With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

"This is a really famous memoir. It’s not about Burma, it’s about the Pacific and told from the American perspective. If anybody has seen the HBO show The Pacific —which was the follow-up to Band of Brothers— it’s partly based on Eugene’s memoir. I chose this book to understand what island warfare in the Pacific was like. Burma is a vast country with many different types of environments. The war in the Pacific that the Americans fought was a completely different game in many ways. It’s a brilliant combat memoir and a real page-turner. It’s unflinching and quite morally serious at times, very big picture reflective, but it also covers a lot of the action on the ground, keeping you gripped by the story. Like T he Forgotten Highlander, it brings the personal horror of the war against the Japanese to the fore, but it’s a different flavor of it entirely. You’ve got these two memoirs covering the war in Asia, but it’s completely different experiences, both uniquely awful in their own way. Again, it brings home just what a vast, horrific war it was in Asia. Yes, they’re island hopping, landing on these Pacific islands. My grandfather was a Marine as well, though a different kind—he was a British Commando. Nevertheless, it’s amphibious landings onto areas where they don’t necessarily know the Japanese strength and what they’re going to be facing there. In some ways, it has similarities with the fighting on Hill 170 at Kangaw, where my grandfather was. It’s a slightly different environment, but they’re facing the same enemy. They’re fighting the same ideology."