ISBN 1-932033-22-X
160 pages

Preface; Introduction; photos; maps; diagrams; Sources and Further Reading; Index

Appendices: Japanese 32nd Army OB; Tables of Organization; Strength, March 1945; US Battle Casualties

   Okinawa 1945 was originally published in 1990 as Japan's Battle for Okinawa. A revised and expanded edition was released in 2001, and this is the same edition "...redesigned with new artwork and photographs." With well-written, informative text and a handsome design, there's only one minor but quite noticeable inconsistency in this package: although the text covers Japanese plans and operations almost exclusively, the photos are almost entirely of American leaders, hardware, and troops.
   Despite that anomaly, it's nice to see a book about the Pacific War from the Japanese perspective. Although the literature is full of firsthand accounts and scholarly studies in English of operations from the German viewpoint to complement the almost limitless number of Anglo-American works about the war in Europe, far fewer books from Japan have been translated into English and only a handful of writers working in English have taken advantage of Japanese resources to produce original titles to complement the US-centric view of the war in the Pacific. Thus, Okinawa 1945 is something of a rarity as an English-language book about Japanese planning, tactics, personalities, and operations.

   The Battle of Okinawa, 1st April to 22nd June 1945, is known to English language readers through a variety of" accounts, both official and commercial publications. Some of these works focus on operations, and some provide personal perspectives, so that most major features of the American experience on Okinawa are well understood. However, another whole dimension of the Okinawa struggle is nor as well known: Japan's Okinawa. To staff and front-line soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), the events of Okinawa appeared quite differently than they did to their American counterparts. For the Japanese, the operational problems were different, the solutions were different, and the perceived results from day to day were different. American combat experiences on Okinawa teach us something about the lethality of modern warfare; Japanese experiences on Okinawa may teach us still more.
   The Japanese Empire's strategic need to hold Okinawa was absolute. After US air strikes on Truk in February 1944, Imperial General Headquarters (IGHQ) assumed that the United States sooner or later would try to seize Okinawa as an advanced base for invading Japan itself and accordingly garrisoned the island with the newly organised 32nd Army. As time went by, it became apparent that any US assault on Okinawa would enjoy air and artillery superiority, abundant naval artillery cover, superior firepower on the battlefield, and predominance in armour. Japan's 32nd Army knew well in advance both where it would fight on Okinawa and that it would face certain destruction.
   Although the large Japanese garrison on Okinawa was as well supplied as it could be with men, provisions, and artillery, it was not well prepared at first with doctrine and training. When Japan's Greater East Asia War began in 1937, its army was conceived as, and was, a superior infantry force. It relied on infiltration, manoeuvre, bold attack, and close combat tactics to prevail over its adversaries, the Chinese and European colonial garrisons. Beginning with Guadalcanal, however, Japan faced an adversary with more firepower than itself on a confined island terrain. For an isolated Japanese island garrison subject to devastating offshore bombardment, manoeuvre and close combat skills were of little use. In fact, the IJA's received operational methods were completely inappropriate to the realities of most battles of the Pacific campaign, including Okinawa.

   When 32nd Army was activated on Okinawa in March 1944, the Imperial General Headquarters defensive strategy for the island mostly involved using a number of airfields from which Japanese aircraft would strike devastating blows against the invaders. First, however, those airfields needed to be built, a task which consumed much of the army's energy due to the fact that almost all the construction had to be carried out using "shovels, hoes, straw baskets and horse-drawn wagons...." Although the island was reinforced with additional ground troops in July and August, planners in Tokyo continued to believe that airpower would be sufficient to destroy invading forces at sea. Of course, even when the airfields were completed, that strategy still required 32nd Army's ground forces to defend the island against invasion until the aircraft were ready for action. In accordance with IGHQ strategy, ground units were scattered around the perimeter of the island. However, given the unreadiness of the air forces and the transfer of its best division to the Philippines in November 1944, 32nd Army staff realized the original plan could not be successfully carried out with such reduced strength. Under the new conditions, four basic plans were considered.

