Customer Reviews

Pacific Legacy: Image and Memory from World War II in the Pacific

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I've read a lot of books about the Pacific war, but this one is definitely my favorite.

Rex Alan Smith served 36 months as an Army Engineer in the Pacific. Since then, he has traveled extensively, visiting and talking with other veterans of the Pacific war. Gerald Meehl has spent years combing the Pacific and photographing the places which played important roles in WWII in the Pacific: places such as Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Bataan, Corregidor, Guadalcanal, Tulagi, Munda, Tarawa, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa; along with lesser-known, but exotic outposts, such as Bora Bora and Pago Pago.

What emerges from their work is a series of more than 20 essays on individual battles, in the order in which they occurred, from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the final surrender at Tokyo Bay. The essays begin with explanations of why the battles were fought, and what strategies were employed. Aerial photographs give you an overall view of the operation. First-hand accounts by the men who fought there give you a chilling sense of what it was like to charge up the beach in the face of withering enemy fire. There are hundreds of photographs - about half in black and white, which were taken during the actual fighting; and half in color, taken by Mr. Meehl some years later, often of the same scenes. The color photographs are beautiful and haunting. You'll see the rusting hulk of an abandoned tank, or the crumbling rubble of a bombed-out pillbox, surrounded by sparkling white beaches with swaying palms, crystal clear ocean waters, and blue skies with fluffy white clouds.

In his introduction to the book, Joe Foss, Medal of Honor winner at Guadalcanal, says, "We could not cover every campaign in detail, nor was it our purpose to present a comprehensive history of the Pacific war. Rather, we tried to create for the reader, while the veterans themselves can recall it, what that war was like--how it looked and felt and smelled--and to examine the legacy today of a war so fiercely fought on faraway Pacific Islands."

I normally don't write reviews but for this book I had to make an exception. Of the hundreds of books on the Pacific war I've read over the years, this stands head and shoulders above any I've read. The photos are spectacular and are well laid out. If you have any interest in the personal part of that war, this is an absolute must. Just as an aside, I recommended to a WWII Seabee friend, he bought it, and found his photo.

World War II in western europe holds a sort of fascination for people partially because it occurred in environments that, albeit european, are familiar to us and to people that are similar to us (as American readers). The War in the Pacific is the opposite - it seems to have occurred in some otherworldly idyll - beautiful and largely unpopulated or underpopulated, the setting for the Pacific War might well have come out of some video game designer's imagination.

However, it was very much a real war and the places are very much real. And, they do exist! "Pacific Legacy" takes us to places that for many of us have been half shrouded in myth, legend, and imagination through our interpretation of written text. Guadalcanal is a real place, as are Sugar Loaf Hill, Tarawa, Iwo, and Tinian. And yet the author's taking us there, through photos and text, does not fully pop our illusions - they still largely remain somehow otherworldly. Look at the world around you now and think about how it has changed in the last 70 years. Now think about the place on Iwo Jima where American marines planted that flag - it is remarkably unchanged and in fact it seems that even war barely changed the place which seems destinated to ourlive the human race. Let this wonderful book both ground your thinking about the Pacific War in terms of the realities of such places and also provide mental flight for you to them.

I don't know who the reviewer was kidding who wrote that this is the best book he has read on the pacific war - that's pretty silly, since "Pacific Legacy's" take is fairly narrow; but it is certainly unique and invaluable. Beautiful photographs. Very highly recommended.

NB: a book that makes a good complement to this is one called "Perilous Memories" that has been unfairly thrashed on amazon by people who obviously haven't read it. If you appreciate Pacific Legacy, Perilous Memories is an excellent companion.Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s)

This book was a gift for my fiance and he loves it. He first fell in love with the book when we were on vacation in Hawaii but did not want to pay the high price they wanted for it over there. It was ordered some time after we got home and he said it was way more of a book than he ever expected it to be. He said it is absolutely amazing. Great book.

Learned about this book through the same friend who suggested the historical novel, The Happy Immortals, whose author, Robert Boyd Delano, served in Leyte and Okinawa.

I'm under 40, a retired professional athlete, a true blue Californian, and have never spent time in combat like the heroic infantry soldiers in the Pacific islands, but I truly enjoyed this book.

Thank goodness for books like this, for can learn greatness from the soldiers who went gave so much to allow us to enjoy our freedoms.

This book is outstanding for War 2 history buffs. Even those who don't study that period should be intrigued with this graphic review of that era when we lost so many lives and changed so much of America's knowledge of what did and could happen to our country.

A quite good book where photos take you in places where at the present you use to go in vacation and sometime you don't know what happened there.
Smith and Meehl had a brilliant idea!