273. The Battle of Okinawa: Part 1 - The Invasion
40:15 Share

Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.

I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com.

This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It's tax season, and we're all a bit tired of numbers. But here's one you need to hear. $16.5 billion. That's how much the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud last year. Now here's a good number. $100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.

Battleground 45

And this was a huge engagement, as our listeners will know, that was described as one of the last great battles of World War II and certainly one of the largest set pieces of the Pacific War. Hello, Saul. How are you? Yeah, very good, Roger. And welcome back from your trip. You've just come back from Poland, haven't you? I have. Thank you. Yeah, I'm very interested to get stuck into Okinawa today with you. I know we've talked about it before and you, of course, written a brilliant book on the subject.

But just tell us a bit, you know, the campaign starts 1st of April 1945 with the American landings.

Just tell us a bit about Okinawa itself and its significance. And then the sort of wider, before we go into the weeds of it, the sort of wider strategic significance of what the Americans think they're doing by invading the island. Yeah, well, the first and most important thing to note, Roger, is that Okinawa is actually part of Japan proper. So it's not one of the home islands, as they are called.

And those geographically, of course, are all very close together, Kyushu, Honshu, Hokkaido. But it is part of the wider Japanese administrative sphere. So it is one of the prefectures and it's the most southerly. Its location is 400 miles south of Kyushu, which is the most southerly of the home islands. So geographically, it's separated, but it is part of the administrative sphere.

hole. And the other point to note is its size. It's pretty big. So it's about 70 miles long. The width of the island, it differs between 20 miles in one place at its widest and just two at another. So you can see it's long, thin and narrow, but it's real key strategic worth as far as the Western allies are concerned.

is the fact that it has a number of airfields and also a number of anchorages. So if we consider what's going on by the spring of 1945, the Allies have advanced both through the center of the Pacific all the way to Iwo Jima, which has been captured just

a week or two before the Okinawan campaign in an incredibly bloody battle, fought entirely by the Marines. Huge casualties. They actually take more casualties in that battle, Roger, than the Japanese do for the first time in the whole of the Pacific War. Not more fatalities, it's true, but more overall casualties. So,

I think the signal to the Allies is that the Japanese, the closer they get to the home islands, the more ferocious the fighting is going to be. And they expect nothing less on Okinawa. The difference between Okinawa and Iwo Jima is one, its size, as I've already referenced, Iwo Jima is only about five miles long. And because of that, the sheer number of people defending it. So you've got about 110,000 Japanese servicemen there.

maybe 80 to 85,000 frontline troops and another 25,000 militia who are second rate really, but they're still going to fight to the finish if indeed it comes to that. So the Americans are in no doubt this is going to be a tough nut to crack.

They want to get hold of the island, really, because it's the last jumping off point before the actual invasion of the home islands. They're going to use it both to bomb the home islands, but also to base troops there from which they can actually launch the final invasion. And of course, they'll use air cover from the island as well as from their aircraft carrier. So it's an absolutely crucial stepping stone and really the last major step.

territorial gain they need before this final cataclysmic battle. But importantly, prior to the battle for Okinawa, is the strategic thinking in Washington that they will just continue through and sort of plod through up to the home islands and onwards? Because, I mean, we all know the wider significance, which we'll talk about later on, of Okinawa in the decision-making towards the deployment of the atomic bomb. Yeah.

But was the thinking that they would just carry on? Or was this, like you said, it's an important place to take so that you could more effectively bomb the home islands themselves. So there's that tactic, of course. But is the thinking still that they would sort of island hop onwards or not? That's exactly the thinking at this stage. Remember, halfway through the Battle of Okinawa, Roosevelt dies and Roosevelt's known all about it. Of course, he's authorized the atomic

bomb building program and he's replaced by Truman who knows nothing about it and has to get up to speed very quickly but what they don't know while the battle of Okinawa is underway Roger is whether these atomic bombs are actually going to work so clearly in strategic terms they've got to assume they might not work and therefore what are we going to do next to knock Japan out of the war as quickly as possible they're already attempting to bomb it into submission they're

We've had the big firestorm over Tokyo, which has killed up to 80,000 people, horrendous casualties in early March 1945. They effectively have got a cordon that is a blockade of the island. So no foodstuffs are getting through, no oil is getting through. And the ability of the Japanese to wage war is slowly but surely being throttled.

