On April 24, 1945 the Marine Corps of the United States had been fighting inch by inch on the beaches of Okinawa for over three weeks.
The Allies believed that capturing Okinawa would be integral to their success in ending the war in the Pacific Theater. Okinawa is the largest of the Ryukyu Islands located just 350 miles south of the Japanese mainland and without its airfields, the Allied forces believed they would be unable to successfully invade mainland Japan.
Over the course of 82 brutal days, a weakened Japanese army unsuccessfully defended Okinawa. And because the Imperial Army did not believe in surrender, it suffered massive losses fighting its soldiers to death. Indeed, Over 1,400 Japanese Kamikaze pilots entered the fray, ready to die for their cause because they knew that if Okinawa fell, the motherland was as good as defeated.
All the Allied forces had to do now was to take advantage of Japan’s many vulnerabilities to end the war. In the Battle of Okinawa, Allied soldiers did just that in one of the last — and bloodiest — events of the war.
but this they faced and it ended up to be a trap,
No Japanese soldiers met them on the shore. It was Easter Sunday — April 1, 1945.
What the U.S. soldiers did find were civilians. Japan had effectively disowned the natives of Okinawa; mainland Japanese regarded Okinawans as second-class citizens and these natives paid the price for their homeland. As many as 150,000 civilians died during the Battle of Okinawa, many of them young boys recruited to fight.
and,
The U.S. suffered another high-profile casualty: journalist Ernie Pyle. While he accompanied the 77th infantry division, Japanese machine gunners killed Pyle, a man whose war-time coverage made him a beloved correspondent.
The Battle of Okinawa saw the deaths of up to 100,000 Japanese soldiers and 14,000 Allied casualties, with 65,000 more wounded. However, the civilians of Okinawa still bore the highest death toll of the battle with over 300,000 deaths.
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