Hellish Prelude at Okinawa
Naval History
Volume 19, Number 2,
By Colonel Joseph H. Alexander, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
April 2005
U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE PHOTO ARCHIVE
The strategy 60 years ago was to seize Okinawa as a staging ground for the invasion of Japan proper. A vast armada of U.S. ships, from carriers and battleships to destroyer escorts, suffered staggering losses from kamikaze attacks. Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher's flagship, the Bunker Hill, right, took two kamikaze hits within 30 seconds, setting off fuel explosions that killed more than 350 of her crew.
The three-month battle for Okinawa in spring 1945 was an epic struggle. It pitted the U.S. Fifth Fleet—one of the mightiest armadas the world has seen—against thousands of Japanese kamikaze suicide aircraft, flown by young volunteers intent on crashing into U.S. ships for the glory of their emperor and the survival of their country.
Strategic planners in both Washington and Tokyo anticipated that the Okinawa campaign would forecast the tactics and slaughter to be expected on an even larger scale when the Allies finally invaded the Japanese home islands. Yet, the battle for Okinawa had its own protracted horrors. The fighting ashore became a grinding battle of attrition that claimed an average of 3,000 lives each day, among the antagonists as well as the native Okinawans. In the simultaneous air-sea combat waged offshore, the Japanese sought to prove their disciplined suicide pilots could defeat the technological superiority of the U.S. fleet. At the end of the 90-day ordeal, the fleet prevailed, maintaining its ‘round-the-clock support to the Tenth Army ashore, even while sustaining the loss of more sailors and ships than in any other conflict in the Navy's history. Reviewing the losses, Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, commanding the Fifth Fleet, described the battle for Okinawa as “a bloody, hellish prelude to the invasion of Japan.” 1
The campaign began with an exchange of preemptive strikes that gave notice the war at sea had become decidedly more dangerous the closer the U.S. fleet approached Japan. Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher assembled the fast carriers of his vaunted Task Force 58 in Ulithi Atoll the second week of March to commence final preparations for Operation Iceberg, the campaign to seize Okinawa. On 10 March, Mitscher convened a conference with his principal subordinates on board his flagship, the Essex (CV-9)-class fleet carrier Bunker Hill (CV-17).
Mitscher and his superiors, Admiral Spruance and Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commanding the Central Pacific Theater, shared a concern about the increasing lethality of the Pacific War. Peleliu, Luzon, and Iwo Jima had been unexpectedly costly, exacerbated by the enemy's increasing resort to suicide attacks. The initiation of Japanese kamikaze attacks against U.S. ships, first in the Philippines, then at Iwo Jima, posed an undeniable threat to fleet operations in support of an amphibious campaign. Mitscher warned his task group commanders to expect hundreds—possibly thousands—of suicide planes in the Ryukyu Islands.
Mitscher's warnings were prophetic. At the same time he convened the meeting on the Bunker Hill , an old adversary, Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, commanding the Japanese Fifth Air Fleet, said farewell to a group of volunteer flight crews preparing for a long-distance, one-way mission from Kyushu to attack the U.S. anchorage at Ulithi, 800 miles to the southeast. Ugaki, who had served as chief of staff to the legendary Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and later commanded the battleships during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, had devised Operation Tan, a preemptive strike against Mitscher's fast carriers.
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Admiral Ugaki launched his 24 bombers the morning of 11 March. Bad weather and mechanical problems en route thinned the numbers to a handful, but one suicide bomber swept into the lagoon just after sunset, spotted the USS Randolph (CV-15) loading ammunition under spotlights, and crashed into her flight deck aft, destroying 14 aircraft and setting her ablaze. It was a sobering introduction to the operation.
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