Pacific Theater

James P. Duffy | Fall 2017

Too often overlooked today, the New Guinea campaign was the longest of the Pacific War, with 340,000 Americans fighting more than half a million Japanese.

Jim Duffy is author of the recent book, War at the End of t

Remembering Ernie Pyle

Gil Klein | Spring 2020

The great war correspondent, who died 75 years ago during the battle of Okinawa, had a knack for connecting with everyday people, both on the front lines and at home.

Eavesdropping On The Rising Sun

Bernard A. Weisberger | Fall 2009

A young man from Queens jumps into the thick of World War II intelligence activities by translating secret Japanese messages

IN HIS MARVELOUS MEMOIR, Flights of Passage, my friend and onetime colleague Samuel Hynes, a Marine Corps combat aviator in World War II, writes that the war is the shared secret of his generation—those young men who came of age between December 7, 1941, and September 2, 1945.

World War II 1941 To 1945

Roger J. Spiller | November/December 2004

Those Yanks of World War II are white-haired now. Great-grandchildren play about their feet. The grand parades and great commemorations are over. Only a few monuments to their achievements are yet to be built.

My Father and I and Saburo Sakai

Francis R. Stevens, Jr. | December 1998

Half a century after his father’s death, he struck up an extraordinary friendship with a man who had been there

My quest began sometime shortly after World War II. I was a young boy when my maternal grandfather told me the story of how my father, Lt. Col. Francis R. Stevens, had been killed in the skies over New Guinea.

Farthest Forward

Dick Keresey | July/August 1998

Tough, nimble, and pound for pound the most heavily
armed ships in the U.S. Navy, PT boats fought in the very
front line of the greatest sea war in history. But even
today hardly anyone understands what they did.

One night in August 1943 PT-105 was drifting on station in the Solomon Islands—specifically, two miles southeast of Vella Lavella, three miles north of Gizo, and fifteen miles west of Kolombangara, all of which were enemy-occupied. As a matter of fact, other than the PT boat lying close on my port quarter and a couple of coastwatchers hiding out in the hills, there was not a friendly of any sort within fifty miles. My legs ached from hours of standing on a hard, constantly moving, sometimes bouncing deck.

Sea Dogs

William Galvani | October 1994

They padded aboard submarines and proved themselves steadfast in boredom and in battle. During the worst of war these canine mascots brought their shipmates some of the comfort of home.

SAILORS HAVE BEEN TAKING DOGS TO SEA SINCE A PAIR OF canines shipped out with Noah. Nevertheless, the picture of the floppy-eared poodle, looking as jaunty and confident as the young submariners who surrounded her, surprised me.

A Short Walk On Guadalcanal

Thomas Fleming | May/June 1993

J. L. O. Tedder missed the battle, but his peacetime pursuits are heroic enough

Every so often one comes across a writer who should be awarded the literary equivalent of the Victoria Cross or the Medal of Honor—one who gazes into the jaws of a hellish assignment and goes forward, resolute paragraph after resolute paragraph, knowing that there is no light a

The Biggest Theater

Edward L. Beach | December 1991

Revisiting the seas where American carriers turned the course of history, a Navy man re-creates a time of frightful odds and brilliant gambles.

Some memories are good and some bad, but the fact is that they change over the years. All of us who were part of it can recall how angry we were about the war against the Axis Powers. We were mad at all of it: Pearl Harbor, enemy atrocities, everything.

Four Months On The Front Line

Nikolai Stevenson | October/november 1985

A former Marine recalls the grim defense of Guadalcanal in 1942

July 1942. Winter in Wellington, New Zealand, brought long, slanting sheets of rain that drenched the U.S. Navy transports looming huge and dark along the city’s docks. The men of the 1st Marine Division labored around the clock to combat-load the ships.

Not Forgetting May Be The Only Heroism Of The Survivor”

October/November 1983

Years after one of the bloodiest and most intense battles of the war in the Pacific, a Marine Corps veteran returns to Tarawa

WAR IS A COUNTRY no traveler ever forgets. It haunts those who survive the journey as no other experience.

