Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II's Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat

by Patrick K. O'Donnell

Drawn from interviews with more than eight hundred veterans, a combat history of the Pacific War recreates the most crucial battles, from raids on remote Japanese outposts to the desperate fighting on Guadalcanal and in Burma.

Genres: History, World War II, Military Fiction, Nonfiction, War, Memoir, Military History

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

O’Donnell is a bestselling author, critically acclaimed military historian and an expert on elite units. The author of twelve books, including: Washington’s Immortals: The Untold Story of an Elite Regiment Who Changed the Course of the Revolution, The Unknowns, First SEALs, Give Me Tomorrow, The Brenner Assignment, We Were One, Beyond Valor, and Dog Company, he has also served as a combat historian in a Marine rifle platoon during the Battle of Fallujah and speaks often on espionage, special operations, and counterinsurgency. He has provided historical consulting for DreamWorks’ award-winning miniseries Band of Brothers and for scores of documentaries produced by the BBC, the History Channel, and Discovery and is the recipient of several national awards. He also regularly contributes to several national publications and shows.

Reviews

[Sleepy Boy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb collection of combat memoirs in the PTO.

[Noah Goats · Rating 4 out of 5]

This oral history of the Asian theater in WWII, as seen through the eyes of the American servicemen who fought there, is a powerful book. The stories these men have to tell are harrowing, and filled with courage, cruelty, savagery, selflessness, horror, and every other extreme human emotion. I was very moved by what some of them had to say about their experiences.

I also appreciate that the author took the time to find and interview a couple Japanese Americans who served in the Pacific. The soldiers of the all Japanese American 442nd regiment are legendary for their courage and tenacity while fighting the Germans in Europe, (winning more decorations than any other US military unit in history)but for whatever reason you don’t hear much about the Japanese Americans fighting against Japan (mostly in intelligence). The patriotism of these men is truly inspiring.

[Poppy || Monster Lover]

If you’re gonna quote Ronald Reagan in this book, I’m not gonna trust you to give an accurate account of this war.
DNF

[Robert Cox · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well organized collection of powerful and enlightening memoirs from the Pacific Theater of WWII mixed with pertinent context and background. Solid.

[Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

WWII in the Pacific was far more barbaric than I think most people realize. Brutal content, but great for understanding how the war was fought on the front lines.

Tough to read “all of the sudden” over and over again though…

[Steve Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the unabridged audiobook of this work.

Patrick J. O'Donnell's books do a great job of sucking away the jingoism and mindless "glory" that has cloaked accounts of war. He interviews veterans, and they spare nothing in giving their first hand accounts of the horror and despair of combat. These vets pull no punches, describing the horrific injuries they received and the unsettling, if not graphically gory deaths of comrades that they were forced to witness.

In this book O'Donnell recounts the service of elite units of the Army Airborne, and the units of Marine Raiders and "Para-Marines" that served in the Pacific theater. The latter units of Marines were disbanded later in the war, and their veterans went on to comprise the nucleus of future Marine divisions.

I'd give this a five star rating but for the narrator's unforgivable pronunciation of military terms. I'm not willing to give him a break on this one. Former Marines like me and sailors that served with Marines will wince when they hear him pronounce the words "corpsman/corpsmen" as "cores-man/cores-men". The "s" is silent along with the “p”, as it is in Marine Corps. The traditional fighting knife of the Marines, the KA-BAR isn't properly pronounced as "KAY-BAR"...the narrator simply spells out the letters K-A-B-A-R. He does the same thing with the Japanese word "Sho", when describing the name of the Japanese defense plans for the Philippines, he simply spells it out.

Maybe I don't know enough about voice narration. Maybe the readers don't get any time whatsoever to read the books before hitting the studio. But if they do, there are some excellent sources out there for learning how to pronounce unfamiliar words.

[Nathan Casebolt · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one is real anymore, and it’s killing us. Strangers in comments conduct flame wars that dehumanize participants and onlookers alike. We plug into endless scrolls of people who’ve ground themselves into content so we can all feed our lives to the algorithm. We feel more deeply connected to scripted personalities who mainline memes to our amygdalae than we do to our own neighbors. When everyone is pixels, no one is real; and if no one is real, then their suffering isn’t real. It’s just good, clean fun.

