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Castle, the city and citadel of Okinawa’s ancient kings. Its flanks swept back to the sea on either side, through a jungle of ridges to the chief city of Naha on the left (to the west), through similar hills back to Yonabaru Airfield on the right. It was the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line. It held the bulk of Ushijima’s fighting men—the Sixty-second Division, which had served in China, the Twenty-fourth Division, and the Forty-fourth Independent Mixed Brigade. To its left, on Oroku Peninsula jutting into the sea west of Naha, were about thirty-five hundred Japanese sailors and seven thousand Japanese civilians under Vice Admiral Minoru Ota. Roughly three thousand soldiers of the Second Infantry Unit under Colonel Takehiko Udo held the wild, uninhabited northern half of Okinawa—that part that Ushijima, at the urging of Yahara, had chosen not to defend. Nor would Ushijima attempt to contest the Hagushi Beaches in west-central Okinawa. He would defend the Minatoga Beaches to the south because they were in the rear of his Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line, but he would protect almost nothing north of that line, except, of course, its approaches. He would not even defend Yontan and Kadena Airfields to the east of the Hagushi Beaches. These would be wrecked the moment the Americans appeared by a special force drawn from the Boeitai, the Home Guard of about twenty thousand men whom Ushijima had ruthlessly called up from among the Okinawan males between twenty and forty. The wrecking crew was called the Bimbo Butai, or “Poor Detachment,” by those Japanese soldiers whose loathing of Okinawa and all things Okinawan had already become a problem to General Ushijima.
    Conscription of the Boeitai had unwittingly led to one of the chief complaints among Ushijima’s soldiers: the lack of fresh vegetables. There hadn’t been enough adult males around to produce the normal vegetable crop that fall and winter, and Tokyo was shipping in bullets, not beans.
    “I cannot bear having just a cup of rice for a meal with no side dishes at all,” a soldier wrote. “Our health will be ruined.”
    The lament was raised frequently elsewhere, and Ushijima took account of it by urging his men to “display a more firm and resolute spirit, hold to the belief of positive victory, and always remember the spirit of martyrdom and of dying for the good of the country.”
    By way of consolation, the general issued each man a pint and a half of sweet-potato brandy, proclaimed a temporary amnesty for drunkards, and promised another issue on April 29, 1945, when the Emperor Hirohito would become forty-four years old.
    Cho came back from his visit to Tokyo in late January. He reported that Ushijima’s defense plans dovetailed with Imperial Headquarters strategy and that he had been able to dispel some doubts about the decision not to defend the Hagushi Beaches. Cho was also elated by a secret report he had seen concerning the kamikaze. The attacks by twenty-six of Admiral Ugaki’s six-plane units had brought about instantaneous sinking of one American battleship, six carriers, and thirty-four cruisers. Even the clearheaded Cho had been blown overboard by the Divine Wind. He got out an inspirational message for the Thirty-second Army’s top commanders. It said:
    The brave ruddy-faced warriors with white silken scarves tied about their heads, at peace in their favorite planes, dash out spiritedly to the attack. The skies are slowly brightening.
    But the skies were rather darkening with the airplanes of the American Fast Carrier Forces, which began striking the Great Loo Choo late that month. After the raid of January 22, a Japanese soldier wrote in his diary:
    While some of the planes fly overhead and strafe, the big bastards fly over the airfield and drop bombs. The ferocity of the bombing is terrific. It really makes me furious. It is past three o’clock and the raid is still on. At six the last two planes brought the raid to a close. What the hell kind of