At a nighttime command conference convened on May 21, 1945, Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, commander of the 120,000-man Japanese 32nd Army in Okinawa, decided that his troops would have to evacuate their underground headquarters deep beneath historic Shuri Castle and retreat further south. The ferocious Battle of Okinawa had been raging for eight weeks, and Ushijima’s well dug-in Japanese fighters had made American forces pay dearly for every small gain thus far. But by late May, US army and marines were closing in on the beautiful ancient capital of Shuri,…