This eclipse of the human behind a rising sun of screens meets pushback in Patrick K. O’Donnell’s set of memories from American men who fought in the Pacific during World War II. Slippage of reality is precisely what drove some to open up to him. One man said, “I've never really talked about this to anyone. The only reason that I am now is if someone doesn't relate it the way it actually was instead of the Hollywood version, it's going to be lost.” Another said that he watched people in an airport during the Gulf War cheer as an American cruise missile obliterated an Iraqi bunker on CNN: “Don't people realize that there are human beings in there? That's why I'm telling you my story.”

I don’t mean to imply that Hollywood and the Internet have changed human nature. We’ve always mentally interned each other in conceptual camps of Others whose humanity is less, or at least less valuable, than our own. This was certainly true in the Pacific theater, a long and bloody string of atrocities by no means limited to one side (though Japanese soldiers far exceeded Americans in terms of unthinkable sadism). As O’Donnell writes, “The ground combat in the Pacific came close to a war of annihilation. Dark undercurrents, such as racism, fueled a visceral hatred of each side for the other.” I remember the time an elderly couple from the Greatest Generation criticized Clint Eastwood’s movie “Letters from Iwo Jima” for making the Japanese too human. Brutality casts a long shadow.

You’ll find brutality in these stories. Unless you pretend we are other than we are, you can’t tell an honest story of war without brutality. You’ll find here men who fought with omnicidal fury when they realized starving Japanese soldiers were cannibalizing captured Americans as well as their own dead. You’ll find the untrustworthy son of a bad cop who got fragged during patrol, and members of his unit who still debate whether one of their own took an opportunity. You’ll find Japanese who tortured men to death and Americans who shot surrendering Japanese because no one had logistics for prisoners — or because scenes of Japanese barbarity left no space for mercy. "I did not want to go back to the war,” Ray Mitchell says of his resistance to attending a unit reunion. “I've changed since I fought in those jungles, and the men I served with were some of the meanest individuals I've ever known."

This, and not heroically sanitized John Wayne movies, is what the war was. "The reality of war cannot be even imagined by anyone who has not been there,” says Deane Marks. “You see none of this in the movies. Only from a poor sucker infantryman can you learn what it is like, and the infantryman will very seldom talk about it." O’Donnell catalogs the cost of war through men who processed mind-breaking horrors in different ways. One had such nightmares that he nearly strangled his wife in his sleep. Others pushed it down and got on with living, never thinking or talking about it until they spoke with O’Donnell. Some told him things they’d never told anyone. Some spoke to him the day before they died. All were changed. “I started going down the roster,” says Jack Sheridan of his visit to an ad hoc military cemetery on Iwo Jima, “and it included most of the men I served with in the 1st Battalion. I was one of the very few that survived. So I found a quiet place and I cried. I still cry about it.”

What stands out, though, is not so much the horror but the capacity to absorb it without losing humanity. Not everyone did, but more held onto who they were. Andy Amaty dismisses the idea that the Japanese were inhuman beasts: “I'm one of the few to capture them alive. One of them was an officer who was taking care of a corporal. To say they didn't care for life was a fallacy.” Jack O’Brien fetched a priest for a dying Japanese soldier who had studied in the United States and converted to Catholicism. Harry Clark bore the weight of killing without allowing his heart to harden: “It's terrible to find out the name of somebody you killed...At my age I'm forgetting so many things, but the last thing I'll ever forget is Ryuki Yanigara.” You’ll find here men who dragged wounded comrades down beaches to safety, crossed kill zones to save their friends, and gave the last full measure of devotion to get their buddies home.

Memories like these are valuable for those of us who’ve never known such terrors and, may it please God, never will. To understand, even through a book dimly, the cost of war is a step toward understanding the value of life — and perhaps toward valuing the lives hidden by our screens. For those of us who are Americans, we must also remember that these men fought for something greater than empire and more enduring than hatred. America today is a faltering giant, unsure of its identity and wracked by partisan diseases. But the same heart still beats, however strongly or faintly, in the rhythms of an idea: that all men are created equal. The story from “Into the Rising Sun” that most reminds me of this is Grant Hirabayashi’s. He was a Japanese-American man whose family was interred in one of the camps for citizens who had committed no crime more serious than looking like the enemy.

Hirabayashi enlisted as a way out of camp, and left for the front confused and angry. Here he was on a train, off to fight for a country that put his family behind barbed wire and pointed machine guns at them. Then a conductor treated him and his uniform with courtesy and respect, and Hirabayashi says, “It changed me. It made me realize I was a soldier and I had a mission to fight the enemy.” Later, while serving as an interrogator, he confronted a Japanese officer who accused him of betraying his people. Hirabayashi’s response represents the best ideal of his country, an ideal he clung to even as his family suffered through a partial collapse of our commitment to the equality of every person. “Wait a minute,” Hirabayashi said to a man who sneered at him as a race traitor. “If we were to cut our wrists, maybe the same blood would flow out, but I'm an American. I'm an American soldier.”

