Stars and Bars, on Ice
Today is the 80th Anniversary of Operation Iceberg, the invasion of the Japanese island of Okinawa, the last major amphibious assault of World War II.
Men of the 7th Infantry Division head for the beaches of Okinawa in LVTs. 1 April, 1945. SC 205191
It was an Army-led effort, commanded by Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. (USMA 1908), whose 180,000-strong Tenth United States Army— the only campaign fought by this Army– included the 7th, 27th, 77th and 96th Infantry divisions in the XXIV Corps; along with the 1st, 2nd and 6th Marine Divisions of III Amphibious Corps.
In a weird bit of military trivia, the hard-fought battle was, sort of and unintentionally, the high water mark of the Confederate military.
As recently noted by the DOD but not sufficiently explained:
On May 29, 1945, a Confederate flag was raised over Shuri Castle before being removed and replaced by an American flag three days later, on Buckner’s orders.
What makes this flag story interesting is that Buckner’s father, Simon Bolivar Buckner, was a Confederate Army brigadier general and later governor of Kentucky.
Buckner was among the Americans killed on Okinawa. He was hit by Japanese artillery fire on June 18, 1945, while checking on the progress of his troops at the front. He was the highest-ranking U.S. military officer killed during World War II
Buckner was only one of 65,631 casualties the Tenth Army suffered in the three-month campaign.
As for “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey used to say…
The U.S. Ensign finally hoisted over Shuri’s battled ramparts on 30 May (not three days later) was raised by Marines of the 1st Division, a distinguished relic that reportedly already had been flown by the unit over Cape Gloucester and at Peleliu.
The souvenir-sized “Stars and Bars” it replaced had been carried in the helmet of a Captain in the 5th Marine Regiment, Julian Delano Dusenbury (Clemson ’42), who added a Navy Cross for the fight at Shuri Castle to the Silver Star he earned at Peleliu. Wounded on 7 May (for the third time in the war) and evacuated, his men– mostly from the South– recovered the flag from his bloody helmet and, having no other one to fly, rose it over Suri when it was finally captured.