Talk:Battle of Okinawa/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

MediaWiki anniversary event

An event in this article is a April 1 selected anniversary (may be in HTML comment).

Deleted POV statement

I just deleted:

", which never happened due to the controversial decision to use the atomic bomb."

Can we really say this for sure? -- Taku 06:39, Nov 3, 2003 (UTC)

That's the way I always heard it. I used to work with a guy who said the bomb saved his life - he was assigned to the force being prepared to invade Kyushu, which was expected to incur massive casualties. Stan 06:56, 3 Nov 2003 (UTC)

But I have heared different from Japanese. I think it is POV to state that as if it were true. -- Taku 07:28, Nov 3, 2003 (UTC)

Even if the Japanese disagree, that's only their POV. The alternatives to invading the bigger islands were dropping the bomb or surrendering. The latter would only be considered after American forces suffered signifcantly more casualties (in other words, after another invasion.) -- M4v3rik 15:25, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)

it could also be called only American POV to state that it was the dropping of the bomb which resulted in surrender, and there are documents and witnesses who say otherwise, and that the Japanese had already offered surrender at least three times before the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima.

On the contary. Without taking a stand on the extremely complex isssues entailed in the decision to drop an atomic bomb on Japan, the fact is that the Japanese War Cabinet refused steadfastly to entertain any notion of surrender, even after being told about the extraordinarily powerful American weapon. Japanese military code of honor, which was one of the strongest in the world, refused to allow such talk, even when the Emperor himself advised in its favor at Cabinet meetings. The Emperor was more concerned with the quality of life of his subjects, while the military acted in accordance with its ancient Honor Code. Even after the atomic bombs were both dropped, the Cabinet did not want to surrender. It was only with the extraordinary broadcast of the Emperor's own voice in Japanese radio, that the decision to surrender to the Allies was rendered palatable. Again, I am not taking any stand on the decision to deploy nuclear weapons against hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. But the facts regarding the Japanese military establishment, here described briefly, surely played a role in Truman's decision. 66.108.4.183 12:56, 9 August 2006 (UTC) Allen Roth

Buckner

At the end it says that "[Buckner] was the highest ranking American to die during the war." Is that true? Leslie J. McNair was also a lieutenant general; was he junior to Buckner? —wwoods And near the beginning it says "At the very end of the campaign, Buckner was killed by ricocheting shell fragments, becoming one of the most senior US casualties in the entire war." So was he the highest ranking death? Needs to be clarified.

The article is correct in stating that he was the highest ranking American officer killed by enemy fire. General Malin Craig died of natural causes; Lieutenant General Leslie J. McNair was killed by "friendly fire" from American aircraft, and is therefore considered to be the most senior officer killed in action; and Lieutenant General Frank Maxwell Andrews was killed in a plane crash. All were senior to Buckner, but did not die as a result of enemy fire. Hawkeye7 22:16, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Size/detail of article

It's surprising that this is such a short article, considering its historical significance. In particular, I think there should be more on the naval operations, which were epic and attracted a massive wave of kamikaze attacks.Grant65 (Talk) 08:30, May 14, 2005 (UTC)

Naval Operations

I agree with the above - what about the huge naval battle, including the involvement of the British_Pacific_Fleet? SpinnakerMagic July 27 2005

I also agree that there should be more on the naval operations.Brendenhull 13:38, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Civilian casualties

I changed the deaths from 100,000 to 150,000 which is what i have heard repeated in the past in media. I have an academic source below.. what do folk think/does any one have the books for first-hand info? [1] -max rspct 17:33, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Speaking of civilian casualties, why does it say "76,000+ soldiers killed and 27,000 civilians killed, 7,455 surrendered/captured (2,300 Japanese), 150,000+ civilians killed" in the chart under Japanese casualties? --Steven 5:17, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

The current figures do seem rather confused. John Keegan gives the following figures in The Second World War (ISBN 0-7126-7384-2):

• Japanese:
  • 70,000-160,000 civilians died
  • 7,400 troops captured
  • 110,000 troops died
  • 16 ships lost
  • 7,800 aircraft lost
• American:
  • 4000 died from army divisions
  • 2938 died from Marine Corps
  • 763 aircraft lost
  • 38 ships lost

-- Ewx

Okay, I changed the table using the above information. But I'm missing the date for the reference -- Steven 00:38, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I have another book Okinawa 1945- The last Battle of Osprey is well detailed and have more accurate info about the casualties sustained and the Kamikaze attacks in the battle.

I will finish reading it and add the information i have just talked. If you have another book tell me. Miguel

Citation and POV concerns

Where are the quotes in the "Quotes" section from? Did I miss the citation completely? Also, this article feels a little POV to me, biased in favor of the Americans. Very little is mentioned about the effect of the battle on the land and people of Okinawa and other Ryukyu Islands. Turly-burly 04:29, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Naval Warfare and the Yamato

I draw your attention to this section:

"Shortly before the battle, the Japanese battleship Yamato was sunk, by American aircraft, on her trip to Okinawa in the disastrous Operation Ten-Go. The Japanese had a plan to beach Yamato on Okinawa's shore, and to use her as a land battery. Widespread rumors that the ship was only given enough fuel for a one-way trip are false; Feifer debunks this (references)."

That portion is in the section labeled "before April 1st". However, the Yamato was launched on April 6th and sunk on April 7th. In addition, the mention of fuel is misleading... Feifer actually tells less simple story. (the following is from memory, but its recent memory) Those fueling the Yamato were given orders to only give the Yamato fuel for a one-way trip. However, hesisant to secure a death sentence for the largest warship ever built, the fuelers frantically searched all of Kure for fuel, finally managing to get enough fuel from various sources for a return trip for the Yamato. As there is no section on naval warfare, and thus nowhere to place a revised version of the above portion, I am deleting it. Branman515 23:58, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Dates of Battle

The dates of Battle (per GlobalSecurity.org):

• Beginning: "The invasion began on 01 April 1945 when 60,000 troops (two Marine and two Army divisions) landed with little opposition."
• Ending: "The so called "mopping up" fighting between 23 and 29 June ..."
• Signing: "The document ending the Battle of Okinawa was signed on what is now Kadena Air Base on 07 September 1945."

This information is the basis for a revert of a change of dates to March 23 and June 23. —ERcheck @ 14:37, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Actually, it was hoped the Yamato could smash it's way through the US fleet's defenses in combination with support from kamikazes and destroy the US carriers before they could escape.

"symbolic"?

"the bombs were a powerful symbolic display of American power", in the penultimate paragraph, ignores the fact that if we took the time to build more bombs we could have done vastly more damage than we did (if that is possible), at relatively little cost and very few American casualties. it was only sensible for the Japanese to correctly assume this. David R. Ingham 06:13, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

British Involment and What Ships?

The article does not mention the involment of the British Carrier Force TF-57, and the complex causalties section is gone!!! To made things worse the article itself is not good, it lack of important details considering such a important battle. --Unknown Author.

I have heard that 40 carriers (including 4 from Great Britain and her commonwealth) and 18 battleships were present. If this is so, surely this puts Okinawa as the largest amphibious assault ever. There must be a list of ships somewhere? --Author Dr W A D Jack

I can't find a page on Wikipedia that lists all of the ships that took part in the invasion. British Pacific Fleet lists the ships from Great Britain and Commonwealth that took part in the overall compaign. http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_okinawa1.html#usnavy gives some information on size of the naval forces present. --Ambulnick (talk) 11:58, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Comment in the article

The following comment was placed in the article. I have moved it to the talk page.

"JaimeHistory Note: A Japanese Army Division in 1945 typically consisted of about 10,000 men. Thus, the above reference to a 100,000 stong 32nd Army consisting of only 3 divisions and 1 independent brigade does not add up. There must have been many other units."

I make no claim as to the validity or invalidity of this comment whatsoever; but it did not belong in the article in its present form. A knowledgeable editor should evaluate it and proceed from there. Nimur 17:24, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Japanese 32nd Army

According to historian Antoni Wolny (in his Okinawa, 1945, can be found here in Russian http://militera.lib.ru/h/wolny/index.html), the japanese regulars on the island consisted of 80 thousand men, armed with 27 tanks, 250 aircraft, 400 motor boats with kamikazes, 287 field guns, 126 mortars, 110 anti-tank guns, 223 anti-aircraft guns and 1541 machineguns (medium and heavy). Those forces were to be supported by 4265 aircraft, a battleship, a cruiser and 8 destroyers. With respect, Ko Soi IX 06:02, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Japanese diehards

Weren't there thousands of Japanese who continued to hold out in the tunnels, many were buried alive, and actually hundreds surrendered only after the war ended? --HanzoHattori 10:18, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

On a similar note, something like half of the Japanese prisoners from Okinawa were actually from an auxiliary force of some 20,000 civilian militiamen, not IJA regulars. With that in mind and looking at the numbers from various battles, the only reason there were a relatively large number of Japanese prisoners at Okinawa was because we faced a large Japanese force which would logically result in more prisoners rather than any breakdown in their military discipline. Kensai Max 06:15, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Misuse of the term "Pyhrric" victory

Okinawa was not Pyhrric. It was extremely costly but in terms of casualties, the Americans losses were far lower absolutely and relatively to the Japanese ones. A Pyhrric victory cripples the victory's warmaking capacity--the reverse was true. The Americans, however, lacked the *will* to force another such bloodbath. I think this should be relabeled "costly" Allied victory, not "Pyhrric." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.242.22.77 (talk) 05:11, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Right, not a Pyrrhic victory. Wrong about American will to fight. Binksternet 06:50, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. I would go further and say that the Americans, far from lacking the will for another bloodbath, were willing to accept one. Hawkeye7 11:08, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

The Allies were deadly serious about invading Japan after Okinawa - the Allied leadership was willing to accept high casualties if Japan didn't surrender after the atomic bombs. --Nick Dowling 23:48, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Taking 70,000+ trained American soldiers and sailors out of action (KIA/WIA/MIA) to eliminate a comparably-sized enemy garrison that could have been bypassed sounds pretty pyrrhic to me - Okinawa was certainly more costly to the United States in terms of men and materiel than it was to Japan and more importantly delayed the Allied advance by some two months from the original timetable, giving the Japanese precious time to prepare for an invasion of the Home Islands. How many American lives would those two months have meant had we launched Operation Downfall instead of just nuking Japan? More than lives, the result of the battle itself was far from certain - the Olympic landings could have easily been one of the bloodiest disasters in military history. That's the real question as to whether we had un-done ourselves by winning on Okinawa. Kensai Max 20:41, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

The objective of the campaign was not to destroy the Japanese garrison but to establish an air and naval base close to Japan from which operations against the Japanese home islands could be supported. In this, the value of Okinawa exceeded all hope. The alternatives, the invasion of Formosa or the establishment of an enclave on Chinese mainland, were considered long and hard and ultimately rejected as being more costly. The campaign on Okinawa cost the Japanese more men and material than the Allies. The outcome was never in doubt. The Japanese had no means of reinforcing their garrison; while the Americans could always reinforce. Therefore, it was only a matter of time before the Japanese garrison was destroyed; the only issue was how much the Japanese garrison could extract in payment for the islands. The Allies remained committed to invading Japan, and again the outcome would never have been in doubt. Hawkeye7 03:21, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Spoken like Douglas MacArthur himself. That's the kind of bravado that would have killed a million Americans on Kyushu and Honshu and led to articles on Wikipedia on the present state of the Imperial Japanese military. 128.153.211.154 16:28, 9 November 2007 (UTC) (Kensai Max here)

Estimates of Civilian Casualties

It seems that the extremely wide ranges given for estimates of civilian casualties needs some substantiation if this article is to truly be useful on the subject. Given that the civilian casualties are estimated to be almost thirty times the U.S. military casualties, one has to wonder what the situation was that generated so many deaths (it's just not really addressed in the article, as written). 76.103.155.148 02:11, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

References cleanup

Some of the sections in this article aren't as well-referenced as other sections are, and there's at least one parenthetical citation. --健次(derumi)^talk 16:34, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Buckner

From my readings there seems to be some controversy over Buckner's service in Okinawa. It appears that many of his subordinates during the Battle of Okinawa felt Buckner was not fit to command, and that excessive causalities on both sides resulted. Surprisingly, in his memoirs, General Douglas MacArthur also stated the same about other battles as U.S. forces moved toward Okinawa and Japan. Has anyone analyzed the end of the Pacific War from this perspective?