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

My dad served in the Pacific during World War II so I chose this book to give me a glimpse of what it was like for him. The book describes the war in the Pacific as “a war without mercy” and the accounts that the soldiers give of combat there prove that to be true. It was the most savage and brutal theater in World War II and it was the experience of the Pacific theater and the last battle of World War II in Okinawa that led to the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My dad was to have gone to Okinawa but ended up on the small island of IE Shima where the battle for that island paralleled in time and brutality the battle for Okinawa. The book does a good job of describing the war strategy and tactics in the Pacific but what I was most interested in was the “boots on the ground” individual accounts of the men who served. The book conveyed well the brutality of the war and I feel helped me when combined with my dad’s diary understand better what he experienced.

[Michael Flanagan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book covering the U.S.A's marine's involvement in the Pacific theatre of war during WWII. Patrick O'Donnell has personally collected first hand accounts of those involved, some never told before. All the major battles are covered, with a great overview of each.

The individual stories overlap seamlessly to weave a timeless story of the horror’s, sorrow and courage of war.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II's Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat by Patrick K. O'Donnell is based on the author's research including hundreds of personal interviews taken over a decade of the soldiers and marines who were there going from one island to the next as they pushed the Japanese back towards their homeland. This is not a "big picture" book about war strategy and campaigns but a personal view of the violent nature and the brutality of war from those on the front lines fighting a fanatical enemy in the Japanese soldier similar to With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge; it puts you right in the middle of the action as they saw it happening around them. They were dealing with an enemy willing to do anything for victory, from kamikaze flights to human-guided torpedoes. Over the course of the war, Marines, paratroopers, and rangers encountered D-Day-sized beach assaults, cannibalism, friendly-fire incidents, and endured torture as prisoners of war. They claim no glory for themselves. As one soldier put it, "When somebody gets decorated, it's because a lot of other men died." By at last telling their stories, these men present a hard, unvarnished look at the war on the ground. Only with these accounts can the true horror of the war in the Pacific be fully known. Together with detailed maps of each battle, Into the Rising Sun offers a complete yet deeply personal account of the war in the Pacific, and a ground-level view of some of history's most brutal combat.

[Dee Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audible.com 9 hours 15 min. Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach (A)

This book is a wonderful collection of the personal stories of the men who fought in the Pacific Theater from Midway, Guadalcanal, the Solomon Islands, Burma,the Philippines, Iwo Jima, ,and Okinawa. Most are stories by Marines and Army "the boots on the ground" who reveal old memories that O'Donnell has captured for posterity. My dad was a Marine who served in the Pacific. After the war he lived only 18 years and died from cancer.. I never had the opportunity to hear of his experiences, and he never spoke to my mother about them. In listening to these stories, I find myself learning about the war he never spoke about. I am proud of the men who fought, died, were injured or returned with unseen scars in order to preserve America's freedom.

[Laura McGinley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t call this a particularly enjoyable read which is why it took so long to finish. However these men are telling their stories, some for the first time, and they are stories that people need to hear about the realities and difficulties of war. This book is written as a series of stories that each veteran individually told as an interview with the author, who did a great job compiling the stories and giving us context. You can practically hear it in their voices. Many are disturbing and hard to read and you can’t have anything but respect for these men. That is the primary reason I had to give this book five stars. It’s important and took a lot of courage for these veterans to open up, and I believe it should be our duty to listen.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book, filled with diverse accounts from soldiers and Marines who served in the Pacific theater. I usually find this style less appealing, as some authors directly transcribe veterans' speech without much editing. With all due respect to veterans, I prefer authors who refine and enhance the narrative for better readability. I hope my preference is understandable. What made this book more enjoyable for me was the historical preface before each chapter, which summarized many of the battles in which the interviewed veterans participated. Regardless, I am pleased to have read it and appreciate the inclusion of numerous Army experiences from the Pacific, which are often underrepresented.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Into the Rising Sun: In Their Own Words, World War II's Pacific Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat by Patrick K. O'Donnell is the true story of men who fought in the Pacific region. O’Donnell interviewed hundreds of brave men who served their country in a time of need. I enjoyed hearing about their stories, their valor, and their sacrifice. Some of the book was hard to read. The stories of savagery was most challenging. But the book is good, well documented and well told. I recommend this book.

