Bloody Beaches


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Bloody Beaches


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On D-Day 15 September 1944, five infantry battalions of the 1st Marine Division's 1st, 5th, and 7th Marines, in amphibian tractors (LVTs) lumbered across 600-800 yards of coral reef fringing smoking, reportedly smashed Peleliu in the Palau Island group and toward five selected landing beaches. That westward anchor of the 1,000-mile-long Caroline archipelago was viewed by some U.S. planners as obstacles, or threats, to continued advances against Japan's Pacific empire. The historic battles of the Marines at Peleliu are recounted in this U.S. Marines history book.




The Assault on Peleliu


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The Assault on Peleliu, first published in 1950, is a detailed recounting of the U.S. Marines' fierce battle for Peleliu, part of the Palau Islands in the south Pacific. Facing approx. 11,000 hardened, entrenched Japanese troops, the 1st Marine Division began landing operations on September 15, 1944. What followed were more than two months of bloody fighting resulting in heavy casualties before the island was declared secure in late November. Included are more than 90 photographs and maps.




Bloody Beaches


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Bloody Beaches: the Marines at Peleliu


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The historic battles of the Marines at Peleliu are recounted in this U.S. Marines history book. This book is one in a series devoted to U.S. Marines in the World War II era.




Hell in the Pacific


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In what may be the last memoir to be published by a living veteran of the pivotal invasion of Guadalcanal, which occurred almost seventy years ago, Marine Jim McEnery has teamed up with author Bill Sloan to create an unforgettable chronicle of heroism and horror McErery’s Rifle Company—the legendary K/3/5 of the First Marine Division, made famous by the HBO miniseries The Pacific—fought in some of the most ferocious battles of the war. In searing detail, the author takes us back to Guadalcanal, where American forces first turned the tide against the Japanese; Cape Gloucester, where 1,300 Marines were killed or wounded; and bloody Peleliu, where McEnery assumed command of the company and helped hasten the final defeat of the Japanese garrison after weeks of torturous cave-to-cave fighting. McEnery’s story is a no-holds-barred, grunt’s-eye view of the sacrifices, suffering, and raw courage of the men in the foxholes, locked in mortal combat with an implacable enemy sworn to fight to the death. From bayonet charges and hand-to-hand combat to midnight banzai attacks and the loss of close buddies, the rifle squad leader spares no details, chronicling his odyssey from boot camp through twenty-eight months of hellish combat until his eventual return home. He has given us an unforgettable portrait of men at war.




The Two Thousand Yard Stare


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"El Paso artist Tom Lea was commissioned by Life Magazine to paint the war as it was being experienced by U.S. and Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Along with his sketchbook, Lea carried on these assignments his "record of work", a notebook in which he recorded observations and details on the images he hoped to create from the events he had seen." "Brendan M. Greeley, Jr. has collected virtually all of Tom Lea's firsthand accounts of his assignments for Life, along with his powerful sketches and unforgettable paintings, and placed them in context, along with photographs and research focusing on the people, places, and wartime events encountered by Tom Lea. Drawing on previously unpublished sources - the artist's diary, letters to the Texas historian J. Frank. Dobie, oral interviews, and archival materials from Texas and national collections - Greeley presents in The Two Thousand Yard Stare a uniquely comprehensive and sustained treatment of Lea's creative accomplishments during World War II." "This well-documented and astonishingly illustrated volume will fascinate those interested in the realistic depiction of war, in both images and words. Also a must-read for students, scholars, and collectors of the artist's work, The Two Thousand Yard Stare: Tom Lea's World War II is a brilliant compendium of the work and thought of one of America's most compelling painters and writers."--BOOK JACKET.




Twenty-Two on Peleliu


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A memoir of a tough childhood—and tough combat—by an “adventurous, lively, outspoken, opinionated” WWII Marine veteran (Columbus Dispatch). On September 15, 1944, the US First Marine Division landed on a small island in the Central Pacific called Peleliu as a prelude to the liberation of the Philippines. Among the first wave of Marines that hit the beach that day was twenty-two-year-old George Peto. Growing up on an Ohio farm, George always preferred being outdoors and exploring. This made school a challenge, but his hunting, fishing, and trapping skills helped put food on his family’s table. As a poor teenager living in a rough area, he got into regular brawls, and he found holding down a job hard because of his wanderlust. After working out west with the CCC, he decided that joining the Marines offered him the opportunity for adventure, plus three square meals a day—so he and his brother joined the Corps in 1941, just a few months before Pearl Harbor. Following boot camp and training, he was initially assigned to various guard units until he was shipped out to the Pacific and assigned to the 1st Marines. His first combat experience was the landing at Finschhaven, followed by Cape Gloucester. Then as a Forward Observer, he went ashore in one of the lead amtracs at Peleliu and saw fierce fighting for a week before the regiment was relieved due to massive casualties. Six months later, his division became the immediate reserve for the initial landing on Okinawa. They encountered no resistance when they came ashore, but would go on to fight on Okinawa for over six months. This is the wild and remarkable story of an “Old Breed” Marine—his youth in the Great Depression, his training and combat in the Pacific, and his life after the war, told in his own words.




With the Old Breed


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“Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir, With The Old Breed. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific—the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary—into terms we mortals can grasp.”—Tom Hanks NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In The Wall Street Journal, Victor Davis Hanson named With the Old Breed one of the top five books on epic twentieth-century battles. Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitive oral history, The Good War. Now E. B. Sledge’s acclaimed first-person account of fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa returns to thrill, edify, and inspire a new generation. An Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of such heroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene B. Sledge became part of the war’s famous 1st Marine Division—3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. Even after intense training, he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu, where “the world was a nightmare of flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets.” By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled with fear but no longer with panic. Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Here, too, is the story of how he learned to hate and kill—and came to love—his fellow man. “In all the literature on the Second World War, there is not a more honest, realistic or moving memoir than Eugene Sledge’s. This is the real deal, the real war: unvarnished, brutal, without a shred of sentimentality or false patriotism, a profound primer on what it actually was like to be in that war. It is a classic that will outlive all the armchair generals’ safe accounts of—not the ‘good war’—but the worst war ever.”—Ken Burns




The Final Campaign


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