High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr. (July 18, 1886 ? June 18, 1945) was a American lieutenant general during World War II. He served in the Pacific Theater of Operations and commanded the defenses of Alaska early in the war. After that assignment, he was promoted to command Tenth Army, which conducted the amphibious assault (Operation Iceberg) on the Japanese island of Okinawa. He was killed during the closing days of the Battle of Okinawa by enemy artillery fire, making him the highest-ranking American to have been killed by enemy fire during the war, and among the highest-ranking military officers to die, along with Lt. Gen. Lesley J. McNair, who was killed by friendly fire in France on July 25, 1944, and Lt. Gen. Frank Maxwell Andrews, killed in an air crash in Iceland on May 3, 1943. Buckner was posthumously promoted to the rank of a full four-star general on July 19, 1954 by a Special Act of Congress.