Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

At noon on October 9, the fleet rang up flank speed for the all-night run to Okinawa. The ships roared through the night, but no patrol planes appeared on radar; the Japanese did not expect them. Carney remarked that “we caught the boys on Okinawa utterly unprepared, because I suppose they figured nobody in his right mind would be at sea during anything of this sort. We arrived unheralded and in full force.”58 Arriving at its planned launch point northeast of Okinawa at dawn on October 10, the fleet turned into the wind and began launching planes. The initial fighter sweep found few enemy planes airborne, but plenty parked on the ground. At Yontan Airfield, the largest on Okinawa, the attackers strafed parked planes, leaving about a dozen ablaze. Then followed four waves of bombers, escorted by additional fighters armed with bombs and rockets; they targeted airfields, barracks, ammunition dumps, fuel tanks, and defensive installations all up and down the Ryukyus. In the last of the day’s strikes, they worked over targets still burning fiercely from the earlier raids. Fires engulfed the ancient central district of Naha, Okinawa’s prefectural capital, killing about six hundred civilians and leaving four-fifths of the town in ashes. The fire destroyed much of the art, architecture, and cultural patrimony of the old Ryukyuan kingdom. Even now, older Okinawans remember the disaster by the date it occurred: 10/10.