Alexander Joseph H. The Final Campaign: Marines in the Victory on Okinawa

Washington: Marine Corps Historical Center, 1996. — 52 p.Daybreak on 29 May 1945 found the 1st Marine Division beginning its fifth consecutive week of frontal assault as part of the U.S. Tenth Army's grinding offensive against the Japanese defenses centered on Shun Castle in southern Okinawa. Operation Iceberg, the campaign to seize Okinawa, was now two months old — and badly bogged down. The exhilarating, fast-paced opening of the campaign had been replaced by week after week of costly, exhausting, attrition warfare against the Shun complex. The 1st Marine Division, hemmed in between two other divisions with precious little maneuver room, had advanced barely a thousand yards in the past 18 days — an average of 55 yards each bloody day. Their sector featured one bristling, honeycombed ridge line after another — sequentially Kakazu, Dakeshi, and Wana (with its murderous, reverse slope canyon).