Note: there was also a eugenics program in Japan that targeted individuals with inferior genetics. This may be important if we take a closer look at the fact that the genocide that took place in Okinawa cleared out the poorest of the Okinawans. Coincidence? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.2.138.203 (talk) 07:59, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Regarding the recent Atrocity additions

"... to believe that U.S. soldiers were barbarians who committed horrible atrocities (such as the U.S. practice of mutilating the dead), killed their families and themselves to avoid capture."

The above sentence doesn't seem to follow any sort of sense. "(such as the U.S. practice of mutilating the dead)" appears to have been added in, rather arbitrarily, in an attempt to make the article less favorable to an American POV. But one can only guess as to why families would kill themselves because Americans would... mutilate their dead bodies.

Also, I'm having difficulty finding any sources for the supposed mass rape of the Okinawan population by American soldiers, outside of that single citation. One would think that 10,000 women raped, by American forces, would have press widely and readily accessible. I'm also having difficulty finding sources (aside from the same single citation) for the "general practice" of rape against Japanese women by American forces. Perhaps I'm simply looking in the wrong places but, if so, this is certainly a well-kept secret. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.121.178.166 (talk) 09:16, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Well, if you'd read the article in question you'd have seen the following sentence: Hoyt in "Japan’s war: the great Pacific conflict" argues that the allied practice of mutilating the Japanese dead and taking pieces of them home was exploited by Japanese propaganda very effectively, and "contributed to a preference to death over surrender and occupation, shown, for example, in the mass civilian suicides on Saipan and Okinawa after the Allied landings". Personally I don't find it at all difficult to imagine that if you have an enemy where this is "picture of the week" in one of the largest periodicals, a Congressman gives his president a letter-opener carved out of human bone etc, it would be quite easy for the local Japanese press to convince the population that the enemy was completely barbaric, perhaps leading the civilians to believe that it would be better to die by their own hand rather than wait for the enemy to kill them his way. Certainly Japanese conscripts had little hope for survival[2],[3]

As for the rapes, the source (A HNET review of a book by Peter Schrijvers) seems reliable to me (who inserted it). Other historians who have investigated American rapes of Japanese are Yuki Tanaka and John Dower. You can also check Joanna Bourke, An Intimate history of Killing, London, Granta Books, 1999, p. 354.

The rapes are no secret, it's rather that people probably prefer to read sanitized fairytales about the greatest generation such as those penned by Stephen Ambrose. There's no profit in writing about the darker side of war, and can be bad for the career. There are many myths that people don't want shattered. [4], [5], [6], [7],[8], [9], [10], [11]

The history of American rapes in Europe was not even possible to publish in the U.S.(Taken by Force by J. Robert Lilly). But I suppose that as the last veterans die off there will be less need to protect their image, and more historians will start investigating such topics. Cheers--Stor stark7 ^Talk 23:01, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

It's lucky that Sweden wasn't subjected to the terror of American rape and occupation, isn't it? After all, neutrality allowed the Swedes to get rich supplying the Reich with raw materials right up until 1945. It's so much nicer to sit on the sidelines and pontificate afterward rather than getting involved in the ugliness that is war.169.253.4.21 (talk) 22:16, 29 April 2008 (UTC)TexxasFinn

Dear TexxasFinn, I do not understand your comment. Yes, I'm glad women and girls in Sweden were spared the fate of being subjected to rapists. Surely you must agree? In fact it was very close that the Allied invasion plans would have made Sweden into a battle-field: Sweden_during_World_War_II#Potential_Allied_invasion. You seem to have a few misconceptions here, that perhaps I can cure. Sweden did not "get rich" during the war. All it did was keep its industry intact. In fact, after the war, when the U.S. shut down the German industry the Swedish economy was as harmed as everybody else's in Europe was through loosing its main and key trading partner.[12],[13] I'm glad the Americans thanks to the Communists changed their mind after a few years. Lets hope not too many starved to death in Europe because of it. It was by in the 50's and 60's being able to supply products and materials that were needed to rebuild Germany and the rest of Europe that Sweden (temporarily) got rich. Also, you seem to imply that Sweden should have joined the Allies? Why? True, we bowed to whoever were strongest, when the Germans were winning we aided the Germans, but when the Allies were winning we aided the Allies. We traded with all, and spied for the Allies. After the war we extradited Baltic refugees to the nice Allie from the East, to be shot immediately or if lucky sent to Gulag. But again why should we have joined the Allies? As far as we could tell it was a resource war, Japan needed resources, primarily oil, the U.S. and the European countries were in control of that oil through their forces of occupation/colonial troops. Hell, after the war the Dutch even spent half of their Marshall plan aid on troops to try to reconquer Indonesia with it oilfields. Why should Sweden side with such Imperialists? True, in Europe the Nazis were began killing the Jews on a massive scale during the war, so perhaps morally we should have done more. But how much of that was known? Before the war even the U.S. refused Jewish refugees, so who would have expected such crimes? As far as Sweden was concerned I expect it was seen as just another imperialist war for access to oil, other resources and trading markets. Personally I think the way for the Germans to win without a war would have been to seed the Allied occupied/colonized territories with arms for the liberation movements, i.e most of Africa, the Pacific, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, India etc and then sit back and see its enemies bleed to death trying to keep their Empires. But that's just my theory. The only thing Sweden did wrong was not helping Finland. But then the Swedish socialists had dismantled the armed forces prior to the war. Our mobile infantry used bikes...Our airforce consisted of some Italian models that had a tendency to loose their wings when in flight...--Stor stark7 ^Speak 14:41, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

The part about rape is ridiculously biased. The 10,000 figure and the quote about the prevalence of rape are attributed to a single unnamed "academic." And it doesn't mention the fact that there are no official records of mass rape. To make it NPOV it should mention that there is no offical record but there is anecdotally evidence of the occurrence of rape supported by the story of the three marines. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Boombastastic (talk • contribs) 14:04, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Really?!? If you'd read the NYT article, you'd know that "One possible explanation for why the United States military says it has no record of any rapes is that few if any Okinawan women reported being attacked out of fear and embarrassment, and that those who did were ignored by the United States military police, the historians said. Moreover, there has never been a large-scale effort to determine the real extent of such crimes." It would not simply be enough to state just a lack of records. But, if you'd bothered to read the book pages available you'd never even made this comment. By the way, I don't know if he did the original research, but if you'd checked the references used in the article you'd see that it is attributed to Peter Schrijvers[14] in "The GI War against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific during World War II".[15]--Stor stark7 ^Speak 14:21, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

It'd be fine with me if you want to add a sentence explaining why there might be a lack of records. And I did read those pages before I made the edit and it also states that there are no official records. The new paragraph is more NPOV. It states that there are no official records but there are many stories that rape may have happened and even gives an example of one such story. Boombastastic (talk) 16:10, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

I've done so, and I've also reinserted some of the surreptitiously deleted information. If you are unhappy with the topic of the included information, please find sources contradicting it and insert them, do not simply delete or change the contents of sourced information.--Stor stark7 ^Speak 17:03, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

I know the 10,000 figure comes from Peter Schrijvers book but he credits the claim to "one Okinawan historian" who is unnamed and unreferenced. It's unreliable. I haven't found any other estimates of how many rapes occured and 10,000 is a pretty large number to put up from an unreliable source. Boombastastic (talk) 17:14, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

It is only you who says that the number is unreliable. Peter Schrijvers aparently does not think it is unreliable, and that is the way Wikipedia works, we use the facts and analysis that scholars have made. We are not allowed to make judgements. Schrijvers judgement is as follows ""The estimate of one Okinawan historian for the entire three-month period of the campaign exceeds 10,000. A figure that does not seem unlikely when one realizes that during the first 10 days of the occupation of Japan there were 1,336 reported cases of rape of Japanese women by American soldiers in Kanagawa prefecture alone" (p. 212)." So he analyzes the analysis, and comes to the conclusion that it is sound. Also, it is not only Schrijvers who notes the 10,000 estimate, the NYT also uses the 10,000 victims number. If you really insist I think I can dig up the name of the historian, but quite frankly I don't see the relevance wasting my time that way.--Stor stark7 ^Speak 17:32, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Frankly, Stor stark7, it might be more useful if the text for this article was completely scrapped and purged of all of the speculation and thinly-veiled commentary and unverified single-source-originated fact claims in order for the article to be completely started over from scratch. I am 198.252.8.202, and it was not until now that I realized for the first time just how much of an emotional investment you have made in this article. I would really like to work with you, along with anyone else, in improving this article-not work against you-and with your cooperation, I am confident that we can all work together to achieve this common purpose. However, what I am reading on this page, in combination with your selection of source material, leads me to believe that we immediately face two major concerns.

First, the ability to cite a single source which makes a unique claim as to fact does not in any way mean that therefore you have now proven that the "fact" is true, and that now it is justified to include this new "fact" in a serious encyclopedia article. All fact claims must be verified from multiple sources (preferably 3 to 5 sources, depending on the situation, although this is not always possible) in order to warrant inclusion in an encyclopedia entry. If I bought a book, and the book also contained footnotes and a bibliography, can you understand how unacceptable it would be if each claim as to fact throughout the book only had one source in order to back the claim up with some kind of verification? In all honesty, you need to understand that single-source verification is unacceptable if you are going to write a high-quality article for any encyclopedia.

Second, please remind yourself from time to time that not one of us "owns" any Wikipedia entry, or any part of any article, for that matter-I don't mean to offend you or anyone else by making this statement, and I understand that you have somewhere around three years of experience here. I have patiently read all of the notes that you have entered in regard to this page, and I have even followed a few of the reference links which you have so graciously provided (thank you for being so conscientious as to share all of these links which you have collected for our benefit), but when I read all of this material, not only did I become concerned with your editorial attitude toward this project even more, it has now become apparent that you have introduced several more problems into this article which did not exist before, which I will address to everyone's attention here. I do not, as you said above, surreptitiously delete information, but I will not tolerate POV corruption of any article, no matter how accidental it is, and I will not automatically assume that anyone who biases an article in any direction is doing so deliberately, because unconscious decisions to tilt an article away from NPOV really do get made.

(1) I also have read the work of author Edwin P. Hoyt in the past, but I hope you understand that, while he does work with original documents, Hoyt does not do much, if any, original research because, instead of being a professional historian, Hoyt is a writer of popular military history (among other things) who has deliberately sought out the general public as his intended target audience, as opposed to being a writer of monographs intended for reading by other professional historians. I raise this issue because you may have misunderstood his reference to the small number of Japanese who were willing to surrender on Saipan and Okinawa. General history authors (that is, those authors who intend to write history for the general audience) advance opinions-they do not engage in technical historical data analysis.

I am afraid that you have not taken into account alternate causes for why so few Japanese surrendered. When did you take into account the military code of bushido (or, for that matter, the mores of Japanese society, which would have determined how civilians would have treated any veteran who had surrendered to the Allies upon their return), the intended purpose of which is to make surrender nearly impossible, and always dishonorable? When considering the content of Edwin Hoyt's book, exactly where did you see proof that far greater numbers of Japanese troops had, in fact, been willing to surrender at earlier stages of the war? What stage of the Pacific War would that be? Would it be the Solomons campaign, for instance-from Guadalcanal on? No luck there. What about operations in the Marshall Islands? What about the amphibious operations in the Gilberts? The general fact is that the Allies had to wait until the end of WWII in order to see the greatest numbers of Japanese troop surrenders, and you have apparently not noticed this fact.

This is not a failure of Edwin Hoyt's stated opinions; this is a failure of your historical analysis. You have committed the error of invoking the fallacy of the single cause (falsely attributing the low numbers of Japanese personnel who were willing to surrender, rather than die, to the prospect of having their corpses mutilated and having Americans take any of their bones that had been exposed to the elements and were easy to recover as war trophies), and if Hoyt's book had firmly established that, instead of surrendering in greater and greater numbers at the end of the war, Japanese troops were giving up in fewer and fewer numbers, then why didn't you add that new information to Battle of Okinawa by directly quoting from his book verbatim? Is it because Edwin Hoyt never said anything like what you are claiming about American brutality in his book?

