War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its size,

and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history

through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Music James Early. Hello, and welcome back to Key Battles of the Pacific Theater of World War II.

This is James, your host, as always.

And now we are moving into the biggest, one of the bloodiest, if not the bloodiest.

It depends on how you define it. We'll talk about that later, but a super bloody, super

horrible, awful, nasty, disgusting battle, the Battle of Okinawa. And this is key battle number nine.

So we are getting fairly close to the end.

In our last couple of episodes, we talked about the predecessor to this battle, and that was

the Battle of Iwo Jima.

And it was bad enough.

It was bloody.

But Okinawa is going to dwarf even Iwojima.

As always, my good friend and my longtime podcast partner, Scott Rank, is with me.

Scott, what's new?

How are you?

All right.

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