Battle of Okinawa

On 1 April 1945 American forces landed on Okinawa almost unopposed, because the Japanese commander had pulled his army back into fortified ridges across the island's south. What followed was the largest amphibious operation of the Pacific war and nearly three months of fighting for positions such as Kakazu Ridge, Sugar Loaf Hill and the Shuri line. Offshore, waves of kamikaze aircraft sank or damaged hundreds of Allied ships, and the US Navy suffered its heaviest losses of the war. Okinawan civilians were caught between the armies, and many died in the fighting, of starvation, or in mass suicides urged or forced on them by Japanese troops. The losses on the island weighed on American planning for an invasion of Japan's home islands, an invasion that never came after the atomic bombings and the Soviet declaration of war.

How Okinawa is remembered remains a live political question in Japan. In 2007 the education ministry ordered textbooks to soften the statement that the military forced civilians into group suicides, and a mass protest rally in Okinawa that autumn pushed the government into a partial retreat. The Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe was sued by a former garrison commander and a relative of another over his account of the suicides, and the courts ruled in Oe's favour. Okinawans mark 23 June as Memorial Day, and the long American military presence on the island keeps the battle tied to present day arguments about bases.