Long Step Nearer

Less than two weeks after the end of the Iwo Jima battle the U.S. Navy had assembled the greatest invasion armada ever to operate in the Pacific: 1,400 ships and up to 100,000 soldiers and marines of the new Tenth Army. When it was all ready, they poured this power into Japan's front yard.

Northward in the Ryukyus, the ladder of islands stretching from Formosa to Japan, steamed Admiral Raymond A. Spruance's Fifth Fleet, working in small units, striking here, there, everywhere. In the southern Ryukyus the British Pacific Fleet, working with U.S. Pacific forces for the first time, struck at the Sakishima island group.

Day by day the attack narrowed down to the main objective: poverty-stricken, malaria-ridden, snake-infested Okinawa, largest and staunchest rung in the Ryukyu ladder. Once firmly established on Okinawa, Americans could climb up the 370 miles to Kyushu, Japan's southernmost main island, or climb down 365 miles to Formosa, potential springboard for landings in China.

Preliminary landings were made on several tiny islands west of Okinawa--in the Kerama Rhetto, and, the Japs said, also on Mae, Kamiyama. Then, at 8:30 on Easter Sunday morning, the Okinawa invasion was launched. After a ferocious preparatory bombardment, Lieut. General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. sent the seasoned troops of his new Tenth Army swarming ashore. Marines and soldiers fought side by side in this army, as they had in World War I's famed 2nd Division. Comprising the army were Major General John R. Hodge's XXIV Army Corps and Major General Roy S. Geiger's III Marine Amphibious Corps.

Here was no Iwo Jima. On this island, 60 miles long and two to 20 miles wide, there was room to land and maneuver. Jap opposition on the beach was almost nonexistent. Quickly the troops moved inland through a maze of tiny one-and two-acre farms. They spread north and south, pushed eastward. Still resistance remained slight. Some men marched a mile without hearing a shot.

Moving Fast. By nightfall the Tenth Army had a solid beachhead more than three miles deep in some places and more than eight miles wide. Within the beachhead, safely in U.S. hands, were the Yontan and Kadena airfields. Supplies were pouring ashore in a steady stream. The next day, against scattered resistance, they pushed on to the east coast, cut the island in two.

Perhaps the enemy had been puzzled as to where the landings would come, and unprepared where they did come. Perhaps he planned to give up the hard-to-defend southern part of the island and retreat into the mountainous north.

Whatever the reason for the light resistance, there was little serious expectation that Okinawa would come cheap. The island was too important a strategical prize for that. If it were lost, said the Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri-Hochi, Japan would have "no hope of turning the course of the war." Here Nippon must fight. And from Admiral Nimitz' headquarters, as the campaign went into its third day, came reports of rising resistance.

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