Okinawa '45: Kamikaze

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The battle marked the end of the Imperial Navy as any sort of modern fighting force.

The American Wolf's presence at the door of the sacred home soil completed the isolation of the Japanese home islands to the east and the west and facilitated the powerful strategic bombing campaign that had now begun to consume Japan's cities in flames.

The battle featured some of the most ferocious naval and ground combat in human history.

Ironically and tragically, it brought widespread death and destruction to a land that had mostly known peace, marking a seminal moment in in the history of the Okinawan people.

And that was John C.

McManus reading from John C.

McManus's

to the end of the earth.

And welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk, USA, a special edition at the end of our Okinawa series that James and I have been doing.

With me, Al Murray, James Holland, and John C.

McManus.

John, is it a while since you wrote about Okinawa?

When did you write to the End of the Earth?

It's only a couple of years, isn't it?

Yeah, that book came out a couple of years ago.

So it was...

So it's all quite fresh in your mind, the battle.

And I mean, because the thing Jim and I have said at the start of each of these episodes is if you want to understand the atomic bomb and its use, look at this battle and it's pretty much outlined for you why anyone would be thinking we need to do this.

Absolutely.

Yeah, because, you know, the ferocity of this battle on every level, air, land, and sea is really kind of off the charts.

And so we're seeing in Okinawa over those really almost three horrifying months that, you know, the way the Japanese are going to fight is not going to diminish.

It's actually going to go to the opposite as we get closer to the home islands.

And I think that's what's maybe a little disquieting.

So I think that in tandem with the fire bombings is what makes us most understand the atomic bombings.

Yeah.

Well, so for those of you who've listened to the series so far, in the first one, we were looking at the kind of background to it, the strategic situation, what the plans were respectively for the Imperial Japanese and for the Americans and their allies.

Don't forget the British Pacific Fleet.

And then in the second one, we were focusing very heavily on the naval battle.

And we got up to the kind of, you know, only actually about the kind of sort of middle end of April.

And then in the third episode, we were looking at the ground battle through the prism of one man's experience.

And that was, I'm afraid to say John, he was a guy from the U.S.

Marine Corps.

But he was in the 29th Infantry.

But, you know, you're here to kind of fight the flag for the army.

But also, I think in this kind of first off, we really do need to finish off what was going on in the naval battle because this just is the biggest air, land, sea battle of the war, isn't it?

Really?

I mean, I can't think of another one that involves air, land, and sea in one battle quite so completely.

Not even Normandy.

Guadalcanal, maybe on some levels, but it's, you know, smaller forces, you know, earlier on in the campaign.

It is.

Of arguably equally strategic importance, greater strategic importance.

But, you know, in terms of scale and size, this is the biggest sustained single battle that the U.S.

Navy fights, surely.

It's the deadliest battle in the history of the U.S.

Navy in terms of sailors lost.

And yeah, I think they lost, what, 36 to 38 ships, something like that, which is staggering.

Leyte is pretty huge too in the fall of 1944, the Battle of Leyte Gulf and the aerial operations, and obviously the land ops and all that.

But

it's a bit less concentrated than Oginawa, which is, you know, most of the fighting on this one island.

There are exceptions, of course.

Yeshima or the 77th Division fights there.

But yeah, I mean, it really is a kind of climactic battle in which whatever's left of the Imperial Navy is involved.

And then this really quite remarkable Allied fleet.

That's what's always struck me, guys, is like, I mean, just the combined strength of the Royal Navy and the United States Navy.

coming into this this particular battle.

I don't know that there's ever been a time in human history when you had a fleet that was so incredibly powerful.

And especially in terms of aviation.

I mean, there's what, 12 fleet carriers involved between the two, something like that.

Yeah, it's absolutely immense, isn't it?

That's kind of mind-blowing.

What's interesting about this expression of American naval power, particularly, is when people talk about, yes, there's a Germany-first policy, but not if you're in the U.S.

Navy, the entire thing has been tilted to the Pacific.

And of course it would be, because the Royal Navy said, well, we'll deal with the Atlantic.

We'll cope with that.

And at times is hard pressed and at times needs the assistance of the U.S.

Navy.

But the U.S.

Navy are really completely geared to a Pacific campaign.

Right for the word go, aren't they?

And King has been tilting things in that direction right from the off.

And this is the sort of muscular expression of it.

Because after all, the Navy has to arm and has to catch up and has to expand, doesn't it?

But by now, they can bring everything to the party, can't they?

Yeah.

I mean, I definitely think that the warship side of the Navy has always been oriented toward the Pacific.

And I mean, you know, the battleship people, the carrier people, the escort people have had to be more oriented toward the Atlantic because of the, you know, the battle of the Atlantic and escorting convoys and all that.

And I'm talking talking destroyers, destroyer escorts,

escort carriers, which are this little subset of this larger navy that really, really wants to be looking to the Pacific and really wants a kind of showdown fight with the Imperial Japanese Navy, which to some extent, that's what Midway is about on some levels, is achieving that equilibrium.

It'll give us a balance of power later.

So Okinawa,

it has always struck me as this kind of capstone moment for

this warship navy.

And I think the Japanese see it that way way too, when you look at which targets they're trying to strike.

They're trying to hit the carriers.

They're trying to hit the bigger ships when arguably they'd be better off trying to hit the troop ships and the logistical ships and all those unglamorous ships that would really, if you sunk them, that would really stop the invasion cold on some levels.

But they're still thinking in terms of hitting the larger capital ships, which certainly you can kind of understand.

Because they're in the grip of their old naval thinking, aren't they?

That your navies square up against one of each other and one knocks the other out.

They're thinking in battleship terms, too.

It's like they haven't learned the lessons of the war so far as they've been presented to them.

Because, you know, this isn't the first attempt by the Americans to see somewhere amphibiously, is it?

They figured out how to defend Okinawan what to do to bleed the Americans on land, but they haven't figured out how to actually stymie them navally, have they?

This is why the kamikaze thing is working up to a point.

It's the best they could do up to a point.

But if they carry on attacking capital ships, they're not going to disrupt invasion.