[Sher · Rating 4 out of 5]

“You can’t handle the truth.” That is the way I felt reading this book. It is a very hard read! These former WWII soldiers finally, towards the ends of their lives, open up some very personal feelings about what happened in the South Pacific at that time. It was not pretty. In fact, it was down right ugly. War is hell, there is nothing else that can be said. The only redeeming factor was the great love these soldiers had for one another, and often, the tender feelings they had for their enemies. But it was kill or be killed, and these survivors chose to kill. What a choice!

[Matias Myllyrinne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great series of American front line soldiers’ experiences from the war in the Pacific Theater. Grounded and no glorification of the horrors of war, if anything understated and factual - chilling and moving at the same time.

No grand strategy or larger context is provided. This is well in keeping the view in the individuals and their experiences but is not for those looking for a political or strategic perspective. Recommended reading for military history readers.

[Aaron Borunda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very detailed collection of first hand accounts of soldiers in the pacific theater. Since it follows multiple people you get to read a wide range of some of the most graphic accounts. Each chapter starts with setting up the background information of a specific battle, then goes into the memoirs of soldiers from that battle.

If you like Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, he uses a lot of excerpts from this book in his shows. It

[Patsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

War memories from survivors of the war in the Pacific preserved from individuals some nearly 60 years after. It is so important to collect these events for the future. However, some of the events are not for the faint of heart to read. I had many family uncles who were in Europe and/or the Pacific in WWII. This helps to understand why some were never the same when they came home.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a work of oral, not narrative, history, you have to approach this book with a different mindset than something like Ghost Soldiers. But if you make the mental shift, this is a fascinating and moving collection of the recollections of some of the men of our greatest generation. A first hand look at the experience of combat in the Pacific Theatre.

[B.H. Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was detailed and harrowing account of the war on the Pacific from the men who were there… many parts were difficult to read. These men experienced so much that is truly difficult for those of us who have never lived in wartime to understand. I am thankful for all these men went through for the freedoms we have today.

[David Engel · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thirst of personal stories of WWII veterans was thoroughly slaked by this book. Also, I appreciated the chapter overviews covering the portion of each campaign in the chapter with maps, not only of the battlefields, but the location of each veterans account. I am amazed at these soldiers and marines endurance of abject brutality and depravation.

[Jeff Pollock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection of retrospectives. Somewhat limited in scope given its focus on veterans of "elite" units, but the accounts contained are vivid and organized in such a way as to construct a solid narrative that is often lacking in such works.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know they say war is hell. This book does an great job of describing hell.

My Dad was a veteran of WWII. He served on the USS Texas. When I grew up, I knew a lot of the older men had served in WWII, and I have no idea what they saw. It is amazing to me, how many of these men turned out to live productive, and what seemed like happy lives. How they could do that, after what they saw, and lived through?

[Robert Hopwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t like a lot of first hand accounts of battle, they can become too tedious and bounce around, if that makes sense. I thought the author of this book did a great job of putting everything together, it probably helped that the people he interviewed had years to reflect on their experiences.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brutal book but very important to history. My grandfather is briefly mentioned in the book, he was a paratrooper and served in the pacific. He did not like to talk about it so don’t know much about what he had to endure. This was very eye opening and broke my heart.

[Nate Hendrix · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only person who might write a better oral history would be Stephen Ambrose. Books like this really give one an idea of how the soldier in the field lived day to day. O'Donnell add enough overview so that the history is clear, but it is the men's individual stories that make this book shine.

[Bruce Cline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raw, ugly, disjointed, grisly, sometimes horrific, many times heroic, and roughly told — undoubtedly much like battle. This definitely is not a smoothly told tale of warfare, but that was not the author’s intent.

[Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moving stories told by those who lived through the Pacific war. O'Donnell employs an effective technique of prefacing several interviews with an overview of the battle in which they fought, invisibly sewing together separate narratives into a unified story.

[Nick Caminiti · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know it’s traumatic for these people to retell stories about the hardest times one can experience. But I’m so grateful for them, without books like these the real war wouldn’t be knowable and all we would have is the glorified Hollywood and basic “government approved” high school history version

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very well written book, but difficult to read. It shares the accounts of many of our veterans and what they experienced or witnessed. Sheer brutality at times.

Yet, it is important to know our history and these stories aren't told in school books or Hollywood scripts.