On Easter Sunday 1945, the largest amphibious force ever assembled landed on Okinawa and met almost no resistance. That silence was the opening move of Colonel Hiromichi Yahara's plan to abandon the beaches and draw the U.S. 10th Army into a fortified limestone maze in the south. This episode deconstructs the Typhoon of Steel, or Tetsu no Bofu, explaining why the island's airfields, including Kadena, were the essential stepping stone for Operation Downfall and why the Japanese 32nd Army chose attrition over victory.

We cover the more than 1,400 kamikaze sorties that hunted the radar picket ships and struck the USS Bunker Hill, the one-way voyage of the battleship Yamato under Operation Ten-Go, and the reverse-slope defenses at Kakazu Ridge and Sugar Loaf Hill that turned each crest into a killing ground. The episode follows the blowtorch an ...