One of the greatest stories ever told in American History!

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	• Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War William Manchester Back Bay Books, 2002 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 72 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

a steadfast memoir

Those of my generation who read World War II memoirs are so removed from that time and place that we merely grasp at this experience of war and the American society that fought it. In between us and our grandparents lies the redolence of the 1950s, the enduring narcissism 1960s, and the incubus of a cold war. But for those of us willing to learn, Goodbye Darkness is surely among the most competent of guides.

The book memorializes William Manchester's experience as young sergeant of Marines through the eyes of a middle-aged traveler visiting the locales of epic Pacific Theater battles. His description of the historical context of each battle rests upon a foundation of ample scholarly research. Manchester provides personal recollections where appropriate. (He spent time on Guadalcanal after the fighting ended there; his combat experience was on Okinawa.) And he then describes his visits to these island battlefields during a subsequent 1979 trip. He admits in the Author's Note that he "resorted to some legerdemain in the interest of re-creating, and clarifying the spirit of, the historical past." In any case, the writing is just what you've come to expect from Manchester: funny, sensitive, learned, deft, fine.

Goodbye, Darkness is the summation of Manchester's post-war cathexis, with the author enjoined a quarter century after the fact with the bloody fugue that hacked his manhood from a boy's life. As with his previous works, Manchester's voice is strong and clear, but here it's more personal. He is wrestling with ghosts, specifically his own disaffected, alienated doppelganger from a quarter century ago; the savage young sergeant of Marines who visits his middle-aged persona in the ragged, misbegotten battlefields of post-war dreams.

I admired the restraint of this book. Manchester loads the tumbrel of war horrors lightly. He economizes on the brutality and asks nothing for its personal cost. Despite the brutality of the landings on Tarawa, Guadalcanal, Saipan, Guam, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and others described in the book, Manchester balances the strategic, the tactical, and the personal. He observes that "the whole history of war is a story of men moving closer and closer to the ground and then deeper and deeper in it." That's very much the story of the Marine Corps experience on the beaches of the Pacific islands and it's fighting ground that Manchester is burrowing into here, not the angst of his generation.

One of the characteristics I most appreciated was a resolute refusal to whinge, self-indulge, or to ponder the bellybutton of his generation. Indeed, some of the best writing in the book considers the unique qualities of his generation and their capacity to fight this kind of gruesome war. Manchester has no interest in the sympathy of his readers, either for himself or his generation. It's not sympathy, but respect is that I find his generation deserves, but I find my respect is rooted in Manchester's refusal to demand it.

His description of the atmosphere at the front is powerful without resorting to melodrama. Quoting the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, Manchester describes his comrades with their "sad infinite eyes, like those of a newborn beast of burden." In describing why they did what they did, often risking their lives, often dying in desperate fighting, he says of his comrades "we were all psychotic, inmates of the greatest madhouse in history, but staying on the line was a matter of pride. Pride was important to young men then." (Written in the twilight of the Vietnam War, all the book's references to Vietnam are oblique.)

Manchester's father had fought in World War I. He brought home a grave wound and a quiet dignity. That dignity reverberated through Manchester's youth, creating in his mind and spirit an appetite for glory and honor. The Pacific War reduced that appetite, grinding away the shibboleths of war. In war "I realized that something within me, long ailing, had expired," he writes. "Although I would continue to do the job, performing as the hired gun, I now knew that the banners and swords, ruffles and flourishes, bugles and drums, the whole rigmarole, eventually ended in squalor."

What made them the Greatest Generation? What ignited them and drove them to return, wounded, to the line from safe hospitals to fight alongside their comrades in desperate battles, as Manchester himself did during the war? As he writes, "It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn't do it to them. I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I knew now, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another." A great insight and a great book.

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A Testament to "The Greatest Generation"

I was engulfed in this book from the first page. I've read several memoirs of airmen and Marines' who served in various wars, but this is perhaps the most graphic, and gripping of all that I've read. It is hard not feel a great sense of patriotism after reading "Goodbye, Darkness." I did find it a little difficult to distinguish what battles the author specifically served in, but this is just the result of him giving a quick-and-dirty rundown of all the events that occurred in the Pacific theater--a good thing considering most people's ignorance (including myself) of the events that took place there.

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One of the greatest stories ever told in American History!

This is one of the best books I have ever read! It is so moving a account of a brave US Marine surviving, leading and triumphing in World War II. The author's account of events is amazing. I highly recommend it for all of those interested in an important time in US and World History.

Manchester's War

Manchester makes it clear that he was not in on every battle he describes. Only a dullard would think that, or let it color his thinking about this book.

Manchester's writing skill is superb -- it is, after all, his vocation -- and that skill brings this book to the front of personal, and overview, narratives. One gets, at the same time, through this volume, a sense of the Marines' war in the Pacific, and of the individual's war therein.

Manchester's choice to serve. not as an officer (which his IQ, if not his temperament, certainly qualified him) but as an enlisted man provides a most interesting view of both the Corps and battle. Smart enough to understand both strategy and tactics, his perspective illuminates the World War II Pacific theater on several levels.

It is somewhat surprising how deeply into his psyche he allows us to see, but, we have to suspect, this memoir would have been terribly shallow, and for Manchester, infinitely less cathartic, without the glimpses. bravo for his bravery, both on the battle field and at the keyboard.

reading both Manchester's account and Gene Sledge's account allows us to -- admittedly -- at second-hand experience the personalness of the Pacific war. The terror we can only poorly imagine, but the sense of tragedy, uselessness, wastefulness, and sheer stupidity of war pound us relentlessly.

If you never read anything about the Pacific war, read this and read Sledge.

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Great Autobiography of World War II

The first serious books I began reading as a child were World War II histories. In my nearly 50 year reading life (so far!) I've read hundreds of books about the War from all perspectives, grand histories, military strategy, biography and autobiography, unit accounts, picture books, official military reports. William Manchester's autobiography of his Marine experience in the Pacific is the one book I've read that is the exemplar, that if you were to read only one book about World War II, this would be the one. It contains enough "big history" to give you a good and accurate sense of what the War "was." But against that larger background Manchester shares his own story and weaves it into a big narrative that feels like an "everyman" experience.

I recently read Max Hastings book, "Retribution," which describes the "big history" of the last year of fighting in the Pacific, the time and place for most of Manchester's autobiography. These two books provide a nice contrast in approach and reading them both would give you a very strong sense of history and of psychology for that aspect of WWII.

"Goodbye, Darkness" is one of my favorite books and one that I've reread several times and will read again. Manchester teaches a great deal about life and death, war and peace. This is a powerful book that will be read generations from now.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

For the first time in trade paperback, the book in which one of the most celebrated biographer/historians of our time looks back at his own early life and gives us a remarkable account of World War II in the Pacific, of what it looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and, most of all, what it felt like to one who underwent all but the ultimate of its experiences. Back Bay takes pride in making William Manchesters intense, stirring, and impassioned memoir available to a new generation of readers. A book that will enthrall readers interested in the experiences and exploits of Americas greatest generation. As noted in a recent front-page New York Times article, William Manchester is today widely regarded as Americas preeminent biographer/historian. In the two decades since its initial publication, Goodbye, Darkness has achieved the status of a modern classic.

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