June 22, 2006
Iraq and Okinawa Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST It was a bad day in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday. A total of nine U.S. soldiers were killed, far above the daily average in recent months.
It goes without saying that every life lost is a personal tragedy, not only for the young men who died when they had so much to live for, but for those who knew and loved them. There is little we can do but offer them the “thanks of the Republic” and to hope that “our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”
But for those not personally touched by these deaths, we might look at things from a wider perspective. Today marks the sixty-first anniversary of the official end of the Battle of Okinawa, the last great battle of World War II. Over the time it took to capture the 459-square-mile island, about 12,500 Americans died, and about 60,000 were wounded. Japanese military deaths were at least 100,000, and civilian deaths far worse. Among the dead were the great war correspondent Ernie Pyle and the commander of U.S. land forces on Okinawa, General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., the highest ranking American soldier to die in the Second World War.
So while nine deaths in one day in the War on Terror are a very bad day indeed, on Okinawa American battle deaths averaged more than 150 a day. So terrible was the slaughter on that once beautiful island that many historians believe it led directly to the decision to use the atomic bomb in order to convince the Japanese high command to surrender without an invasion of the main islands.
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