Last year at this time I took a trip to Okinawa. One place I visited there was called Peace Prayer Park. It was extremely difficult to imagine that war had ever seen the tiny island.
Peace Prayer Park is easy to find. It's right next to the Suicide Cliffs just down the road a ways from the Japanese Naval Underground Headquarters, the caves mentioned earllier in this post.
There I saw the names of 200,656 men women and children inscribed on black marble slabs who died on that tiny island in the last battle of World War II.
Japanese 188,136
From other prefectures (soldiers and civilian employees) 65,908
From Okinawa (soldiers and civilian employees) 28,228
From Okinawa (civilians fighting in battles) 56,861
From Okinawa (non-fighting civilians) 37,139
Americans 12,520
Following the battle there was not one thing on the island growing or man-made that was over 24 inches high. The entire population of the island was 574,368 and there were 4.72 artillery shells fired per person during the battle.
I also visited the Japanese Naval Underground Headquarters. There is a room in there where the high command filed in with hand grenades and pulled the pins on themselves rather than surrender. Of course, this was only days after the Japanese soldiers there had bayoneted the babies of civilian employees to keep them from crying and giving away their position to the Americans.
I had the privlege of also seeing the museum set up by two former airmen who, when they left the Air Force were asked to vacate the building they had occupied on Kadena AFB, but were given ample space at Camp Kinser (Marine) for displaying artifacts they had found on the island.
The most moving exhibit they had was a rusty .30 caliber machine gun. A Marine was cut off on Sugar Loaf Hill and was surrounded by Japanese. He lifted the .30 of its tripod, as his field of fire was 360 degrees, and in a matter of minutes had Japanese bodies stacked up around him like cord wood. Wounded in both legs and unable to move from his position, he was certain to become another stastic once his ammunition ran out. Another Marine saw him and grabbed a tanker and told the tank commander to drag him strapped under the tank up to the stranded Marine and he would grab him and then the tank could drag them back to safety.
The tanker straddled the stranded Marine and was about to pull both him and his rescuer back to relative safety when the stranded Marine said he needed to spike the .30 so it could not be used against them. He spiked the gun and was dragged back to safety, a hospital, and a chest full of medals for him and his rescuers.
This was in June of 1945. 50 years later, the Marine who had been stranded was visiting the island and was in the museum. The curator, a young airman at the time asked him to take a trip to Sugar Loaf Hill and show him where the action had taken place. When they got there, he remembered everything as it had been on that day, and remembered the actual spot of where the events had taken place.
The curator, airman, returned to his car and brought out a metal detector. Within five minutes they had found the gun, spiked as it had been on that day, by the stranded Marine.
The casualty figures give you an idea why the US did not want to invade Japan, the casualties for that would have been in the millions. Dropping the bombs on Japan have gotten us spit on over the years by Japanese and other countries, but in the long run it save millions of lives.
Jeesh! I can't imagine someone would actually PAY to go to OKINAWA. I spent 3 1/2 years there in early 1960s and then another 18 months there starting in 1968.
Open sewers, smelly streets, terrible food, and the people there hated us and still do. They also weren't too bright.
They demonstrated about the B-52s leaving there with bombs about it being too dangerous, but never complained when they swapped the 52s (started bombing out of Guam) and Kadena got the KC-135s loaded to the gills with fuel (equally dangerous on take offs).
I got a real kick out of seeing the wax-on, wax-off movie that was supposed to have been shot in Okinawa....nothing like it.