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U.S. Landmark Books #94
From Pearl Harbor to Okinawa: The War in the Pacific: 1941-1945
An account of American military actions in the Pacific Ocean in World War II
194 pages, Library Binding
First published September 1, 1960
3 people are currently reading
111 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Bliven Jr.
19 books3 followersBruce Bliven Jr. was born on Jan. 31, 1916, in Los Angeles but moved to New York when he was 17 months old. He later said, ''Fifty-four years later, I began to write New York history to find out where I was.''
He wrote three books about the city's history and one about the whole state, ''including Buffalo,'' as he said in a remark published in ''Contemporary Authors.''
His father, a journalist, was managing editor of The New Republic. The son inherited his father's liberal stance and joined him in quitting the Descendants of the American Revolution in February 1941 after the group opposed the Lend Lease Act aiding countries fighting the Nazis.
Mr. Bliven wrote briefly for a newspaper in Stroudsburg, Pa., and for The Manchester Guardian, the British paper, before graduating from Harvard in 1937. He then wrote editorials for The New York Post, leaving to serve in World War II.
''I was a lieutenant in the field artillery and took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy and wrote a children's book about it a dozen years later to find out what happened,'' he said. That book was ''The Story of D-Day, June 6, 1944'' (Random House, 1956).
When he returned to civilian life, he became a magazine writer who ranged across many subjects with deep knowledge but ''did not wear it on his sleeve,'' said Philip Hamburger, another New Yorker writer.
He met his wife, the former Naomi Horowitz, at The New Yorker, where she was a writer, and they had a son, Frederic.
Mr. Bliven was a prolific writer of popular books and magazine articles on subjects as diverse as military campaigns and the history of the typewriter. He died on January 2, 2002, at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
He wrote three books about the city's history and one about the whole state, ''including Buffalo,'' as he said in a remark published in ''Contemporary Authors.''
His father, a journalist, was managing editor of The New Republic. The son inherited his father's liberal stance and joined him in quitting the Descendants of the American Revolution in February 1941 after the group opposed the Lend Lease Act aiding countries fighting the Nazis.
Mr. Bliven wrote briefly for a newspaper in Stroudsburg, Pa., and for The Manchester Guardian, the British paper, before graduating from Harvard in 1937. He then wrote editorials for The New York Post, leaving to serve in World War II.
''I was a lieutenant in the field artillery and took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy and wrote a children's book about it a dozen years later to find out what happened,'' he said. That book was ''The Story of D-Day, June 6, 1944'' (Random House, 1956).
When he returned to civilian life, he became a magazine writer who ranged across many subjects with deep knowledge but ''did not wear it on his sleeve,'' said Philip Hamburger, another New Yorker writer.
He met his wife, the former Naomi Horowitz, at The New Yorker, where she was a writer, and they had a son, Frederic.
Mr. Bliven was a prolific writer of popular books and magazine articles on subjects as diverse as military campaigns and the history of the typewriter. He died on January 2, 2002, at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 29, 2019
"FROM PEARL HARBOR TO OKINAWA" is one of the first books that I read on the Pacific War when I was in public school during the 1970s. It offers a well laid-out account of the history of the Pacific War, ranging from the attack on Pearl Harbor; the Japanese invasions and occupations of Guam and Wake Island (where the U.S. Marines staged a brave and stout resistance against overwhelming odds for close to 3 weeks in December 1941); the Japanese conquest of the Philippines; the Battles of Coral Sea & Midway; Guadalcanal; and the various island hopping campaigns staged by American land, air, and naval forces which ultimately led to Japan's defeat in August 1945.
December 28, 2014
I randomly found this book in my school's tiny library when I was around 8 or 9 years old. It was an amazing book for me to read as a child. The war in the Pacific was fascinating, from the jungle warfare on Guadalcanal and in Burma, to the island-hopping campaigns of Nimitz and the naval battles involving destroyers and aircraft carriers. I remember pronouncing the word "battalion" as "battle lion" in my head. I remember idolizing Douglas MacArthur. I remember the book jumping around to different narratives of the Pacific theater. Reading this book as a young child made me a World War II buff for life. It made me hunger for more knowledge of the war. I'll never forget finding it on the shelf and devouring it in a matter of days.
