REMEMBERING THE PACIFIC WAR

Air Classics, Apr 2004 by Hulett, George

Excellent volume captures a harrowing period of history

Pacific Legacy - Image and Memory from World War II in the Pacific by Rex Alan Smith and Gerald A. Meehl (Abbeville Press)! vividly surveys, in fascinating narrative and evocative illustration, all aspects of the Pacific war - bringing alive the terrors of charging point-blank into Japanese gunfire on invasion beaches, flying with Doolittle on a one-way trip to bomb Tokyo, living with the tedium of everyday life on support bases miles from the fighting, recklessly attacking Japanese destroyers in plywood PT boats, bearing up under the drudgery of building coral runways on forward bases for the B-29s that relentlessly bombed Japan, and living through the swarms of kamikaze attacks on American ships.

This volume presents something else unique among WWII histories, an unprecedented color record - spanning nearly 30 years - of dramatic wartime relics that survived for decades on most of the Pacific island battlefields. American landing craft and tanks are still there on treacherous reefs and beaches where tragically they were stopped by enemy fire so long ago; aircraft of both sides lie hidden in jungles where they crashed; battle-scarred Japanese pillboxes and artillery emplacements still stand sentinel, and packed coral landing strips for our heavy bombers remain as good as new.

Such evocative memento mori have been captured beautifully by Jerry Meehl, probably the only photographer to have trod so many of these far-flung battle sites, some of them still rife underfoot with unstable explosives and now off limits, as is Iwo Jima, once again a Japanese stronghold. The authors also searched official archives for pictures that show the agonies of combat, and in these one often sees the very tanks and amtracs that still remain on distant invasion beaches. Also uncovered were captured photos of Japanese pillboxes and gun emplacements newly built, in dramatic contrast to what H they look like now.

In addition to chapters that cover the entire war, from the attack on Pearl Harbor to lapan's surrender in Tokyo Bay, each of the more than 20 individual battle essays features an hour-by-hour narrative that relies heavily on the first-hand accounts of men who were there, archival pictures shot during the actual fighting, and color photographs of Japanese defenses still standing that help the reader visualize what it was really like to have been in the Pacific, doggedly island-hopping to victory.

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