19451776 Club
Organized resistance ends on Okinawa; 82 days of fighting cost 50,000 American casualties
General Ushijima's Thirty-Second Army is broken at the island's southern tip, and planners in Washington now have their grim estimate of what invading Japan will cost.
By the summer of 1945, American planners were calculating the cost of invading the Japanese home islands — and Okinawa was the dress rehearsal that terrified them. For 82 days, U.S. Tenth Army ground through Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima's Thirty-Second Army across the island's fortified ridges and rain-soaked valleys, losing roughly 50,000 men while killing around 100,000 Japanese troops. Organized resistance collapsed on June 21, 1945, in the Mabuni area at the island's southern tip; Ushijima committed suicide the following day. At least 149,425 Okinawan civilians died — caught between two armies, coerced into mass suicides, and killed by starvation, artillery, and direct violence on both sides…
