{"id":78651,"date":"2018-04-02T12:39:38","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T16:39:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=78651"},"modified":"2018-04-02T14:10:53","modified_gmt":"2018-04-02T18:10:53","slug":"operation-iceberg-the-battle-for-okinawa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=78651","title":{"rendered":"Operation Iceberg; the Battle for Okinawa"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Yesterday marked 73 years after the start of Operation Iceberg, the battle for Okinawa, the last push towards the Japanese mainland. 180,000 American soldiers and Marines, along with their British, Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian allies assaulted the island defended by 77,000 Japanese troops and their local Okinawan militia that fielded 20,000 souls.<\/p>\n

12,000 Americans were killed in the battle that lasted 84 days. There were about 50,000 overall US casualties. <\/p>\n

Only 7000 Japanese were captured while the rest fought to their death, including their commander, Ushijima and his chief of staff who committed seppuku on June 22. <\/p>\n

The Okinawans were told that they would be raped and killed by the Americans, so many of them jumped after they threw their families from cliffs into the sea. 150,000 Okinawan died in the battle.<\/p>\n

12 US destroyers were sunk and 386 ships were damaged and 768 aircraft were lost. The Japanese lost 1,430 aircraft and 16 ships. <\/p>\n

Seven Americans were awarded Medals of Honor including Desmond Doss, the conscientious objector who saved seventy five of his comrades. We lost Ernie Pyle, the famous war correspondent, during the Battle for Okinawa. <\/p>\n

The massive losses on Okinawa are said to influence President Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb to end the war with Japan and to avoid an invasion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday marked 73 years after the start of Operation Iceberg, the battle for Okinawa, the last … Operation Iceberg; the Battle for Okinawa<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":78652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[217],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-we-remember"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/78652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}