But they've also got the signal from the fighting on all of these islands that the Japanese aren't going to surrender. And they are absolutely planning for the possibility that the five million or so Japanese servicemen who are on the home islands are actually going to fight to the death. And not just that, some of the civilians are going to do the same. So, yes, they're already putting in place plans for what will become known as Operation Downfall. And that is two parts to it. There'll be an initial invasion of

Kyushu in the autumn of 1945, and then a final invasion of the main home island, including the capital Tokyo, Honshu. And that's going to take place in the spring of 1946. And all of this is being discussed while the Battle of Okinawa is underway. So it's very much a stepping stone for this final battle. Right. On that, the first day when they land, 1st of April, I think it is, isn't it? Which is appropriate. Yeah.

You've got this enormous American force. I've just jotted down here, 1300 ships, 183,000 troops.

ready to land. That's not including naval forces, naval personnel as well. So that initial landing, which of course is carried out with great fanfare and presumably the appropriate softening up by artillery, is pretty much uncontested. So, I mean, what's going on? Is this a miscalculation or is it a Japanese ruse? I mean, there must have been some head scratching going on in American circles at that. Yeah.

There was, because if you look at the firsthand accounts of the American servicemen going into action that day, they have been told, in fact, that many of the first wave won't survive. They've been trying to steal the men to the prospect of heavy casualties because, of course, they've experienced this sort of fighting on the beaches at places like

Peleliu and Iwo Jima, where enormous casualties were taken on the beaches. And they're assuming the Japanese defenders of Okinawa are going to do something similar. In reality, they have thought of a completely different strategy for defending the island, and that is going to be defence in depth. So what they've effectively done towards the bottom third of the island, they build a series of defensive positions, sort of interlocking fields of fire into a series of ridgelines,

And these defensive positions have dug right down into the coral rock so that there are tunnels, 60 miles of tunnels, emplacements, guns effectively protected from artillery fire and American bombing. And the intention is that they are going to make the Americans bleed for every yard of

ground they gain on the island. But this strategy does not involve defending the beaches because, of course, the beaches will be saturated by American fire. So what they're going to do is they're going to stay in these lateral lines across the center of the island and wait for the Americans to come onto them. And the bigger picture, the bigger strategic picture here, Roger, is

a mad idea in Tokyo, where the Imperial General Headquarters is based, that's a sort of tri-service headquarters, that actually the main battle is going to be fought at sea. And it's going to be fought at sea, not by Japanese fleet, because one doesn't really exist anymore, but by Japanese kamikaze. And they're going to use swarms of kamikaze planes to knock out as many aircraft carriers and battleships in the American Fifth Fleet. And they had a

an enormous number of them, 20 aircraft carriers alone. But the Japanese hope to knock out so many of these that they're going to force the fleet to withdraw. And then they can, at leisure in effect, knock off the amphibious force which has actually landed on the island. That's their belief. They think that really it's going to be a so-called mopping up operation. It couldn't have been further from the truth. Yes, they do launch these swarms of kamikazes, and I'm sure we'll come on to that. But in reality, they have very little opportunity

overall effect on, although they do knock out a number of American ships, they don't hit many capital ships and they don't sink a single capital ship. That's an aircraft carrier or a battleship. So their overall intention to win the naval battle by the use of kamikaze is never going to be realized. And was that, I mean, they've been using kamikazes, of course, since the previous autumn, as I understand it, autumn of 44. Yeah.

