OKINAWA, THE LAST BATTLE, Part Two: Facing The Shuri Line 

Where were the Japanese? Instead of becoming casualties chopped up in the surf, befuddled GIs and Marines strolled onto the Hagushi beaches walking upright. Other than the occasional report of sniper fire, they faced, in the words of Time correspondent Robert Sherrod, “slightly more opposition than they would have had in maneuvers off the coast of California.” Wrote journalist Ernie Pyle, “medical corpsmen were sitting among their sacks of bandages with nothing to do.” By the end of L-Day, almost the entire first wave, some 66,000 infantry and supporting armor and vehicles, made it safely to shore with only 28 KIA.

Gen. Buckner’s men were understandably ebullient, especially veterans who’d seen the worst carnage on the beaches of Tarawa and Peleliu. One Marine remembered amazed comrades joyfully declaring, “This is just like one of MacArthur’s landings. We don’t even have to crawl!” A 7th Division soldier crossed the beach and ascended a hill while remarking in disbelief, “I’ve already lived longer than I thought I would.” A member of the 1st Marines said, “They pulled an April Fool’s joke on us!”

By midday on L-Day, elements of the 6th Marines swept across Yontan Airfield while those of the Army’s 7th Division captured Kadena Airfield and even reached the Pacific coastline, cutting off Okinawa’s northern defenders from the rest. Planners hadn’t expected the airfields, two of five on the island, to be captured until L+3. The 1st Marines also cut across the island to the other side with little resistance. Their division commander, Maj. Gen. Pedro de Valle was confused: “I don’t know where the Japs are,” he admitted.

Light opposition aside, there were still disturbing harbingers of impending tragedy. Americans were encountering terrified civilians on a scale not before seen in the war, even on Saipan. And many refused to leave their cave hideouts despite interpreters promising them humane treatment. Mike Monroe of the 382nd Reg., 96th Div. burst into a hut to find a group of old men, women, and children cowering inside, passing around a pot of tea. “Within minutes, they were all dead.” They’d drank poison rather than be captured by the Americans, whom the Japanese brainwashed them to fear more than death itself.

The ground forces weren’t the only ones puzzled by the lack of enemy opposition, which had yet to materialize to any degree even after the first week of the landings despite waves of Kamikaze attackers tormenting Mitscher’s and Rawlings’ ships out east in the Pacific. On April 8, in a spasm of optimism, Adm. Turner radioed Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz who was exercising overall command of the operation from Hawaii: “I may be crazy but I think the Japs have quit the war, at least in this section.” The unimpressed Nimitz radioed back: “Delete all after ‘crazy.’” 

The easy landings were a gift from the Japanese commander on Okinawa, Gen. Ushijima Mitsuru, a soft-spoken, physically imposing officer who was universally respected by his men. Ushijima was caught in yet another interservice rift. The Navy wanted to fight a decisive battle on Okinawa, and would pledge whatever resources remained to affect that end. But the Army believed Japan should husband her strength for a showdown on the home islands. As such, Ushijima received no more reinforcements. In fact, the Army withdrew some of his units from Okinawa to shore up Formosa’s defenses should the Allies strike there as well. It became clear to Ushijima that his garrison was to be sacrificed. And thus, his mission would be to inflict as many casualties on the enemy as he could to dissuade the Allies from invading Japan proper and instead prompt them to negotiate a more favorable peace.

Mimicking the tactics used so effectively by the defenders on Peleliu and Iwo Jima, Ushijima chose not to have his men cut down on the beaches, but rather just offer token resistance. Instead, he and this Thirty-Second Army and supporting units would dig in and stay holed up in the lower third of the island. Ushijima would utilize the series of rugged limestone and coral ridges running in a 5-mile east-to-west belt across the island like a dividing wall. The escarpments were honeycombed with natural and manmade caves, stone tombs, and steep gorges gouged out by winding ravines. The landscape was made all the more formidable as the Japanese had burrowed anywhere from 30 to 60 feet into the earth to make hollowed-out defensive positions that were interconnected to living quarters. Okinawa’s series of parallel folds that ran from coast to coast presented ideal terrain for a defense in depth.