Now, this leads us neatly on to kind of where the Japanese think they they are by, you know, as early as two weeks into the battle, because, you know, on the 14th of April, Imperial General Headquarters announces that air attacks have so far sunk or crippled 326 ships, including six carriers, seven battleships, 34 cruisers, and 48 destroyers.

And a week later, on the 21st of April, Radio Tokyo reports that the Allies had lost half of its 1,400 ships, including 400 sunk, with casualties of 800,000.

And, you know, they report that these catastrophic losses have driven the Americans, and I quote, into the black depths of confusion and agony.

But actually, it's some way off that to put it.

People in confusion and agony are the Japanese, there, aren't they?

Well, yes.

And, you know, we've talked a lot in the last few months about delusion of the Axis forces in the final months and weeks of the Second World War.

And here you've got it again, haven't you?

I mean, it's just absolutely bonkers.

And it seems that Imperial General Headquarters really does believe that the kamikazes are winning.

But of course, they're not.

And one of the big problems, of course, is kamikazes go off.

It's quite hard to report back because they're dead.

Yeah.

I mean, you don't know about the damage assessment from someone who's dead.

What's funny about this is they didn't learn anything because they did the exact same thing the previous fall before the invasion of Leyte when they circulated these stories basically about how we had tried to launch airstrikes against Formosa, you know, today's Taiwan, and how basically they had sank all of Halsey's fleet.

And Halsey tweaks them back with this acerbic kind of response about, oh, you know, it's amazing.

I've got my ships here.

Which fleet did you sink?

You know, that kind of thing.

So there they were, they were deluding themselves, and it actually shaped their strategy in how they reacted to the American invasion of Leyte.

Here, I think this time it's a little bit more geared toward the population to say, yeah, you may think the war is going worse and the Americans are getting closer, but actually, look at all this damage we just inflicted on them.

Don't worry, we can still handle this.

And they clearly couldn't.

But the reality is quite different because, you know, Radio Tokyo is reporting this on the 21st of April.

In actual fact, by the third week of June, the total that they've sunk is 13 destroyers, 15 auxiliary vessels, and eight other vessels.

You know, not a single battleship, not a single carrier.

They've hit plenty of carriers, four carriers, I think it is by that stage, but they haven't sunk any.

So, you know, in all, it's not, it's not a great return for the loss of 1,430 aircraft by the end of the battle, which is a huge amount when they haven't got that, you know, when they're really on their last legs.

But you can't get away from the fact that the kamikazes are still having considerable effect.

I mean, they're causing immense strain, immense anxiety, battle stress, all those kind of things.

I mean, and they are, they're causing lots of damage, being an encumbrance, to put it mildly, aren't they?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It means the way you're operating permanently on your nerves, aren't you?

Yeah.

And every air attack has the possibility.

That could be you.

Well, exactly.

Again, we've talked about the sort of murderous cynicism at the core of a lot of Japanese decision-making by this stage of the war.

But as an effects-based operation, which is sort of more modern parlance, it has a tremendous effect, doesn't it?

You've got to be on watch.

Every aircraft could be a kamikaze rather than bloke, drops, bomb, departs.

This is the thing, isn't it?

Every single one could have your name on it.

As a terror weapon, it's fantastic, isn't it?

It is.

You just think about what happens every time, you know, kamikazes are picked up.

You know, that's ear-splitting alarm buzzers sounding on the ship, smoke generator generators spewing out, kind of revolting, horrible, kind of chemical grey-green fug haze, you know, which gets in your lungs and sort of is obviously unbelievably toxic and horrible.

Five-inch guns start booming, cannons pumping, the sound is absolutely immense.

The blast concussion clearly is going to take its toll.

You know, ammunition supplies appear to be endless because they're all starred at Karamo Reto, which is this anchorage that's so important.

to the battle and for the for the Americans.

So the gunners are just pounding away with sort of gay abandon.

And we should say this since you're the American, John.

But I mean, you know, this quote from one American sailor is amazing, isn't it?

He says, I never saw so much fire and tracers coming from one place in my entire life.

It just made a big cone up there, and the cone would move around.

Then you'd see a plane light up in the tip of the cone and go down, and the cone would just keep moving.

It was a spectacular sight.

Now, he's lucky enough to be topside, by the way, because a majority of a lot of these crews are, you know, below decks.

So that to me,

that had to be just so difficult mentally because you don't know what's going on.

At any second, there could be a kamikaze slamming into your ship and you don't know that that's happening.

So think of how that would work on you mentally and emotionally.

And what struck me about the kamikazes and like the tie-in to the 21st century is we've still, unfortunately, never come up with any kind of fail-say solution to the suicide bomber.

I mean, we're talking about guys on planes in 1945.

In the 21st century, you know, you're talking about SV bids and, you know, individual suicide bombers with vests and all of this kind of stuff.

So, how do you really combat that?

And I think that's what the Americans in particular, and I'm sure the British are just having a hard time wrapping their mind around how people could do this and how you really combat that.

Yeah, that's such a good point.

In a peculiar way, it's not unrelated to drone warfare, is it?

The aircraft, the pilot no longer matters.

A pilotless aircraft that can attack, say, a strategic bomber in its airfield at the other end of Russia has the same advantage in that there's you're not risking someone's life to do it.

These lives have been written off.

They've been risked.

They've been, the pilots of these aircraft have been, are as good as dead, literally.

And so if you shoot him down or not, it makes no difference to him, does it?

What a conundrum.

One of the ironies here is because the fighting's so bloody for the Americans.

They're taking terrible casualty rates, but they still do care about their men.

You know, you can look at the balance sheet and go, is that worth it?

Which is, after all, the question that the Japanese are trying to force onto the American: is it worth all these guys' lives?

But if you're, if the other side don't care, what on earth do you do?

And that's what's sobering because every, I guarantee you, every you know, sailor in that fleet wants to survive and to confront someone who literally doesn't, uh, seemingly.

I mean, it's it's really difficult.

Plus, it's at a higher, more bloodless level, it's very efficient in its own weird way in terms of machinery and cost.

If I can expend one plane to take down your ship, think about what that means.

I mean, how efficient that is and how much that costs you to build a ship and train the crew and all that.