but um was this the first time that sort of mass kamikaze attacks had been if you like sort of put within a larger strategic framework by the japanese yeah it was because um they tried them for the first time in a semi-organized way at late gulf the naval battle of late gulf and and during the late campaign that's when macarthur invades the island of late which is

at the bottom of the Philippines. And he's going to kind of work his way through the Philippine islands. And they do have some success there. They sink a small aircraft carrier and a number of other ships. And there's a belief that if they've got enough of these planes, that they can really do some serious damage. So, but it's really a question of needs must here, Roger. I mean, if they still had an effective fleet with effective aircraft,

power flying off that fleet, they wouldn't have used this desperate tactic because let's face it, it's a one-shot weapon. I should just mention to the listeners actually that it wasn't just a question of planes being flown in a suicidal way against American ships. They also had manned torpedoes which would be released from the submarine that had taken them to the location and then guided in by a pilot literally strapped to it. And of course, he's not going to come back from that.

And they also had missiles that would be fired from, launched from planes. And again, they would be piloted to their target. So it's extraordinary to think, isn't it, from a Western perspective that Japanese service women were prepared to go to their deaths in this way. But it was all part of

the cult of self-sacrifice that is much more prominent in Japanese society and culture at that time. And interesting enough, the word suicide in Japan does not have the same kind of immoral connotations that in a Judeo-Christian scenario it does with us. It was absolutely a

and more than that expected for you to lay down your life in the cause of the empire and for the emperor. And therefore, as a result of this, they didn't have to put guns to anyone's heads to encourage them to become a Ghazi. Quite a lot of them were very proud to do so. I quote in my book, Crucible of Hell, about the Battle of Okinawa, about one particular guy who's about to go off and his family couldn't be prouder, you know, to wave him off and know that he wouldn't be coming back.

Wow. So the sort of mentality, I mean, we talked last week about the battle for Breslau in spring of 45 and how for a lot of Germans of that era and particularly geographical sort of space, you know, Eastern Germany, this was seen as existential. They saw this sort of, as we talked last week, the Asiatic hordes of the Red Army was like the Mongol hordes of 700 years before. And they saw it in similar terms.

But the logic of what they were doing at the same time, strategic logic, was that they were hoping to sort of hold up Allied armies in the hope that something would give effectively. But there's a similarity there to Japan, to this Japanese strategic vision. But then in the Japanese case, I suppose that what you're describing off Okinawa is,

is effectively trying to win a pitched battle. They are trying to win a pitched battle. They probably, the more realistic among them, know they're not going to win that battle. But what they hope to do is bloody the American knows enough to encourage them to say, OK, you know, we understand even taking Okanagan is going to cost enormous numbers of lives. So imagine what it's going to be like when we get to the home islands. And all of those calculations, interesting enough, do come into the minds of the American leaders as well.

as we'll come on to, the idea that they were suddenly going to sue for peace and allow the Japanese to retain a large chunk of their empire, particularly the bit in China, which is the element that they really wanted to keep their hands on. You know, that was pie in the sky, frankly. But that was the thinking. And it was based, I suppose, to a certain extent on the desperate situation that they found themselves in by early 1945.

Right. So with the strategic situation out of the way, Saul, we can move to operations on Okinawa itself. So we said that the first landings are on 1st of April, more or less uncontested. They spend more or less a week then effectively mopping up the northern half of the island. By the, I think I've got here, 9th of April, they are first sort of encountering these entrenched Japanese positions in that sort of southern part.

southern third of the island. So how does that initially go? What's the realization on the Americans' part that they're going to be in a pretty serious battle? What's that like?

Yeah, I mean, they're shocked is the truth of the matter, because they've landed on the island on the 1st of April, Love Day, as it was known, also the 1st of April, April Fool's Day, which also happened to be Easter Sunday. So all of these kind of strange coincidences happening at the same time. So quick has been their advance out of that initial beachhead, which was virtually uncontested, as you pointed out.

