What Happened To The Dead At The Battle Of Okinawa?
Few battles in human history were as brutal as the U.S. invasion of Okinawa — but what happened to the bodies of the countless soldiers and civilians who died?
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00:00Few battles in human history were as brutal as the U.S. invasion of Okinawa,
00:04but what happened to the bodies of the countless soldiers and civilians who died?
00:08The Battle of Okinawa was the last major conflict of World War II,
00:12ending a mere two months before the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
00:17On the Western Front, Germany surrendered in May 1945, right in the middle of the battle,
00:21meaning that Okinawa was essentially the conventional combat capstone to both the
00:25Pacific Theater of Operations and the war as a whole. It was also one of the most brutal battles
00:30of the war. Japanese soldiers proved more than willing to defend the island or die trying.
00:35Kamikaze rockets, torpedoes, ships, and planes bombarded U.S. vessels,
00:39and the situation on land wasn't much better. U.S. Marine Eugene Sledge described the battle
00:44in his book With the Old Breed, which would later become the basis for the HBO series The Pacific.
00:49He wrote,
00:50The scene was nothing but mud. Shellfire flooded craters with their silent,
00:54pathetic, rotting occupants, knocked out tanks and Amtraks, and discarded equipment.
00:58Utter desolation.
01:00There's not a day goes by that I don't think about it."
01:03Nearly a quarter of a million Japanese soldiers and civilians died over 83 days on Okinawa,
01:08and the U.S. suffered one of the costliest battles in the country's history.
01:12In fact, the fighting was so vicious that it left President Truman rattle,
01:15as Joseph Whelan explained in his book Bloody Okinawa, The Last Great Battle of World War II.
01:21Whelan wrote,
01:22They could see how costly it would be to invade the mainland.
01:25The island would just be a charred cinder.
01:27In this sense, the brutality of Okinawa, as well as Iwo Jima before it,
01:31directly influenced the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan.
01:35Death was everywhere on Okinawa. The battlefield was full of the residue of battle. As one 77th
01:41Infantry Division soldier once wrote, including the bodies of Japanese soldiers and civilians,
01:45lying torn asunder. Ghastly as it sounds, the front lines were close enough for the
01:50living to head out every single day, retrieve what remains they could, and bring them back
01:54for burial. These remains were interred at temporary cemeteries further away from the
01:58combat areas. There were six such cemeteries in total across Okinawa.
02:03And they were just snuffed out.
02:08After Japan officially surrendered on September 2, 1945, the United States Department of War
02:13set about retrieving the men who'd been buried at these temporary cemeteries.
02:17In total, authorities recovered 10,243 such individuals and sent their remains to Saipan,
02:23north of Guam in the Pacific Ocean. At that point, next of kin determined whether they
02:27wanted the remains sent back to the U.S. or kept at a military cemetery overseas.
02:32Official death tolls for U.S. troops from Okinawa reached about 12,500,
02:377,500 ground units, and 5,000 soldiers. Given the number of bodies recovered,
02:41this means that over 2,000 Americans never made it to the U.S.'s temporary cemeteries.
02:46The Battle of Okinawa might have been the final major battle of World War II,
02:49but it was the first and last battle of the war fought within Japan's national borders.
02:53Okinawa itself had been absorbed into Japan in 1875. Prior to that, Okinawans were their own
02:59people who had lived in their own kingdom for over 400 years. When the U.S. attacked Okinawa
03:04in 1945, all of its history ended up in the crossfire, as well as hundreds of thousands
03:09of civilians. Many more Okinawan civilians died during the Battle of Okinawa than Japanese
03:14soldiers — up to 150,000 civilians versus more than 70,000 soldiers. As the battle raged on,
03:21locals could do nothing but flee south through active battlefields, until there was nowhere
03:25left to run. PBS quotes one survivor as saying,
03:28"...we saw dead bodies, crying and screaming people, and a person who was begging to be
03:33shot to death. It was total chaos." It fell to those same locals to gather the
03:37dead after the war ended. They built monuments around Okinawa as they burned the fallen until
03:42the Japanese government finally intervened in 1955. Uncollected remains were gathered together
03:47in Naha, Okinawa's capital, but the ossuary there proved too small. The bones were then moved to
03:52Itoman, south of Naha, where they were collectively cremated and interred as part of a
03:56memorial complex. Not all of those who died during the Battle of Okinawa were moved to
04:00temporary cemeteries on the U.S. side or collected and burned on the Japanese side.
04:05Numerous sources provided glimpses into the worst possible outcome for many of the deceased on both
04:10sides — desecration. Teeth, skulls, and ears were the U.S. military's most commonly collected form
04:16of so-called war trophies, and often carried around by combatants and, in some cases,
04:20sent back home. Life magazine's May 22, 1944 Picture of the Week famously featured a young
04:26U.S. woman gazing at a Japanese skull on her desk, sent to her by her Navy boyfriend — a
04:31staggering testament to how normalized abuse of human remains became during the Pacific War.
04:36For 70 years, they didn't hear anything, and then they'd get a phone call to say
04:40their relative had been found. It was like their father was coming home.
04:45The remains of those who fell in Okinawa continue to be found to this day,
04:48largely thanks to active search efforts. In 2021, for example, eight individuals were
04:53found in a cave in Okinawa's south. An Okinawan official told the Asahi Shimbun,
04:58In the past seven to eight years, the remains of one to three people are typically found
05:02at a single location. Finding more than five remains is unusual.
05:06More recently, in 2023, the remains of 46 women and one child were discovered together.
05:11The non-profit Kuentai USA, a joint Japanese-American venture, remains devoted to
05:16uncovering and repatriating those still unaccounted for on Okinawa and other Pacific
05:21islands. Formed in 2014, they found 16,000 soldiers in the Philippines and 800 in Saipan,
05:27to date. They have since turned their attention to Okinawa. The organization
05:31even holds a list of named, still-missing U.S. servicemen.
05:35The clock is ticking, too. In 2021, the Japanese Ministry of Defense announced a
05:39plan to build a new U.S. military base on Okinawa. Public protests aimed at the development pointed
05:44out that construction is likely to damage the remains of those killed during the war.
05:49Even the remains left elsewhere are now almost 80 years old and rapidly decomposing.
05:54As Kuentai USA says,
05:56If the remains are not repatriated sooner,
05:58there would be nothing to identify when the remains are all disappeared.