Islands of Fear

Descendants of the ancient Ainus,* now mixed with Japanese, Chinese and Polynesian strains, the 600,000 people of the Ryukyu Islands had been treated as second-class citizens by the Japanese, and have little reason to love their rulers. But they have also been taught that Americans were barbarians who would violate and torture their women, torture and kill their men. And then the Americans came.

The first reactions were frightening. In the Keramas, 77th Division patrols heard inhuman wailing and bursting hand grenades all through the first night ashore. In the morning a patrol came upon a scene of horror. More than 150 fear-maddened men, women & children had killed themselves or one another.

The bodies lay about a narrow gully in family groups. One blanket covered a father, two small children, a grandfather and grandmother, all strangled by cloth ropes. The mother, a woman of about 35, had tied one end of the rope to a tree, the other end around her neck, leaned forward to die. Reported Corporal Alexander Roberts:

"The only sounds came from little children who were wounded but not dead. . . . I saw one little boy with a big V-shaped gash in the back of his head who was walking around. A doctor told me that the child couldn't possibly live and would die any minute of shock."

But as American medical men labored to save the injured, the mood among the survivors changed. Fear diminished. An old man who had killed his daughter wept with bitter remorse.

On Okinawa, along with the easy landing, came another surprise. Civilians began filtering through the lines. They seemed the most miserable people on earth, averaging no more than five feet in height, undernourished beyond description.

Civil affairs officers had long known that the more than half-million Okinawans would constitute a major problem. Whether they would be friendly or hostile had not been known. These first people, once their fear quieted, seemed friendly and docile enough. In their behavior there seemed reason to hope that in Japan's Ainu strain, a people might be found ready to reject the militarism of the Japanese and live at peace with the world.

* Only white people to have survived almost unchanged from the Stone Age, the few remaining "hairy Ainus" now live in the northern Japanese islands.

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