Shifting their direction of attack on 4 June to the southwest, General Hodge's troops moved across the small, tidy fields, the rice paddies along the sea, and the hills luxuriantly green from the continuing spring rains. By midafternoon the 7th Division had secured more than 6,000 yards of coast line and had reached the soggy banks of the Minatoga River. Infantrymen waded the swollen stream, the only bridge having been destroyed. The 96th joined on the west to extend the Corps line from Minatoga to Iwa. To the south the Japanese had prepared the outposts of their next important line, which was to be their last. Behind the American lines the supply routes, now stretched beyond an unbridged river, were strained to the limit. Commanders immediately explored the possibilities of landing supplies at Minatoga. During the several days that followed, the American troops crowded steadily but more cautiously forward against a heavy and determined opposition that was reminiscent of previous fighting and suggested that the enemy's last line was close at hand.{500}
It was only by chance and whim that the Oroku Peninsula was defended by the Japanese after the Shuri line was abandoned. Before 1 April enemy naval units were responsible for this two-by-three-mile peninsula and the installations emplaced there to protect the airfield and the city of Naha. A few days before the American landings took place, but after the threat of invasion made it either impossible or unnecessary for the naval units to continue with their more specific missions, they were consolidated under the Okinawa Base Force. Most of the Navy personnel congregated on Oroku Peninsula. The Okinawa Base Force, commanded by Rear Admiral Minoru Ota, was in turn responsible to the 32d Army, toward which Ota adopted a policy of complete cooperation.{501}
The total strength of enemy naval units on Okinawa was originally nearly 10,000 men; less than a third of that number, however, belonged to the Japanese Navy, the majority being either recently inducted civilians or Home Guards. Of the men who made up the construction units, the naval air units, the Midget Submarine Unit, and the other organizations that became a part of the Base Force, only two or three hundred had received more than superficial training for land warfare. None of these naval units participated in combat until the counterattack of 4 May, when a limited number of naval troops were sent to the front line and sustained very high casualties. Other units were subsequently fed into the front lines. The 37th Torpedo Maintenance Unit was almost completely destroyed when, with three times as many men as rifles, it entered the fighting at Shuri and Yonabaru toward the end of May.
The greatest misfortune affecting the ultimate fate of the enemy naval forces occurred at the time of the mass exodus from Shuri. The 32d Army headquarters directed all naval troops to fall back on 28 May to a new defense area, near the coastal town of Nagusuku. Because of an ambiguously worded order, the remaining men of the Base Force destroyed most of the weapons and equipment which they were unable to carry; they then moved south on 26 May, two days before they were scheduled to withdraw. When they arrived at their assigned area they found it totally unsuited to the type of fighting for which they were prepared, as well as inferior to the area they had just left. Disgusted with their new sector, the young officers asked Ota for permission to return to Oroku "to fight and die at the place where we built positions and where we were so long to die [sic] in that one part of the island which really belonged to the Navy." Advocates of independent action by the Navy succeeded in persuading Ota of the advisability of returning the troops to Oroku. Without consulting the Army Ota ordered the troops back on 28 May, and the return was effected that night. Naval troops numbering about 2,000 returned to their former positions. Some Navy personnel stayed in the south to fight on the Yuza-Dake or Yaeju-Dake line; the rest of the original 10,000 had been used up in the previous combat.
Naha airfield, the largest and most important which the Japanese had constructed on Okinawa, was at the northern end of a strip of flat land on the west side of Oroku Peninsula. The rest of the peninsula was wrinkled with ridges and hills up to 2000 feet in height but was lacking in any pattern or dominant terrain features. Between the hills were valleys planted in sugar cane and other dry crops; the valleys had been sown with mines and were carefully covered by automatic weapons firing from camouflaged cave openings.
ADVANCING TO YAEJU-DAKE through the Iwa area, American tank passes burning native house, fired to lessen danger from snipers. Below is seen a patrol of the 381st Infantry, 96 Division, moving south toward Yaeju-Dake.