(ww2) Why couldn't sugarloaf hill and others have been bypassed/starved out?

[What's the sitch?]

I saw a documentary on this and it seems that the Japanese allowed the Americans to fully land and take large sections of the island and were basically just entrenched in certain prepared areas. Was there a real reason to send so many people to their deaths of this meat grinder instead of just setting of wires and kill zones to keep the Japanese in their sections? Was it just a remnant of prior ages of battle where you defeat an enemy just because they are there? Or some belief that they must be hiding something worth dying in droves for(some weapons lab with new tech)?



I don't mean to sound like an armchair general with 20/20 hindsight but in all the video games I play you just skip those areas or wall the enemy in for later. By all appearance to me as a non expert it seems that the Allies owned all the coast and enough land area to build landing strips if they needed and the Japanese would just starve to death in their bunkers and holes anyway.

I've tried looking up this question elsewhere and I can't really find anyone talking about it.

 

[PsihoKekec]

There was the rationale that as long as organised Japanese forces are holding positions on Okinawa, airfields and anchorages that were prepared for invasion of mainland would be at risk of attack. Americans also didn't know how well supplied the Japanese were.

On Iwo Jima the Japanese launched mayor attack on the airfield after the battle was over, forcing Americans to launch systematic clearing operations of caves and tunnels, lasting several weeks, that cost Americans a number of casualties.

 

[LordsFire]

There was the rationale that as long as organised Japanese forces are holding positions on Okinawa, airfields and anchorages that were prepared for invasion of mainland would be at risk of attack. Americans also didn't know how well supplied the Japanese were.

On Iwo Jima the Japanese launched mayor attack on the airfield after the battle was over, forcing Americans to launch systematic clearing operations of caves and tunnels, lasting several weeks, that cost Americans a number of casualties.

Pretty much this. It's especially important because Okinawa was the one land base in range of the home islands. IIRC it's where the nuclear bombing missions were launched from.

 

[Zachowon]

We had to make sure they couldn't just dig tunnels right up to our airfields and destroy them

 

[PsihoKekec]

We had to make sure they couldn't just dig tunnels right up to our airfields and destroy them

Those airfields were way too far to dig tunnels all the way to them, it was classical foot infiltration that the planners feared, as the Japanese were quit good at it.

 

[Bear Ribs]

One issue is going to be artillery attacks. Japanese infantry-portable Mortars had a range of several miles. Okinawa is only 7 miles wide at it's widest and 70 miles long. If there's Japanese infantry on the island, there's very good odds a couple of guys with those mortars could sneak or swim their way to within a few miles, hit it with mortar spam, and run before counterfire arrives, or just die and another group does it again next week. There goes the airstrip, the ammunition dump, and maybe even all the officers, food supplies, or other critical parts of the base.

Another issue is, even if they have no mortars, an officer with a radio and a pair of binoculars can watch the US base and call in troop movements to the home islands. This means every sortie, the Japanese forces know the composition and general heading of every airstrike as soon as it begins, allowing them to easily launch a counterattack with precision and a numerical advantage. This saves the Japanese a lot of fuel (less patrolling, they just launch to directly intercept American planes) and puts American forces at a much greater risk.

I don't mean to sound like an armchair general with 20/20 hindsight but in all the video games I play

Video games very, very rarely accurately depict just how long-ranged modern weaponry, or even WW2 weaponry, really is because it's no fun for the player to get blown up by an artillery shell from an enemy location that would take half an hour for the player to even reach at maximum speed. Games also don't generally do much with logistics, recon, or gathering intel because the enemy AI isn't smart enough to do it right, and it's unsatisfying for the player to spend their time enabling some NPC to do the actual blowing up of enemy stuff.

 

[Zachowon]

Unless it is a game like Arma

 

[What's the sitch?]

