The Pacific War Uncensored

A WWII reporter’s dangerous adventures in Singapore, Malaya, Java, and more. Harold Guard became a war correspondent by chance after he’d been invalided out of the navy following a submarine accident. Thereafter, working for United Press, he gained a front-row seat to many of the most dramatic battles and events of the century. In March 1942, Guard arrived in Australia, having narrowly escaped from Japanese forces invading Singapore and Java. His dispatches from that disastrous front prompted one observer to comment on “the crisis days when everybody except Harold Guard was trying to hush up the real situation.” At the time, he was acclaimed by the Australian press as one of the top four newspapermen covering the war in the Pacific. Over the next three years, Guard was to have many more adventures reporting on the Pacific War, including firsthand experience flying with the US Air Force on twenty-two bombing missions, camping with Allied forces in the deadly jungles of New Guinea, and taking part in attacks from amphibious landing craft on enemy occupied territory. He also traveled into the undeveloped areas of Australia’s northern territories to report on the construction of air bases being built in preparation for defending the country against the advancing Japanese. What made Harold Guard’s achievements even more remarkable was that he was disabled and had to walk with a stiff right leg due to his navy injury. Despite this, he often reported from perilous situations at the front line, which gained him considerable notoriety within the newspaper world. Guard endeavored to give honest accounts, and this often brought him into conflict with the military censors. In this book, the full story of Guard’s experiences and observations during the Pacific War have been reconstructed with the help of his dispatches, private correspondence, telegrams, and audio accounts. No longer subject to censorship, the starkly honest perceptions of how the Allies nearly failed and, at last, finally won the war can now be told.

The definitive history of American war reporting in the Pacific theater of World War II, from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After almost two years slogging with infantrymen through North Africa, Italy, and France, Ernie Pyle immediately realized he was ill-prepared for covering the Pacific War. As Pyle and other war correspondents discovered, the climate, the logistics, and the sheer scope of the Pacific theater had no parallel in the war America was fighting in Europe. From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The War Beat, Pacific provides the first comprehensive account of how a group of highly courageous correspondents covered America's war against Japan, what they witnessed, what they were allowed to publish, and how their reports shaped the home front's perception of some of the most pivotal battles in American military history. In a dramatic and fast-paced narrative based on a wealth of previously untapped primary sources, Casey takes us from MacArthur's doomed defense on the Philippines and the navy's overly strict censorship policy at the time of Midway, through the bloody battles on Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Tarawa, Saipan, Leyte and Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, detailing the cooperation, as well as conflict, between the media and the military, as they grappled with the enduring problem of limiting a free press during a period of extreme crisis. The War Beat, Pacific shows how foreign correspondents ran up against practical challenges and risked their lives to get stories in a theater that was far more challenging than the war against Nazi Germany, while the US government blocked news of the war against Japan and tried to focus the home front on Hitler and his atrocities.

This “excellent, wonderfully-researched” chronicle of WWII journalism explores the lives and work of embedded reporters across every theater of war (Chris Ogden, former Time magazine bureau chief in London). Luminary journalists Ed Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, Walter Cronkite, and Clare Hollingworth were among the young reporters who chronicled World War II’s daily horrors and triumphs for Western readers. In Reporting War, fellow foreign correspondent Ray Moseley mines their writings to create an exhilarating parallel narrative of the war effort in Europe, Pearl Harbor, North Africa, and Japan. This vivid history also explores the lives, methods, and motivations of the courageous journalists who doggedly followed the action and the story, often while embedded in the Allied armies. Moseley’s sweeping yet intimate history draws on newly unearthed material to offer a comprehensive account of the war. Reporting War sheds much-needed light on an abundance of individual stories and overlooked experiences, including those of women and African-American journalists, which capture the drama as it was lived by reporters on the front lines of history.

As World War II rated in Europe and in the Pacific, the Associated Press reported the action. The AP was there as witness and recorder of history from Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, Midway and Okinawa, in the air, on the ground, and at sea, sending back stories and pictures under battle conditions. The author provides an incisive and penetrating narrative of the war, including quotes, anecdotes, and analysis. Over 100 photographs are featured from the AP archives.

The "untold story of friendship, heroism and survival in World War II"--Book jacket.

A harrowing account of an epic, yet nearly forgotten, battle of World War II—General Douglas MacArthur's four-year assault on the Pacific War's most hostile battleground: the mountainous, jungle-cloaked island of New Guinea. “A meaty, engrossing narrative history… This will likely stand as the definitive account of the New Guinea campaign.”—The Christian Science Monitor One American soldier called it “a green hell on earth.” Monsoon-soaked wilderness, debilitating heat, impassable mountains, torrential rivers, and disease-infested swamps—New Guinea was a battleground far more deadly than the most fanatical of enemy troops. Japanese forces numbering some 600,000 men began landing in January 1942, determined to seize the island as a cornerstone of the Empire’s strategy to knock Australia out of the war. Allied Commander-in-Chief General Douglas MacArthur committed 340,000 Americans, as well as tens of thousands of Australian, Dutch, and New Guinea troops, to retake New Guinea at all costs. What followed was a four-year campaign that involved some of the most horrific warfare in history. At first emboldened by easy victories throughout the Pacific, the Japanese soon encountered in New Guinea a roadblock akin to the Germans’ disastrous attempt to take Moscow, a catastrophic setback to their war machine. For the Americans, victory in New Guinea was the first essential step in the long march towards the Japanese home islands and the ultimate destruction of Hirohito’s empire. Winning the war in New Guinea was of critical importance to MacArthur. His avowed “I shall return” to the Philippines could only be accomplished after taking the island. In this gripping narrative, historian James P. Duffy chronicles the most ruthless combat of the Pacific War, a fight complicated by rampant tropical disease, violent rainstorms, and unforgiving terrain that punished both Axis and Allied forces alike. Drawing on primary sources, War at the End of the World fills in a crucial gap in the history of World War II while offering readers a narrative of the first rank.

A portrayal of how and why Japan waged war from 1931-1945 and what life was like for the Japanese people in a society engaged in total war.