The Battle of Okinawa: The Blood and the Bomb

by George Feifer

OKINAWA was the site of the largest land-sea-air battle in history.

Surely some understanding of its nature is wanted for responsible assessment of the decision to use the atomic bomb, dropped some six weeks after the battle's end. Even accepting that no final judgment of the rights and wrongs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can ever be made, condemnation of those horrors out of context — without knowledge of even greater devastation on Okinawa — makes the debate too easy.

More than twice the number of Americans were killed and wounded than on Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima combined.

Okinawa's civilian tragedy exceeded that of Hiroshima in most ways, including the number of noncombatants killed. Some 150,000 died, even more horribly than those seared and slaughtered under the mushroom cloud. They had weeks to witness their children's mutilation by "the typhoon of bombs and steel," as they called the colossal deluge of American firepower, or by Japanese troops when their morale collapsed after months of sacrificially courageous defense. And if innocence can be quantified, the Okinawans had more of it than the Hiroshima victims. They bore less responsibility — actually none — for the war in which they were massacred.

Another puzzle is why so little is remembered — more precisely was never appreciated, even then — about the relatively huge American sacrifice. The whole nightmarish experience went into a kind of black hole of national memory.

can't say they appear to feel much remorse for the immeasurable suffering Japan caused other peoples in World War II, in particular Okinawans, whose pain many mentioned only when prompted. But they are appalled by war — and by leaders who take their people to it, journalists who lie to fire them up — as only people with their experience of hoodwinking and suffering can be.

Before the survivors stopped expecting anything like equal treatment, Okinawans used to wonder why so little attention was paid to their numbers. They felt it altogether right for mainland Japanese families to stream to the island to hold memorial services for their dead and to search for the bones of the missing. The annual expressions of international grief on the anniversary of Hiroshima's losses were also right and good — but how to explain the scant interest in the larger Okinawan ones?* While the atomic victims were categorized in minute detail by age, sex, occupation, distance from the epicenter, and other indices, the Okinawan dead remained almost secret.

Fifty-five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their precise death tolls are also unknown. Estimates vary between a 1967 United Nations figure of seventy-eight thousand in Hiroshima and twenty-seven thousand in Nagasaki to more than thrice that in later Japanese accounting. Some experts take 140,000 and 70,000 as a best final estimate: a combined total some 25 percent higher than on Okinawa, where final guesses put the figure at about 150,000 civilians.

But if one innocent life is as sacred as another — if what shocks and dismays about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is their appalling numbers — the comparison with Okinawa must be pursued.

And the greater number of civilians slaughtered on Okinawa than in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki more often died in days or weeks rather than minutes, with that much more time to witness their families' agony.

"Look at it this way, the way the Japanese never seem to and Americans have never thought of," said a long-term American resident of Okinawa in 1990. "The relatives of Japanese soldiers killed and missing in action here have been visiting the island for decades, expressing legitimate grief over what their poor men endured. What they never seem to realize is that every Okinawan family was devastated far worse. No matter what happened to Japan, it was easier than what happened to Okinawa. Many Japanese talk about the atomic bomb with deep, moving pain while they're here, never thinking that Okinawans lost much more than two cities — just about their whole island."

So it went for lucky survivors — and the tragedy would continue after, when a world well informed and regularly reminded about the atomic deaths would scarcely hear of the Okinawan.

The immense cost of capturing the island, in human and material terms, did undoubtedly have a considerable influence on the decision to use atomic weapons. American leaders were left in no doubt that the losses in American lives increased dramatically the closer they came to the Japanese homeland. The experience of Okinawa . . . the most brutal military engagement between American and Japanese forces in the war . . . convinced them that invasion was too high a price to pay. — Ian Gow, military historian

I lived through Okinawa somehow, but the great battle of the mainland lay ahead. How long could my luck hold? Then the dropping of the A-bomb put a brand-new light in my life. I'd be going home, after all. And I did! — Thomas Hannaher, American artilleryman

Okinawa veterans' sympathy for the atomic victims was greatly lessened by their conviction that the alternative would have been their own deaths or crippling injuries. Certain of that, they'd feel pity, contempt, or anger — most of which would turn to resignation over the years — for noncombatants who later branded the bomb's use as unnecessary and immoral. Their gut told them there was no other way but to kill the Japanese, that all the rest was talk, that no one could understand — because it was otherwise incomprehensible — unless he'd fought the singular enemy.