Roger, that they are thinking, hold on a second, we've actually caught them on the hop. I mean, I've got a quote from the American commander, Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., who was, believe it or not, Roger, the son of a famous American Civil War general. And yes, I do mean the son, which probably means that his father had to be in his 70s when he had him. But

Buckner, who's in his late 50s, no experience of fighting in the Pacific up to this point. And so you may reasonably ask the question, why on earth would he be given the job? And there's a very quick answer to that. He was next man up, in effect, next senior man up. But he was also an army man. He came from the US Army and not the US Navy or the US Marine Corps. And there'd been a lot of

controversy and bad feeling about some of the earlier battles in which you had this kind of tri-service scenario, one in particular during Saipan when the Marine Commander Holland Smith sacked one of his divisional commanders. He was an army commander called Ralph Smith.

the so-called Smith versus Smith controversy. And this went down very badly in the US Army, who in the end were devoting the majority of the resources, certainly as far as the ground fighting in the Pacific was concerned. And they felt very much that you needed an army guy to lead this. Yes, there'll be Marines. Yes, there's Navy. But in the end, the army has got to play the dominant role. And so Buckner was next man up. He was also seen as a safe pair of hands. Yes, he didn't have experience, but he was known as a very diplomatic general, sort of, you know,

sensible, was never going to panic in a difficult situation, although they weren't going to know that for sure. Anyway, with that as a preamble to Buckner, you get some lovely extracts from his diary, which I use a lot in the book Crucible of Hell. And his first one was, this is related to the first day, we landed practically without

opposition and gain more ground than we expected to for three days. The Japanese have missed their best opportunity. I mean, he thinks he's got them on the hot. He thinks that, you know, this is a sign that they're not prepared. They're not ready. They've landed in a place that's taken the Japanese by surprise and the campaign's going to be wrapped up relatively soon.

relatively quickly. Well, as you've already mentioned, Roger, that's not going to be the case. And what happens on about the 7th or 8th of April, so that's a weekend. By the way, the fighting is still going on in the north. The US Marines, four divisions land on the 1st of April. Two of them are Marine divisions. They go north and two are Army and they go south. And the two Army divisions, the 7th and the 96th Infantry Divisions, are the ones that come up against this first

outer crust of the incredibly formidable Japanese defensive system. And this is known as the Kakazu Hill Mass, which boasted, and I sort of I'm now quoting from the U.S. official history, an ideal combination of defensive features, including a deep moat, a hill studded with natural and man-made positions, and a cluster of thick walled

buildings. And so we now get the first kind of serious engagement on Okinawa, which is a four-day battle, begins on the 9th of April. It's preceded by enormous kind of artillery bombardment on the part of the Americans, and it utterly fails to break through. The storm of defensive fire, which is coming from the Japanese in these very effective positions,

which cost those two divisions, those two army divisions, 3,000 casualties and prompted one veteran of that corps to describe the operation as a meat grinder for the US troops. And so indeed it was. So Buckner's now got a problem. He's up against the initial bit of opposition. But what he doesn't want to do at this early stage is bring the Marines south because he wants it to be an army operation area.

and for the army to get all the glory of taking the capital of Okinawa, which is below this defensive belt, the port of Nahu. So he continues at this stage to fight on with army troops alone against these major defences. Okay, it's now time to have a quick break and we'll be back in a moment. Thank you.

Hello, I'm William Durimple. And I'm Anita Arnand. And we are the hosts of Empire, also from Goldhanger. And we're here to tell you about our recent miniseries that we've just done on The Troubles. In it, we try to get to the very heart of the violent conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted from the 1960s all the way up to 1998.

