Gerald Astor - Crisis in the pacific: the battles for the philippine islands by the men who fought them

AT THE TIME of the fiftieth anniversary of the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, the outpouring of books on the subject occasioned an essay by Samuel Hynes, a Navy pilot during World War II and a professor of English at Princeton. He had written his own memoir, and he remarked that personal narratives of war generally aren't about emotions: they have to do with physical particulars, equipment, terrain and weather, sights, sounds and smells, the punishment the body takes from wounds, illness, hunger, heat, cold. Hynes indicated that if the authors intended to provide a feeling of how it was, then they would seem to have failed.

Having immersed myself in such individual accountsthis is my fifth book that tells of WWII through the words and memories of those who participatedI can vouch for the accuracy of Hynes's reading but not necessarily his conclusion. The details, the sights, sounds, smells, the physical sensations described by those involved do have a capacity to evoke in a reader at least a semblance of the feeling of how it must have been, a shudder of horror, a flush of exaltation, a mournful shiver. In some instances, the author does speak of emotions. But in my experience, words that focus on feelings create no more of an emotional response than descriptions of what happened. Frequently, the effort to recall sensations becomes an intellectual exercise, like attempts to capture in language the feelings generated by a piece of music or a painting.

The most common literary weakness of individual memoirs lies in an inability to separate out the details that have only a personal significance from matters that resonate with readers. This is the nature of the beast, war. An individual soldier, even a MacArthur, however heroic or brilliant, doesn't determine the course of modern war any more than a single person builds a cathedral. War is a group enterprise. The campaigns in the Philippines consisted of millions of acts by hundreds of thousands of people. A solitary human was submerged in the multitudes and buried under the weight of machines and technology. The man with the gun, even an artillery piece, was but a tiny spark in a long night rent by thunderous lightning. Although desperately concerned with preservation of the small self, a combatant's potential to build his story to a peak is destroyed by the absence of a crowning event. And for even the massive armies there was no last battle. The climax of WWII lay in the explosions of the A-bombs, but for the troops, the fighting just petered out. There was no decisive battle marked by some heroic act and that is certainly true of both the defense and liberation of the Philippines.