On 25 April 1945, the US 69th Infantry Division met the Soviet 58th Guards Rifle Division at the German town of Torgau on the Elbe River. The Eastern Front met the Western Front. The War in Europe was almost over.

On the morning of 16 April 1945, US Sumner class destroyer DD-724, the USS Laffey, was assigned the most dangerous job in the US Navy: radar picket for the Fifth Fleet off of Okinawa. The USS Laffey was expected to identify Japanese air attacks originating from the Japanese Home Islands and direct American fighters to intercept. The problem was that many Kamikaze attacked the first American ships they saw, which invariably were the radar pickets.

Just after dawn while most men were in breakfast chow line, the first Japanese bomber was spotted radar and the crew raced to battlestations. The single D3A Val divebomber with its distinctive fixed landing gear retreated from the Laffey’s anti-aircraft fire. An obvious scout, the Val was a harbinger for the hell about to descend on the Laffey.

At 0825, the Laffey identified a large raid of 320 Japanese aircraft. They directed the fighters to intercept. At 0830, four Val divebombers attacked. Twelve minutes later, 50 planes broke off from the main formation to attack the Laffey, including 22 Kamikaze. The Laffey had just four older FM2 Wildcat Fighters from the escort carrier USS Shamrock Bay flying top cover.

The captain, Commander Frederick Becton, ordered the Laffey to flank speed while the helmsman made frequent radical course corrections to disorient the attacking Japanese. The first Kamikaze hit started a fire that the flank speed exacerbated. Becton slowed the ship down to contain the flames, but this just convinced the Japanese that the Laffey was crippled and ready to sink. After several more strikes, Becton increased the speed and the crew fought the flames, flooding, and Japanese simultaneously.

The Laffey, the four Wildcats, and eventually twelve F4U Corsair fighters desperately fought off the Japanese attacks for over 80 minutes. In that time, the Laffey took serious damage: she was hit by six Kamikaze, four bombs, strafed three times, and was even clipped by a Corsair whose daring pilot prevented an attacking Val dive bomber from slamming into the bridge. By 1030, the Laffey was on fire and out of ammunition, listing to port, and the stern was almost underwater due to flooding. She had all of her 5” guns knocked out, half of her 20mm and 40mm AA mounts destroyed, all of her masts knocked down, and the American flag hung off of a makeshift pole.

When asked if they should abandon ship, Becton replied, “No! I’ll never abandon ship as long as a single gun will fire.” He did not hear a nearby lookout who said under his breath, “And if I can find one man to fire it…”

At 1033, 24 more Corsairs and F6F Hellcats arrived and shot down the last of the attackers to much jubilation from the remaining crew. The USS Laffey suffered 32 dead and 71 wounded in two hours of fighting.

The USS Laffey is now a museum ship off of Patriots Point, outside of Charleston, South Carolina.

By 1945, the Battle of the Atlantic was won by the Allies. However the Germans clung to the hope that wonder weapons and superior technology could somehow turn the tide. U-1206 was a brand new Type VIIC boat that could travel faster and stay submerged longer than U-boats before it.

Part of the reason U-1206 could stay submerged for long times was the toilet system. Unlike Allied submarines where human waste went into a holding tank, waste on German U-boats was flushed directly into the sea. The lack of a holding tank allowed more space for other critical necessities, like fuel and batteries. This also meant that the waste couldn’t be flushed out while submerged too deeply, an unfortunate olfactory situation for a submarine if it was submerged for too long. The Type VIIC boats fixed this problem, not with a holding tank, but a complicated high pressure valve system that permitted a crew member to flush while deeply submerged. The valve system was so complicated that “Toilet Specialists” were needed to operate it.

On 14 April 1945, the captain of U-1206 was taking his daily constitutional while submerged off Scotland. He didn’t want to bother the toilet specialist to flush, so he broke out the manual to do it himself. In the process, he stuffed up the toilet. Swallowing his pride, but not too much, he called the boat’s engineer to fix the problem instead of the junior ranking toilet specialist. While trying to unplug the toilet, the boat’s engineer opened the wrong valve and seawater flooded into the boat. The water eventually reached the boat’s batteries and the chemical reaction caused a cloud of chlorine gas. The crew brought the boat to the surface so they could open the hatches to air the gas out. While on the surface, U-1206 was promptly sunk by the RAF.

During the “Phony War” between the Western Allies and Germany in 1939 and early 1940, both sides eyed Norway as a potential area of operations. The Allies wanted to cut off Germany’s supply of Swedish iron ore that was shipped thru the Norwegian port of Narvik, and ship arms and supplies to Finland who was at war with Germany’s de facto ally, the Soviet Union. (Finland surrendered in March before the plan came to fruition) Germany wanted to use Norway’s fjords for U-boat bases, and use airfields on the Norwegian Sea to secure the iron ore shipments. In early April 1940, both sides struck near simultaneously but where Allied operations (and the Norwegian response) were characterized by confusion and timidity, the German attack was characterized by decisiveness and audacity.

