The Battle of Okinawa: The Blood and the Bomb (Paperback)

The whole point is to show how the horror of island hopping campaign that reached its bloody climax on a very large island with a very large civilian population. Although the charnel house of Burma, Tarawa, Peleliu, Saipan, the Philippines and other place names of the East Asian War were truly very much encounters largely between two brutal armies. In Okinawa we get this gigantic clash redux with civilians at the centre.

What Feifer does is describe this massive clash of arms on human beings, how humans behave in war and how civilians get the short end of the stick.

But let me be clear here: I have read a lot of Pacific War history and regularly join in the applause of the fighting prowess of the US Marines -- I have seen the battlefields at Okinawa, Peleliu, Saipan, Truk and many other sites of WWII horror. Feifer is honest in his discription of the horrors perpetrated by both sides. But he honestly points out in his introduction that the actions of the US pales in comparison with the cruelty of the Japanese. He spends most of his time on these attrocities and a VERY limited amount of time on those that Americans, through design or accident, perpetrated on Japanese POWs or Okinawan civilians (contrary to the other previous reviewer it is not at all a "rant" -- he should read the introduction again!). It is a fair and documented representation of what happenned and it is a sobering reminder of the responsibilities of democratic countries and their necessity to fight war always in a just manner and never to sink to the level of the opposition.

That is the one lesson of this book. The other one is that this is an excellent book for all nations to understand what happens in modern war when civilians get caught in the middle. It is a great book for those who seek a greater understanding of when the necessities of war cross over the elemental rights of civilians. It reminds us also of our humanity ---from the acts of kindness by a grisled Marine giving water and food to a child or an old woman, to the horror of an irrate Japanese commander willing to sacrifice people to a vain endevour and psychotic tribute to an obscurantist Japanese militaristic code.

I recommended it to my niece and young nephew. They are unlikely to read military history. But they will be much wisened by this book. As such who cares whether they know a toss about the 1st or the 5th Marines. What this book teaches them about humanity is much more than lines on a map and the order of battle.

However, as military history, this book is certainly a failure.

* The lack of maps has been noted by a previous reviewer.

* The author is apparently a journalist by trade and writes the book as if he just found the scoop of a lifetime: War is awful, and only he has discovered this fact, and of all the battles ever fought in the history of man, Okinawa was by far the worst, and only he has the honesty to give you the inside story.

* Worse than the lack of maps is the lack of citing. He has quotes from many interesting participants and then doesn't provide the source. He has a lengthy bibliography, but you have no way of following up. This is especially critical because he challenges the generally held notion that Yamato only had enough fuel for a one-way trip to Okinawa. The author states emphatically that this is not the case, but does not source this controversial claim!

* A lot of factual errors in this work, too. Example Doozy: Did you know that the single engine F-4U Corsair could carry more armament than the four engine B-29? Me neither.

* The chapter on Okinawa's influence on the decision to use the atomic bombs is quite good.

* The concluding chapter with the author's sermonizing on affairs after WWII is possibly the most ignorant geopolitical rant I have ever read. No doubt the Okinawan civilian has gotten the short end of the stick for centuries now, but to evaluate U.S. conduct without taking into consideration the pressures of the Cold War makes me think that the author had a point he wanted to make and was not going to allow facts (or even differing opinions) get in the way.

If you're not familiar with the battle or the Pacific War, this is NOT a book for you if you are actually trying to understand that campaign.

On the other hand, if you want an oral history from men on the bloody ground perspective, this is a fast-paced read.

Part of the problem is the lack of visual aids. One reviewer has already remarked the absence of photographs. Only one map is provided--of half the island--sketchy & erratically annotated. Combined with Feifer's herky-jerky narrative style--perhaps better described as a collection of shaggy-dog stories adrift in time and space--the reader gets little or no sense of what happened when, or (more importantly) what effects any one incident might have had on the ensuing. As one example, the discussion of kamikaze attacks against the naval forces, which continued from April 1 landing into late June, is concluded before any real treatment of the fighting in the south begins; and there is little effort to "crosswalk" the two.

Feifer claims (in his introduction to the 2001 edition) that "this book doesn't pretend to be a military history...The Battle of Okinawa involved matters more important than its bloody heroism and anguish in the field and on the sea..." Yet there is precious little here BUT blood and anguish-at least until the penultimate chapter on how the battle affected the decision to use the A-bomb.

Here is another problem: Feifer writes with a chip on his shoulder. His motto seems to be "war is hell" (or maybe, as one Marine puts it, "hell is war"), & he throws tale after tale of horror like grenades into the reader's lap in order to convince him. Maybe this is the fundamental reason for the confused & confusing narrative--nothing is to get in the way of the "moral".

More disturbingly, Feifer's "damning with faint praise" treatment, while generally unbiased in the technical sense, leaves a perceptive reader feeling manipulated. Again and again, Feifer thunders with outrage regarding some facet of the battle that particularly offends him--and then very quietly, almost as an afterthought, admits facts that show his outrage is at best overblown, at worst intellectually dishonest. (He castigates war correspondents at length-- "Dispatches from Okinawa outdid themselves in masking rather than conveying the hardships.... Whatever few facts they supplied, their tone and assumptions fed the usual cheerleading prevarications." --then, two pages later, admits that "Reporters played on the same team as the fighters or didn't get to the game.... A maverick...wouldn't have lasted long." Well, golly. To paraphrase a famous quote of the time: Doesn't the author know there was a war on??)

It's hard to fault Feifer's portrayal of the Okinawans as the real losers in the battle, with as many as a third of them killed. Surely a large number were victims of US bombardment that for all its fury left the deeply dug-in Japanese garrison largely intact. Maybe this is why he highlights supposed American moral failures while soft-pedaling those of the Japanese. With a 15-page chapter titled "American Atrocities", but no corresponding section for the defenders, he invites readers to conclude that the US was the prime villain. Reports of Japanese atrocities, including the casual murders of civilians as well as prisoners, are widely scattered & without emphasis, apparently to ensure that nothing mollifies righteous indignation at US actions.

Or perhaps Feifer just dislikes the US government. From the alleged hauteur of Commodore Perry's original visit to the evils of the current US military presence chapter, the author has little good to say. (Though he finally, grudgingly admits that "if the bases must stay, many [Okinawans] quietly prefer them to remain in American hands than to be given over to the Japanese[!]")

I wish Mr. Feifer had given a list of what he considers to be the best of the "more traditional [military histories of the battle, that] exist in English and Japanese" so that the interested reader (like myself, whose father was a motor-pool T-5 in the campaign) could complete the picture of which "The Battle Of Okinawa" gives part. Considering how narrow his interests, both historical and moral, in the conflict, I have to wonder if he even bothered to find them, let alone read them.