Amazing and deeply touching memoir | Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

Manchester's War | Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War | William Manchester

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	• Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War William Manchester Back Bay Books, 2002 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 75 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A marine's memoir

William Manchester was a wonderful writer--one of the best I've ever read. In this case, he makes his personal history so interesting, you can't put the book down. I've read Goodbye Darkness twice over the years and am ready to do it again.

Amazing and deeply touching memoir

After thirty years, and more than sixty years after the event, Manchester's memoir is to this reader deeply affecting and brings home World War II with shocking closeness. As a child of ten, I remember being thrilled by the descriptions of Okinawa as being the ultimate in island battles; it was soon eclipsed, however, by the news of Hiroshima and the rapid collapse of the Japanese. The author's histories of Guadacanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa bring those bloody battles to life. For me, they have not been dimmed by the passage of the era.

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Manchester's War

Manchester makes it clear that he was not in on every battle he describes. Only a dullard would think that, or let it color his thinking about this book.

Manchester's writing skill is superb -- it is, after all, his vocation -- and that skill brings this book to the front of personal, and overview, narratives. One gets, at the same time, through this volume, a sense of the Marines' war in the Pacific, and of the individual's war therein.

Manchester's choice to serve. not as an officer (which his IQ, if not his temperament, certainly qualified him) but as an enlisted man provides a most interesting view of both the Corps and battle. Smart enough to understand both strategy and tactics, his perspective illuminates the World War II Pacific theater on several levels.

It is somewhat surprising how deeply into his psyche he allows us to see, but, we have to suspect, this memoir would have been terribly shallow, and for Manchester, infinitely less cathartic, without the glimpses. bravo for his bravery, both on the battle field and at the keyboard.

reading both Manchester's account and Gene Sledge's account allows us to -- admittedly -- at second-hand experience the personalness of the Pacific war. The terror we can only poorly imagine, but the sense of tragedy, uselessness, wastefulness, and sheer stupidity of war pound us relentlessly.

If you never read anything about the Pacific war, read this and read Sledge.

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Goodby Darkness by William Manchester

Simply put one of the best memoirs of war I've ever read. If you want the naked truth from his point of view (a view I agree with). It's shows his level of dedication to the people in the countries involved and too his own troops. He tears himself apart in this book his feelings are on every page. He talks of the young American isolationist (anthropology student) who's only interest in the time was swing music and because he's not military the Japanese execute him. His only request to bring his accordion with him, he's singing God Bless America with it as he dies. Says it was that kind of time (1942) He comments that half the small memorials people put up at that time are gone today vanished, lost through neglect or taken by sightseers This is that kind of time (1979 when he wrote it). He mentions that he feels surrounded by 11,000 ghosts, the men Wainwright surrendered to the Japanese on May 8, 1942. He says combat as he saw it was exorbitant, outrageous, excruciating and above all tasteless. The Sergeant in him will never forgive the Japanese soldier. The older man in him knows he must. It's that kind of book! Doug Johnson

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a steadfast memoir

Those of my generation who read World War II memoirs are so removed from that time and place that we merely grasp at this experience of war and the American society that fought it. In between us and our grandparents lies the redolence of the 1950s, the enduring narcissism 1960s, and the incubus of a cold war. But for those of us willing to learn, Goodbye Darkness is surely among the most competent of guides.

The book memorializes William Manchester's experience as young sergeant of Marines through the eyes of a middle-aged traveler visiting the locales of epic Pacific Theater battles. His description of the historical context of each battle rests upon a foundation of ample scholarly research. Manchester provides personal recollections where appropriate. (He spent time on Guadalcanal after the fighting ended there; his combat experience was on Okinawa.) And he then describes his visits to these island battlefields during a subsequent 1979 trip. He admits in the Author's Note that he "resorted to some legerdemain in the interest of re-creating, and clarifying the spirit of, the historical past." In any case, the writing is just what you've come to expect from Manchester: funny, sensitive, learned, deft, fine.

Goodbye, Darkness is the summation of Manchester's post-war cathexis, with the author enjoined a quarter century after the fact with the bloody fugue that hacked his manhood from a boy's life. As with his previous works, Manchester's voice is strong and clear, but here it's more personal. He is wrestling with ghosts, specifically his own disaffected, alienated doppelganger from a quarter century ago; the savage young sergeant of Marines who visits his middle-aged persona in the ragged, misbegotten battlefields of post-war dreams.

I admired the restraint of this book. Manchester loads the tumbrel of war horrors lightly. He economizes on the brutality and asks nothing for its personal cost. Despite the brutality of the landings on Tarawa, Guadalcanal, Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and others described in the book, Manchester balances the strategic, the tactical, and the personal. He observes that "the whole history of war is a story of men moving closer and closer to the ground and then deeper and deeper in it." That's very much the story of the Marine Corps experience on the beaches of the Pacific islands and it's fighting ground that Manchester is burrowing into here, not the angst of his generation.

One of the characteristics I most appreciated was a resolute refusal to whinge, self-indulge, or to ponder the bellybutton of his generation. Indeed, some of the best writing in the book considers the unique qualities of his generation and their capacity to fight this kind of gruesome war. Manchester has no interest in the sympathy of his readers, either for himself or his generation. It's not sympathy, but respect is that I find his generation deserves, but I find my respect is rooted in Manchester's refusal to demand it.

His description of the atmosphere at the front is powerful without resorting to melodrama. Quoting the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, Manchester describes his comrades with their "sad infinite eyes, like those of a newborn beast of burden." In describing why they did what they did, often risking their lives, often dying in desperate fighting, he says of his comrades "we were all psychotic, inmates of the greatest madhouse in history, but staying on the line was a matter of pride. Pride was important to young men then." (Written in the twilight of the Vietnam War, all the book's references to Vietnam are oblique.)

Manchester's father had fought in World War I. He brought home a grave wound and a quiet dignity. That dignity reverberated through Manchester's youth, creating in his mind and spirit an appetite for glory and honor. The Pacific War reduced that appetite, grinding away the shibboleths of war. In war "I realized that something within me, long ailing, had expired," he writes. "Although I would continue to do the job, performing as the hired gun, I now knew that the banners and swords, ruffles and flourishes, bugles and drums, the whole rigmarole, eventually ended in squalor."

What made them the Greatest Generation? What ignited them and drove them to return, wounded, to the line from safe hospitals to fight alongside their comrades in desperate battles, as Manchester himself did during the war? As he writes, "It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn't do it to them. I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I knew now, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another." A great insight and a great book.

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For the first time in trade paperback, the book in which one of the most celebrated biographer/historians of our time looks back at his own early life and gives us a remarkable account of World War II in the Pacific, of what it looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and, most of all, what it felt like to one who underwent all but the ultimate of its experiences.

Back Bay takes pride in making William Manchester's intense, stirring, and impassioned memoir available to a new generation of readers.