Welcome to the America’s Veterans Stories podcast. Kim Monson is your host. The WWII Battle of Okinawa was fought April 1 to June 22, 1945. Col. Bill Rutledge (Ret. USAF) discusses the battles in the Pacific that led up to the Battle of Okinawa. Col. Rutledge shares the stories of personal friends and colleagues who fought at Okinawa. He notes the background of Kamikaze. Plus Col. Rutledge shares his thoughts about the Manhattan Project and dropping the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and our other wars and conflicts. America’s fighting men and women strapped on their boots and picked up their guns to fight tyranny and stand for liberty. We must never forget them. Welcome to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. These stories will touch your heart, inspire you, and give you courage. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Here’s Kim Munson.
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And welcome to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteranStories.com. And the show comes to you because of a trip I took in 2016 with a group that accompanied four D-Day veterans back to Normandy, France for the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day landings. Returned stateside realizing that we need to know these stories and record them and broadcast them and archive them. So hence, America’s Veteran Stories. So pleased to have on the line with me a regular guest on both my shows, and that is Colonel Bill Rutledge. He’s 96 years young. He’s traveled the world. He has a deep interest in people and places and our history and a retired lieutenant colonel from the United States Air Force. Colonel Rutledge, welcome.
SPEAKER 09 :
Thank you, and it will be a great day.
SPEAKER 05 :
It will be a great day. We are pre-recording this, and we’ll broadcast this on June 22nd, which is a very important day in World War II. It was the conclusion of the Battle of Okinawa, of which the Allies were victorious. But we want to talk about how we got there and what happened. You’ve got personal stories regarding some of those at the Battle of Okinawa. So let’s start with… What was the progression in the Pacific to get to the Battle of Okinawa, which was fought April 1 through June 22, 1945?
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, in the summer of 1942, everything had been going in the Japanese favor. And there was great fear that they would be able to land in Australia by that fall. Then the opportunity presented itself, and we took the initiative to land the Marines on Guadalcanal in the early fall of 1942. And people don’t recognize that this was the key turning point, because if we could stop the Japanese there… Then we could progress by doing a step-by-step from island to island to return towards the Philippines and then eventually to proceed on towards the Japanese mainland. So this was the long-range plan, and it actually worked.
SPEAKER 05 :
And many of these battles, though, were very hard fought, very bloody as they were progressing on the island hopping throughout the Pacific, yes?
SPEAKER 09 :
Yes. I have a very, very close friend who one of his first landings was on Kwajalein. And he was a Marine. He joined when he was 17. Didn’t even finish his senior year in high school in Minneapolis. And he went out and that was the first landing. And then, of course, he made several others. And he was a very close friend and told me so much about so many of the battles and that we in the general public in those days were not privy to. They were very classified. They couldn’t share information with us in the American public because then this would be revealing some of their plans and what was going on to the Japanese. So consequently, they censored so much that we received that we were not knowledgeable of, and so much that we learned later through reading and through television, radio, and firsthand reports from those who returned from the war.
SPEAKER 05 :
So you were just, you were probably a kid during this time, yes? You weren’t that old.
SPEAKER 09 :
I was 13 when Pearl Harbor was attacked. When they went into Okinawa in the spring of 1945, I was 16 and was going to turn 17 in July. So I was looking forward, like so many in my generation, that Presumably, I would be in the military within a year, and thank goodness for the bomb.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, and we’ll talk more about that. So we’ve gone through all these different battles up through the Pacific, and each one of them was to get a better advantage on air bases so that we could have bombers that could bomb the Japanese mainland, correct?
SPEAKER 09 :
That’s correct. That’s one of the reasons, for example— that we had had the battle in Iwo Jima in February of 1945. It was to gain control of the island so we could use the airstrips there for emergency landings for B-29 crews who were coming back out of Tokyo because they would get shrapnel damage and other damage from Japanese planes. And over the long run, it saved Many, many crews, many, many bombers. But unfortunately for the Marines, the casualties were catastrophic.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, the Marines were pretty amazing on that. And let’s see, the Battle of Iwo Jima was, I should know this, it was February 19 of 1945 through March 26. So now we’re moving over to April 1, which isn’t that far off to the Battle of Okinawa. So that was kind of one, you know, one-two punch, yes?
