The Battle of Okinawa: Prelude to Downfall
The Battle of Okinawa: Prelude to Downfall
The 1945 Battle of Okinawa saw the most organized, planned, and resourced use of “kamikaze” or suicide attacks by the Imperial Japanese Army, Navy and Air Force against the United States Armed Forces and her allies. “2,000 Japanese pilots were lost in sorties that killed almost 5,000 American sailors.”[1] Okinawa saw not only the most concerted effort and use of the “kamikaze” by the Japanese, but ultimately, the only campaign in the whole of the Pacific Campaign.
The US
forces across the Pacific Theater had seen the Imperial Japanese use “banzai”
or human wave attacks during the 1942 Guadalcanal campaign and again during the
1944 Battle of Saipan. Martial history does indeed have many instances of
‘suicidal’ combat with the famous stand of the Spartans against the Persians at
the Battle of Thermopylae. But these
desperate and, often last-ditch stands were and are rare. The human condition
almost always seeks survival.
The
Imperial Japanese efforts during the Battle of Okinawa struck at the very
psyche of the American Soldiers, Sailors and Marines. As Westerners, the
“Western mind- 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 reckless actions of a deranged
leader, but accurate reflections of fundamental differences in culture and
society.”[2]
The
European Theater, in contrast, saw cultural and societal similarities between
the combatants. Of course, that was until Allied forces entered Germany proper
and saw the ‘death camps’ and apparatus of the “final solution”. Nevertheless,
the Japanese presented many more dissimilarities from the Westerners they
opposed. The Japanese, emphasizing a code of honor and of saving face, viewed
surrender as the ultimate betrayal that was disloyal, disrespectful, and
ultimately, cowardly.
Nowhere
in the Roman-Greco history of the West was this ‘suicidal act’ the norm. Even
the sacrifice of the Spartans at Hellespont-Thermopylae was not planned as a
final act but more, due to terrain, the most precise location that gave the
Spartans tremendous advantage along the Persian line of attack.
American
Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines wrestled with the Japanese sense of honor and
knew, too, of the despair, the final and fanatic sacrifice that made no sense,
but that the Americans were readily willing to oblige and assist. The U.S. Navy
lost many destroyers, escorts, picket ships and auxiliaries but in the final
tally, “not a single fleet carrier
battleship was sunk.”[3]
On the
whole, the Japanese ‘kamikaze’ attacks were of tremendous concern to the Americans
and Allies but from the tactical to the operational and strategic levels, these
attacks did not deter the Allied war effort against Japan. On the contrary,
they only pressed the Allies into larger and more ferocious attacks against the
Japanese home islands. But as the period
of 1943 passed on into 1944, one thing became alarmingly clearer: “Not every
island and atoll was host to progressively greater savagery, but the trend was
clear- The nearer the site to the sacred Japanese homeland, the greater
resistance and blood.”[4]
And so, little surprise to the Americans that the Japanese unleashed a most
desperate measure against them that was beyond anything they had yet
experienced in the preceding two years.
During
the three months of the Battle of Okinawa the Americans tried to fend off or
contain the danger posed by the “kamikaze” attacks and the suicidal hold outs
of the fanatic Japanese infantrymen defending the island in caves and bunkers.
The Americans on land, increased use of artillery, mortars, and flamethrowers.
At sea they extended the distance of the anti-aircraft picket ships and added
more guns of every kind to all naval vessels. And in the air, Japanese home
island airfields were targeted and fighters conducted patrols at greater
distances from the Okinawa battle area.
The
battle on land was a tough, bloody, long grinding fight that, for the
Americans, took more time and resources than anticipated. The suicide ‘banzai’
charges of the Japanese became a “serious and deadly annoyance rather than a
decisive tactical”[5] one. On land and sea the
Americans learned and developed techniques to minimize the effects of the
‘kamikaze’ and ‘bansai’ attacks.
