Two Marines share a foxhole with an Okinawan war orphan.

Overcoming the civilian resistance on Okinawa was aided by propaganda leaflets, one of which is being read by a prisoner awaiting transport.

At some battles, such as Iwo Jima, there had been no civilians involved, but Okinawa had a large indigenous civilian population. Okinawan civilian losses in the campaign were estimated to be between 75,000 and 140,000. In addition, it is estimated that more than a third of the surviving civilian population was wounded.

With the impending victory of American troops, civilians often committed mass suicide, urged on by the fanatical Japanese soldiers who told locals that victorious American soldiers would go on a rampage of killing and raping. Ryukyu Shimpo, one of the two major Okinawan newspapers, wrote in 2007: "There are many Okinawans who have testified that the Japanese Army directed them to commit suicide. There are also people who have testified that they were handed grenades by Japanese soldiers" (to blow themselves up).^[10] Some of the civilians, having been induced by Japanese propaganda to believe that U.S. soldiers were barbarians who committed horrible atrocities, killed their families and themselves to avoid capture. Some Okinawans threw themselves and their family members from the cliffs where the Peace Museum now resides. A Japanese American Military Intelligence Service^[11] combat translator with the U.S. military, Teruto “Terry” Tsubota, tried to convince civilians to not kill themselves, even climbing into caves to talk to them, but his efforts had limited success.^[12]

Edwin P. Hoyt, in "Japan’s War: The Great Pacific Conflict", argues that the Allied practice of mutilating the Japanese dead and taking pieces of them home was exploited by Japanese propaganda very effectively, and "contributed to a preference to death over surrender and occupation, shown, for example, in the mass civilian suicides on Saipan and Okinawa after the Allied landings"^[13] Life Magazine "picture of the week" in May 22, 1944 depicted a beautiful blonde with a Japanese trophy skull sent to her by her Marine lieutenant boyfriend.^[14][15] This image gained widespread circulation in Japan, as did the news that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been presented with a letter-opener carved out out of a Japanese soldiers arm bone by Congressman Walter.^[16] In Japanese media the Americans came to be portrayed as "deranged, primitive, racist and inhuman".

While there are no official documents from US or Japanese sources that mention any instances of rape atrocities, there are several anecdotal accounts that such acts may have occurred.^[17]

"One possible explanation for why the United States military says it has no record of any rapes is that few if any Okinawan women reported being attacked out of fear and embarrassment, and that those who did were ignored by the United States military police, the historians said. Moreover, there has never been a large-scale effort to determine the real extent of such crimes."^[18]

According to Peter Schrijvers, rape was "a general practice against Okinawan women".^[19] An estimated 10,000 Okinawan women were raped by American troops during the Okinawa campaign.^[19]. However, despite being told that they would suffer rape, torture and murder at the hands of the Americans, civilians "were often surprises at the comparativly humane treatment they received from the American enemy."^[20][21] According to Laura Elizabeth Hein and Mark Selden the Americans "did not pursue a policy of torture, rape, and murder of civilians as Japanese military officials had warned."^[22]

In 1998 the remains of three US Marines stationed on Okinawa were discovered outside of a local village. Accounts from elderly Okinawans may verify that the men had made frequent trips to the village to rape the women that lived there but were ambushed and killed by men from the village on one of their return trips.^[18] according to the same article, published in 2000,: "rape was so prevalent that most Okinawans over age 65 either know or have heard of a woman who was raped in the aftermath of the war."^[18]

Okinawan historian Oshiro Masayasu (former director of the Okinawa Prefectural Historical Archives) writes based on several years of research:

Soon after the US marines landed, all the women of a village on Motobu Peninsula fell into the hands of American soldiers. At the time, there were only women, children and old people in the village, as all the young men had been mobilized for the war. Soon after landing, the marines "mopped up" the entire village, but found no signs of Japanese forces. Taking advantage of the situation, they started "hunting for women" in broad daylight and those who were hiding in the village or nearby air raid shelters were dragged out one after another.^[23]

U. S. historian James J. Weingartner attributes the very low number of captured Japanese in U.S. POW compounds to two important factors, a Japanese reluctance to surrender and a widespread American "conviction that the Japanese were "animals" or "subhuman'" and unworthy of the normal treatment accorded to POWs.^[24] The latter reason is supported by historian Nial Fergusson, who says that "Allied troops often saw the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians [sic] — as Untermenschen."^[25] The massacres of Japanese prisoners is also supported by the research of Professor Richard Aldrich.^[26]

In its history of the war, the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum^[27] presents Okinawa as being caught in the fighting between America and Japan. During the 1945 battle, the Japanese Army showed indifference to Okinawa's defense and safety, and the Japanese soldiers used civilians as human shields against the Americans.^{[citation needed]} Japanese military confiscated food from the Okinawans and executed those who hid it, leading to a mass starvation among the population^{[citation needed]}, and forced civilians out of their shelters. Japanese soldiers also killed about 1,000 Okinawans who still spoke a different local dialect in order to suppress spying.^[28]

[

Aftermath

American Sherman tanks knocked out by the Japanese artillery.

