Okinawa '45: Allied Assault

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This is the largest open seas on martyr in history.

Seven divisions and the whole Pacific Fleet.

1,457 ships and half a million men.

Think about this.

All those ships and men have to arrive together at the right time and place, thousands of miles from the USA.

Remarkable logistics.

The seven divisions all come from different places and are all on ships.

An awesome sight.

Then there were the warships, carriers, battleships, and cruisers, and lots of destroyers.

There are also some 40 submarines that had been in the operation and had transported the underwater personnel who had worked on the barriers.

I am sure the public did not realize the size of the Okinawa operation.

In some ways, it was bigger than D-Day.

And that was, of course, 1st Lieutenant Bill Looney.

He's the executive officer for Charlie Company, 1st 5th Marines Regiment from the 1st Marine Division.

The old breed.

Yes, welcome to We Have Ways to Making You Talk.

And the one word, Okinawa.

It is, quite simply, the biggest battle of the Pacific.

Yep.

It's huge.

It's absolutely huge.

And it's three-dimensional, as all amphibious operations are, but much more so than most, I think.

You know, air, land, and sea.

The naval battle is just...

off the scale.

It's so dramatic.

There's so much going on.

The ground battle is a complete horror story that involves native Okinawans as well as the 32nd Japanese Army, as well as the U.S.

10th Army, which is a combined army and marine ground force.

You've also got the British Pacific Fleet.

Let's not forget them.

Also involved in this.

This is enormous in its scale and complexity.

And it is only right that this 80th anniversary of 1945, we do a bit of a number on Okinawa, to be fair.

We're also going to be tackling Burma, of course.

Yeah, yeah.

But Okinawa, it's a biggie.

You can't do Iwo Jima and Peleliu and not do Okinawa.

Well, and also, a thing we've been talking about a lot lately on the podcast is the decision to drop the atomic bomb.

And if you want to know why, listen to these episodes.

Well, quite.

Yeah.

We're going to begin going back a little bit in time because Operation Iceberg, as the American assault on Okinawa is codenamed, begins on Easter Sunday, 1st of April, 1945, April Fool's Day.

But inevitably with these things, the preparations begin a little bit earlier than that.

And we're going to be turning to 0710 hours on the morning of Monday, the 19th of March, 1945.

So there's a low cloud ceiling of 10 tenths cloud, around 2,000 feet covering the ocean in what were ideal conditions for the aircraft of the Japanese Imperial Navy's Fifth Air Fleet to attack.

Fifth Air Fleet is based on Kaiushi, the southernmost island of the kind of mainland of Japan.

And down below, just a few miles off the south coast of the island of Shikoku, was much of Task Force 58, a huge fleet of the US Navy.

And they're waiting for their own fighters to return from attacking targets on Kyushu, where there's plentiful Japanese airfields.

Suddenly, a swarm of Japanese bombers appears.

They've got past the combat air patrol above the CAP and they hit the USS WASP of Task Group 58.

One with a single bomb that penetrates three decks before detonating and killing around 100 crewmen.

Minutes later, a Yokosuka D-4Y Suesi dive bomber hurtles through the cloud base at about 1,000 yards ahead of the carrier USS Franklin, which is the carrier for Admiral Ralph Davidson's Task Group 58.

And it drops two 250 kilogram bombs before the anti-aircraft gunners can react.

Pops out of the low cloud.

You haven't got time to spot and react, have you?

That's the thing.

No.

This low cloud is absolutely perfect for ambushing ships.

Exactly.

If the dive bombers can find them, they have the whip hand here.

The bombs punch through the flight deck and into the heart of the ship with catastrophic consequences.

Worse than any other suffered that survived the Pacific War.

Hundreds are killed instantly.

Yeah, I mean, it's an absolute horror story.

And the USS Franklin is one of the big aircraft carriers, and it's known as the Big Ben after Benjamin Franklin.

And how it works is you've got Task Group 58, which is huge.

This is the big carrier strike force.

So this is, it's an outsized fleet, effectively.

Yeah.

It is absolutely enormous.

And it's divided into different task groups within

the task force, because it's so enormous.

So you've got task group 58.1, you've got task group 58.2, 58.3, 58.4, and there's even 58.5, which is a kind of sort of night operations thing.

So typically these task groups would have, you know, maybe a couple of aircraft carriers, some cruisers, screening destroyers each.

What's really interesting is each of these task groups is about the same size as the British Pacific Fleet.

Yeah.

And the size of the Royal Navy now full stop.

Full stop.

Yes.

It's extraordinary, isn't it?

Yeah.

And this attack is so sudden that Captain Leslie Gares at Gears, who's on the bridge, doesn't see either the bombs or the dive bombers before the explosions because they've been perfectly ambushed.

Ordnance and service ammunition on the anti-aircraft mounts cooks off, which then causes more explosions.

A number of Hellcats armed with tiny Tim rockets, as they're called, are also catch fire and those begin fizzing off.

I mean, just imagine.

It's the inferno, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Commander Joe Taylor, who is the XO, the second in command, says, some screen by to starboard, some to port, and some straight up the flight deck.

The weird aspect of this weapon whooshing by so close is one of the most awful spectacles a human has ever been privileged to see.

Some went straight and some tumbled over end over end.

Each time one went off, firefighting crews forward would instinctively hit the deck and yell.

He's not into stating the obvious, but that is the obvious.

And then other ships in the task group are watching this in.

Well, because you're seeing, you know, from quite a long way, you can see the explosions and you can see towers of of sort of rolling black smoke rising above them.

It sort of pinpoints it very, very obviously.

Yeah.

