Corporal William Manchester, gazing ahead from a rise at the top of a hill, thought the scene looked “hideous, but it was also strangely familiar, resembling, I then realized, photographs of 1914–1918. This, I thought, is what Verdun and Passchendaele must have looked like. The two great armies, squatting opposite one another in mud and smoke, were locked together in unimaginable agony. There was no room for a flanking operation; the Pacific Ocean lay to the east and the East China Sea to the west.”7
