Typhoon of Steel: The Battle of Okinawa (1970) By James H. & William M. Belote
 
TYPHOON OF STEEL is the first comprehensive history of the last military campaign of World War II ever written for the general reader. It is based on interviews in Japan and Okinawa with military and civilian survivors, with numerous Americans who fought in the campaign, and on many months of research in the official American and Japanese reports.The result is an authoritative and engrossing narrative of the most difficult and costly military undertaking in the Pacific theater. Planned as the prelude to the invasion of the Japanese home islands, the battle for Okinawa turned out instead to be the final climax.
 
The landing itself proved ridiculously easy: virtually no enemy opposition met the nine-mile-wide flotilla of landing barges that swarmed onto the beaches, or the early probes inland. But the local Japanese military command, ably led by Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, had planned and ultimately carried out a tenacious defense in depth that prolonged the fighting for more than two and-one-half months and cost Army and Marine casualties of over 39,000. Among them was Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, the highest ranking U.S. officer to be killed in action in World War II.Even more dramatic and almost more effective was the Japanese kamikaze assault of thousands of suicide planes on the shipping that was essential to maintaining the troops on the island. These attacks sank 38 U.S. ships, damaged 368 more, and caused over 9,000 naval casualties.
 
TYPHOON OF STEEL tells the story of the Okinawa campaign from both sides, from the initial plans and preparations to the suicide of General Ushijima on June 22, 1945, when organized resistance ceased. It includes enthralling accounts of the last cruise and death of the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, the triumphant ordeal of the carrier U.S.S. Franklin, the heroic fight for survival against kamikazes by the U.S. destroyers on picket duty offshore, the death of the beloved American correspondent Ernie Pyle, and the remarkable exploits of many individual G.I.'s, Marines, and Japanese in close-in combat.
 
Hard Cover with Dust Jacket
368 pages
In Good condition