Eliot: Price Okinawa cost not too high
Compares casualties with Iwo and Saipan battles
By Maj. George Fielding Eliot
While we do not as yet have the full breakdown of the American casualties on Okinawa, Adm. Chester W. Nimitz has made public enough figures so that some comparisons can usefully be drawn. These comparisons suggest that the Okinawa campaign has not been as costly as hasty assumptions have led many of us to believe.
In the first place, we have – in comparing Okinawa with Iwo Jima and Saipan – tended to forget that on Okinawa we were using many more troops than we did at either of the other two places. Hence comparisons based on total casualty figures are misleading; a better comparison may be had by using percentages.
The total numbers of troops and navy personnel employed are not available. But we do know that we used seven divisions on Okinawa as against three divisions at Iwo Jima and at Saipan. We will not go far wrong if we assume hat the amount of naval and air support, special service units, and so on, will be roughly proportionate to the number of divisions employed.
Compares casualty figures
Now let us look at the casualty figures.
| Total casualties |
Killed and missing |
Wounded |
| Okinawa |
11,260 |
33,769 |
| Iwo |
4,630 |
15,308 |
| Saipan |
3,426 |
13,099 |
| Average casualties per division engaged |
Killed and missing |
Wounded |
| Okinawa |
1,608 |
4,824 |
| Iwo |
1,543 |
5,103 |
| Saipan |
1,142 |
4,366 |
If you look only at the first two columns, the natural tendency is to say: “Good Lord, it is getting worse as we go along. At this rate the conquest of Japan will cost us millions.”
But if you also look at the second two columns, you realize that in proportion to the numbers engaged, the losses on Okinawa were about the same as on Iwo, and not vastly greater than on Saipan.
95,000 Japs defended Okinawa
But there is still another yardstick which must be applied to these figures, and that is the number of days that the fighting continued. We cleaned up Saipan in 24 days and Iwo in 26. It took us 82 days to possess ourselves of Okinawa. The reason is, of course, that Okinawa is a much larger place than either Iwo or Saipan, was more heavily garrisoned, and we had to use much larger forces. Iwo was defended by 24,000 Japanese, Saipan by 30,000, while on Okinawa, including a certain number of local selectees, we had to deal with 95,000 of the enemy.
On both Iwo and Saipan, the fighting was conducted in one sustained, intensive operation, almost without pause. On Okinawa, there were operational pauses here and there, as is inevitable in any campaign involving an entire army.
Moreover, it should be remembered that in the Okinawa campaign, we were fighting much closer to the mainland of Japan and therefore to the sources of Japanese power – especially airpower – than we were either on Iwo or Saipan.
And by the time we got to Okinawa, the Japanese were really beginning to get their suicide air attacks going on a large scale. Hence at Okinawa we had a disproportionately high ratio of naval casualties.
