He earned a second Bronze Star with “V” on Leyte. He was by this point a soldier with documented battlefield experience and documented courage under fire, even though he had not fired a single shot.
He also contracted tuberculosis on Leyte, though he did not know it at the time. The illness would not become apparent until after the war, but it was already present in his lungs when the 77th Division shipped out for Okinawa.
## Okinawa and the Strategic Picture
The battle for Okinawa began on April 1, 1945, when American forces of the Tenth Army began landing on the island in what was designated Operation Iceberg. Okinawa was not a distant island with limited strategic value. It was approximately 340 miles from the Japanese home islands, and American planners intended it as an air base from which long-range bombers and fighter planes could support an eventual invasion of Japan.
The Japanese understood this as well as the Americans did. They had concentrated their defenses accordingly, constructing a series of fortified positions across the southern part of the island that were designed to maximize American casualties and slow the advance. The defenders understood that they could not hold Okinawa indefinitely against American firepower, but they could make the cost of taking it as high as possible.
The 77th Infantry Division had landed on the Kerama Islands west of Okinawa in late March 1945 before joining the main fight on the island itself. By late April, the division was engaged in the fighting in the central and southern parts of the island.