Tales of Combat (Five Best)

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Ray E Boomhower, Tales of Combat. Wall Street Journal, Feb 12, 2022, at page C8 (in the column "Five Best").
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fiv ... -combat-11644597382

Note:
(a) Tarawa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarawa
(section 1 Etymology; section 4 History: "During World War II"))

On the map, you can see Betio.
(b) Guadalcanal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalcanal
(an island in Solomon Island; section 2 History, section 2.2 Western charting: toponymy)
(c) worm's-eye view
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worm%27s-eye_view

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Tarawa
By Robert Sherrod (1944)

1. "It was inconceivable to most Marines that they should let one another down, or that they could be responsible for diminishing the bright reputation of the corps * * * The Marines simply assumed they were the world's best fighting men." So wrote Robert Sherrod, a 34-year-old Georgia native, in "Tarawa: The Story of a Battle." Nothing prepared him, however, for the carnage he witnessed in November 1943 while accompanying elements of the Second Marine Division as they stormed ashore on Betio, a small, bird-shaped island in the central Pacific. As he worked on his book based on notes he had taken while the fighting still raged around him, Sherrod kept one thought in mind—to make clear to Americans that "war is not always the romantic, smashing adventure the afternoon newspaper headlines make it * * * War is a cruel, desperate necessity which calls for courage and suffering." His "Tarawa" transmits this truth with impressive power.


Invasion Diary
By Richard Tregaskis (1944)

2 Richard Tregaskis achieved fame thanks to his bestselling book "Guadalcanal Diary" (1943) before turning to the European theater. "Invasion Diary" finds him in Sicily and Italy. He joins a photo-reconnaissance mission over Palermo in the company of Col Elliott Roosevelt (FDR's son); from the nose of a B-17 Flying Fortress, he witnesses the first bombing mission against Rome. On the ground with American paratroopers, he struggles to survive a patrol. The lure of the front "is like an opiate," Tregaskis writes. After "the tedium of workday life, its attraction becomes more and more insistent." The attraction almost costs him his life when he is hit in the skull by shrapnel from a German shell. His memory of this near catastrophe is nonetheless lyrical and moving: "An orange mist came up quickly over my horizon, like a tropical sunrise, and set again, leaving me in the dark. Then the curtain descended, gently."


They Called It 'Purple Heart Valley'
By Margaret Bourke-White (1944)

3 Known as "Maggie the Indestructible" to her fellow staffers at Life magazine, the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White was one of the first female war correspondents. She was in the Soviet Union when the Nazis launched their surprise attack in 1941. Later, when she was sent to cover the Italian campaign, she found that the intimacy of the fighting there sharpened her awareness. "I began to listen to what people said. I mean really listen." She discovered during her five months in Italy that cameras couldn't report everything. She began to rely both on photographs and her own prose to produce "Purple Heart Valley." In it, she explored the myriad responsibilities of the Army Service Forces—the engineers, quartermasters, medical corps and artillery spotters. She also saw firsthand the war's effect on the civilian population. She came to ask difficult if not outright unanswerable questions, among them: What was the use of all the bloodshed?


Brave Men
By Ernie Pyle (1944)

4 Ernie Pyle captured the attention of the American public as a national columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service by delivering a "worm's-eye view" of World War II. He paid homage to the dirty and dangerous job of the average GI. "I love the infantry because they are the underdogs," Pyle wrote. "They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without." A reader perusing Pyle's columns from 1943 and 1944, collected in "Brave Men," can see what he meant when he described himself as "a letter writer [one who write letters for the illiterate]"—one whose words provided comfort to family members wondering about their sons, brothers and husbands overseas . Pyle memorably describes the beaches of Normandy after D-Day; he discovers "toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand." Looking further, he approached what he thought was a pile of driftwood. "They were a soldier's two feet. He was completely covered except for his feet; the toes of his GI shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly."


We Are the Wounded
By Keith Wheeler (1945)

5 When war with Japan broke out, North Dakota native Keith Wheeler of the Chicago Daily Times was sent to report on the action. His beat was the Pacific: he traveled with the military to places like Kwajalein, Bougainville, Saipan and Guam. His journey ended with the Marines on Iwo Jima when he became one of the more than 15,000 Americans wounded; it was also where he learned what all fighting men came to know: "Anywhere it hits you it's within an inch of killing you." Instead of a story of a victorious battle, Wheeler decided to write about those "defeated in victory"—the blinded, legless, armless and faceless. Despite the tragedy they had endured, Wheeler discovered them to be the "most remarkable class of human beings." John F Kennedy urged Americans to read "We Are the Wounded" to better comprehend "the extent of your debt to them." A debt, Kennedy added, that could not be repaid but had to, at least, "be acknowledged and understood."