US troops landing on Kerama Islands as they advanced on the Okinawa mainland (March 1945, US military photograph).
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The Battle of Okinawa ended on June 23, 1945, leaving roughly 200,000 dead on the Japanese side—civilians included—and approximately 12,000 on the American side.
Three months before it ended, in March, US forces made their first landing on Kerama Islands, about 40 kilometers from the mainland of Okinawa—captured here in a black-and-white photograph, colorized using AI, with fine adjustments informed by period materials. A heavy overcast sky hangs over the scene, as if foreshadowing what was to come.
Unlike the battle for Iwo Jima that immediately preceded it, the US landing operation on Okinawa—codenamed Operation Iceberg—relied heavily on young draftees thrust suddenly into combat, rather than career military personnel such as Marines.
Many were teenagers fresh out of high school. The savage fighting in urban areas and in the island's caves and grottoes, which drew in local civilians, left deep wounds of self-loathing and guilt in these young men.
Cases of psychological breakdown resulting in removal from the front line exceeded battlefield deaths, reaching some 26,000—the worst figure in US military history to that point. What added further shock was the striking youth of the Japanese soldiers they faced.
3,000 Kamikaze Aircraft
The Tekketsu Kinnotai (Iron and Blood Imperial Corps )—a unit conscripted from local middle school students—ranged from 14 to 16 years old.
Among the American soldiers who found themselves aiming rifles at boys younger than themselves, some hesitated at the sight of faces that reminded them of a younger brother, only to be shot in turn; others fired wildly in tears; still others screamed for their mothers and fled. That "world gone mad" must have been no different for the young Japanese soldiers themselves.
Some American veterans later recalled asking themselves why they were killing people on an island they'd never heard of when just the day before they had been high school students. Multiple such testimonies are said to survive.
Half of the roughly 1,800 members of the Tekketsu Kinnotai were killed in action. Among the Himeyuri Student Corps—a nursing unit of girls around the age of 17—half of the two hundred and some members lost their young lives, including through suicide.
There is a saying that Okinawa was a "sacrificial stone" in the defense of the Japanese mainland, but the battleship Yamato and five other vessels, which sortied on a one-way mission without even enough fuel to return, were sunk, and some 3,700 men perished.
Around 3,000 kamikaze aircraft, their pilots giving their lives, showed no mercy even to American sailors undergoing psychiatric treatment on ships offshore, inflicting wave after wave of terror.
No one wishes to see that "madness" again. But it is certain that young people—including the American soldiers in these photographs—lived in desperate conditions within it. There is no such thing as a life that deserves to be called a "sacrificial stone."
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Ishigaki Then and Now: The Battle of Okinawa, Grief and Forgiveness
(Read the article in Japanese.)
Author: Takeshi Minagawa, The Sankei Shimbun
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