Okinawraq

Victor Davis Hanson:

Sixty years ago, the United States military invaded Okinawa, Japan, on April 1, 1945, the last bastion of the Japanese maritime empire that stood in the way of an assault on the mainland.

Operation Iceberg was perhaps the largest combined land-sea operation since Xerxes swept into Greece, involving more troops than at Normandy: 1,600 ships, 183,000 infantry and 12,000 aircraft. More than 110,000 skilled Japanese troops, commanded by the brilliant Lt. Gen. Ushijima and buttressed by another 100,000 coerced Okinawan irregulars, were ready for them.

Despite the most terrible naval barrage in history, and an ominous unopposed initial landing, almost everything imaginable then went wrong. The ravaged island was not to be declared secure until July 2--a little more than a month before the final Japanese surrender.

In just these few weeks before the end of the war, 12,520 Americans were killed--well over twice as many as were lost at the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. In all, more than 33,000 Americans were wounded and missing. Perhaps another 200,000 Japanese soldiers, Okinawan auxiliaries and civilians died in the inferno.

Luminaries were not exempt. The commander of the operation, Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr.--the highest-ranking American officer to die in the Pacific--was killed. So was the celebrated war correspondent Ernie Pyle. The notorious Isamu Cho, who had sought to overthrow the Japanese civilian government in 1931, committed suicide along with Ushijima.

Almost every controversy of the present war has an antecedent at Okinawa.