Shooting the Pacific War
Shooting the Pacific War

Author: Thayer Soule

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0813184959

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Thayer Soule couldn't believe his orders. As a junior officer with no military training or indoctrination and less than ten weeks of active duty behind him, he had been assigned to be photographic officer for the First Marine Division. The Corps had never had a photographic division before, much less a field photographic unit. But Soule accepted the challenge, created the unit from scratch, established policies for photography, and led his men into combat. Soule and his unit produced films and photos of training, combat action pictures, and later, terrain studies and photographs for intelligence purposes. Though he had never heard of a photo-litho set, he was in charge of using it for map production, which would prove vital to the division. Shooting the Pacific War is based on Soule's detailed wartime journals. Soule was in the unique position to interact with men at all levels of the military, and he provides intriguing closeups of generals, admirals, sergeants, and privates -everyone he met and worked with along the way. Though he witnessed the horror of war firsthand, he also writes of the vitality and intense comradeship that he and his fellow Marines experienced. Soule recounts the heat of battle as well as the intense training before and rebuilding after each campaign. He saw New Zealand in the desperate days of 1942. His division was rebuilt in Australia following Guadalcanal. After a stint back in Quantico training more combat photographers, he went to Guam and then to the crucible of Iwo Jima. At war's end he was serving as Photographic Officer, Fleet Marine Force Pacific, at Pearl Harbor.

The Pacific War
The Pacific War

Author: William B. Hopkins

Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA

Published: 2010-11-04

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1616732407

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This “important comprehensive study” of WWII in the Pacific examines the high-level decision-making and strategy that led to victory (Roanoke Times). Once the stories have been told of battles won and lost, most of what happens in a war remains a mystery. So it has been with accounts of World War II in the Pacific, a complex conflict whose nature is often obscured by simple chronological narratives. In The Pacific War, William B. Hopkins, a Marine Corps veteran of the Pacific war and respected military history author, opens the story of the Pacific campaign to a broader and deeper view. Hopkins investigates the strategies, politics, and personalities that shaped the fighting. His regional approach to this complex war conducted on land, sea, and air offers an insightful perspective on how this multifaceted conflict unfolded. As expansive as the immense reaches of the Pacific, and as focused as the most intensive pinpoint attack on a strategic island, Hopkins’ account offers a fresh way of understanding the hows—and more significantly, the whys—of the Pacific War.

Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (Vol. 1) (The Pacific War Trilogy)
Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (Vol. 1) (The Pacific War Trilogy)

Author: Ian W. Toll

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2011-11-14

Total Pages: 732

ISBN-13: 0393083179

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Winner of the Northern California Book Award for Nonfiction "Both a serious work of history…and a marvelously readable dramatic narrative." —San Francisco Chronicle On the first Sunday in December 1941, an armada of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Six months later, in a sea fight north of the tiny atoll of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent into the abyss, a blow that destroyed the offensive power of their fleet. Pacific Crucible—through a dramatic narrative relying predominantly on primary sources and eyewitness accounts of heroism and sacrifice from both navies—tells the epic tale of these first searing months of the Pacific war, when the U.S. Navy shook off the worst defeat in American military history to seize the strategic initiative.

Pacific War Stories: In the Words of Those Who Survived
Pacific War Stories: In the Words of Those Who Survived

Author:

Publisher: WW Norton

Published: 2011-09-27

Total Pages: 1224

ISBN-13: 0789260107

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This is the most extensive collection published to date of first-person oral histories on so many diverse aspects of the war in the Pacific—told in gripping, eyewitness accounts by more than seventy veterans from all branches of service. In this new book by the authors of Pacific Legacy: Image and Memory of World War II in the Pacific, the history of the War in the Pacific comes vividly to life in the words of those who witnessed it first hand. The editors create for the reader, as the veterans themselves recall it, what that war was like—how it looked, felt, smelled, and sounded. The stories collected here are a unique portrayal of the mundane, exotic, boring, terrifying, life-altering events that made up their wartime experiences in World War II in the Pacific, a war fought on countless far-flung islands over an area that constitutes about one-third of the globe. What the veterans saw and lived through has stayed with them their entire lives, and much of it comes to the surface again through their vivid memories. This is an important book for military buffs as well as for the survivors of World War II and their families. The narratives, grouped into fifteen thematic, chronologically arranged chapters, are stirring, first-hand accounts, from front-line combat at the epicenter of violence and death to restless, weary boredom on rear area islands thousands of miles from the fighting. While their experiences differed, all were changed by what happened to them in the Pacific. These are not the stories of sweeping strategies or bold moves by generals and admirals. Instead, we hear from men and women on the lower rungs, including ordinary seamen on vessels that encountered Japanese warships and planes and sometimes came out second best, rank-and-file Marines who were in amtracs churning toward bullet-swept tropical beaches and saw their buddies killed beside them, and astounded eyewitnesses to the war’s sudden start on December 7, 1941.