Ninety percent of the buildings on the island were completely destroyed, and the lush tropical landscape was turned into "a vast field of mud, lead, decay and maggots".^[29]

The military value of Okinawa "exceeded all hope". Okinawa provided a fleet anchorage, troop staging areas, and airfields in close proximity to Japan. After the battle, the U.S. cleared the surrounding waters of mines in Operation Zebra, occupied Okinawa, and set up the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands, a form of military government.^[30] Significant U.S. forces remain garrisoned there, and Kadena remains the largest U.S. air base in Asia.

Some military historians believe that Okinawa led directly to the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A prominent holder of this view is Victor Davis Hanson, who states it explicitly in his book Ripples of Battle:

"...because the Japanese on Okinawa, including native Okinawans, were so fierce in their defense (even when cut off, and without supplies), and because casualties were so appalling, many American strategists looked for an alternative means to subdue mainland Japan, other than a direct invasion. This means presented itself, with the advent of atomic bombs, which worked admirably in convincing the Japanese to sue for peace, without American casualties. Ironically, the American conventional fire-bombing of major Japanese cities (which had been going on for months before Okinawa) was far more effective at killing civilians than the atomic bombs and, had the Americans simply continued, or expanded this, the Japanese would likely have surrendered anyway. Nevertheless, the bombs were a powerful symbolic display of American power, and the Japanese capitulated, obviating the need for an invasion of the home islands."

Cornerstone of Peace Memorial with names of all military and civilians from all countries who died in the Battle of Okinawa.

In 1945, Winston Churchill called the battle "among the most intense and famous in military history."

In 1995, the Okinawa government erected a memorial named Cornerstone of Peace^[31] in Mabuni, the site of the last fighting in southeastern Okinawa. The memorial lists all the known names of those who died in the battle, civilian and military, Japanese and foreign. At present there are 237,318 names listed including 148,136 Okinawans (mostly civilians) and 14,005 Americans.

[

Revisionist controversy regarding mass suicides

Okinawan civilians in 1945.

There is ongoing major disagreement between Okinawa's local government and Japan's national government over the role of the Japanese military in civilian mass suicides during the battle. In March 2007, the national Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry (MEXT) advised textbook publishers to reword descriptions that the embattled Imperial Japanese Army forced civilians to kill themselves in the war so they would not be taken prisoner by the U.S. military. MEXT preferred descriptions that just say that civilians received hand grenades from the military.

This move sparked widespread protests among the Okinawans. In June 2007, the Okinawa Prefectoral Assembly adopted a resolution stating, "We strongly call on the (national) government to retract the instruction and to immediately restore the description in the textbooks so the truth of the Battle of Okinawa will be handed down correctly and a tragic war will never happen again."^[32]

On September 29, 2007, about 110,000 people held a rally in the history of Okinawa to demand that MEXT retract its order to textbook publishers on revising the account of the civilian suicide. The resolution stated: "It is an undeniable fact that the 'multiple suicides' would not have occurred without the involvement of the Japanese military and any deletion of or revision to (the descriptions) is a denial and distortion of the many testimonies by those people who survived the incidents."^[33]

On December 26, 2007, MEXT partially admitted the role of the Japanese military in civilian mass suicides.^[34] The ministry's Textbook Authorization Council allowed the publishers to reinstate the reference that civilians "were forced into mass suicides by the Japanese military," on condition it is placed in sufficient context. "It can be said that from the viewpoint of the (Okinawa residents), they were forced into the mass suicides," the council report stated.^[35] That was, however, not enough for the survivors who said it is important for children today to know what really happened.^[36]

Nobel Prize winning author Kenzaburo Oe has written a booklet which states that the mass suicide order was given by the military during the Battle of Okinawa in the closing days of World War II.^[37] He was sued by the revisionists, including a wartime commander during the battle, who disputed this and wanted to stop publication of the booklet. At a court hearing on November 9, 2007, Oe testified: "Mass suicides were forced on Okinawa islanders under Japan's hierarchical social structure that ran through the state of Japan, the Japanese armed forces and local garrisons."^[38] On March 28, 2008, the Osaka District Court ruled in favor of Oe stating, "It can be said the military was deeply involved in the mass suicides". The court recognized the military's involvement in the mass suicides and murder-suicides, citing the testimony about the distribution of grenades for suicide by soldiers and the fact that mass suicides were not recorded on islands where the military was not stationed.^[39]

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See also

American soldiers of the 77th Division on Okinawa frontline listen to radio reports of Victory in Europe Day on May 8, 1945.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Battle of Okinawa

• Cornerstone of Peace
• Himeyuri Students
• Ryukyuan people

[

References

Notes

Books

• Zaloga, Steven J. Japanese Tanks 1939-45. Osprey, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84603-091-8.

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