Admiral Arthur W.

Radford, who's on board the Yorktown from Task Group 584, is 15 miles away and he's watching it through his binoculars.

We could not believe that anyone remained alive on a ship undergoing such travail.

I mentally said goodbye to my classmate, Admiral Davison, and the Franklin skipper, my friend, Captain Leslie Gears.

And from Yorktown, nine enormous explosions are counted.

And one sailor said, That's all, brother.

We can tell Big Ben goodbye.

You know.

I don't know why I'm laughing.

It's just.

Well, here we are again, Jim.

I'm struck again by people thousands upon thousands of miles away from the United States of America, perishing in this inferno in a war they didn't start, that they didn't want.

When we've been touring the Victory 45 book, we've talked an awful lot about isolationist America and how it's turned around.

These are people who were isolationists five minutes ago.

Just a few years ago.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the thing to remember, isn't it?

And that points to why getting the war over is the thing they're really, really, really keen on.

And the other thing that strikes you on this whole battle of Okinawa, the thing that's really struck me, sort of reading up on it all, is just this incredible levels of courage by both sides.

Yeah.

It's truly awe-inspiring.

And not least now on the USS Franklin, because Captain Gaz decides to try and save his ship rather than abandoning it.

The cruiser, the USS Santa Fe, comes alongside and takes off many of the crew, including Admiral Davison and his staff, who, after all, is, you know, a task group commander.

And fire control parties are then working tirelessly and in immense danger.

But incredibly, by about 11 a.m., they've managed to subside most of the flames to a point where the cruiser USS Pittsburgh manages to kind of link up with the Franklin and take it off in tow.

And soon after, the carrier is making three knots.

And the amazing thing about this is, of course, it's being towed by the Pittsburgh.

But all the while, work is furiously furiously going on on the carrier.

You know, no one's idle.

You know, they're working down in the engine rooms.

They're kind of mending stuff, repairing stuff, pairing, wiring, and all this kind of stuff.

So that by 3 a.m.

on the 20th of March, so less than 24 hours after it's been hit, the Big Ben regains enough power and it's able to make 20 knots under its own steam.

And it's that ability to not only kind of, you know, be immensely courageous, but also the engineering clout to be able to keep these ships going at sea, even when they've been kind of very, very badly stricken.

All the way that it goes, it first of all, it goes to Ulethi, a safe anchorage and port on an atoll in the central sort of southern Pacific.

So it's about 1600 miles away from kind of Okinawa.

And all the way, any witnesses that see it could scarcely believe that the Franklin is afloat.

You know, it's just this sort of blackened wreck where some of the wreckage is fused to the ship, such as being the heat of the flames.

And incredibly, 807 men are killed and 487 wounded in that attack.

So that's half the cost.

And Chester Nemitz, you know, the commander-in-chief Pacific says no other ship in World War II and possibly in history suffered such extensive injuries and yet remained afloat.

I mean, it's just, I guess it's the point I was making.

It kind of speaks of the superb training of the U.S.

Navy, you know.

Yeah.

But also the way the Americans have turned things around from, again, from a kind of a standing start.

The U.S.

Navy was in five years or in three years, in two years even, has expanded and ended up with this incredible capacity and skill.

It's extraordinary, isn't it?

And, you know, the other thing that I think is really clear that you've got sort of courageous, brave, enlightened commanders, naval commanders now.

I mean, you know, these people are of the highest caliber, from Nimitz down to these individual captains like Captain Gares.

I mean, these are people who know the sea backwards, who know what they're about, have embraced modern technology.

You know, work as a team.

team.

And I think that's key to the whole thing.

You know, you're working into the team of your particular task group, but you're also part of a wider team, which is your task force, and then an even wider team beyond that, which is, of course, the Pacific Fleet.

But this attack on the USS Franklin on the 19th of March, of course, is also a reminder that this is a war that is not done yet.

You know, the Japanese might be all but beaten, but they've still got plenty of fire in them and there's plenty of violence to come.

And it's going to reach a crescendo in the forthcoming battle for Ochenauer.

And that this attack might be termed conventional conventional and the Japanese have something unconventional that may be more effective up their sleeve.

Indeed.

So Task Force 58 had returned to Ulithi after the end of the Irojima battle.

Ulithi is a major US Navy base on a tiny atoll in the Caroline Islands between Marianas and the Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific, north of New Guinea.

So one of these pimples in the middle of the nowhere that's actually incredibly important allows the Americans to leapfrog across the Pacific.

Base been built from nothing following unopposed landings there in

September 1944.

It's amazing, isn't it?

It's absolutely incredible.

In a matter of months, it's just got to boom.

It's there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's U.S.

Navy Seabees, so sappers essentially from the 18th Special Battalion, arrive on the 1st of October and then the 88th Naval Construction Battalion on the 11th of November.

They build a large recreation base.

for 20,000 personnel, docking piers, camps.

I literally can't get my head around this.

I wonder if it's, I bet if you look on Google Maps, you can Google if it's all still there.

A 1600 seat theater and a 100-bed hospital with a large anchorage.

I think one would have heard of Alethi had there been fighting for it, but there isn't.

So it's just one of those places in the story of the Second World War that...

It's a U.S.

naval base, and that's it.

Yeah.

It was plain forgotten about, but it's incredibly important because it's part of the operational side of things.

And operational art is you've no option but to engage with it if you're fighting a naval war.

Yeah.

It's all operational.

They have a short period of rest and refit, but on the 11th of March, Admiral Jock Clark on the flight deck of the USS Hornet in task group 58.1.

Still at Ulethi.

Uleafi.

