America and Russia. All we followed, and really all we cared about, was the battle lines advancing, the bulging and ever expanding Allied Fronts squeezing Germany, culminating in the surrender of the German Armies to Montgomery and Patton, and the Russians storming Berlin. Once the European War was over, we knew that all the Allies attention would now be paid to Japan that already was starving and falling apart, with no fuel, so that it was now a rarity to ever see any vehicle on the road or any Japanese plane in the sky. And all the time there was the relentless bombing campaign with B29 Superfotresses pounding their cities day and night with huge incendiary firestorms.
So at the beginning of May there was the end of the European War and VE - Day and we all gave a cheer. There was no toasting in either beer or champagne, but everyone was overjoyed, and our eyes only now had to concentrate on the pace of the Americans “Island Hopping” campaign.
In February following the terrible resistance met in trying to take Saipan, the next target nearer to Japan was the small island of Iwo Jima in the Bonins. Its value would be in the establishment of an airstrip for fighter planes to protect the B29s from Saipan attacking the next target , the Island of Okinawa just south of Japan proper. This island would then become the main base for the final assault on Japan. To reduce American casualties to a minimum, Admiral Spruance kept up a weeks long saturation shelling with 16guns from his battleships and pounded the volcanic island relentlessly with everything he could from his other naval vessels. In spite of this it took a month on Iwo Jima to overcome the Japanese tenacious resistance in caves built out of the rocky volcanic rock on an island only about 7 miles long , and 6,000 US servicemen were to tragically die in its capture with a further 28,000 seriously wounded..
Once acquired the next stage was the attack on Okinawa itself with a major seaborne invasion. To assist the Americans with their two enormous Task forces, the British now with two battleships and four fleet carriers
and escort carriers with 250 aircraft, five cruisers and attendant destroyers all arrived off Formosa to help in the battle. The landings at Okinawa started on the 23rd March and the task forces protecting the invasion were subjected to an unprecedented attack by Japanese Suicide (Kamikaze or ‘divine wind’) bombers which flew 1,900 sorties into the combined fleets. In spite of an army of 450,000 men taking part, and all the Combined American and British fleets, it still took 3 months to subdue the island with hundreds of thousands of casualties all round. The cost in loss of life in landing in Japan proper was going to be a forbidding prospect.
I will mention here that a month after the war was finally over in September, a couple of our inmates Mr & Mrs Scott were out walking in the country, the day we were suddenly at two hours notice, told to depart from our camp. Instead of following us on, they returned to Australia via Okinawa where they spent a couple of days in transit. Four months after the area they were in had been fought over, there were still planes spraying the wrecked city with disinfectant, and the nauseous foetid smell of rotting flesh from the bodies in the hot humid summer air, still permeated through the ruins and rubble. I remember meeting up with them about a year later in the Vanderbilt Hotel In Gloucester Road, London and he said that no one could ever have imagined the stench and just what conditions were like in Okinawa 4 months after that bitter battle.
