I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

OKINAWA 1952This lower end budget war film was put out by the B unit at Columbia Pictures. The film is about a gun crew on a U.S. Navy Destroyer Escort at the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945. The invasion was the first of the Japanese home islands. Needless to say the Japanese were not going to go softly. They launched masses of Kamikaze suicide aircraft at the invasion fleet.The film follows the crew of one of the 5inch gun turrets on the U.S.S. Blake. The men are, Cameron Mitchell, Richard Benedict, James Dobson and Rhys Williams. The officers in charge of the ship are played by, Pat O'Brien as the Captain and Richard Denning as the XO.The ship starts as part of the fleet bombarding the shore as the landing takes place. Then they are transferred out to be part of the radar picket line. The picket line is to give early warning of any Japanese aircraft. The carriers can then direct fighters to intercept the enemy before they reach the transports etc.The Japanese however do not always play according to plan. They sometimes decide to take out the radar pickets. The ships are alone without the fire support of other ships. (36 ships including 12 destroyers were lost with 120 ships damaged) The kamikazes piled on and the action became heated.The gun crews become exhausted with barely any time off alert. Gunner Mitchell is the gambler of the group, and has been spending his time winning everyone's beer ration. Also in the crew is Benedict the ladies man, Dobson the smart one and the old man of the group, Rhys Willaims. Any free time is spent sleeping or taking about what to do after the war.The Japanese keep coming and the ship is damaged after a hit by a kamikaze. The ship is lucky that the aircraft's bomb did not explode. The Captain, O'Brien manhandles the unwanted gift to the side and pushes it over into the drink. The list of dead and injured grows as the ship fights off repeated attacks. Gunner Dobson badly burns his hands during one of the raids and is replaced by galley hand, Rudy Robles. The attacks finally end but not before Rhys Williams is killed.There is a running gag through the film about what gunner Mitchell plans to do with all the beer rations he has won. Unfortunately for him the entire lot is destroyed during one of the kamikaze attacks.Taken as the low budget film that it is, it makes for a decent time-waster. The film uses quite a lot of stock battle footage which for the most part is edited into the narrative rather well. (The British pom-poms shown being a minor glitch) The film has a runtime of only 67 minutes and fills the time at a nice pace.The director here was long time B-Film helmsman, Leigh Jason.

I don't get the hate for this movie. It's not cheap, it's deliberately small, focused and about as emotionally involved as you can get with a small crew of men acting in a 1940s way. I almost wish we hadn't had the bridge scenes with the command crew, and had to entirely take it from the point of view of the gun crew. That's how history happens; people go about their little part, and get these rare little views of the big action. I was unusually not disturbed by the cookie cutter characters. We rarely see how they really are, but instead get their public face, to their crewmen while at war. People fall into bravado and storytelling just like this. There were moments of doubt and fear that showed this off I think, very well. Stock footage, sure. But only rarely did I notice the grain mismatching, and they spent an awful lot of effort to make it blend into the narrative. My favorite of these is about 50 minutes in when one of the characters grabs onto a fitting on the gun to lean out and look at a heavily damaged passing ship. They did this because in the foreground of the stock footage is a sailor doing just that. It brought the stock into the story, and is such unseen stock of such specific damage you could never have simulated it with new footage, especially in the 50s. I was especially pleased with the sets. I guess they are sets due to lighting and so on, but the interior of the gun mount looks absolutely perfect and realistic, and absolutely unexpectedly so. It really helped with the verisimilitude of the whole endeavor.

The battle for Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands just south of Japan, trailing off Kyushu like a jet stream was the final battle of World War II in the Pacific. Commanding the Navy Task Force was Raymond Spruance the victor at Midway and it was the largest flotilla ever put together, over 1500 ships. Not to mention the Army and Marine forces who did the fighting on land. As this was Japan's back door so to speak they fought with ferocious intensity with full use of the Kamikaze suicide planes.The story of Okinawa needed an epic film like The Longest Day. Instead we got a hastily put together film with a lot of cliché stock characters from war films of the era. Pat O'Brien stars as the skipper of the destroyer on which this film's story is told and Richard Denning is his executive officer.They may be top billed but O'Brien and Denning take second place in screen time to the crew of one of the naval guns on the destroyer. The crew consists of Rhys Williams, Richard Benedict, James Dobson and Cameron Mitchell who dumbed down his command of the English language to the level of Leo Gorcey. The crew is mostly sitting around waiting for the Kamikaze attacks which they know will come.Okinawa is not a horribly bad film, but with an epic title like that it sure falls short of the mark. The Army, Navy, and Marines who fought there deserved something much better.

First, I would like to say that it was a great surprise for me to see the director's name: Leigh Jason himself. This guy made only comedies during the 40's. And his last feature is a war movie. Incredible, isn't it? Of course, there is lots of talk, but it gives a pretty good study of characters. For this kind of production, I mean. Pat O'Brien is as fine as usual, Cameron Mitchell gives here one of his first appearances on a screen. Well, I guess so...I'll check on IMDb. But I would say that this feature is a little too long, even if the running time is only 67 minutes. I know, it seems incredible. Perhaps is it too much talkative?Action scenes, only at the end and focusing on Japanese kamikazes, are taken from stock shots, essentially.Produced by Wallace Mac Donald. Good feature, and rare.