I agree emphatically with this as some of it is deeply flawed. He says that his general history of the war should not be judged as complete and invites the reader to seek other sources for this. For lack of a better way I will comment on each part of the book. At times I personally found it distracting with only his eloquence in telling the story the saving grace.
Those looking for a straight forward story are going to be deeply disappointed by his format. In this case I really did not how I was going go until almost the very end of the book. Usually I have pretty good idea how I am going to review a book a fairly short way in. The author employs a disjointed style to tell his tale in which each chapter usually consists of three distinct parts, an overview of the course of the war that brings you to the battlefield he has come to see, a bit of a travelogue of the island as it appears now and a vignette of his wartime service to illustrate some point. Manchester travels thoughout most of the Pacific battlefields to see how they look after some thirty years and to allow his personal Jacob Marley to peel away the layers of his hidden soul and anguish.
He states that upon his discharge he figuratively and literally threw away all that reminded him of his time in uniform, but by the mid 1970's however, his dreams were beginning to be dominated by a figure he calls "The Sergent", a spectral figure that demands of him an accounting of all that had passed and of what it cost. The author states early on that his reason for writing about his wartime experience was to come to terms both with what he did in the war and what the war did to him.
In the latter days of the Pacific War Manchester served as a Sergent in the USMC and participated in the assault on the Japanese Island of Okinawa. William Manchester is a respected author of biographies and histories, the most notable being perhaps his biography of Douglas MacArthur American Caesar. Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War, By William Manchester, Little, Brown and Company -Publishers., 1980, Hardcover, 401 pages, Photos, Maps.
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