SPEAKER 09 :
Yes. And the The main thing that’s really significant is that the master plan for the invasion of Japan had already been approved for the whole year in 1945. And President Truman had approved a plan for invasion of Japan 1 November 1945. Now, when he did that, the Manhattan Project was in process. We were hopeful that it would work, but it was never tested before we did Okinawa. So we sequentially did Iwo Jima, then Okinawa very shortly thereafter. Because Okinawa was a large island, and it would give us a staging area for the invasion in November of 1945. The admirals, the generals… the commanders all over the Pacific, none of them knew anything about the Manhattan Project. They didn’t know that there was a potential atomic bomb that had the chance of maybe ending the war. So everything was conceived step by step. And so Okinawa was the right target at the right time, but it’s very fortunate that things developed as they did. Because the casualties were staggering in Okinawa.
SPEAKER 05 :
They were staggering. And I looked at Wikipedia, which I’ll just say I looked at Wikipedia. And it said that the casualties for the allies or the Americans was around 50,000 with 12,500 dead. That is significant because each one of those is someone’s son, brother, father, uncle. And so those are significant numbers. But it was even more significant for the Japanese. The report said that there was 94,000 dead of Japanese if you look at everything. That’s a lot of life. War is a terrible thing, Colonel Rutledge.
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, the most recent book that I read on the battle there was written by an Army major. He was a major at the time. He later became a general officer. And he wrote this when he was 99 years old, and it was published in 2020. And he made it very clear that this was primarily an Army venture. The Marines had… bled out so badly in Iwo Jima, they were pulled back, and most of them were held in reserve. Now, there were Marines that came in and landed after the Army had taken possession of the southern part of the island, but it was largely an Army event. And the author, of course, since he was Army, was rather resentful that the Marines had such success with their press corps. During the war, people used to always say, well, for every Marine, there is a Marine reporter and photographer. So there was a bit of competition between the two.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, and they all fought valiantly.
SPEAKER 09 :
Very much so. The Army landed on April 1st, and it happened to be Easter Sunday. And they had no expectations that it would be such a long battle, 82 days. And not only were the casualties terrible for the Americans— But for the natives on the island, there’s an estimate that there were at least 100,000 Okinawans who lost their lives during this 82-day period. And one of the reasons is that they had been so instructed by the Japanese or actually propagandized against the Americans that they had a fear of of the abusive actions that they should expect if the Americans took control. So a huge number of the Okanawans who died were suicides, and many of them were by jumping off cliffs, especially on the northern end of the island. And whole families would just hold hands and jump off. And I’ve seen pictures that were taken of those times when people were trying to warn them, look, You’ll be safe. You’re okay. But they were still fearful. The Japanese lost just about everything there. Very few were captured, only those mostly who were wounded. The estimate that I saw was that they had lost, for sure, 125,000 soldiers. And the death toll for the American, even though we had— like you say, maybe almost 50 casualties, 50,000, that we had about 7,500 that were killed in action. There’s both Marines and Army.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay, so the battle, it is a significant battle. And just tell us a little bit about the Japanese islands, because you were stationed there for a little while. So give us the lay of the land on what the Japanese islands look like.
SPEAKER 09 :
Well… Generally speaking, they’re running north and south. There are three main islands in Japan. They talk about the home islands. And so Okinawa is maybe an hour, an hour and a half flight due south of Kyushu, which is a southern island. And the first landing that was scheduled for 1 November 1945 was going to be on the western shore of Kyushu. We learned later from reviewing Japanese war plans and then also comparing those with our invasion war plans that had we gone and made that invasion, there would have been millions of casualties on both sides. So that was one plan. Then there was a follow-on plan that when Kyushu was captured, presumably if it was, then we would go on to Hokkaido right above where, and landing would be in March of 1946 near Tokyo. And then, of course, there’s still a third Northern Island up there, that was really irrelevant to the overall battle plans.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. Well, we’re going to continue this discussion of the Battle of Okinawa that it concluded on June 22, 1945. I’m talking with Colonel Bill Rutledge. And it’s very important that we know this history. And I’m also very honored to have the United States Marine Foundation Memorial as one of our nonprofits that I totally support. And as we’re talking about the Marines and the Army. at the Battle of Okinawa. It’s so important that we honor and remember those that have given their lives or been willing to give their lives for liberty, which is the responsible exercise of freedom. So for more information regarding the Memorial Foundation, go to usmcmemorialfoundation.org. We’ll be right back.
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SPEAKER 1 :
Ah, ah, ah.
