Okinawa: A Decorated Marine's Account of the Last Battle of World War II

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It began on April Fool's Day, 1945, which was also Easter Sunday. It lasted eighty-four days. In that time the United States lost its commander in chief, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and at the site of the battle itself, lost its most beloved war correspondent, Ernie Pyle. In that time Germany was finally defeated, but when GIs on the island heard the news, they snorted in contempt - "So what?" For these men were fighting for their own lives against a tenacious Japanese force whose goal was to "bleed all over" the Americans and thus drown them in Japanese blood. To achieve final victory over Japan, Okinawa had to be seized; it would be a catapult for the planned invasion of Japan itself. And so the U.S. Marines and Army attacked Okinawa with 540,000 men and 1,600 seagoing ships, eclipsing even D-Day in troops, tonnage, and firepower. But Japanese troops were hunkered down in a honeycomb of caves and terrain that the U.S. Tenth Army commander, Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, called the most ...