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.
With unprecedented access to the veterans, rare photographs, and unpublished memoirs, Voices of the Pacific presents true stories of heroism as told by such World War II veterans as Sid Phillips, R. V. Burgin, and Chuck Tatum—whose ...
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.
Drea, Edward J. MacArthur's ULTRA: Codebreaking and the War against Japan, 1942–1945. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Dull, Paul S. A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy (1941–1945).
When I sit and kind of think back about it now, had it not been for that period, things probably would have been different. I thought at the time, given everything that was happening, there was only one word, “survive.
One Japanese admiral admitted that ‘Our war was lost with the loss of Saipan’. This is a highly illustrated story of what US General Holland Smith called ‘the decisive battle of the Pacific offensive’.
Story of how military photographers got their shots while storming beaches and assaulting pillboxes with combat troops.
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.
... Martin Clemens, Andrew W. Coffey, Jeremiah Collins, John P. Condon, Paul Cox, Elfriede Craddock, Jerry Crad-dock, ... R. E. Duca, Rodolfo Dula, Jim Earl, Florence Fenton, Y. Fujumura, Robert B. Fowler, Jay Gildner, John R. Griffith ...
This fascinating and powerful collection of first-hand accounts—prepared with the assistance of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association—brings to vivid life one of the most fateful days in American history.Here, in...
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.