The key to any campaign-level work is the balance between small-scale fighting and the big picture. Mr. McManus achieves this by serving up vignettes from senior commanders before plunging into the fighting front. In taking stories from both ends of the command chain, on both sides of the battlelines, he allows the squalor and violence of the Pacific War to take coherent shape as part of a broader, history-changing epic ... a solid mix of strategic insight, tactical analysis and ground-level fighting in which the American soldier’s deprivation and self-sacrifice claim their due credit.
The author’s accounts of combat against the never-surrender Japanese army make an invasion of the Japanese home islands seem like the fiery depths of hell. Although he all but ignores the debate ever since over the use of atomic bombs, his prose leaves little doubt that any home island invasion would have had more fatalities for both sides than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined ... He looks at the Army’s generals as a mixed bag, even on an individual basis ... Similarly, while describing his GIs as valiant, he criticizes their tendency to hunker down at nighttime. Sometimes, though, he quotes them with a humorous edge on the details of combat.
An infantryman’s view of warfare at its dirtiest and bleakest ... To his credit McManus focuses on the war from the perspective of the infantry soldier—on both sides—and civilians caught in the crossfire.