Aight, I can see the stray range attack thing being a good enough reason, real life doesn't function off an hp stat after all, its typically one decent shot and your dead or the vehicle is dead and I guess knowing how starved in general the Japanese were at this point is probably more of a hindsight fact and not something that was really known or well known, for all they knew maybe there were fully stocked for years worth of underground bases. I don't think the digging thing is really a believable one though. Would be helpful if they actually mentioned this in shows instead of just expecting me to blindly applaud all actions taken in a "MY COUNTRY RIGHT OR WRONG" sort of style.

 

[Zachowon]

The Japanese would fight till death.
There was nome of this starving them out to surrender

 

[Bear Ribs]

Aight, I can see the stray range attack thing being a good enough reason, real life doesn't function off an hp stat after all, its typically one decent shot and your dead or the vehicle is dead and I guess knowing how starved in general the Japanese were at this point is probably more of a hindsight fact and not something that was really known or well known, for all they knew maybe there were fully stocked for years worth of underground bases. I don't think the digging thing is really a believable one though. Would be helpful if they actually mentioned this in shows instead of just expecting me to blindly applaud all actions taken in a "MY COUNTRY RIGHT OR WRONG" sort of style.

Yeah, documentaries could stand a lot of improvement.

As far as the tunnels go, I agree that's a longshot. Most tunnels dug under those conditions are on the order of three-five hundred feet. The tunnel at Stalag Luft III that inspired the movie The Great Escape, f'rex, was 336 feet long. There're a few on the order of half a mile but usually in drier climates, like the 3000~ foot smuggling tunnels under the Rio Grande. They could possibly use tunnels for a sneak attack but managing to dig unnoticed all the way into the base seems farfetched.

However, it's also worth remembering that humans are extremely cunning compared to game AIs or even Documentary Makers and the number of dirty tricks a soldier encampment can pull off is ridiculous, ranging from defecating in the water supply to spread dysentery to improvising 1001 booby traps from mines to pungi sticks to floating tiny handmade fire rafts down a stream. Far safer to capture/kill all of them than risk them coming up with some BS off-the-wall trick you didn't expect.

 

[What's the sitch?]

The Japanese would fight till death.
There was nome of this starving them out to surrender

Lol, whos talking about surrendering? I even mentioned letting them starve to death(actual death) in the opening post. The whole thing was questioning the choice of going into their killing field instead of making them come into ours.

 

[Zachowon]

Lol, whos talking about surrendering? I even mentioned letting them starve to death(actual death) in the opening post. The whole thing was questioning the choice of going into their killing field instead of making them come into ours.

I mean, fully depends upon the area a the like.
Not every single time would we be able to open fields of fire and just wait.
Because that would take away forces from future landings and the like.
Add in the fact as mentioned above, mortars

 

[BF110C4]

Also there was the Guadalcanal effect. The US Marines who took the island initially didn't have enough troops to pursue and erradicate the local garrison, so the japanese had enough of a foothold to launch harrasement and intelligence patrols, receive reinforcements on a safe(ish) location instead of those same troops being forced to perform landings on potentially occupied beaches, to use those reinforcements to prepare counteroffensives and have a reasonable clear image of the aerial and naval forces in the island or its local waters. Who knows, if the 1° Marines had have enough forces to agresively destroy the japanese then the campaign for the island might have been measured in weeks instead of months of brutal ground combat and punishing naval actions.

In Okinawa, a region prepared to resist an invasion by the japanese for entire months there was every posibility that locations under siege would be prepared not only to survive but also as locations from which the mainland japanese would try to send reinforcements to link up with the besieged units in order to counterattack.

 

[Zachowon]

The US Army took over for the Marines on Guadalcanal

 

[BF110C4]

The US Army took over for the Marines on Guadalcanal

Yeah they did. But I mean about the first days of the invasion before the japanese made concerted efforts to reinforce the displaced garrison. It was a practical impossibility, but I bet more than one observer remarked that if the Marines had been able to cut off the japanese retreat during the first few days of the invasion the japanese would have gave up the islands with far less of a fight since sending additional forces wouldn't have had a safe place to land or intel to perform an attack.