The nightmare of Okinawa made Truman decide to use the atom bomb

The US operation of 1945 to take the island of Okinawa was the largest battle of the Pacific during the second world war. Seven US divisions were used in the operation, approximately half a million men, along with the entire US Pacific fleet of 1,457 ships. The initial assault was led by a landing force of 183,000, which brought with it 747,000 tons of cargo. It was, according to this superbly researched, well-written book, ‘the greatest air-land-sea battle in history’.

The US side was led by Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr, the son of a famous Confederate general. His opponent on Okinawa was Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, whose force of 60,000 was vastly outnumbered — but the terrain was in his favour. Okinawa, a densely forested subtropical island of coral escarpments and valleys, was excellent for defence. In anticipation of the US attack, the Japanese had dug more than 60 miles of tunnels, where they would await the onslaught.

D-Day on Okinawa was 1 April 1945 and it began with a colossal artillery barrage from the US fleet. By nightfall, 60,000 US troops were ashore, but the Japanese were nowhere to be seen. The calm was short-lived. As the Americans advanced inland, the fighting quickly descended into a scene of almost hallucinatory horror. Neither side gave any quarter, and the Japanese were driven from their defensive positions by flamethrowers, napalm strikes and hand-to-hand combat.

The loss of life was horrendous. One US commander calculated that, once replacements had been taken into account, the casualty rate in his unit had been 185 per cent. A near unreadable passage describes an effort to recover the corpses of US Marines killed in the assault of Sugar Loaf Hill. One soldier recalls finding ‘bodies so decomposed they had started to turn green and were falling apart’.