It was not until 2015 that I learned that my father was on the U.S.S. LST 1039 during the battle of Okinawa. The 82-day-long battle lasted from 1 April until 22 June 1945. Okinawa was the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War with over 12,500 Americans killed or missing. Battle deaths were 4,907 Navy, 4,675 Army, and 2,938 Marine Corps personnel.

My mother told my sister that Dad used to wake up terrified of Kamakazie attacks after returning from the war. During the period 26 March-30 April, 20 American ships were sunk and 157 damaged by enemy action. For their part, the Japanese had lost up to 30 April more than 1,100 planes in the battle to Allied naval forces alone. Between 6 April and 22 June, the Japanese flew 1,465 kamikaze aircraft in large-scale attacks from Kyushu, 185 individual kamikaze sorties from Kyushu, and 250 individual kamikaze sorties from Formosa.

The Battle of Okinawa (Japanese: ???, Hepburn: Okinawa-sen?), codenamed Operation Iceberg,[16] was a series of battles fought in the Ryukyu Islands, centered on the island of Okinawa, and included the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific War during World War II being the 1 April 1945 invasion of the island of Okinawa itself.[17][18] The 82-day-long battle lasted from 1 April until 22 June 1945. After a long campaign of island hopping, the Allies were approaching Japan, and planned to use Okinawa, a large island only 340 mi (550 km) away from mainland Japan, as a base for air operations on the planned invasion of Japanese mainland (coded Operation Downfall). Four divisions of the U.S. 10th Army (the 7th, 27th, 77th, and 96th) and two Marine Divisions (the 1st and 6th) fought on the island. Their invasion was supported by naval, amphibious, and tactical air forces.

The battle has been referred to as the "typhoon of steel" in English, and tetsu no ame ("rain of steel") or tetsu no b?f? ("violent wind of steel") in Japanese.[19][20][21] The nicknames refer to the ferocity of the fighting, the intensity of kamikaze attacks from the Japanese defenders, and to the sheer numbers of Allied ships and armored vehicles that assaulted the island. The battle was one of the bloodiest in the Pacific.

The Allied forces suffered 14,009 deaths (over 12,500 Americans killed or missing) with an estimated total of more than 82,000 casualties of all kinds. This does not include several thousand who succumbed to their injuries received during the battle, but died days and even months later.

Based on Okinawan government sources,[22] Japan admittedly lost 77,166 soldiers (not including civilians and supporting naval or air forces based elsewhere) during the campaign, who either died of wounds, were killed or committed suicide during the battle. No figures are given for supporting Japanese forces killed. Allied grave registration forces counted 110,071 dead bodies. Simultaneously, some 42,000 to 150,000 local civilians (including all male citizens over 18 and both male and many female students under age 18 who were drafted to fight the invaders) who were killed or committed suicide or went missing, a significant proportion of the estimated pre-war estimated 300,000 local population.

The severity of the campaign, along with many civilians fighting, led to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which together with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria [23][24] caused Japan to surrender less than two months after the end of the fighting on Okinawa.

Gordon Smead (1926)