April 3, 2017
I FINALLY stopped procrastinating on this book and finished it. (YAY) It was pretty good, though I can't claim to have understood most of it. (If anyone is wondering, I read this for novel research. I'm not a war buff. :P)
June 13, 2023
How wild is it that I began reading this, and then unexpectedly uncovered some answers to a rather sticky family mystery in my genealogy research?! A rather obscure distant relative, my great grand-Aunt, the older sister of my great-grandfather, had a son, whom I have long been informed was killed at Pearl Harbor. Over the years, literally, I haven't been able to find anything about him at all, but then came across someone's information that led me down another rabbit hole. It appears that rather than death at Pearl Harbor, this person was killed in action in the Philippines, as a PFC in the army. He and several other allied troops were apparently attempting to assist missionaries in escaping the invading Japanese, but they were captured, executed by beheading, and buried in a mass grave. In 1949, their bodies were recovered, repatriated and buried together at a National Cemetery in Missouri. So, this book really hit home at an opportune time.
I won't go into too much detail about content, as it's fairly well-known and accessible. As with the other Landmark books (I really prefer the ones which were written in the 1950s as opposed to the modern volumes, despite some of the outdated language), this is a good overview to some complex subject matter. The author, Bliven (who was a year older than my relative described above) does an excellent job of describing the events in the Pacific theater over the course of the long war in a fairly balanced way. Neither does he mince words about the devastating toll in lives wrought by the tragic events that led to the deployment of the first, and hopefully last, nuclear weapons used in a theater of war.
This volume covers a lot of time and geography, so it doesn't include many biographies or personal stories of individuals in any great depth, which are a prominent feature of many of the Landmark books. One small aside: the brief mention of another tragic figure who fought and nearly died in the Pacific theater. Bliven writes, "The versatile PT boats were the best answer we had. Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, the skipper of PT boat 109, was on patrol... when a Japanese destroyer, looming up out of the night, rammed his ship and cut it in two. By a series of near miracles, Kennedy and ten survivors of his twelve-man crew managed to swim to a small nearby island, and after days of gallant effort to attract attention, they were rescued."
By necessity, the book abbreviates events, but this one is worth telling. After their boat was struck at about 2:30 AM, Kennedy rescued several of his men, who had been badly burned. They then clung to the bow for 12 hours, until its sinking was imminent, before deciding to swim for land, to Plum Pudding Island, now renamed Kennedy Island, about 3 1/2 miles away, a feat which took about four hours. A new problem shortly arose, however: the island had no drinkable water. Kennedy then swam an additional 2 miles the following day in an attempt to hail a passing PT boat. Two days later, the crew had to swim another near-four miles to yet another island to try to attract the attention of rescuers. They were discovered on day three, but rescue took another two days. Kennedy even scratched a message onto a coconut while he was on Naru island, which was later recovered. He eventually had it made into a paperweight, which is now on display at his presidential library. The remains of PT-109 were actually discovered in 2002, at a depth of 1,200 feet, by Robert Ballard, the same man who first discovered the remains of the Titanic.
Kennedy suffered serious back injuries from the incident, however, requiring months of hospitalization at Chelsea Naval Hospital, and later, several more months of recovery at a military hospital in Arizona. He was forced to retire in March, 1945, on physical disability. It's curious that he was even allowed into the military, in fact, as he had a chronically bad back and multiple other ailments. In fact, his father likely played the pivotal role in his getting in; it's more fact than rumor that after JFK's rejection from the US Army's Officer Candidate School, Joe Kennedy had an old navy buddy call in a favor to a Boston doctor, who certified JFK's good health, sufficient to get a job with the Office of Naval Intelligence.
This incident made Kennedy, who was already well-known as Joe Kennedy's son, a war hero. His older brother, Joe Jr., whom their father had been grooming for political life, was killed in the war when his plane exploded in 1944. The PT-109 story was featured in the New York Times and other publications of the day. After the attack, JFK's condition improved somewhat, but he was plagued by severe pain for the rest of his life, requiring frequent treatment with steroids, which caused other physical ailments, probably including his Addison's Syndrome, which was so severe that pathologists could not identify any adrenal tissue during his autopsy following the assassination in November, 1963. In fact, some have argued that, in a sense, he didn't "survive" the Japanese attack, in that had he not been so severely wounded, he may not have been wearing a back brace the day he was shot by a sniper in Dallas. The back brace held him upright after the initial hit in the back, which was likely survivable, preventing him from slumping down out of the line of fire, which then allowed the gunman another shot, that one fatal.
