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Then suddenly the soldiers saw bodies—and they were not all Japanese bodies. The advancing troops ran into a main defense position, a line drawn across the island just north of Naha. From concrete pillboxes, hillside caves and ravines, murderous machine-gun fire raked their lines. The heaviest concentration of Japanese artillery of the Pacific war backed up the small arms. While marines in the north continued to gain 2,000 and 3,000 yards a day against little opposition, the soldiers were slowed to 200-yard jumps.
The Japanese defenses, "Buck" Buckner knew, would grow even stiffer; tough fighting was bound to come. But he knew, too, that Japan's best chance to turn back this invasion—the period when the first troops were coming ashore—was gone. Perhaps counting too much on a three or four months' delay between the end of the Iwo Jima fighting and the start of the next U.S. operation, the Japs had delayed reinforcing Okinawa's garrison. Certainly the Japanese commander had pulled a major blunder; he had prepared for attack from the east and south, found himself fighting an attack from the west.
Belatedly the island empire awoke to its peril. With Buckner on Okinawa, even medium U.S. bombers could soon roam Japanese skies. Communications with China would be endangered. The homeland itself faced invasion. In Japanese, "Okinawa" means "Rope off in the Sea"; in any language, it now spelled doom.
First Aims. General Buckner had been born for this job. His father, Simon Bolivar Buckner ST., named for the South American liberator, had served with distinction in the Mexican War and worn a lieutenant general's stars in the Confederate Army. As a brigadier he had been forced to surrender Fort Donelson to his old West Point classmate, U. S. Grant. But he was exchanged, twice promoted, and wound up the war still fighting.
Afterward he indulged in no romantic retreat into the Lost Cause. Life at Glen Lily, the general's 1,000-acre estate near Munfordville, Ky., went on in much the same spacious ante-bellum way. But the general hustled out to enlarge the fortune he had made speculating in Chicago real estate, get himself elected Governor of Kentucky, belabor the reformers. At 62 he took a 28-year-old bride, and fathered the present lieutenant general.
The youngster grew up in a rugged, outdoor life, its setting the lovely, wooded country of rolling hills known in Kentucky as the "Pennyr'y'l." "I went barefooted," Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. has written, ''hunted, trapped, fished, swam, canoed, raised chickens, fought roosters, rode five miles daily for the mail, trained dogs, did odd farm jobs, learned not to eat green persimmons and occasionally walked eight miles to Munfordville to broaden my horizon by seeing the train come in, learning the fine points of horse trading or listening to learned legal and political discussion on County Court Day."