(2) Exactly how did you establish for the purposes of this encyclopedia the freedom from bias, the credibility, the competence, or even the basic professional honesty of university social sciences professor Dr. Peter Schrijvers? The normal way to establish the credibility of an expert is to see how many of that expert's fact claims are upheld by independent, alternate sources. You actually stated above that the reason for which you choose to cite the H-Net review of Peter Schrijvers' book as unbiased evidence which is appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia is that it "seems reliable to me (who inserted it)".

What exactly does that statement mean? I can't make any sense out of that sentence. Since when does the Wikipedia statement "Encyclopedic content must be verifiable" mean that you can insert any claim into an article that you can find that will prop up a point of view that you think should be included in that article because it "seems reliable to me"? Since when are social sciences websites unbiased-or even claim to be unbiased?

In the H-Net review of his book, it is clearly explained that most of the information in Peter Schrijvers' book comes from secondary sources-so exactly how did you expect, for the purposes of this article, to hold Schrijvers accountable for the credibility of these other sources? This review also makes it clear that Schrijvers never claims to have any other source for the unique claim that over 10,000 Okinawans were victimized in American mass rapes during combat besides "one Okinawan historian," who is quoted anonymously! What do you think the word verifiable means? The word is supposed to mean provable from more than one source, all of which in and of themselves are known quantities of reliability and credibility, and none of which only quote from one another. It should concern me, and you, and anyone else that these American mass rapes have never been reported or even claimed by any Japanese government agency, any organ of the UN, any NGO individual or group, any organization of professional military historians, or, for that matter, any other Okinawan historian-any one of which has a strong, ideological, vested interest in doing whatever it may take in order to reveal this truth to the world, and confirm its authenticity.

This is the kind of problem that you make for everyone else who wishes to read an accurate encyclopedia article dealing with the invasion of Okinawa. Not only do you not improve the accuracy of the article, but, by insisting on including information that is only claimed by a single, anonymous source, you instead sabotage the credibility of the entire entry in one shot. Excuses don't cut it. It was not the responsibility of Peter Schrijvers, or the responsibility of "one Okinawan historian" to make sure that their historical data was verified well enough for inclusion in Wikipedia, but it was your responsibility to verify it, and you refused to attempt to verify the mass rape claim before entering it into the article because, frankly, you enjoyed the report too much to leave it out of Wikipedia. This is exactly why single-source-verified fact claims always fail the WP:V test.

(3) You have stated that books written by authors Yuki Tanaka, John Dower, and Joanna Bourke will also back up the claim that over 10,000 Okinawans were mass-raped by American combat personnel during the duration of the battle on their island. Now, if that was really true, then why did you fail to directly quote at length from all of these books, word-for-word, exactly what these authors say about Americans mass-raping 10,000 Okinawan citizens during combat? Is it because these authors never made such a claim in these books? Could it be because one or more than one of these authors has never even addressed the Battle of Okinawa, much less the War in the Pacific in any respect?

(4) You have also stated that author J. Robert Lilly is another one of the authors who will verify that Americans raped 10,000 Okinawans during the invasion and capture of the island. Now, leaving aside for the time being that his book is totally irrelevant to your claims about Okinawa because the book deals with Europe, not Japan, if his book really says all that you claim it says, then why haven't you made this massive improvement to the quality of this article by including this new information and by directly quoting from Lilly's book at length, verbatim, exactly what it says about the propensity of Americans to engage in mass rape of thousands of victims at one time? Could it be that you cannot quote from this book either because Lilly also will not support your mass rape claim?

(5) I swear I don't understand why you thought that it would be a good idea to quote a story printed by the New York Times which dealt with the discovery of the remains of three Americans on Okinawa. First, your initial problem is that the NYT article obtains the 10,000 Okinawans mass-raped figure from the Peter Schrijvers book-so you have accomplished exactly nothing by quoting this newspaper because you cannot claim that you now have two sources for the 10,000 mass-raped, since you only have the one source that you started out with. Second, when you tried to justify why you really have no documentation for the claim that American troops engaged in mass rape, you quoted from the NYT article, beginning with the words "One possible explanation for why the United States military says it has no record of any rapes is that few if any Okinawan women reported being attacked out of fear and embarrassment, and that those who did were ignored by the United States military police..." The weasel words "One possible explanation" should be the tip-off for everyone who has always been opposed to the inclusion of speculation in Wikipedia. This quote proves not only that the New York Times never had any solid leads that would prove American mass rape, but also that no one responsible for this story ever did any actual reporting of their own in order to nail down this claim one way or the other. Third, newspapers should only be quoted as sources of then-current events information, since newspapers are such notoriously bad sources for historical data-but, then, you should already know that. Fourth, if you must quote from a newspaper, you must look for a non-partisan newspaper, and in case you did not know, the NYT has had an extremely leftist, anti-Pentagon, anti-military bias for decades, from the ownership level all the way down the totem pole of the newspaper workforce.

Unless the subject of an encyclopedia article is the very bias in question, and unless the information to be included in the article deals with that exact bias, it is never justifiable to insert biased information or information from biased sources into that encyclopedia article, or for that matter any other encyclopedia entry.

(6) Thank you for providing the Google Books link. Do you have any non-biased information sources? I read that book page, and I already see two major problems with the credibility of this source. First, it clearly says that all of the present-day, anecdotal reports of rape at the hands of Americans have been collected by "Okinawan Women Act Against Military Violence," a self-described feminist group-and, as anyone can infer from the very nature of the ideology of feminism, this is also an anti-military, anti-American biased group as well, since there is no such thing as pro-war or pro-military feminism, and since there is no such thing as pro-American feminist ideology, either. Second, if you think so well of this particular book, and if you think this particular book will also help prove that Americans mass-raped over 10,000 Okinawan citizens, then why didn't you edit Battle_of_Okinawa to include direct, word-for-word quotations at length from this book that say exactly that American troops mass-raped over 10,000 Okinawans during this battle? Is it because this book, like all of the other books that you have cited, does not say what you want it to say?

Third (and this is the big problem with your editorial judgement), what this book page says at the bottom is that in the first 5 years of the American occupation of Okinawa, 76 murders or murder-rapes are known to have been reported at the time that these crimes would have been committed. Here's the point: the exact same personal shame that those victims who were able to survive would have felt over being raped would have also have been felt by the over 10,000 victims who were supposedly mass-raped by American forces. So how do you explain the huge discrepancy between 10,000 and 76? The number 76 means that, if taken on average, 15.2 murders or murder-rapes were committed each year of the first 5 years of American occupation. Even while ignoring the fact that murder is being included along with rape, the U.S. occupation force can never be so much smaller than the invasion force that the discrepancy between 10,000 and 15.2 per year can be explained away by the size of the occupation force. Just what did you expect Wikipedia readers to conclude once they read your "improved" version of this article? Did you expect everyone to agree that American military personnel mass-raped over 10,000 innocent Okinawans in less than 5 months, and then decided to start budgeting themselves by rationing themselves down to just 15.2 murders or murder-rapes each year for 5 years?

(7) You dismissed the legitimate criticism of a fellow editor by saying, up above on this page, "It is only you who says that the number is unreliable. Peter Schrijvers aparently does not think it is unreliable, and that is the way Wikipedia works, we use the facts and analysis that scholars have made. We are not allowed to make judgements." What you apparently don't understand is that 1) no single expert or author-Lord, liar or lunatic-can be the sole basis for any Wikipedia entry that must be cross-referenced and confirmed, 2) Wikipedia rules, in fact, require all editors to "make judgements" in order to avoid violating anyone's copyright protections, in order to make sure that all data entered is verifiable, with reference to how accurately you type data into the article, making sure slander, libel, and defamation of character are all avoided, etc., etc. It seems possible that you might believe that acquiring a second source, a third source, or, heaven forbid, an actual fourth or fifth source is nothing more than an unproductive waste of your time-after all, you did say above on this page "quite frankly I don't see the relevance of wasting my time that way." You have already "made the judgement" that only one source is sufficient in order to include an unproven allegation even though the "source" is, in reality, anonymous. We all need to make dead sure that this kind of unproven allegation is kept out of Wikipedia until it can be proven through unbiased, independent sources. 198.252.8.202 ^Talk

• Your entry is very long and confusing. First, let me recomend that you get a proper user name, to make it easier to communicate with you and judge whether your edits are vandalism or not. Or is it you who stated that Stephen Ambrose was stabbed to death with a banana?[16] Funny, but not very encyclopedic. Further, stating that I am Swedish in your edit summaries is rather superfluous and bad taste. Are you implying that Swedish people are somehow inferior when it comes to editing? Further before declaring your opinion on what types of content are allowed in encyclopedias, please read what types of contents are allowed here, please read the policies, such as Wikipedia:NPOV and Wikipedia:Verifiability.
• If Hoyt makes an analysis based on a synthesis of works performed by others, that is perfectly acceptable here. Further, Hoyt was referring to civilian suicides, something you seem to confuse with Japanese soldiers reluctance to surrender.
• Credibility, Please, again, read up on policies before editing and arguing. We are not here to establish the ultimate "truth", we are only here to state what the different scholars say, sometimes they contradict each other, and then we state that. It is not up to us to judge who is "right".
• Calling me a liar: What I wrote was: Other historians who have investigated American rapes of Japanese are Yuki Tanaka and John Dower. You can also check Joanna Bourke, An Intimate history of Killing, London, Granta Books, 1999, p. 354.they are referred to as sources for the rapes in the Pacific, in the book on rapes on the western front by Lilly, which I hold in my hand right now. As for Tanaka, if you'd bothered reading the sources in the text, you'd see that one of Tanakas books is used already[17]
• You are lying: Sorry, but this I must state so bluntly, I cant even give you the credit for miss-understanding my text. You wrote this You have also stated that author J. Robert Lilly is another one of the authors who will verify that Americans raped 10,000 Okinawans during the invasion and capture of the island.. I have never ever done so. Please don't lie, at least not so openly.
• "your initial problem is that the NYT article obtains the 10,000 Okinawans mass-raped figure from the Peter Schrijvers book" Peter Schrijvers book was published in 2002. the NYT article was published in 2000. Enough said.
• "the NYT has had an extremely leftist, anti-Pentagon, anti-military bias for decades, from the ownership level all the way down the totem pole of the newspaper workforce." Funny, I don't see that in The New York Times or Criticism of The New York Times. Please discuss your theories there.
• "Okinawan Women Act Against Military Violence" Please don't falsify the sources, the book uses many other sources than the feminists, not that I in any way agree with you that they are inegilible because they are [SIC] "as anyone can infer from the very nature of the ideology of feminism, this is also an anti-military, anti-American biased group as well, since there is no such thing as pro-war or pro-military feminism, and since there is no such thing as pro-American feminist ideology, either.". Let me give you a non-feminist quote from the same book. Okinawan historian Oshiro Masayasu (former director of the Okinawa Prefectural Historical Archives) writes based on several years of research:

Soon after the US marines landed, all the women of a village on Motobu Peninsula fell into the hands of American soldiers. At the time, there were only women, children and old people in the village, as all the young men had been mobilized for the war. Soon after landing, the marines "mopped up" the entire village, but found no signs of Japanese forces. Taking advantage of the situation, they started "hunting for women" in broad daylight and those who were hiding in the village or nearby air raid shelters were dragged out one after another.

• Another quote: The following two books, with some pages available from Google Books, tell of continuing rapes during the years of Allied occupation. Voices from the Japanese Women's Movement The Making of Black Revolutionaries The first book speaks of Japanese women being raped in the fields and in the U.S. military bases. The later book tells the experience of a black soldier of the forces of occupation, a few years into the occupation.

The saddest thing was that some of the brothers also called the Okinawans gooks. They adopted the superior attitude of the american white man and they, too, though thought they were better than the Okinawans. They, too, did some of the things the whites did, especially to the women of Okinawa. Not so much, but enough to open my eyes.

There came a night when several men in my barracks whent out and brough back an elderly woman from a nearby village. They pulled a train on her, passing her from one bunk to another.

How could you put that gun to that womans head and then rape her like the white soldiers were doing all over the island of okinawa? When you heard about what the white soldiers were doing, how could you not think of slavery and what the man did to our women? How could you adopt the white man's way? How could you go out and kill brown men by day and rape brown women at night? How could you?

• Interesting math you did regarding the numbers of rape. It never struck you that the possibility to report rapes occurring during a combat campaign, and opportunities for reporting rape afterwards when fighting is no longer ongoing can be quite different? Intresting also that you take the official rape figures at face value as the "truth".