A
Marine veteran of the Pacific island hopping campaigns said that almost from
the beginning, “the Japanese would give no quarter” and that “Marines almost
universally agreed to neither give nor expect any quarter from their enemy in
return.”[6]
Two tremendous items helped shape the American reaction and conduct in the
fighting across the Pacific: 1) The ferocity of the Japanese resistance during
the Battles of Iwo Jima, Saipan and Okinawa coupled with 2) a paucity of
Japanese surrenders from 1942 to 1945.
In
reply to the Imperial Japanese actions in the Pacific, the United States
unleashed the full fury of her arsenal. More ships, more bombings, more naval
gunfire and artillery shells, and more aircraft. And after the surrender of the
Nazi’s in April 1945, more and more men would be unleashed upon Japan as well.
The
final weapon unleashed, forced the Empire of Japan to unconditionally surrender
and ended the war far sooner than anticipated. This weapon would change the
course of human history and the effects are still felt today. The weapon: the
atom bomb. And as far as the American servicemen in the Pacific were concerned,
this was absolutely the appropriate answer to the carnage and butchery the
Imperial Japanese forces had unleashed across the Pacific from Nanking, China
in 1937 to Okinawa in 1945.
Critiques
of the American planning and execution of the Battle for Okinawa abound due to
the high and unanticipated costs. Many ask if the island could have been
bypassed. Or, encircled and lay siege to. Perhaps this could have been done but
this would have simply prolonged the brutal war in the Pacific. And with the
surrender of Nazi Germany, the tired eyes of the Allies looked at finishing up
the war against Japan as quickly as humanly and technologically possible. Technology
and the bomb made these desires come true.
Modern
warfare in the late twentieth and early twenty first century has seen the
suicide bomber in play once again. The counter to this technique, however, does
not include the use of flamethrowers per se but in Afghanistan the US Air Force
engaged the entrenched Taliban with ‘bunker buster’ precision munitions and the
“Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB). “Force protection” measures include ‘stand-off’
perimeters, and checkpoints to search for these murderous weapons.
A
perfection of modern suicide bombings was experienced by the Sri Lankan government
during the Civil War from 1983 to 2009. Of note is that the ‘Tamil’ insurgents
of the ‘Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’ (LTTE) used suicide attacks much like
the Imperial Japanese had done during WWII. The Tamil Tigers, however used the
suicide bomb as “an
offensive weapon, not a defensive one. It was devised to make up for the
Tamils' numerical disadvantage.”[7]
The Sri Lankan Army, faced with the same challenges of the Americans during the
Battle of Okinawa. And like the Americans, the Sri Lankan Army, perhaps
benefitting from a lack of international media scrutiny, developed a strategy
that, at the tactical level, increased the carnage and pressure against the
LTTE. An assumption can be made that the LTTE’s use of organized suicide
bombers on land at sea only served to pressure the Sri Lankan Government and
her Army to increase the ‘cost’ to the LTTE.
As in
the Battle of Okinawa, the Sri Lankan Civil War exacted a tremendous toll on
civilians. From the Imperial Japanese Army to twenty first century terrorist
organizations the theme that runs its course with the use of suicide attacks is
only an increased demand for an expedient end to the suffering. And the longer
it takes, the exhausted civil governments involved, loosen the harnesses
holding back the security forces charged with defeating this most ghastly and
murderous threat.
Bibliography
1.
Hanson, Victor
Davis, “Ripples of Battle, How the Wars
of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think”,
Anchor Books, New York, 2003, p43
2. Ibid. p45
3. Ibid. p44
4. Feifer, George, Battle of Okinawa: The Blood and the Bomb, Rowman & Littlefield, Aug 1, 2001, p7
5. Hanson, Victor Davis, “Ripples of Battle, How the Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think”, Anchor Books, New York, 2003, p53
6. Dowling, Timothy C., Personal Perspectives: World War II, ABC CLIO, 2005 p107
Comments
Post a Comment