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Welcome back to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteransStories.com. And we are talking with Colonel Bill Rutledge, retired United States Air Force, and about the Battle of Okinawa. It was fought April 1 through June 22, 1945. And Colonel Rutledge, this was not the first time that there was an invasion or an attempted invasion of Okinawa, correct? No.
SPEAKER 09 :
That’s correct. And it dates all the way back to the 12th century when the emperor of China set a massive fleet with soldiers for an invasion of Japan. And they were going to invade actually up in Hokkaido, which is considered the main island right in the middle. It’s where Tokyo is located. But they were going to go on the west coast from there. And as they approached Hokkaido, the Japanese mainland, there was a huge typhoon. The typhoon season normally is like September and October. So they were coming in very close to the coast. The Japanese were going to do what defense they could, but they would have been overwhelmed. And then there was this huge typhoon. And the typhoon really destroyed the fleet, destroyed the army that was attacking. And so the Japanese referred to this thereafter as the divine wind. And their word for this collective divine wind was kamikaze. And kamikaze was one of the most significant factors in the Battle of Okinawa. And also, it would have been a catastrophic factor had we made the invasion of the mainland. because it was far more destructive than we were ever let known in the general public. And only in reading years later did we find out the devastation caused by the kamikaze aircraft. When you have a pilot who’s making a one-way flight with a bomb aboard, and his purpose is to dive into a ship, preferably a ship that either is an aircraft carrier or is loaded with Marines or soldiers. So it was all suicidal, and it was based upon this idea of kamikaze. We pilots are a part of the kamikaze that will save the homeland and save the emperor.
SPEAKER 05 :
And I know it was pretty devastating. I’ve interviewed some veterans that had been on ships that had been hit by kamikaze planes. And, yes, the devastation of those particular attacks was significant. So this is going on during this Battle of Okinawa. So where do you want to begin with this?
SPEAKER 09 :
I’d like to talk about the personal aspects of it. I was 16 years old, and I had two very close friends in the Marines. And what had happened was two years before, we had been playing basketball. We were a very small town, and they went to a Catholic church in Jacksonville, Florida. And so we played them, but we got to know them, and they became very close personal friends. They graduated in June of 1944. the Marines had a policy called a buddy enlistment program, whereby they would guarantee that if there were friends who wanted to go together into the Marines, they would go to basic together to boot camp. And then they would be assigned also together to the same infantry company for continued battles in the Pacific. So both of these friends of mine, um, They went together. They went all through this procedure. And so after the Army had taken possession of a large part of the southern part of the island, the Marines were landed on the eastern shore, sort of midway up the island. And when they went in, then they proceeded over to an area ridge. It’s really important to also describe a little bit that the island has got… I’m not saying mountains, but it has large hills throughout. And it’s sort of like a spine running north and south and also in some places east and west. So the terrain for battle was terrible. It was really bad. So they had landed. The Marines were going forward. And then my two friends, Tim McCarthy and Charlie Lee, were together moving forward. And they encountered the Japanese in a very strenuous battle. And the same day, almost within minutes of one another, they were both hit. Charlie died on the scene. Tim had a terrible wound in his left arm that took away most of the tissue in his upper left arm. And so he was completely immobilized. And those were the two really close personal friends I got. I didn’t know about the particulars until I saw an article in the Jacksonville newspaper about two months later. And it had a photograph of Charlie Lee. And it stated under there that he was one of the casualties. And about the same time, I had a letter that I had sent to Charlie because I had been writing to Charlie. And it came back to me unsealed and just said, undeliverable. And I kept that letter for many years. It’s one of my old scrapbooks. But it was a personal situation where I experienced that. Later, Tim, now this is a real small world. This all was in the spring of 1945. In 1950… I was graduating from the University of Florida and was working there. And Tim McCarthy showed up looking for a job. And he came to work with me at the university. And I got to know him very well. And then he became an usher for our wedding. And we, my wife and I, were married on December the 7th. 1951, 10 years to the day from Pearl Harbor. And that day, it was the last day that I saw Tim when he ushered at our wedding.
SPEAKER 05 :
Wow. Do you know what ever happened to him after that?