It's something that we both lived through and remember from our childhoods, but younger listeners may not know anything about it. And it's the time when there was division along religious and political lines. Neighbors turned against each other. Residential city streets became battlegrounds. Thousands were killed.

and the IRA bombed London. It seemed as if an end was out of reach, but in 1998, a peace process finally brought those 30 years of violence to an end. But the memory of the troubles is still present, not only within Northern Irish communities who experienced it, but

but in international relations and political approaches to peace. And new audiences are starting to understand this national trauma through films like Belfast and kneecap and TV shows like Derry Girls. In fact, our guest on the miniseries is Patrick Radden Keefe. Now, he's the author of the non-fiction book that inspired the hit TV drama Say Nothing.

It's one of my favourite books. It's, I think, the kind of in-cold blood for our generation, extraordinary work of non-fiction. And if you'd like to hear more about this very recent conflict that put Northern Ireland on the global stage and hear from Patrick Radden Keefe, we've left a clip of the miniseries at the end of this episode. To hear the full series, just search Empire wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back. And we're back with Saul David talking about the battle for Okinawa. And we've got a couple of characters that sort of jump out of the page, partly because I suppose their modern cultural reference, resonance, as it were. One of them being Desmond Doss, who's, as we know from the fairly recent film, when was it? 2016, I think, Hacksaw Ridge, I think.

which I remember being tremendously impressed by. But that's a fantastic story, isn't it? Tell us about him. The Dost story is astonishing. So you've got Kakazu, and then as they move a little bit further south from Kakazu, they come up against another of these ridgelines, or at least this section of the ridgeline, known as the Maida Escarpment. And Hacksaw Ridge, as you say, Roger, was its nickname by the Americans. And actually, I went there when I was in Occupation,

and now I'm researching the book, I went to have a look at it. And what is unfortunate about most of the defensive lines we're talking about today, Sugarloaf Hill and a number of other of these sort of iconic locations, is that they don't really exist anymore. They've been subsumed by the expansion, the urban expansion of the capital. But you can still see the Maida Escarpment. You can still stand on

on top of it. And what's remarkable about it is not its height. It doesn't actually rise up very high. It's only a few hundred feet. It's just that it rises almost directly from the plane in front of you. So what you had, as far as the Americans were concerned, and DOS's unit, which was part of the 77th Division. So you've got the 96th and the 7th, and they then get reinforced not that long after by the 77th Division. Its job is to break through the Maida Escarpment. You get a series of

absolutely horrific battles on the top of the escarpment and the reason it's so difficult for the americans is first of all they have to literally climb a sheer cliff kind of 100 feet sheer cliff to get to the top of the escarpment and even when they're on the top what they don't realize is that the japanese are so uh heavily entrenched within the escarpment that even after they've

captured a bit of ground, they're still at risk of being shot in the back because the Japanese kind of pop up from their tunnels underneath. And that's exactly what they do on the day of the famous action in which Doss wins his Medal of Honor. He's a medic. He's a Seventh Day Adventist from Lynchburg, Virginia, who's, you know, he's often described as a

conscientious objector. He wasn't that. He didn't actually want to hold arms in battle, but he didn't object to actually assisting his fellow colleagues. And what happens on that day is that his company, Troops, is initially involved in an assault, which looks like it succeeded. And then the Japanese counterattack, partly by popping up from all these locations, and prevent

pretty much every able-bodied man, that's every able-bodied man in this company who hasn't been wounded or killed, retreats back down the escarpment. And all that's left at the top are the dead and the dying, and

and Desmond Doss, who's a medic. He refuses to leave without at least attempting to rescue some of these guys. I suppose what's a slight advantage to him is there's a lot of smoke on the battlefield and the Japanese can't really see what's going on and they don't realize that everyone has withdrawn. And so Doss gets at least a couple of hours in which he slowly but surely...

