Goodbye Darkness -- by William Manchester

 

It's mindblowing what I read here coupled with what I've learned elsewhere. Not that everything I've learned is necessarily true, but I am programmed to receive information before tossing any out too soon.

The late great journalist Ernie Pyle was killed in the Okinawa battle in the early stages, but Author William Manchester was there as a Marine Sergeant, and almost killed in the fight's later stages. I've read two of Pyle's books, containing many of his columns, and jumped on Goodbye Darkness starting with the last chapter. There were some blatant similarities in both of their writer's voices.

Manchester admitted being a Pyle reader and might have gone considerably deeper in one of the later chapters. Manchester had plenty of life and death to study in the thick of the Pacific War.

"Despite all evidence to the contrary, most thinkers, with the exception of the Egyptian era and the twentieth century, had come down hard on the side of rebirth. Plato, Aristotle, the fourteenth-century  Moslem Ibn Khaldun, and Oswald Spengler believed men and civilizations were destined for rehabilitation. So did the biblical prophets: Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and Jesus. All used the same evidence: the generational cycle and the cycle of the seasons," he wrote on p. 296 of my copy.

And Manchester was left for dead for four hours after an exceedingly rare Japanese screaming Mimi explosive launch hit the old Okinawan tomb he and a few other Marines were sheltering in. The Marine closest to him was totally obliterated by the projectile, with a bone firmly implanted in Manchester. The future bestselling author was eventually checked over by a Navy corpsman he knew, and Manchester was quickly bolted into the hospital system, eventually getting him to San Diego where he got the word of Japan's surrender.

Some fast research shows that some writing talent showed up on the other side, too. There were some active writers from the Japanese mainland who moved to that island, and Okinawa natives Shun Medoruma and Eiki Matayoshi stand out. So did Ernie Pyle's energy self-distribute? Maybe someone has the answer.

This was a memoir of the author in the Pacific, with his return trip not coming until 1977-78. He belonged to an unusual group, calling itself The Raggedy Ass Marines. Most were Up East Ivy Leaguers, not the more common blue-collar-born and bred Marines of legend, or Hollywood lore. Manchester was from an old Massachusetts family, but his mother was from Virginia, and of Confederate blood.

My only complaints with Goodbye Darkness were the imagination-lacking editing and some vocabulary choices. Some of Manchester's memoir, rather naturally, drifted off into PTSD hallucinations, which probably caught some readers off guard. I'm guessing that setting those old battlefield memories in print probably sparked discussions between several in the publication process. Another never-ending battle.

Manchester moved about the battlefields of his youth like a professor in a lecture, sharing information and insight. I read all the way through the book, and reread the final chapter. It seemed like everyone else was reading Manchester books when I was outside being a kid. That was probably quite valuable, too. But now I can catch up on his works, and they're probably cheaper now, too.