The Pinnacle, Battle of Okinawa

What Happened

The Pinnacle was a coral spire roughly 30 feet (9.1 m) tall, crowning a ridge about 450 feet (140 m) high, some 1,000 yards (910 m) southwest of the village of Arakachi on Okinawa. Between 5 and 6 April 1945, the U.S. 7th Infantry Division fought to take it. The position was held by troops of the Japanese 62nd Division, who had fortified the spire and the ground around it and concealed their machine guns, mortars and artillery with care. The American advance was pinned down by accurate fire from positions that were difficult to see, let alone hit.

The fighting lasted two days. The Pinnacle was an outpost in front of the main Japanese defensive line at Shuri, and its capture was a preliminary to the much larger assault on that line. The action belongs to the opening phase of the Battle of Okinawa, the largest amphibious landing of the Pacific War.

Background

Okinawa is the largest of the Ryūkyū islands, and in 1945 it lay between the Japanese home islands and the American advance across the Pacific. The U.S. Tenth Army landed on the island on 1 April 1945. Rather than defend the beaches, the Japanese commander on Okinawa, Lieutenant General Ushijima Mitsuru, concentrated his forces inland along a fortified line anchored on Shuri, a castle town in the south of the island. The 62nd Division formed part of that garrison.

The American plan required the 7th Infantry Division to work through the approaches to the Shuri line. The Pinnacle stood on one of those approaches: a raised coral ridge that gave its defenders observation over the surrounding ground and made any attack across the open slopes costly. The Japanese had turned the ridge into a strongpoint, with the spire itself serving as a fortified observation and fire position. The fight for it fell in the first week of April, while the American forces were still pushing south toward the main defensive belt.

Why It Mattered

The Pinnacle mattered because of what lay behind it. It was an outpost of the Shuri defences, and the Shuri line was the obstacle that determined the shape of the entire Okinawa campaign. Until positions like the Pinnacle were cleared, the American divisions could not bring their full strength against the main line. The two-day action of 5–6 April was therefore a necessary preliminary: a small, costly step in the slow southern advance that would occupy the Tenth Army for weeks.

The battle also illustrates the character of the fighting on Okinawa. The Japanese defenders made systematic use of high ground, concealment and interlocking fire, so that a feature only 30 feet tall could delay a full division. The Pinnacle's capture did not break the Shuri line; it removed one fortified outpost in front of it.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name is ピナクルの戦い, read ピナクルのたたかい (pinakuru no tatakai). The romaji is Pinakuru no Tatakai, meaning "the Battle of the Pinnacle". The name is a hybrid: an English loanword written in katakana, joined to a native Japanese word by the possessive particle の.

ピナクル (pinakuru) — katakana for the English "pinnacle". Katakana カタカナ is the syllabary used for foreign loanwords, and this word was borrowed directly from English to name the coral spire. Each character is a syllable rather than a meaning-bearing unit: ピ (pi), ナ (na), ク (ku), ル (ru).

の (no) — hiragana ひらがな, the possessive and linking particle. Here it joins the name of the place to the noun that follows, so ピナクルの戦い is "the battle of the Pinnacle".

戦 — the single kanji in the name. Its reading in this word is たたか (tatakai, with the final い written in hiragana). It means "war", "battle" or "fight". The same character appears in 戦争 (sensō, "war") and 作戦 (sakusen, "military operation"), and it is the first element of 戦後 (sengo, "the post-war period"), a word encountered constantly in writing about twentieth-century Japan.

い — hiragana, completing the reading たたかい. The full word 戦い (tatakai) is the native Japanese noun for a battle or fight, as distinct from the Sino-Japanese 戦争 (sensō), which refers to war as a whole. A two-day engagement over a single ridge is a 戦い.

The name is dated to the Shōwa era 昭和 (しょうわ), year 20 of the era — 1945.

Key Figures

Ushijima Mitsuru (牛島満, うしじま みつる) commanded the Japanese 32nd Army on Okinawa and chose to fight the decisive battle inland along the Shuri line rather than at the beaches. The Pinnacle was one outpost of the defensive system he ordered built.

The 62nd Division (第62師団, dai-rokujū-ni shidan) of the Imperial Japanese Army garrisoned and fortified the Pinnacle and held it during the battle of 5–6 April 1945.

The U.S. 7th Infantry Division (第7歩兵師団) was the American formation that attacked and captured the position on 5–6 April 1945.