helps to evacuate the wounded from the top of the hill. And he does this by kind of rigging up a kind of rope. He's learned knots from his days as a scout, as a young man. And he uses a bowline, which is a knot I've used sailing many times. It's very effective because it locks absolutely steady and you can put it underneath the man's arms and then lower him down. So he's lowering down

casualty after casualty after casualty and there was something like 150 wounded abandoned on the hill and I suppose whenever I read the story of DOS or talk about it Roger it always occurs to me what about all the other people who did a runner and didn't help any of these wounded guys you know and not only why did they leave them all in the first place why didn't anyone go back up to help DOS but they didn't so what he's doing is he's lowering them down and there are a couple of

of guys at the foot of the escarpment who are then taking these guys to the medical aid post. But no one comes back up to assist Dost. And meanwhile, it's only a matter of time before sooner or later, the Japanese are going to work out what's going on. And that's exactly what happens. So slowly but surely, as the smoke clears, they're thinking, well, maybe we should advance across and send a reconnaissance across.

and as they're doing this DOS is really thinking okay I haven't got everyone but I've got as many as I can get I'm just going to get one more it was always in the back of his mind one more man one more man one more man and finally as the Japanese are making this final sweep he himself decides to drop down it's the most unbelievably courageous act we don't know for sure how many people he saved but

You know, the official, if you look at his Medal of Honor citation, it says 100. Other sources say 50 or 75. But whatever the number, it's an astonishing act of courage for him to have stayed up there for that long and rescued that many people. It is indeed an incredible story. So you've got the army forces there who are bogged down and being attacked in the rear and absolutely slogging it out against the Japanese.

Help me with the chronology here. So at what point does Buckner kind of decide that he has to call in the Marines? And at what point do the Japanese press the button on their counterattack out at sea? Yeah, well, very good. Very good point. Well, first of all, the counterattack out at the sea has already taken place. I mean, it's an extraordinary story. I mean, I mentioned the fact that the main counterattack as far as the naval warfare is concerned,

concerned, is going to be from kamikaze. And those kamikaze attacks are put in from the 1st of April onwards. Right from the start? Right from the start. They're launching these kamikaze attacks. They do...

come to a crescendo on certain dates, but as well as launching these kamikaze attacks, which would have been more effective if it hadn't been for a very sophisticated system of defense that the U.S. Navy constructed around the islands. And what they did is they gathered all their main capital ships and their supply ships close to the islands. And then they had an outer ring about 20 miles out, a ring of destroyers, which was

An early warning system, but also intended to draw the kamikazes onto these much more expendable ships, these destroyers. But they had very effective radar and they were able to, as they tracked the incoming flights of kamikazes, able to call up the planes, both from carriers, but also on some of the airfields which had been captured in the first couple of days or not for now.

who were then flying combat air patrols, CAPs, as they're still known today. And those CAPs were very effective. Very few of the kamikazes actually got anywhere near the capital ships. There were a couple of moments where capital ships were hit. The Bunker Hill was hit. That's an aircraft carrier. And 700 people were killed. And what's quite interesting...

when you consider what might have been if the Japanese had been able to get closer to more aircraft carriers, they were quite vulnerable because they didn't have armored decks, which the Royal Navy did. So the Royal Navy had something called the British Pacific Fleet, which was allied to the Americans, of course.

Not at Okinawa, but at a chain of islands not that far away. And they were also hit by kamikaze. Two of their flight decks were crashed into by kamikaze. But within hours, they were up and running and they could be used again. Whereas the American ships, including the Bunker Hill that were hit, they're pretty much knocked out of the game. Not sunk.

but they couldn't be operational at that point and they had to be taken back to the US to be refitted. So it was a real danger that they were going to cause a lot of trouble. But this picket system was incredibly effective. The number of kamikaze attacks that were put in, and there were hundreds of flights against the Navy, weren't that effective. But they also tried one other thing that's quite interesting and it's not always remembered as far as the Battle of Okinawa is concerned.

And that was to send their last big battleship, the Yamato, which was the biggest battleship in the world, this absolute leviathan with 18-inch guns and a covering force of cruisers and destroyers south to the battle to take on the American fleet. And if it managed to get through the fleet to beach itself on the island of Okinawa and be used as a kind of mobile gun platform. Well, you know, again, hopelessly optimistic, Roger, because...