As the remainder of the Tenth Army came ashore on Hagushi throughout the first week, a dozen miles south, Gen. Ushijima and his officers including his chief-of-staff, the fiercely militaristic Lt. Gen. Chō Isamu, and the bookish operations officer Lt. Col. Yahara Hiromichi, who was the mastermind behind Okinawa’s elaborate defenses, studied the enemy operations from their HQ in the Okinawa’s ancient Shuri Castle. Their fortifications now complete after several months of work with shovels and hand tools, their tunnels stocked with supplies of food, water, medicine and ammunition, the emperor’s soldiers waited for the GIs of the 7th and 96th Divisions to come to them. The unwary Americans reminded Yahara of “a blind man who has lost his cane, groping on hands and knees through a ditch.”

While the unsuspecting soldiers and Marines enjoyed their brief stay of execution, they fanned out across the island. The Marines pivoted northward to clear the upper two-thirds, and the Army headed south. As Ushijima saw little defensive advantages in the north he only left a small force there to harass the Marines, who made good progress securing that part of the island. By April 13, the Marines reached Hedo Point at the northern tip overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

In the lower third of the island, however, Ushijima’s men were following his orders to patiently wait for the Americans to come to them while they stayed hidden inside some 60 miles of underground fortifications — positions that were all but invisible to aerial reconnaissance, and impervious to shelling. Then they would, as Yahara prescribed, “attack the enemy from ‘underground.’” Having been lulled into a false sense of an easy mission, the GIs were unknowingly marching right toward the nearly impregnable defensive line manned by most of the 77,000 regulars of Japan’s Thirty-Second Army, along with 9,000 Naval personnel and 39,000 conscripted Okinawans.

Eventually, the advancing GIs ran up against the outer band of the Shuri Line defenses, and Ushijima’s guns opened up, firing the first salvos of what would be months of the most concentrated and constant Japanese artillery of the war. The Thirty-Second Army fielded almost 700 guns of all types, plus 1,300 mortars, large and small, as well as 24 of the terrifying 330mm “spigot mortars” that lobbed garbage can-sized projectiles down onto the Americans, detonating a 660-lb explosive. All were positioned within Col. Yahara’s 20-square mile Shuri Zone of interlocking fortifications and crisscrossing fields of fire. U.S. troops had never faced such concentrated artillery in the Pacific before. A 7th Division captain remembered the shelling as a “low whine changing to a louder and louder scream … it seemed that a pair of rubber gloves filled with ice cubes had grabbed your stomach and flipped it over.” Petrified Okinawans would refer to the constant shellfire as a “typhoon of steel.”

For the Americans, any optimism that Okinawa might be an easy campaign was shattered as casualties began to rise sharply as the GIs ran up against places like Kakazu Ridge, a 300-foot high escarpment that had been converted into a fortress of machine gun and mortar positions. Kakazu Ridge is not far from the infamous Hacksaw Ridge, where Private First Class and Medal of Honor recipient Desmond Doss heroically saved the lives of 75 wounded soldiers without the use of a firearm. Mel Gibson directed the 2016 movie based on his life, “Hacksaw Ridge,” with Andrew Garfield playing Doss.

Staff Sgt. Don Eaton of the 96th described what became the pattern of the battle for the next two months. The Japanese allowed his patrol to advance into a valley “and then hurled volley after volley of deadly accurate fire.” Now those medics Pyle observed gratefully idle on L-Day had their hands full as a stream of broken, bloodied men and mangled corpses began to flood into their aid stations from a front line that had suddenly become a factory of death.

Every hillside bristled with expertly camouflaged strong points supported by pre-sited artillery and mortar emplacements manned by determined defenders. In a bitter repeat of previous battles, the Americans had to root them out with bazookas, grenades, satchel charges, and the awful flame-throwers, one cave, one gully, one hut at a time. It was slow, methodical, demoralizing work that was both physically exhausting and psychologically taxing. And, as per Ushijima’s strategy, his attackers paid for every square yard taken with young men’s lives.