In the early hours of 9 April, 1940, two hundred German transport planes approached the various Scandinavian coasts. Each of the distinctive three engine Ju-52s carried a “stick” of 18 German Fallshirmjaeger (paratroopers) and a canister containing their weapons and ammunition (The Germans jumped unarmed and retrieved their weapons on the ground). The lightly armed paratroopers had to hold out against a possible overwhelming Allied response before any help could arrive by troops carried by the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) The fallshimjaegers’ vital mission was to seize five airfields that constituted the all-important initial objectives for the first contested airborne operation in history: Operation Weserubung.

Operation Weserubung was the German codename for the invasions of Norway and Denmark. It was a complicated and flawed, but tenaciously executed joint, interagency, and multinational (well, two anyway) surprise attack that had little reason to succeed, and every reason to fail. It required independent simultaneous successful actions against a series of linear unsupportive but logistically connected objectives. The plan required airborne troops to seize airfields for future Luftwaffe dominance of the sky. Simultaneously and underneath the nose of the British Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, the Kriegsmarine landed troop at five spread out target cities along the Norwegian Atlantic coast. Due to troop transport shortages, the ground troops available were woefully understrength for the tasks assigned to them. A serious failure at any point would have caused the failure of the entire operation. However, German diplomatic and informational efforts more than made up for the troop shortfall.

During the military attack, the German Foreign Ministry convincingly continued to negotiate with the Norwegians and prevented a timely full mobilization. Additionally Norwegian fascists under Vidkun Quisling sabotaged any response and assisted from within their socialist cousins from the south. Fortunately for the Germans, individual initiative from their junior officers mitigated any temporary Allied successes, and most importantly, Allied indecisiveness assured German victory.

The Allied invasion fleet was actually off of Narvik on 9 April but was recalled to Scotland in order to not offend the Norwegians, despite reports of German planes and ships nearby. It was turned around and sent back five days later. Unfortunately for the Norwegians, this five day delay meant any Allied assistance arrived long after they could be used to attack the vulnerable German enclaves in the southern portion of the country. Through dishonest and duplicitous negotiations, the Nazi Foreign Ministry prevented a full mobilization of the Norwegian Army. The Norwegian delgation continued to negotiate in good faith for days, all the way up until Gestapo agents arrested them. Furthermore, the Quislings in the government, particularly the bureaucracy, prevented the partial mobilization from being carried out efficiently. Instead of two days, it took a week for the Norwegian Army to mobilize. By then it was too late and air landed German troops poured into the country through the secured airfields.

The only Allied successes in the first few days were at sea. On the night of 9 April, five British destroyers attacked and scattered the German’s Narvik invasion force, whose ships were then hunted down and sunk by a larger task force centered on the battleship HMS Warspite. In the south, the Oslo Invasion Force but halted by Norwegian cannon protecting the entrance to the fjord, which allowed time for the Norwegian royal family, the parliament, and the treasury to escape capture. But the captain in charge of the German embassy’s security, on his own initiative, commandeered a few Norwegian Army trucks and a company of German paratroopers, and chased the Norwegian decision makers out of the country, which further delayed Norway’s response to the German invasion.

90% of German objectives were seized within 24 hours, if tenuously. Denmark fell in six hours. But even with the German’s amazing initial successes, the British, French, Polish and Norwegian troops resisted and even advanced over the next two months, especially around Narvik. It took the fall of France in June and the impending invasion of Britain for the Allies to evacuate their troops and finally surrender Norway.

The only positive outcome for the Allies was the near total annihilation of all of Germany’s destroyers and troop transports in the two months of battles against the Allied navies in the North and Norwegian Seas. Their loss forced Germany to require total control of the air over the English Channel to compensate for the lack of escorts for the slow invasion barges destined for Operation Sealion, the invasion of Great Britain.

At dawn on 7 April 1945, the crews of the fourteen remaining ships of the Japanese 2nd Combined Fleet were assembled on their decks and briefed on Operation Ten’ichigo, “Heaven One”. Now commonly known as Operation Ten-Go, the plan was a naval Kamikaze attack on the American Fifth Fleet off of Okinawa.

The last remnants of the 2nd Combined Fleet centered on the mighty battleship Yamato, which was still the largest and most powerful battleship in history. Once there, the Yamato and his escorts were to beach and become unsinkable shore batteries, with the Yamato’s massive 18” guns destroying the American invasion fleet. Each sailor was given the opportunity to stay behind, and of course none did. The Japanese task force departed Yokohama with all of the remaining fuel in port for the one way trip to Okinawa. Hundreds of aircraft Kamikaze from the second wave of Operation Kikusui No. 1 were to keep the Americans busy while they were in transit.