The Yamato and its fleet were spotted by American submarines when it was miles away from the islands. It was tracked. Aircraft carriers were sent north to intercept it. And from those aircraft carriers flew bombers and torpedo planes. And they, in a series of attacks, swarms of attacks on the 6th and 7th of April, knocked the Yamato down.

out, stop it in the water and eventually sink it with the loss of almost 3,000 lives. You know, one of the last great naval battles of the Second World War, but one that was won almost entirely by air power and therefore the Yamato was no more.

Wonderful. I mean, it's an incredible story. So the second point there is about the deployment of those Marines who are in the north of the island. So what's going on there with Buckley? You mentioned about this, you know, inter-service rivalry as the background that he wanted it to be an army operation primarily. But at what point does he realize that actually these Japanese defenses in the south of the island are...

you know, necessitate him bringing in the big guns of the US Marine Corps? Yeah, I consider the first stage of the Battle of Okinawa, the one we're really concentrating on today, to be one of real missed opportunity by Buckner. Yes, he didn't necessarily want to deploy the Marines. He wanted the army to win the glory in the south.

But as soon as he came up against serious opposition, and I talked about that initial issue from the 9th to the 13th of April, as soon as that had happened, there were people within the army high command, that's junior to Buckner, who were saying, why don't we launch a second? Why don't we have a second landing on the south of the island behind these very effective defenses and basically force the Japanese to defend?

defenders to split their, you know, split their forces and make it easier for us to overwhelm them. Well, Buckner considers this. He gets his staff to look at it. The staff come back and the staff always do. They're always worried about things like logistics. And, you know, if the staff had any say in Patton's advance across France in 1944, they probably wouldn't have made half the ground they did. So sometimes a commander's got to overrule staff. But

What the staff were effectively saying is, look, this could be another Anzio. We'll land somewhere. The Japanese will seal us off. We won't be able to get enough troops and ammunition ashore quickly enough. We don't have enough landing craft available. And the result of all of this is going to be another disaster, another Anzio. In reality, the Japanese were stretched quite thin. And by the end of April,

They had moved significant forces to this major defensive belt in the center of the island. Initially, they had a lot of troops guarding the beaches in the south for the very reason they thought that Americans might try a second landing. But by the end of April, they'd moved most of those forces to bolster the defenses because they were taking heavy casualties themselves. This was the time at which Buckner should have launched a second amphibious attack.

south. He had the troops to do it. He had the 77th Division, Doss's Division, which I mentioned, which was amphibious trained. Indeed, the divisional commander, a man called Bruce, was saying, you know, please let me launch this second attack. They knew from intelligence that the Japanese had moved reinforcements to the north, and yet Buckner refused. He took the

cautious decision, which is, no, I'll keep on hammering them from the north. I'll bring in more and more artillery and we'll keep blasting them out of their positions. But of course, this was playing into the Japanese hands because it's going to mean that the meat grinder battle is getting worse and worse. So you have a series of attempted

operations launched against this strong defensive line. It's nibbling away at it all the time, of course. They are making a little bit of ground, but they aren't making a breakthrough. And meanwhile, the Americans are taking more and more casualties. So it's only by the end of the month that Buckner comes to the conclusion, OK, I can't do this with U.S. Army alone. I need to bring in the Marines. And and

One quick point to make about the Marines, their main job in these island operations is because of their expertise as amphibious warriors. That is effectively landing on a hostile shore. They are not really intended to fight long campaigns, long ground war campaigns. You get ashore, you establish yourself, and then you bring in the army. That's really the way it should be. So to bring the Marines into the operation was really a sign of failure on the part of Buckner.

But that's what he decided to do. He's going to, in other words, he's going to increase the kind of velocity of the assaults by having, instead of the original two divisions in line across the island, you're going to have four divisions, two Marine on one side and two Army on the other side. And surely, as a result of this kind of size of number, he felt he would ultimately be able to break through and knock out the Japanese resistance.