Yeah, an hour after sunset and suddenly, and we said, a kamikaze aircraft appears low in the sky and flies straight into the USS Randolph, which is another Essex-class carrier, puts a 40-foot hold in the deck, 27 men are killed and 14 aircraft destroyed.

This is the beginning of a completely unexpected and if you thought what's going on with the Yorktown was bad.

For kamikaze bombing, you don't require those perfect conditions.

All you require is a pilot willing to...

You can go further because you haven't got to do a return trip.

You can go further because you haven't got to do a return trip.

And you don't need skill in dive bombing either.

You don't need to work the parabolas and all that.

So the attackers have flown from Kyushu, which is 1600 miles away on a one-way mission.

This plane is one of 24 Kamikaze planes that took off as part of Operation Tan.

10 suffered from engine problems.

Yeah, right.

And turned back.

Oh, no.

Oh, yeah.

I just, you know, I'd love to go and kill myself.

The oil pressure, my oil pressure.

Oh, no.

I'm sorry.

There seems to be.

I can't lower my undercarriage again.

Well, you don't need to lower your undercarrier carriage again.

Yeah, but several others disappear en route.

I bet they do.

But one lone bomber finally hits the Randolph at 6.52 p.m., as ever, because no one knows what's going on on the other side of the hill.

The Imperial Japanese Navy, 5th Air Fleet staff, they conclude that 11 American carriers must have been struck.

In fact, it's just one.

Well, we've talked a lot about delusion

in recent episodes.

And, you know, one of the things that is just absolutely breathtaking is the delusion of the Imperial Japanese headquarters and what's going on at the kind of high command levels.

It is absolutely nuts.

Be that as it may, despite the attack on the Randolph, the whole of Task Force 58 is back out at sea on the 14th of March under Admiral Mick Mitcher, who's a tough old bird, if ever there was one.

And his flag

is on the USS Bunker Hill.

So there are these four main task groups, 58.1 to 58.4.

And then there's, as I mentioned earlier, the 58.5, which is the kind of sort of night operation smaller one.

Their task is to absolutely hammer Japanese air bases on Kyushu, Shikoku, and southern part of Honshu, of the main Japanese home islands, head of Operation Iceberg, which is, as we mentioned, the invasion of Okinawa.

And L-Day, Love Day, not D-Day, is scheduled for the 1st of April.

So this is very much the kind of softening up operations.

Yeah.

And, you know, no one is expecting it to be easy.

You know, they're dominating the skies and, you know, they've got the upper hand.

But these crazy Japanese and their kamikazes, etc., are still posing a massive threat.

Yeah, the Japanese have other ideas, don't they?

And what it's all about for the Japanese by now is making it too difficult and too bloody for the Americans.

Yeah, they're close to achieving that, is the truth.

But what is absolutely not happening anymore is there are no aircraft carriers that are operable.

You know, amazing when you think how crucial that was to the whole Imperial Japanese Navy's strategy, the start of the war.

You know, whatever planes are taking off, they're taking off from southern Japan.

And that means

and Shikoku and places like that.

So yeah, and what's left of the Japanese air force is now combined into the Japanese air fleet, which is commanded by Admiral Matomi Yugaki, who is obviously a naval officer.

But there are both Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy units in this.

And it's much the same way that kind of, you know, U.S.

Army and U.S.

Marine Corps are operating side by side in ground operations, same kind of thing, same principle, I suppose.

And Yugaki is based at Kanoya Air Base.

So he has corralled almost all the surviving aircraft that the Japanese have.

And their job is to kind of try and delay invading the home islands as long as possible.

But there's some debate over this.

You know, it's not straightforward.

Yeah.

Two weeks earlier, though, Tokyo had ordered that the best and most experienced air squadrons be kept back for invasion of the home islands, not to be used against a mere carrier raid.

So even if American Navy, US Navy planes appear over the homeland, Japanese pilots were to resist the urge to engage.

So they're saving them up, basically.

Anti-fighter plane combat for the purpose of air defense of strategic points will not be carried out in principle with combat strength, except when the situation is particularly favourable or when it is urgently needed.

But what you do see is increasingly is

greater fractiousness at command level at this time.

Yeah.

You know, people are not just taking it on the chin in the way they used to.

And Yugaki, amazingly, just decides to completely ignore this because he says, well, this is absolutely crazy.

Because if his airfields are going to be destroyed and the aircraft destroyed, then he won't be able to carry out any scouting and patrols and he won't be able to defend Kyushu, you know, that have been destroyed on the ground without putting up any fight at all.

So, you know, he thinks, actually, no, sod this, so I'm going to counter-attack with entire strength.

Yes.

I mean, Japanese officers are pretty liberal with their orders, aren't they?

Often.

Yeah.

And can frame it in terms of, you know, I'm doing the right thing for the Emperor, regardless of the orders of the people in between me and the Emperor.

Can't they?

That's how they tend to do it.

So before dawn on the 18th of March, 90 miles south of kyushu 130 hellcats and corsairs are launched these are u.s navy fighter planes yeah and the latest they're fast they're agile they're they're absolutely full to the gunwales with 50 caliber machine guns and they can take bombs and and all sorts well the vorte corsair is a proper unit isn't it yeah yeah yeah it's absolutely amazing and there's little opposition a few aircraft on the ground so they mainly strike ground installations there's a second round of strikes that same afternoon of the 18th of march further inland and the u.s air crew claim 102 enemy aircraft shot down, 275 destroyed on the ground.

This is clearly kind of exaggerated, but

potentially not massively so.

Yeah, with a slight pitch of salt, but basically they're dominant.

That's the point.