And I can take it down with one warplane and lose one pilot.

Of course, it comes from this kind of cynical presumption of the Japanese sort of military cult that's controlling their government that, you know, they'll use the lives of these young men in whatever manner they see fit.

Now, from the American standpoint, too, though, this is a kind of breach of honor in a way.

You know, like the fighter pilots fighting in the skies and all that.

We could wrap our mind around that and we could respect that.

As one of the, the, this was a guy who was a, I think he was a gun captain on one of the ships.

And he said, you know, in a regular attack, it's a sporting chance you've got.

And I thought that was a really interesting phrase, the sporting chance of a fair fight between two worthy adversaries.

But he's saying when it's man against man bomb, all that is out the window.

And I think that was part of what was wrenching.

is how the the Japanese could do this on top of everything else they'd done in the war.

And it all, it leads to that kind of idea that these are just people beyond the pale, that they're weird fanatics and somehow not quite the same sort of human beings.

Savages.

I mean, that's how you end up people thinking like that.

It leads you straight there.

And if you're on a slippery slope of racism anyway, with the way this theater's being conducted, you're going to end up right there, aren't you?

It's not going to take any pushing, is it?

Not at all.

For ships damaged, what happens to it?

It goes to this anchorage, Karamo Reto, which has now been renamed by the Americans as Busted Ship Bay.

And this is just an absolute lifesaver.

So there's lots and lots of ships that would have been scuttled had it not been for this.

But once again, you know, American logistics and operational art is just at full whack here.

So, you know, 200 plus US and British naval ships and support vessels are hit by kamikazes or indeed still conventional bombing tax as well during this battle.

And each one of those, which isn't sunk, then goes to Karamoreto, where they are either patched up enough to enable them to go to a leafy or

and then on to Pearl Harbor or wherever, or back to San Francisco, or they're kind of patched up and put back into the battle again.

You know, there are sufficient engineers and stores and supplies and parts that they can do all that.

And that to me is just mind-boggling that this can happen.

And it's such a game changer for the battle because instead of the American US Navy especially being sort of badly depleted by the end of the battle, it's been knocked about a bit, but it's still intact and still pretty, you you know, fully functioning at the end.

And that's an amazing thing.

Do you know, I think the leadership in Okinawa, I'd be interested to see your take on this, John, but it seems to me the leadership of the U.S.

Naval leadership is pretty impressive as well.

I mean, these guys are pretty, you know, Mitch, Spruance, these guys, you know, they're absolutely resolute in what they're doing.

And, you know, you just take Spruance, for example, you know, Fifth Fleet Commander-in-Chief, after being forced off the USS Indianapolis, he then makes a USS New Mexico's flagship.

And David Wilcott, who is the Fifth Fleet Naval Surgeon, is on the quarter deck with a number of other officers when he watches a swarm of Japanese planes.

And there's a lone kamikaze, then heads straight for them.

And all the officers on the bridge kind of move out of the way and take cover, except for Spruits, who's watching with his binos trained without flinching at all.

I mean, that just takes nerves of steel.

And Wilcutts actually chastises the Admiral for being reckless.

And Spruits just says, if you're a good Presbyterian, you'd know that there is no dangerous unless your numbers up.

in other words you know it's gonna hit me it's gonna hit me predestination right

i mean

just amazing i mean the the us navy is not dissimilar to the army isn't it john that it into war it's small it has ambitions that there's things it wants to do it regards canada as its mortal enemy

something's going to change right exactly

but again it's this thing that everyone knows everyone they've all come through together it's this small cader of people.

And there are those who don't like one another.

And so they're all kind of on the same page as one another, even with the disagreements, right?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I've often said in relation to both the Army and the Navy, we have enough military professionals, good, dedicated military professionals to fight and win this war, but not so many that were racked by careerism.

You know, that the services are racked by careerism.

And you have a big divide between draftees and the professionals, as you will for a while during the Vietnam era, for instance.

Yeah, I mean,

people like Spruance, Mitcher, I mean, that's the first team.

These are first-rate naval thinkers.

These are people who, by 1945, know what they're doing on so many levels.

But I think a big part of what has carried us to this point of proficiency is the ability to do the forward logistics.

And yes, Spruance is part of that, but there's others like Rear Admiral Glover or whatever, you know, who don't get a lot of the glory.

But, you know, it used to be before the war,

and this affected diplomacy, that you felt like you needed bases all over the world for your navy.

That's how you did your forward logistics.

Now we really don't need that by 1945 because the fleet has become so adept at that conveyor belt type of logistics.

Maybe some anchorages here and there as you get, you know, places like Ulithi or whatever.

But I'm talking about the ability to keep ships

in action for incredible amounts of time and to service them in terms of oil and food and whatever.

It is absolutely amazing.

But but of course, you know, it still requires young men to kind of maintain this effort.

And the effort is the strain must have been absolutely immense.

I mean, there was time where you're kind of sort of standing offshore and you're watching the poor bloody infantry kind of slogging on land and thinking, God, thank God for that.

I'm not in one of those.

But this is not one of those moments.

You know, it's absolutely horrendous.

And, you know, destroyer pickets obviously have the worst of it, but there's lots of them who are getting absolutely hammered.

There's one gunboat captain who writes, I think you should read this out, John.

Yeah, he says, the strain became almost intolerable.

We were gaunt and filthy, red-eyed and stinking.

The ship was a mess with empty shell casings everywhere.

My face was pockmarked with particles of burned gunpowder since one Orlikon anti-aircraft gun fired as close as three yards from my battle station.

Wow.

That must have been, that'll take the paint off your skin, much less the gun mount.

We prayed for bad weather, which was about the only thing that slowed down the stream of Japanese planes.

So to them, it's just like this conveyor-belted enemy planes coming in.

It doesn't take many.

It could be 10 over three days, and that's a lot.

So he's talking about the strain.

I mean, I think that's, that's a great quote, because obviously you get the sense of how fatigued you are, of course, too.

But

just the little thing like

his face with the gunpowder particles on it.

Oh, just horrendous.

Things like that.

There was another story about one guy who just had had enough.