With the Americans stalled and taking escalating losses, Gen. Chō convinced Ushijima to go on the offensive, against Yahara’s objections. All across the line from April 12-14, the Japanese attacked, and the combat, including night incursions, was ferocious. But the attacks were beaten back by superior U.S. Army firepower, and Ushijima reverted to the defensive.

As the fighting continued with the dead piling up with little progress to show, the Americans were quickly becoming inured to the grisly nature of war. In the pre-dawn of April 13th, edgy GIs saw movement on the perimeter and opened fire. PFC Donald Decker remembered that when the shooting stopped, they heard “a baby howling.” After fifteen minutes the crying stopped, then resumed. Then “there was a long burst of fire from one of our machine guns and silence.” In the morning light, they found the baby’s body strapped to the back of its dead mother.

On April 19, a frustrated Hodge, now with three divisions to work with, launched another assault on the Japanese defenses with over 320 guns in the attack — the largest artillery barrage of the Pacific War — and supporting shore and aerial bombardment. But the Japanese were holed up on the reverse slope of the hills and waited out the rain of shells only to return to their positions and lob mortars into the Americans struggling up the front slope. Flame-throwing tanks managed to clear out some Japanese positions, but no breakthrough materialized. It was only when the Japanese chose to abandon a position and withdraw to the next ridgeline fortress that the Americans were able to advance.

Okinawa, which had started off as a cakewalk, was quickly becoming the most horrific meat grinder of a war filled with horrific meat grinders. By the end of April, the Army units were exhausted and depleted. Meanwhile, General Buckner faced mounting criticism for his unimaginative pounding tactics. Marine commanders especially were adamant that he should launch a flanking amphibious assault below Shuri to break the stalemate. Instead, Buckner called for the III Amphibious Corps with its two Marine divisions to come south and join the fight. The battle would continue as is. 

But if the ground forces had run into a buzzsaw at the Shuri Defense Zone, miles out to sea, the U.S. Navy was also in a desperate fight. While Buckner’s men were being cut down by Yahara’s brutally effective protracted defense zone, the Fifth Fleet was busy fending off the greatest single threat to the U.S. Navy in its history.

* * *

Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three books. Follow him on Substack and X/Twitter.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

​[#item_full_content]  

​[[{“value”:”

Where were the Japanese? Instead of becoming casualties chopped up in the surf, befuddled GIs and Marines strolled onto the Hagushi beaches walking upright. Other than the occasional report of sniper fire, they faced, in the words of Time correspondent Robert Sherrod, “slightly more opposition than they would have had in maneuvers off the coast of California.” Wrote journalist Ernie Pyle, “medical corpsmen were sitting among their sacks of bandages with nothing to do.” By the end of L-Day, almost the entire first wave, some 66,000 infantry and supporting armor and vehicles, made it safely to shore with only 28 KIA.

Gen. Buckner’s men were understandably ebullient, especially veterans who’d seen the worst carnage on the beaches of Tarawa and Peleliu. One Marine remembered amazed comrades joyfully declaring, “This is just like one of MacArthur’s landings. We don’t even have to crawl!” A 7th Division soldier crossed the beach and ascended a hill while remarking in disbelief, “I’ve already lived longer than I thought I would.” A member of the 1st Marines said, “They pulled an April Fool’s joke on us!”

By midday on L-Day, elements of the 6th Marines swept across Yontan Airfield while those of the Army’s 7th Division captured Kadena Airfield and even reached the Pacific coastline, cutting off Okinawa’s northern defenders from the rest. Planners hadn’t expected the airfields, two of five on the island, to be captured until L+3. The 1st Marines also cut across the island to the other side with little resistance. Their division commander, Maj. Gen. Pedro de Valle was confused: “I don’t know where the Japs are,” he admitted.

Light opposition aside, there were still disturbing harbingers of impending tragedy. Americans were encountering terrified civilians on a scale not before seen in the war, even on Saipan. And many refused to leave their cave hideouts despite interpreters promising them humane treatment. Mike Monroe of the 382nd Reg., 96th Div. burst into a hut to find a group of old men, women, and children cowering inside, passing around a pot of tea. “Within minutes, they were all dead.” They’d drank poison rather than be captured by the Americans, whom the Japanese brainwashed them to fear more than death itself.

