Saul David - Crucible of Hell: Okinawa ; The Last Great Battle of the Second World War

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright Saul David Ltd 2020

Cover image Getty Images

Cover design by Richard Lioenes

Saul David asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Maps by Martin Brown

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Source ISBN: 9780008342487

Ebook Edition April 2020 ISBN: 9780008342494

Version: 2020-03-02

For Matt

PFC Don Dencker, a good student whose hobby was racing pigeons, during training with the 3/382nd Infantry at Camp Luis Obispo, California. (Courtesy of Ann Dencker)

Private Howard Arendt, from Louisville, Kentucky, with five tent mates from the 3/22nd Marines. (United States Marine Corps Archives: USMCA)

A landing ship firing rockets onto Japanese positions on Okinawa in late March 1945. (Library of Congress)

Marines climb into a landing craft on Love Day, 1 April 1945. (USMCA)

Landing craft and ships off Hagushi beaches on Love Day, 1 April 1945. (Department of Defense)

Private Salvatore Giammanco, a 20-year-old Italian immigrant from Brooklyn, the first ground casualty of the campaign. (USMCA)

Major General Lemuel Shepherd, the commander of the 6th Marine Division, with his staff on Okinawa. (USMCA)

An American intelligence officer questions a Japanese prisoner. (USMCA)

The celebrated war correspondent Ernie Pyle enjoys a cigarette break with men from the 1/5th Marines on 8 April 1945, a week after the Okinawa landings. (Department of Defense)

The body of Ernie Pyle, lying in a roadside ditch on Ie Shima. (Department of Defense)

Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, commanding the Japanese Thirty-Second Army on Okinawa.

Ushijima and staff plot the battle. (Japanese Cabinet Intelligence Bureau)

A Japanese light tank with two of its dead crewmen in the foreground. (USMCA)

Marines follow two M4 Sherman tanks into action. (USMCA)

American troops use a flamethrower to flush out Japanese snipers on a beach. (USMCA)

US Marines assaulting a former Japanese barracks at Shuri in late May 1945. (Department of Defense)

Soldier firing a .30 calibre Browning automatic rifle (BAR) on 2 May 1945. (USMCA)

A rifleman looks for a target, while his officer talks into his battery-operated walkie-talkie. (USMCA)

Standing atop the Maeda escarpment (Hacksaw Ridge), PFC Desmond Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist from Lynchburg, West Virginia. (Department of Defense)

Colonel Francis Fenton kneels beside the body of his son PFC Mike Fenton, a 19-year-old scout/sniper in 1/5th Marines who was killed in the fierce fighting for the Awacha Pocket on 7 May 1945. (Department of Defense)

Ensign Kiyoshi Ogawa, the pilot of one of two kamikaze planes that struck the aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill on 11 May 1945.

Smoke and flames pour from the USS Bunker Hill after the kamikaze attacks. (Department of Defense)

Sugar Loaf Hill, near Naha. (Department of Defense)

American soldiers collecting supplies dropped by air during the fierce fighting for Shuri Castle in late May 1945. (USMCA)

Japanese schoolgirls wave cherry blossoms to bid a kamikaze pilot farewell as he leaves on his suicide mission from Chiran air base, Kyushu, on 12 April 1945. (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

US Marines evacuate a wounded colleague. (USMCA)

Two soldiers cover a Japanese sniper hidden in a wrecked church. (USMCA)

Major Bruce Porter DFC, the commander of 542 (N) Squadron. (USMCA)

A US Marine removes grenades from the corpse of a female Japanese soldier killed in the fighting. (Courtesy Himeyuri Peace Museum)

Miyo Takaesu, one of the 118 student nurses of the Himeyuri Corps recruited from schoolgirls between the ages of 15 and 19 who perished in the battle for Okinawa. (Courtesy Himeyuri Peace Museum)

Lieutenant General Simon Buckner, with Colonel Clarence Bull Wallace and Major Bill Chamberlin of the 8th Marines. (Department of Defense)

Men of the 6th Marine Division raise the Stars and Stripes to signal the end of organised Japanese resistance as they reach the sea at the end of the Kiyan Peninsula on 21 June 1945. (USMCA)

Japanese soldiers surrendering to US forces during mopping-up operations in late June 1945. (Department of Defense)

An aerial view of the Little Boy atomic bomb exploding over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. (Library of Congress)

The USS Eldorado slowed as it approached the west coast of Okinawa in the pre-dawn darkness. Ahead, noted a US Marine Corps colonel, could be seen the muzzle flashes of naval guns, arcing trajectories of red-hot projectiles, the glow of fires on a distant blur of shoreline. Above the hum of our ships circulating blowers could be faintly heard the roll and reverberation of man-made thunder as our supporting battleships, cruisers, destroyers and rocket gunboats increased the tempo of their shore bombardment.

Designed as a floating command post, the Eldorado was packed with advanced communications equipment that left space for only two five-inch anti-aircraft guns. Yet she contained a highly valuable human cargo: Vice Admiral Richmond K. (Kelly) Turner, USN, the straight-talking 60-year-old commander of the huge amphibious armada of 1,300 ships and 183,000 combat troops that was converging on Okinawa, the most southerly of Japans forty-seven prefectures; and ground-force commander Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr, 58, the snowy-haired son of the famous Confederate general. It was 1 April 1945, or Love Day,