Meet the survivors.
The World War II veterans of this book endured unspeakable horrors, came home to America, and more than sixty-seven years later are still alive today. These men—Marines who fought in the Pacific—are national treasures.
This book could not be written ten years from now. Not five. Maybe not even two. All the book’s contributors are in their golden years. Some are eighty-eight years old, others ninety. Richard Greer, our oldest contributor, is ninety-five. But the men shared their stories as if World War II happened yesterday.
In the following pages, these veterans will take you back in time. You’ll experience the shock they felt as boys when Pearl Harbor was bombed. You’ll feel the jolt of boot camp as civility is thrown out the window to turn boys into men. You’ll sail with them to the island of Guadalcanal for their harrowing first battles as Marines as they square off against a seasoned and vicious foe. The journey does not stop there. They’ll take you to Australia for a raucous R&R, then back to the sound of gunfire, to the rain forests of Cape Gloucester, the coral ridges of Peleliu, the black sands of Iwo Jima, and the mud of Okinawa. In the end, they’ll bring you home, as they once returned, triumphant, joyous, yet tormented by the loss of so many friends.
Today these men are fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers in our communities, our neighbors, the guy at the grocery store, the man in church. Yet what they experienced was so graphic, so horrible, it seems astounding that they are among us. And normal. And so humble.
Many books exist about the Pacific War. What sets this book apart is its oral-history style. In this type of book, the author presents the “voices,” then steps back into the shadows. This is a conversation between you—the reader—and the men. Imagine for a moment it’s late at night and you’ve walked into the kitchen for a drink and you find your father or grandfather and his old war buddies around the kitchen table. They’re swapping stories. You listen and what you hear you’ll never forget. That is this book.
After Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Gary Goetzman produced their award-winning HBO miniseries, Band of Brothers, viewers wanted to know about the battles that took place on the other side of the world. This led to the production of the 2010 miniseries The Pacific.
The Pacific brought to life the names, places, and battles of the legendary 1st Marine Division. This unit fought in the first American offensives against Japan and was still in the theater of war when the shells stopped flying. The HBO series followed three principal veterans, the quirky Robert Leckie, the sensitive Eugene Sledge, and the larger-than-life John Basilone. These men deserved the spotlight they received. Basilone wore the Medal of Honor for good reason, and after the war, Leckie and Sledge documented their experiences in epic books for the world’s education. Each appears as a character in Voices of the Pacific, but not as “voices,” simply because none of the three are now living.
The power of this book comes from its freshness. We swing the spotlight over to living heroes who served alongside these icons. The “new voices” in this book are veterans with their own breed of heroics. Some are hometown heroes. Some, like Sid Phillips, R. V. Burgin, and Chuck Tatum are already known by their books or from the silver screen. And many of the men in this book are speaking up for the first time. A reader need not have seen The Pacific to appreciate Voices of the Pacific. The heroism in these pages stands alone.
For many years now I’ve worked closely with the Marines whose stories follow. I met Chuck Tatum a decade ago and edited his book Red Blood, Black Sand for him. I also had the privilege of working with Sid Phillips, on his lighthearted memoir, You’ll Be Sor-ree!. Sid had more stories in him—dark, violent stories he did not put in his own book. I asked him why he was hesitant, and he said he didn’t want his grandkids reading about the raw, rotten, savage side of World War II. So instead he focused on the humor and camaraderie that he found amid the horror.
There’s a time and place for everything, and this book is about last words from living men. The veterans are not getting any younger. None of us are. So in this book, the gloves come off—for Sid Phillips and all our contributors. They agreed to participate because we made them a promise: In this book, you can tell it as it was.
What follows is not a sanitized version of the war. It’s the last survivors talking to you, digging deep and pulling out painful memories, gut-busting humor, and rousing accounts of American bravery, sacrifice, and old-fashioned goodness. Here they give us one last tale, one last time.
So where did we find the men who loaned us their voices? Our recruiting efforts were like a snowball. One veteran agreed to participate then told us where to find his buddy, then his buddy told us how to find his buddy. Before we knew it, we had the fifteen heroes whose voices you will hear.
Time was of the essence, so I enlisted the help of journalist Marcus Brotherton, who had profiled the men of Easy Company for his bestselling oral history project, We Who Are Alive & Remain. Together we did countless hours of interviews, editing, and shuffling the parts of the book together like a jigsaw puzzle.
We got a little carried away. We interviewed World War II Marine pilots of Wildcat and Corsair fighters who had roamed the skies above the ground-pounders. We talked with Katharine Phillips-Singer, whom you may remember as the Southern lady who stole the show in Ken Burns’s documentary The War. Katharine shared her colorful memories of the World War II home front. But in the end, we ran out of pages. That material is not lost. In fact, it’s available to you on our website, www.valorstudios.com.
One question puzzled me at the start of this book, but not at the end. How did these men return to the world after what they saw, did, and suffered? How does a man keep his sanity after sleeping in waterlogged foxholes so long his toenails rot away? How does a man tell a joke after having 970 battleship shells dropped around him, each blast sucking the air from his lungs? How does a man keep fighting after seeing his gut-shot buddy be carried away, screaming on a stretcher?
The answer, we invite you to discover, lies on the pages that follow. I’ll let you come to your own conclusion, but I’ve come to mine: The Marines of this book are an extraordinary breed.
Adam Makos
Denver, November 2012
