Battle of Okinawa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Unbelievable courage and sacrifice.

 

My dad went on to Okinawa on D+10. He was USN, a motor machinist mate. He once noted not much vehicle repair occurs during an invasion.

Now he is gone, and many of the details are fuzzy. Why he was attached to the Marines, why he was doing corpsman duties--other than the obvious, a surplus of dead and dying. His accounts of the effects of cave clearings with flamethrowers and the reaction to a sniper are memorable. ("you keep shooting till something falls out of the tree....")

He nearly drowned during the loading of troops into a landing craft. AA fire had hit his ship (Kamikaze attacks result in a lot of AA fire going everywhere, even into friendly ships). As a result, the netting started to fall away. The boat took off, and the netting fell into the drink. If you were near the top, you were thrown clear as my dad and one other guy were. If you were under the net....

He was there a year after the war. He cut the engines off Corsairs, dropping them into the drink while the rest was push overboard later. He spent time cutting brand new trucks in two so they could be pushed into the drink. He survived the typhoon, watching from a ditch as his 6x6 tumbled off in the wind.

I have quite a number of his pictures. B29s, orphans, countryside.

As he noted much later, Iwo Jima got all the press, as the flag image was used to sell bonds. Look at the stats for the losses and you'll see the difference. That flag image is much more appealing than the flame thrower into the cave.

He was 19 at the time.

 

Thank you for that piece of personal history. It was young men like your dad who endured, that gave us the freedom we have now. It is a debt that we still need to repay.
Thank you again.