Brotherhood of Heroes
The Marines at Peleliu, 1944 -- The Bloodiest Battle of the Pacific War
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4.6 • 29 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
This Band of Brothers for the Pacific is the gut-wrenching and ultimately triumphant story of the Marines' most ferocious—yet largely forgotten—battle of World War II.
Between September 15 and October 15, 1944, the First Marine Division suffered more than 6,500 casualties fighting on a hellish little coral island in the Pacific. Peleliu was the setting for one of the most savage struggles of modern times, a true killing ground that has been all but forgotten—until now. Drawing on interviews with Peleliu veterans, Bill Sloan's gripping narrative seamlessly weaves together the experiences of the men who were there, producing a vivid and unflinching tableau of the twenty-four-hour-a-day nightmare of Peleliu.
Emotionally moving and gripping in its depictions of combat, Brotherhood of Heroes rescues the Corps's bloodiest battle from obscurity and does honor to the Marines who fought it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The battle of Peleliu, though certainly not the bloodiest of the Pacific war, was a ghastly ordeal. The rugged hills of the tiny coral island were honeycombed with caves and bunkers whose determined Japanese defenders had to be pried from every nook and cranny at the cost of nearly 10,000 American casualties. Sloan, author of Given Up for Dead: America's Heroic Stand at Wake Island, delivers an engrossing grunt's-eye-view of the fighting, structured around personal reminiscences by the Marines who bore the brunt of it. By day, they inched forward with tanks, machine guns, grenades and flame-throwers; by night, they grappled in their foxholes with knife-wielding enemy infiltrators. The author repeatedly salutes the Marines' bravery but allows the horror of war-the loss of friends, the stench of the dead, the torment of thirst and sleep deprivation-to make itself felt: "I had resigned from the human race... I just wanted to kill," recalls one soldier. Sloan maintains enough perspective that the shape of the battle isn't lost amid the action, and he critiques American commanders' conduct of the campaign, which many historians consider a tragic waste of lives on an island that should have been bypassed. His regrettably one-sided account says little about the Japanese experience, and his focus on slogging foot soldiers somewhat distorts the character of the American effort, which relied on massive artillery and airstrikes. Still, he tells a gripping story, full of excitement and pathos, about one of the more hellish struggles of the Second World War. Photos. Agent, Roger Labrie.
