Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit FRIDAY, JUNE 29, 1945. COST OF OKINAWA.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 65, Issue 221, 29 June 1945, Page 2

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit FRIDAY, JUNE 29, 1945. COST OF OKINAWA.

The capture of the important island of Okinawa was not effected without much bloodshed. Three months of the hardest •fighting resulted in the lo*ss of some seven thousand lives, against which are to be set eleven times as many Japanese dead, with a mere four thousand taken “prisoner, wounded or otherwise. The real lesson of this fierce island, campaign relates not to the enemy, but to the Americans. It is familiar ground by now that the Japanese soldier fights fanatically to the death long after the issue of a battle has been decided. Why he does so, scientific study of human behaviour may some day explain. What is more worthy to ibe meditated upon is that title leaders of a free democracy were in a position to decide, calmly and of set purpose, that a certain military objective had to be attained and that the lives of thousands of soldiers must be treated as “expendable” in order to attain it. The American naval and military chiefs knew that they could take Okinawa; they also knew that the price wjould be heavy, as it had been on Saipan and Iwo Jima. In the third place they knew that this certainty was equally clear to the officers and men free citizens all who would have to do the job, and that they would see the ordeal through to the end. No greater mistake was made by the original aggressors than to suppose that the great English-speaking democracies were soft at the core, or that America, where the rights of the individual had been stressed since the Founding Fatheis, would hesitate to spend the lives of her sons in thousands when flesh and blood alone could win a battle.