Their joy obviously doesn't resolve the ethical questions about using the appalling weapons. Nor can that be done on these pages — or, probably, any pages. Certainly the libraries of previous writings haven't done it. All that can be done here is to ask whether the Battle of Okinawa can throw any light on the tortured question, remembering that the sum of its civilian and military deaths probably exceeded those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and that the cultural devastation was greater and longer lasting.

Still, most decisions are made for more than one reason, so this doesn't invalidate the conventional wisdom that Harry Truman made his untroubled choice much under the influence of the unexpected duration and ferocity of Ushijima's defense. At least that much is true. From the time the new president took office in mid-April, the casualties on Okinawa almost equaled those of the previous three years in the Pacific, ever since, and including, Pearl Harbor. Dreading "an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other," Truman — an Army veteran who'd seen some of World War I's carnage with his own eyes — was shocked by answers to his pointed requests for the final count of dead and wounded.

High seawalls backed by gun-bristling fortifications more formidable than the Shuri Line's silenced Americans in other units of the occupation force who visited their planned landing sites. One insisted that clusters of dreaded heavy cannon now flying white flags from their barrels would have "blown us out of the water."

The potential killing grounds also held large supplies of bamboo spears with knives tied to their ends. Since all men of fighting age were gone from the area, the observers supposed women and children would have used the makeshift weapons. "Who the hell could have shot those women and kids?" asked one. He paused. "I guess we'd have had to."

The calls for the hundred million to "die proudly" were more insistent than ever. (Mainland Japan's population was actually closer to seventy-five million in 1945; the commonly used hundred million figure included citizens living in colonies.)

fifteen-year-old who confided to her diary that they'd have looked ridiculous facing American flamethrowers and machine guns with such tools dutifully took part in the drills nevertheless. "One reason for persisting . . . was that no one wanted to be blamed for quitting. Another was that people weren't fully aware of the grim situation in Okinawa, the Pacific or even the Japanese cities unless they happened to be there."

Thousands of planes were intact — the tallies vary from three to sixteen thousand — many of which were carefully hidden and designated for kamikaze use. Some five thousand additional pilots were being trained to fly them. Had they been sent up, with their shorter distances to cover, the toll inflicted would have been stunning, and supplemented by a panoply of old and new suicide weapons. (The radio commentator who said he looked forward to an early landing "just to sense the thrill when we strike a deadly blow to the enemy" and promised "worldwide amazement" at Japan's array of "special attack" weapons wasn't entirely bluffing about the latter.) Allied naval brass, knowing the Japanese had been concentrating on the mainland's defense for months, braced for much more intense kamikaze attacks than those at Okinawa.

How the hell are you going to storm a country where women and children, everybody would be fighting you? Of course we'd have won eventually, but I don't think anybody who hasn't actually seen the Japanese fight can have any idea of what it would have cost. — Austin Aria, American infantryman

The ratio of Japanese combat deaths to American was over 10 to 1 on Okinawa. It might have been marginally lower if fighting had proceeded to the enemy's heartland, where reinforcements would have been more easily available than to the Japanese garrisons on the cut-off islands. However, civilian deaths from conventional combat surely would have been much higher, if only because the mainland had many more civilians who were committed to die for Emperor and country. The best estimates of total Japanese deaths in a conventional mainland campaign are five to ten million. If civilian suicides and suicidal resistance had generated hysteria — a likely prospect in light of the experience on Guam and Okinawa — the toll might have been higher.

New information confirms that Stalin was preparing to land troops on the northernmost home island of Hokkaido (home to many of Captain Kojo's soldiers). If the Red Army had seized it, Japanese casualties, extrapolating from the number of POWs who died in Soviet camps, would have reached four hundred thousand. That would have been just a part of the loss if, as a full Allied partner during ground combat from 1945 to 1946 or later, Stalin insisted on dividing Japan, like Korea and Germany.All postwar life, starting with retarded economic recovery, would have suffered heavily.

Japan was finished as a warmaking nation [but] . . . Japan's leaders were going to fight right on. To not lose face was more important than hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives. . . . To continue was no longer a question of Japanese military thinking, it was an aspect of Japanese culture and psychology. — James Jones, WW II

Until recently, the Emperor, a little like Tsar Nicholas II during World War I, had been more concerned with preserving his imperial prerogatives than with ameliorating the suffering of his people. Like his Army leadership, he firmly believed that the "decisive" battle would take place in the homeland, and did nothing to encourage responses to American peace feelers in May, while the Shuri Line held. (No response was made.)

