You have read the Pacific memoirs, the ones where a rifleman describes the mud and the smell and the friend who was there one second and gone the next. You want that same closeness, but for the whole of Okinawa, start to finish, so the ninety days finally hang together as one story instead of a list of hills and unit numbers.
This audiobook follows seven documented people through the last great battle of the war. You walk ashore with a Marine who will end up on Sugar Loaf Hill, dig in with an Army infantryman below Shuri, stand a gun station on a destroyer as the kamikazes come out of the sun, wait in a cave with a Japanese defender who knows how it ends, and hide with an Okinawan family caught between two armies. Every chapter opens on a scene, and the map moves as they move.
By the final chapter you will know the ground, the people, and what became of the ones who lived. Press play and start at the landing beaches.
