“The Japanese made an all-out stand. It took 82 horrendous days for the island to be captured. Not until 22 June was the conquest complete, by which time 13000 US soldiers and, according to some estimates, a quarter of a million Japanese had died. Many of the Japanese casualties where civilians and there are terrible tales of mass suicides by mothers clutching their children and leaping to their deaths off cliff tops to avoid capture by the foreigners whom, they had been led to believe, were...