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The main assault landing of the U.S. Tenth Army across Okinawa's Hagushi beaches on April 1, 1945, was enormous in scale, a fitting climax to the development of amphibious tactics in the protracted Pacific war. At H-Hour on that historic date, four full divisions landed abreast over 10,000 yards of beach front. Army and Marine assault troops rode ashore in a noisy flotilla of more than 800 tracked amphibians, each negotiating the fringing reef with ease. By nightfall the landing force had placed 60,000 troops ashore, occupying a beachhead 2 miles deep by 8 miles long.
To the veterans of the earlier, "bare-bones" landings at Tulagi, Adak and Tarawa, this was an operational feast fit for a king. The Americans had gotten so proficient in projecting naval power ashore that the Japanese at Okinawa barely contested the landing.
Long overshadowed by this massive achievement on L-Day was a series of smaller amphibious landings around the periphery of Okinawa which also contributed to the ultimate victory. Those subsidiary landings-the "other beach-heads"-involved units varying in size from a company to a division. Each reflected the collective amphibious expertise attained by all components engaged in Operation Iceberg, the forcible seizure of Okinawa. Applied with great economy of force, these landings produced such valuable operational dividends as fleet anchorages, fire support bases, auxiliary airfields and expeditionary radar sites for early warning to the fleet against the incessant kamikaze attacks.
At one point in mid-1943 the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) could identify only three divisions in the Pacific with "amphibious expertise": the First and Second Marine Divisions, veterans of Tulagi and Guadalcanal, and the 7th Infantry Division, fresh from the Aleutians. By the time these same units joined with four other divisions to constitute the Tenth Army for Okinawa, the number of amphibiously experienced divisions deployed in the Pacific had expanded sevenfold.
No unit of either service better represented this accumulation of amphibious virtuosity than the Fleet Marine Force Pacific (FMFPac) Amphibious Reconnaissance Battalion, commanded throughout the war by Major James L. Jones. The Marines came close to losing the services of Jones and his men as early as November 1943 when friendly fire nearly sank the transport submarine Nautilus in the Gilberts. The sub and its force...