Okinawa is some 300 nautical miles from Japan, the largest of the Ryukyu chain of islands.From it, the allies launched the final assault on Japan by mainland. But as it happened, the battle for Okinawa was the last major battle of World War 2. The U.S. attack force approaching Okinawa consisted of 1,381 ships, and carried 746,000 tons of supplies and 183,000 troops. Altogther, nearly half of a million men were involved in moving cargo to Okinawa from ports all around the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese naval forces that might have opposed the Americans had been largely destroyed. Their only hope of slowing the approaching American armada was their kamikaze suicide planes. Kamikaze means "divine wind," a reference to a typhoon in the year 1281 that drove back Kublai Khan's armada and kept it from invading Japan, as the Americans were now. Kamikaze pilots were young volunteers, long on courage and short on experience, who were eager to give their lives for their country. They wore white headbaands signifying death, and before their final suicide flights they attended their own funerals, sending farwell letters to their families along with little white boxes containing bits of their hair and nails, all that would remain of them after they crased into the American ships. The Japanese war had become a suicide war. Close to two thousand seperate kamikaze attacks were launched during the Okinawa campaign. They sank or damaged 368 American ships, killing or wounding 9,700 sailors, the greatest one-battle loss in the U.S. naval history. On April 1st, 1945, L day, the U.S. attack was launched. Assault boats rushed to the beach, loaded with men expecting fire resistance. But there was almost none. At the end of the first day, sixty thousand troops were on the beaches. The land shone with peaceful fields and crops with beautiful flowers. The veterans of the bloody battles of Palau, Guadalcanal, and Iwo Jima looked around in amazement. They thoght it was an April Fool's joke. Okinawa is a large island, sixty miles long and, in places, ten miles wide, the most populated of the Ryukyu Islands; a land of small farms cultivating rice, sugar, and sweet potatos. It's shaped like a barbell, wide at either end, with a two-mile wide isthmus in the middle, where landings occured. Two nearby airfields were quickly overrun. By the end of the second day, units of the First Marine Division had seperated the southern third of the island from the northern two thirds. Uncertain where the enemy was, the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima, was waiting. He knew th U.S. forces could not be stopped. His only hope was to delay and perhaps thwart an invasion on Japan itself. Abandoning the beaches and open ground as indefensible, he had, instead, dug in on the southern end of the island, where the land flared up into steep fortress-like hills and jagged limestone cliffs, forming a natural, nearly impenetrable wall. At the foot of these hills the Japanese had laid mine fields and dug trenches where rifelmen armed with grenades and morators waited. Behind them in the hills,were machine gun nests, higer still,heavy artillery. The limestone cliffs were honeycombed with natural caves that the Japanese expanded, using Okiniwan laborers, to intricate tunnels and caverns, some large enough to hold an entire company of men. These fortifications stretched across the island, making it difficult and sometimes impossible for tanks and trucks to maneuver. Behind these fortifications were 100,000 battle-hardend veterans of the Japanese Third-second Army. General Ushijima's plan was to seperate the Americans from their machines, their supporting tanksand armor, and force them into a bloody and costly hand-to-hand combat. Delay the Americans, slow them down, chew them up, make them pay a heavy price for every inch of ground. By the middle of April, the U.S. forces had reached the southern hills and were on the offensive. Sugar Loaf Hill, Horseshoe and Half Moon Hills, and Conical Hill stood like fortress. The Americans were out in the open under a constant barage of machine guns and mortars spewing sharp shrapnel and broken rock. Advances were counted in yards.Then in May, the rin started falling steadily. Roads became sticky with mud and jammed with traffic. Tanks and trucks stalled in muddy sinkholes. So no man went forward without carrying fuel, ammo, or food, and on the return bringing back the wounded or the dead. Five weeks after the campaign began, the war that had been going on in Euorpe had finally ended. But there was hardly a moment to celebrate. The Pacific war aginst the Japanese went on. It took eighty-three days, nearly three months, before the bloodiest fighting of the pacific war ended. The U.S. loses: 11,933 men killed, 39119 wounded, and more than 26,000 other casualties, mostly victims of the battle fatigue, too traumatized to go on fighting. The Japanese loses included 110,000 killed and 10,550 taken prisoner. Rather than surrender, on June 22, the day the campaign oficially ended, the Japanese commader ordered his own decapitation in a ceremonial suicide. A few days erlier, the U.S. commander was hit by shrapnel, and died minutes later. In all, Okinawa caused nearly 207,000 deaths.

U.S. soilders fighting for Okinawa in 1945. (Notice the Thompson he's holding)