On July 17, 1946, the Army’s historical section sent a draft chapter on the Battle of Okinawa to a Marine general, asking for his comments. That general was Oliver P. Smith, who had served inside the Tenth Army headquarters as deputy chief of staff throughout the battle. He was one of 34 Marine officers on that staff, a number that had been cut from roughly 60 of 120 after Smith convinced the army commander, Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, to reduce it.
Smith responded to the army historians 13 days later. His reply is filed among his papers in the Marine Corps archives, alongside the diary he kept on the island. What he told the army that summer never appeared in published accounts of the battle. One diary entry was written after the Sixth Marine Division pushed 55 miles across the island from the landing beaches in 14 days, then spent seven more clearing the mountains of the Motobu Peninsula.
Smith wrote that the campaign should end the belief in some circles that Marine service was confined to the beach and could not move quickly over rough terrain. Nine months earlier on Saipan, the Army’s senior general in the central Pacific, Holland Smith, had said Marines were merely beach runners who knew nothing about land combat. That dispute was still fresh when the invasion force hit the beaches of Okinawa on April 1, 1945. Papers left by Marine officers about the soldiers beside them tell a different story.
The first thing they gave the army was artillery. By the end of the first week of April, the Fourteenth Army Corps had met the outer defenses around Shuri, so Buckner sent most of the Marine heavy guns south. Marine 105mm howitzer battalions were paired with army units and placed under army commanders. Their two long-range gun units joined an army 8-inch howitzer unit in a provisional group named for its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Henderson.
Three units of the Eleventh Marines, the First Marine Division’s artillery regiment, went to the Army’s 7th and 96th divisions, and a fourth followed days later. Between April 7 and May 6, those guns fired 53,988 rounds in 2,344 missions in support of the Army Corps. Colonel Wilburt Brown, who commanded the Eleventh Marines, later wrote that his four units earned praise from the army divisions they worked with. A later history added that the Marines came out with genuine respect for the army’s 8-inch howitzers, which were often the only weapons powerful enough to break well-built Japanese strongpoints.
That 1955 study, written by the Marine Corps’ own historical branch, is also where the most heavily used army division on Okinawa receives its most precise treatment. The 27th Infantry Division, a New York National Guard formation mobilized by both services at Saipan, came in as a floating reserve and entered the line in mid-April. The study notes it landed short of its authorized strength by nearly 2,000 men, and that Marine divisions sailed with attached replacements that put them over strength by 5 percent. It also gives the 27th credit where it was due.
On the afternoon of April 18, Company G of the 106th Infantry crossed the Machinato inlet in daylight, using engineer assault boats under a heavy smoke screen. The company held the village of Machinato by dusk. Engineers had a footbridge up by midnight. Before dawn, the rest of the battalion moved 1,000 yards in the dark undetected and was waiting at the west end of the Yuruso-Imura escarpment when the corps attack began.
The study credits that night march for the division’s large gains along the coast the next day. That next day was April 19, and it opened with what the study describes as a preparation of 19,000 rounds from 27 artillery battalions, with more than one gun for every 30 yards of the five-mile front. Nearly all the Japanese survived in their caves. In a footnote, the Marine historians let an army general speak about his guns.
The corps artillery commander later said he doubted the whole morning barrage killed as many as 100 of the enemy. That day at Kakazu Ridge, a reinforced company of 30 tanks passed through a gap in the hills after Japanese mortars and machine guns stripped away their infantry. Antitank guns, mines, and soldiers with satchel charges destroyed 22 of the tanks. A footnote adds that maintenance crews later recovered all but five.
Another footnote explains how division engineers learned to build a Bailey bridge from scratch in the five days before the attack, crediting a unit history by the 27th’s own historian, Edmund Love. In the fighting itself, Buckner’s operations officer asked for tank companies of the First Marine Division to support the 27th. The Marine division commander, Major General Pedro del Valle, refused to send the tanks alone. He told the corps commander the army could have every man he led, but not piecemeal.
His concern was training. On Peleliu, his tanks and infantry had trained together as integrated teams. Sending tanks without their infantry could end in disaster. The corps commander, Roy Geiger, and Oliver Smith passed the point to Buckner, who agreed not to commit the Marines in fragments.
The fighting lasted nine days in a tangled hill area near the coast known as the Item Pocket. Early on April 29, the last 34 defenders attacked the 65th Infantry and were wiped out by Company K. In the twelve days beginning the 19th, the study counts 2,661 combat casualties in the 27th, including 36 deaths, against an estimated 5,019 Japanese killed or captured. Then it adds a line of its own.
“At that rate,” the study says, “every man who started with the 27th Division would be buried or hospitalized before the campaign was over. ”
On April 30 and May 1, the First Marine Division relieved the 27th on the western end of the line. The army’s official history describes that relief too, citing a 1946 book by a Marine captain named James Stockman. The 1955 study adds a detail that captures the condition of those soldiers more than any casualty table.
When the Fifth Marines took over, each infantry company of the battalion inherited the position of an entire battalion of the 105th Infantry. That same afternoon, four or five army tanks tried to pass through the village of Awacha. Antitank fire hit them as soon as they emerged. Then the Marines entered the same ground, and over six days they suffered 1,000 combat casualties, slightly more per day than the 27th had lost over its twelve days.