And this is on the combat fatigue side.

He'd been part of, he was on a gun mount, I think, and he had so many kamikaze attacks that he's dealing with.

And one day he just said to the other guys on the crew, he said, you know, it's just, it's just too hot today.

And he jumped overboard and died.

God.

Well, we've talked a lot about destroyer pickets, the radar destroyer pickets.

And on May the 3rd, 1945, there's two

who are operating together.

There's a USS Aaron Ward and the USS Little, and they're attacked by 50.

plus kamikazes and aaron ward is hit by seven kamikazes badly flooding fire spreading nearly sinking 45 crew killed in action 49 wounded in action eventually it manages to be towed to Busted Ship Bay and survives, which is just amazing.

It actually later fights in Korea and very successfully so.

The USS Little is targeted by 18 kamikazes, hit by four and sunk in 12 minutes with 30 of her crew.

I mean, just, you know, that's what these guys are up against.

And sometimes there are just so many kamikazes that, you know, you can't avoid that fate.

There's so many that enough of them are going to hit you.

You know, the most famous, I suppose, one of the most infamous attacks during the Akinawa battle, because there's those incredible colour photographs from it, is the attack on the USS Bunker Hill, which is one of the kind of fleet carriers, which is Admiral Mitch's flagship, which is targeted on the 11th of May, 1945.

But it's interesting, a pair of Kamikas, it just swarms around those pickets, and then just a pair come onto the bunker hill.

It's a low cloud base, so the gunners have only a split second to respond.

The first drops a 550-pound bomb before crashing onto the flight deck near number three elevator and crashing into 34 Hellcats, which are all fueled up, ready to go.

Yeah, there's photographs of those all on fire.

The bomb goes through three decks before coming out of the hull and exploding close underneath the hull.

So at least it didn't go off inside the ship.

Morsels of small mercy there.

And the second plane comes down in basically a near-vertical dive straight into the flight deck.

Obviously, it's the chain reaction because the 34 fueled up Hellcats on the deck.

That's the American way of doing naval air powers.

You've got lots of planes.

They're always ready to go.

The British would have fewer and they're using the lift and being a bit more, they're not quite quite so, not a sort of a massed battle approach to things.

So you've got secondary explosions.

Hundreds of men are killed from the blasts or the fires or the results of the fires asphyxiation.

There's smoke a thousand feet right up to that low cloud.

The entire rear end of the ship's on fire.

And obviously, because it's full of aviation fuel, full of avgas, it's going to burn, isn't it?

This is the problem with an aircraft carrier.

And there's ammo cooking off, fuel burning off.

And for an hour, there's just an inferno on board the ship.

Yeah.

And anyone looking at that would go, that's it.

It's done.

Yeah.

This is going to sink.

And what's amazing about it, it doesn't.

It's just amazing.

It's a testament to the fire control mechanisms and the training of the crew.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the only thing that's going to save ships like that.

Yeah.

Absolutely incredible.

But, you know, three officers, 10 enlisted men of Task Force 58, you know, the staff, 3 p.m.

Mitcher plus 60 surviving members of his staff transferred to the USS Enterprise.

Anyway, war correspondent Phelps Adams sees Mitcher leave.

He goes, he looked tired and old and just plain mad.

His deeply lined face was more than weather beaten.

It looked like an example of erosion in the Dust Bowl country.

But his eyes flashed fire and vengeance.

Yeah.

Well, that's Mitcher.

He's a tough cookie, though, isn't he?

He's tough as old nails.

I mean, on a good day,

his face looked like a beat-up baseball glove.

I mean, you know.

This guy, you have the wrinkles, and he looked like he'd, you know, spent his whole career as an aviator with an open cockpit with the wind blowing in his face.

I mean, yeah, he looked about 20 years older than he was, didn't he?

Yeah, and they just called him the old man, and he did.

He looked much older.

He was 58 or something at the time.

That's what's sobering now to think of.

I know he probably wasn't all that old, but he really did look it and seem it, of course, to many of the young sailors, obviously.

But especially at this moment.

I mean, think about that, having to evacuate with your staff and figure out where you're going to go and having been part of this attack.

I mean, that's pretty crazy.

But also it says something of the scale of these vessels, the way they're constructed, the kind of, you know, the different bulkheads, which sort of contains damage in one particular area or so, the kind of anti-flooding devices, the firefighting details that you were talking about earlier on, John.

I mean, it takes eight hours of firefighting to get the flames under control.

You know, by which time, obviously, the bug girl's looking terrible.

389 killed in action, 264 wounded in action.

You know, the casualties are really high because because many of the men below decks, which is exactly what you were talking about earlier on, die from smoke inhalation.

And the bodies of 22 pilots from VF-84, which is a naval air squadron, fight squadron, you know, they're discovered in a hatchway where they've been trying to escape.

Can you imagine?

It must have been horrendous.

But the engines of power plant are kind of largely okay.

So Bunker Hill is still able to steam and sail for Liffey at 20 knots.

I mean, can you believe it?

It's insane.

That's crazy.

It's just incredible.

It says so much about the construction of these vessels as well at the kind of height of war i mean i don't comment when the bunker hills laid down but i mean this is engine naval engineering of the highest caliber isn't it that it can sustain this much damage and still operate at 20 knots to a liffy which is what 1600 miles away something like that and hey just think of the human cost too when something like this happens aboard a major vessel i mean you lose hundreds of people in the blink of an eye and so so almost 400 killed put this in perspective for you the invasion of los negros in february march 1944 by the first cavalry division was a pretty major operation, relatively speaking, for MacArthur, and it went on for weeks and whatever.

Well, the 1st Cavalry Division suffered 326 killed in action in a bunch of very, very savage, ferocious fights.

Well, here in the blink of an eye aboard Bunker Hill, we've lost more than that killed just on that day.

To put this in perspective, on Omaha Beach on D-Day, ladies' figures are 842 dead.

Yeah.

Totally.

So, right, exactly.

That's a good point, Jim.

So that, so it's about half that.

One of the most notorious bloody episodes of the entire war.

So, you know, there you go.

When things go sideways on a naval vessel like that, it's incredibly deadly.

