To the Last Line

The enemy on Okinawa had been com pressed into a minute fraction of the island's area -- no more than 20 of its 485 sq. mi.-- and U.S. ground forces called for fire support from the fleet's guns to soften another stubborn line, the last on which the enemy could stand. Along the Yaeju-Dake escarpment, 3,000 yds. long, 600 ft. high, including a 300-ft. cliff, perhaps half of the 15,000 or so surviving Japanese were dug in. They had scores of fortified caves, from each of which they would have to be burned by flamethrowers or blasted by grenades and satchel charges.

The U.S. fighting men doing the job had to face a curtain of fire from rifles, rockets, machine guns, 20-and 40-mm. guns and mortars. The balance of the enemy remnants fought with the same stubbornness on Oroku Peninsula.

As ever, the Japanese were relying on hopeless stratagems. With a group of seven soldiers, killed while trying to infiltrate Marine lines south of Naha, were two women, each armed with hand grenades.

Navy doctors reported that stores found in caves included large stocks of morphine, opium, heroin and cocaine, evidently for morale-building.

But Naha field, best air base on Okinawa, had been captured by the 4th Marines under husky, soft-voiced Colonel Alan Shapley, former Annapolis football star.

It was being repaired to give U.S. air forces room enough to take over the air defense of the island, and release the fleet for other projects.

Post Mortem. How long the fleet had been held there, supporting the invasion, had become the subject of rumbling & mumbling in Washington. Homer Bigart, conscientious front-line correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, had kicked off with a dispatch from Okinawa, suggesting that Tenth Army tactics had been ultraconservative, that the campaign might have moved faster if the III Marine Amphibious Corps had been used last month for an end-run landing in the south, behind the Jap lines, instead of being thrown into a power drive at the Shuri line alongside the Army's XXIV Corps. Columnist David Lawrence picked up the cry and shrilled about the "military fiasco at Okinawa ... a worse example of military incompetence than Pearl Harbor." He blamed the Navy's heavy losses, in ships and men, on the "bungling" which had prolonged the conquest.

Responsible Army, Navy & Marine Corps officers deplored the fracas. They had learned from bitter experience that the airing of such interservice differences could do grave harm.

Hair-trigger critics might profitably bear in mind that the U.S. forces' real troubles on Okinawa came not from the errors of friends, but from the implacable resistance of a fanatical enemy. Even so, with victory in sight, the Okinawa campaign was almost exactly on its original schedule.

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