Everett Taylor: Taylor's Yarns

By EVERETT TAYLOR

April starts with "Fool's Day" and the month usually is thought of as a rather carefree period with emphasis on showers, flowers and sunshine, perhaps intermingled with a touch of spring fever.

It also is a month in history when some monumental battles were fought with the outcomes highly significant in the final resolution of bloody and at times desperate conflicts.

One involved Texas in its fight for independence against Mexico General Santa Anna's forces, which had overwhelmed Lone Star forces at places such as the Alamo and Goliad.

But on April 21, 1836, Texas volunteers under Gen. Sam Houston surprised Santa Anna and his troops at San Jacinto, routing the invaders and securing independence for the new republic. Texas remained an independent entity for 10 years before becoming one of the United States.

On April 1, 1945, now 63 years ago, the last great battle of World War II began with United States forces invading Okinawa on Easter Sunday. It turned out to be the climactic battle of the war, but it also was one of the hardest fought, claiming thousands of casualties on both sides and among the island's residents.

Some surviving participants in the battle still live in this area.

A new telling of the Okinawa struggle is a recently published book, "The Ultimate Battle," written by Bill Sloan, whose father-in-law was in action there. Like most other Okinawa veterans, Sloan said, his father-in-law seldom talked about that experience. After researching the book, the author added, "I understand why."

"Okinawa was the last battle of the largest war since civilization began and the deadliest campaign of conquest ever undertaken by American arms," the prologue of the book explained. "It rang down the curtain on one momentous era in the earth's political/military history and raised the curtain on another era even more momentous."

The book is described as "the full story of the last great clash of World War II as it has never before been told."

In his research efforts, Sloan did manage to locate veterans who survived the Okinawa conflict and persuaded them to provide their eyewitness accounts of the worst imaginable battlefield action, often fought foot-by-foot under tremendous duress.

Many of those who fought and sacrificed to pry the embedded enemy out of Okinawa's hills and caves were heroes of other bloody battles in the South Pacific, including some recovered from serious earlier combat wounds. By the time it was over, at least 115,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen from both sides were killed, as were nearly 150,000 civilians.

Civilian casualties were extremely high, Sloan's novel indicates, because they were encouraged to commit suicide by Japanese troops who convinced them that would be better than the fate of being captured by the Americans.

Participating in the battle were more than 1,500 American ships, nearly 2,000 Japanese kamikazes sworn to sink those ships, and "two huge armies locked in a no-quarter struggle to the death - the 541,000 GIs and Marines of the U.S. Tenth Army, and Japan's 110,000-man 32nd Army."

Adding to the misery was heavy and prolonged rainfall in May that turned the battlefields already battered to bits by bombs, artillery fire, mortar fire, flame throwers, grenades and other types of ammunition, and soaked with the blood of many participants, into a slippery slush.

When the battle was over, Sloan wrote, most of the GIs, Marines and sailors who survived were too worn out to celebrate. Any elation they might have had likely was also sedated by the prospect they could soon be on the front lines again for a pending invasion of Japan itself.

Sloan has no doubt the slaughter at Okinawa helped convince President Truman to use the atomic bomb against Japanese cities in the hope of shortening the war "and averting a far more horrific loss of life."

That is the way it turned out, as all were thankful. Japan agreed to an unconditional surrender only after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, making Okinawa "the last epic struggle of World War II."

TAYLOR
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