Masaie Ishihara, a sociology professor at the Okinawa International University, said ''there is a lot of historical amnesia out there'' about those traumatic postwar years. He said that ''many people don't want to acknowledge what really happened.''

One possible explanation for why the United States military says it has no record of any rapes is that few if any Okinawan women reported being attacked out of fear and embarrassment, and that those who did were ignored by the United States military police, the historians said. Moreover, there has never been a large-scale effort to determine the real extent of such crimes.

Even today, efforts to speak to women who had been raped were rejected because friends, local historians and university professors who had spoken with the women said they preferred not to discuss it publicly.

''Victimized women feel too ashamed to make it public, and criminals who killed the three marines are afraid,'' said a police spokesman in the nearby city of Nago.

In his book ''Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb,'' (Ticknor & Fields, 1992) George Feifer said that there were fewer than 10 reported cases of rape by 1946 in Okinawa, ''partly because of shame and disgrace, partly because Americans were victors and occupiers.'' Mr. Feifer said that ''in all there were probably thousands of incidents, but the victims' silence kept rape another dirty secret of the campaign.''

In interviews, historians and Okinawans said that some Okinawan women who were raped gave birth to biracial children, many of whom were killed at birth. More often, however, rape victims obtained abortions from village midwives.

The first published account in English of the discovery of the remains of the three marines appeared in The Pacific Stars and Stripes in 1998 shortly after the remains were retrieved. In the article, an Okinawan man who would not give his name said that as a child growing up after the war in Katsuyama, the remote mountain village where the remains were found, he heard village elders talk of an incident involving the American marines.