• Again, please read up on wikipedia policy, I'm sure once you've grasped it you will be able to make constructive contributions. A respectable scholar has given the 10,000 Japanese source his blessing as accurate. It has in the past been used by other sources such as the NYT so it is obviously a well known estimate. If it is false, or some scholar feels it to be in error then I'm sure you can find a source that states so, in which case we can introduce such for balance. But what we can not do is remove it because you feel the source is "un-american" or such.
• Surrendering Japanese. Since you obviously are confused as to what refers to civilians, and what refers to soldiers, I will make this brief:

Niall Fergusson: "it was not only the fear of disciplinary action or of dishonor that deterred German and Japanese soldiers from surrendering. More important for most soldiers was the perception that prisoners would be killed by the enemy anyway, and so one might as well fight on." (He is referring to Germans on the Eastern front, by the way). This is from "Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat", War in History, 2004, 11 (2): p.176.

• I also recommend that you read the section I introduced below, should be enough sources there for you to convince you of the prevalence of prisoner killing. It was the trophy hunting that helped scare the civilians enough to suicide. Knowing that nice white women had table ornaments like this, and that this was so accepted that it was "picture of the week" in Life Magazine, led them to think that the Americans were horrible monsters, and that is was better to be dead than in their hands. The soldiers simply fought on because they knew there was no point in trying to surrender, they knew they would be killed by the Americans anyway if they tried to surrender. It was only late in the war that the leadership managed to stop the U.S. soldiers "take no prisoners" policy, since it was interfering with intelligence gathering.--Stor stark7 ^Speak 15:46, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Please note that there is a dedicated article on this topic at American mutilation of Japanese war dead - which is primarily authored by Stor stark7 using the sources (and some of the same text, I think) used in this article - and any comments on or additions to that article or the discussion on its talk page are welcome. Nick Dowling (talk) 02:21, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Possible contradictory statement

This statement, For the first time in the Pacific War, the Japanese had ample time to dig elaborate fortifications, much as they had on Iwo Jima, and they also had large numbers of tanks and artillery pieces, doesn't make much sense to me. Could it be the first time in the Pacific War if it was how they acted earlier on Iwo Jima? Also, the Iwo Jima link there goes to the article about the island itself, not the battle - I think it would be better to link to the actual Battle of Iwo Jima article. Tanthalas39 (talk) 21:51, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Generally wretched quality of military history entries

I find wholesale near-plagiarism, obvious opinions, ramshackle presentation. Most of this content seems to have been regurgitated by a History Channel addict. Is there anything to be done about this? I contribute to physics articles where the standards are MUCH higher. As a great lover of military history, I find it lamentable that the quality of these offerings is so uniformly poor.

-drl Antimatter33 (talk) 12:56, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

>Is there anything to be done about this?

Yes, you can improve it. :-)   Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 20:05, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Operation name

There is no mention of the Operation name in the main text - I believe it was known as Operation Iceberg. That should be rectified I think. Gatoclass (talk) 16:21, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree. Operation Iceberg redirects to this article, so I've added ", also known as Operation Iceberg", which is in keeping with the use of codenames on pages such as Normandy Landings --Ambulnick (talk) 11:04, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

"75,000-140,000 civilians dead"?

WWII in Color documentary states 150,000. --84.234.60.154 (talk) 07:41, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Japanese photos?

Is there really no more photos of Japanese than exploding yamato, dead or surrendered soldiers? There are quite lot pictures of Americans, like helping orphans, aircraft firing rockets... Pictures are good but I think should be more Japanese pictures too. Ofcourse I am not certain that there exists any. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kuhlfürst (talk • contribs) 16:55, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Should the Battle of Iwo Jima be merged witht this article?

I mean they're both the most important pacific battles in US history, and they happened one after the other, so, why not?--66.229.133.74 (talk) 19:57, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Reply

No, Iwo Jima is a separate battle in a different area of the Pacific. It is a major battle so it deserves its own section. It was a different operation anyway so there is even less reason to merge these articles. Besides, merging articles over a certain length just makes it harder to find what you want in a section. BernhardFischbein (talk) 14:03, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Constant Information?

I'm not saying you're wrong, or anything like that. At all, actually. But... When I added up the total of "casualties lost" in paragraph 2, line 5, the sum was 219,000.

"Casualties totaled more than 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing, more than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan conscripts killed, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians who perished in the battle."

Please, add it up for yourself.

This is where I get confused. When I added up the numer of "casualties lost" in pararaph 4, line 6, I only got about 152,000. Add the last "hundreds of thousands", and the data is still uneven.

"The battle has one of the highest casualties: the Japanese lost over 90,000 troops, and the Allies (mostly United States) suffered nearly 50,000 casualties, with over 12,000 killed in action. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, wounded or attempted suicide."

You see, I'm giving this terribly important speech soon and the professer is an unbelievable hard[explicit]. I'm just trying to get my data straight so he doesn't pull out the whip again... *whimper*

75.164.202.223 (talk) 00:21, 3 June 2008 (UTC)Sine Nomine

Reply: I have the same concerns about the introduction and the inconsistent numbers of casualties given. Granted, it is impossible to know how many were killed overall especially on the Japanese side, but these numbers are all over the place. Is there any reason to have three or four different sets of numbers in the introduction anyway?

One more comment. The last paragraph of the introduction is copied word for word from globalsecurity.org http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/okinawa-battle.htm I thought direct copying was not acceptable, and all info should be paraphrased and cited?? Kevin —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.23.101.153 (talk) 01:54, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

words words words words

Battle of Okinawa/Archive 1
Location {{{place}}}
Strength
548,000 servicemen, 1,600 ships, 2,000 aircraft, Ground Forces were: 185,000 regulars 800 M4 tanks, 290 Amtanks, 870 LVTs, low number of M3 tanks, 702 artillery pieces, 600 mortars, 502 AA guns, 27 chemical mortars, ? AT guns, thousands of MGs	100,000 regulars and militia, 350 suicidal motorboats ? ships, 1,465 kamikaze aircraft, Naval personnel - 10,000 men Ground Forces were: 40,000 Japanese regulars 15,000 Korean soldiers 25,000 militia 27 tanks, 110 AT guns, 287 artillery pieces, 126 mortars, 223 AA guns, 333 heavy MGs 1208 light MGs
Casualties and losses
American casualties: 12,513 dead or missing, 38,916 wounded, 33,096 non-combat losses, 14,000 retired due to nervous breakdown 79 ships sunk and scrapped, 100 heavilly damaged ships, 763 aircraft destroyed, at least 221 M4 tanks destroyed, many LVTs destroyed, many Amtanks destroyed, at least 4 M3 tanks destroyed British casualties: ? aircraft destroyed ? ships	65,548 dead or missing, 1,900 dead kamikaze 6,000 dead airmen and seamen 17,000 wounded 10,755 captured or surrendered, 16 ships sunk and scrapped, 930 kamikaze aircraft destroyed 2,200 other aircraft destroyed
75,000-140,000 civilians dead or missing

Move this shit to the article (like the "casualties" section or "order of battle" or whatever). --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 17:57, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Also

The intro says "Casualties totaled (...) more than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan conscripts killed, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians who perished in the battle." while the infobox says "65,548 dead or missing" and "75,000-140,000 civilians dead or missing" (and the casualties section says the similar thing). Further: "There were more than 26,000 non-battle casualties." VS "33,096 non-combat losses" in the box. COME ON PEOPLE, what the hell is this (it's bad even for a wikipedia "standards"). --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 18:07, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

And yeah, freaking for all this crap and moar. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 18:12, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Also2 (Japanese revisionism?)

Just as the JAPANESE (imperial) military is symbolically losing to the survivors in the court (Jmilitary ordered them to kill themselves so the Americans won't "rape and kil them"), wikipedia article is flooded with this shit in civilian casualties" section (much of this also completely unrelated anjd refering to japanese POWs, or lack of such):

Edwin P. Hoyt, in "Japan’s War: The Great Pacific Conflict", argues that the Allied practice of mutilating the Japanese dead and taking pieces of them home was exploited by Japanese propaganda very effectively, and "contributed to a preference to death over surrender and occupation, shown, for example, in the mass civilian suicides on Saipan and Okinawa after the Allied landings" Life Magazine "picture of the week" in May 22, 1944 depicted a beautiful blonde with a Japanese trophy skull sent to her by her Marine lieutenant boyfriend. This image gained widespread circulation in Japan, as did the news that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been presented with a letter-opener carved out out of a Japanese soldiers arm bone by Congressman Walter. In Japanese media the Americans came to be portrayed as "deranged, primitive, racist and inhuman".

While there are no official documents from US or Japanese sources that mention any instances of rape atrocities, there are several anecdotal accounts that such acts may have occurred.

"One possible explanation for why the United States military says it has no record of any rapes is that few if any Okinawan women reported being attacked out of fear and embarrassment, and that those who did were ignored by the United States military police, the historians said. Moreover, there has never been a large-scale effort to determine the real extent of such crimes."

According to Peter Schrijvers, rape was "a general practice against Okinawan women". An estimated 10,000 Okinawan women were raped by American troops during the Okinawa campaign.. However, despite being told that they would suffer rape, torture and murder at the hands of the Americans, civilians "were often surprised at the comparativly humane treatment they received from the American enemy." According to Laura Elizabeth Hein and Mark Selden the Americans "did not pursue a policy of torture, rape, and murder of civilians as Japanese military officials had warned."

In 1998 the remains of three US Marines stationed on Okinawa were discovered outside of a local village. Accounts from elderly Okinawans may verify that the men had made frequent trips to the village to rape the women that lived there but were ambushed and killed by men from the village on one of their return trips. according to the same article, published in 2000,: "rape was so prevalent that most Okinawans over age 65 either know or have heard of a woman who was raped in the aftermath of the war."

Okinawan historian Oshiro Masayasu (former director of the Okinawa Prefectural Historical Archives) writes based on several years of research:

Soon after the US marines landed, all the women of a village on Motobu Peninsula fell into the hands of American soldiers. At the time, there were only women, children and old people in the village, as all the young men had been mobilized for the war. Soon after landing, the marines "mopped up" the entire village, but found no signs of Japanese forces. Taking advantage of the situation, they started "hunting for women" in broad daylight and those who were hiding in the village or nearby air raid shelters were dragged out one after another.

U. S. historian James J. Weingartner attributes the very low number of captured Japanese in U.S. POW compounds to two important factors, a Japanese reluctance to surrender and a widespread American "conviction that the Japanese were "animals" or "subhuman'" and unworthy of the normal treatment accorded to POWs. The latter reason is supported by historian Nial Fergusson, who says that "Allied troops often saw the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians [sic] — as Untermenschen." The massacres of Japanese prisoners is also supported by the research of Professor Richard Aldrich.

Shit removed. (maybe I'll reinstate SOME of this after all) --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 18:21, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Biophys (talk) 02:23, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps this issue deserves less space, but it seems to be sourced (I have looked at several articles cited here). So, the deletion seems to be overboard. Also note a completely redundant paragraph that appears after last revert. Text is indeed poor and contradicts itself.Biophys (talk) 02:34, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Also3

So I removed this, as unreferenced AND conflictinbg with the rest of the article. It's below:

Okinawa was the largest amphibious invasion of the Pacific campaign and the last major campaign of the Pacific War. More ships were used, more troops put ashore, more supplies transported, more bombs dropped, more naval guns fired against shore targets than any other operation in the Pacific. More people died during the Battle of Okinawa than all those killed during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Casualties totaled more than 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing, more than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan conscripts killed, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians who perished in the battle.

The battle of Okinawa proved to be the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. Thirty-four allied ships and craft of all types had been sunk, mostly by kamikazes, and 368 ships and craft damaged. The fleet had lost 763 aircraft. Total American casualties in the operation numbered over 12,000 killed [including nearly 5,000 Navy dead and almost 8,000 Marine and Army dead] and 36,000 wounded. Navy casualties were tremendous, with a ratio of one killed for one wounded as compared to a one to five ratio for the Marine Corps. Combat stress also caused large numbers of psychiatric casualties, a terrible hemorrhage of front-line strength. There were more than 26,000 non-battle casualties. In the battle of Okinawa, the rate of combat losses due to battle stress, expressed as a percentage of those caused by combat wounds, was 48% [in the Korean War the overall rate was about 20-25%, and in the Yom Kippur War it was about 30%]. American losses at Okinawa were so heavy as to elicit Congressional calls for an investigation into the conduct of the military commanders. Not surprisingly, the cost of this battle, in terms of lives, time, and material, weighed heavily in the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan just six weeks later.

words words words words again (and Yom Kippur? wtf?)--Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 18:33, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Stop reposting the silly whitewash

Thank you. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 07:06, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Also an explainationL:

This is: 1. half off-topic (POWs in the section about civilians)

2. the rest is anecdotal-style white-wash of the Japanese suicide order at the time there is a huge scandal in Japan (see the article). Note that it is pro-Imperial-military lobby losing the Japanese courts, and they don't even bring this "we were right, the barbarians were raping and torturing left and right so we just out our people out of misery" argument. The bulk of casualties is because the Japanese military starved civilians, used them as human shields, killed them outright, and told them to kill themselves.

