tiganeasca
Moderator
How much do you know about World War Two? My guess is that your knowledge is proportional to your age. That seems natural. My grandfathers served in World War One but they were a generation removed. I didn’t hear their stories about that war. I didn’t learn much about that war until I was older and even then, partly because I took courses on the subject in college and partly because I read about it because I found the topic interesting. If I hadn’t, I would probably still know very little about it.
Not long ago, I shared some personal history about growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. That was a pretty eventful period and I have many good—as well as my share of sad or difficult—memories of that time. I didn’t serve in Vietnam for two reasons: I had a student deferment to attend college and, even if I hadn’t had that exemption, my number in the draft lottery was too high for me to be drafted. (For those outside the USA, the system the US government used to decide who would be drafted was based in part on a lottery. Every date in the calendar had a number assigned from 1 to 365, drawn by lottery; they drafted men in order of the numbers drawn.) This review, however, takes me backwards. I start by noting that World War Two had ended just seven years before I was born. I am sure many posters here have grandparents or great-grandparents who either fought in that war or lived through it. In my case, my father served in the war. And I am fortunate enough that he—after many decades—was able to talk about the war a little bit.
My dad enlisted in 1942 in what was then called the U.S. Army Air Corps (it would later become the U.S. Air Force). He was 21 years old. It still astonishes me that he—or, sadly, anyone—went to war at that age. I know how immature and foolish I was at that age. To know that he flew over occupied Europe (he was based in England) at the age of 22 and, as an officer, had partial responsibility for his crew, amazes me. In 2001, when he was 70—the same age I am now—my parents took our family to London and Amsterdam to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. My father and I made plans to visit his old air base one day. The morning we were supposed to go, my dad changed his mind. I certainly couldn’t (and didn’t) object but I was curious why. He explained in three words: “Too many ghosts.” This in 2001, 57 years after he had left the service. This, too, from a man who once told me that the best advice he got when he first landed in England was: “Don’t make friends.” Why not? “It makes it easier when they don’t come back.” His particular unit had a very high casualty rate, higher even than front-line infantry. He flew nearly 40 missions and, needless to say, was lucky to survive.
In his 70s and 80s he began to talk about the war a bit more. He had said virtually nothing before that. He was never completely comfortable talking about the war and I imagine many of his memories were still too vivid to share. But in the late 1990s, he finally began to share some stories…mostly funny ones or stories that made fun of himself. Only occasionally did he tell serious, difficult-to-hear (or tell) stories. A few years before he died, my wife discovered that France wanted to identify American veterans who contributed to the liberation of France. We had records of my dad’s missions (including D-Day) and, after a lengthy process, were fortunate enough that the French government eventually awarded him the Legion of Honor on his 90th birthday.
Why do I share all this personal history? Because World War Two is the subject of the book I want to review: Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener. And because I think my own indirect experience of the war is relevant. Many of you will know Michener from his popular 1,000-page novels, books that were enormously well-liked (at least in the US) by readers and often bestsellers but most of which were either disdained or ridiculed by critics. It’s probably no surprise that Michener’s name is almost entirely absent from 15 years’ worth of posts on this board.
Tales of the South Pacific is different…at least for me. Michener served in the South Pacific for the U.S. Navy in World War Two. He was a “paper pusher,” not a fighting soldier, and in his spare time he began writing “some stories that disturbed me.” Over and over, Michener shows in simple, understated language the courage and bravery of so many of these “plain” people—the pilots, the ordinary seamen, the nurses, the coastwatchers—people whose stories would otherwise go unremarked and unremembered. There are plenty of books about the admirals and the generals, about the large overview of the war in the Pacific. There are piles of books about individual battles or tactics or strategy.
All of the tales here are based on fact and all of them include enough real names and places to make the stories vivid and affecting. These are the stories are about the men and women who followed the orders and fought the battles, not the ones giving orders or creating grand strategy. They tell about the long stretches of time when nothing happened. The brief explosive moments of combat. The extraordinary time and obsessive detail that went into planning for invasions or other campaigns. What it was like to be in a strange world, thousands of miles from home. Most of these stories can be read as entertainment, told for their own sake. Most of them are easy to read. Some are funny, some are informative, some are heart-breaking. Most are easily enjoyed. In fact, the reading is so easy that Michener can lull the reader into stopping at the surface. You can read this book easily without digging deeper. And I am under no illusions: it is not great literature. But every tale, it seems, tells timeless truths. Lurking just beneath the entertainment and the laughs are tears—of pain, of sadness, of fear, and of understanding. I believe that many (if not most) of the stories invite (or perhaps even expect) you to probe and ponder the issues that they raise.
