Crucible of Hell: Okinawa: The Last Great Battle of the Second World War, by Saul David Ferdie Rous

FERDIE ROUS Crucible of Hell: Okinawa: The Last Great Battle of the Second World War

Saul David opens his book with a description of the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War, on the morning of 1st April 1945. It was the first day of Operation Iceberg, the Battle of Okinawa.

The reserved Japanese high command and the inexperienced, wildly overconfident commander of the American 10th Army, Lieutenant General Buckner, looked on as 90,000 rounds of artillery pounded Okinawa’s coral caves. Hundreds of amphibious assault craft and tanks ferried 12,000 US soldiers to the island’s shores. It was the largest sea armada ever assembled (1,457 ships), more than 747,000 tons of supplies were needed and over half a million men fought in the campaign.

The large number of sources allows David to address every aspect of the conflict, letting each story speak for itself. One soldier describes his commander as having a second-rate mind with a ‘third-rate mind struggling towards the surface’. And there’s an unforgettable image of Kikuko Miyagi, an Okinawan woman drafted into the nursing corps, cleaning the pus-spurting, maggot-ridden wounds of the screaming, writhing Japanese soldiers, only for them to be killed where they lay. But jumping from sinking destroyers to the White House Map Room (FDR’S and then Truman’s centre of operations for the war) does get dizzying.

The two sides are compared throughout. Both command structures have their failings. General Ushijima, the Japanese commander, seems tired, while Buckner is far too cautious, preferring to hold to US army doctrine (artillery, not infantry, wins battles) rather than listen to the advice of his battle-hardened subordinates. Buckner failed to heed advice not to wear his general’s stars on his helmet. He was killed as a result, making him the highest-ranking American to die in the war.

Kamikaze attacks are often described, and David attempts to clarify the

philosophy behind them. There is no ‘sin’ in Japanese and Shintoist perceptions of suicide, which is why they are known as jiketsu (self-determination) and jisai (self-judgement). Suicide features not only as a form of attack: many soldiers, told to avoid the ‘shame of being taken prisoner’, killed themselves before Americans could get to them. Entire command posts were found with the dead all around. Civilians killed their families. An account of two boys who are made to kill their mother with their bare hands is hard to read.

The battlefield does get monotonous. Fresh voices, such as that of Ernie Pyle – the only newsman to earn his stripes during the war – refocus the reader’s attention with descriptions of the mosquitoes, subtropical heat and topography of the island. Pyle had spent most of his time as a war correspondent in Europe – so he notices what Pacific veterans would see as the everyday.

David’s style is immersive. His vivid descriptions hit at all the senses. The sounds and smells of the battlefield are constant and striking. The desolation of the island is notable. The quaint villages and forests become a bare landscape of empty earth and rock, not unlike Verdun or Flanders, as some soldiers noted.

On a battlefield, the bodies of the dead can be mourned. This isn’t the case in a naval war. Alexander Burnham, a radio operator on a repair ship, noted how, after a battle, everything reverts to ‘Homer’s wine-dark sea’. There will be ‘no monuments, no crosses’; just an ocean ‘for ever anonymous’.

David rarely passes judgement in his own words. He does so only regarding the atomic bomb. The monumental casualty rate of Okinawa (250,000) and the projected loss of a million more in the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands are considered reason enough to justify the bomb; to prevent, as one marine said, making more corners ‘of some Oriental field for ever American’.