War in the Pacific
War in the Pacific

Author: Harry Gailey

Publisher: Presidio Press

Published: 2011-08-03

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 0307802043

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Historian Harry Gailey offers a fresh one-volume treatment of the vast Pacific theater in World War II, examining in detail the performance of Japanese and Allied naval, air, and land forces in every major military operation. The War in the Pacific begins with an examination of events leading up to World War II and compares the Japanese and American economies and societies, as well as the chief combatants' military doctrine, training, war plans, and equipment. The book then chronicles all significant actions - from the early Allied defeats in the Philippines, the East Indies, and New Guinea; through the gradual improvement of the Allied position in the Central and Southwest Pacific regions; to the final agonies of the Japanese people, whose leaders refused to admit defeat until the very end. Gailey gives detailed treatment to much that has been neglected or given only cursory mention in previous surveys. The reader thus gains an unparalleled overview of operations, as well as many fresh insights into the behind-the-scenes bickering between the Allies and the interservice squabbles that dogged MacArthur and Nimitz throughout the war. NOTE: This edition does not include a photo insert.

When the Shooting Stopped
When the Shooting Stopped

Author: Barrett Tillman

Publisher:

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781472848994

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In the 44 months between December 1941 and August 1945, the Pacific Theater absorbed the attention of the American nation and military longer than any other. Despite the Allied grand strategy of "Germany first", after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. especially was committed to confronting Tokyo as a matter of urgent priority. This fascinating new history tells the dramatic story of the final weeks of the war, detailing the last brutal battles on air, land and sea with evocative first-hand accounts from pilots and sailors caught up in these extraordinary events.

Shooting the War
Shooting the War

Author: Otto Giese

Publisher: US Naval Institute Press

Published: 2003-08-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781591142980

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The war diary of former German naval officer Otto Giese recounts a seafaring career of extraordinary scope. It begins with the dawning of World War II, while the author is a junior officer on board the ocean liner SS Columbus, and continues through his confinement in a British prisoner-of-war camp after the war. Readers will be moved by the author's ability to put a human face on the German experience of the war. The book contains more than 100 Leica-quality photographs, an exceptional assortment taken by Giese throughout his wartime service that offers a unique historical overview. Also included are vivid accounts of the scuttling of the Columbus, furtive blockade running, and the arduous life of the men who served in Germany's fleet of "gray wolves" as they prowled the polar sea and other remote corners of the world. Even with Germany's surrender, the war was far from over for Giese and his comrades, who remained deep in the Malayan jungle until captured by the British and imprisoned in the infamous Changi Jail. Interspersed among tales of hardship and loss are colorful anecdotes that relay joy and camaraderie. Whether it be plots to escape detention at Angel Island, the unlikely processing of German seamen at Ellis Island, or a stint "policing" guerrilla warfare in the Malayan jungle, the author greets the incongruous moments of war and life with equanimity. At the same time his memoirs offer an unwavering assessment of the dictates of duty.

Through These Portals
Through These Portals

Author: Wayne C. MacGregor

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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MacGregor's gripping memoir lends an amazing sense of immediacy to descriptions of the Great Depression and savage, face-to-face, small-unit infantry action in 1944-45 on the western Pacific front--depicting war at its worst and individual soldiers at their best.

Faithful Warriors
Faithful Warriors

Author: James Dean Ladd

Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Published: 2013-09-15

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1612510175

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Faithful Warriors is a memoir of World War II in the Pacific by a combat veteran of the 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division. Written with award-winning author Steven Weingartner, Col. Ladd’s book recounts his experiences as a junior officer in some of the fiercest fighting of the war, during the amphibious invasions of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, and Tinian. Ladd's recollections and descriptions of life--and death--on the far-flung battlefronts of the Pacific War are vividly rendered, and augmented by the personal recollections of many of the men who served with him in his wartime journey across the Pacific. This vividly written memoir will stir the memories of those who lived during these trying times and will help future generations of readers to understand the realities of the Pacific War.

Saipan
Saipan

Author: Bruce M. Petty

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2016-05-01

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1476613710

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The battle for Saipan is remembered as one of the bloodiest battles fought in the Pacific during World War II, and was a turning point on the road to the defeat of Japan. In this work, the survivors--including Pacific Islanders on whose land the Americans and Japanese fought their war--have the opportunity to tell their stories in their own words. The author offers an introduction to the volume and arranges the oral histories by location--Saipan, Yap and Tinian, Rota, Palau Islands, and Guam--in the first half, and by branch of service in the second half.