The Battle of Okinawa was supposed to be the final step before the invasion of Japan. By the time American forces landed on the island in April 1945, the war in Europe was all but over. Hitler was cornered in his bunker.
Mussolini had been executed. The world was already imagining a postwar order. But in the Pacific, the war had taken a different shape-more brutal, more relentless, more personal. And in Okinawa, it reached its peak.
The island itself was a paradox. A place of lush hills and gentle seas, where farmers had tended fields for generations, now transformed into the stage for one of the most ferocious battles in modern history. Soldiers would describe the air as thick with death, the ground as unstable with the bodies of the fallen.