A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2017 Da Capo Press I was a precocious child when I started reading books about the Second World War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first published work I remember reading was the condensed version of Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day in the Colombian edition of Reader's Digest. This was around the same time that I saw The Great Escape in a Bogota theater; these two early exposures to the topic via mass media awoke in me an interest in World War II that has never abated. In many of the books I read in the 1970s, the Battle of Midway was usually heralded as the engagement that turned the tide of the Pacific War against the Japanese Empire and in favor of the United States and her allies in the region. After all, Japan's loss of four of her big fleet carriers, 248 planes, a cruiser (plus a second cruiser badly damaged) in exchange for the carrier USS Yorktown,  the destroyer Hammann, and 150 aircraft stopped the Japanese advance to the east. But as decisive as...

(C) 1992 Penguin Books  Pros: Fascinating study of one of the most famous - and toughest - World War II battles. Cons: None. On August 7, 1942, eight months to the day after Japan's "dastardly attack" on Pearl Harbor and barely eight weeks after the Battle of Midway ended a 6-month-long string of defeats for the Allies in the Pacific, elements of the First Marine Division, supported by the largest U.S. fleet yet assembled, came ashore on the beaches of Guadalcanal and two nearby islands in a barely opposed initial landing. Their mission: to capture an airfield (which the Marines named Henderson Field, in honor of Maj. Lofton Henderson, who had died at Midway) that, if left in Japanese hands, could have helped cut the lifeline between Australia and the United States. The initial success of the landings, however, was followed by some of the fiercest land, air, and naval battles of the Pacific War. Japanese and American naval forces struggled ince...

In 2003, two years after the successful first run of HBO's  Band of Brothers,  a World War II-set miniseries based on the late Stephen E. Ambrose's non-fiction book about a company of paratroopers in the 101st Airborne Division that saw action in Normandy, Holland, the Battle of the Bulge and captured Hitler's Eagle Nest in southern Germany, its executive producers, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, began working on a similar project which focused on the "other war" America fought on the far side of the world against Japan. Before his untimely death in 2002, Ambrose had begun to outline a book about the Navy sailors and Marines who had participated in every offensive action against the Japanese Empire, starting from the 1942 landings at Guadalcanal and ending in the bloody 1945 struggle for Okinawa, the gateway to the Japanese home islands. However, Ambrose - weakened by his losing battle with cancer - found that the war in the Pacific was far more comple...

Although the naval battle of Midway (June-4-6, 1942) is often called the "turning point" of the Pacific War between the United States and Japan, many historians consider the six-month-long Guadalcanal campaign to be the true pivot point on which the tide of battle turned in favor of America and her Allies. Midway, for all its merits as an "incredible victory" for the U.S. Pacific Fleet and a morale boost for the nation six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, had been a defensive engagement; the breaking of Japan's JN-25 naval cipher code, cool-headed leadership on the part of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the availability of three U.S. carriers, bad planning on the part of the Japanese, the carefully-laid ambush of the Japanese carrier force, the bravery of U.S. aviators and a great deal of good luck all contributed to stopping Japan's eastward advance and a possible invasion of Hawaii. However, the United States could not have defeated Japan by...