And we've seen that at Sabo Island, too, of course, with the loss of over a thousand sailors with four cruisers going down in the beginning of the Battle of Autocanal.

So it's this pattern through the whole war.

But the most amazing thing is that three days later, Mitch's new flag, which is the USS Enterprise, is also hit by Kamikaze.

So he has to move ship yet again, this time to the USS Randolph, which I'm pretty sure was not a fleet carrier.

No, it it's amazing.

Yeah.

But then one day after Bunker Hills hits, Spruance's flagship, which is the USS New Mexico, is also struck.

It's five and a half.

That's not a battleship.

12 of May, two lone Kamikazes approach them out of the sun.

You know, a five-inch shell blows one of the two out of the sky, but the second crashes into the starboard side of the ship.

Bomb detonates on the gun deck and tears a massive 30-foot hole and ignites the gas storage tanks.

I mean, can you believe it?

And yeah, they're all really worried about Spruance because they can't find him and they kind of feel the worst.

But eventually, they find him on the second deck manning a fire hose i mean ah god what a guy eh

that's a leader he's just the business isn't he spruce making himself useful that's very strong isn't it yep he should have gotten five star rank my opinion 55 killed 100 casualties including 55 killed in action you're right john these are big bites aren't they they are you know anyone on a ship skilled cruiser skilled and deeply trained and all that sort of stuff and gone in an instant i mean you think those all those pilots

gone like that.

Yeah, on a bunker hill, yeah.

And they're naval pilots.

They've, you know, the next level of skill, you know, to be able to fly for an aircraft carrier.

But Spruance writes, I had just started for the bridge when the anti-aircraft batteries opened up, so I remained undercover while going forward on the second deck.

And we were hit before I got very far, which is fortunate for me, as the two routes to the bridge led right through the area where the plane and bomb hit.

The suicide plane is a very effective weapon, which we must not underestimate.

I do not believe anyone who has not been around it within its area of operations can realize its potentialities against ships.

Well, there you go, John.

So he's speaking to Washington there.

You know, I've always thought that, that he's speaking to Washington there about what's the next step in terms of the invasion of Japan, because we're going to deal with even more of these in the invasion of Japan, possibly.

And this is kind of new in the minds of a lot of people as of Okinawa, and yet it had gone on since the Battle of Leyte Gulf on some level the previous fall.

You know, a little bit at Iwo Jima, and of course, the invasion of Luzon.

The Japanese launched a bunch of kamikazes there that killed 500 sailors, didn't sink any ships.

So

I think there was a sense for Spruance that maybe some at higher level were slow to realize the threat posed by the kamikazes.

And I've always thought that that quote maybe was geared for, as he saw it, for those folks.

It must be, because after all, if you're, say, you are trying to land on the South Island, those aircraft haven't got to fly hundreds of miles to get to you and come to a radar picket.

They're just going to be upon you, aren't they?

They're going to come low over ground and then straight out over the sea and onto you and nothing you're going to be able to do about it in terms of radar picketing and all that sort of thing until maybe you've got people ashore with radar blah blah blah but at that early stage where you're very very very vulnerable and we're casually talking about events in kind of you know the second week of may 1945 which of course coincidentally is v e day in europe but you know it's it's it's not certainly not vj day over in the pacific and you know there's this great line from one of the marines who kind of hears the news and he goes well i didn't change the position of our lines or the texture of the mud, the tin of the sky, or the amount of ammunition each of us carried in our launchos.

I love it.

Yeah, great.

I'm very happy for you.

Yeah.

Yeah, it might have loved it happening on the moon as far as many of them thought.

Absolutely.

But there is a kind of, you know, as sort of May gives way to June, there is a sense that the kamikazes are lessening, that, you know, the heat is dying down a little bit.

There's this change of command, isn't there, on the 27th of May, because there is this rotation that they do.

And it should have happened a month earlier, but it doesn't because they're in the thick of the battle.

And because you know, the fifth fleet is the A-team, and the third fleet is kind of just not quite as much.

So, you know, Admiral McCain takes over from Mitcher, and you know, Halsey takes over from Spruance, and so on.

You know, so the normal five-month rotation cycle changed to six just for this.

But Nimitz and King can afford this changeover at this time because the Americans clearly are winning, albeit at a terrible cost, but they are not going to lose now.

And those kamikazes are starting to filter out, aren't they?

We should take a break.

When we come back in part two, we should talk about concluding remarks on this terrible, terrible battle.

What happens in the end on the island, how the naval battle plays out, and so on.

And your thoughts, John, on Simon Bolivar Booklair and all the rest of it.

Sounds good.

We'll see you in a moment off of the break.

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Welcome back to We Have Ways of Make You Talk.

Before we resume with our sort of wash-up of Okinawa, don't forget We Have Ways Festival in September, the 12th to the 14th of September at Black Pit Brewery, just next door to Silverstone Racetrack off the M40.

Couldn't be easier to get to.

It's a whole weekend of exactly this kind of chat.

And John, you're joining us again this year.

Can't wait.

Yeah.

Yeah, well,

we're going to have a great time.

If you want to find tickets, tickets, it's easily done.

We have waysfest.co.uk.

There's weekend tickets, day tickets.

You can camp.

Under 16s are free.

So bring your surly teens and they can experience the true wonder of Second World War history.

We'll see you there.

Now, we've just been looking at the naval battle really and the effect of the kamikaze offensive.

It characterizes really the sort of desperation because, you know, we talked about the Yamato Bansai charge in one of the earlier episodes.

Yeah, I really think that's just grotesque.

I mean, it's all grotesque.

All the kamikazes are grotesque, but there's something particularly, even

more so, especially awful, about the bansai charge of the Amato force.

I just, I just found that just horrible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it characterizes the Japanese defense of Okinawa and the way it's organized and the way it sticks to its strategic objectives and everything is in a way a great success, isn't it?

They get what they want from the defense of Okinawan the way they're doing it.

They make it very clear how difficult they can make things for the Americans.

