TOKYO (Reuters) - More than 100,000 people gathered in Okinawa on Saturday to urge the government to retract its order that publishers cut schoolbook references to the Japanese army forcing civilians to commit suicide during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa.

The rally was the largest held on the southern island since it was returned to Japan by the United States in 1972, Kyodo News quoted the organizers as saying.

The Battle of Okinawa left some 200,000 dead including many Okinawan civilians, often entire families, who committed suicide rather than surrender to Americans.

Some eyewitness accounts say they did so on the orders of Japanese soldiers, but conservative historians have called into question those accounts, arguing that the suicides were voluntary.

In March, the education ministry ordered publishers of high school textbooks to modify their descriptions of the suicides, a move that outraged many Okinawans and prompted local assemblies as well as prefectural lawmakers to adopt resolutions blasting the education ministry move.

"It is an undeniable truth that mass suicides resulted from military orders. It is our duty to hand this down as a historical fact to generations to come and to make sure that such a brutal war never occurs again," Kyodo quoted the chairman of the prefectural assembly and head of the rally committee as saying on Saturday.

The gathering was organized by a committee comprising members of all the blocs in the Okinawa prefectural assembly, including Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, as well as local governments, teachers unions and citizens groups in the prefecture, Kyodo said.

Five publishers have so far complied with the government's instruction, and the new versions of their textbooks are to be used in the academic year starting next April, Kyodo reported.