The ground forces weren’t the only ones puzzled by the lack of enemy opposition, which had yet to materialize to any degree even after the first week of the landings despite waves of Kamikaze attackers tormenting Mitscher’s and Rawlings’ ships out east in the Pacific. On April 8, in a spasm of optimism, Adm. Turner radioed Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz who was exercising overall command of the operation from Hawaii: “I may be crazy but I think the Japs have quit the war, at least in this section.” The unimpressed Nimitz radioed back: “Delete all after ‘crazy.’” 

The easy landings were a gift from the Japanese commander on Okinawa, Gen. Ushijima Mitsuru, a soft-spoken, physically imposing officer who was universally respected by his men. Ushijima was caught in yet another interservice rift. The Navy wanted to fight a decisive battle on Okinawa, and would pledge whatever resources remained to affect that end. But the Army believed Japan should husband her strength for a showdown on the home islands. As such, Ushijima received no more reinforcements. In fact, the Army withdrew some of his units from Okinawa to shore up Formosa’s defenses should the Allies strike there as well. It became clear to Ushijima that his garrison was to be sacrificed. And thus, his mission would be to inflict as many casualties on the enemy as he could to dissuade the Allies from invading Japan proper and instead prompt them to negotiate a more favorable peace.

Mimicking the tactics used so effectively by the defenders on Peleliu and Iwo Jima, Ushijima chose not to have his men cut down on the beaches, but rather just offer token resistance. Instead, he and this Thirty-Second Army and supporting units would dig in and stay holed up in the lower third of the island. Ushijima would utilize the series of rugged limestone and coral ridges running in a 5-mile east-to-west belt across the island like a dividing wall. The escarpments were honeycombed with natural and manmade caves, stone tombs, and steep gorges gouged out by winding ravines. The landscape was made all the more formidable as the Japanese had burrowed anywhere from 30 to 60 feet into the earth to make hollowed-out defensive positions that were interconnected to living quarters. Okinawa’s series of parallel folds that ran from coast to coast presented ideal terrain for a defense in depth.

As the remainder of the Tenth Army came ashore on Hagushi throughout the first week, a dozen miles south, Gen. Ushijima and his officers including his chief-of-staff, the fiercely militaristic Lt. Gen. Chō Isamu, and the bookish operations officer Lt. Col. Yahara Hiromichi, who was the mastermind behind Okinawa’s elaborate defenses, studied the enemy operations from their HQ in the Okinawa’s ancient Shuri Castle. Their fortifications now complete after several months of work with shovels and hand tools, their tunnels stocked with supplies of food, water, medicine and ammunition, the emperor’s soldiers waited for the GIs of the 7th and 96th Divisions to come to them. The unwary Americans reminded Yahara of “a blind man who has lost his cane, groping on hands and knees through a ditch.”

While the unsuspecting soldiers and Marines enjoyed their brief stay of execution, they fanned out across the island. The Marines pivoted northward to clear the upper two-thirds, and the Army headed south. As Ushijima saw little defensive advantages in the north he only left a small force there to harass the Marines, who made good progress securing that part of the island. By April 13, the Marines reached Hedo Point at the northern tip overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

In the lower third of the island, however, Ushijima’s men were following his orders to patiently wait for the Americans to come to them while they stayed hidden inside some 60 miles of underground fortifications — positions that were all but invisible to aerial reconnaissance, and impervious to shelling. Then they would, as Yahara prescribed, “attack the enemy from ‘underground.’” Having been lulled into a false sense of an easy mission, the GIs were unknowingly marching right toward the nearly impregnable defensive line manned by most of the 77,000 regulars of Japan’s Thirty-Second Army, along with 9,000 Naval personnel and 39,000 conscripted Okinawans.