The atomic bomb attacks and the Soviet entry into the war, thus deteriorating our position, shocked us. But we can take some countermeasures. . . . We still have enough fighting strength remaining. Furthermore, don't we have large army forces still intact on the Chinese continent and in our homeland? It might be the view of some clever fellows to surrender with some strength left instead of being completely destroyed. . . . But those fellows advocating that idea are nothing but selfish weaklings who don't think seriously about the future of the nation and only seek immediate benefits. — August 11 diary entry of Admiral Matome Ugaki, commander of the 5th Air Fleet on Kyushu, which carried out kamikaze and conventional attacks on the American fleet off Okinawa

For example, the Japanese ambassador in Moscow believed the peace overtures to Stalin were "ridiculous" because they claimed too much for Japan. At that point, even the Emperor preferred waiting for a more "favorable moment" to offer serious concessions, meanwhile keeping up the fight to show the Americans "the disadvantages of continuing the war." More to the point, the government wouldn't accept Washington's demand for unconditional surrender because the military still controlled it.

Besides, all the would-be peacemakers were on the periphery of real state power. Japan remained dominated by the Supreme War Council's die-hard faction, the very kind of "Manchuria Gang" activists and sympathizers who had terrorized and assassinated opponents in the 1920s and 1930s and helped push the country into her wars.

In a secret memorandum to the throne, Marquis Kido ventured that Japan had lost the war, "regrettable though it is." Nevertheless, the overriding determinant was the military leaders' will to "fight to the death." Therefore, he had to advise the Emperor that any peace move was "almost impossible."

"Even if the Japanese people are weary of the war," Commander of the Combined Fleet Admiral Soemu Toyoda insisted, "we must fight to the last man." And scarcely any of those "last men" themselves — the cannon fodder — made the slightest sign of opposition, let alone protest, no more than did Captain Kojo's doomed men. Most Japanese, including civilians, still couldn't conceive of any other end to the war than victory or death. Just before the Emperor's August 14 broadcast telling his people to accept defeat, Tokyo shopkeepers sharpened knives, expecting an order for the entire nation to commit suicide.

Little of the military affirmation was bombast. None of it changed until the atomic bombs, both of them. Even then, some of the key generals insisted the fighting should continue in the ashes. And the resolution of even the less fiercely committed decision makers ebbed so slowly, with such distant prospect of the eventual acceptance of common sense over bushido, the Way of the Warrior, that continued resistance was all but inevitable. Their relegation of other considerations — such as the desire to continue living — to secondary importance much diminishes the significance of the evidence of Japan's weakened condition and the small but waxing peace faction.

That's why many Japanese civilians as well as American infantrymen cheered the bomb. Not surprisingly, the Japanese kept their approval to themselves. Even half a century later, few feel able to voice their belief that the terrible weapon liberated them. But nonmilitarist Japanese, of whom there were surely millions, now and then do whisper a confession that they believed they were doomed before Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved them.*

Conservatively put, Okinawa demonstrated the extreme unlikelihood of surrender by the Japanese who held the country in their grip, no matter what the odds against successful defense. The foregone outcome of the battle for the island neither made the Japanese fight less resolutely nor diminished the casualties on either side, or among Okinawan civilians.

As we're about to see, the high commanders were extremely reluctant — and in some cases simply unwilling — to consider surrender even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But although it can never been known whether the Japanese in control would have abandoned their commitment if given just a week or two more to consider Hiroshima's significance, the indecent haste with which Nagasaki was demolished so soon on its heels apparently made little difference to them. The Supreme War Council's minutes also reveal that the generals were nearly as determined to continue after the second bomb as after the first. (The destruction of the cities appeared to have troubled them less than it did Truman.) They were stopped only by the Emperor's unprecedented cabinet pronouncement, after decades of outward silence about decisions made in his name. Even after His Majesty expressed his wish to prevent further slaughter by "bearing the unbearable" of surrender, it was touch-and-go during the five days after Nagasaki whether hardliners would prevent him from making his very first broadcast to the nation — the surrender resolution — as some were utterly determined to do.

Those circumstances also weaken the argument that a demonstration bomb dropped off a Japanese coast before resort to the deadly ones might have been enough to achieve surrender. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, conscience probably did require such a warning, even though only two atomic bombs had been made, and the military diehards' grip might have been further strengthened by a demonstration bomb that failed to explode. (None of the makers was certain the triggers would work over a target, as opposed to at the test site.) Still, the same evidence of the persistence even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki suggests it would have changed none of the relevant minds.

