Who won the Battle of Okinawa?
The United States won the Battle of Okinawa, fought from 1 April to late June 1945, the largest amphibious assault of the Pacific War. American forces took the island from Japan after nearly three months of savage fighting and mass kamikaze attacks on the fleet. More than 12,000 Americans, about 110,000 Japanese soldiers and at least 100,000 Okinawan civilians died, and that cost weighed heavily on the decision to end the war with atomic bombs rather than invade Japan itself.5
In the spring of 1945 the Pacific War reached Japan's doorstep. On Okinawa, only 350 miles from the home islands, American troops faced a dug-in Japanese army determined to make the invasion as costly as possible, and they did. The battle was dubbed the Typhoon of Steel. When it was over, both commanding generals were dead, and so was perhaps a quarter of the island's civilian population.6
Part of The greatest battles of the Pacific War · Before: Battle of Iwo Jima · Key figures: Desmond Doss
The gateway to Japan
By 1945 the Allies were closing on Japan itself. Operation Iceberg, the invasion of the Ryukyu Islands, was meant to carry the war to Japan's threshold: Okinawa, about 60 miles long and from 2 to 18 miles wide, would become a base for the air war against the home islands and for the invasion to follow, and it would cut Japan's sea and air routes to the south.7
The assault force was the new Tenth Army of Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., about 183,000 men for the assault phase, with the Army's XXIV Corps and the Marines' III Amphibious Corps, two divisions each, and three more divisions in reserve. Admiral Raymond Spruance's Fifth Fleet would carry and cover them, under the overall command of Admiral Chester Nimitz. Against them stood the Japanese 32nd Army of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, some 100,000 men including Okinawan conscripts, who chose not to fight on the beaches but to fortify the rugged south of the island and bleed the attackers.8
L-Day
Air and naval attacks on the Ryukyus had begun as early as October 1944, and in March 1945 the carriers of Task Force 58 destroyed hundreds of Japanese aircraft. On 26 March the 77th Division landed in the Kerama Islands west of Okinawa, where it found some 350 small boats gathered for suicide attacks on the invasion fleet.9
On 1 April 1945, L-Day, the Americans came ashore on the Hagushi beaches on the west coast, Marines to the north and the Army to the south. The landing was almost unopposed: by nightfall more than 60,000 men were ashore on a beachhead some 15,000 yards (about 8.5 miles) long, and by 4 April they had cut the island in two. Troops sent north had taken the northern two-thirds of the island by 22 April. During the capture of the small island of Ie Shima, the beloved war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed by machine-gun fire on 18 April.10 › 1 April in military history, 1945
Kamikaze and the Yamato
The Japanese answer came from the air and the sea. On 6 and 7 April more than 350 kamikaze aircraft struck the fleet, and the giant battleship Yamato sortied on a one-way mission to finish off the damaged ships. Without air cover she was easy prey for Admiral Marc Mitscher's carrier planes, and on 7 April she was sunk, a sign that the age of the big-gun battleship was over. The rocket-powered piloted bomb called Baka made its debut too, claiming its first victim, the destroyer USS Abele, on 12 April.11
Kamikaze attacks, first seen at Leyte Gulf in October 1944, reached their peak off Okinawa. Of the 34 American ships sunk in the campaign by Britannica's count (36 by the National WWII Museum's), 26 were sunk by suicide attacks, and 368 more were damaged. The Navy lost 4,907 men killed or missing and 4,824 wounded, more killed than the Army or the Marines ashore. As late as 5 June Mitscher claimed that only one percent of the suicide planes reached their targets, a figure that proved a gross understatement.12 › Battle of Leyte Gulf, 1944
The Shuri line
The Army divisions that turned south ran into the real defense: successive belts of fortified ridges, caves and tombs across the island from Naha through Shuri to Yonabaru, held by about 60,000 men. The attack of 19 April on the outer Shuri defenses cost XXIV Corps 2,851 casualties in four days, the Tenth Army's heaviest losses of the campaign. The Americans attacked in waves by day behind massive artillery fire, flame-throwing tanks led the infantry against caves that had to be destroyed one by one, and because the Japanese neither took prisoners nor offered to surrender, the fighting at close quarters was waged to the death.13