However, little opposition and few aircraft on ground is the clue.

However, that same afternoon, Imperial Japanese Navy pilots come through the thick cloud and hit USS Enterprise and Yorktown.

Intrepid is also hit.

The three carriers managed to contain the damage, but the Americans are unnerved to find there are still enemy pilots who can pull this stuff off.

Yeah, clearly, enemy pilots are clearly experienced.

You know, these are not rookies where they've done it.

And I think that's, it's more the kind of the skill of the Japanese pilots that's really shocked them rather than the fact that the pilots have appeared.

Yeah.

You know, and that's the same day, of course, that they strike Franklin and Wasp that we were talking about earlier on.

Yeah.

So on the morning of the 19th of March, the Americans then attack Japanese warships anchored at Kure and Hiroshima in the inland sea.

I mean, people like to say Hiroshima has never been involved in that the atomic bomb is the first time it's troubled by the war.

That is not the case.

No.

U.S.

Navy pilots, they have a bad time of it.

Two squadrons of Hellcats are ambushed from behind by elite pilots.

The 343rd Kokutai flying the new Kawanishi N1K2s.

A dozen American planes lost.

Well, that's quite a big hit.

That's quite a big hit in one go.

Yeah.

And lots of anti-aircraft fire over Kure

as well.

The Americans lose 60 planes that day.

I mean, it's...

That's a lot, isn't it?

Yeah, it is a lot.

And when you consider that to replace that aircraft, it's got to come all the way across the Pacific.

Yeah.

You know, these are precious assets, aren't they?

Well, yeah.

and the pilots are going to come all the way across the Pacific, too.

And if you're shot down and taken prisoner, it's no picnic, is the other thing.

Put it mildly, yeah.

But there's no getting away from the fact, but you know, that's what they're there to do.

And, you know, no one is expecting it to be easy.

And, you know, this is all part of the softening up operations for Okinawa.

And the idea is that by reducing the airfields on Kyushu, particularly, you know, their lives will be easier when it comes to the invasion of the island of Okinawa.

That's the plan.

And in two days of strikes, Task Force 58 had hit Japanese airfields, ports, warships, destroyed as many as 400 enemy aircraft.

But they had had a pasting in return.

You know, there's no getting away from it.

Six aircraft carriers hit and damaged, three of which needed major repairs and were now out of action.

So that's the Enterprise of Wask and the Franklin.

So Mitcher, actually, Admiral Mitchell, actually decides to pull back before the planned third day of strikes.

So most of the task force then RVs with their service squadron, 150 miles southeast of Okinawa for refueling and rearming and so on and prepping for icebergs.

So that's the other aspect of this is, you know, it's all very well having the naval base of Ulifey kind of 1600 miles away, but you also need service squadrons 150 miles away.

So that's like your A echelon, you know, your immediate backup troops rather than your B echelon, which are kind of sort of in the rear.

And, you know, the logistics of that are obviously enough to make your head hurt a bit.

Yeah.

Well, so while your head's hurting, we will take a brief break and we'll be back with the plan for Operation Iceberg.

Did you need a better operational names, the Americans?

has faced?

Yeah, well, I think so.

It's good.

I mean, but I'm not really thinking of icebergs.

I'm just thinking of lettuces.

We'll see you in a tick.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was queer.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome back to Weird Ways of Making You Talk with me.

I'm Murray James Holland.

Now, Jim's thinking lettuce.

I'm thinking how iceberg is the perfect name for an operation like this, where there is the tip of the iceberg, the bit doing the fighting, then the enormous bulk of operational effort and art beneath that tip of the iceberg to make it come off.

But you can stick with the lettuce if you want, Jim.

Well, I don't want to at all.

It's just the center of my mind.

I'm can't get it out.

I'm much prefer your version.

That's the truth of it.

This is the point: is that every

American operation, the Pacific, expeditionary warfare in Europe, everything's got to get across the channel.

Oh, it's got to get across the Atlantic to the UK and then across to Britain and then across the channel.

But what we're looking at here is an army of 183,000 men, which is Army and Marine Corps people plus 120,000 120,000 service troops and engineers.

It's a logistical fleet of 1,200 plus ships.

So that's your transports and your supplies and your victuals.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's Task Force 58 plus the British Pacific Fleet.

300 warships.

You want to compare the distances crossing the English Channel.

It's 6,100 miles from San Francisco is Okinawa.

I mean, it's 850 miles from Iwo Jima.

It's 920 miles from Manila.

It's 1,400 miles from Guam.

And it's 1,400 miles from Ulithi.

These distances...

Yeah, it is.

And also, just one comparison.

200 warships.

Okay, so on D-Day, there's 1,213.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there's almost 80 more in the Pacific waters around Kanawa than there were on D-Day.

I mean, just think about what that looks like.

You know, 200 warships.

Yeah.

It's extraordinary.

It's immense.

One of the key distances, though, in all this, is they're only 330 miles from Kyushu.

So this is, if you're looking at the island hopping towards the mainland, this is, this is one of the most important hops possible.

And here's a stat for you.

Oh, I love this.

So this vast Allied fleet is burning 6 million barrels of fuel per month.

6 million.

And every single one has to be transported from the US in tankers.

Incredible.

It is absolutely incredible.

Just defies all logistical logic.

Yes.

And again, this is to take this small island.

What's it going to take to take the Japanese mainland?

Well, heaven.

Well, exactly.

So should we have a look at Okinawa?

Yes.

I mean, you know, we keep banding about this place, but what is it?

How long is it?

How wide is it?

What does it look like?

