World War II Memoirs: The Pacific Theater (LOA #351): With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa / Flights of Passage / Crossing the Line (The Library of America 351)

About this book

In one volume three unforgettable memoirs that capture the brutality fear and heroism of the American land air and sea war in the Pacific. Every generation is a secret society former Marine pilot Samuel Hynes wrote. The secret that my generationthe one that came of age during the Second World Warshared was simply the war itself. This volume brings together the powerful memoirs of three Americans who came of age fighting in the Pacific and who survived to tell their stories. Remarkable literary achievements that capture history with the immediacy of lived experience all threepresented here in an illustrated collectors editionare classics of the modern literature of war. In With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (1981) Marine veteran E. B. Sledge bears unflinching witness to the horror fear and degradation of prolonged close-quarters combat. A mortarman serving in a front-line rifle company Sledge survived thirty days of nightmarish fighting on the remote coral island of Peleliu where heat thirst filth and fear and hatred of the Japanese eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. On Okinawa he faced an even greater test of endurance amid deep mud driving rain and incessant shelling as men fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hells own cesspool. Written with precision and clarity Sledges memoir is a haunting testament to his struggle to hold on to decency and sanity and a moving tribute to the esprit de corps of the U.S. Marines. Flights of Passage (1988) is Samuel Hynes evocative and elegiac memoir of his fairly ordinary flying war. A true believer in the religion of flight he writes with lyricism candor and humor about the joys and dangers of his stateside training as a dive-bomber pilot the beauty and excitement he experienced flying in combat over the Ryukyu Islands and his wartime education in the realities of friendship sex love and sudden random death. Alvin Kernan enlisted in the Navy in 1941 at age seventeen to escape life on a failing Wyoming ranch. Crossing the Line (1994 revised 2007) is a vividly written account of his remarkable service on three aircraft carriers first as an aviation ordnanceman and then as an air gunner. A perceptive and thoughtful observer of the sailors life at sea and on shore Kernan witnessed the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack and the launching of the Doolittle Raid armed planes at Midway survived the sinking of the Hornet and flew on the final mission of the fighter ace Butch OHare. With thirty-two pages of photographs and endpaper maps.