Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific

Description

A brilliant history of the land battles in the Pacific theater of World War II, with stirring personal accounts of the horrifying struggle between the Japanese and Allied forces.
 
The horrors of WWII in the South Pacific extended far beyond the detonation of atomic bombs. In this revelatory portrayal of the lives of the regular infantrymen who struggled to contain the Japanese advance, Eric Bergerud has given us a compelling and chilling record of the incredible hardships endured by these soldiers, and the heroic efforts that resulted in the reversal of the course of the war. Bergerud spent hundreds of hours interviewing the last surviving veterans of this remarkable campaign, and he has placed their personal experiences at the center of his analysis of military strategy.
 
“Aspires to do for the ground war in the South Pacific what Keegan achieved in Six Armies in Normandy.”—Los Angeles TimesThe South Pacific campaign of World War II set new standards for savagery in modern warfare. The ground fighting reached a peak of intensity when the U.S. Marines landed at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands while the Australians repulsed the Japanese advance across New Guinea. Battling jungle rot and malaria, the Australian Army teamed with the U.S. against the Japanese, whose battle ethos demanded they fight until victory or extermination. In Touched by Fire, Eric Bergerud, a professor of military and American history at Lincoln University in San Francisco, restores the campaign to its rightful place of importance as a diabolical struggle for survival in World War II s most heartless terrain.