So one TBM Avenger crewman describes Okinawa as a dainy island with crumpled hills, thickly wooded, sloping down to a neat, crazy quilt of tan and green farmland.

That makes it sound quite nice, doesn't it?

It's long and thin, really, with little sort of bits that stick out.

So it's 60 miles long and sometimes it's 15 miles wide and sometimes it's only three miles wide.

Total area, 480 square miles.

Have you been there?

No.

You've not been?

No.

Quite likely to though.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

And it's sparsely populated, heavily forested, the northern half.

80% of the pre-war population live in the southern half.

Yeah.

And that's where the main towns are and whatnot.

The economy is fishing and farming.

Sugarcane, rice, yams, barley, cabbages, oaks and pines make up the trees there.

There's few paved roads and the locals are still using horses and carts.

Yeah.

But four airfields.

Well, yes.

and most of these have been built by the Japanese the previous year.

They're obviously all out of action by March 1945.

You know, Naha had been hammered the previous October.

This is an island that's been regularly visited by the Superforts, the B-29s, over and over.

So, you know, there's not much left.

There's two main towns, Naha and Shuri.

There's also the kind of sort of the ancient castle of Shuri as well.

The southern half of the island is sort of rugged with sort of soaring ridges, plunging ravines, rocky escarpments, and natural caves, which makes you think anyone attacking it, you're just going to think, uh-oh, you know, where have we seen that before?

CF Pelelu and Iwo Jim, etc.

So, the 1940 population is around 800,000, but a large number were actually evacuated.

So, they've been sent to Kyushu and to Formosa.

And Nimitz intelligence suggests there's only around 65,000 Japanese troops on the island, but actually, it's more like about 100,000.

So, actually,

there's 75,000 troops of the Japanese 32nd Army and about 25,000 total local militia.

And Okinawa is part of Japan.

It's fully incorporated in Japan, but only since 1879 when the entire Ryuku archipelago was annexed.

So this does make the Okinawans culturally, racially, and linguistically quite different from their northern mainland neighbors.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, you know, the mainland Japanese regard these sort of hicks as rather inferior.

Yeah.

But nevertheless, people who are caught up in their war, it's not like they're saying, fine, you can have these inferior Japanese people.

They're still going to get caught up with it.

I mean, now the Japanese decide they're going to, as at Peleliu and Iwojima, they're going to do defense in depth.

Because after all, you have high rocky terrain, which is well back from the beaches.

There's no point opposing the landing.

No.

Not when you can bleed the Americans once they're ashore.

Yeah, exactly.

And Okinawa is defended by the 32nd Army under Lieutenant General Mitsuro Oshijima.

And originally, he's planned not to conceive the beaches beaches or even airfields and wait for the Japanese to come to them on ground of his own choosing.

And he's not going to use his heavy artillery until the invaders are well in land.

This is all based around knowing you're going to lose, isn't it?

Yep.

Can't save the island.

Hasn't got deep pockets in terms of ammunition.

So the point is, what he's going to do is just fight to the last round and make it as disgusting and unpalatable for the Americans as he possibly can.

Yep.

There is a difference between Palalua and Iwo Jima because at Iwojima and Palalu, they did at least assault the attackers when they landed.

They then retreated to their honeycomb web of tunnels, et cetera, but they did attack in the initial waves.

Ushijima is thinking, there's not even point in doing that.

You know, what's the point of saving the airfields?

We're never going to use them.

They're wrecked anyway.

What's the point?

Let's wait for them to come to us so that they're coming to the ground of our choosing.

And also, then we can conserve our ammunition to have the greatest effect because his absolute aim is to drag this out as long as possible and exact as heavy a price on the attackers as possible.

But it's interesting because this plan is only implemented right at the very end of 1944.

But again, part of this sort of rising kind of almost insubordination from lower command, you know, commanders lower down the food chain, such as an army commander compared to Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo.

You know, he is going against a grain of what it is that IGHQ has envisioned for Okinawa.

You know, and initially in the early part of 1944, Imperial General Headquarters is envisioning Okinawa as a sort of massive 60-mile long, unsinkable aircraft carrier.

And that's why they've been furiously building all these extra airfields, which is why you've got four.

But obviously, Tokyo never accepts the major flaw in this strategy that you can't be defending successfully against relentless juggernaut of United States Navy amphibious operations.

I mean, you know, you just can't.

Well, it's essentially as if they've lost the Battle of Malta already, isn't it?

Yeah.

In effect.

They're trying to use it as a Malta, but they haven't even made a standing start.

And it is interesting, isn't it?

that nevertheless, no one at any point is thinking of abandoning Okinawa.

No, they're not thinking of abandoning it.

They're just thinking, how can we be most effective here?

And, you know, there's clearly plenty of grumbling at 32nd Army Headquarters.

And one of Ushijima's staff notes, it was as if our ground forces had sweated and strained to construct airfields as a gift for the enemy.

Why are they wasting their time building airfields, which they're never going to use and which eventually are only going to be used by the Americans?

You know, why are we doing this?

By kind of November 1944, Ishijima's staff are pushing for a complete rethink on this.

Now, 32nd Army Headquarters is in a bunker underneath Shuri Castle, and Colonel Hiromichi Yahara, who's a

senior operations officer at 32nd Army Headquarters, has argued that they just simply don't have enough strength to defend the beaches, planes, or airfields.

So instead, he persuades Ishijima towards a revised defense plan, which is then issued to 32nd Army on the 26th of November 1944.

But they do this without approval from Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo.

Yeah, they're just doing it anyway.

So they opt for is a system of tunnels, bunkers, pillboxes, trenches, tanks, sort of a honeycomb of interlinked caves, all interlinked with tunnels.

