As we prepare to celebrate Easter week, we should keep in our prayers and remembrances the many Americans (mostly young men and teens) who fought and sacrificed during that same time 81 years ago in the Battle of Okinawa.
It was the bloodiest battle and the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific Theater of World War II.
On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, the Navy’s Fifth Fleet under Admiral Raymond Spruance attacked the Japanese-held island. They were joined by a British, Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian naval task force and more than 180,000 Army soldiers and Marines. This was the final push toward invading mainland Japan and putting an end to the war.
Military planners considered the capture of Okinawa and its airfields to be a crucial and necessary precondition for the invasion of the Japanese mainland.
Were the U.S. to invade Japan, estimates of potential American casualties were upward of 1.7 to 4 million, with between 400,000 and 800,000 deaths.
The Battle of Okinawa only served to raise those estimates, as had the recent brutal battle for Iwo Jima, where U.S. casualties numbered 26,000 over five weeks of fighting. Only a few hundred Japanese had been captured out of the 21,000 troops who fought to the death.
God Bless my Father's Generation and all who've served.
My father would be appalled at the way freedom has been wasted in this country on people who don't deserve it.
ReplyDeleteThey were betrayed by their own government who's replacing their grandchildren with scum from every craphole on earth.
ReplyDeleteyeah. my Dad served thru the damn war. the weird part was the most scared he ever got was during the typhoon of 44
ReplyDeletehe had to go "topside" for some damn thing and looked over at a ship riding a crest of a wave. he said you could see the front and back out of the water. and he said they "lost" 3 ships to the typhoon and tried to find guys after it.
they didn't find many at all was all he said about it. funny thing, I had always thought that destroyers where good sized ships ? but to lose 3 of them to one typhoon ?