Customer Reviews

Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific

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The superb account rendered so graphically in this book educates a new generation of readers as to the horrific practical realities involved in the Allied island-hopping strategy employed by the Allies in waging the Pacific campaign during World War Two. Indeed, while the specific individual battles often involved far fewer ground troops and were much smaller in scale than what occurred in the European theater of the war, the ferocity of the opposition and the relative number of casualties were staggering. Thus Eric Bergerud's gripping recounting of the incredible details involved with the war in the South Pacific in "Touched With Fire: The Land War In The South Pacific" reminds us of the terrible costs associated with that campaign.

This was truly a campaign requiring a total re-education of the American military involved. Starting with the disastrous lessons of the quite different realities of jungle warfare first experienced on Guadalcanal, the Allied command had to learn to adapt to the extremely tenacious, ingenious, and almost indefatigable efforts of the island's Japanese defenders, who could subsist on a little water and rice and move through the jungles with much great ease and skill than could we. No one was prepared for the sustained levels of ferocity with which the Japanese fought, usually to the death, over these small atolls that they had to recognize they could not hold onto forever. Yet they fought on.

The book recounts the many ways in which the war in the Pacific was different from that waged in Europe, and is organized around several themes such as terrain, climate, diseases such as dysentery, etc. in illustrating how the very different negative circumstances surrounding the island hopping strategy affected and constrained our ability (as well as those of the Japanese) to fight effectively in such an environment. Of course, as the author maintains, the Allies learned very quickly; they needed to in order to survive. As so well described in Ronald Spector's "Eagle Against The Sun", the Japanese were incredibly ingenious in devising ways to use topography, indigenous materials, and a willingness to "`rough-it" to build virtually impregnable walls of resistance to the oncoming invaders.

This is a very well written, passionately argued, and absolutely entertaining book to read. The author has done a remarkable job in documenting and substantiating his notions and theories, and I found myself surprised at how well some of his more provocative and controversial ideas are supported by the data he employs. This is an eminently worthwhile book, a wonderful addition to the growing library of titles exploring the realities of the war in the Pacific, and one I would recommend to anyone interested in learning more about the gritty details of the Allied `island to island' war against the Japanese. Enjoy!

Many people reading this review are well read concerning the European theatre and shockingly ignorant about the Pacific. I was also, until now. While Bergerud's style is not nearly as gripping as other recently popular authors on WWII his complete coverage of the savagery and confusion in the Solomons and New Guinea will grab even the hardest East Front grognard. The author gives extensive coverage of the armies, the weapons, and the brutal terrain that defined the war in the South Pacific. My only complaint about the work is its somewhat overly detailed description of the force structures and island geography that may distract the casual reader at times. Bergerud gives the Australian forces much deserved respect and completely immerses the reader in the horror that was Jungle warfare in WWII. His books about Vietnam have given him extra insight into the jungle warfare that is still so foreign to the American military. The book focuses completely on the South Pacific and does not cover the mid-Pacific campaign (Siapan, Guam, Iwo Jima, etc.) and this is also a strong point. I strongly recommend this book as an introduction to the land war in the Pacific in WWII. All European theatre fans should read it.

The first jungle war was not Vietnam. It was in the hellish jungles of New Guinea and the Solomons. Apart from the well-known fighting at Gualdacanal, this camapign is quite unknown. Well, gruesome hand-to-hand combat between filthy, diseased, and starving footsoldiers is admittedly less romantic than steel aircraft carriers steaming in wast lotillas on a dark blue ocean, releasing deadly fighters into the sky.
It was here, though, in the, decidedly unromantic, jungles of New Guinea and the Solomons that the back of of the Japanese army was broken. Thus enabling the victories in the north pacific.
The author quite fairly describes the strenghts and weaknesses of the participating forces. It was not really inferior equipment, poor tactics, or poor soldiering that led to the Japanese defeat; it was faulty straegic planning and an unflexible doctrine.
I give a kudos to the author for giving the Australian and Commonwealth troops their due, and comparing them favourably even to the US marines!
One could say that the British Empire did serve a purpose here, since it meant that countries like Australia, India, New Zeeland, Fiji, etc., were already mobilised, and had, in some cases, gained valuable combat experience before the Japanese attack.
I think that the relative lack of maps and illustration makes the book a little bit difficult to follow sometimes, and the narrative, while excellent, suffers from the somewhat disjointed structure of the book.

I previously believed that military history is primarily composed of the battles, the strategies used in the battles, & the leaders of the troops, with stories about individual soldiers mixed in to promote a better sense of understanding about the battle or war.

After reading Eric Bergerud's book Touched With Fire, I now must add another component to that definition of military history - the theatre in which the battle or war was fought. People think of the European Theatre in World War II, they think of the Pacific Theatre, and they think of the war in the North Atlantic. This book really expands on the geographical influence of the fighting in the south pacific, especially the islands of New Guinea & the Solomans.

