Word: okinawa
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...next six hours. Of the 3,000 crewmen on board, 353 died in the smoke and flames. The kamikaze attacks were part of the Japanese navy's Ten Go (Operation Heaven), which sent 1,465 volunteer pilots on suicide missions against Allied ships during the assault on Okinawa, then in its second month...
...same time that the Bunker Hill was aflame, Lieut. General Simon Bolivar Buckner, commander of the American forces fighting to capture Okinawa, was undertaking a new offensive to seize control of the island. The Americans knew the tiny speck in the Pacific was the ultimate stepping-stone to the empire's home islands. Throughout the 83-day struggle for Okinawa, Buckner's favorite toast, over bourbon and water, was "May you walk in the ashes of Tokyo." Aware of this objective, his enemy, Lieut. General Mitsuru Ushijima, prepared a war of attrition to keep Okinawa from becoming a staging ground...
While the majority of Allied soldiers shrank from atrocity, a few were not averse to inflicting on the Japanese the horrors that had been visited on their comrades. In Tennozan, George Feifer cites Marine memories of barbaric acts against "the Japs" on Okinawa. The dead were cut up in search of souvenirs; soldiers, surrendering unarmed, were shot. Elsewhere, hospital ships were sunk and prisoners tortured. In 1946 Edgar Jones wrote in the Atlantic Monthly: "What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians...
...June 22, 1945, the U.S. had conquered Okinawa, just 350 miles from Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. LeMay's bombers set those islands aflame. From March to May, enormous sections of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, Kawasaki and Yokohama were incinerated. The raids on Tokyo had to be called off after May because scarcely any major targets were left. Of the carnage, LeMay said, "No point in slaughtering civilians for the mere sake of slaughter." He was after military production. But, he added, "the entire population got into the act and worked to make those airplanes...
...strategists also prepared for an invasion of Kyushu. Allied intelligence estimates in late April put 84,200 Japanese troops in southern Kyushu. In fact, by late July almost 600,000 Imperial troops were on the island. That balance of Japanese to American fighting men portended a cataclysm. At Okinawa, until then the Pacific's largest land battle, 278,000 U.S. troops fought 83,000 Japanese. The Americans considered a worst-case scenario requiring three attempted landings to achieve victory. Meanwhile, Tokyo had issued orders to its troops--decrypted by U.S. intelligence, which long before had broken the Japanese ciphers--that...