When Victory is Ours

When Victory Is Ours: Letters Home from the South Pacific 1943-1945 provides an intimate look aboard a Landing Craft, Infantry 432 (LCI) during WWII.  For over two years, Lt. Cmdr Morris D. Coppersmith transported Marines and other soldiers to beachheads throughout the South Pacific, often under heavy fire along coral reefs whose sharp shoals could cut men to ribbons.  Despite many close calls during assault beachings at Finschhafen, Hollandia, Humboldt, Biak, Japen Island, Alexishafen, Leyte, Zamboanga, Noemfoor and countless others, he survived without injury and was awarded several medals including the Bronze Star.  He rubbed elbows with generals and admirals and met with Col. Archibald Roosevelt, the youngest son of President Theodore Roosevelt, yet established deep interpersonal relationships with his crew, regardless of rank. 


His crew managed to shoot down multiple Japanese planes. Coppersmith survived a kamikaze attack; he witnessed the removal of charred remains of American soldiers from a Japanese POW camp in Puerto Princesa, Philippines.  Only a few weeks before, fleeing Japanese soldiers had ordered imprisoned American soldiers to enter slit trenches and poured gasoline upon them, burning them alive days before their rescuers’ arrival.  Coppersmith writes of the gratitude Filipinos showed to arriving American troops, having experienced extreme oppression under the Japanese.


 His eye for detail also provides a fascinating glimpse of the daily life of indigenous peoples throughout the South Pacific through Bora Bora and Samoa, the Fiji Islands, and New Guinea, meeting topless women in grass skirts and pygmies and cannibals.   Coppersmith came to love Australia despite the anti-Semitism he personally experienced there.  He never flaunted his Judaism but he didn’t hide it either, and many of his experiences are written through the perspective not only of a patriotic US soldier, but as a Jew whose family, himself included,  immigrated from a shtetl in Russia in 1913 and made a new life for themselves in America.  In one especially moving passage he describes Yom Kippur worship services in Hollandia, New Guinea with the trunks of coconut trees serving as seats.  


This account is unique, as most memoirs from this era were written after the War.  Diaries were prohibited, lest they fall into enemy hands.   However, as Commander of the ship, Morris D. Coppersmith was determined to “have a complete record of my adventures for some day in the future.  It’s the only record I will have.  Further, you will notice that the Censor who passes on my mail is initialed ‘MDC,’ and you know good and well who he is.”   These letters and accompanying photographs to his family are that record.