Island Infernos
The US Army's Pacific War Odyssey, 1944
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- € 7,49
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In Fire and Fortitude—winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History—John C. McManus presented a riveting account of the US Army's fledgling fight in the Pacific following Pearl Harbor. Now, in Island Infernos, he explores the Army’s dogged pursuit of Japanese forces, island by island, throughout 1944, a year that would bring America ever closer to victory or defeat.
“A feat of prodigious scholarship.”—The Wall Street Journal • “Wonderful.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch • “Outstanding.”—Publishers Weekly • “Rich and absorbing.”—Richard Overy, author of Blood and Ruins • “A considerable achievement, and one that, importantly, adds much to our understanding of the Pacific War.”—James Holland, author of Normandy ’44
After some two years at war, the Army in the Pacific held ground across nearly a third of the globe, from Alaska’s Aleutians to Burma and New Guinea. The challenges ahead were enormous: supplying a vast number of troops over thousands of miles of ocean; surviving in jungles ripe with dysentery, malaria, and other tropical diseases; fighting an enemy prone to ever-more desperate and dangerous assaults. Yet the Army had proven they could fight. Now, they had to prove they could win a war.
Brilliantly researched and written, Island Infernos moves seamlessly from the highest generals to the lowest foot soldiers and in between, capturing the true essence of this horrible conflict. A sprawling yet page-turning narrative, the story spans the battles for Saipan and Guam, the appalling carnage of Peleliu, General MacArthur’s dramatic return to the Philippines, and the grinding jungle combat to capture the island of Leyte. This masterful history is the second volume of John C. McManus’s trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War, proving McManus to be one of our finest historians of World War II.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian McManus follows Fortitude and Fire with an outstanding second volume in his planned trilogy on the Pacific theater of WWII. Covering the period from the invasion of the Marshall Islands in January 1944 to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's premature declaration of victory at the Battle of Leyte in December 1944, McManus's extensive cast of characters includes commanders, officers, enlisted men, and captured soldiers toiling in Japan's horrendous POW camps. He delves into each island invasion in scrupulous detail, documenting, for instance, how the Army Air Force bombed Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands for seven weeks to prepare for the amphibious assault, which nevertheless devolved into an "incremental slugfest" as outnumbered Japanese soldiers fought ferociously from pillboxes, entrenchments, and the ruins of bombed-out buildings. McManus sheds light on famous battles (Bougainville, Corregidor) as well as lesser-known affairs (Sanananda, Attu), and incisively profiles U.S. military commanders including MacArthur, a brilliant strategist and courageous leader who was also "a man of astonishing pomposity, megalomania and egocentrism." Distinguished by informative deep dives into logistical and strategic issues and McManus's storytelling prowess, this is an excellent study of how the U.S. turned the tide of the war in the Pacific.
