Cadeau, Yvan Okinawa 1945

"Typhoon of steel": this is what the battle for Okinawa was called. The flood of fire that the US forces rained down on the Japanese defenders of the island between April and June 1945 seems to justify this description. For the USA, the aim was to capture a springboard before they could launch their final operation, the conquest of Japan. For Japan, on the other hand, the aim was to cause such carnage among the GIs and Marines that Washington abandoned its invasion plans, but was also prepared to give up the principle of unconditional surrender that would allow the imperial institutions to be preserved.

For these reasons, the battles fought in the air, on land and at sea on the Ryukyu Archipelago took on a fierce and merciless character. For the first time in history, waves of hundreds of kamikaze aircraft were launched against the US fleet while Navy sailors looked on in disbelief. The soldiers of the 32nd Japanese Army, entrenched in the incredible defence system they had built, were willing to sell their lives dearly, and the conquest of every hill, every ridge, resulted in extremely high casualties on both sides. However, the Battle of Okinawa, somewhat eclipsed by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, deserves to be better publicised, not only because of its gigantic scale, but also because it was the last major battle of the Second World War, bringing a bloody end to a cycle that had begun in the late 1930s.