**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 generation--the one that came of age during
the Second World War--shared 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 three--presented here in an illustrated
collector's edition--are 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 hell's own cesspool." Written with
precision and clarity, Sledge's 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 sailor's 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 O'Hare.
With thirty-two pages of photographs and endpaper maps.