I have read this book many times and every time I read it, it affects me deeply. Many in my family served in World War Two, including a cousin of my mother’s whose Navy ship was sunk by a kamikaze pilot in April 1945, three weeks before the end of the war in Europe. He suffered horrific burns and died a few days later. I re-read the book from time to time as a way of paying homage to those who took part in the war by simply remembering them. Of course, what Michener highlights is true of every war, not just World War Two. But it many of the people and places and things he writes about echo for me because of those in my family or the stories my father me.
Michener ends the first story—just an introduction, really—with language that has always haunted me because it makes clear how much of who we are and what we know depends on people, on individuals and their own stories. And that, after all, is why we read anything, not just war stories.
“As long as our generation lives.” The older I get, the more this phrase resonates. We will soon lose all first-hand memory of World War Two, as we have with every war that preceded it. There are fewer veterans of that war alive every day. It will become just another piece of history, territory explored only by historians. My father’s memory will live as long as I do. What I know of him and his service and his life disappears when I die. No one will ever know about him afterwards except in general, impersonal ways.
It has always been like this. It was true of those who fought at Troy or Kurukshetra, of those who fought at Agincourt or Gawakuke, Stalingrad or Itaparica. Which is precisely what makes the stories in Tales of the South Pacific so moving and so timeless. I have read many excellent “war novels”: Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead; Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn (Vietnam); Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate; Uwe Timm’s Morenga (German Southwest Africa); Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes (Afghanistan). The list is far too long and it starts with the Iliad and the Mahabharata only because that’s where the written record starts. Each is brilliant in its own way. And each tells the same story…a different aspect perhaps, but the same story.
Ulysses. Arjuna. Tony Fry and Joe Cable. My father. They are all and they are none of them heroes. Each one who has gone to war knows the same story—in a very personal and profound way—a story that the rest of us will never really know.
Not long ago, I shared some personal history about growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. That was a pretty eventful period and I have many good—as well as my share of sad or difficult—memories of that time. I didn’t serve in Vietnam for two reasons: I had a student deferment to attend college and, even if I hadn’t had that exemption, my number in the draft lottery was too high for me to be drafted. (For those outside the USA, the system the US government used to decide who would be drafted was based in part on a lottery. Every date in the calendar had a number assigned from 1 to 365, drawn by lottery; they drafted men in order of the numbers drawn.) This review, however, takes me backwards. I start by noting that World War Two had ended just seven years before I was born. I am sure many posters here have grandparents or great-grandparents who either fought in that war or lived through it. In my case, my father served in the war. And I am fortunate enough that he—after many decades—was able to talk about the war a little bit.
My dad enlisted in 1942 in what was then called the U.S. Army Air Corps (it would later become the U.S. Air Force). He was 21 years old. It still astonishes me that he—or, sadly, anyone—went to war at that age. I know how immature and foolish I was at that age. To know that he flew over occupied Europe (he was based in England) at the age of 22 and, as an officer, had partial responsibility for his crew, amazes me. In 2001, when he was 70—the same age I am now—my parents took our family to London and Amsterdam to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. My father and I made plans to visit his old air base one day. The morning we were supposed to go, my dad changed his mind. I certainly couldn’t (and didn’t) object but I was curious why. He explained in three words: “Too many ghosts.” This in 2001, 57 years after he had left the service. This, too, from a man who once told me that the best advice he got when he first landed in England was: “Don’t make friends.” Why not? “It makes it easier when they don’t come back.” His particular unit had a very high casualty rate, higher even than front-line infantry. He flew nearly 40 missions and, needless to say, was lucky to survive.
In his 70s and 80s he began to talk about the war a bit more. He had said virtually nothing before that. He was never completely comfortable talking about the war and I imagine many of his memories were still too vivid to share. But in the late 1990s, he finally began to share some stories…mostly funny ones or stories that made fun of himself. Only occasionally did he tell serious, difficult-to-hear (or tell) stories. A few years before he died, my wife discovered that France wanted to identify American veterans who contributed to the liberation of France. We had records of my dad’s missions (including D-Day) and, after a lengthy process, were fortunate enough that the French government eventually awarded him the Legion of Honor on his 90th birthday.