Fortunately for the Allies, the 2nd Combined Fleet never made it to Okinawa. Two submarine’s spotted them departing but could not engage because of the TF’s speed. The Japanese, with no air cover, planned to avoid submarine and air attack by traveling at flank speed and violently zig-zagging for the entire trip. The tactics worked for about five hours, until the first planes of three waves of over 400 American and British torpedo and dive bombers finally found them and attacked just after noon. For two hours Japanese gunners and damage control crews valiantly kept the ships afloat, but by 1400 the one sided contest was over. All of the ships were sunk and the Yamato took twelve torpedo hits and eight bomb hits before he went down. Operation Ten-Go was the last significant action in the Second World War by the Japanese Navy, which three short years earlier was the terror of the Pacific.

In 1336, Japanese warrior Kusunoki Masashige fought a brave but futile defense at the Battle of Minatogawa. The moment before his inevitable defeat, Masashige committed seppuku, ritual suicide, in front of his attackers rather than surrender or be taken prisoner. Masashige became a legend in Japanese history and his emblem, the kikusui or floating chrysanthemum, became the symbol for Japan’s struggle to death with the Allies in 1945.

On 6 April 1945, the Japanese launched the first of ten massed airborne Kamikaze strikes against the US Fifth Fleet off Okinawa. Operation Kikusui, No 1 consisted of almost 700 aircraft including 355 Kamikaze. US codebreakers knew of the attack and every fighter in the Fifth Fleet was airborne to meet them. Nonetheless, the Allied fighter patrols could only shoot down 200 or so before they reached the fleet. The northern most destroyers on radar picket took the brunt of the initial attacks. Notwithstanding orders to bypass the destroyers and hit the vulnerable carriers closer to Okinawa, most Kamikaze struck the first ships they came across. Once a “gap” was made in the picket line, Kamikaze continued on toward the fleet. 200 more were shot down by antiaircraft gunners. It wasn’t enough.

180 Kamikaze and normal strike aircraft slammed into the fleet. Despite hours and even days of epic damage control efforts, two destroyers were sunk, and four more so damaged that they were sent to scrap after the day’s battle. Four other destroyers and two destroyer escorts were so badly damaged that they required more than 30 days of repairs. One LST and two ammunition ships were destroyed, and one fleet carrier, the USS Hancock, was sent back to Pearl Harbor for repairs.

The Japanese were not pleased with results considering the resources expended. The Americans’ mastery of the fundamentals: damage control, disciplined anti-aircraft fire, radar direction, combat air patrols, intelligence, and fleet logistics provided the fleet a resilience that had prevented a disaster.

Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come.

On 22 March 1945, the last of the 180,000 men of the US Tenth Army, under US Army Lt Gen Simon Bolivar Buckner were loaded onto transports. The final ships bearing the US 1st, 2nd, and 6th Marine Divisions, and US Army’s 7th, 27th, 77th, and 96th Infantry Divisions departed the Ulithi atoll on the 1400 ships of the US Fifth Fleet that afternoon for the trip to Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands. The US Tenth Army was the largest land force under direct US Navy command in American history. On 26 March, the US Fifth Fleet arrived off Okinawa. That morning, the US 77th Infantry Division seized the Kerama Islands just west of Okinawa for an anchorage to support the main landings, and protect the vulnerable transports from small Kamikaze suicide boats.

On Easter Sunday, 1 April 1945, the US Army XXIV Corps, and US Marine III Amphibious Corps landed on the eastern shores of Okinawa to complete silence.

On paper the Japanese 32nd Army under Gen Mitsuru Ushijima had over 150,000 soldiers to defend the island of Okinawa, including tens of thousands of drafted Okinawan civilians, and thousands of school children shamed into volunteering. The number wasn’t nearly enough to cover the entire island as the Japanese did at Iwo Jima. Okinawa is 22 times the size of Iwo Jima, so Ushijima decided to defend, Peleliu style, at choke points and successive fortified lines across the southern half of the island. The Americans landed against no opposition.

The Americans seized the Kadena and Yontan airfields by nightfall. The US Tenth Army was the only US Army in the war to have its own dedicated air force, and it flew off of those air fields every minute of day light for the next 80 days. By 4 April, the Marines controlled the northern half of the island, with only small Japanese stay behind troops conducting guerilla warfare in the Marine rear areas. The Marines only finally defeated the guerillas once all Okinawan civilians in their sector were herded into internment camps. Without civilian support, the Japanese hold outs were all hunted down by the end of the campaign. The last organized Japanese force in northern Okinawa fought to the death on Mount Yae Take on 20 April.

