Much friendlier than expected –
Okinawa civilians prove docile, most respectful to Americans
By William McGaffin
WITH THE U.S. TENTH ARMY ON OKINAWA (April 2, delayed) – The civilians of Okinawa are friendly.
That has been our experience to date with the hundreds who are coming into our lines, bowing respectfully, with grave faces that break into smiles when we smile at them.
It is my guess that the docile attitude of the 1,200 or more whom I saw this afternoon will be typical of the entire civilian population here. There are approximately 450,000 of them.
Through an interpreter I talked with a group of civilians. They were Yakusho Imi Yakusho – farmers – from villages we have overrun in our sensational two-day advance. Among them were a 35-year-old man with his wife, three children and 81-year-old father.
The husband, barefoot and dressed in a blue kimono and American style snap-brim felt hat, said Okinawa was “overjoyed” because the Americans had come, although they were very frightened at first of “bakugeki imi bakugeki” – which was their words for “bombing by planes.”
Few had been injured, however. They had taken refuge in caves, heeding our pamphlet warning three days before the landing.
Three and a half million pamphlets were dropped, instructing the natives in Japanese to clear out of the towns and stay away from the airfields because we were going to bomb and shell them. On the reverse side was conveyed in picture language – a huge fleet of U.S. planes and ships of all types converging on Okinawa.
Many civilians came in with pamphlets clutched in their hands. Their eyes still were wide with astonishment. They said they never had seen so many ships and planes before.
Provost Marshal Lt. Col. Floyd Stephenson of Washington, D.C., said:
They are coming in much faster than we expected. We thought they’d be hostile or at least critical and distrustful of us. After all their only word about us has come from the Japanese.
The colonel said:
But they are not real Japanese. They have a heavy Chinese strain. The Jap overlords made them very conscious of their “inferior” position. All they have known has been years of oppression. It is possible they resent this more than we expected.
The Jap military went off leaving these people without food or water. They said until we came, they had had none for 10 days.
Fed by Americans
I watched a long line of them getting some of the K-rations that our troops are eating. Most of them were barefoot and in kimonos. Invariably each one, whether a two-year-old, or a gray-bearded elder, would bow politely to the Marine as the package of K-ration was doled out.
And each time the Marine solemnly bowed back.
The Marines say that “they are very simple and amiable and always think of the old folks first.”
Many civilians are still hiding fearfully in caves, but they come out without making trouble when our men go up to the entrances and talk to them. There have been no acts of sabotage.