At a fortified mound called Chocolate Drop Hill, 130 feet high, the Americans reached the base three times in five days and were thrown back each time. In one six-hour period land and naval guns fired 30,000 shells at it; on one side alone the Japanese had some 500 entrances to their underground positions, which had to be sealed with dynamite. It was finally reduced between 17 and 20 May. Elsewhere on the Shuri line the 29th Marine Regiment suffered 80 percent killed and wounded, by the National WWII Museum's count the highest regimental loss for the US military since the Civil War. Then the May rains turned the battlefield into a sea of mud. From 4 April to 26 May the Americans advanced only four miles on the south of the island.14
The last stand
US troops broke into the suburbs of Naha on 12 May, Shuri fell on 31 May, and Naha's airfield was taken by 6 June. Ushijima's army withdrew to the southern tip of the island and fought on, but its men were running out. It took the Americans from 26 May to 21 June to cover the last ten miles.15
On 18 June, at about 1:15 in the afternoon, a Japanese shell burst over a forward observation post where General Buckner was watching an assault by the 8th Marines. A fragment of coral struck him in the chest, and he died within minutes, the highest-ranking American officer killed by enemy fire in World War II. Major General Roy Geiger of the Marines took over the Tenth Army. In the early hours of 22 June, in a cave on Hill 89 near Mabuni, Ushijima and his chief of staff, General Isamu Cho, took their own lives. That day the American flag was raised over Okinawa, and on 2 July the campaign was declared over.16
The cost
American battle casualties came to 49,151: 12,520 killed or missing and 36,631 wounded, besides more than 26,000 non-battle casualties in the Army and Marines, many of them cases of combat fatigue. The Americans lost 763 aircraft. About 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan soldiers were killed, and only some 7,400 were taken prisoner.17
The heaviest toll fell on the people of Okinawa. At least 100,000 civilians died, a quarter of the population by Britannica's estimate and perhaps a third by the National WWII Museum's, killed in the crossfire or by their own hands under orders from the Japanese military; in some cases families were handed a grenade to use when capture seemed near. In the last two weeks of June about 80,000 women, children and old men crawled out of the caves at the southern tip, a third to a half of them wounded.18
Why Okinawa mattered
Okinawa was the last great battle of the Pacific War and a grim preview of what invading Japan would cost. Based on it, American planners estimated that an invasion of the home islands would cost at least 225,000 American casualties, and pessimists put the figure at a million. President Harry Truman told his staff he hoped there was a possibility of preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other. That calculation weighed heavily in the decision to use the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, after which Japan surrendered.19 › Battle of Iwo Jima, 1945
The island itself stayed under American administration for nearly 27 years and returned to Japan only on 15 May 1972. Large US bases remain there today, and their presence has long met strong local opposition.20
Memory
On 23 June 1995, fifty years after the battle, the Cornerstone of Peace was unveiled at Mabuni in Itoman, near the caves where Ushijima died. Its black stone walls carry the names of those who died in the battle; with the names added in 2022 the total came to 241,686. For the wider war in the Pacific see our guide to the greatest battles of the Pacific War, the commanders of the Pacific War, the story of the medic Desmond Doss and the World War II era page.21
In film and television: The Mosquito Bowl
Peter Berg's film The Mosquito Bowl, adapted from Buzz Bissinger's 2022 book of the same name, is due in US cinemas on 30 October 2026 and on Netflix on 25 November 2026, according to Variety and Marine Corps Times.22
The true story behind it: on Christmas Eve 1944, 65 Marines of the 4th and 29th Marine Regiments, 6th Marine Division, many of them former college stars, played a football game on a rough field of dirt and coral on Guadalcanal while they waited to ship out for Okinawa. Within months, 15 of those players had been killed in the battle.23