SPEAKER 09 :
He was working for the power company. And we just never had contact after that because I was moved shortly thereafter. I was moved up into south carolina he was moved all around florida our paths just never crossed again so um but it was very personal um because these were good friends and this was one of those experiences there it was devastating now i had another one didn’t this really relates to kamikazes both of the next two um while i was at florida there we stayed in a rooming house And there were about 10 of us. And one of the people that I had been seeing for years, it was probably 1950, and he had gone to take a shower. And so his arm was exposed when he was returning to his room, both of his arms. And they were terribly burned. I mean, the burns were horrible. And I looked and I saw him, and I just… I said, Zell, what happened? And he, like so many veterans from real combat, had never spoken about what he did during the war. And he said, I was on the Franklin. And the Franklin was one of our large carriers that was hit by kamikaze. And it was the most devastating one hit. kamikaze action in a whole war in that it took this whole carrier out of battle. But the real impact was that over 1,000 Marines, I mean 1,000 sailors on that ship died from the flames and explosions because a kamikaze came down, straight down, went through the flight deck, down into the area where the planes were being reloaded with with bombs and also all the fuel that was down there. So everything was highly combustible. So not only were that many, 1,000 sailors killed, but well over 1,000. No, I’m sorry, 600 were killed. But over 1,000 additional sailors were terribly injured, and they all thought that the ship was going to go down. For some reason, it didn’t. It survived and limped back all the way back to New York. But by the time it got back to New York, the bombs had already been dropped. The war was over. So it was scuttled when it got there. But they had every intention of refurbishing the carrier and putting it back into operation because they had no idea at the time it was returning back. anything about the bomb or anything about any military action that would delay their action. So it’s very common when you get a ship that doesn’t sink to try to get it back and get it into service, and that was a situation. Now, there was one other friend of mine who got hit with kamikazes. He was from Nebraska. from a little town out there, and he, like a lot of people, lied about his age, and he went out into the Navy and was in the battle. He was on a destroyer escort, and he was out in one of the gun ports that’s on the side of the ship, and kamikaze came in, and it struck the ship, and the shrapnel and other things from its approach and also from the impact he was badly wounded and this was Jack a fellow I had met on the golf course and so he told me his story about why he had gone and how young he was and so these were four personal experiences of people that I knew that were on Okinawa or certainly at sea around the area that were affected by the kamikazes.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, and to think about these young guys, 17 years old, I mean, they’re just kids that were over there in this battle. And that was common with the Marines, really.
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, it was common not only with the Marines, but also with the Army, too. For example, the landing in Normandy, the average age for the people that got out of the ship, got out of the landing vehicles, was 19.
SPEAKER 05 :
Isn’t that hard to believe? When I was back in Normandy with the four D-Day veterans and we were at the cemetery, I was talking with one of them, and he basically said they never had the opportunity to get married and have children, and they were just so young. And that really struck me, taking these lives so young. And they did that… They did it because they were, I think, generally it’s this higher purpose of standing for liberty, to make sure that people could live free. That’s the bottom line. Now, I know that there’s all kinds of politics and all kinds of other things, factors that go into it. But I would say the American soldier, the sailor, the Marine did. The airmen that really the big thing is, is that is standing for our country and standing for these important principles. And I think it’s important that we honor them for doing so.
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, it’s true. And your reference, of course, to Normandy, I was at the same location that you were. I visited there in the year 2020 and I went out there. to the cemetery and to the landing area near Utah Beach. And I went over and looked down and just could not imagine at Pointe du Hoc how the Marines had come up. Or the Army.
SPEAKER 05 :
It was the Rangers. It was the Rangers.
SPEAKER 09 :
Right. The Rangers. Correct. And they’d been training for two years for climbs of this nature. But… It was so sheer, and plus there were so many guns above there, and the fact that they came in at low tide instead of high tide, that the ropes weren’t long enough. So there’s so many things which are not plannable in combat that people have to improvise. And how they succeeded, it’s amazing. And the same thing, of course, in Okinawa. There’s one thing, also digressing, but it relates to kamikaze.
SPEAKER 05 :
Let’s keep that as a cliffhanger for our next segment. We’re going to go to break. We’re talking with Lieutenant Colonel Bill Rutledge, retired United States Air Force, regarding the Battle of Okinawa, which was fought April 1 through June 22, 1945. We’ll be right back.