   These four respective options corresponded, roughly speaking, to Japanese methods on:
   (1) Guadalcanal, where contact with the main American force was piecemeal.
   (2) Saipan, where suicidal attack in the open brought early defeat.
   (3) Iwo Jima, which was still to take place, where there would be a dogged dug-in defence near airfields the Americans needed.
   (4) Luzon, also still to take place, where Japanese forces would withdraw to the northern mountains and survive to the end of the war intact but strategically passive.

   Eventually 32nd Army chose the third option, paving the way for one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Pacific War.
   Huber goes on to discuss the building of caves and bunkers, a process—much like airfield construction—undertaken without mechanized equipment or explosives. The author then looks at the structure and individual units of 32nd Army, command and staff, and "heroism versus realism" among the senior officers, notably the chief of staff, General Cho, and his senior operations officer, Colonel Yahara (author of a worthwhile book about the battle). This leads into the Japanese decision to destroy some of the airfields they had worked so hard to construct. The change in plan stemmed from realization that insufficient air resources existed to carry out decisive attacks against the invasion fleet, and ground defenses were too weak to prevent the Americans from capturing the bases within a few days. Better to destroy the airfields in advance than to risk the enemy capturing them intact.
   After a year of planning and preparation, the Japanese defenses were put to the test when initial American bombardment began on 23 March 1945 and the amphibious invasion commenced on 1 April. As with the entire book, although the chapter on the invasion is filled with photos of Americans, the text continues to focus almost exclusively on the decisions and operations of the Japanese in response to the assault. The next chapter, on tactics, includes a few photographs of Japanese positions and weapons (as well as diagrams of Japanese defenses) while it continues to mostly review how 32nd Army fought the battle:

Cave warfare
Tanks vs caves
Japanese anti-tank tactics
American anti-cave tactics
Japanese artillery

   The fourth and fifth chapters carry the story of Japanese defensive operations through the end of the battle. Huber follows 32nd Army's ineffective offensive of 4 May and the general Japanese withdrawal at the end of the month. Withdrawing units managed to break contact and escape mostly unscathed thanks to screening forces, deception measures, and a relatively unaggressive American response. Even so, the Japanese army had sustained serious losses.

   The Japanese thus succeeded in moving all their units intact to the south, and the Americans were unable to effect the rapid pursuit strategists dream of and destroy the 32nd Army. Nonetheless, the IJA losses in the execution of this operation were staggering. When the 32nd Army staff took stock on 4th June of forces on hand, there were only 30,000 men left of the 50,000 men who had been present two weeks before. The 32nd Army had lost 40 per cent of its personnel in the one-week retreat, some through the 62nd Division's aggressive attacks against the Americans at Yonabaru, some by the interdiction and harassing artillery fire directed at the roads the Japanese were using, some in the countless and hopeless rearguard actions. Although historians have never made much of this, one must wonder if the smoothly executed retreat was really well advised or that it allowed the Japanese to resist for a longer period. Yahara, who condemned the heavy losses, 7,000 men, of the 4th May offensive he opposed, had no self-criticism for the far heavier losses of the 29th May retreat that he sponsored.
   IJA staff officers noted that the 30,000 men who did survive now included few trained combat troops. Only 20 per cent of the combat troops present on 1st April were still able to fight. Most of the personnel surviving after 4th June were service, support and construction troops. Moreover, the retreat resulted in heavy losses of infantry weapons other than personal firearms. Only 20 per cent of the machine guns and 10 per cent of the heavier weapons survived. Hand grenades and mines were now almost exhausted. Only the large field guns that were kept in the rear with the 5th Artillery Command were relatively unscathed. Half of these were still intact, including 16 x 150mm howitzers.
   Officers of the upper echelons also survived. Though company officers serving in the front line companies were almost wiped out, battalion commanders and their staffs were nearly untouched. All but 14 battalion level staff members were still at their posts on 4th June. This allowed for maximum organisational cohesion in spite of the heavy losses on the line. Even so, these men were becoming increasingly exposed by the savage fighting, a staff without an army.

