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Landings on Okinawa in World War II began bloody contests Date published: 4/1/2005
WORLD WAR II in the Pacific was unlike anything else experienced in the history of warfare. It covered distances that even today boggle the mind. In a sense, the front, if you will, was thousands of miles long and mostly water, with the fighting taking place at sea and on a host of islands that most Americans had not heard of before 1941. Also, what was rather special in this conflict was that for the most part, the fighting didn't take place on the home soil of either of the major combatants. It was usually fought on someone else's territory or at sea. But when it did reach the home shores of either the United States or Japan, the intensity of the reaction often stunned the invader. For instance, when the Japanese captured two of our islands in the Aleutians, the United States reacted overwhelmingly. It's still hard to say just how strategically important these islands were, but having any portion of the United States occupied by our enemy was unacceptable. But our reaction was measured compared with that of the Japanese later in the war. The Japanese didn't have to face an assault on their home soil until late in the war. The invasion of Iwo Jima, which occurred in February 1945, was arguably the first attack on what Japan considered its home turf. And the Japanese fought to the last man to defend it. The U.S. Marines will gladly attest to this. But Iwo Jima was still a long way from Japan. It was very small, and it had no civilian population. However, Okinawa, the next island the American forces invaded, had been, since 1879, administratively and politically a part of Japan. This added a new mind-set, and fierceness, to the Japanese defense--something that shocked even the most hardened American veterans of the war. The U.S. landings on Okinawa began 60 years ago in what was called Operation Iceberg. The island of Okinawa is about 400 miles from Japan and is a part of what's called the Ryukyu Islands. They form a chain of islands that run from the southern Japanese island of Kyushu all the way to Taiwan. With two large airfields and a harbor, Okinawa was considered critical as a staging base for the eventual U.S. invasion of Japan.
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