On 16 April, the 77th Infantry Division conducted another amphibious invasion, this time the island Ie Shima. The fighting on Ie Shima was fiecre and included hand to hand combat with Japanese civilians, including women and children, armed with spears. Famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed on Ie Shima when a Japanese machine gun ambushed his jeep as he drove to the front with one 77th’s regimental commanders. A burst caught him in the forehead and he was buried on the island with the rest of the 77th’s casualties. The 77th erected a small monument, which still stands, that reads, “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.”
Though the fighting in the north was tough, the battle for southern Okinawa was in an entirely different level of Hell. The XXIV Corps was stopped cold in the broken ground north of Shuri. The defenses extended the width of Okinawa and there was nowhere for the Americans to go except into the teeth of Ushijima’s defenses. The Americans only took the Japanese advanced line when its defenders retired to the main line of resistance just a bit further south. The Army divisions were fought out by 24 April and the relatively fresh Marines of the III Amphibious Corps were sent south.

On 2 May, the skies turned cloudy and it started raining. It would stay that way until July. That same day, the Marines went on the offensive. They made almost no progress despite fierce fighting and several potential breakthroughs. The Japanese didn’t just defend, they counter attacked using tunnels and defilades in the broken terrain to move troops to the flank or even behind the Marines. Ushijima had thousands of fresh troops that were guarding southern beaches which were obviously not going to see a landing. Several Marine companies were cut off and nearly annihilated before they fought their way out of their entrapments.

The successful defense on 2-3 May against the Marines convinced Ushijima’s subordinates to pressure him into a large scale attack with tanks and beach landings behind the Marines. Ushijima knew he could not win the Battle of Okinawa, but he did believe that every day he held the Americans on Okinawa was another day that the Home Islands could prepare for their inevitable invasion. He had an entire veteran division in reserve and wanted to use them bleeding the Americans in the naturally defensible terrain of the island. But his subordinates demanded that they attack lest they lose face. Ushijima gave in.

The Japanese counter offensive was initially a complete surprise, but the landings and assaults were quickly isolated and destroyed. As Ushijima had foreseen, the offensive was a complete waste of men; men he had no way to replace. Nonetheless, for the next 45 days, the Americans ground down the Japanese in brutal attritional warfare. The superior Japanese positions endured a seemingly inexhaustible supply of American firepower. An example of the brutal and ruthless nature of the fighting was Sugar Loaf Hill, a bare 15m high bald hill that was initially a company objective for the 29th Marines. Sugar Loaf anchored the far end of the Shuri Line. Eleven assaults over seven days, 12-18 May, by three different marine regiments consumed nearly 5000 American casualties, and killed 2500 Japanese. Most American wounded at Sugar Loaf never saw a Japanese soldier. But every American casualty could be replaced while the quality of the Japanese defenders declined. On 29 May the Shuri Line was broken when the Marines secured Shuri Castle.

The remaining 30,000 troops of the 32nd Army withdrew to the Kiyan peninsula for a last stand. By this point in the battle, cut off Japanese troops were committing suicide by the thousands. A Marine landing on the peninsula resulted in nearly 1200 Japanese sailors committing suicide when they were cut off below ground. As the situation for the Japanese became untenable, the Japanese soldiers began demanding of Japanese civilians that they too commit suicide. Corrupted by propaganda that the American were going to rape and kill them anyway, many did. The sound of a grenade going off in an underground bunker was a common occurrence, and thousands of Japanese civilians jumped from the southern cliffs to avoid capture. Of the 300,000 pre-battle civilian population of Okinawa, over 100,000 were dead by mid-June, mostly by suicide.

On 18 June, while checking on troops, Buckner was killed by Japanese artillery fire and became the highest ranking American officer killed by enemy fire in the war. He was replaced by Marine Major General Roy Geiger before he was replaced by Gen Joseph Stilwell, who was in the Philippines returning from China when Buckner was killed.

On 21 June, Ushijima ordered his remaining troops to disperse and conduct guerilla operations. He committed seppuku the next day, but not before ordering his aide, Colonel Yahara, to stay alive to tell the Japanese side of the story. Yahara was the senior Japanese officer to survive Okinawa. About 14,000 Japanese soldiers surrendered during the Battle for Okinawa, but almost all were Okinawan or Japanese mainland civilians drafted just before the battle. The Americans suffered 14,000 dead and 50,000 wounded in the Battle of Okinawa, more than in the Battle of the Bulge in Europe, the largest American battle in history.

The ferocity of the Japanese defense, the American casualties, and the mass suicide of Japanese civilians on Okinawa (and the specter of a post war conflict with the Soviet Union) convinced President Truman to authorize the use of atomic bombs against Japan in lieu of direct invasion. The planners of Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, and its two subordinate operations, Operation Olympic: the invasion Kyushu, and Operation Coronet: the invasion of Honshu had projected more than a million Allied casualties subduing Japan. Truman said, “I do not want another Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.” The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August, 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later on 9 August. Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945.