   Although the Japanese continued to fight with their usual tenacity, in a departure from previous campaigns in the Pacific War more than 7000 IJA troops surrendered rather than die. (Huber points out many of them were native Okinawans.) Nonetheless, the majority of defenders died fighting, including most staff officers who conducted "honorable death attacks" when no troops remained in their units. General Ushijima, commanding officer of 32nd Army, and his chief of staff, General Cho, committed ritual suicide on a ledge outside their cave on 22 June. A handful of officers, including Cho's assistant, Colonel Yahara, were ordered to avoid suicide and escape so they could make a full report about the battle to Imperial General Headquarters.
   Huber sums up the Japanese experience in a strong Conclusion. Here are the first few paragraphs:

   The Japanese achievement on Okinawa was remarkable. Despite being outnumbered 2-to-l in manpower and outgunned 10-to-1 in ground firepower alone, the Japanese mounted a dogged defence for ten weeks, denied their adversary strategically desired terrain, and inflicted casualties in all categories almost equal to their own numbers. Okinawa was the only occasion in the Pacific war, apart from Iwo Jima, where an IJA force acquitted itself so well. The credit for this achievement must go in part to staff decisions made long before the battle began. The building of the fire-port caves and the development of the tactics for their use, as much as any other factors, allowed 32nd Army to offset the effect of the overwhelming land, air, and sea bombardment directed against it.
   Although not usually thought of in these terms, the battle for Okinawa was a case where diligent staff work countered disproportionate firepower. Moreover, the Okinawa tactical solutions came mainly from the staff at the place where the battle was to be fought, and who had to implement them, They also had to ignore both the IJA's deeply ingrained traditions of light infantry attack and the specific directives they received from higher headquarters. The staff members of the 32nd Army were alone in their final responsibility for the outcome and also alone in the solutions they devised. Though none of the units present on Okinawa had served in earlier Pacific campaigns, the Okinawa staff did, to some extent, develop their tactics in the light of earlier combat experiences in the Pacific. Nonetheless, the 32nd Army staff members were successful iconoclasts who tempered their own operational education in defiance of what they were advised to do by faraway theoreticians.
   The Okinawa battle was unusual in that it exhibited the stasis and lethality of World War I fronts even though it employed the full range of mobile World War II weapons: tanks, aircraft, radios, and trucks. On Okinawa, the modern weapons increased battle zone lethality due to bombardment and fire, without doing anything to decrease the static quality or the front. This suggests that dense battle, the 'fire-swept zone' characteristic of World War I, may occur in modern warfare regardless of weaponry, wherever two large forces are concentrated to acquire the same finite objective. Episodes of dense battle therefore took place in World War II on Okinawa and Iwo Jima, as well as in the urban siege warfare of the several European fronts.
   Dense battle makes special demands or an infantry force. Infantry on the surface in the fire-swept zone, whether attacking or counter-attacking, must be fearless, agile, technically ingenious, and tolerant of heavy casualties. World War I staff officers invented a new kind of soldier that exemplified these qualities, the storm troops. Paradoxically, the old IJA doctrine's emphasis on fearless, almost thoughtless, light infantry attack was a suitable preparation for surface combat in the fire-swept zone. Light infantry combat, even hand-to-hand combat, flourished at the margins of the fire-swept zone, and in dense battle everything is done by margins. The IJA's old tactics of boldness, small-unit initiative, self-sacrifice, and close fighting were, unintentionally, an ideal training for dense battle in counter-attack warfare, even though that training was contrary to the larger operational tactics needed on Okinawa.

   The remaining three chapters did not appear in the original edition of the book. Dale E. Floyd studies American engineer operations against cave defenses on Okinawa; Lowry Cole assesses American naval losses in the campaign (especially in light of the original Japanese plan to rely on air attacks to hold the island); and Chapter Eight contains the interrogation reports of Colonel Yahara and Mr. Sita (secretary to General Cho). Appendices include a Japanese order-of-battle for Okinawa, various TOEs, details of personnel strength for each unit, and battle casualties.
   It can't really compare to full operational histories of the battle on Okinawa (such as The Last Battle from the American greenbooks or Feifer's Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb), but Okinawa 1945 makes an excellent companion to those books with large amounts of tactical detail from the Japanese vantage and much cogent analysis. A great addition to any Pacific War library, and a book that should whet appetites for more detailed histories of Pacific battles from the Japanese side of the lines.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Casemate.
   Thanks to Casemate for providing this review copy.