Bergerud presents a compelling argument that the battles fought by soldiers, the tactics used by generals, and the way men lead their troops in battle is greatly affected, if not primarily driven by, the environment. Bergerud explains that the soldiers fighting in the South Pacific encountered a whole different war than those soldiers fighting in Europe, and not just because the enemy was Japanese rather than German or Italian. Bergerud maintains that the jungle was more of an enemy at times than the human opponent ever could have been. He also develops the theory that the jungle was one of the strongest allies that a fighting man could have, since it would shield him from the enemy or provide him with the necessary cover to launch a surprise attack, as the Japanese often did when fighting in the South Pacific.

Bergerud focuses primarily on the terrain and how it shaped the war in this book, although he does intermix (quite nicely, in fact), stories from the soldiers about their experiences and some, although limited, tactical information about the battles.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to understand why climate and geography play such a huge role in warfare. I would also highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking to understand the tremendous differences in the land war in the South Pacific versus the land war in Europe or the Middle East. Overall, it is a very good book, and one well worthy of reading by any student of military history or just someone curious about the Pacific theatre in World War II.

Eric Bergerud has produced a very good soldier's history of the land war in the South Pacific. For Americans, this is a sadly understudied period, often ignored in favor of the far larger battles on the Central Pacific Islands or the Philippines. However, it was during this period that the outcome of the war in the Pacific was actually in doubt, and therefore where the Japanese were on a relatively equal footing with the Allies. The relative forces involved make the American involvement certainly equal to the parallel operations in North Africa and Sicily, but at that time we were far from being even equal partners with the British. It is a fascinating campaign in an exotic region, and Bergerud treats it as such.

Bergerud takes a Keeganesque approach, but balances it with the necessity of his narrative. Those looking for an in-depth strategical analysis should look elsewhere - jungle wars are by necessity not wars of large manuver units. It is, by necessity, a grunt's story. However, Bergerud's narrative does describe the campaign and some of the higher strategic considerations which led to those grunts being sent to wherever they were sent, and why their respective armies sent them out to fight the way that they did. The narrative takes the reader on a fascinating journey through life as a combat solider in the South Pacific: where he fought, how he was wounded, injured or rendered ill (disease being a huge problem in the jungles of the South Pacific), how he was cared for in injury and death, what he ate, how he was armed, why he fought, and all the other elements that you need to really understand what a rifleman's life was like. The author makes good use of veterans' interviews in illustrating his points.

Australians will take comfort (and hopefully Americans will learn something) in the attention paid to their contribution in the South Pacific. The MacArthur propaganda legacy does not hold sway over this book.

If there is any great failing in this book, it is the lack of material present about the Japanese. At times, coverage of the Japanese is excellent. However, at no time does the author use as much interview material from Japanese veterans as he does from Allied vets. Also, Bergerud gives Japanese morale the short end of the stick. That is a serious flaw, given that by the time one reaches the chapter on morale, a reader should be painfully aware of just how much every Japanese attack in the South Pacific (even the successful ones) resembled massacres. What motivated these men to go and die in droves is a subject worthy of a serious examination, and Bergerud does not give it one.

That aside, this is a great book for anyone wanting to bone up on the South Pacific campaign!

This is probably the best history I've read about fighting in that area. Bergerud says of General MacArthur that he was a "flawed personality but a magnificent general." Bergerud writes that he was always very careful with the lives of his men. MacArthur fought the U.S. Navy and powers in Washington who wanted to go slam -bang into every Jap base in the South Pacific and hang the cost in American lives.
MacArthur preferred to go right by them whenever possible and leave them marooned. When the war ended over 250,000 Japanese troops were sitting looking at the sky and ocean, armed to the teeth but with no one to fight. It is important to remember that much of the criticism of MacArthur came from those who told us Mao was an "agrarian reformer" and were also hopeful a defeated Japan would fall behind the Iron Curtain. MacArthur prevented that.

Eric Bergerud has written a superb study of the conditions under which American and Australian troops fought against the Japanese in the Pacific from 1942-45. I've recommended it to several friends with an interest in the history of World War Two, and they were every bit as impressed as I was. A fantastic book.

I have read many stories of World War II, but this one treats things differently. Instead of book with a story that starts at the beginning and ends at the end of the campaign, this book condenses the "story" into a single 38-page chapter.

The remaining almost 500 pages deal with different aspects of the entire campaign. It includes sections on the terrain (almost all jungle), the armies, the tactics, and many other features of the South Pacific war. There are many reminiscences from those who fought, and occasionally a story of a specific campaign.

What this does is give you a far better picture than most books of what it was like to be there. Instead of talking about the "harsh" jungle or the "relentless" Japanese, you get a huge detailed picture of exactly what it was like - the smell of the jungle, and the tactics the Japanese used.

Interspersed with this are Bergerud's comments on the effectiveness of how each company waged war, the strengths of the weapons, and how unprepared all sides were for the terrain.

