“Double Ten” (10/10) is a special day for many Chinese in Taiwan, and
elsewhere, because of the Chinese Revolution which began on October 10, 1911. (My posting a year ago was about that.) But 10/10 is a day of sad memories for the
people of Okinawa, and other Japanese, because of the bombing of Okinawa on
October 10, 1944.
To learn more about
that bombing, and what happened in the following ten months, I have recently
read The Battle for Okinawa (1972,
1995) by Hiromichi Yahara and a few selected places in The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb (1992) by the American
journalist/novelist George Feifer.
Naha is the capital
city of Okinawa, and on that fateful day of 10/10/44, from 80 to 90 percent of
the city was destroyed by U.S. bombers. According to Feifer, “Roughly a
thousand civilians, twice as many as military personnel, were killed” in that
bombing (p. 90). Colonel Yahara (1902-81), a
senior staff officer of Japan’s 32nd Army, which was deployed for
the defense of Okinawa,
writes that the October 10 devastation of Naha was “a sad foretaste of the
tragedy to come” (p. 31).
Yahara’s book is
mostly about the U.S. military invasion of Okinawa that
began on April 1, 1945. From the Japanese standpoint he describes in detail the
preparations for and the actual battle for Okinawa beginning on that April
morning. The following fifteen weeks was a terrible, terrible time for American
and Japanese soldiers (and Okinawan civilians) alike.
Although it took place more than fifty years ago, I still
remember part of a conversation with a Kentucky man. I began a pastorate of a
church in the little town of Ekron, Kentucky, in the summer of 1959, just a few
weeks before starting to seminary in Louisville. During my first months there I
tried to visit and get acquainted with as many church members as possible. One
of those members was Elwood Morgan, who lived about a mile west of town.
As we visited, Elwood mentioned having served in World War
II, and he said that he was involved in the bloody battle for Okinawa. (That
was more than five years before I knew I would be going to Japan as a
missionary and about three decades before I had the opportunity to visit
Okinawa for the first time.)
But Elwood wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say much about his
experiences in Okinawa. Even though some 15 years had passed, the horror of
what he had seen and experienced there was too painful to talk about.
At the end of the battle of Okinawa, Yahara states, “So complete was the
devastation that the most gifted poet could not have expressed the desolation
of this Okinawa. It was beyond description or belief” (p. 185).
He also notes that
the “Okinawa Defense Forces had lost some sixty-five thousand dead in battle. .
. . Enemy battle casualties amounted to about forty thousand” (p. 156). The
footnote on that page points out that the death toll among Okinawan civilians
exceeded 100,000.
Yahara says the
Japanese soldiers should have surrendered more quickly, cutting the loss of
civilian life. And perhaps they would have, had it not been for the bombing of
the capital city of Naha on 10/10/44, which reinforced the propaganda about the
cruelty of the enemy. The intentional bombing of civilian populations has often
been considered a violation of the “rules of war.”
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