know that then. We didn’t know.” Somehow the stark paradoxes of Okinawa, the easy beach landings and horrific inland fighting, the suicides on land and kamikazes at sea, the civilian and quasicivilian casualties, the connection of Okinawa to Hiroshima, and the lingering questions over whether the worst battle of the Pacific was really necessary, all that brought out something in both men years later—Goodbye, Darkness was published in 1979, With the Old Breed reprinted in 1981—that otherwise might have stayed silent. Both books suggest that those few weeks on the island changed their authors in ways hundreds of thousands of events in their later lives decades later did not. And perhaps one reason why America acted so forcefully against the suicide bombers of September 11 was that, consciously or not, their fathers and grandfathers had seen it all—and dealt with it—long before on Okinawa.

Goodbye, Darkness and With the Old Breed, of course, along with the death of the famous, are only the more public manifestations of thousands of private sagas that have circulated both here and in Japan since emanating from the killing fields of Okinawa. They are only the tiny visible tip of the far larger proverbial iceberg below, whose foreboding presence has been just below the surface in the collective minds of tens of thousands ever since. How a rural, farming Swedish family found itself linked with the madcap last plans of Mitsuru Ushijima and Isamu Cho a world away I am not quite sure yet. But it happened, and for dozens of us it has made all the difference ever since.