Combat Loaded: Across the Pacific on the USS Tate

5. Okinawa: For Those in Peril on the Sea!

Chapter 5 OKINAWA For Those in Peril on the Sea! The international date line runs north to south roughly through the middle of the sparsely inhabited Central Pacific Ocean. By convention, each new day is born at midnight in remote darkness along this line. As the first rays of sunlight crossed the line on April 1, 1945, they gave birth to the holiest of Christian holidays, Easter Sunday, a date set by celestial events. U.S. military planners also chose this date for the start of the largest operation of the Pacific War: the invasion of Okinawa. The event, designated L-Day, was more commonly referred to by its radio call sign, Love Day. Oddly, the climactic battle of the Pacific War began on the same day on which Christianity remembered the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, who preached universal love for both friend and foe. The men in the largest U.S. naval force ever assembled, which was preparing to throw four divisions ashore at Okinawa in a single day, could not miss the irony of these two events falling on April Fool’s Day. The amphibious landings at Okinawa were a masterpiece of logistics and planning. At the start of the assault, the United States employed more than half a million men, including 182,000 assault troops, 60,000 of whom landed on Love Day. Of the 1,213 ships assembled, 318 directly supported the landings. This massive projection of sea power required movement across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. The Normandy D-Day invasion, although heavily contested from the onset, originated from just over the horizon in England. The 156,000 men who landed in Normandy on D-Day were within reach of land-based airfields and the thousands of ships and support craft operating from British ports. The Okinawa campaign relied on vulnerable aircraft carriers for air support and maritime supply lines thousands of miles long.1 Strangely, the landings of two army and two marine divisions on Love Day met little resistance. Unlike Normandy on mainland Europe, the invaders did not have to worry about yielding the element of tactical surprise with a prolonged bombardment. On an island such as Okinawa, the navy could indulge OKINAWA 53 in as much preparatory and diversionary shelling as needed without fear of enemy reinforcement. This meant that the landing zones were pulverized by a well-coordinated naval bombardment that was supplemented with air strikes. The Japanese answer to this dilemma was to wait in the island’s interior behind a well-prepared series of defensive lines. While the Americans attacked their fortified positions in what would surely be a long and expensive campaign , the Japanese planned to sink the navy’s support ships, cutting off the U.S. Tenth Army’s supplies and escape. This plan, code named Operation TenGo , primarily called for the destruction of the amphibious transports. Love Day ended with the Americans’ consolidation of their successful opening moves. At home, many families and friends of the servicemen were attending Easter worship services, unaware of the unfolding events at Okinawa. A common hymn selection was “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” also known as the “Navy Hymn” and sung regularly as part of church services during the war: Verse 1 Eternal Father, strong to save, Whose arm hath bound the restless wave, Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep Its own appointed limits keep; Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, For those in peril on the sea! While most of those on the home front remained blissfully ignorant of the events that were developing at Okinawa, forty-five Japanese pilots at the Kanoya airbase on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands, were readying themselves for what would be, for many, a final mission. From the Japanese perspective, an aircrew had little or no chance of surviving the war. The ever-increasing U.S. air superiority had severely reduced Japan’s air power. The chances of surviving even a routine mission were becoming unlikely. Japanese pilots came to accept their deaths as a logical outcome of the conflict. Many of these pilots were now resolving to die as kamikazes, after inflicting the greatest possible loss on the Americans. Kamikaze philosophy defined a successful suicide mission as killing ten or more of the enemy and causing significant damage to a ship. Kamikaze pilots trained to aim for the vital sections of...