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FIVE BEST
Pacific in Name Only
Firsthand accounts of World War II.

BY STANLEY WEINTRAUB
Saturday, August 12, 2006 12:01 a.m.

1. "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" by Ted Lawson (Random House, 1943).

Following Pearl Harbor and further catastrophes early in World War II,
President Roosevelt proposed a mission to give America a psychological
lift: an audacious bombing run on Japan. Crews for 16 bombers were
trained and led by Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, a former test pilot with
an engineering doctorate from MIT. In "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," Ted
Lawson, who was at the controls of one of the planes, gives a
breathtaking account of how the twin-engine B-25s, each loaded with four
500-pound bombs, roared over Japan at tree-top level on April 18, 1942,
and successfully struck the enemy's capital city. This affront to
Japanese pride helped spur the country's disastrous plunge two months
later into the Battle of Midway, the turnabout of the Pacific War.

2. "Baa Baa Black Sheep" by Gregory Boyington (Putnam, 1958).

Marine Fighting Squadron 214 was known as the "Black Sheep" because it
had been cobbled together from replacement pilots by the pugnacious
Gregory "Pappy" Boyington. The rag-tag but deadly squadron lost its
colorful leader--a drinker and brawler on the ground, an ace in the
air--when Boyington was shot down in early 1944 in the South Pacific.
Captured by the Japanese and badly injured, he somehow survived 20
months of prison-camp brutality. For a decade after the war, the Medal
of Honor winner lived on beer, bombast and brag. But then he produced
"Baa Baa Black Sheep." Based on records of his missions, embellished and
cocky in some places, ruefully self-deprecating in others, the book
tells a story that might not be as it really was but is as it should
have been.

3. "Goodbye, Darkness" by William Manchester (Little, Brown, 1979).

William L. Shirer lauded this "gripping, haunting book" as "the most
moving memoir of combat in World War II that I have ever read." It
remains hard to fault that judgment. Determined to exorcise his postwar
nightmares by writing them away, William Manchester returned in 1978 to
the Pacific islands where he had lost his youth and nearly his life
during the horrific battle at Okinawa. A Marine sergeant, he received a
"million-dollar wound" that got him evacuated, saving him for writing
history, including his own. He confesses that he had become "a thing of
tears and twitchings and dirtied pants. I remembered wondering dumbly,
Is this what they mean by 'conspicuous gallantry'?" "Goodbye, Darkness"
is written with conspicuous gallantry.

4. "The Railway Man" by Eric Lomax (Norton, 1995).

If the bridge over the river Kwai hadn't been made legendary by the
Oscar-winning film of that title, this book might have done the job.
Eric Lomax, a Scot with a passion for trains, was captured in Singapore
during the war and forced into slave labor. During his years of torture
and starvation, one of his tormentors was an English-speaking overseer
whom Lomax never forgot. Savagely beaten, Lomax lived a hideous
existence, nursing his hatred long afterward--until in 1989 a friend
showed him a Japan Times story about his captor, now in Buddhist
atonement for war atrocities. Almost 50 years after his release, Lomax
and his wife met the aged, frail Takashi Nagase at the bridge on the
Kwai. Recognizing that Nagase's Buddhism made it essential that he be
forgiven before he died, the ex-POW parted movingly from his former
enemy. Lomax writes with quiet dignity, but his pity and the exaltation
recall Greek tragedy.

5. "Hiroshima" by John Hersey (Knopf, 1946).

Based on interviews with six atomic-bomb survivors, "Hiroshima" relates,
with passionate dispassion, their experiences on the morning of the
blast and its grim aftermath. (The account was first published in August
1946, when it filled an entire issue of the New Yorker.) Hersey offers
no personal conclusions--he lets the victims do that, and their thoughts
range from pain and anger and indifference to a concession that the Bomb
"ended the bloodshed." Immensely moving in its flat tone, which belies
its immediacy, "Hiroshima" may be the most unforgettable work of
journalism in the 20th century.

Mr. Weintraub's "Eleven Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944"
(Free Press) will be published in November.

Copyright ) 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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