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And welcome back to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteransStories.com. Sponsor of the show is Hooters Restaurants. They have five locations, Loveland, Aurora, Lone Tree, Westminster, and Colorado Springs. And a great place to get together for lunch or happy hour, Monday through Friday. They’ve got great specials. And how I got to know them, it’s a really important story about freedom and free markets and capitalism. And… how that matches up with PBIs, those politicians and bureaucrats and interested parties that try to control our lives. And so be sure and check out Hooters restaurants. We greatly appreciate that. I’m talking with Colonel Bill Rutledge. He is 96 years young and he’s traveled the world. He has this great interest and curiosity in people and places in history. And we’re talking about the Battle of Okinawa. that was fought during World War II, April 1 to June 22, 1945. Now, first off, you had a thought. We were talking about over at Normandy, Pointe du Hoc, and I’ve been at Pointe du Hoc as well, looking down those cliffs and just amazed what the Rangers had to do to climb up those cliffs with the Germans shooting down at them. And then, as you mentioned earlier, I guess best laid plans in battle, you never know, is they came in at low tide instead of high tide. And so their ropes weren’t long enough. So some of them were even like free climbing up those cliffs, Colonel Rutledge.
SPEAKER 09 :
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And their casualties were very, very straight, strong. And I read through another book years ago. They started this training. See, the landing was interesting. June 6, 1944. And they started this training in 1942. They first did their training in northeast Georgia, right up near the Appalachians. And one of the things early on was how to scale a vertical surface, how to climb, how to do this. And so that training started. then was carried over to England, and then they trained in England wherever they could find enscarpments like that, such as along the coast on both the east side, where you had the cliffs of Dover, and over on the west side, where they had sheer drops. So the people who were going to do the landing were well trained, but they couldn’t have anticipated what they were running into. It was impossible. So, so much for For Europe, we need to get back and talk a little bit more about the key on kamikazes and why they’re so significant. We, meaning the general public, we were never told how effective the kamikazes had been in Okinawa. And only later, I mean many years later, was it revealed that the kamikazes And almost all kamikazes, the largest number of kamikazes were fighter plane size. And they could strip off a lot of weight because they weren’t going to have to, they didn’t need return fuel. So they put as much destructive combustibles aboard the aircraft as possible. And everyone knew it was a suicide mission. But what we learned later, was that they had actually sunk 36 American warships. And in addition to that, they had damaged 368 other warships. And that the seamen alone, that they had lost almost 5,000 U.S. sailors on these kamikaze attacks.
SPEAKER 05 :
What did the kamikaze attacks do to the Japanese population? They lost a lot of young men, yes?
SPEAKER 09 :
Yes, but their philosophy was very unusual. They truly had a belief in the divinity of their leader, and they felt that… They were all doing this as a sacrifice for their nation. So as they were drafted or volunteered, but as they left their homes, the majority of the young men would talk with their parents. They would all have a little bit of sake and talk and toast. And it was like we will never see one another again. The idea of somebody going off to battle and then returning was a loss of face. In the Orient, face is everything. And so they knew that they probably would never see their family again. And in turn, of course, the family was bidding farewell to their son, no matter which branch of service they went into. But for those later in the war who were going to become kamikaze pilots, there was no question there. They even would have ceremonies before they took off on their flights where they would gather together, talk about what they were going to do. The commanding officer for that particular unit would be there. They again would use sake as a toast. They would bid them a farewell. They’d get in their aircraft, and they’d never see one another again. That was the mindset. I mean, it was so contradictory to anything that we in the Western world would think of. Our objective was always to return and to be successful in battle. Theirs was not that. It was not necessarily to return. They wanted to be successful in battle, but it meant their lives, and that was their dedication. One of the terrible things about the kamikazes is that not only were they so destructive, but then our military intelligence made some gross blunders in that they assumed that the Japanese would not have very many when we would make a landing in November of 1945. And they figured, well, we haven’t seen any Japanese zero fighters yet. in july in late starting in late june and through july so we think they just don’t have enough and they don’t want to put them airborne and they want to save them so the speculation was that they would probably have a few hundred aircraft that could be used later well they were only off about four or five hundred percent um because the japanese had more than 2 000 aircraft that they had built and held in reserve, and moved to various airfields all around the islands so that they couldn’t be damaged. But they were holding those in abeyance because their defensive war plans called for them to attack our troop carrier ships first priority. So had we pursued the landing on Kyushu in November 1945, we would have lost tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines before they ever could get ashore. Because troop ships were their number one target. And they just had this huge capability. Now, one thing, it was after the war, we’re not talking kamikazes anymore, at least I didn’t think so, until I went to a golf tournament in 1971. in Japan, and it was hosted by the commander of the 5th Air Force. And the people invited were mostly Japanese admirals, generals, high-ranking civilians, and also a person who would be equivalent to our Secretary of Defense. So Secretary of Defense was going to be the lead-off because he was the most senior person present. So he was on the number one tee, and his aide went over and placed the golf ball on the tee, a ceremonial sort of procedure. And so he stepped up and he hit the ball, and he made a good hit. It went straight, but it was a smoke ball. I’ve never actually seen one myself, but it was. So you hit it, and when the contact— it starts smoking as it goes away. It’s prepared specifically for such clownish things as that. But nevertheless, he hit it. And as soon as he hit the ball and saw the smoke, he jumped up in the air and held his fist way up high, and he yelled, kamikaze! Wow. And I’m standing by this Japanese admiral, and I said, what’s he talking about? He said, well… The secretary was a kamikaze pilot and had the war continued for hardly any length of time, he would never be here today because he would have been using his aircraft and crashing it into a ship.
