Okinawa's Price

On Kakazu Ridge, a miserable little 300-ft. fold in the earth just north of Naha, U.S. Tenth Army infantrymen found out for sure what they had suspected all along: Okinawa would come high.

The fact was driven home first to Lieut. Colonel Byron F. King's battalion. They had come to the ridge after an easy march from their landing places, only to find themselves pinned against a main Japanese defense line, boxed in by artillery fire, their flanks under merciless mortar attack.

Grimly, while their toll of dead and wounded mounted, they dug in and clung to the ridgeside. The wounded were moved into a little ravine for protection, but Japanese shells reached in to kill them on their litters. Their officers ordered a retreat. Some of the battalion got through the fire to safety.

New Blood. Then came Lieut. Colonel John G. Cassidy's battalion. In four days of bitter fighting Major General John R. Hodge's XXIV Corps troops won and lost the ridgetop three times. The Japanese met them coming up, popping out of caves and old tombs to hurl grenades and satchel charges--heavy explosives, carried on a handle like a satchel, and usually used to blast fortifications. Japanese artillery fire pounded them while they were on top. Then Japanese infantry charged furiously with fixed bayonets and ousted them.

Right across the island, units were reporting the same kind of resistance. Along the ridge the Japanese had developed an elaborate interconnected system of caves and pillboxes, some of the pillboxes two and three stories deep in the ground. And beyond this ridge was another fortified ridge, from Naha to Yonabaru.

The army waited while the materiel needed to crack these lines was assembled. Some days the front was almost quiet. Every night it was a roaring hell. Mortar shells, 600 and 1,000 pounders, smashed against the U.S. lines, 300 to the hour. Artillery fire drummed incessantly.

Land & Sea. Off shore, U.S. warships hurled great projectiles into the Japanese positions. And always over the beaches came the supplies. The Japs sent land-based aircraft against the ships. In one day 242 were shot down. To soften the enemy's air attacks on Okinawa Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher's Task Force 58 steamed into Japanese waters, struck at Kyushu, destroyed 368 enemy planes in four days.

In the north of the island the ist and 6th Marine Divisions, for once handling the easy end of the job, were clearing out scattered resistance and would soon be able to help in the south. The 27th Division (onetime New York National Guard) had come ashore for another crack at the Japs. The power was being built up.

The Japanese commander must have known that in the face of this power there could be but one outcome to the battle--U.S. victory. Still, he had a plan--the usual plan: live awhile, kill some Americans, then die.

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