And at the heart of it is the Shuri Castle, which is the ancient seat of the Ryukuan kings.

And Ushijima's command post bunkers on the reverse slope of the ridge near the castle.

And basically, they've built a thing in extremely tough nut to crack and that negates lots of the American advantages, right?

Once you're engaged in this battle, American control of the air is kind of

but it's just nowhere near as important as it could be.

Yeah, well, it is who cares?

So the ground battle, that's for sure.

So it's three concentric rings of fortifications around Sherry Castle with sweeping fields of fire.

Ian Toll, the writer, calls it a Pacific Verdun.

Yeah.

And he's onto something.

I mean, this is the other thing is this, these Japanese soldiers, this is very, very hard work building all this.

Oh, my God.

Can you imagine?

Yeah.

There's no concrete here.

This is, you know, so the front of the bunkers are, you know, the embouchures of these caves are lined with pine logs, which have been cut from the northern part of the island.

Then they've got kind of huge camouflage of branches and trees and camouflage netting and all the rest of it.

And the heavy guns can be brought into different positions.

So they've got a sort of quite a wide 360, but a very wide arc of fire.

And they can also pull them back into the caves.

Yeah.

You know, the artillery is among the best troops left in the Imperial Japanese Army.

So, you know, they're going to be a really, really tough nut.

I mean, this is a kind of defensive network that the Americans are going to have to clear bunker by bunker, tunnel by tunnel, ravine by ravine, ridgeline by ridge line, and it's going to be completely unforgiving.

Yeah.

Now, there are civilians, of course, as we said on the island.

Yep.

In March, that most of them have evacuated north.

But you've also, if you're a civilian there, and even though you're held in low regard by your fellow Japanese citizens, you're now part of the defense militia.

Every civilian is told to try and kill 10 enemy soldiers before being killed themselves.

In other words, oh, and by the way, you will get killed as well.

Women and children are ordered to safe areas so as not to become operational obstacles because it was not

acceptable to lose in battle to save civilian lives.

I mean, honestly.

Well, at least they know where they stand.

Yeah, I suppose.

Yeah, where you stand is.

It's brutal, isn't it?

It's absolutely brutal.

It's a death cult.

yeah hundreds of teenage school children are mobilize a student as a student corps with serving as cooks messengers laborers and nurses all okinawans between 17 and 45 are conscripted into a new defense corps and they're told what's going to happen to them if the americans get their hands on them they're told all these horror stories aren't there yep whatever they can do to mobilize people and by the end of march 300 000 uh civilians are in the southern half of the island and without sufficient food stockpiled they're just not ready for this and that's because the 32nd Army has only got one use for these Okinawan civilians, and that's as defenders.

You know, they're not interested in their personal liberties or anything like that.

No.

It's all about preparing for the onslaught when the Americans come, making it as long as possible.

And the 32nd Army are all preparing for imminent demise, and so should the Okinawans.

That's the brutal truth of it.

But clearly, a human catastrophe is in the making, and so it is.

I mean, crikey.

Yeah, it's completely horrendous, all this.

Now, there is a Japanese air strategy.

which has been devised by Yugaki, and that is that the Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft would target enemy warships, and the Imperial Japanese Army aircraft will target the transports.

And this will be done in a crossover between conventional bombers and fighter planes and one-trip kamikaze attacks.

So flight cadets have been hurried through training and then sent straight to strike squadrons and then invited to volunteer as kamikazes.

So, you know, the old days of 500 hours training before you reach your frontline squadron, they have long gone.

And the plan is just really simple.

It's to keep the fighting on Okinawa for as long as possible.

And this means that the Allied fleet is going to be forced to remain in the Area Federation, which then puts a greater strain on it logistically and gives the Japanese greater opportunity to attack them.

Japan's last hope is to degrade the enemy's preponderance and ships, aircraft, and men to obstruct the establishment of advanced bases to undermine enemy morale morale and thereby seriously delay the final assault on Japan.

So there you have it.

This is a gargantuan delaying operation.

That's all it is.

You know, there's no question that they're going to win.

No.

In the Western theater, we always say, just give up.

When are they just going to give up?

We're actually well beyond that here, aren't we?

Yeah, yeah.

Because everything Hitler's doing is framed in terms of we will finally triumph.

This isn't it.

Is it?

Not at all.

Yeah, yeah.

So

it's just totally crazy.

Absolutely crazy.

But anyway, so nearly all the

air power that the Japanese still have is in the hands of the 5th Air Fleet under Admiral Yugaki, as we already mentioned, is at Kanoya Air Base in southern Kyushu.

And it's a kind of mixed force, you know, 600-plus strong at varying times.

It's hard to keep tabs on it because of the numbers just keep getting shot down, then more come through.

You know, what is also extraordinary is the rate of replenishment that's going on at this time.

But of course, with that rapid replenishment also comes a massive drop in quality.

And, you know, these are not well-trained pilots by this stage.

Anyone new coming to it, you know, they're prone to deadly accidents.

Weather constantly interrupts.

You know, this is not like flying in Florida or Texas or whatever.

This is much more kind of European in style in terms of kind of the vagaries of the weather.

Training is constantly interrupted and the air crews are generally in a bad way despite receiving the kind of priority allocations of fuel and supplies.

And for example, on the 27th of February, Yugaki is given a briefing on the process of of extracting biofuels from pine roots.

So schoolchildren are being sent into the country to extract this.

But this requires more than 1,000 hours of labor for one hour's flight on biofuels.

I'm sorry, Jim, and obvious joke's come to me.

They're flying net zeros, right?