I finished this book with a far deeper understanding of these battles, and I'd be interested to see this approach applied to other military history books.

Even if you could care less about WWII, military history, or history in general, read this book. Bergerud gives an accurate, if bare-bones, account of the grander strategic scale on which the war in the South Pacific was fought, and then precedes to the real meat of the text: a series of chapters covering the conditions in which the infantry actually fought. The book's greatest strength is the massive amounts of material that the author has gleaned from the actual veterans of the conflict, and surely in the future historians who are trying to reconstruct what actually happened on the ground in WWII will be truly grateful for this kind of research. The stories of the men who actually served in the South Pacific give the war a more human character than it could ever have without these accounts. The war is presented to the reader in all of its splender and horror and even on many occasions its comedy. If you liked the style of Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers, Bergerud does it even better. Indeed, it is a shame that Bergerud's book hasn't achieved the same kind of recognization as has Ambrose's work. He lets these veterans speak for themselves, and it is these accounts that truly make this book great.

After reading previous reviews of this book, I was disappointed. This work fills a needed gap for the general reader by helping bring to light the sacrifices of the anonymous men and units who fought the Japanese to a standstill, then rolled them back in the southwestern Pacific. Unfortunately, I feel that in the process it unfairly and unfortunately denigrates the contributions of other fighting forces in the war against Japan.

Granted, most Americans have a concept of the war in the Pacific that is seriously flawed, and particularly in their views of the southwestern Pacific theatre. For most Americans, perceptions of the Solomons campaigns are colored by the extensive coverage - both contemporary and historical - of the role played by the 1st and elements of the 2nd Marine Division on Guadalcanal. In reality, the lion's share of the fighting in the Solomons, Bismarcks, and on New Guinea was borne by US Army and Commonwealth forces. This book in part redresses that imbalance, emphasizing the role played by the US Army and Australian forces (but somehow neglects the also highly regarded New Zealanders).

Unfortunately, the treatment goes farther and unfairly villainizes most of the US Navy command structure that prosecuted the Central Pacific campaign. The author seems to have accepted the view, common in the early 1940s, that MacArthur was our greatest general and should have been in overall command in the Pacific for a slow and inexorable march through the Philippines and Formosa. In reality, MacArthur was a brilliant but fatally flawed general, as ably portrayed by William Manchester. The author of this work only briefly touches on some of the worst episodes while describing the fighting on northern New Guinea, when MacArthur was managing a massive and self-serving PR campaign, while exhorting his harried field generals with histrionic 'don't come back alive' speeches.

In reality American plans for the war against Japan had always revolved around a central Pacific campaign, for very clear reasons. The southwestern Pacific (1) simply did not offer the port facilities necessary to prosecute what had to be a naval war, (2) would have meant that most campaigns would have been prosecuted in the face of Japanese land-based air (as in the Cape Gloucester campaign), and (3) would have been fought in enclosed, uncharted waters that would have helped nullify the American advantage in naval airpower. In short, the Central Pacific campaign was savage and bloody, but necessary.

Also, no account is taken of the fact that by forcing Japan into what amounted to a two-front war (not counting the CBI and Chinese theatres, which are still sorely neglected by writers), the Americans ably used their overwhelming advantage in physical resources to nullify the apparent Japanese advantage of interior lines. The Japanese were like an outclassed boxer, continually staggered by alternating left-right punches.

Even Halsey, MacArthur's favorite admiral, suffers. He is castigated for the unnecessarily bloody and protracted New Georgia campaign. The real problem on New Georgia was not the Japanese so much as the long approach march - twenty miles through some of the most horrible terrain on earth. US Army leaders had bought into a 'strategy of the indirect approach', and had originally planned to land over eighty miles away and march overland, through even worse terrain. Halsey intervened with a plan to land closer. The Army leadership absolutely would not take the ultimate step and launch a Marine Corps-style direct assault across the Roviana Lagoon against the main Japanese position at Buna (as the Japanese most feared they would). The rest is, unfortunately, history. Halsey, not the Army generals, was responsible for putting a stop to this creeping hemorrhage by bypassing Kolombangara to land on Vella Lavella, disjointing Japanese plams for another battle of attrition.

There is no doubt that the Marine Corps cultivates publicity (for very good reasons, as outlined in Allan Millett's excellent organizational history of the Corps), and was particularly successful in publicizing their contributions to the Pacific war. Unfortunately the contributions of Allied forces in the southwestern Pacific were probably overshadowed more by their leader's ego (anonymous forces under Douglas MacArthur have inflicted another defeat on the Japanese, MacArthur has returned to the Philippines, et cetera) than by anything the Navy and Marines did.

The historical fact is that the Army (MacArthur) competed with the Navy and Marine Corps (Nimitz), to the ultimate detriment of Japan. To rightly emphasize the contributions of the one, it is not necessary to minimize the other. This controversy had almost died a well-deserved death with the interservice rapprochement that followed the Gulf War, and it's a shame to see it resurrected.