And so orders go out at the end of April 1945 to the Marine forces in the north of the island, we need you to move south now. The 6th Marine Division has pretty much mopped up the north of the island. The 1st Marine Division hasn't really been doing much after its initial incursion across the island. It's really been holding the ground in the centre of the island. Well, these two divisions are now ordered to move south and join in the major battle. So if we could just have a little...

pause there at that at that point can you give us a sort of a a tour of the horizon of that point in the battle and so where we are you've mentioned where we are in okinawa itself but where's you know where's american thinking is american thinking shifted already the japanese shifted you know but this is now the end of april we're getting very close to the to you know ve day for example is is looming in the first week of may um

Does that have an effect on the thinking of the Americans? Is that something that impacts them? Or is it just kind of a shrug? Well, our war isn't over, you know, so where are we around this? What's everyone thinking at this point? I mean, the individual servicemen on the island are relatively unconcerned of what's going on in Europe because they know they've still got to

big job in hand. I mean, they are thinking even when Okinawa is over, we're still going to be needed for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. And that was absolutely the case. So they do get the news. First of all, Truman's death comes through. Truman dies on the 10th of April. So during this first phase. So first of all, they get the news of Roosevelt's death. This comes through on, well, he dies on the 10th of April. They learn about it on the 11th, 12th of April. And again, they're

relatively unconcerned. There are some people thinking, I mean, depending on your political persuasion, of course, Roger, but there were some people thinking, no, this guy's been running the show since 1933. He's been president of the country since 1933. He's a trusted war leader. And now all of a sudden, as the war is...

uh nearing its end in europe and also you know getting to its conclusion in the pacific we've lost you know our sort of guiding light and it was a bit of a shock to the system for some of them i mean buckner writes in his diary you know what next what next not least because no one had ever heard of truman i mean back in those days and for many uh occasions since the vice president is you know often at

relative political non-entity. He's there just to, you know, as a kind of make peace for the president and not to provide any kind of competition. And so if in these situations where someone dies in office, you're either assassinated or they die as Roosevelt did in post-

Then the vice president, who's been a relative political non-entity, suddenly becomes president. And as I mentioned before, has to get up to speed on all these things. So he's very much thinking to himself, OK, the war in Europe is almost over, but how am I going to finish it in the Pacific? And the longer the Okinawan campaign goes on,

The more prolonged the war is going to be, everyone's aware of that. So there's a lot of pressure on Buckner and the naval commanders to finish Okinawa as quickly as possible. You might have imagined, given that, that he would have taken the risk of this amphibious operation. But he was very much, as I've hinted at, inexperienced and safety first. And so he decides not to.

The pressure is on, but he's still thinking, oh, we'll win this battle when we'll win this battle. I just need to get enough troops in line to do the job. Wonderful. I think, well, it's probably a good place to break there. So we've got, you know, the Americans poised for the final push south into the bottom half of the island. The strategic situation is nicely balanced. So I think we can break there and we'll come back and do the second half in the next episode. Great stuff. Thanks, Roger.

So here's a clip from our series on the Troubles. This is the strangest thing about this story is that Northern Ireland is so small.

And listen, there are other, I mean, you could tell a similar story about Sarajevo or any number of other types of places where there's been a conflict, Rwanda, and then the conflict ends and everybody still kind of lives in the same community and you see these people. But, you know, there's an instance even as adults where Helen McConville was with her own family in McDonald's and sees one of the people who abducted

her mother. There's a moment that I describe in the book where Michael McConville actually gets into the back of a black taxi in Belfast as an adult. He sees in the mirror in the front of the taxi, he realizes that the man driving him is one of the people who decades earlier abducted his mother. The strangest, most eerie aspect of this is he doesn't say anything. He doesn't even know if that guy

recognizes him and they drive in silence and then he just pays the guy's money and leaves. To hear the full series, just search Empire wherever you get your podcasts.