The Americans were good guys here and in general they did spare the population as much as they could (just like they did not run a rampage in Japan, Imperial Army-style, after Japan surrendered). This including rescuing suicide attempt victims. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 07:16, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

The information that you keep blanking is suitably referenced, and notable, i.e. very much on topic. Whether you consider is a "whitewash" regarding the suicides or not is not relevant to the article, the article should contain notable information regarding the Battle of Okinawa. As you note apparently the information is not used anywhere in any "whitewash" campaign, so it is just what it is, information about how the civilians were affected by Japanese propaganda making use of the documented American mutilations, and also on the rapes committed by U.S. troops on Okinawa. I strongly suggest that you read up on Wikipedia policy, you can start here Wikipedia:Five_pillars--Stor stark7 ^Speak 09:11, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

No, it is not. Civilians are not POWs. The point is the military ordered the civilians to kill themselves and each other. They wanted them all to die (except on the islands where there were no military). The American policy was not to mass murder the people in they hold under gunpoint, it was the Japanese military policy. This stuff clouds this important issue with bullshit. It was the Japanese propaganda who had described the American troops as savages who "raped women, ate children and killed men after having castrated them" to drive them to kill their children and themselves and it was a lie. It doesn't matter now if there was some anegdotical(!) stories of isolated crimes and some odd claims or even some real incidents, the point is, as that the invaders (the good guys) were in general sparing the population, even rescuing the forced suicide survivors (like this boy), while the opressors who starved them and then decided to exterminate them and they did, needlessly killing thousands of people. This is what Okinawa calls "one of the cruellest and most useless massacres to ever have taken place". So, NO and NO. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 16:43, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

In every war (even peace-keeping missions!) there are inidents of rape or other crimes by the undisciplined soldiers. But this is all different when the military orders their own people to kill their own children and then themselves. This is self-genocide. It's complete madness, I never heard about something like this elsewhere. It's like if, say, Hitler ordered to distribute hand grenades so everyone in Berlin would be ordered to strangle their children and blow up or leap from high or eat rat poison before the Soviets arrive - then the Soviet large-scale "rape of Berlin" (100,000 or so women) wouldn't even compare with this then. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 16:55, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Look, you seem to have gotten the wrong idea about what this project is all about. We are creating an encyclopedia, not stressing particular political messages or historical viewpoints. The suicide influencing propaganda using the massacres and mutilations of Japanese POWs, as well as the widespread rapes during the fighting and occupation are not bullshit. And your personal opinion that they "clouds this important issue" about the Japanese encouraging suicide is just that, your personal opinion which has no place here whatsoever. We are not here to draw conclusions, we are here to present the facts as reported by scholars. Scholars have reported the influence of massacres and mutilations, and they have also reported the rapes. These things are notable enough to merit inclusion in the article alongside the Japanese criminal activities. I once again urge you to familiarize yourself with the policies governing editing this encyclopedia before you get yourself blocked.--Stor stark7 ^Speak 17:58, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

"The suicide influencing propaganda using the massacres and mutilations of Japanese POWs, as well as the widespread rapes during the fighting and occupation are not bullshit."

No, it is. Or was. I gave you a link to The New York Times article.[18] Military lied to them that the Americans will rape them and then drive tanks over them if they were captured, so almost half of this island(!) commited suicide. Which was not suicide, they were brainwashed to murder themselves, so it was a murder, not suicide. But this boy and his mother tried but failed (but she still to kill her daughter) - and when the American arrived, they didn't torture them to death. They gave them cigs and candy. And this was a typical stpory. The genocidal(!) propaganda campaign by the Imperial military was TOTAL BULLSHIT. This what I meant by BULLSHIT. Which killed people. And this is what they wanted. To everyone to die. They even distributed grenades for the people to kill their families. But they failed and most people survived. And I won't allow to repeat this and cloud this incredible tragedy with bullshit, sorry. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 11:22, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

And no, the military were NOT telling them the invaders have a habit of killing Japanese soldiers trying to surrender - Japanese soldiers were not supposed to try to surrender at all! Come on, don't you know about this? What they were telling them was the white devils were child-eating monsters. Literally. They were brain-washing them with outrageous lies to make them murder their families and themselves (the Germans were also telling their people the Soviets were inhuman monsters, but they were NOT telling them to kill themselves). Because Japanese civilians were not supposed to surrender, too. Now excuse me while I write a Teruto Tsubota article (no, there won't be any rape stories there, I'm sorry). --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 11:39, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Any discussion of prisoner-taking on Okinawa needs to acknowledge that a far higher proportion of Japanese defenders were taken prisoner during this battle than in any of the other major battles of the Pacific War. In his excellent paper Japan's Battle of Okinawa Thomas M. Huber states that 7,400 Japanese prisoners were taken on Okinawa (about 7.4% of the total force) prior to the general Japanese surrender at the end of the war. Moreover, Huber states that "many of the 7,400 captured were hastily impressed native Okinawans who were less imbued with the no-surrender doctrine" which indicates that it was the IJA's unwillingness to surrender which was the key factor in keeping the number of POWs down in this battle. In regards to the material on US troops mutilating Japanese war dead a) there's a whole article on the topic so only any relevant incidents are needed here (note also the ongoing discussion of this material on that article's talk page) and b) the incidents which are being added occured before this battle started, so I don't see why they're being included here as they relate to different battles. Nick Dowling (talk) 05:37, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Nick Dowling (talk · contribs), let me first make some points clear to you.

• Wikipedia:Canvassing is a no-no, and I would have expected someone who made it through an RFA to know better!
• The user who you seem to wholeheartedly agree with has removed:
  • The sourced information about the rapes during the invasion, which constitutes the mayor part of the segment that "Captain Obvious deleted".
  • The small segment relating to how the mutilations and propaganda regarding them influenced the civilian population.
  • Massacres of prisoners.

So Nick, am I to take your agreeing with[19] "Captain Obvious" to mean that you consider the rapes of 10,000 Okinawan women to be irrelevant? Do you support "Captain Obvious" in his censoring the rapes from this article? Could you please explain how you motivate that?

Also Nick, am I to understand that you support "Captain Obvious" in censoring the effects of the mutilations on the civilians? I.e. this paragraph:

Edwin P. Hoyt, in "Japan’s War: The Great Pacific Conflict", argues that the Allied practice of mutilating the Japanese dead and taking pieces of them home was exploited by Japanese propaganda very effectively, and "contributed to a preference to death over surrender and occupation, shown, for example, in the mass civilian suicides on Saipan and Okinawa after the Allied landings" Life Magazine "picture of the week" in May 22, 1944 depicted a beautiful blonde with a Japanese trophy skull sent to her by her Marine lieutenant boyfriend. This image gained widespread circulation in Japan, as did the news that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been presented with a letter-opener carved out out of a Japanese soldiers arm bone by Congressman Walter. In Japanese media the Americans came to be portrayed as "deranged, primitive, racist and inhuman".

As to the massacres of prisoners, Nick, I partly agree with you, we should change the deleted text on that part. However your statement "which indicates that it was the IJA's unwillingness to surrender which was the key factor" sounds rather like OR to me, please see Wikipedia:NOR. I propose we use more direct Scholarly conclusions, and for example exchange that deleted paragraph for this:

"Allied soldiers in the Pacific often deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered. According to Richard Aldrich, who has published a study of the diaries kept by United States and Australian soldiers, they sometimes massacred prisoners of war. Dower states that in "many instances ... Japanese who did become prisoners were killed on the spot or en route to prison compounds." According to Aldrich it was common practice for US troops not to take prisoners. This analysis is supported by British historian Niall Fergusson, who also says that, in 1943, "a secret [U. S.] intelligence report noted that only the promise of ice cream and three days leave would ... induce American troops not to kill surrendering Japanese.""

"Fergusson states such practices played a role in the ratio of Japanese prisoners to dead being 1:100 in late 1944. That same year, efforts were taken by Allied high commanders to suppress "take no prisoners" attitudes, among their own personnel (as these were affecting intelligence gathering) and to encourage Japanese soldiers to surrender. Fergusson adds that measures by Allied commanders to improve the ratio of Japanese prisoners to Japanese dead, resulted in it reaching 1:7, by mid-1945. Nevertheless, taking no prisoners was still standard practice among U. S. troops at the Battle of Okinawa, in April–June 1945.

--Stor stark7 ^Speak 09:07, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Stor, if you're going to post near-identical and controversial text on a bunch of articles, then you should expect that a) this material is going to be challenged b) that the discussions on the different articles will cross-polinate each other and c) that editors who are responding to the material will notice that it's appearing elsewhere and post notifications. An uncharitable interpretation of your repeated complaints about asking other editors for their opinion is that you are trying to keep each discussion seperate so it's just you versus individual editors on the individual articles. Incidently Wikipedia:Canvassing doesn't state that canvassing "is a no-no", but that notifications are OK if they're targetted selectively and neutral. You seem to be ignoring that Captain Obvious is providing cited material, and you are doing nothing to work towards a solution which balances these competing sources. Instead you're proposing re-posting two paras of text which only include a single sentance related to the topic of this article and doesn't incorporate the fact that a uniquely high proportion of Japanese surrendered in this particular battle. Nick Dowling (talk) 09:30, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Nick, an uncharitable view of this would be to assume you jump in whenever you thing you can recruit help to your viewpoint, without actually trying to understand the issues first. As to canvassing, policy says as follows "Campaigning is an attempt to sway the person reading the message, through the use of non-neutral tone, wording, or intent. While this may be appropriate as part of an individual discussion, it is inappropriate to canvass with such messages." you have on at least two separate canvasing occasions, possibly more that I didn't spot, labeled me explicitly as "on a self-declared mission to push this material which few specialist historians consider worthy of covering in any detail (see Wikipedia talk:Neutral point of view#Undue Weight Criteria), and has some decidedly fringe views on WW2 in the Pacific". Still on the topic on uncharitable, you still have not replied on why you do not wish information about 10,000 raped Okinawan women to be included here.

As to the cited material, what exactly has he provided to the article? As far as I can tell he has provided nothing that wasn't there before he joined Wikipedia, his activities seem confined to deleting large amounts of on-topic sourced material (in my eyes vandalism), since it in his eyes "clouds this important issue" or is "Bullshit". He basically seems to feel that some of the information he deleted contradicts his favorite information. How exactly are we to "work towards a solution" with such an attitude. The only solution possible would then be to adopt Captain Obvios tactics and delete the rest i.e. all of the information, including Obvious favorite topic. I cant believe you actually seem to agree with his very strange way of arguing.--Stor stark7 ^Speak 12:00, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

"you still have not replied on why you do not wish information about 10,000 raped Okinawan women to be included here" - I don't intend to dignify that with a response. Nick Dowling (talk) 12:22, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, what else are we to make of your apparent unconditional support of Captain Obvious, especially since the rapes constitute the major part of the segment that is the victim of his blanking?--Stor stark7 ^Speak 15:42, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Japanese soldiers obviously massacred and tortured POWs and civilians through the war (see Japanese war crimes for a general article, including even cannibalism), and even tortured and killed some American prisoners during this battle too. Guess what, Stor: I don't try to even mention this off-topic stuff in the section called "Civilian losses" of Okinawa.

The US policy was NOT to murder civilians. The rape was NOT officially sanctioned (no equivalent of Rape of Nanking or the "comfort women"). It was the Japanese military which attempted to exterminate the population, while the Americans tried to disrupt the mass suicides and rescue the suicide victims (instead of, I don't know, probably rape them to death and take their skulls, according to you). I'm not discussing this anymore.