That's very good.

It's ridiculous.

Yeah, absolutely ridiculous.

A complete waste of time.

Fair enough.

Agaki is pretty pessimistic, right?

Isn't he?

No, he's not.

He's not.

He's not.

And he keeps a diary and he knows that, you know, his life is coming to a close.

And he's full of feelings of guilt and despair and, you know, all sorts as he sort of wanders around his leafy above-ground area of the Kanoya air base.

He's ordered on March the 25th, Combined Fleet Headquarters in Hioshi, order him to initiate Operation Ten Go, which is a mass suicide and bombing attacks on the Allied fleets.

Obviously, preparing for this will take time.

The air element will be carried out in conjunction with a similar naval bansai charge of warships.

I mean, he's utterly bonkers.

I mean, totally madam.

We'll get on to what happens on Operation Tengo in our next episode.

But trust me, it's extraordinary.

Because, you know, you can't just get this massed operation up and running just with the click of your fingers.

It's agreed that Operation Tengo is going to take place on the 6th of April.

And at pretty much the same time, 32nd Army would launch a counter-attack in Okinawa.

Now, you know, Ushijima is not happy about this at all.

He's defied Imperial General Headquarters with his battle plan of creating the tunnel network in the southern half of Okinawa and waiting for the Americans to come to him.

That involves staying put in their tunnels.

So he's not at all happy about having to do a counter-attack.

But anyway, those are the orders.

But it's interesting because Yugaki keeps a daily diary and he does confess to feeling wretched and guilty about consigning so many of his air crew to death.

And he vows to follow the example of those young boys someday.

I was glad that my weak mind, apt to be moved to tears, had reached this stage.

I mean, you just want to give them all a slap don't you yeah you do that's the best way of putting it yeah wake up stop this is madness american plans you know they need it as a base so they need control of the island don't they completely control the island it's steve prince's plus one minus one it's you know you're denying it to the enemy and gaining the benefit yourself so overall command of iceberg is admiral raymond a spruance i think the other thing that's really really worth pointing out is the main reason they want it is they wanted it as as the kind of launch pad for the expected invasion of of kyishu in november 1945 you know the attack on the japanese mainland no atomic bomb at this point they want it as an aircraft carrier the way the japanese want it as an aircraft carrier so yeah plus one minus one exactly well and a base camp as well and and you know a kind of a port and warehouses and storage and ammo and supplies and hospitals and blah blah blah

Spruance has argued for the assault on Okinawa and it persuaded both Nimitz and King.

And he's another one of these sort of big men, isn't he?

They're all these big, experienced, experienced, quietly spoken super types.

He kind of looks like Popeye a bit.

He's got a kind of sort of long nose that sticks out.

He's kind of thin-jawed.

He always wears a kind of, you know, a naval version of a baseball cap.

He's pretty casual.

He doesn't say much.

He's a very kind of taciturn fellow, but absolutely top-draw bloke.

I mean, you know, he's an incredibly proficient and exceptional commander.

Yeah.

Commanding Task Force 51 is Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, and that's the transport fleet that's got the Joint and U.S.

Marine Corps, Army and Marine Corps Expeditionary Forces.

That's got old battleships, escort carriers, screening cruisers, destroyers, hundreds of attack transports, thousands of assault craft, minesweepers, hospital ships, incredibly importantly, and other auxiliary vessels.

Yeah, and it's really interesting about Turner because, you know...

Richmond Kelly Turner, you know, we've come across him a lot.

He's there at Guadalcanal.

You know, he's been through the whole thing.

And there is a kind of acceptance by both Nimitz, King, and Spruance that Turner is burnt out by this stage.

That this guy just needs to go home.

They also know that he's drinking heavily each night, which actually is in breach of U.S.

Navy regulations.

You know, you're not supposed to drink on ship, but he's necking his whiskey every night and all the rest of it.

But they also believe that whether he's sober or half-cut, Turner is going to do a better job than anyone else.

So it's kind of one last show.

Yeah.

And he does, to be fair.

Yeah, just fine, isn't he?

Yeah.

So the invasion troops are placed collectively into the U.S.

10th Army.

This is under Lieutenant General Simon B.

Buckner Jr.

of the U.S.

Army.

So he's not a Marine commander.

He's an Army commander.

The Army troops are in the 24th Corps under Major General John R.

Hodge.

Who he?

I mean, it's just amazing, isn't it?

There's all these kinds of corps commanders that, you know, most people have never even heard of.

Well, the U.S.

Marine Corps

in the 3rd Amphibious Corps is the 1st...

and 6th Marine Divisions, the 1st Marine Division, of course, being the old breed that were there at Guadalcanal, etc., under Major General Roy S.

Geiger.

And, of course, the British Pacific Fleet is also part of the plan, designated Task Force 57 under Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser.

Remember him?

Yep.

Battle of the North Cape.

Yeah.

And their job is to operate, you know, separately, a cover and screen to the south between Okinawa and Formosa, which is now Taiwan.

And the British Pacific Fleet includes four carriers, two battleships, 15 screening warships.

And, you know, it is really only the size of a U.S.

Navy task group.

Just amazing.

And Fraser is reporting directly into Spruant.

And in theory, they're operating independently, aren't they?

They've been told, yes, you can come and join in the Pacific, but we're not going to help you out.

But actually, they are plugged into the American logistic thing.

Yeah, and

there's no reason for the Americans to be poo-poo about this.

I mean, it's still not an insignificant force.

No, I know.

But the official policy is that they've got to defend for themselves, but it's not actually what's going on.

Yeah.

Which I think is quite interesting.