The U.S., you know, the Marine Corps and the Army expend lots of excellently trained chaps there and the japanese really make the they obviously they lose the island in the end but they really make them pay for it they send a great message to their own population of how they will be expected to resist should the moment come after all

and so on in that respect their land campaign is a great success their air campaign isn't really and their naval campaign is is just an epic in pointlessness kind of agree on that yeah yeah i mean their their navy is nearly done in terms of being an attack and strike force outside of of course the naval aircraft that could be in play.

Their aerial side, though, is still very potent, especially the kamikazes.

The land side, I mean, in a way,

they had just begun to fight within the last year to a year and a half from an Imperial Japanese Army perspective, because I don't know, I think we've talked about this before.

The Army's perspective tends to be towards China and think of that as their war.

And the bulk of the army is basically tied down.

in China.

And it's as the war gets more serious that you see the Imperial Japanese Army come into play in larger numbers, especially by the Philippines in 1944.

And so, you know, they've got, what, about 80,000 or so in play at Okinawa.

You know, it's good numbers, but it's small-ish compared to what could be available in Japan itself.

And that's kind of the sobering thing is land-wise, they're just ramping up.

So give you an example.

Operation Olympic, Lieutenant General Walter Krueger's 6th Army was supposed to land at Kyushu in November 1945.

And that's that's an enormous army by U.S.

Army standards of about 14 divisions that you're going to have under Kruger.

They still would have been outnumbered.

So, yeah, I mean, what we see at Okinawa, the Japanese are sort of communicating,

this is what the intensity of what this is going to be like.

We're going to bleed you.

And so, are the Allies willing to do that?

I mean, that's what this has come down to now.

Horrific.

It is.

We mentioned Admiral Yukagi quite a lot.

He's in charge of

the air fleet that's largely providing the kamikazes from Kyushu.

i mean it's hard to kind of assess rationally these people because they're all bound up in this sort of grand delusion this sort of this ridiculous sense of warped sense of ultra-nationalistic honor um etc these these young men on their final flights and and john you were saying that you've got a number of last letters of kamikazes oh yeah so that yeah it's fascinating well one thing one thing i would say just up front is that the societal pressure on them and their families of course was for them to do this you know a lot lot of these guys are willing to do it and they'll say the right things.

But from a family pressure side, in the case of many of these guys who were killed, the family, like publicly, had to make it seem like they were thrilled.

They were excited about this.

Now, just think about that a second.

You've just lost your son and putting on a face in front of your neighbors, you have to make it seem like you're overjoyed.

That's right.

Even grieving is kind of controlled by this regime.

So that people had to grieve privately in a way, because it would be viewed as kind of unpatriotic unpatriotic if you were grieving publicly of saying, oh, I'm so sad that my son is dead or whatever.

That to me is so twisted, but that's the mindset, but it just shows you.

So here's one guy.

This is a captain who's 25, and he's writing to his parents.

It says, dear father and mother, I will finally depart as a kamikaze pilot at 3 p.m.

tomorrow, April 12th.

So right in the heart of this battle.

I will leave in high spirits.

I am sure that I will be a sincere fighting officer and that I will repay all my obligations to you.

I will spend my last night without fear with my young men.

These are my final words, which I dedicate to you.

Goodbye.

Wow.

Oh, God.

There's another guy who's a professional baseball player.

What?

That really got my attention.

Very interesting.

So this guy played ball.

He sends a note.

His last note was, I had eight years where baseball was my life.

I thank baseball for giving me my mental strength.

His name is Shizuka Watanabe of the Asahi baseball team.

He had that little note, and then he drew a bat and a glove and a ball.

And that's, that's the letter that he sent.

Let's step back and think a minute.

Let's say I'm a crewman aboard one of these ships.

I'm thinking these guys are these weird fanatics I can't relate to, but I might be able to relate to that guy, right?

So there's the tragedy of this whole thing as I see it as an historian, you know, coming along happily and lazily 80 years later.

It's easy for me to say, but I think these guys have a lot more in common than maybe, you know, they've been led to believe at the time and we've thought ever since.

maybe those letters aren't that far off from the letter the last letter you write where you say dear mum and dad hopefully i'll see you again they're just missing that bit aren't they yeah the tone is not that dissimilar the other day i read a letter of a guy who went on operation frankton which is the british paddleboat expedition to attack the french navy in bordeaux they all knew they were basically probably not going to come back but they felt they had a sporting chance and his letter was was like that except it didn't say and i definitely won't see you again you know if things work out properly, I will see you again.

That's what's absent here, isn't it?

That, in a way, is the sort of depth that the Japanese are prepared to take.

Plenty of men on the Allied side go to war knowing they're not coming back.

As you said earlier, John, it's about the sporting chance, isn't it?

The old aerial battle with the sporting chance.

Yeah, here's another one.

Forgive my selfishness during this short life.

At last I am happy to have a friend who knows me, my one and only friend.

I depart ahead of you.

I feel so lonely.

Goodbye to you.

I will destroy an aircraft carrier.

Let us meet again and go for a walk together.

And he's writing just to a buddy.

Wow.

God almighty.

That's really quite poignant.

It is heartbreaking.

I remember that the story that Dick Jesser told us.

He was in the U.S.

Marine Corps on Iwo Jima.

And, you know, he found this dead Japanese and he was sort of rifling through his body to pick out the good luck flag, which they were all taking as souvenirs.

And as he did so, he pulled it out and out came a whole load of letters.

And, you know, there were photographs of his, this guy, dead guys, mom and dad, and stuff.

And he suddenly realized to his absolute horror that these guys were not monsters.

They were just the same.

Yeah, they were young men who were doing what they had to do and writing letters to their parents, just as he'd been writing his letters to his parents.

And he vowed there and then that if he ever got off this island, he'd never get involved in war ever again.

And then dedicated the rest of his life to kind of human sciences and became one of the pioneering professors at Colorado University.

But amazing guy, but just, you know, you're absolutely right, John.

It's that moment where you suddenly realize that these guys aren't these sort of supermen, automatons, you know, they're just human beings.

Yep.

And in Dick's case, you know, let's think about the subsequent history.

There were a lot of wars he could have gotten involved in.

So he lived that.

