4. The last hours of Vice-amiral Ota

Japanes Navy Underground Headquarters 1944-45

In the last days of the Battle of Okinawa what remained of the Japanese Navy was now in hiding at the bottom of the underground base. Vice Admiral Minoru Ota and about 4,000 of his men were sailors without boats who had no combat training on the ground. Missing weapons and ammunition they made night sorties to desperately try to brake the enemy by blowing themselves up with hand grenades amidst American soldiers* or by attacking with spears made of bayonets and wood sticks. In the last hours of the base, part of the troops and officers committed suicide. I do not have the details, but we know that the high-ranking officers shot themselves in the head and most of the other soldiers committed suicide by grenade or by any other way they found. The museum's brochure mentions that the remains of about 2,400 people have been found in the underground tunnels.

Imagine: there is the battlefield with the deafening sounds of explosions, the smoke that invades the tunnels, the screams of the wounded, the flamethrowers, the howling of the officers, the contradictory orders, the cold, the heat, the blood, the empty bellies, the lack of water, the lack of sleep and light... Stress, fear, panic, despair, threats. Indeed, under these circumstances, many could have commited suicide to honor their debt to their country and end this Hell. Adding to this context of apocalypse  was the Japanese government that was haranguing its people to defend the Japanese soil at all costs, even if there would be no living Japanese on the surface of the earth! The propaganda propagated on all radio waves, exhorting the crowds. The military marched to the slogan: "A ship sunk for a plane, a ship for a speedboat, ten men or a vehicle for a soldier! "...

Picture: underground tunnel Headquarters section

One year before, in April 1944, in anticipation of the American attack, the construction units had been deployed south of Naha in the Oroku region to build fortifications. The underground network housed the naval forces and several aviation squadrons. 10 000 soldiers lived in the entire underground network. In spring 45 the tunnels were seriously damaged by the American bombing and subsequently in June, during the ground warfare, by explosives and flamethrowers. Since the end of the war some tunnels had been restored and in 1970 300m of tunnels were open to the public in the Navy Headquarters sector.

* Japanese called them the “Nikudan”, human bullets                                                                                                              GO TO NEXT PAGE