Please go away. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 10:17, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and the skulls belonged to the Japanese soldiers, not civilians. There's no relation: If the Americans wanted, they would get their skulls from the suicide vitims too (or the cemetaries or whatever). The civilians were killing themselves because of outrageous lies the military told them what would happen if the Ameircan caught them alive (before giving them hand grenades or directing them to the cliffs). --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 10:29, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

And to be completely clear:

The American policy was to capture civilians alive. The Japanese policy was to not allow the civilians to surrender. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 11:05, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk · contribs), I'm not "going to go away". Now let me explain veeery clearly:

• 10,000 rapes are 10,000 rapes. TEN THOUSAND RAPES. It does not matter whether it was officially sanctioned, whether the authorities turned a blind eye, of if it was just something the American soldiers spontaneously felt would be the fun thing to do. 10,000 rapes have a profound impact on a small population such as Okinawas, and is NOTABLE. I'm sorry you don't like it, but talking about whether it was official policy or not will not help you cloud the issue.

Whether it was U.S. policy to murder civilians or not is not what is discussed in the article either. What is discussed is how the U.S. soldiers unofficial but de-facto policy of murdering POW's, and some of them turning Japanese body parts into ornaments was used by Japanese media to scare the shit out of the civilians, civilians who in some cases therefore preferred suicide rather than ending up in American hands. This is notable, and you are damaging the article and by extension Wikipedia by continuously deleting it.--Stor stark7 ^Speak 12:00, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

About "TEN THOUSAND RAPES": Come back if you get any reputable source (for example Okinawa's Peace Memorial Museum, which I guess would be interested in this pretty much) instead of some fringe author (who is so notable as historian that he even has no Wikipedia entry).

"What is discussed is how the U.S. soldiers unofficial but de-facto policy of murdering POW's" of which the Okinawans of course knew nothing about, because according to the propaganda not a single Japanese soldier attempted to surrender ever (and instead every one of them gloriously died for the Emperor).

You are trying way to hard. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 13:27, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Dear Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog, let me provide you with some friendly feedback. 1. Your replies are incoherent and therefore hard to follow. Although that may be a good tactic if you wish to avoid replies, it does not work well for conflict resolution. 2. You consistently demonstrate that you have no understanding of what Wikipedia is, nor of how it operates. A link to a Museum homepage in no way constitutes a reliable source, especially if you are trying to make an argument based on what is absent from the linked page. By the way, from what I can tell the link you provided is devoted to providing instruction on how to reach the museum. Also, authors do not need to have Wikipedia pages to be used as reference, if Wikipedia worked that way we would have to delete the majority of Wikipedia contents as unreferenced. Wikipedia is work in progress, I'm sure that eventually someone will for example write a page on Peter Schrijvers, who as far as I can tell is not a fringe author. But it is informative to know that you regard him as such.

3. As to the last bit, maybe the civilians did not know of the massacres, who knows, but it would be unlikely that the soldiers did not know. What the civilians most certainly did know of was Images such as this, which was cabled to Tokyo from their offices in Europe and was widely publicized as an example of what monsters the Americans were. You bet the Okinawa civilians knew of those things. 4. Maybe I should just wait, from the looks of things I guess it should only be a matter of time before the material can be restored without this hullabaloo.--Stor stark7 ^Speak 15:42, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

"Maybe I should just wait, from the looks of things I guess it should only be a matter of time before the material can be restored without this hullabaloo" There is no consensus to include that text and you should expect that it will be removed by other editors if you simply reinsert it. If you are not already familar with the dispute resolution process you may wish to read up on it - it works rather well, in my experiance. Nick Dowling (talk) 08:30, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

"There is no consensus to include that text": Before the appearance of Captain Obvious that section of the article had been stable in the article for quite some time, after information contradicting it had been added for balance. It seems to me you make judgments based on your preferred preconceptions on the state of things.--Stor stark7 ^Speak 09:46, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

3 RR

Stor and Captain Obvious, please note that, by my count, the three-revert rule now applies to both of you, as you have each reverted this article three times in the last 24 hours. You may be blocked if you revert the other again. Nick Dowling (talk) 10:09, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

How did you reach that count?--Stor stark7 ^Speak 12:15, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

By looking at the page's history. I was actually a bit off: you reverted the article three times in roughly 27 hours yesterday, not 24. You did revert it three times within 24 hours on 6 and 7 July, however, and then reverted it again nine hours later (reverted at 16:30[20] and 21:51[21] on 6 July and 9:01[22] on 7 July (3 reverts in 24 hours) with a further revert at 18:02[23] on 7 July for a total of four reverts in 26 hours). That's clear-cut edit warring. Nick Dowling (talk) 05:51, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Please Nick,you are still WAY OFF! If you are going to warn people of possible 3RR violations, at least make the effort to try to get it right lest you mislead people into believing untruth. Especially since you apparently went back to try to count edits a second time....

Let me point out where you still are very much in the wrong. I only edited the article twice yesterday (the 9th), as should have been obvious to you. My last edit before that was the on the 7th at 18:02 that you point to above (with link no. 23).

From this we can see that Quote: "you reverted the article three times in roughly 27 hours yesterday" still is way of the scale. The "correct" sentence would have to be: "you reverted the article three times in roughly 51 hours yesterday" How come you still can't spot the difference? How come you didn't post "evidence" for yesterdays (the 9th) alleged edits but was careful to provide links to my 4 edits on the 6th and 7th?

Please be more careful with your warnings of 3RR policy violations in the future.

Also, both me and Binksternet have been trying to engage Captain Obvious in dialogue, to no avail (and judging from Captain Obvious talk page also many others have tried and failed). You'd do well to brush up on Wikipedia:Edit war before throwing your accusations around. The only one engaging in edit warring is Captain Obvious, whom you seem to side with.--Stor stark7 ^Speak 09:45, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't see how one person can edit war by themself... I'm happy to say that I was wrong: I looked at the edit history saw, multiple reverts in a very short period of time and didn't look closely enough at the dates. I'm a human, have a cold and am sorry about that mistake. Given that you had recently reverted the article three times in 24 hours without being warned against this at the time I posted the warning and the edit war was still going on (you reverted Captain Obvious a few minutes before I posted the caution [24] and he reverted you less than an hour later [25]), I think that my caution stands though - I imagine that it contributed to Captain Obvious being banned for 24 hours given that he ignored this and other warnings. Nick Dowling (talk) 10:16, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

The most Japanese surrender

I returned the fact tag on the sentence "This was also the only battle in the war in which surrendering Japanese were made into POWs by the thousands". I would like to see the reference for that statement. Binksternet (talk) 14:04, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I see that Huber is the source, and it is quickly explained that the "thousands" (7,400) included many Okinawans. I wonder if that sentence can be called misleading, deserving a rewrite... Binksternet (talk) 22:23, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Since when are Okinawans not Japanese? The IJA was a multi-national force, and many of its units were made up of men from outside the Japanese home islands, and they generally fought to the death as well (though anecdotal evidence suggests that they were a bit more likely to surrender). The current text accurately reflects the source - a relatively large number of Japanese surrendered, and one of the reasons this figure was so high was due to the high proportion of Okinawans who had been impressed into the Army and not indoctrinated prior to the battle. Incidently, Appleman states that 7,401 "Japanese soldiers" surrendered (pg 467), including 200 officers and 3,339 unarmed laborers. Nick Dowling (talk) 23:32, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Right, then, Appleman says 200 officers, 4262 enlisted and 3339 laborers surrendered. I'll accept that. Thanks for the source. Binksternet (talk) 02:07, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

No worries. Nick Dowling (talk) 06:41, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

The IJA's laborer's also often included Koreans and Taiwanese, some of whom fought to the death with the IJA soldiers and some of whom surrendered at the earliest opportunity. Sometimes the American records of prisoners taken don't separate which were actually ethnic Japanese and which weren't. Cla68 (talk) 07:40, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

The many, many edits of Captain Obvious

Captain Obvious, how did this article ever survive before you found it five days ago? Personally, I thought it was in pretty good shape at that time—just a few "citation needed" tags that needed references, a bit of reordering of information for better flow and some clarification about the Okinawan language vs. its dialects. The storm of your edits that substitutes for slow, careful, referenced work has introduced a number of unnecessary changes, and has taken away a good deal of vetted information:

• "Kamikaze" is now an English word. It doesn't require italics.
• "75,000 to 150,000 civilians dead or missing" was more precise than your version of "Up to 150,000 civilians dead or missing". Do you have a reference for less than 75,000?
• Under the banner of wikification, you've achieved a state of overlinking. None of our readers will need links to "headquarters" or "cliff", for instance.
• "Native Okinawan language" adds no clarity to the previous phrase "Okinawan language".
• You've removed entire referenced paragraphs about occurrences of US soldiers raping Okinawans.
• You've removed the referenced paragraph about US soldiers making war trophies of Japanese body parts.

Please attempt to work with established editors here on the Talk page rather than forming a wall of successive incremental edits to hide your large-scale removal of the rape and mutilation information. Binksternet (talk) 15:13, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

• • "Do you have a reference for less than 75,000?" Yes, minimal number is/was 40,000. (As mentioned in the GlobalSecurity article.) Also it depends if you count the largely untrained Okinawan militia and workers for the military as civilians or not. Also 40,000 is almost certainly too low.

• • The "paragraph about US soldiers making war trophies of Japanese body parts" is offtopic spam in the section about the civilian losses.

• • "None of our readers will need links to "headquarters" or "cliff", for instance." I thought the staff like "simple wiki" is not without reason, but seems that everyone in the world is smart and fluent in English after all.

• • "You've removed entire referenced paragraphs about occurrences of US soldiers raping Okinawans." I also didn't add referenced paragraphs about occurrences of Japanese soldiers raping Okinawans (see below). --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 15:35, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I just looked again at the GlobalSecurity article and it says "perhaps 100,000" before going on to report that "the lowest estimate is 42,000 killed". If you wanted to say "40,000 to 150,000", why did you write "Up to 150,000"? I venture that your editing here could use more care and consideration.

I fail to see that the paragraph on war trophies is spam. Which commercial website are we being directed to?

This article is not in the simple wiki. We can assume a degree of literacy from our readers. Overlinking takes away from the flow of the paragraph.

Instead of removing US soldier rape cites, you can add Japanese soldier rape cites, making for a balanced presentation. Binksternet (talk) 16:51, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

If you wanted to say "40,000 to 150,000", why did you write "Up to 150,000"? because it was 75,000-140,000 originally (not even 150,000). As I also said, it also depends on how one counts (interestingly enough, US military seemed to count the Okinawan drafties as civilian losses, when arriving at over 142,000). Okinawan museum website says just "more than 100,000". Also 40,000 is almost certainly too low (in my opinion).

I fail to see that the paragraph on war trophies is spam. Which commercial website are we being directed to? If I suddenly start rambling about Japanese crimes against POWs in the war in a random articles in the sections about civilian losses, this will be perfectly fine and not spam? Come on.