And I think that's, that's also really notable

because, you know, unfortunately, there was a lot of conflict that was going to happen post-1945 that could have involved him.

If he decided to stay in the reserves, for instance, he could have ended up in Korea, chosen reservoir, whatever.

Right.

Same kind of thing.

I mean, wow.

The humanization of the enemy.

And that's, and it's the opposite that's necessary for war on some levels.

Yep.

And a lot less of it, I think, for the most part.

I mean, I think Dick was an exception.

I mean, you know, we were following the fortunes of two U.S.

Marines on Okinawa, but one in particular, Bill Pierce, and then Dick Whitaker to a lesser extent.

And both of them were just sort of, you know, while we were there, we hated Japs.

We just wanted to kill them.

And it was unbelievably brutalizing because it was so close.

You know,

you're seeing the kind of the fruits of this terrible violence.

right in front of your nose and up your nose, frankly, with the with the stench and everything.

So that leads us sort of neatly onto the kind of the ground battle.

So our friends in the U.S.

Marine Corps were pretty down on General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., not least for the kind of sort of lack of extra landing, you know, 2nd Marine Division, you know, ready to go and all the rest of it, never brought it.

You know, what's your take on this, John?

I mean, do you think he's been a bit unfair or do you think they could have done something else?

I'll say this right up front.

His decision not to invade at Minatoga, you know, the supporting invasion with the 2nd Marine Division and all that, that is not an Army Army Marine thing.

There were plenty of Army officers who urged him to have that invasion.

And in fact,

one of them was the commander of the 77th Infantry Division, General A.D.

Bruce, who I think is one of the finest division commanders of the war.

And he had done this exact same thing at Leyte by invading at Ormoc on December 7th, 1944, that really plays a part in ending the Battle of Leyte sometime, you know, without MacArthur's timetable getting too blown up.

So he's telling Buckner, I can do the same thing on the southern coast of Okinawa.

So some of the Marines are saying that.

Some of the soldiers are saying that.

So I think that unfortunately there's been perceived as an army-marine thing.

Oh, this dodgy army guy doesn't know what he's doing.

The Marines understand amphibious warfare.

No, that isn't what's happened here.

What's happened is Buckner, in my opinion, is kind of a newbie to amphibious warfare.

And I don't think that he quite grasps the capability that's at his fingertips with either the 2nd Marine Division or the 77th Division, whichever you want.

I think he has a very revealing quote of this whole thing, in which he says, I don't want this to turn into another Anzio.

Now, Buckner, I think, is a fine professional on some levels, but I think to say a statement like that reveals that he doesn't understand the battle he's fighting.

Anzio is against an enemy that controls a continent that has clear lines of communication and resupply and whatever to the battle area and controls a capital at that point too in Rome.

In this case, you're fighting an enemy that's basically cut off on this island.

You don't really really have to worry about being anzioed here.

What you have to worry about, if it's anything, is to look at maybe what's happened at other times in the Pacific War when you've tried this kind of thing, most notably at Leyte, when it actually did work quite well.

So I think that's where I'm disappointed in Buckner a little bit, who I think overall is a pretty solid commander.

In terms of courage, he's off the charts.

Yeah, well, that's what kills him, doesn't it?

It does.

So I don't think that he's thinking broadly enough, but I tell you, I really investigated this pretty massively when I did the trilogy.

I think it's fascinating and looked at everybody's perspective and especially like some of Buckner's staffers, because of course they were the ones considering with him.

And they said, really, he did think about it very strongly, but he was just very concerned that, you know, whatever unit invaded there would be cut off and they couldn't resupply.

Bruce was trying to tell him, we can resupply this way.

We've done it before.

And since we control the sea, we're going to be able to do this.

Don't worry about us.

So it's just a lack of experience, isn't it?

I think part of it is the inexperience of being sort of new and not quite understanding the capability yet.

Right.

That's only my opinion.

I mean, others may look at it differently, but I have formed the view that he probably should have done it.

I think with the 77th Division, especially, because they were really, really good at this and knew exactly how to go about it.

And they were right there.

They had just fought at Yoshima famously.

Of course, Ernie Pyle had gotten killed

while covering them and all that had already gone on.

So they're right there in the neighborhood.

And they've got Bruce who knows exactly how to do this.

Would that have made it just somehow an easy battle?

I don't think so.

But maybe you're talking about a two-week shorter battle or I don't know.

I'm just totally speculating.

Yeah, and then how many would you have lost shortening it by two weeks rather than extending it by two weeks?

Who knows?

Yeah.

Who knows?

I mean, the amazing thing is he is brave, isn't he?

He's constantly at the front and people are warning him about it, but he still does it.

And on the 18th of June, he goes out 300 yards behind lines.

And, you know, there's some famous photograph of him.

You can see that these staff officers and Buckner are on the on the ridge and he's standing there in his coat, and he's he's looking out.

And this photograph is taken literally moments later.

A shell whistles over, and he gets pelted in the chest by a shell fragment.

And that's that.

Yeah.

Highest ranking general killed in World War II.

By enemy fire.

Yeah, by enemy fire.

Yes, rather than by the US 8th Air Force, of course.

Yeah.

Exactly.

With Leslie McMahon.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One thing I wanted to ask you, John, is why not just draw up opposite the Japanese and starve them out?

Why this determination to fight them out of Okinawa?

The fighting's very, very difficult.

The terrain's intractable.

The Japanese are determined to...

So why not?

Why give them the satisfaction of killing Americans?

Is this because, unfortunately, there is a culture of dynamic battle that's at the core of the way the army and the marine corps are going to prosecute things?

It would be, again, ungentlemanly or not a not a fair fight or not in the spirit of things to simply sit back, gel them so that their lives are miserable and wait until they're starved out.

Why fight?

It's a really good point because by the time that the Americans are up on the Shuri line, it's hardly anything of the island left anyway.

I mean, you know, 90% of it or even more is in U.S.

hands.

Sit back, you know, a thousand, you know, 2,000 yards and just wait.

Yeah, that's the populated part of the island.

Mine it so they can't get out, mine the hinterland, and just go fine.

So, again, this is just my view.

You're talking about the intersection of the culture of three different services that is in itself an extension of our American culture.

