A DATE WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFAMY “Parts of the ship, flames, and bomb fragments flew by us, reaching hundreds of feet into the air. The ship’s midsection opened like a blooming flower, burning white hot from within. Our entire magazine and forward oil storage had exploded; tons of TNT and thousands of gallons of fuel oil poured into the water. Black smoke billowed into the sky as the oil caught fire.”—RUSSELL MCCURDY, MARINES THE FALL OF THE PHILIPPINES “On the Bataan Death March I saw many guys trying to help comrades in distress, but it wasn’t the guys that were in distress who were killed. It was the guys who were trying to help them.”—JOHN BRUER, ARMY COPING WITH CASUALTIES “These guys, the Marines, God love ‘em, they’d fight until they couldn’t fight anymore. They’d fight with broken arms, gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds, and things like that. I’d patch them up and tell them to go back to the ship and they’d say, ‘I’m all right,’ and they would just keep fighting.”—VERN GARRETT, NAVY
gerald a. meehl (left) and rex alan smith
ABOUT THE EDITORS Rex Alan Smith and Gerald A. Meehl co-authored Abbeville’s recent volume Pacific Legacy: Image and Memory from World War II in the Pacific. Smith is a veteran of thirty-six months with the Army Engineers in the Pacific. He is the author of Moon of Popping Trees, The Carving of Mount Rushmore (Abbeville), and One Last Look (Abbeville), about the Eighth Air Force in World War II. Meehl has traveled extensively in the South Pacific over the last thirty years and visited and photographed every major Pacific battlefield and site connected to World War II. He is the author of more than ninety articles, and his photographs have been published in numerous periodicals.
THE WAR IN THE AIR “Suddenly, I heard something hit the plane and turned to look out the left waist gun window, and there was thick black smoke trailing out of the left engine. It turned out that ground fire had hit the prop governor and part of the engine had been shot away.”
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ABBEVILLE PRESS
—JOHN BEDDALL, ARMY AIR FORCE
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Jacket design by Misha Beletsky
THE WAR AT SEA “The kamikaze hit us with sixteen different waves over a period of five hours— so many that the destroyers’ radar couldn’t even keep track of them all.” —BILL LEWIS, NAVY
ISBN 0-7892-0817-2 EAN
Pacific Legacy Image and Memory from World War II in the Pacific By Rex Alan Smith and Gerald A. Meehl ISBN 0-7892-0761-3
SMITH AND MEEHL
MANNING THE PT BOATS “John F. Kennedy was the only one who wanted to go back into combat after he’d lost his boat. And, you know, they would normally send them home, but he wanted to stay there and get another boat.”—DAVE LEVY, NAVY
9 780789 208170
PACIFIC WAR STORIES
FROM PACIFIC WAR STORIES
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h i s t o ry
PACIFIC WAR STORIES IN THE WORDS OF THOSE WHO SURVIVED compiled and edited by
REX ALAN SMITH AND GERALD A. MEEHL
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PACIFIC WAR STORIES IN THE WORDS OF THOSE WHO SURVIVED
REX ALAN SMITH AND GERALD A. MEEHL
o published collection of first-person oral histories encompasses so many diverse aspects of World War II in the Pacific—in gripping, eyewitness accounts from more than seventy veterans of all branches of service. In their own evocative words, veterans who fought for their lives against the Japanese Empire some sixty years ago now think back on the terrifying, perilous, exotic, life-altering events that made up their wartime experiences. What they saw and lived through has stayed with them their entire lives, and much of it comes to the surface again through their vivid memories. These are not the stories of sweeping military strategies or bold tactical moves by generals and admirals. Instead, we hear mainly from those on the lower rungs of the military ladder from ordinary seamen on vessels that encountered Japanese warships and planes and sometimes came out second-best from rank-and-file Marines who in amtracs churning toward bullet-swept tropical beaches saw buddies killed right next to them, and from startled eyewitnesses to the war’s sudden beginning on December 7, 1941. Pacific War Stories is a unique book of stirring, first-hand accounts, from front-line combat at the epicenter of violence and death to restless weariness on rear area islands thousands of miles from the fighting, to chilling aerial encounters with the dreaded Japanese Zero. Fortunately, these compelling stories were collected before it became too late, for they cover myriad aspects of what it was like to have lived through the war in the Pacific, a war fought on countless islands scattered over an area constituting one-third of the globe.