This book was published in 1960, and probably written well before that. On Jan 2, 1960, the man who would become the nation's 35th President announced his candidacy, so it's uncertain if this book had been completed or had gone to the publisher before that time. Little could the author have imagined the eventual outcome, however...
I reiterate my statements that this series should be read by all grade-school children, as they are very accessible and serve as vital part of our education, especially considering how far removed we are now from these events which should never be forgotten. Most people are forgotten within three generations, even if they are direct-line ancestors: who really remembers or knows much about their great-great-grandparents, unless they're famous, infamous, or someone's into genealogy?
As such, I feel blessed to know my family's gold-star history, which makes these books all the more poignant. I've had two relatives killed in action, that I know of, in both World Wars: the one described above, and, on the other side of my family, the brother of my great-great-grandmother, who was killed at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in Lorraine, France, in early September, 1918 - eight shorts weeks before the armistice on Nov. 11, which formally ended the war. The Battle of Saint-Mihiel (Sept. 12–15, 1918) involved the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) and 110,000 French troops under the command of General John J. Pershing. It was part of a plan to break through German lines and capture the fortified city of Metz, the first large offensive launched by the US Army in World War I.
Some figures, like JFK, are famous, of course, as as other immortals such as Pershing, Admiral Halsey and MacArthur. Most of the millions of men and women who fought, and many who died, however, remain nameless, known to few other than their families, and, now, often times, not even to their posterity. I wish more people knew about their individual ancestors who fought these battles and shaped the world in which we now live. The Landmark book series is at least one small way to accomplish that, hopefully inspiring new generations to look to the past, especially within their own family histories.
I won't go into too much detail about content, as it's fairly well-known and accessible. As with the other Landmark books (I really prefer the ones which were written in the 1950s as opposed to the modern volumes, despite some of the outdated language), this is a good overview to some complex subject matter. The author, Bliven (who was a year older than my relative described above) does an excellent job of describing the events in the Pacific theater over the course of the long war in a fairly balanced way. Neither does he mince words about the devastating toll in lives wrought by the tragic events that led to the deployment of the first, and hopefully last, nuclear weapons used in a theater of war.
This volume covers a lot of time and geography, so it doesn't include many biographies or personal stories of individuals in any great depth, which are a prominent feature of many of the Landmark books. One small aside: the brief mention of another tragic figure who fought and nearly died in the Pacific theater. Bliven writes, "The versatile PT boats were the best answer we had. Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, the skipper of PT boat 109, was on patrol... when a Japanese destroyer, looming up out of the night, rammed his ship and cut it in two. By a series of near miracles, Kennedy and ten survivors of his twelve-man crew managed to swim to a small nearby island, and after days of gallant effort to attract attention, they were rescued."
By necessity, the book abbreviates events, but this one is worth telling. After their boat was struck at about 2:30 AM, Kennedy rescued several of his men, who had been badly burned. They then clung to the bow for 12 hours, until its sinking was imminent, before deciding to swim for land, to Plum Pudding Island, now renamed Kennedy Island, about 3 1/2 miles away, a feat which took about four hours. A new problem shortly arose, however: the island had no drinkable water. Kennedy then swam an additional 2 miles the following day in an attempt to hail a passing PT boat. Two days later, the crew had to swim another near-four miles to yet another island to try to attract the attention of rescuers. They were discovered on day three, but rescue took another two days. Kennedy even scratched a message onto a coconut while he was on Naru island, which was later recovered. He eventually had it made into a paperweight, which is now on display at his presidential library. The remains of PT-109 were actually discovered in 2002, at a depth of 1,200 feet, by Robert Ballard, the same man who first discovered the remains of the Titanic.
