Sentinels of Fire

AUTHOR’S NOTE

My father was a division commander (commodore) of destroyers at Okinawa in 1945. I wish I could say that he told me all about it. He did not. He wouldn’t speak of it. It was simply that bad.

The Navy had suffered casualties during the island-hopping campaigns leading up to Okinawa, but nothing like what happened there. In fact, the Navy killed-in-action (KIA) casualties exceeded the ground-troop KIA numbers. Considering the meat-grinder nature of the Okinawa land battle, with hundreds of thousands engaged, that is truly significant.

Navy losses were driven by the ferocious Japanese kamikaze assault. The Americans knew the kamikazes were coming, but drastically underestimated the scale of the impending attacks. Allied and naval Intelligence had estimated that there were no more than five hundred or so aircraft available to the Japanese for kamikaze attacks. The real number was closer to five thousand, resulting in Navy losses of 34 ships sunk and 368 damaged out of a combined Allied fleet of approximately one thousand five hundred ships and other craft.

As usual, I’ve taken some liberties with the historical sequence of actual events in order to simplify the story, but, for the most part, what I’ve written fairly accurately describes the horror of the radar picket line and the quiet heroism of the destroyermen who stood their ground. The fifteen to twenty minutes warning they gave the fleet at sea and the logistics ships at Kerama Retto was crucial. The proof of that came when the Japanese decided that they needed to make the radar picket line itself a priority target.

I’ve long believed that the Okinawa campaign played a significant part in the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. The sheer scale of the fighting, the horrific casualties, and the ferocity with which the Japanese defended what they considered to be Japanese territory gave a clear indication of what would happen if the Allies invaded the home islands. The B-29 campaign and the atomic bombs marked a shift in the Pacific war strategy, with bloody amphibious assaults being replaced wherever possible by machines and brand-new technologies. The Japanese high command knew they could not hold Okinawa, but they were determined to make the Americans bleed for it, and perhaps think twice about an invasion of the home islands. Ironically, I think they succeeded with that.