Instead of removing US soldier rape cites, you can add Japanese soldier rape cites, making for a balanced presentation. How about "Soldiers of both sides were reported to commit rapes during the battle."? --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 17:41, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

You dind't answer me and instead reverted everything again and "tweaked" (I'd tell you what you can "tweak"). OK, I'll ignore you too. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 21:28, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

The rape and mutilation text has been discussed previously on this talk page, and there was no consensus for including Stor's lenghty text on the topic. As much of it had nothing to do with this particular battle, I see no problem with removing it from this article and only keeping the stuff which is directly relevant. Nick Dowling (talk) 05:54, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Are you saying that rapes of Okinawan women is not relevant? (Since the majority of the text relates to the rapes). Thank you also for clarifying your opinions on the consensus, opinions which by the way are wrong; the text had been stable for 2 months before the arrival of Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk · contribs), with whom you seem to have opinions in common. --Stor stark7 ^Speak 10:06, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Did you just notice that I re-added the figure Schrijvers' quotes with a reference back to his book? (please don't respond here - do so below where I have talked about my reasoning when drafting this text). The above discussion from a few months ago shows no consensus to keep the text you are proposing, so it's removal was long-overdue IMO. Nick Dowling (talk) 10:41, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I found something about rapes, after all

Not in the way you would like it, though:

Unfortunately, the prohibition against surrender left a large number of miserable and desperate IJA soldiers in open terrain. Sometimes, they committed suicide by stepping into a fire zone or by holding a grenade to their stomachs, a kind of "poor man's seppuku." Regrettably, during this period, many committed abusive acts against the civilian population. There were many cases in the Pacific war where Japanese soldiers carried out atrocities against subject peoples. Here, the atrocities were committed on a large scale against Japanese citizens. Knowing that death was imminent, the soldiers freely committed rape.

http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/Huber/Huber.asp (Inagaki, Okinawa, 220; and Appleman, Okinawa, 462, 467.) --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 15:29, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Again, again, again; we are not here to like or dislike, we, or at least most of us here, are here to write an encyclopedia. In doing so we have a number of agreed guidelines and policy to follow, one of which is neutral point of view, i.e. we do not take sides, if there are different viewpoints we represent them all even if they contradict each other, and try to let the reader decide for him/her self which is the most likely one. The other main policy is notability, if something is of enough interest to the reader to be included then it is included. Rapes clearly are, even if they were committed by Americans. Another policy is reliability, the sources should be reliable. Personally I'm skeptical regarding the reliability of an official U.S. army account published in 1948[26]--Stor stark7 ^Speak 16:22, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

And this why I directed you to reliable sources. Contacted the museum yet? No? Thought so. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 18:57, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Pleeeeeeeease start trying to read some wikipedia policy, please pretty please, with sugar on top. Please try Wikipedia:Reliable sources. I couldn't find any mention of museum there. Tell you what, if you add museum there and get it to stick, then I'll call the Okinawa museum, deal?--Stor stark7 ^Speak 19:09, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

The Museum internal link is already up there in the article. They are the most-informed and most-neutral of all sources (representing Okinawans themselves), not some fringe book but an unknown author (nowadays everyone may publish a book). Btw, his figure of "10,000" is based on what exactly? I already wrote the both sides were reported to commit rapes, so I don't know what else you now except with your obsession. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 19:48, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Stor, you are very quick to dismiss sources which make statements you don't agree with (and why do you have a problem with this material anyway? - surely you're not clamining that the Japanese Army didn't have a terrible record of war crimes?!). Appleman's 'Okinawa: The Last Battle' is a volume in the official history of the US Army in World War II. This series (which was commissioned by the Army, but written by independent historians encouraged to make their own judgements) is one of the key references on the war and all the volumes in the series are still considered to be incredibly reliable sources and are routinely used by modern historians. The statement is also cited to a relatively recent (1984) Japanese source and Huber himself is a reliable source. By the way, please note that the full text of Appleman's book is available online so you can follow up the reference and read it in context (Appleman is describing the results of the collapse in Japanese morale and disipline in the last stage of tha battle). Nick Dowling (talk) 04:30, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

By the way, Peter Schrijvers endorses and uses Appleman's statement that the Japanese troops "were fighting in a daze, and rape was common since the soldiers felt that they only had a short time to live" in June 1945 (see page 180 of the first edition of 'The GI War on Japan' published by the New York University Press in 2002). In regards to the US troops on Okinawa, Schrijvers states that "exactly how many women were raped by American troops will never be known, as the victims were either too ashamed - or too frightened to report the crime". He then goes on to say that an unnamed "Okinawan historian" 'estimated' that 10,000 women were raped. This statement is not cited, and nor is there any explanation of how the estimate was calculated and the identiy of the historian is not aparant. Schrijvers' main source for his four paras on rape in Okinawa (but, curiously, not the para with the 10,000 estimate - this is the only one of the four which is uncited) is Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II which aparantly "documents for the first time previously hidden Japanese atrocities in World War II, including cannibalism; the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war; the rape, enforced prostitution" and aparantly discussess US rapes on Okinawa to highlight "The Universality of Rape in War". It's fair to say that soldiers from both sides committed rapes, but there is no firm data on the incidence of this on Okinawa. The topic of rape is worth a few sentances in the section on the impact of the battle on civilians, but it's silly to pretend that soldiers from both sides weren't commiting this crime or that anyone knows exactly how common it was. Nick Dowling (talk) 05:00, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I've just expanded the wording to cover this, and cited the relevant books (why was a review of Schrijvers' book from a website being used as a citation? - it wasn't quoting the full passage and was somewhat missleading when used as a source). Three short sentances seems appropriate to me given the lack of data and represents a greater proportion of the article than this topic gets in published histories of the battle. Nick Dowling (talk) 05:26, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

When I read Feifer's The Battle of Okinawa: The Blood and the Bomb, which I no longer have in my possession, I remember that it did mention some isolated incidents of war crimes committed by American troops during the battle but that many more were committed by Japanese troops. If there is a desire to add an Atrocities or War Crimes section to this article I suggest that book as a source. Cla68 (talk) 07:00, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

This Okinawa rape story can also be found in articles Allied war crimes during World War II and War rape. "Unnamed "Okinawan historian" sounds as an unreliable source. We do not know how exactly this 10,000 number appears. Some reviews criticize Schrijvers' book. One should be looking for more sources on the subject per WP:Verifiability. It appears that "Captain" was not that wrong, after all.Biophys (talk) 22:14, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Commonwealth losses?

--Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 18:53, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

The 2nd line of defence not covered at all(!) in the article

I wrote about the remaining IJA/IJN forces and tagged this for expansion (obviously). --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 21:26, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

lso should be written more about the Japanese and U.S. tactics. I don't know, maybe a special article about cave warfare or something ;) The C&GSC article is fascinating. --Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (talk) 21:49, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

L-Day Merger

A merger with the stub L-Day has been suggested. Any one in disagreement? --Ipatrol (talk) 22:33, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Strength and casualties

it says the Japanese strength was more than 100,000 and it says up to 131,000 were killed plus and additional 10,000 (or something) wounded etc. I know it says more than but still this seems stupid, you could say more than 5 and it would be correct but still be stupid... If you get my meaning. Ah well.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.157.48.26 (talk) 13:58, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Sakishima

Does "Sakishima Gunto" refer to the Sakishima Islands? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.205.193.4 (talk • contribs) 19:19, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

In the Aftermath section

"Other Okinawans were murdered by Japanese to prevent their capture or to steal their food and supplies. Ironically, this was also the first (and only) battle in the war in which the Japanese surrendered by the thousands. And they got horny"

Huh? This is definitely a mistake right? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.167.111.153 (talk • contribs) 07:07, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Cultural objects missing from Okinawa

A lingering issue with the battle is that the Marines and GIs involved sometimes took as souvenirs cultural objects that, strictly speaking, were taken in violation of international law. (International law permits combattants to take war trophies such as flags and weapons but not personal property.) Given the intensity of the battle one can understand how such mistakes were made. Several years ago it was discovered that the Marine Corps Museum had a ceramic object that turned out to be an ancient burial urn and it was returned to Okinawa.

But since Okinawa cultural history predating its 19th century absorption by Japan was basically devastated by the battle and the decision of the Japanese military to make the site of Shuri castle a major defensive position, the loss of these objects is a continuing concern to the native Okinawans. The Okinawa crown jewels are one of the missing objects.

I suggest working into the article a mention of this issue and that fact that some veterans have voluntarily returned objects other than war trophies to the Okinawa government. However, this is a sensitive issue with some veterans and I am not sure how to say this without offending some. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mjmarcus (talk • contribs) 23:08, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Prisoner Killing

Allied soldiers in Pacific and Asian theatres were guilty of the same "cruelty and callous disregard for civilized norms" as Japanese soldiers, according to historian Jeff Kingston, referring to the treatment of POWs, among other issues. Kingston quoted documentary film makers Jonathan Lewis and Ben Steele, who said: "the impression of the war as a history of Japanese savagery alone has been eroded by the growing body of evidence of Allied brutality. The issue here is less whether the two sides were as bad as each other, but whether they had more in common than was ever thought at the time..."

A prominent authority on the social history of the Pacific War, John W. Dower, states that "[b]y the final years of the war against Japan, a truly vicious cycle had developed in which the Japanese reluctance to surrender had meshed horrifically with Allied disinterest in taking prisoners." Dower suggests that most Japanese personnel were told that they would be "killed or tortured" if they fell into Allied hands and, as a consequence, most of those faced with defeat on the battlefield fought to the death or committed suicide. And while it was "not official policy" for Allied personnel to take no prisoners, "over wide reaches of the Asian battleground it was everyday practice."

Allied soldiers in the Pacific often deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered. According to Richard Aldrich, who has published a study of the diaries kept by United States and Australian soldiers, they sometimes massacred prisoners of war. Dower states that in "many instances ... Japanese who did become prisoners were killed on the spot or en route to prison compounds." According to Aldrich it was common practice for US troops not to take prisoners. This analysis is supported by British historian Niall Fergusson, who also says that, in 1943, "a secret [U. S.] intelligence report noted that only the promise of ice cream and three days leave would ... induce American troops not to kill surrendering Japanese."

Fergusson states such practices played a role in the ratio of Japanese prisoners to dead being 1:100 in late 1944. That same year, efforts were taken by Allied high commanders to suppress "take no prisoners" attitudes, among their own personnel (as these were affecting intelligence gathering) and to encourage Japanese soldiers to surrender. Fergusson adds that measures by Allied commanders to improve the ratio of Japanese prisoners to Japanese dead, resulted in it reaching 1:7, by mid-1945. Nevertheless, taking no prisoners was still standard practice among U. S. troops at the Battle of Okinawa, in April–June 1945.

Ulrich Straus, a US Japanologist, suggests that frontline troops intensely hated Japanese military personnel and were "not easily persuaded" to take or protect prisoners, as they believed that Allied personnel who surrendered, got "no mercy" from the Japanese. Allied soldiers believed that Japanese soldiers were inclined to feign surrender, in order to make surprise attacks. Therefore, according to Straus, "[s]enior officers opposed the taking of prisoners[,] on the grounds that it needlessly exposed American troops to risks..." When prisoners nevertheless were taken, many times these were shot during transport because "it was too much bother to take [them] in".

Fergusson suggests that "it was not only the fear of disciplinary action or of dishonor that deterred German and Japanese soldiers from surrendering. More important for most soldiers was the perception that prisoners would be killed by the enemy anyway, and so one might as well fight on."

U. S. historian James J. Weingartner attributes the very low number of Japanese in U.S. POW compounds to two important factors, a Japanese reluctance to surrender and a widespread American "conviction that the Japanese were "animals" or "subhuman'" and unworthy of the normal treatment accorded to POWs. The latter reason is supported by Fergusson, who says that "Allied troops often saw the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians [sic] — as Untermenschen."

Weingartner attributes the very low numbers of POWs in U. S. compounds to a widespread conviction among Americans, "that the Japanese were 'animals' or 'subhuman'". According to Weingartner, many U.S. troops regarded fighting the Japanese as more like hunting inhuman animals than a war.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Stor stark7 (talk • contribs) 02:46, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Shelling of Shuri Castle

In this sentence:

"Shuri Castle had been shelled for 3 days prior to this advance by the USS Missouri."

-it says that USS Missouri did the shelling, while the article about Shuri Castle says that USS Mississippi (BB-41) did it, I am not able to pin it down, if someone with access to the records could check it it would be much appreciated. Best regards - Ulflarsen (talk) 17:27, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

POV for civilian casualties

The section on civilian casualties needs some major editing. Save for one small mention that "both sides" committed rape, almost all of the war atrocities in Okinawa are blamed on Japanese soldiers. In Feifer's "The Battle of Okinawa," I remember that the author dedicated a whole chapter on American atrocities. If I had a book on me, I would help edit it myself. I certainly hope somebody will help balance this section.--114.145.27.75 (talk) 12:43, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

(First attempt at participating in discussion of a wikipedia article, apologies for errors in formatting, etc.) The article states that: "despite being told by the Japanese military that they would suffer rape, torture and murder at the hands of the Americans, Okinawans 'were often surprised at the comparatively humane treatment they received from the American enemy.' the article also states that rape estimates of Okinawan women by U.S. troops exceed 10,000. These statements seem contradictory, as the rape of a large percentage of Okinawa's women doesn't seem "humane" by any standard. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.218.29.174 (talk) 03:18, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I think the key word is "comparatively". The source used says the following:

"Okinawans were also forced by Japanese soldiers to commit suicide or were killed outright: crying babies were put to death so as to conceal a group's whereabouts, Okinawans speaking in dialect were shot as suspected spies, civilians were lined up and shot out of sheer frustration by soldiers who saw defeat as inevitable. Still others, who refused to follow American orders to leave the caves, were killed by grenades or flamethrowers. Those who did leave, who found themselves incapable of dying for the emperor, were often surprised at the comparatively humane treatment they received from the American Enemy"

So, the point made is referenced, and it's possible that Okinawans expected even worse. Also, though it says 10,000 were raped, out of how many total? Also, I expect men weren't raped, so they may have often surprised at their comparatively good treatment.