Kennedy suffered serious back injuries from the incident, however, requiring months of hospitalization at Chelsea Naval Hospital, and later, several more months of recovery at a military hospital in Arizona. He was forced to retire in March, 1945, on physical disability. It's curious that he was even allowed into the military, in fact, as he had a chronically bad back and multiple other ailments. In fact, his father likely played the pivotal role in his getting in; it's more fact than rumor that after JFK's rejection from the US Army's Officer Candidate School, Joe Kennedy had an old navy buddy call in a favor to a Boston doctor, who certified JFK's good health, sufficient to get a job with the Office of Naval Intelligence.
This incident made Kennedy, who was already well-known as Joe Kennedy's son, a war hero. His older brother, Joe Jr., whom their father had been grooming for political life, was killed in the war when his plane exploded in 1944. The PT-109 story was featured in the New York Times and other publications of the day. After the attack, JFK's condition improved somewhat, but he was plagued by severe pain for the rest of his life, requiring frequent treatment with steroids, which caused other physical ailments, probably including his Addison's Syndrome, which was so severe that pathologists could not identify any adrenal tissue during his autopsy following the assassination in November, 1963. In fact, some have argued that, in a sense, he didn't "survive" the Japanese attack, in that had he not been so severely wounded, he may not have been wearing a back brace the day he was shot by a sniper in Dallas. The back brace held him upright after the initial hit in the back, which was likely survivable, preventing him from slumping down out of the line of fire, which then allowed the gunman another shot, that one fatal.
This book was published in 1960, and probably written well before that. On Jan 2, 1960, the man who would become the nation's 35th President announced his candidacy, so it's uncertain if this book had been completed or had gone to the publisher before that time. Little could the author have imagined the eventual outcome, however...
I reiterate my statements that this series should be read by all grade-school children, as they are very accessible and serve as vital part of our education, especially considering how far removed we are now from these events which should never be forgotten. Most people are forgotten within three generations, even if they are direct-line ancestors: who really remembers or knows much about their great-great-grandparents, unless they're famous, infamous, or someone's into genealogy?
As such, I feel blessed to know my family's gold-star history, which makes these books all the more poignant. I've had two relatives killed in action, that I know of, in both World Wars: the one described above, and, on the other side of my family, the brother of my great-great-grandmother, who was killed at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in Lorraine, France, in early September, 1918 - eight shorts weeks before the armistice on Nov. 11, which formally ended the war. The Battle of Saint-Mihiel (Sept. 12–15, 1918) involved the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) and 110,000 French troops under the command of General John J. Pershing. It was part of a plan to break through German lines and capture the fortified city of Metz, the first large offensive launched by the US Army in World War I.
Some figures, like JFK, are famous, of course, as as other immortals such as Pershing, Admiral Halsey and MacArthur. Most of the millions of men and women who fought, and many who died, however, remain nameless, known to few other than their families, and, now, often times, not even to their posterity. I wish more people knew about their individual ancestors who fought these battles and shaped the world in which we now live. The Landmark book series is at least one small way to accomplish that, hopefully inspiring new generations to look to the past, especially within their own family histories.
August 22, 2017
This book on the Pacific aspect of WWII is one often found in school libraries, and I read it around 6th grade. I recently grabbed it for a quarter at a book sale, and it's a solid overview of the war in the Pacific. Covering almost four years of war in less than 200 pages requires broad strokes of course, so there aren't intimate details or character portraits. But as an introduction and/or summary of the events, the U.S.-centric book does its job. I'd recommend it to a youngster looking to learn about the Pacific for the first time.
May 29, 2020
This book is written for youth up to about 15 years.
It is mainly and overview of WWII in the Pacific Theatre.
If someone plans on, but hasn’t read about our battle with Japan, this book gives a great perspective. Without the goriest details of battle.
It is mainly and overview of WWII in the Pacific Theatre.
If someone plans on, but hasn’t read about our battle with Japan, this book gives a great perspective. Without the goriest details of battle.
October 26, 2021
A historical view of the war from 1960 for kids.
Read
July 27, 2025the book that got me into WWII history
June 4, 2010
Probably not for young kids to read this. It just talks about a lot of bloody battles.
October 24, 2014
A brief history of World War II in the Pacific Theater. Covers major actions involving the Army, Navy, and Marines. Although short it covers some general knowledge.
December 24, 2022
Great historical text of battles and troop movements during the Pacific Theatre.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews