Battle of Okinawa
Author: George Feifer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2001-08-01
Total Pages: 529
ISBN-13: 0762762543
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA landmark text on the greatest land battle of the Pacific War.
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Tennozan
Author: George Feifer
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Published: 1992
Total Pages: 680
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTennozan offers a remarkable account of the battle of Okinawa, the largest land-sea-air engagement in history. It examines the disastrous collision of three disparate cultures--American, Japanese, and Okinawan--and provides the context for understanding the decision to drop the atomic bomb. 41 photographs.
The Battle for Okinawa
Author: Colonel Hiromichi Yahara
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Published: 1997-03-07
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 1620455889
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCritical acclaim for The Battle for Okinawa "An indispensable account of the fighting and of Okinawa's role in the Japanese defense of the home islands." --The Wall Street Journal "A fascinating, highly intelligent glance behind the Japanese lines." --Kirkus Reviews "The most interesting of the 'last battle of the war' books." --The Washington Post "A fascinating insider's view of the Japanese command." --Dallas Morning News COLONEL HIROMICHI YAHARA was the senior staff officer of the 32nd Japanese Army at Okinawa. A Military Book Club Main Selection
Bloody Okinawa
Author: Joseph Wheelan
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2020-03-03
Total Pages: 508
ISBN-13: 0306903210
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA stirring narrative of World War II's final major battle—the Pacific war's largest, bloodiest, most savagely fought campaign—the last of its kind. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, more than 184,000 US troops began landing on the only Japanese home soil invaded during the Pacific war. Just 350 miles from mainland Japan, Okinawa was to serve as a forward base for Japan's invasion in the fall of 1945. Nearly 140,000 Japanese and auxiliary soldiers fought with suicidal tenacity from hollowed-out, fortified hills and ridges. Under constant fire and in the rain and mud, the Americans battered the defenders with artillery, aerial bombing, naval gunfire, and every infantry tool. Waves of Japanese kamikaze and conventional warplanes sank 36 warships, damaged 368 others, and killed nearly 5,000 US seamen. When the slugfest ended after 82 days, more than 125,000 enemy soldiers lay dead—along with 7,500 US ground troops. Tragically, more than 100,000 Okinawa civilians perished while trapped between the armies. The brutal campaign persuaded US leaders to drop the atomic bomb instead of invading Japan. Utilizing accounts by US combatants and Japanese sources, author Joseph Wheelan endows this riveting story of the war's last great battle with a compelling human dimension.
Okinawa
Author: Robert Leckie
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1996-07-01
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 1101196297
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPenguin delivers you to the front lines of The Pacific Theater with the real-life stories behind the HBO miniseries. Former Marine and Pacific War veteran Robert Leckie tells the story of the invasion of Okinawa, the closing battle of World War II. Leckie is a skilled military historian, mixing battle strategy and analysis with portraits of the men who fought on both sides to give the reader a complete account of the invasion. Lasting 83 days and surpassing D-Day in both troops and material used, the Battle of Okinawa was a decisive victory for the Allies, and a huge blow to Japan. In this stirring and readable account, Leckie provides a complete picture of the battle and its context in the larger war.
Crucible of Hell
Author: Saul David
Publisher:
Published: 2021-05-04
Total Pages: 448
ISBN-13: 9780316534680
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the award-winning historian, Saul David, the riveting narrative of the heroic US troops, bonded by the brotherhood and sacrifice of war, who overcame enormous casualties to pull off the toughest invasion of WWII's Pacific Theater -- and the Japanese forces who fought with tragic desperation to stop them. With Allied forces sweeping across Europe and into Germany in the spring of 1945, one enormous challenge threatened to derail America's audacious drive to win the world back from the Nazis: Japan, the empire that had extended its reach southward across the Pacific and was renowned for the fanaticism and brutality of its fighters, who refused to surrender, even when faced with insurmountable odds. Taking down Japan would require an unrelenting attack to break its national spirit, and launching such an attack on the island empire meant building an operations base just off its shores on the island of Okinawa. The amphibious operation to capture Okinawa was the largest of the Pacific War and the greatest air-land-sea battle in history, mobilizing 183,000 troops from Seattle, Leyte in the Philippines, and ports around the world. The campaign lasted for 83 blood-soaked days, as the fighting plumbed depths of savagery. One veteran, struggling to make sense of what he had witnessed, referred to the fighting as the "crucible of Hell." Okinawan civilians died in the tens of thousands: some were mistaken for soldiers by American troops; but as the US Marines spearheading the invasion drove further onto the island and Japanese defeat seemed inevitable, many more civilians took their own lives, some even murdering their own families. In just under three months, the world had changed irrevocably: President Franklin D. Roosevelt died; the war in Europe ended; America's appetite for an invasion of Japan had waned, spurring President Truman to use other means -- ultimately atomic bombs -- to end the war; and more than 250,000 servicemen and civilians on or near the island of Okinawa had lost their lives. Drawing on archival research in the US, Japan, and the UK, and the original accounts of those who survived, Crucible of Hell tells the vivid, heart-rending story of the battle that changed not just the course of WWII, but the course of war, forever.
