Books in Brief: Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War, by William Manchester (Little, Brown, 401 pp., $14.95). William Manchester now has a second “first” to his credit. In American Caesar he had written the classic study of a commander in World War II, a biography of Douglas MacArthur that ranks among the great military biographies. Now he has written the most probing and searing account of combat in that same war, an account based on his own experience as an enlisted man in the Marine Corps who participated in every one of the deadly firefights from Guadalcanal and New Guinea to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The title refers to the nearly 35-year blackout that clamped down on his mind at the end of the war, insulating him against the horrors he had witnessed, the friends he had lost, and the great love that had sustained him up to that final day in the hell of Okinawa, after he had jumped hospital and, in violation of orders, “returned to the front and almost certain death” on Sugar Loaf Hill. “Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.” In a moving peroration that follows this revelation at the close of his book, Manchester sets down all the ties that brought Americans together and gave them the courage to see it through in a war more devastating than any other in history. “Later the rules would change. But we didn’t know that then.” His record of what he learned by returning to the scene of those terrible struggles should be required reading in every school in this country, if this country is ever again to find the selflessness and capacity for sacrifice that made it what it once was.

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Selden Rodman

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Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War, by William Manchester (Little, Brown, 401 pp., $14.95). William Manchester now has a second “first” to his credit. In American Caesar he had written the classic study of a commander in World War II, a biography of Douglas MacArthur that ranks among the great military biographies. Now he has written the most probing and searing account of combat in that same war, an account based on his own experience as an enlisted man in the Marine Corps who participated in every one of the deadly firefights from Guadalcanal and New Guinea to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The title refers to the nearly 35-year blackout that clamped down on his mind at the end of the war, insulating him against the horrors he had witnessed, the friends he had lost, and the great love that had sustained him up to that final day in the hell of Okinawa, after he had jumped hospital and, in violation of orders, “returned to the front and almost certain death” on Sugar Loaf Hill. “Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.” In a moving peroration that follows this revelation at the close of his book, Manchester sets down all the ties that brought Americans together and gave them the courage to see it through in a war more devastating than any other in history. “Later the rules would change. But we didn’t know that then.” His record of what he learned by returning to the scene of those terrible struggles should be required reading in every school in this country, if this country is ever again to find the selflessness and capacity for sacrifice that made it what it once was.