## The Okinawa Campaign in Context
To understand what Desmond Doss did on the Maeda Escarpment, it helps to understand what the Battle of Okinawa was, at scale and at ground level.
Operation Iceberg, the Allied assault on Okinawa, was the largest amphibious operation of the Pacific War. The landing force on April 1, 1945, included approximately 180,000 soldiers and Marines. The island sits in the Ryukyu chain approximately 340 miles south of the Japanese home island of Kyushu. American planners had designated it as the forward air and naval base for the expected invasion of Japan, which at that point remained the stated American military objective.
The Japanese commander on Okinawa, Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, understood the island’s role in American planning. He had roughly 100,000 soldiers — a combination of regular Japanese Army units and Okinawan conscripts — and he positioned them not on the beaches but in the interior, in a series of fortified lines anchored by the island’s difficult terrain. The strategy was to trade space for American casualties: not to prevent the American landing, which Ushijima considered impossible to stop, but to make the capture of the island as costly as possible.
The American forces moved quickly through the northern part of the island. The southern portion, where the main Japanese defensive positions were concentrated, was different. The terrain here was a series of ridges, escarpments, and ravines that provided the defenders with overlapping fields of fire and that could be held by relatively small numbers of men with machine guns and mortars. The Maeda Escarpment was one of several such terrain features that defined the fighting in the central and southern part of Okinawa.