Descent Into Hell
Author: Ryukyu Shimpo
Publisher: Merwinasia
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781937385279
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1983, concerned about the need to record and explain the experiences of Okinawans caught up in Battle of Okinawa, the local Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper carried out several hundred interviews with survivors. With explanatory comment added, this was published first in serial form, then later as a book. Tens of thousands of Okinawans were killed in the relentless bombardment by American forces, ten of thousands more local recruits died in Home Guard units, thousands of starvation and malaria in places away from the fighting, hundreds of young students died in the Blood and Iron Student Corps or as nurse's aides tending to wounded soldiers in hospital caves, and hundreds of evacuees lost their lives in ships sunk by U.S. submarines or aircraft. There were even people who took their own lives, or the lives of loved ones, to avoid what they had been told by the Japanese Army would be a far worse fate at the hands of American captors. Descent into Hell is the story of this apocalyptic struggle as told by those Okinawans who survived.
82 Days on Okinawa
Author: Robert L. Wise
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-03
Total Pages: 357
ISBN-13: 0062907468
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"A gritty, first-person account. ... One can hear Shaw’s voice as if he were sitting beside you." —Wall Street Journal An unforgettable soldier’s-eye view of the Pacific War’s bloodiest battle, by the first American officer ashore Okinawa. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, 1.5 million men gathered aboard 1,500 Allied ships off the coast of the Japanese island of Okinawa. The men were there to launch the largest amphibious assault on the Pacific Theater. War planners expected an 80 percent casualty rate. The first American officer ashore was then-Major Art Shaw (1920-2020), a unit commander in the U.S. Army’s 361st Field Artillery Battalion of the 96th Infantry Division, nicknamed the Deadeyes. For the next three months, Shaw and his men served near the front lines of the Pacific’s costliest battle, their artillery proving decisive against a phantom enemy who had entrenched itself in the rugged, craggy island. Over eighty-two days, the Allies fought the Japanese army in a campaign that would claim more than 150,000 human lives. When the final calculations were made, the Deadeyes were estimated to have killed 37,763 of the enemy. The 361st Field Artillery Battalion had played a crucial role in the victory. The campaign would be the last major battle of World War II and a key pivot point leading to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to the Japanese surrender in August, two months after the siege’s end. Filled with extraordinary details, Shaw’s gripping account gives lasting testimony to the courage and bravery displayed by so many on the hills of Okinawa.
The Pacific War
Author: Robert O'Neill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-07-20
Total Pages: 413
ISBN-13: 147281357X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMeticulous detail and insightful analysis combine with a gripping chronological narrative to provide the essential guide to the Pacific Theater of World War II. On December 7, 1941, Japanese fighter planes appeared from the clouds above Pearl Harbor and fundamentally changed the course of history; with this one surprise attack the previously isolationist America was irrevocably thrown into World War II. This definitive history explores each of the major battles that America would fight in the ensuing struggle against Imperial Japan, from the naval clashes at Midway and Coral Sea to the desperate, bloody fighting on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Each chapter reveals both the horrors of the battle and the Allies' grim yet heroic determination to wrest victory from what often seemed to be certain defeat, offering a valuable guide to the long road to victory in the Pacific.
Killing Ground on Okinawa
Author: James H. Hallas
Publisher: Praeger
Published: 1996-03-11
Total Pages: 282
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOn May 12, 1945, the 6th Marine Division was nearing Naha, capital of Okinawa. To the division's front lay a low, loaf-shaped hill. It looked no different from other hills seized with relative ease over the past few days. But this hill, soon to be dubbed, Sugar Loaf, was very different indeed. Part of a complex of three hills, Sugar Loaf formed the western anchor of General Mitsuru Ushijima's Shuri Line, which stretched from coast to coast across the island. Sugar Loaf was critical to the defense of that line, preventing U.S. forces from turning the Japanese flank. Over the next week, the Marines made repeated attacks on the hill losing thousands of men to death, wounds, and combat fatigue. Not until May 18 was Sugar Loaf finally seized. Two days later, the Japanese mounted a battalion-sized counterattack in an effort to regain their lost position, but the Marines held. Ironically, these losses may not have been necessary. General Lemuel Shepherd, Jr., had argued for an amphibious assault to the rear of the Japanese defense line, but his proposal was rejected by U.S. Tenth Army Commander General Simon Bolivar Buckner. That refusal led to a controversy that has continued to this day.