SPEAKER 05 :
And that was in, you said, in 1971 that that happened?
SPEAKER 09 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 05 :
Isn’t that, that is fascinating. Okay. So let’s go to break. I’m talking with, excuse me, Colonel Bill Rutledge. And we’re talking about the Battle of Okinawa, which was, it’s also been known as the, as Bloody Okinawa. It was fought April 1 to June 22, 1945. And so that is why we need to remember all of these stories and remember our American foundation and those foundational principles of honor, integrity, and patriotism. And that is something that the Center for American Values is focused on. The center is located in Pueblo on the Riverwalk. And they have a variety of things that they do. One of those is our Portraits of Valor of well over 160 Medal of Honor recipients, which is the highest military honor that can be awarded here in America. And then also they have educational programs, K-12 and on values presentations. So to find out everything that they do and to support them, go to AmericanValueCenter.org. That’s AmericanValueCenter.org. We’ll be right back with Colonel Bill Rutledge.
SPEAKER 03 :
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SPEAKER 05 :
And welcome back to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Bunsen. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteransStories.com. And I’m talking with Colonel Bill Rutledge, retired United States Air Force, 96 years young, and has traveled the world. Such a wealth of information. He’s so curious about people and places in history. We’re talking about the Battle of Okinawa that was fought April 1 through June 22nd. 1945. And Colonel Rutledge, you said, and we’ve talked about it, the kamikaze pilots, they were very effective in the Pacific theater.
SPEAKER 09 :
Yes, very much so. And I went through a listing in this book that I recently read, and it listed a lot of the different ships that were struck by the kamikazes. And one I came across that I was shocked, and this was one of the carriers. It was an Essex class, so it was the larger class of carriers. And it was the USS Hancock. Now, it didn’t say anything much about it other than the fact that it was a target. It was hit. In 1958, I was stationed at the Air Force Academy. And we had a naval liaison officer there. And he made an announcement that he was going to be going out to Alameda, California, and was going out aboard a ship, the USS Hancock, and that we could go out with them because they were going to do training missions. So they would do takeoffs and landings and stops and goes. where they touch down and go up, primarily for reserve officers. So I agreed and went out there. I had no knowledge that the Hancock had even been involved in the invasion, nor did I know that the Hancock had been hit. So we went out. We observed it. It was a good learning experience. And it taught me that when you actually launch an aircraft off the deck, it’s not a fast process. It’s pretty slow. And they use the steam power to pop them into the air off the bow. And then one of the training experiences was interesting. One of the pilots came back, and he came in, and he didn’t get caught on the hook. In other words, he came in too high. So he went around and he tried it again. He didn’t make it. So he got waved off, and they said, well, the practice is this, that if a guy comes in too high on two occasions, we don’t want him to try a third because he’s going to adjust to come in lower, and too many of them are going to hit the deck on the bow of the ship. Right. That was a learning experience. But everything aboard the Hancock was fine. I didn’t see one sign of damage. Nobody told me anything about damage. So it was only years later when I’m reading about Okinawa that I learned that this had been one of the principal carriers in the battle around Okinawa. And there’s another thing that I forgot to mention, but it’s relative. The Japanese had built the largest battleship in the world. It was called a Yamato. It was huge. It was so big that it had over 3,000 sailors aboard the ship as far as their crew. By that time, it had been a target for the Navy aircraft, our Navy aircraft. And so consequently, the battleship had been down near Okinawa. Then it was going back towards the main islands. And our ships, our aircraft, converged on it, and through a series of bomb raids and everything else, they sank it. So it was a big catastrophe for the Japanese Navy, a great loss of face, and especially everybody went down with the ship. There were no indications of rescue. And we had a high school over there, and it was Yamato High School, where American students, children of people assigned to the Air Force over there.
