“Buck Rogers” rocket Marines load projectiles into the racks of a mobile launcher in preparation for laying down a barrage on Japanese positions during the Tenth Army drive to the south of Okinawa. Such barrages were very effective.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 181768
The Army divisions in XXIV Corps matched the Marines’ breakthroughs. On the east coast, the 96th Division seized Conical Hill, the Shuri Line’s opposite anchor from Sugar Loaf, after weeks of bitter fighting. The 7th Division, in relief, seized Yonabaru on 22 May. Suddenly, the Thirty-second Army faced the threat of being cut off from both flanks. This time General Ushijima listened to Colonel Yahara’s advice. Instead of fighting to the death at Shuri Castle, the army would take advantage of the awful weather and retreat southward to their final line of prepared defenses in the Kiyamu Peninsula. Ushijima executed this withdrawal masterfully. While American aviators spotted and interdicted the southbound columns, they also reported other columns moving north. General Buckner assumed the enemy was simply rotating units still defending the Shuri defenses. But these north-bound troops were ragtag units assigned to conduct a do-or-die rear guard. At this, they were eminently successful.
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) 122390
Men of Company G, 2d Battalion, 22d Marines, found themselves fighting in an urban environment in their house-to-house attack against the Japanese in Naha.
This was the situation encountered by the 1st Marine Division in its unexpectedly easy advance to Shuri Ridge on 29 May as described in the opening paragraphs. The 5th Marines suddenly possessed the abandoned castle. While General del Valle tried to placate the indignation of the 77th Division commander at the Marines’ “intrusion” into his zone, he got another angry call from the Tenth Army. It seems that the Company A, 1/5 company commander, a South Carolinian, had raised the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy over Shuri Castle instead of the Stars and Stripes. “Every damned outpost and O.P. that could see this started telephoning me,” said del Valle, adding, “I had one hell of a hullabaloo converging on my telephone.” Del Valle agreed to erect a proper flag, but it took him two days to get one through the intermittent fire of Ushijima’s surviving rear guards. Lieutenant Colonel Richard P. Ross, commanding the 3d Battalion, 1st Marines, raised this flag in the rain on the last day of May, then took cover. Unlike Sugar Loaf, Shuri Castle could be seen from all over southern Okinawa, and every Japanese gunner within range opened up on the hated colors.
The Stars and Stripes fluttered over Shuri Castle, and the fearsome Yonabaru-Shuri-Naha defensive masterpiece had been decisively breached. But the Thirty-second Army remained as deadly a fighting force as ever. It was an army that would die hard defending the final eight miles of shell-pocked, rain-soaked southern Okinawa.
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