Joseph Alexander, a retired colonel who wrote the Corps’ commemorative history of the battle in 1996, did not sugarcoat those facts. “Despite all their experience,” he wrote, “the Marines were no more immune to that fire than the soldiers they had relieved. ”
When the 27th pulled out and moved north on May 2, it left most of its artillery behind. Three light battalions, the 10th of the 4th, 5th, and 6th Field Artillery Regiments, stayed in place under one of the 27th’s generals, William Bradford.
Alexander wrote that their observers and communications teams already knew every inch of that ground and gave the infantry first-rate support around Awacha. On May 7, the Marine artillery commander reorganized his guns and gave Bradford’s battalions a new mission. They were to support the Sixth Marine Division, which was advancing toward a small, steep hill soon to be known as Sugar Loaf. The 27th’s medium battalion, the 24th of the 9th Regiment, marched north with the rest of the division and came back south in late May to support Geiger’s corps as well.
Meanwhile, the Corps was discovering what the soldiers had faced. Smith noted that the Wana Draw, the gorge behind the hills of Kishi, turned into the hardest mission the First Marine Division faced on Okinawa. Between May 11 and May 30, del Valle’s men lost about 200 killed and wounded for every 100 yards they advanced. On del Valle’s eastern flank was the army’s 77th Division, and the Corps records show both sides carefully coordinating their shared boundary.
On May 1, the army corps commander, Major General John Hodge, asked del Valle to help the 77th advance through fire and maneuver. Later, one battalion of the Fifth Marines moved its line 200 yards forward to link up with the 307th Infantry, and from then on timed its attacks to the pace of the soldiers’ advance. On the 11th, a battalion of the Seventh Marines tied in with the 305th Infantry to give both divisions a solid line at their meeting point. The dramatic end came at the end of the month.
On the morning of May 29, the First Battalion of the Fifth Marines found Shuri Ridge lightly guarded, and with del Valle’s approval, its Company A crossed into the 77th’s sector and seized Shuri Castle, the heart of the entire Japanese defense. Only afterward did del Valle’s staff learn that the 77th had planned to bombard the castle that very morning. Urgent radio calls stopped it. The 77th’s commander, Major General Andrew Bruce, was furious, and del Valle later recalled that no army division commander spoke to him again after that.
The attack had begun at 7:30 a. m. , and Company A was inside the castle by 10:15. By the last day of May, rain had turned the Marine sector into mud with no usable road.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Ross told his regiment that his men had gone two days without food and needed a supply line before any major attack. On June 4, soldiers of the army’s 96th Division handed rations to Ross’s Marines on what the unit report called the most miserable day on Okinawa. The harshest criticism Marine officers wrote about Okinawa was directed at one army general, not the army infantry themselves. Buckner refused to land the Second Marine Division on the southeastern coast behind the Shuri line.
The division still had its assigned ships and was still loaded and ready. Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Taxis, the operations officer, said after the war that the Tenth Army should have launched a surprise attack on the southern beaches the moment it stalled. He said he had a reinforced unit ready, trained down to the last detail. Major General Lemuel Shepherd of the Sixth Marine Division said the army commander had no inclination for amphibious operations.
The idea was not exclusive to one service. Several army generals pressed for the same landing, including Bruce of the 77th, who proposed it on April 11. The Tenth Army staff warned of supply problems and heavy resistance on the beaches, and their commander had heard enough about Anzio to distrust a landing too far from the main effort. On June 18, Buckner was killed by Japanese artillery fire.
Command of the Tenth Army passed to Geiger, the first Marine general to lead a field army, who held the post for five days until the army’s Joseph Stilwell took over on June 23. Fifty years later, Alexander’s commemorative history set aside a separate page in a special frame for the army. It noted that the army put as many combat troops ashore as the Marines, suffered proportionate losses, and showed equal courage. It placed Kakazu Ridge, Conical Hill, and the Yuzak Dake escarpment alongside Sugar Loaf and Conical Hill.
It listed army units that fought inside Marine divisions, including the 713th’s flame-throwing tanks, 4. 2-inch mortar batteries, and the 708th Amphibian Tank Battalion, which stayed with the Sixth Marine Division through the entire campaign. It noted that each received the Presidential Unit Citation alongside the Marines they served with. The page did not claim the old dispute had faded.
It noted that some Marines still looked at the 27th Division with bitterness after the Saipan battle. It noted the 27th had trained for Okinawa under poor conditions in the jungles of Espiritu Santo. During May and June, most of the 27th was in the north on ground the Sixth Marine Division had cleared in April. The study describes a Japanese strongpoint there that took the 106th and 165th Infantry ten days of fighting in the rain without artillery or air support, after which they found 195 bodies.
Three of the division’s four artillery battalions had been left in the south to support the Marines by fire. The northern mopping-up continued until August 4, when the troops came down from the hills at Hedo Misaki, the northern tip of the island, having killed more than a thousand Japanese and captured five hundred more along the way. The Motobu Peninsula, which the 27th took over from the Marines, became a rest camp for the First Marine Division. Alexander’s page ended with a plain verdict.
The campaign was too big and too hard for any single military branch to handle alone. In the autumn, the 27th Division was flown to Japan for occupation duty. At the end of 1946, the army permanently disbanded it.