Word: okinawa
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...dissipate our patrimony, generation after generation, in this manner." Naval operations in World War II had indicated clearly which were the important bases. Among them: Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshalls; Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas; the Palaus, and perhaps such farflung winnings as Iwo Jima and Okinawa...
Watching her Okinawa outpost crumble before U.S. attack, a desperate Japan played small cards for high stakes last week-and lost. In two disastrous days 417 Jap planes went spinning into the sea. In 30 fateful minutes of the second afternoon, two cruisers, three destroyers and her last naval trump, the 45,000-ton battleship Yamato, were battered to the bottom...
Preliminary landings were made on several tiny islands west of Okinawa-in the Kerama Rhetto, and, the Japs said, also on Mae, Kamiyama. Then, at 8:30 on Easter Sunday morning, the Okinawa invasion was launched. After a ferocious preparatory bombardment, Lieut. General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. sent the seasoned troops of his new Tenth Army swarming ashore. Marines and soldiers fought side by side in this army, as they had in World War I's famed 2nd Division. Comprising the army were Major General John R. Hodge's XXIV Army Corps and Major General Roy S. Geiger...
Whatever the reason for the light resistance, there was little serious expectation that Okinawa would come cheap. The island was too important a strategical prize for that. If it were lost, said the Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri-Hochi, Japan would have "no hope of turning the course of the war." Here Nippon must fight. And from Admiral Nimitz' headquarters, as the campaign went into its third day, came reports of rising resistance...
...Rhine-crossing paratroopers carried maps that glow in the dark. Amphibious troops as far apart as the Rhine and Okinawa had maps showing high and low water areas, slippery cliffs and rocks...