SPEAKER 05 :
And so, well, two questions. First of all, named at the Yamato, an American school, was that basically to honor the Japanese?
SPEAKER 09 :
You know, I really don’t know, because they were in separate phases of your memory. At that time… I did not even know about the Yamato battleship. Got it. Not at all. Now, most of the different schools were named for the locations of the school. In other words, Chofu, where my children went to school in Japan, was right adjacent to the community of Chofu. Got it. And so I’m speculating that this is one of these suburbs, many, many suburbs of Tokyo. and it very well may have been called Yamato.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. And one other question, going back to the USS Hancock, this pilot that came in twice too high, so wasn’t able to get the hook to stop on the aircraft carriers. They said they waved him off. Did he then just have to go back to the mainland and land?
SPEAKER 09 :
Yes, absolutely. They said that their experience had taught them that it was too dangerous to, especially for people who were not current in their aircraft. And when you’re talking about a person who’s going out there for a reserve pilot for keeping up to date in his aircraft, he wasn’t flying enough. He wasn’t getting enough experiences on and off of the carrier deck. So… The probability was that he would make adjustments that would be too dangerous for him and the ship. Oh, that makes sense. So he had to go back. Okay. Now, there’s some other factors that are very relative in that all the time that they’re preparing, first of all, the invasion plan for going into Japan in November 1945 had been approved by the president. As we started into the year of 1945 so that we had this collective series of invasions of different islands and okinawa was to be the terminal one to be the where we would do all of our staging area. Everything was planned as though that was going to be transpiring nobody knew anything about the nuclear bombs and even the President didn’t know if it would work. So it was in May of 1945 in New Mexico when they made the first test, the test, and they got the explosion there that made them know it. And so because of that, we still, all of our people in the Pacific, we’re still working on the concept. In the summer of 45, General LeMay was sending all these B-29s up to burn out and blow up and destroy buildings. Tokyo generally, but also other industrial areas. And he still had no idea that one of his bombers was going to be used to drop a nuclear weapon. Never knew until it showed up out there, and then he was advised, this is something we think is going to work, and it may end the war. So it was probably late July before LeMay even knew anything about it. And, of course, the one thing we may have discussed before, which is relevant to this invasion plan in Okinawa, and that was Indianapolis. Indianapolis was a cruiser, and it went out there to the Pacific, and it carried the two bombs that were used. And then they dropped it off at the island. And when Indianapolis turned around and was going back towards Pearl Harbor, and a lone Japanese submarine was out there. There weren’t many survivors to those. And the submarine attacked and sank the Indianapolis. And that was the occasion where many people learned later that it was a shark-invested area. And there were probably several hundred sailors that were attacked by sharks. It was just a horrible, horrible experience. It was even referred to in the movie called Jaws, which was such a huge success many years ago, where people were frightened with the great whites. Well, we don’t know whether these were great whites out there. Probably not. But nevertheless… It’s always been a fear of sailors and of me. I lived on the beach. I was always fearful of sharks. But it relates to the fact that if the Japanese had attacked the Indianapolis on its way to the island, the whole war would have been different.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, it certainly would, and we’ve got just about a minute left, and we have talked about this before. But your view of dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 was that ultimately it saved a lot of lives, yes?
SPEAKER 09 :
It saved millions of lives. Millions. Millions.
SPEAKER 05 :
And that is why we talk about these important times in our history. And certainly the Battle of Okinawa is one that we need to know about. I appreciate Colonel Rutledge, you sharing your personal experiences with this and also your views of the kind of the bigger politics on this as well. So thank you so much.
SPEAKER 09 :
Well, thank you. It’s a good opportunity for all of us to learn.
SPEAKER 05 :
Absolutely, and that’s why we do the show. And indeed, we can see that we stand on the shoulders of giants. God bless you, and God bless America.
SPEAKER 08 :
Thank you for listening to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure to tune in again next Sunday, 3 to 4 p.m., here on KLZ 560 and KLZ 100.7.
SPEAKER 04 :
The views and opinions expressed on KLZ 560 are those of the speaker, commentators, hosts, their guests, and callers. They are not necessarily the views and opinions of Crawford Broadcasting or KLZ management, employees, associates, or advertisers. KLZ 560 is a Crawford Broadcasting God and country station.
