Islands of Blood XIII: Okinawa

There are places in the Pacific where you can still hear the whispers of the war. The scarred reefs of Tarawa and the rusting wreckage dotted around Guadalcanal give glimpses of the battles that took place 80 years ago. Okinawa is different. It doesn’t merely whisper: it hollers.

I knew this series would end on the rocky hills of Okinawa when I first set out to write Islands of Blood. After all, the island is part of the Japanese homeland, only 340 miles from Japan, and where the entirety of the Second World War played out its final, brutal military campaign. Before Hiroshima changed everything, Okinawa was to be the prelude to a full scale invasion of Japan. It was the last island the Americans would fight over in the bloody Pacific War.

Okinawa may be a historic part of Japan, but its people are not Japanese. They consider themselves Okinawans. They speak a dialect of Japanese different from the home islands, and those in Tokyo wouldn’t understand them if they spoke in their native tongue. It’s a tropical island filled with limestone and coral, palm trees and papaya. Okinawa is to Japan what Hawaii is to the United States of America.

Early 1945, and the gargantuan American war machine has battled its way across the Pacific Ocean. It leaves a trail of airfields and sunken warships in its wake, along with the names of places that would never be forgotten: Iwo Jima, Peleliu, Tarawa, Saipan, Leyte, Guadalcanal. There’s one target left: Okinawa.

Larger than Saipan, closer to Japan than Iwo Jima, and absolutely vital to any planned invasion of the Japanese homeland for the deployment and subsequent supply of a campaign of such magnitude. Both American and Japanese planners know that if the US can take Okinawa, the full weight of the American military would be on Japan’s doorstep.