Grenade

The Battle of Okinawa, the final battle of World War II, began on April 1, 1945, when the US invaded the Japanese island of Okinawa, the largest island in the East China Sea. It finally concluded over three months later on June 22, 1945. It is now considered one of the bloodiest and most brutal battles of World War II. Fighting took the form of aerial bombing, as well as close-quarters fighting in the island’s caves, villages, and forests. An estimated 240,000 people died during The Battle of Okinawa, including Japanese soldiers and conscripted Okinawans, American forces stationed on the island and on American ships in the bay, and Okinawan civilians (Givens, A. “Okinawa: The Costs of Victory.” The National WWII Museum, 2022). The novel doesn’t shy away from giving readers glimpses of this enormous death toll, describing most memorably the mass of children’s bodies in Kimiko’s high school that Hideki must hide in to avoid capture by US soldiers.

The Imperial Japanese Army adopted a policy of non-surrender; to encourage civilians to die rather than surrender, the government produced propaganda that depicted American soldiers as brutal monsters. Nakahodo, an Okinawan who was a child when the battle took place, remembers being taught, “The Americans were monsters and beasts, and not humans. So, if you were caught by them, you would have your ears and nose cut off, be blinded, and be run over by the tanks. If you were a woman, you would be raped” (PBS, “Civilians on Okinawa”). This led to many cases of suicide and infanticide by desperate Okinawans. In the novel, Hideki is full of fears of US viciousness; his eventual discovery that American soldiers are not really any more monstrous than Japanese ones is eye-opening.

Furthermore, the Japanese perception of Okinawans as second-class, ethnically inferior citizens, led to horrific cases of Okinawan civilians being used as human shields by Japanese soldiers. Grenade portrays this reality several times, as readers see Japanese soldiers hide among civilians, strap dynamite to the bodies of a mother and child, and prepare to use Okinawan children as human shields.

Originally, Okinawa was intended to be a strategically advantageous position from which the US would stage an aerial and naval attack on mainland Japan in November of 1945. However, this invasion never occurred. The Battle of Okinawa allowed American commanders and policymakers to understand the implications of Japan’s non-surrender policy: Based on the aggressive and ruthless manner of the IJA’s defense of Okinawa, one million American soldiers were predicted to lose their lives if the Americans staged a full-scale invasion of Japan. As Alan Gratz points out in his Author’s Note, President Harry S. Truman, as well as US commanders and policy makers, also recognized that non-surrender meant the lives of “every last Japanese soldier and civilian” were at risk (260).

Instead, the US dropped two nuclear bombs: on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Truman, who had learned of the Manhattan Project (the development of nuclear warheads) on assuming the presidency, felt that he had no choice but to deploy these weapons or experience “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other” (Kindy, D: “The Bloody Hell of Okinawa.” Smithsonian Magazine, 2020). The resulting devastation prompted the unconditional surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945 (The National World War II Museum, “Battle of Okinawa”).