World War II Memoirs: The Pacific Theater (Loa #351): With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa / Flights of Passage / Crossing the Line

Pacific Theater Memoirs In The Library Of America

This volume in the Library of America consists of the memoirs of three young men who served in the Pacific Theater late during WW II. Elizabeth Samet, Professor of English at West Point edited the volume and prepared a lengthy introduction exploring the writings of memoirs in the United States's many wars. Samet has written extensively on the literature of warfare and on WW II. She is the author most recently of "Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Pursuit of Happiness" (2021) which also involves WW II in American memory.

The three memoirs in this volume are not battle histories but instead reflect the individual experiences of the authors under the trying circumstances of war. Each is beautifully written to reflect the character of the author. Each memoir is a personal history of combat and a coming of age story. Each work was written late in the life of the author and each combines reflections on extraordinary youthful experience with the distance of age. Each memoir shows the United States on the home front during the War, coming out of the Depression with busy railroad stations and crowded alcohol and sex filled cities for military personel on leave. Each story tells of its author's introduction to sex, both romantic and sexual, while under the age of 21. And each has a theme of comradeship and reflection on the war and its meaning. Each of the three memoirs in this compilation is available separately. I enjoyed and reviewed each memoir on its own, but a great deal is to be gained by having them in a single LOA volume with Samet's introduction and with biographical information on each author. I will offer some comments on each memoir.

E.B. "Sledgehammer" Sledge (1923 -- 2001) was the son of an Alabama physician and a college dean of women students. He served as a private in the Marines and described his experiences in "With the Old Breed and Pelilu and Okinawa" written in 1981. "Sledgehammer" Sledge describes his decision to join the marines and his demanding training, followed by his combat experiences on Peleliu and Okinawa. The book emphasizes the bonds Sledge formed with his fellow marines under the harshest of conditions. The tone of the book is bleak, but it stresses the author's love for his comrades and his patriotism for the United States.

Samuel Hynes (1924 -- 2019) lived with his poor Minneapolis family and briefly attended college before volunteering in 1943 for the Navy Flight Program. His 1988 memoir, "Flights of Passage" is both a story of his military experiences and a coming-of-age story. Most of this memoir focuses on Hynes' arduous journey to becoming a pilot rather than to his service in the final months of the War. Hynes tells a great deal of the tedium of military life and of the bouts of sex and alcohol virtually forced upon young men under the stress of war before they reached the age of twenty-one. The memorandum also describes how Hynes became "a true believer in the religion of flight" and how he came to love, even under the stresses of war, doing something for which he had a gift and was born to do.

Alvin Kernan's (1923 -- 2018) memorandum "Crossing the Line" was written in 1994 and revised in 2007. In 1943, young Kernan borrowed five dollars to leave a Depression-plagued Wyoming ranch to enlist in the Navy. He had three lengthy tours of duty at sea including participation at Midway and at Okinawa and received many decorations for his service, including the Distinguished Flying Cross. His memoir discusses his relationship with his comrades, his combat experiences, his early introductions to sexuality, and periods of boredom punctuated by alcohol and gambling. As do the other two memoirs, Kernan shows a reflective turn. He wrote:

"[W]ars cruelty and randomness, its indifference to human life, and the speed and ease with which it erases existence are not aberrations but speeded-up versions of how it always is. The evidence is there, I went on to reason, to anyone who will look and see the plain facts his senses including common sense offer him-- and what else is there to trust, fallible though they may be?-- that men and women, like everything else in the world, are, in the poet's words, begotten, born, and die. A young man's desire to live made me avoid worrying about the bleakness of total extinction, but we all knew it; it was in our faces, it was the basis of our shared attitude toward one another and life."


After their youthful combat experiences, the three authors each went on to long, distinguished careers in the academy and in the life of the mind. "Sledgehammer" Sledge earned a Ph.D in biology, wrote scholarly articles, led birding expeditions, and became a beloved teacher. Hynes became a Ph.D in English Literature and served as Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton until his retirement in 1990. Kernan also earned a Ph.D in English Literature and became an authority on Shakespeare and the English Renaissance. He also taught at Princeton and acquired the nickname "The Socratic Bulldog" from his graduate students.

I was especially fascinated by Kernan because of his philosophical cast of mind. In 2000, Kernan wrote a memoir "In Plato's Cave" which follows his life after military service, his decision to pursue an academic career in literature, and his thoughts on education and of the changes in educational standards he experienced in the years following WW II. I was moved to read "In Plato's Cave" together with "Crossing the Line". Kernan there wrote of his decision to pursue the life of the mind following the War:

"I was one of those who feel that the most satisfactory end of life is knowledge, not money or power or prestige but an understanding of people and the world they inhabit. I assented to Socrates's view that the unexamined life is not worth living. I had in my innocence developed a view of life that will seem laughable in our skeptical days. Read the right books and listen to the right people, think in the most intense and logical fashion, I believed, totally and without question, and all the darkness of Plato's cave of illusions would burn away in the bright sun of understanding. I did not think that truth remained to be discovered; I believed that in the main it had already been found and that I had just not yet been informed of the results. The true nature of evil and of good, the structure of the cosmos and what existed beyond it, the workings of cause and effect, the laws of history, the nature of the mind, the rules that governed social life, what distinguished good art from bad, these were all, I believed, lying about like golden nuggets on the American campus, just waiting to be picked up."

I enjoyed all three memoirs and their authors, but I felt closest to Kernan.

This book is an outstanding addition to the Library of America. I enjoyed reading the three memoirs and thinking about their similarities and differences. I was moved by the wartime experiences of these three young men and I admired their accomplishments during both wartime and peacetime. I reflected through reading the memoirs on the United States and its history during our current time of difficulty.

Robin Friedman