During the half century following the advent of the new bomb, it took on much symbolic weight that wasn't felt at the time, when it was perceived essentially as merely a much more powerful weapon. Knowing what was then known under the then-enormous pressures to end the awful war — as opposed to enjoying the luxury of retrospective judgment — only some higher order of human being would have made different decisions, or agonized about them much more than Truman did.

However, that too misses the point, since the question, once again, is not about them or why they chose to do what they did, but the consequences. Their failures — the selfishness, narrow nationalism, unwillingness to grapple with the full significance of their decisions — didn't change the situation in Japan. Even if the feeble peace "faction" did manage to turn tables on the militarists, the improbable relief would have come only months or years into the invasion of the mainland, when millions of lives would have been lost. Yes, more willingness to negotiate and a better grasp of the enemy's sensibilities might have coaxed an earlier surrender — but that can be said of any war. And no enemy coaxing had less chance of success than with the commanding members of the Supreme War Council. If Ushijima's laughter at Buckner's surrender proposal was apocryphal, his rejection was no less absolute for that.

Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made. He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down the track. It's all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing. — George Elsey, naval intelligence, decades later

Admirals Ernest King and William Leahy argued that a more hermetic maritime blockade than the one in place during the summer of 1945, coupled with more intense bombing and naval gunfire, would have forced surrender within a reasonable time. Leahy called the atomic bomb "an inhuman weapon to use on a people that was already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [We Americans] had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages." A scattering of high-ranking officers — none from infantry units — agreed.

A few maintained there was no need for atomic bombs or an invasion: Deprived of supplies and food, Japan would have surrendered sooner or later. Most of that sprinkling spoke out only after the war, when evidence became available of just how severely American submarines had crippled Japanese industry. They apparently didn't notice that their argument also applied to the Palau Islands, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and the other murderous stepping-stones. If blockades could have done the job, weren't the deaths there and at Okinawa also logically unnecessary?

Either way, their voices were rare exceptions among the fighting men. Otherwise, an almost visible line separated those who judged Japanese intentions through the prism of combat experience from people further removed, military as well as civilian. Complaints about the atomic bomb's inhumanity in particular increased in proportion to their makers' distance from the hell to which the weapon had put an end. "In gener...

To report that the less one knew about the island battles, the more likely one's disapproval is not to say combat participation was essential for reaching solid conclusions about the bomb, only that the very persuasive arguments against usually leave unmentioned the mortal costs of the...

Actually, they might have. The Stars and Stripes and British ensign flew from nearly a thousand destroyers and destroyer escorts in August, and American yards were launching more every week. Stationed within sight of each other, they and the capital warships, supplemented by thousands of planes, could have sealed off the home islands. But it's hard to understand how that would have saved more lives or otherwise been more humane. On the contrary, it's almost certain the majority of Japanese would have voluntarily or compulsorily — in either case, agonizingly — persisted in rejecting surrender even after mass starvation.

"Alternatives to the atomic bombs carried no guarantee that they would end the war or reduce the amount of human death and suffering." In particular, a blockade, which also wouldn't have distinguished between military personnel and civilians, would probably have been more barbarous because it would have taken more lives, probably many more, by pervasive famine spread by the destruction of the transportation system.

Critics of using the atomic bombs would stand on firmer moral ground if they also protested the incineration of those cities. Their horror at the barbarity of Little Boy and Fat Man would hit harder if it included the killing of so many more hundreds of thousands of civilians by conventional weapons — and acknowledgment that it was certain to continue under the command of the passionately committed Curtis LeMay, the Air Force general who'd promised to beat Japan back to the Dark Ages. (On the eve of the March firebombing of Tokyo that killed nearly two hundred thousand, the general wired a colleague to be ready for an "outstanding show.") If every human life is equally sacred, how can the war's prolongation by more than a month be thought to have been better than a resort to nuclear destruction?

Of course Japan did capitulate, prima facie evidence that all the predictions about her refusal to do so was so much talk. On the other hand, how it was achieved strongly suggests that only the atomic bombs could have done it without the years of "decisive battle" or mass starvation. For surrender was (barely) accepted only when the Emperor spoke up, and that moment came only five days after Nagasaki. It was the terrifying atomic devastation that prompted his startling intervention, then tipped the balance among military commanders in favor of obeying him.

The latter's Imperial Rescript, the unprecedented broadcast that summoned the nation to surrender, made no mention of expected Soviet offensives in Manchuria, perhaps because the Army had already written them off, but spoke only of the crucial determinant: the "new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable."