US Military Okinawa Guide-This is an uber Rare “confidential” guide to Okinawa prepared by the US military in the lead-up to the April 1945 Invasion. Wait until you see this!! The booklet includes 127 pages of text, maps, photographs and illustrations. Page 1 provides an index. Pages 2-6 include a summary of Okinawa Gunto, the main island, and a map focusing on the installations on islands between Okinawa and Kyushu. Pages 7-34 include several maps and many aerial photographs of the island, and includes sections such as “Climatology”, “Population”, “Health and Sanitation”, “Physical Geography”, and even “Poisonous Snakes”, the last a major concern prior to the invasion. Pages 35-64 discuss industry, transport, and navigational information regarding the islands, as well as including many detailed navigational charts. The balance of the work focuses on target analysis and the anticipated strategy and tactics of the Japanese defenders, with a brief index and bibliography in the final pages of the booklet.
It must be noted that the leaf bearing pages 3-4 was removed prior to our acquisition of the booklet. These bore two full-page maps, one of “Principal Installations Nansei Shoto”, Nansei Shoto being the island group surrounding Okinawa; the other a “Distance Chart” centered on Okinawa.
The booklet was rated “Confidential”, and only some 1200 copies were printed. Fortunately, this copy has laid in loose the two-sheet cover memo listing all recipients and the numbers of copies they were assigned. These included among others senior officers in Washington; dozens of Army and Marine battalions and Marine air wings; each battleship, cruiser and destroyer in the Pacific fleet; and senior officers as far afield as India. The memo instructs recipients to destroy the booklet “when no longer of value”, and indeed today it is extremely rare: OCLC lists just two institutional holdings, and I find no record of another copy having appeared on the antiquarian market. In all, a remarkable survival of the War in the Pacific.
Okinawa provided unique strategic advantages as a necessary steppingstone to the invasion of the Japanese homeland, and it became clear from early on in the Second World War that victory required Allied control of the island. The United States Army and Marine Corps landed on Okinawa on April 1, 1945, as the specially created 10th Army. The Battle of Okinawa, codenamed Operation Iceberg, lasted for 82 days after the landing, to June 1945. The size of the forces involved, and the ferocity of the defense rendered it the most destructive battle in the Pacific Theatre, claiming the lives of over 14,000 American and over 77,000 Japanese personnel. More than one hundred thousand Okinawans perished during and after the battle, many forced into suicide by the Japanese occupiers. This was the last major battle in the Pacific and was the closest American troops would get to the Japanese homeland, prior to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This campaign required extensive coordination and planning due to the staggering numbers of troops (more than 200,000), hundreds of ships, thousands of airplanes, and mountains of material required to capture the island. To inform and guide this endeavor, this booklet was produced in November of 1944, five months before the invasion, and issued under the imprint of Admiral Chester Nimitz, American Commander-in-Chief in the Pacific. It provides extensive information, in both text and graphic formats, regarding geography, population, targets, assumed defensive tactics, navigational, and much more. This source is important both for its breadth and specificity, being a work that would have been invaluable to anyone involved in the planning and execution of the battle, from high-level officers to pilots on bombing raids.
A note printed in red under the table of contents provides evidence of the fluidity of events and the urgency behind the booklet’s publication. It mentions recent strikes on the Okinawan capital at Naha, by which “many of the installations identified herein will probably be found to have been destroyed. However, no information is now available as to the exact areas razed nor the extent of the destruction. It was therefore necessary to include herein a full target analysis without regard to damage.
References: OCLC 26733740, giving holdings only at Brown University and the Hoover Institution (Stanford)