Why do I share all this personal history? Because World War Two is the subject of the book I want to review: Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener. And because I think my own indirect experience of the war is relevant. Many of you will know Michener from his popular 1,000-page novels, books that were enormously well-liked (at least in the US) by readers and often bestsellers but most of which were either disdained or ridiculed by critics. It’s probably no surprise that Michener’s name is almost entirely absent from 15 years’ worth of posts on this board.
Tales of the South Pacific is different…at least for me. Michener served in the South Pacific for the U.S. Navy in World War Two. He was a “paper pusher,” not a fighting soldier, and in his spare time he began writing “some stories that disturbed me.” Over and over, Michener shows in simple, understated language the courage and bravery of so many of these “plain” people—the pilots, the ordinary seamen, the nurses, the coastwatchers—people whose stories would otherwise go unremarked and unremembered. There are plenty of books about the admirals and the generals, about the large overview of the war in the Pacific. There are piles of books about individual battles or tactics or strategy.
All of the tales here are based on fact and all of them include enough real names and places to make the stories vivid and affecting. These are the stories are about the men and women who followed the orders and fought the battles, not the ones giving orders or creating grand strategy. They tell about the long stretches of time when nothing happened. The brief explosive moments of combat. The extraordinary time and obsessive detail that went into planning for invasions or other campaigns. What it was like to be in a strange world, thousands of miles from home. Most of these stories can be read as entertainment, told for their own sake. Most of them are easy to read. Some are funny, some are informative, some are heart-breaking. Most are easily enjoyed. In fact, the reading is so easy that Michener can lull the reader into stopping at the surface. You can read this book easily without digging deeper. And I am under no illusions: it is not great literature. But every tale, it seems, tells timeless truths. Lurking just beneath the entertainment and the laughs are tears—of pain, of sadness, of fear, and of understanding. I believe that many (if not most) of the stories invite (or perhaps even expect) you to probe and ponder the issues that they raise.
I have read this book many times and every time I read it, it affects me deeply. Many in my family served in World War Two, including a cousin of my mother’s whose Navy ship was sunk by a kamikaze pilot in April 1945, three weeks before the end of the war in Europe. He suffered horrific burns and died a few days later. I re-read the book from time to time as a way of paying homage to those who took part in the war by simply remembering them. Of course, what Michener highlights is true of every war, not just World War Two. But it many of the people and places and things he writes about echo for me because of those in my family or the stories my father me.
Michener ends the first story—just an introduction, really—with language that has always haunted me because it makes clear how much of who we are and what we know depends on people, on individuals and their own stories. And that, after all, is why we read anything, not just war stories.
"They will live a long time, these men of the South Pacific. They had an American quality. They, like their victories, will be remembered as long as our generation lives. After that, like the men of the Confederacy, they will become strangers. Longer and longer shadows will obscure them, until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear like Shiloh and Valley Forge [two iconic battles in U.S. history]."
“As long as our generation lives.” The older I get, the more this phrase resonates. We will soon lose all first-hand memory of World War Two, as we have with every war that preceded it. There are fewer veterans of that war alive every day. It will become just another piece of history, territory explored only by historians. My father’s memory will live as long as I do. What I know of him and his service and his life disappears when I die. No one will ever know about him afterwards except in general, impersonal ways.
It has always been like this. It was true of those who fought at Troy or Kurukshetra, of those who fought at Agincourt or Gawakuke, Stalingrad or Itaparica. Which is precisely what makes the stories in Tales of the South Pacific so moving and so timeless. I have read many excellent “war novels”: Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead; Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn (Vietnam); Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate; Uwe Timm’s Morenga (German Southwest Africa); Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes (Afghanistan). The list is far too long and it starts with the Iliad and the Mahabharata only because that’s where the written record starts. Each is brilliant in its own way. And each tells the same story…a different aspect perhaps, but the same story.
Ulysses. Arjuna. Tony Fry and Joe Cable. My father. They are all and they are none of them heroes. Each one who has gone to war knows the same story—in a very personal and profound way—a story that the rest of us will never really know.
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