Survivors recall horrors of Battle of Okinawa 70 years on

Painful past: Shimabukuro recalling her wartime experience during an interview at the Himeyuri Peace Museum in Itoman. — AFP

ITOMAN (Japan): Seventy years after the Battle of Okinawa, Yoshiko Shimabukuro still has terrifying nightmares of watching friends and Japanese soldiers die as they hid in caves to escape fierce American shelling.

One of 222 female students mobilised as a battlefield nursing unit for the Imperial Army in March 1945, she also suffers deep pangs of guilt for surviving the war while many of her classmates perished in the hell holes that served as military hospitals on the island’s southern tip.