Battle of Okinawa

For 82 days in the spring of 1945, American and Japanese forces fought for Okinawa, the main island of the Ryukyu chain, about 340 miles from the Japanese home islands. Codenamed Operation Iceberg by the Americans, it began with the largest amphibious landing of the Pacific war on 1 April and ended in late June. It was the bloodiest battle of the Pacific campaign, and above all a catastrophe for the island's civilians, remembered as the "typhoon of steel".

After a long campaign of island hopping, including the costly capture of Iwo Jima, the United States wanted Okinawa's airfields and anchorages as a base for the planned invasion of Japan itself. It assembled the Tenth Army under Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., made up of Army and Marine divisions with more than 180,000 personnel, backed by a huge fleet that included a British Commonwealth contingent. Defending the island was Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima's 32nd Army, around 100,000 troops in all, including tens of thousands of conscripted local Okinawans and some 1,780 schoolboys pressed into a combat corps.

The 77th Infantry Division took the nearby Kerama Islands from 26 March. On 1 April the main force came ashore on the Hagushi beaches on the west coast. Ushijima concentrated his main defence in the south, in caves and fortified ridges around Shuri Castle. While Marines cleared the north, American divisions moving south ran into ferocious resistance at Kakazu Ridge, Conical Hill and Sugar Loaf Hill. Japanese counter-offensives on 12–14 April and 4 May failed with heavy losses. Late May brought monsoon rains that turned the battlefield into mud, and on 29 May Marines entered the ruins of Shuri Castle after the Japanese had withdrawn further south.

Offshore, the Japanese made suicide air attacks a central part of their strategy for the first time, launching seven major kamikaze waves involving more than 1,500 aircraft between 1 April and 25 May. The Japanese battleship Yamato was sunk with its task force, at a cost of more than 4,000 lives. The US Navy in turn lost dozens of ships sunk and hundreds damaged, more in so short a time than ever before.

Rear Admiral Minoru Ōta and some 4,000 naval troops died by suicide in their underground headquarters on 13 June. Buckner was killed by Japanese artillery fire at a forward observation post on 18 June. Organised resistance ended on 21 June, and Ushijima and his chief of staff Isamu Chō took their own lives in the final hours.

American battle casualties are generally put at about 50,000, including about 12,500 dead, with tens of thousands more non-battle casualties. The US military estimated that some 110,000 Japanese soldiers died, a figure that includes conscripted Okinawans, while more than 7,000 regulars were captured, the first large-scale Japanese surrender of the Pacific war. Civilian deaths are estimated at between 40,000 and 150,000; local authorities count at least 149,425 Okinawans killed or missing. Many civilians were caught in the crossfire, and Japanese soldiers used some as human shields, and seized their food, and thousands died in mass suicides that many survivors say were urged or ordered by Japanese soldiers.

Because Japan surrendered in August 1945, the invasion that Okinawa was meant to support never took place. Some historians argue that the scale of the losses on Okinawa helped persuade American leaders to use atomic bombs rather than invade, though the reasons for Japan's surrender remain debated. Large American forces are still based on the island, including Kadena, the largest US air base in Asia.

Our 1938 map shows Okinawa as part of the Empire of Japan, and our 1945 map shows the region at the close of World War II.