There's a tension, isn't there, about the British Pacific Fleet.

Chiefs of staff at Churchill disagree about what to do, whether they should be involved at all.

Roosevelt then goes, no, no, no, I want you guys on board, and is central to their involvement.

But they've now been designated with the task force number.

Basically, says that the Americans are comfortable with them being there now, is the truth.

It's very, very interesting.

Well, it's also amazing when you think that, you know, 1939, the Royal Navy is the world's largest.

Oh, yeah.

And now by, you know, March 1945, it's, oh, that's good of you to come and join us.

You put yourself over there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because they're dwarfed by the Fifth Fleet.

Yeah, I mean, they're a tiddler by comparison.

I mean, it is very much the American attitude in the Pacific, though, that it's their war.

They don't really want anyone else getting out of their way, which is how the Australians end up sidelined and all that sort of stuff.

Now, the sea around Okinawa is never more than 100 fathoms deep, and it's easy to mine.

So there's tons of mine sweeping that has to go in prior to L Day.

And it's a quarter of a million square miles of ocean have to be swept for mines.

Yeah, it's not a small amount, is it?

It's unbelievable.

On the 26th of March, L Day minus five, three battalions of the 77th Infantry Division land on the Kurama Islands, 15 miles southwest of Okinawa.

It's a small garrison of 500 troops who are quickly overpowered and who clearly haven't decided to turn it into some sort of Japanese cavalry.

No, this is really key to the whole battle because it's a small archipelago of hilly islands, but they offer really good protected anchorage.

You can't be hit from Okinawa there and it's shelter from winds and all the rest of it.

And it's large enough to accommodate about 75 larger ships in the anchorage.

And the Americans call it the Karama Roadstead.

And there's narrow entrances to which can be guarded by submarines, and also, you know, the space for seaplane base as well.

And then on the 27th of March, dozens of auxiliary and repair ships already begin arriving.

Their job is to become a floating logistics task force, you know, where they can do fueling and ammo and repairs and so on.

And the repairs is going to be the really, really key bit.

The other thing is, while they get there, the US troops capture 315 Shinyo plywood kamikaze suicide speedboats dear god it's quite the kind of the bonus you know they weren't expecting that at all and again it's kind of you know they've got them and so the japanese can't have them anymore and then on the 31st of march the kaiser islands are also captured which are just eight miles west of okinawa and the interesting thing about that is that 155 millimeter artillery is swiftly put ashore you know these are the long toms and whatnot and they line up targets on okinawa because they can operate that far yeah yeah that's what actually well within what a long tom can do isn't it so blind Yep.

The Japanese are sending the odd kamikaze to try and interrupt things.

Yeah, all the while every so often a kind of buzz in the sky and then, you know.

But it's not their main effort that's yet to come.

L-1, the 31st of March, Spruance's flagship, the USS Indianapolis, is attacked by a lone Oscar fighter.

It releases its bomb a split second before crashing into the port side aft.

The bomb penetrates through the condenser room and the mess deck before detonating next to one of the ship's fuel tanks.

I mean, ship's okay, but it has to be patched up at Karama and then has to sail home for repairs.

That's a near-miss.

Sprunts could have been killed

had things turned out differently.

And he's moved to the battleship USS New Mexico.

And then 72 hours before Love Day, they start the naval bombardment.

It's a gigantic fire plan commanded by Admiral Morton El Deo.

His ships fire 3,800 tons of shells in the last 24 hours.

And they're shelling the wrong bit.

You know, they're in the tunnels in the south.

Keeps everyone awake in in Okinawa.

So, you know,

frayed nerves.

Every village in southern Okinawa is destroyed and the airfields are smashed up.

But it doesn't touch the sides when it comes to the fortifications.

I suppose it's

a wasted effort.

I suppose it keeps the Japanese troops awake.

Well, probably keeps everyone in the fleet awake as well.

But it certainly lets you know it's coming, right?

The guns are only firing because you're about to land on the beach.

You know what I mean, Jim?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I do.

There's mood music.

If you're in the assault force, it must concentrate the mind.

Yeah, yeah, you bet.

First Marine Division have been warned to expect 80 to 85% casualties.

In first waves, yeah.

It's unbelievable.

So L-Day arrives.

Sunday, the 1st of April, 1945.

Easter Day, April Fool's Day.

Men aroused before dawn.

Usual final preparations, breakfast of the condemned men, steak and eggs.

Always tastes delicious, but less delicious than it might do if you don't think you're going to be one of the 85% people about to become casualty.

And it's interesting, you know, it's checking your weapons and kit and all the rest of it, you know, nerves, smoking.

And obviously a lot of men are fresh to action, but there's also, you know, there are plenty of veterans too.

You know, so virtually all the NCOs, particularly corporal and above, you know, they fought in at least one amphibious assault, which I think is amazing.

Yeah.

They're lowered into sort of landing craft, the big guns of the warships still thundering.

And then as dawn creeps over the seas and the island, waves of aircraft roaring overhead.

The men are fearful, but at the same time, you know, lots of them recorded that they were incredulous incredulous any enemy troops could still possibly be alive.

You know, and you can see why they would be thinking that.

It's slightly cloudy, it's a cool breeze, temperatures around 24 degrees Celsius, so that's 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

And then 8.30 a.m., you know, all the sort of circling around getting into formation.

The time is come.

Flags go up on the control boats, leading assault craft open throttles, and Operation Iceberg, the invasion of Okinawa, is underway.

Right.

And in the next episode, we'll be looking at the naval battle.

Well, really focusing on that.

And I've got to say, boy, the drama of that is just unbelievable.

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