Bloody Okinawa, by Joseph Wheelan ⭐️⭐️⭐️☆☆

Joseph Wheelan’s new book, Bloody Okinawa, a comprehensive look at the Battle of Okinawa, the bloodiest, most destructive single campaign of World War II, is a detailed, extensively researched account of the battle for this strategic island, an important stepping stone in the Allies’ march to Japan—but it goes overboard, in my opinion, in the depiction of the more grisly details of the campaign.

The bitterly stubborn defense of the island of Okinawa by Japanese forces was prosecuted as a purposefully attritional campaign to give Japan time to prepare the defenses of the home islands, or to force the Allies to the bargaining table before they could get into a position to invade. Japanese soldiers, sailors, airmen, and many Okinawan civilians saw it as their duty to lay down their lives for the Emperor, and to take as many U.S. personnel with them as possible.

The incomprehensively brutal fighting, when battlefields became muddy charnelhouses as U.S. Army and Marine forces struggled to dislodge the Japanese from their defensive strongholds as the weeks of bloody conflict raged on, is described in detail—and to be honest, it makes for wearying reading. The book displays extensive research, without a doubt, but I feel that the author—or his editor—could have exercised some restraint in the recitation of the details of battlefields that became muddy, churned-up fields of open graves and mutilated bodies. It got to the point that I was skimming paragraphs to glean the important information about the progress of the fighting, without dwelling on the gruesome details of rotting, fly-blown corpses. The same could be said for the extensive descriptions of the horrific injuries suffered by Navy personnel on ships subjected to kamikaze attacks.

There were a couple of odd aspects of the author’s writing that gave me pause as I read, one being the incongruous use of “crash” as a transitive verb when describing kamikaze aircraft attacks, as in “…another Zero crashed the forward part of the ship…”, or “(The U.S. Navy destroyer) Newcomb was crashed five times…”. A half-decent copy editor would have flagged this usage.

Another quirk was the author’s use of the term “carrier escort” to describe the smaller carriers colloquially known as “baby flattops” or “jeep carriers”—the correct terminology being “escort carriers”. I see this as a failure of editing, as a copy editor who was familiar with Navy terminology would have corrected this usage.

All in all, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the last great battle of World War II, and the bloodiest in the war in the Pacific, but it cries out for a firm hand from a copy editor to correct the incongruous usages the author persists in, and the over-the-top reliance on the graphic description of the most gruesome details of the battlefield. Having read this book does not compel me to seek out more of this author’s work.