Okinawa Battle Quotes

. . . the sole aim of Okinawa Karate is to teach A person to handle violence and violent individuals; whether it is tactile, mental or spiritual

Patience and Forgiveness are at the heart of A warrior's success, they help engender necessary intervals of space and time to evaluate difficult encounters.

. . . for any worthwhile martial arts skill to be pragmatic, it has to be done live, otherwise it is of limited or no use in actual combat

True Martial Arts is universal, simple and practical. Anything else is too complex to be used in combat.

Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where your woman is, that you come back to in the intervals between a greater love - the only real love - the lust for riches buried in the earth, that are your own if you can find them. Perhaps you do not call it home, even to yourself. Perhaps you call them 'my house,' 'my woman,' What if there was another 'my house,' 'my woman,' before this one? It makes no difference. This woman is enough for now. Perhaps the guns sounded too loud at Anzio or at Omaha Beach, at Guadalcanal or at Okinawa. Perhaps when they stilled again some kind of strength had been blasted from you that other men still have. And then again perhaps it was some kind of weakness that other men still have. What is strength, what is weakness, what is loyalty, what is perfidy? The guns taught only one thing, but they taught it well: of what consequence is life? Of what consequence is a man? And, therefore, of what consequence if he tramples love in one place and goes to find it in the next? The little moment that he has, let him be at peace, far from the guns and all that remind him of them. So the man who once was Bill Taylor has come back to his house, in the dusk, in the mountains, in Anahuac. ("The Moon Of Montezuma")

The battle of Okinawa had ended. Over 12,000 Americans and more than 100,000 Japanese were dead. The American flag flew only 350 miles from Japan.

As more than one Marine historian has said, it's unfortunate to the memory of the men who fought and died on Peleliu that it remains one of the lesser known and poorly understood battles of World War II

Naval and occasionally land-based air power turned the great sea battles—the fighting near Singapore, the chase of the Bismarck, the Coral Sea, Midway, the fight over the Marianas, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa—mostly into contests of carrier-based aircraft attacking with impunity any enemy ships except like kind.

Boot camp was . . . being treated like a criminal. It was like I had broken a law by joining the Marines and had been sent to reform school.

The men performed their roles like actors trapped in a morality play

The fate of the Empire truly rests on this one action,

Translated as “God Wind,” “Divine Wind” and “God Spirit,” kamikazes would sink 47 Allied vessels and damage over 300 by the end of the war, but the rise in the use of kamikaze attacks correlated the loss of the Empire’s air superiority and its waning industrial might. This method of fighting would become more common by the time Iwo Jima was fought over, and it was especially prevalent during the invasion of Okinawa. The “privilege” of being selected as a kamikaze pilot played directly into the deep-seated Japanese mindset of “death before defeat.” The pilot training manual assured each kamikaze candidate that when they eliminated all thoughts of life and death, fear of losing the earthly life can be easily overcome. Still,

Buckner.

whiskey

Perry had come to end those offenses — but more importantly to secure trading opportunities and coaling facilities and to awaken the Japanese to their "Christian obligation to join the family of Christendom," which the secretary of the Navy had confided was the mission's underlying motive.

Okinawa was the last major battle of the bloodiest war the world had ever seen. (It has been pointed out to me that, by virtue of fighting in both the Pearl Harbor attack and the Okinawa invasion, I can claim a small footnote in history for having served at the opening shots and the final battle of America’s Second World War.) The campaign claimed the lives of more than a quarter million people. Of those who died, close to 140,000 were civilians living on the island; 107,539 were Japanese servicemen; and 12,274 were U. S. servicemen. The battle pitted the greatest U. S. naval flotilla ever assembled against the most tenacious of enemies, both in the air and on the ground. In the sky, kamikaze pilots flew to their deaths as they ravaged the U. S. fleet. On the land, Japanese soldiers fought to the death rather than surrender. The radar picket ships took the biggest beating of the U. S. naval ships engaged at Okinawa, all the while protecting the rest of our ships from 1,900 kamikaze attacks. Fifteen of the picket ships were sunk; 45 were damaged. Causalties of those serving on those ships were 1,348 dead and 1,586 wounded.

incident plus such Japanese tactics as playing dead and then throwing a grenade—or playing wounded, calling for a corpsman, and then knifing the medic when he came—plus the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, caused Marines to hate the Japanese intensely and to be reluctant to take prisoners. The attitudes held toward the Japanese by noncombatants or even sailors or airmen often did not reflect the deep personal resentment felt by Marine infantrymen. Official histories and memoirs of Marine infantrymen written after the war rarely reflect that hatred. But at the time of battle, Marines felt it deeply, bitterly, and as certainly as danger itself. To deny this hatred or make light of it would be as much a lie as to deny or make light of the esprit de corps or the intense

In his book Joker One, Campbell tells how after the platoon’s first prolonged engagement, one of his Marines came up to him and said, “Sir, do you think we fought well today, sir? I mean, that was our first big fight. Would the Marines who fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, you know, be proud of us?” Campbell had to turn away and compose himself before he answered that the Marines had indeed acquitted themselves well. And as time passes, the battle for Fallujah, some of the bloodiest door-to-door fighting in history, will rank among the great battles of the Marine Corps.

When she arrived in Castine the USS Comfort was a tired, World War II vintage Hospital Ship. Her keel had been laid as a Maritime Commission C1-B hull, which was most frequently used in the construction of troop ships. Built by the Consolidated Steel Corporation in Wilmington, California, she was launched on March 18, 1943. As the USS Comfort (AH-6), a naval hospital ship, she served in the South Pacific during World War II, having a U.S. Navy crew and an Army medical staff. In 1945, the USS Comfort took part in the battle of Okinawa, and was struck by a kamikaze pilot, killing 28 of the ship’s personnel, including six nurses, and wounding 48 additional people. When she was decommissioned and struck from the Naval Vessel Register, her title was retained by the U.S. Army. Not being needed, she was taken up to the Hudson River Reserve Fleet near Bear Mountain in New York. In 1949 her title was returned to the Maritime Commission, who on August 24, 1953, assigned her to Maine Maritime Academy for use as a training ship.

Doc kept at his work. In a quiet, calm voice he told me to get a battle dressing out of his pouch and press it firmly against his face to stop the bleeding while he finished work on the wounded arm. Such was the selfless dedication of the navy hospital corpsmen who served in Marine infantry units.

In 1937, the amphibious assault doctrine was issued by the Marine Corps and ultimately adopted by the navy. But a study was a study and a manual was a manual and tests in the field were tests in the field. The only way to see if the theory worked was to attack an entrenched enemy with real action, real bodies, and real ammunition. Tarawa became that battle, marking in earnest the start of the island-hopping campaign through the central Pacific that would ultimately lead to Okinawa on the doorstep of the Japanese homeland. The great victory at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, had been epic for the Marine Corps. But the initial landing there in August of 1942, the largest in the Solomon Islands chain, had been largely unopposed. The landing on Tarawa would not be. III