And what I mean by that, the Navy's culture is to not want their ships hanging around very long long in any typical invasion.

And that makes total sense because they're more vulnerable and you're using up all the logistics like we were talking about.

So they want to, you know, do their thing and get out of there and go on to the next operation and not risk their ships.

The Marine Corps culture, which of course, as a maritime service, comes from the Navy in a way, is quick hitting amphibious invasions.

Get on with it.

I would say.

And I think this has often led to a misconception that Marines are reckless, they embrace frontal attacks, that they're stupid in some way.

No, I really push back against that.

They're smart.

They understand they're not going to go forward into the enemy strength, but they are aggressive and they're trained as such and they should be.

The Army's culture, of course, is more towards continental littoral warfare.

We don't have to worry about ships hanging around in the neighborhood and you're going to use your combined arms and it is a little bit more deliberate, but it also is aggressive.

And we need to be constantly moving forward with the use of all these combined arms to prosecute a battle and completely defeat an enemy.

And we've seen this happen,

this kind of culture

of American, here's our battle narrative, and here's our battle.

And we fight it to its conclusion.

And now it's over.

And we can have an end point.

Standing back and starving them out, that's going to take time.

And we don't want this war to linger on any longer than it needs to, in part because of what it means for our economy back home and the inconvenience of rationing and all that.

In other words, it's an extension of a line that you and I, Al, have talked about a lot, which is you want to get on with it, but you don't want to get on with it so fast that you're going to kill lots of extra people.

but at the same time you've got to get a shift on because if you don't you'll kill lots of extra people so you know it's that whole thing it's actually actually an extension of kind of you're always doing things six months ahead of where you where you should be in terms of supplies and stuff it's just it's the same problem it's that narrow ridgeline of speed with risk but not wanting too much risk and not wanting too much speed because with speed comes risk and with governments that can be elected out if the public don't like the way things are going yep yeah that's right in britain elections are suspended but they aren't in america and yep you know I think that, and obviously, we've got a new president at this point.

It's on his desk, and he might be saying, get on with it.

Because, after all, all the arguments about Normandy are about how it's too slow, whereas in fact, it's going at just the right pace to draw the Germans in and destroy them.

Yeah.

Even in the biggest, most important in battle in Northwest Europe, everyone's saying, hurry up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Putting more.

Needless to say, the net result of all this is just horrendous casualties.

I mean, needless to say, General Ushijima, who's the commander of the 32nd Japanese Army, you know, he performed seppuku on himself.

He did, yes.

Ushijima's body was found and buried with full military honors by the Americans.

Gosh.

I mean, in terms of Japanese, you know, 94,136 killed in action, just troops.

You know, when you think there was kind of only

80,000, something like that in the first place.

So that also includes sort of militias, which are drawn in.

Then...

At least 150,000, maybe as high as 200,000 Okinawans killed.

If you remember, there were 800,000 roughly in the start of the war.

In terms of US casualties, well, you know, with total U.S.

casualties killed in action, it's 12,500, which is a hell of a lot.

You know, a hell of a lot.

U.S.

battle casualties in total 50,000.

U.S.

Army, 19,929 U.S.

total.

U.S.

Navy total 10,007.

Non-battle casualties, many as 33,000.

So, you know, it's a hell of a lot.

119 British killed in action, 83 wounded in action.

So a total casualties of all kinds, you know, wounded, missing, killed, illness, combat fatigue, all the rest of it, somewhere between 76,000 and 84,000 police on the Allied side.

That's a big hit.

It is.

That's a big bite.

And about 7,000 taken prisoner, Japanese in total, out of all of it.

Which is a big spike.

All the rest dead.

That's a lot, relatively speaking, though, isn't it?

Exactly.

So

we had less than that in captivity from all previous battles in the war on the cusp of this.

That 7,401, which was just the military personnel, there's also others who are sort of on the margins, militia, Okinawan militia, civilians, whatever.

There's even more than who were taken prisoner, too, in those fragile last week or two and into July.

And you were seeing a little bit more willingness on the part of some Japanese to surrender toward the end.

One example of that is Colonel Yahara, who's Ushijima's operations officer.

He didn't intend to surrender, but Ushijima had told him you need to get away and blend in and tell this story and whatnot.

And that's one of the reasons why we know a lot about the inner workings of Ushijima and his staff.

Now, you're getting it from just his point of view, from Yara's point of view, but still it's quite interesting.

So, you are seeing on the part of some Japanese the willingness to lay down arms and think of something else.

And that's one thing that's a little bit different than mostly before.

Yeah, well, I hope everyone's found this series interesting.

I mean, I found it absolutely fascinating, you know, depressing and upsetting at times.

And, you know, I hope also that no one is left in any doubt of just how truly awful this battle was.

I mean, in a series of totally brutal battles in the Pacific, this stands out as kind of, you know, kind of high point of awfulness.

Does.

Yes.

No quarter given, no quarter taken.

Total war.

And profound consequences, obviously, at the time.

But for Okinawans to this day, certainly those who lost their lives then, but everything it means for basically an American military occupation for a generation till 1969, but also an American military presence thereafter.

And of course, the controversy of that and the Japanese, whether they will really, you know, like the tension between Tokyo and Okinawa.

I mean, oh oh my God, it goes on to this day.

There's really reverberations from this battle long term.

So I think Okinawa is really a cautionary tale for us of what war really means at that level.

Yep.

Yeah.

Well, thanks very much for joining us, John.

Thanks, Jim, for taking us through those episodes.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

James and I have been talking about victory in Europe an awful lot, and that's what's going on in the background.

So if anyone, the thing to remember is that the war's going at this intensity in the Pacific, and there's no end in sight.

So if there are celebrations on the 8th of May, then they're brief and they're bittersweet, is the simple truth.

And one thing I should say is, of course, that we've just covered Iwo Jima this year, we've covered Okinawa, but attentions now turn to Burma.

Yeah.

So, we've got a Syria four-parter on Burma coming up.

So, do join us for that.

And thanks for listening.

Yeah.

Thanks for listening, everyone.

Cheerio.

Cheerio.

See ya.