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bastards are they? Bomb from six to six!
    They were “hard-nosed bastards,” these Americans, and there were more and bigger ones coming—toward both the Ryukyus and Japan, both by air and by sea. Naha was being pounded to rubble and the wolf packs of the American submarine service were littering the floor of the China Sea with sunken cargo vessels and drowned soldiers.
    The most shocking loss of all occurred on June 29, 1944, when the U.S. submarine Sturgeon under Lieutenant Commander C. L. Murphy sent four torpedoes flashing into the side of the troop transport Toyama Maru, sending her to the bottom along with fifty-six hundred soldiers and most of her officers and crew.
    Such reports helped to discourage the troops of the Thirty-second Army, and one private wrote in his diary: “The enemy is brazenly planning to destroy completely every last ship, cut our supply lines and attack us.”
    He was absolutely correct, and “the enemy” by then was also hurling neutralizing thunderbolts at the homeland.
    Throughout February and March, while the Marines were conquering Iwo Jima, land- and carrier-based planes struck again and again at the Great Loo Choo. Superforts began to rage all over the Ryukyus. Okinawa was effectively cut off from Kyushu in the north, Formosa in the south. On March 1, while the Fast Carrier Forces were returning to Ulithi from their third strike at Japan, there were so many planes strafing, bombing, and rocketing Okinawa that pilots had to get in line for a crack at a target. Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima was impressed.
    “You cannot regard the enemy as on a par with you,” he told his men. “You must realize that material power usually overcomes spiritual power in the present war. The enemy is clearly our superior in machines. Do not depend on your spirits overcoming this enemy. Devise combat method [ sic ] based on mathematical precision—then think about displaying your spiritual power.”
    Ushijima’s order was perhaps the most honest issued by a Japanese commander throughout the war. It was Bushido revised, turned upside down and inside out—but the revision had been made too late.

First Blood for America
    CHAPTER FIVE
    In early October 1944—little more than a week after the crucial San Francisco conference—Fleet Admiral Bull Halsey’s monster Task Force Thirty-eight was speeding blacked-out through the Pacific night, bound northwestward for the opening salvos of the Okinawa campaign. When dawn broke it revealed a splendid and thrilling spectacle: seventeen aircraft carriers carrying one thousand aircraft, six fast battleships, fourteen cruisers, and fifty-eight destroyers together with the subsidiary ships such as oilers and tenders plunging through a white-capped gray sea almost at flank speed, some of them with “a bone in their teeth”—white bow waves curving away from either side of their prows—a huge and terrifying force to any Japanese unfortunate enough to witness their approach. Actually, Halsey’s fleet alone was more powerful than the entire battle force deployed by Admiral Nimitz at Midway on June 6, 1942, to defeat Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet, thus restoring carrier power in the Pacific to par with five apiece and—more important—turning the tide of naval battle against Japan.
    Halsey’s TF 38 was so large that it was spread out into four separate groups, each a task force in itself with a rear admiral in command. The precious carriers, as always, sailed in the center of each group in boxlike formation, with the battleships and cruisers steaming at the quarters, their protective antiaircraft guns raised like spikes fingering the sky. Around each formation sped the circling destroyers, seagoing sheep dogs snapping at the heels of their flocks, but actually screening them and searching, searching, searching for enemy submarines.
    On all ships, surface and air radars rotated unceasingly, feeding information to their Combat Information Centers,