In ‘The Pacific’ Part 9 ‘Okinawa’ the last and in many ways the worst battle of World War II is depicted through the eyes of Eugene Sledge and his friends. Okinawa was a hell of mud, rock, and rain paid for by blood.
Spoilers follow, surely.
What made Okinawa exquisitely horrific was the presence of civilians in the island, which was considered part of Japan proper. As many or even more civilians died during the battle as did Japanese soldiers. Over three times as many Americans died on Okinawa as the entire casualty list of the War on Terror, Afghanistan and Iraq, in just the space of two and a half months.
The episode is told through a series of vignettes in scenery that seems to be indistinguishable from any other. The battlescape Sledge and the Marines are fighting in is all gray, gray mud and rotting bodies below, gray sky above that continually rains. The filth and the stench has turned friend and foe alike all gray.
All of that lack of sensory reception, along with the constant threat of death, along with the agony of knowing that one’s actions will likely kill innocents, would be enough to make some of the strongest men go mad, some catatonic, some screaming, and some, like Sledge, having made a “stone of the heart” as the Irish poet once wrote. Sledge’s father’s fear that the soul of his son would be ripped out looks as if it may come true. He is become in his own mind a machine for “killing Japs.”
And yet, an incident with a baby and a dying woman in a bombed out hut brings Sledge back a little from the brink. If the war has taught him rage and remorselessness, he can also still know pity and grief. The war, which has killed so many, has not quite yet killed his humanity, though for a time it was touch and go.
Perhaps two months later, with the green of grass and trees, and blue sky and ocean returned to their lives, the Sledge and his fellow Marines hear of a super bomb that was dropped that obliterated a single Japanese city. They do not know it yet, but the Hiroshima bomb and the one to follow that will destroy Nagasaki means that they will return home to their families and a country that they helped to save.
The killing ground that was Okinawa convinced the Generals and Admirals were planning the invasion of Japan that such an invasion would be a blood bath unparalleled in the history of humanity. The death toll would be in the millions, allied and Japanese. The atomic bombings, as horrific as they were, were a mercy, a final wakeup call that said, “End this or face certain annihilation.
How fortunate it was that the Japanese Emperor Hirohito got the message and told his people to face the unendurable and lay down arms.