Eventually, the advancing GIs ran up against the outer band of the Shuri Line defenses, and Ushijima’s guns opened up, firing the first salvos of what would be months of the most concentrated and constant Japanese artillery of the war. The Thirty-Second Army fielded almost 700 guns of all types, plus 1,300 mortars, large and small, as well as 24 of the terrifying 330mm “spigot mortars” that lobbed garbage can-sized projectiles down onto the Americans, detonating a 660-lb explosive. All were positioned within Col. Yahara’s 20-square mile Shuri Zone of interlocking fortifications and crisscrossing fields of fire. U.S. troops had never faced such concentrated artillery in the Pacific before. A 7th Division captain remembered the shelling as a “low whine changing to a louder and louder scream … it seemed that a pair of rubber gloves filled with ice cubes had grabbed your stomach and flipped it over.” Petrified Okinawans would refer to the constant shellfire as a “typhoon of steel.”

For the Americans, any optimism that Okinawa might be an easy campaign was shattered as casualties began to rise sharply as the GIs ran up against places like Kakazu Ridge, a 300-foot high escarpment that had been converted into a fortress of machine gun and mortar positions. Kakazu Ridge is not far from the infamous Hacksaw Ridge, where Private First Class and Medal of Honor recipient Desmond Doss heroically saved the lives of 75 wounded soldiers without the use of a firearm. Mel Gibson directed the 2016 movie based on his life, “Hacksaw Ridge,” with Andrew Garfield playing Doss.

Staff Sgt. Don Eaton of the 96th described what became the pattern of the battle for the next two months. The Japanese allowed his patrol to advance into a valley “and then hurled volley after volley of deadly accurate fire.” Now those medics Pyle observed gratefully idle on L-Day had their hands full as a stream of broken, bloodied men and mangled corpses began to flood into their aid stations from a front line that had suddenly become a factory of death.

Every hillside bristled with expertly camouflaged strong points supported by pre-sited artillery and mortar emplacements manned by determined defenders. In a bitter repeat of previous battles, the Americans had to root them out with bazookas, grenades, satchel charges, and the awful flame-throwers, one cave, one gully, one hut at a time. It was slow, methodical, demoralizing work that was both physically exhausting and psychologically taxing. And, as per Ushijima’s strategy, his attackers paid for every square yard taken with young men’s lives.

With the Americans stalled and taking escalating losses, Gen. Chō convinced Ushijima to go on the offensive, against Yahara’s objections. All across the line from April 12-14, the Japanese attacked, and the combat, including night incursions, was ferocious. But the attacks were beaten back by superior U.S. Army firepower, and Ushijima reverted to the defensive.

As the fighting continued with the dead piling up with little progress to show, the Americans were quickly becoming inured to the grisly nature of war. In the pre-dawn of April 13th, edgy GIs saw movement on the perimeter and opened fire. PFC Donald Decker remembered that when the shooting stopped, they heard “a baby howling.” After fifteen minutes the crying stopped, then resumed. Then “there was a long burst of fire from one of our machine guns and silence.” In the morning light, they found the baby’s body strapped to the back of its dead mother.

On April 19, a frustrated Hodge, now with three divisions to work with, launched another assault on the Japanese defenses with over 320 guns in the attack — the largest artillery barrage of the Pacific War — and supporting shore and aerial bombardment. But the Japanese were holed up on the reverse slope of the hills and waited out the rain of shells only to return to their positions and lob mortars into the Americans struggling up the front slope. Flame-throwing tanks managed to clear out some Japanese positions, but no breakthrough materialized. It was only when the Japanese chose to abandon a position and withdraw to the next ridgeline fortress that the Americans were able to advance.

Okinawa, which had started off as a cakewalk, was quickly becoming the most horrific meat grinder of a war filled with horrific meat grinders. By the end of April, the Army units were exhausted and depleted. Meanwhile, General Buckner faced mounting criticism for his unimaginative pounding tactics. Marine commanders especially were adamant that he should launch a flanking amphibious assault below Shuri to break the stalemate. Instead, Buckner called for the III Amphibious Corps with its two Marine divisions to come south and join the fight. The battle would continue as is. 

But if the ground forces had run into a buzzsaw at the Shuri Defense Zone, miles out to sea, the U.S. Navy was also in a desperate fight. While Buckner’s men were being cut down by Yahara’s brutally effective protracted defense zone, the Fifth Fleet was busy fending off the greatest single threat to the U.S. Navy in its history.

* * *

Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three books. Follow him on Substack and X/Twitter.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

“}]]