destruction. If a strongpoint was more heavily held, tanks, machine-guns and artillery would keep up a covering fire while American soldiers climbed on top of the cave entrance, hurled grenades inside and prevented escape unless the cave had another opening. If possible, combat engineers got into place with their flame-throwers. If flame-throwers could operate, the defenders would either die immediately or retreat if possible. Americans were always on the look-out for a prepared cave that would have some kind of ventilation. Once found, US infantry employed incendiary devices of all kinds. If trapped, imperial soldiers either burned to death or were buried alive. (The Japanese called the American tactics of sealing and destroying caves ‘the horse-mounting technique’ and feared it greatly.) Japanese would retreat if necessary and if possible. However, ultimately the defenders ran out of space and supplies. The obvious solution in such circumstances was surrender. In practice, for Japanese forces, the response was suicide.

      After two weeks of vicious fighting the Japanese position cracked on Saipan. The ‘end game’ disintegrated into barbarism remarkable even for the Pacific War. The Japanese commanders committed suicide. Previously they had ordered a pointless banzai assault against US infantry that cost the lives of 2,000 Japanese troops. After this grim prelude insanity gripped the island. Saipan had been Japanese territory since the First World War. Consequently it possessed a civilian population of approximately 25,000. Terrified by bogus propaganda that US forces would rape and murder them, thousands of women and children committed suicide, many within view of shocked American Marines. According to American testimony and interrogation of survivors, many civilians were forced to die by enraged and often drunken Japanese soldiers as an adjunct to their own suicide. Americans estimated that two-thirds of Saipan’s civilian population perished. Only a handful of prisoners came from the dead garrison. The Japanese inflicted 14,000 casualties on US forces, the worst so far of the Pacific War. It should be emphasised, however, that US losses were very slight during the blood-crazed last days. Saipan, and many battles that followed, duplicated on a large scale the pattern first seen at Buna: initial fierce Japanese resistance, slow American dominance due to superior firepower and Japanese isolation, and a final act of pointless Japanese suicidal violence.

      Events followed this grisly pattern every step on the way to Tokyo. Marine Eugene Sledge, a veteran of the terrible struggles at Peleliu in 1944 and Okinawa in 1945, later tried to express the almost unimaginable stress put on the combat infantry:

      ‘The struggle for survival went on day after weary day, night after terrifying night. One remembers vividly the landings and the beachheads and the details of the first two or three days and nights of a campaign; after that, time lost all meaning. A lull of hours or days seemed but a fleeting instant of heaven-sent tranquillity. Lying in a foxhole sweating out an enemy artillery or mortar barrage or waiting to dash across open ground under machine-gun or artillery fire defied any concept of time.

      To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement; but to those who entered the meat grinder itself, the war was a nether world of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning; life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilisation and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines – service troops and civilians.’⁹

      All the small islands such as Biak, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Peleliu and Iwo Jima assaulted in the 18 months of war were ruthless ‘slugfests’ with relative violence controlled only by the size of the forces involved. It was both logical and fitting that Okinawa, the last battle of the Pacific War, was the most violent single encounter of the war and the one in which the Japanese leadership incorporated suicide most deeply into the essential fabric of imperial warmaking.

      Because it was south of the home islands and relatively close, both sides knew that, if in American hands, Allied land-based aircraft of all types could wreak havoc across Japan and cover the already planned assault on Kyushu. After witnessing the enormous size of the American fleet that had assaulted the Philippines, Tokyo knew that when the Americans inevitably hit Okinawa, they would do so in great force. In a very real sense, Okinawa was a suicide mission in every respect. The Imperial Army hoped that a huge ‘butcher bill’ delivered to Washington might convince a hopefully war-weary America to consider the cost of attacking the Japanese homeland prohibitive and thus make the Americans willing to agree to some kind of compromise peace. No one in Tokyo expected the 100,000-man Japanese garrison on Okinawa to survive.

      On 1 April 1945 the Allies (a large British task force participated in naval support) attacked Okinawa. Although initially unopposed, Marines and soldiers soon found themselves in an all too familiar fight against an entrenched and fanatical enemy. As before, the invaders had copious support from carrier-based aircraft and heavy naval gunfire. Convinced that their pilots no longer had the skill to contest Allied airmen, the Japanese sent some 2,400 kamikaze aircraft against Allied ships. Nearly 5,000 Allied sailors died in these attacks, a total slightly larger than the carnage in the Solomons 2½ years before. Allied sailors viewed their enemy with bewilderment, later expressing attitudes ranging from profound respect for Japanese courage to the view that they were fighting men who were pathologically insane. One witness, Vice Admiral C. R. Brown, later expressed the ethical confusion wrought by the kamikaze attacks:

      ‘Among us who were there, in the Philippines and at Okinawa, I doubt if there is anyone who can depict with complete clarity our mixed emotions as we watched a man about to die in order that he might destroy us in the process. There was a hypnotic fascination to a sight so alien to our Western philosophy.’¹⁰

      Against the advice of many combat officers, Tokyo decided to expend what remained of the Imperial Navy on a suicide mission. The Navy ordered a task force based on the super-heavy battleship Yamato and eight smaller warships to sortie to Okinawa. Shadowed from the outset, the small force received its first American air attack barely 100 miles south of Kyushu.

      Ensign Mitsusu Yoshida’s battle station was to serve as liaison between the bridge of the Yamato and its air-search radar, giving him a unique vantage point for the tragedy to follow. Early in the battle an American bomb scored a direct hit on the heavily armoured radar room. Yoshida rushed to the scene where many close friends and comrades served. He described the psychological hammer-blow of war at its worst:

      ‘It is as if someone had taken an axe and split a bamboo tube. The bomb, a direct hit, must have sliced way in at an angle and then exploded.

      Tuned and retuned in preparation for today’s decisive battle, the instruments have been scattered in all directions. I don’t recognise the debris. Not even any pieces left.

      Just as I begin to think that everything must have been blown away, I notice a chunk of flesh smashed on to a panel of the broken bulkhead, a red barrel of flesh about as big around as two arms can reach. It must be a torso from which all extremities – arms, legs, head – have been ripped off.

      Noticing four hunks scattered nearby, I pick them up and set them in front of me. To the charred flesh are stuck here and there pieces of khaki-coloured material, apparently scraps of military uniform. The smell of fat is heavy in the air. It goes without saying that I cannot tell where head and arms and legs might have been attached…

      What emptiness! How did they die, those beings who only a moment ago were so real? I cannot stop doubting, stop marvelling.

      It is not grief and resentment. It is not fear. It is total disbelief. As I touch these hunks of flesh, for a moment I am completely lost in thought.’¹¹

      Three hours after the first bomb fell, five imperial ships, Yamato among them, were on the bottom, and four surviving destroyers were heading back to Japan as fast as possible. In one afternoon the Imperial Navy lost 3,500 men, almost as many sailors as the Allies lost to aerial kamikazes throughout the entire Okinawa campaign. In return, Japan gained nothing.

      The garrison at Okinawa, because it was close to Japan, received an unusual number of artillery pieces of medium field level (105mm) and above. American infantry had a multitude of standard land artillery and was, despite kamikaze attack, continually