June 21, 2007
Okinawa Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:45 PM EST Today is the anniversary of the American victory on Okinawa, the largest and last amphibious invasion of the Second World War. The invasion began on April 1, 1945, and 82 days later Okinawa had become the bloodiest battle of the island campaign in the Pacific. Okinawa was one of the few islands the Japanese were able to extensively fortify before the Americans hit the beaches, and the only island where they had a lot of artillery and armor. The Japanese flew 1,900 kamikaze missions, sinking dozens of ships and killing around 5,000 American sailors. The Japanese army inflicted more than 72,000 American casualties on Okinawa itself, more than 12,000 of those casualties killed or missing in action; the Japanese army itself suffered around 66,000 dead. More than 140,000 Okinawans, a quarter of the civilian population, died in the battle, many of then used as human shields by the Japanese (others were simply murdered, either to prevent their surrender to the Americans or for other reasons). Around a third of the surviving Okinawan population was wounded in the battle. A 1995 memorial on Okinawa lists the 237,318 fatalities known at that point to have died as a result of the battle. Most of the elements that made Okinawa so ghastly a battle would have been reproduced in any invasion of Japan, along with some new and worse possibilities, and a desire to avoid another Okinawan campaign on a much vaster scale was almost certainly among the most powerful American motives for using nuclear weapons against Japan. To read even a terse summary of the battle is to understand that American policymakers had other things on their minds in the summer of 1945 than the problem of dealing with Stalin, and that having those more pressing concerns, they are unlikely to have used nuclear weapons for the sole or even primary purpose of intimidating Stalin. To teach in a liberal-arts college, however, is to discover that the belief that intimidating Stalin was in fact our main or even sole motive has become an article of faith for an amazing number of nominally educated Americans. Almost all of my students, a self-selected and generally very impressive group, had acquired this misinformation somewhere along the road. In most cases, they were apparently taught it in school, where they were not taught much, if anything, about the battle of Okinawa. The conventional wisdom about American motives for bombing Hiroshima, like the conventional wisdom about the criminal idiocy of British commanders on the Western Front in World War I, is one of the cases where professional opinion among specialists has been moving in the opposite direction from non-specialist “educated” opinion for almost a generation, but has made almost no headway outside the tiny worlds inhabited by military and diplomatic historians. This is dispiriting, and instructive.
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