Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir Of The Pacific War

William Manchester “Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir Of The Pacific War,” Little Brown & Co., 1979, 401 pp.

If you want to be exposed to the viciousness of WWII in the Pacific at the level of sound and smell, and, as opposed to the less vicious European theater, read this book by the well regarded author, William Manchester, with special emphasis on his personal experiences as a Sergeant involved in battle.  Also: should you believe the dropping of the atomic bombs was unnecessary and a war crime, this book may change your mind.

As I read, I remembered my experience with a WWII Pacific veteran in 1949 when I was in second grade.  His name was Joe and he lived above our second floor apartment in Madison, WI.  He escorted me to early mass at St. James many times a week to teach me the intricacies of being an altar boy.  Some evenings I would go up to his apartment for Latin lessons.  After these lessons, he often showed me pictures he had collected during the war.  I remember bodies floating down rivers, hanging from trees, etc.  He matter-of- factly, absent emotion, explained the pictures as if we were examining some kind of vermin—He detested the Japanese as less than human.  Reading this book of Manchester’s helped explain his attitude to me.  (As incongruous as Joe and the altar boy story is to this book’s theme, how about the incongruity of who recommended I read it?  Thanks Ann).

Goodbye Darkness was a war of no quarter—the Japanese fought that way and the Americans had to join in.  Manchester visits all the battle sites until his final destination on Okinawa’s Sugar Loaf Hill, where in nine days 7,547 Marines fell near the spot where he had been gravely wounded and left for dead (much as had occurred to his Father in WWI). 

My Notes:

Pg. 61:  The April, 1942 ten-day, seventy-five-mile notorious Bataan Death March to POW cages in northern Luzon where Jap guards began shooting prisoners who collapsed in the sun and suffocating dust, and withheld water from men dying of thirst.  Beatings followed as well as beheadings and torture.  From seven to ten thousand Allied soldiers perished during this march.  Corregidor, however, held out for another month. On May 8^th, 1942 Jonathan Wainwright surrendered some eleven thousand men to the Japanese.  MacArthur had been ordered to evacuate himself and his family to Australia.

Pg. 174:  Bastogne was considered an epic battle in the European theater where the 101^st Airborne was surrounded for eight days.  But the Marines on Guadalcanal were isolated for over four months: There have been few such stands in history.  All but abandoned by the vessels which brought them there, reduced to eating roots and weeds, kept on the line though stricken by malaria unless their temperature reached 103 degrees, dependent for food and ammo on destroyers and fliers who broke through the enemy blockade, always at great risk, they fought the best soldiers Tokyo could send against them, killed over twenty thousand of them, and won.

Pg. 255:  It is a military maxim, repeated down the ages, that casualties of 30 percent are usually the most a fighting unit can endure without losing combative spirit.  Tarawa, where over 40 percent fell, proved that wasn’t true of the Marine Corps.  Also, on Peleliu the First Marines lost 56 percent of its men; on Iwo Jima the Twenty-sixth Marines lost 76 percent of its men; on Okinawa the Twenty-ninth Marines lost 81 percent. 

Pg. 341:  Battle for Iwo Jima: (19 February – 26 March 1945), Marines lost 25,851 men:  The famous flag rising atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima was taken early in the struggle, on the fifth day, before Americans confronted the enormity of the challenge before them.  They were unaware that the volcanic slopes beneath them swarmed with Japs, like mites in cheese.  It seemed inconceivable that the island’s eight square miles could conceal so large a Nipponese army. 

Pg. 355:  Kamikaze attacks:  Altogether, Nippon’s human bombs accounted for 400 ships and 9,724 seamen.