Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War

by William Manchester Narrated by Barrett Whitener

Overview

The nightmares began for William Manchester twenty-three years after World War II. In his dreams he lived with the recurring image of himself as a battle-weary youth ¿angrily demanding to know what had happened to the three decades since he had laid down his arms.¿ To find out, Manchester visited those places in the Pacific where as a young Marine he fought the Japanese.

In this intensely powerful memoir, America¿s preeminent biographer-historian, who has written so brilliantly about World War II in his acclaimed lives of General Douglas MacArthur (American Caesar) and Winston Churchill (The Last Lion), looks back at his own early life. He offers an unrivaled firsthand 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169806717
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/2006
Edition description:	Unabridged

Related Subjects

• Biography
• History
• Literary Biography
• Military Biography
• Historical Biography
• United States History
• Military History
• American Literary Biography
• Historical Biography - United States
• 20th Century United States History - General & Miscellaneous
• United States Armed Forces
• World War II
• U.S. Military Biography
• War Narratives
• General & Miscellaneous Military Biography
• Historical Biography - United States - 20th Century
• Marine Corps - United States Armed Forces
• Pacific Theater - World War II - Campaigns & Individual Battles
• Pacific Theater - World War II - General & Miscellaneous
• World War II - Personal Narratives
• World War II Narratives
• 20th Century American Authors - Literary Biography
• U.S. Military Biography - General & Miscellaneous
• U.S. Marine Corps - Military Biography
• World War II - War Narratives
• Authors, American->20th century->Biography
• Soldiers->United States->Biography
• United States Marine Corps->Biography
• World War, 1939-1945->Personal narratives, American
• World War, 1939-1945->Personal narratives, American->Pacific Theater

Read an Excerpt

Goodbye, Darkness

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By William Manchester

Back Bay Books

Copyright © 1980 William Manchester
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-316-50111-5

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Chapter One

Blood That Never Dried

Our Boeing 747 has been fleeing westward from darkened California, racing across the Pacific toward the sun, the incandescent eye of God, but slowly, three hours later than West Coast time, twilight gathers outside, veil upon lilac veil. This is what the French call l'heure bleue. Aquamarine becomes turquoise; turquoise, lavendar; lavendar, violet; violet, magenta; magenta, mulberry. Seen through my cocktail glass, the light fades as it deepens; it becomes opalescent, crepuscular. In the last waning moments of the day I can still feel the failing sunlight on my cheek, taste it in my martini. The plane rises before a spindrift; the darkening sky, broken by clouds like combers, boils and foams overhead. Then the whole weight of evening falls upon me. Old memories, phantoms repressed for more than a third of a century, begin to stir. I can almost hear the rhythm of surf on distant snow-white beaches. I have another drink, and then I learn, for the hundredth time, that you can't drown your troubles, not the real ones, because if they are real they can swim. One of my worst recollections, one I had buried in my deepest memory bank long ago, comes back with a clarity so blinding that I surge forward against the seat belt, appalled by it, filled with remorse and shame.

I am remembering the first man I slew.

There was this little hut on Motobu, perched atop a low rise overlooking the East China Sea. It was a fisherman's shack, so ordinary that scarcely anyone had noticed it. I did. I noticed it because I happened to glance in that direction at a crucial moment. The hut lay between us and B Company of the First Battalion. Word had been passed that that company had been taking sniper losses. They thought the sharpshooters were in spider holes, Jap foxholes, but as I was looking that way, I saw two B Company guys drop, and from the angle of their fall I knew the firing had to come from a window on the other side of that hut. At the same time, I saw that the shack had windows on our side, which meant that once the rifleman had B Company pinned down, he could turn toward us. I was dug in with Barney Cobb. We had excellent defilade ahead and the Twenty-second Marines on our right flank, but we had no protection from the hut, and our hole wasn't deep enough to let us sweat it out. Every time I glanced at that shack I was looking into the empty eye socket of death.

The situation was as clear as the deduction from a euclidean theorem, but my psychological state was extremely complicated. S. L. A. Marshall once observed that the typical fighting man is often at a disadvantage because he "comes from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable. "This was especially true of me, whose horror of violence had been so deep-seated that I had been unable to trade punches with other boys. But since then life had become cheaper to me. "Two thousand pounds of education drops to a ten rupee," wrote Kipling of the fighting on India's North-West Frontier. My plight was not unlike that described by the famous sign in the Paris zoo: "Warning: this animal is vicious; when attacked, it defends itself." I was responding to a basic biological principle first set down by the German zoologist Heini Hediger in his Skizzen zu einer Tierpsychologie um und im Zirkus. Hediger noted that beyond a certain distance, which varies from one species to another, an animal will retreat, while within it, it will attack. He called these "flight distance" and "critical distance." Obviously I was within critical distance of the hut. It was time to bar the bridge, stick a finger in the dike-to do something. I could be quick or I could be dead.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Goodbye, Darkness by William Manchester Copyright © 1980 by William Manchester. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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