Also note that, in any case, wikipedia can reflect contrary points of view, if both are reliably referenced. Hohum (talk) 19:37, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I suggest you read the archive of this talk page, here onwards, as far as I can remember the current article version on this sub-topic is the work of the famous sock puppeteer User:Captain Obvious and his crime-fighting dog (sock of User:HanzoHattori) with User:Nick-D, and includes such sillines as attribution that "convinced hundreds of civilians to not kill themselves" attributed to an interview with the person in question and where the hundreds only comes from the title...--Stor stark7 ^Speak 21:36, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Excuse me? A mention of Teruto Tsubota being "sillines"[sic]? Dead god... This guy is a HERO on Okinawa and especially on Tsuken Island. He's officially recognised by the Tsuken people, the US military, the US civilian govt (Clinton), Okinawan government and the Peace Memorial Museum too. How on earth saving hundreds of people (not only civilians) from being killed or killing themselves, while not killing (or raping) anyone, could be considered "sillines[s]"? (And I guess this 9/11 conspiracy-theory stuff above is not "sillines", right?) Another such hero was Takejiro Higa, but he has no Wikipedia article. Maybe he should have one!

As of what the people were told to except: Every woman's fate was supposedly to be raped, and every male captive was to be tortured before being executed by the Americans. That's it, no less. And to avoid precisely this fate, they were told to simply kill themselves (sparking even such horrible stuff like people killing each other with rocks, strangling family members, etc). It was not spontaneous and grenades were distributed among the civilians precisely for suicides. Many, many people complied. This is really tragic, especially when a whole family got wiped out and then there's this single survivor.

BTW, the mass suicides of the population were not only limited to Okinawa. To just quote the Battle of Saipan article: "Many hundreds of Japanese civilians committed suicide in the last days of the battle, some jumping from "Suicide Cliff" and "Banzai Cliff". Efforts by U.S. troops to persuade them to surrender instead were mostly futile. Widespread propaganda in Japan portraying Americans and British as "devils" who would treat POWs barbarically, deterred surrender"- I guess you'll now go and stamp a POV there too, eh? The suicides as captured on camera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65EShYbK5ww and the cliffs today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-G7_I4Tm5M Google up whatever you need more {even Google Books, whatever). I don't see any POV problem here. --82.160.239.145 (talk) 14:26, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Are there any film related to battle of Okinawa?

If there are, maybe we should put them in the refrence list. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.144.101.32 (talk) 11:46, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Number of people killed + captured is less than the number of soldiers

On the Japanese side, along with the "Citation needed" link, if you add the number of people killed (110,000) + the number of people captured/injured (12,000 approx) then you get more than 100,000 people for which it says "Citation needed". Should we at least move this figure up? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sudiptachatterjee (talk • contribs) 00:16, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

"Rape & Mass Suicide"

You are making the mistake of stating a fact in a headline that is clearly disputed in the sources given in the text. This is not a WP:NPOV way of summarizing the section, which is what a heading is supposed to do. If there are accusations, then that is how they need to be presented. Since the sources given clearly state that the very fact that there were rapes at all are disputed, then the heading needs to reflect this, otherwise it is presenting an inaccurate summary of the facts. Rapier (talk) 02:27, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

A title which says "Rape and mass suicide" simply describes the topic being presented - which is about "Rape and mass suicide". It doesn't say it's proven or unproven, i.e. it takes *no position*, leaving it to the reader to decide, based on the main body of the text. In fact, adding "alleged" IS making a POV statement about the veracity of the contents of the section, readers can see the veracity from the main body by the sources used. Would we put "Proven rape and mass suicide" if indisputable evidence was provided - of course not. (Hohum ^@) 18:43, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Again, you are mistaken. The point of the heading is to summarize the contents of the paragraph. The sources given in the paragraph clearly state that there are disputed accusations, and that any actual crimes are a matter of dispute. Just as when a criminal case is being reported by a journalist, people are referred to as "suspects", not "rapists". The crime is "alleged" until it is proven. There is no proof in the information given, therefore stating the topic as simply "Rape and Mass Suicide" is guilt by implication. It is not proper for an encyclopedia to take that stance. If you wish to bring a third party into this, I'd be happy to go to mediation. Thanks. Rapier (talk) 20:22, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

WP:HEADING says "Headings provide an overview in the table of contents and allow readers to navigate through the text more easily." Where do you draw your interpretation from?

There is no implication of guilt in the title, I believe that you are adding that in your mind. It doesn't identify whether "rape" refers to Japanese or American soldiers raping civilians - it's attributed to both in the article, and I don't think the former is refuted there.

I expect other interested editors of this article will comment within a day or two without the need for an invite, but if they don't, I expect a member of WPMILHIST will offer an opinion if a request is posted in the appropriate place. (Hohum ^@) 22:04, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Gents, I am not really one to wade into these types of arguments anymore and I don't claim to have the answer but if my two cents means anything I believe that the header, as it currently stands, does give off an impression to the casual reader that it is proven and could probably be worded better. Either way I think you'll come to a decent compromise.--Looper5920 (talk) 22:31, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Hohum: fair enough. Thanks for the civil disagreement! Looper: Are you referring to the heading in talk or the "Accusation" heading in the article currently when you say "does give off the impression of it being proven"? I appreciate your opinion! Rapier (talk) 22:36, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Rape allegations

I propose dropping the term "allegation" from the rape section. The word "allegation" can be defined as an "assertion made with little or no proof." This makes the rape claim seem spurious, and is an unfair representation of what current research shows. Within the section alone, we have multiple historians stating that on both sides, rape did occur within the battle. There are no sources from historians countering such accusations, or even claiming it to be an "allegation".

There is one statement in the section asserting that government officials did not know of any rapes, but it is completely pulled out of context from its source (a newspaper article that covers the issue of rape in Okinawa!). The source itself contradicts government claims by including other historians' analysis:

Masaie Ishihara, a sociology professor at the Okinawa International University, said there is a lot of historical amnesia out there about those traumatic postwar years. He said that many people don't want to acknowledge what really happened.

One possible explanation for why the United States military says it has no record of any rapes is that few if any Okinawan women reported being attacked out of fear and embarrassment, and that those who did were ignored by the United States military police, the historians said. Moreover, there has never been a large-scale effort to determine the real extent of such crimes.

Even today, efforts to speak to women who had been raped were rejected because friends, local historians and university professors who had spoken with the women said they preferred not to discuss it publicly.

"Victimized women feel too ashamed to make it public, and criminals who killed the three marines are afraid," said a police spokesman in the nearby city of Nago.

In his book Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb, (Ticknor & Fields, 1992) George Feifer said that there were fewer than 10 reported cases of rape by 1946 in Okinawa, partly because of shame and disgrace, partly because Americans were victors and occupiers. Mr. Feifer said that in all there were probably thousands of incidents, but the victims' silence kept rape another dirty secret of the campaign.'

In interviews, historians and Okinawans said that some Okinawan women who were raped gave birth to biracial children, many of whom were killed at birth. More often, however, rape victims obtained abortions from village midwives.''

One reader has made the ridiculous assertion that the whole issue of rape in Okinawa is an "allegation" because nobody was convicted. Since when did history necessitate a judicial burden of proof? There have been very few war crimes trials in history (especially pre-WW2). Should we assert that the Darfur and Armenian genocides are "allegations," or of having "little of no proof"? Until somebody actually includes a source that directly counters the whole episode of rape in Okinawa (as opposed to the "logic of omission", whereas if government sources don't include it, then the testimonies of Okinawan women are a bunch of lies), the accusation of "allegation" is incredibly POV.164.67.232.115 (talk) 04:43, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

• Disagree - No, one doesn't accuse and convict people in an encyclopedia without a reliable source stating actual cases. End of argument. Rapier (talk) 07:15, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Nice, I like how you have to put "disagree" in bold. I'm assuming you said that with a lot of passion. George Feifer's book, "The Battle of Okinawa," includes several eyewitness testimonies of rape in Okinawa on page 373. The wiki article's section on rape in Okinawa also includes two reliable sources: a New York Times article (which quotes multiple historians, including Feifer) and a book review by a professor at the University of Geneva. Note that neither or these sources, nor any other, question the the occurrence of rape and state it as a fact. Do not shift the burden of proof on me, when my position is reinforced by reliable historical sources. You have none. End of Argument. Wikipedia does not allow individual research, if you disagree with what the sources say, provide evidence.164.67.232.115 (talk) 09:09, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

That is the standard format of replying to "proposals" made on talk pages, as it allows for easy perusal to help establish consensus. That is how we do things here. Maybe you should create an account, learn the proper proceedures for article editing, and continue this debate in a proper fashion. There is not a single source provided that proves that rapes actually occured. There are sources that state that rape was alledged on both sides. Making this conclusion is unencyclopedic unless sourced, so until that source is produced this change should not be made. Rapier (talk) 18:49, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

164.67.232.115 if you are going to edit wikipedia you need to understand the requirement to include reliable sources for your edits. If as you say "multiple historians" support your claims, then add them as references (using inline citations). Failure to do so, especially on a topic of controversy, is just going to result in your edit being reverted and potentially sanctions against you for edit warring. The burden of proof isn't being shifted - you have taken it upon yourself by editting the article. Anotherclown (talk) 20:19, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Strenght and losses in the infobox, also the popular culture

If the figures are only for the land battle, they should be indicated as such. There was a huge naval armada and thousands of people died and were injured in the kamikaze attacks and in the naval battle. (As I indicated in the infobox already.) Also all such figures should be referenced anyway.

As of popular culture: The Pacific was in "See also" section, but when i made it to a proper, it was SUDDENLY! a trivia somehow. Really? Oh, and I know there was a Japanese war film in the 1970s and a portrayal in a number of video games too. --94.246.150.68 (talk) 20:41, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

As a general rule 'popular culture' sections should be avoided. See WP:MILMOS/C. Anotherclown (talk) 00:46, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

"As a general rule" it was however okay to have it in See also for several months? --94.246.150.68 (talk) 01:22, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Untitled

Only my opinion of course. I found the L-Day page interesting but not particularly germane to The Battle of Okinawa. I would recommend that there be a link from the Battle of Okinawa page but that the two not be merged. I would suggest that an author expand the L-Day page to include explanations of all [char]-Day designations of which L-day is one. This might take the L-Day page far from Okinawa and WWII and I see that to be a benefit

Not sure how to sign this

Sashhenka (talk) 19:56, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Be well

Sashh

The folowing statement is highly inaccurate considering the number casualties that occured on the German eastern front: "The battle resulted in one of the highest number of casualties of any World War II engagement." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.76.64.118 (talk) 22:34, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Re-assessment April 2011

I have now reassessed this article as Start class for MILHIST as it fails the referencing criteria for B class. Overall it is quite good however many paragraphs lack citations altogether. Once these have been added to the article a request for reassessment can be made at: Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment. Good work so far though. Anotherclown (talk) 21:39, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Picture caption change requested

The caption "A 6th Division Marine demolition crew watches explosive charges detonate and destroy a Japanese cave, May 1945" feels like it would be more correct if it were rewritten as "A 6th Marine Division demolition crew watches explosive charges detonate and destroy a Japanese cave, May 1945". I only say this because I spent four years in the Marine Corps, and it strikes me as more lucid. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.88.34.151 (talk) 14:08, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

That reads better to me. Why don't you go ahead and make the change? --Yaush (talk) 14:31, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Okinawa vs. B of the Bulge

Are there any RS's that contend that, taking into account the naval and supply forces needed, the Battle of Okinawa exceeds the BotBulge for the AMERICAN largest WW2 battle? HammerFilmFan (talk) 20:49, 13 May 2011 (UTC) HammerFilmFan

I remember hearing a claim that every purple heart being used to this day was ordered for the expected casuality numbers for this operation. If you can verify this, please add it to the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.156.121.36 (talk) 23:22, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

That is only partly true, all the Purple Hearts used by the US armed forces today were made for the eventual invasion of Japan. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.3.51.158 (talk) 03:05, 17 January 2012 (UTC)