The Pacific by Hugh Ambrose

 

It's a horrible irony that the OED defines “pacific” as “characterized or tending to peace; tranquil”; between 1941 and 1945, the ocean of that name was anything but. From Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour to America's atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Pacific campaign was marked by grotesque violence, incompetence, bravery, and unforgiving racial hatred. The battles for islands such as Teleliu and Okinawa killed thousands of young men and profoundly scarred those who survived. Private Eugene Sledge, for example, one of the five men whose experience Hugh Ambrose recounts here, was turned from an enthusiastic young recruit into a tormented veteran, spiritually crushed by the realities of combat. Using the same bestselling formula as his late father's Band of Brothers (both have now been made into HBO miniseries), Hugh Ambrose succeeds in detailing the minutiae of war, but in focusing at such an individual level he sometimes leaves the larger strategic picture obscured. In a sense though this reflects the experience combat troops had of the campaign, and of its baffling scale; where men often had little idea where they were and what they were meant to be doing, other than to kill the enemy or be killed in return. [Richard Strachan]