Culpable Negligence

Edward L. Beach | December 1980

A SUBMARINE COMMANDER TELLS WHY WE ALMOST LOST THE PACIFIC WAR

LIFE ABOARD

Ordeal At Vella Lavella

Walter Lord | June 1977

Tales From The Black Chambers

Clifford B. Hicks | April 1973

THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF CODES AND CIPHERS HAS PLAYED AN EXCITING AND OFTEN CRUCIAL PART IN AMERICAN HISTORY

By choice, cryptographers are an unsung and anonymous lot. In war and peace they labor in their black chambers, behind barred doors, dispatching sheets of secret symbols and reading encoded messages from the innermost councils of foreign governments.

The Marianas Turkey Shoot

Admiral J. J. Clark | October 1967

Japanese naval air power was wrecked at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, but, says a U. S. carrier admiral who was there, our Navy missed a chance to destroy the enemy fleet and shorten the war.

The Siege of Wake Island

John R. Burroughs | June 1959

An eyewitness account of the World War II battle in the Pacific.

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.

Catton, Bruce

Bruce Catton (1899 – 1978) was the Founding Editor of American Heritage and arguably the most prolific and popular of all Civil War historians. He wrote an astonishing 167 articles for American Heritage, and won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia. Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Gerald Ford, in 1977, the year before his death.

Commager, Henry Steele

A longtime member of the editorial advisory board of AMERICAN HERITAGE, Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) taught at New York University, Columbia, and Amherst College, and authored more than forty books. He first gained attention in 1930 as co-author, with Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, of The Growth of the American Republic, which became a standard textbook for decades. His anthology Documents of American History (1938) remained a widely used collection of primary sources for many years.

Dickson, Paul

Paul Dickson is the author of more than 55 nonfiction books and hundreds of magazine articles. Although he has written on a variety of subjects from ice cream to kite flying to electronic warfare, he now concentrates on writing about the American language, baseball and 20th century history. Bestselling books include: Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, The Hidden Language of Baseball, and The Joy of Keeping Score.

Dolin, Eric Jay

Eric Jay Dolin is a bestselling author of popular books on American history, maritime history, and the environment. His works include Fur, Fortune, And Empire, a history of America's fur trade, Black Flags, Blue Waters, about the history of pirating in America, and Leviathan, about the history of whaling in the U.S. His more recent book is A Furious Sky, which retraces 500 years of hurricanes in America and the impact they had on the nation's development.

Eisenhower, John D.

John D. Eisenhower, the son of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is a retired United States Army officer and the author of several books on military history. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium from 1969 to 1971.

Ellis, Joseph J.

Joseph J. Ellis, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf 2000), is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College whose work focuses on the lives and times of the founders of the United States of America.

Fleming, Thomas

Thomas Fleming is a longtime contributor to American Heritage and former president of the Society of American Historians.

Flexner, James Thomas

James Thomas Flexner (1908-2003) was most famous for his extensive writings on American art history and a four-volume biography of George Washington, for which he won a special Pulitzer citation. Flexner's other historical biographies include the one-volume Washington: The Indispensable Man, The Young Hamilton, Mohawk Baronet (Sir William Johnson, 1st Baronet), and The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John Andre.

Foner, Eric

Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians. One of the foremost experts on the Civil War, Slavery, Reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln, Foner's most recent book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, published in the fall of 2010, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2011.

Gates, Henry Louis

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, and the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He recently completed The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader (Basic Civitas Books, 2012), a collection of essays on history, culture, and African-American genealogy. Gates has hosted several PBS television miniseries, including the history and travel program Wonders of the African World and the biographical African American Lives and Faces of America.

Gordon, John Steele

John Steele Gordon has been a frequent contributor to American Heritage and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author most recently of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins 2004). Gordon's writing concentrates on business and financial history, and his 1999 book, The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000, was adapted into a two-hour CNBC special.

Gordon-Reed, Annette

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Professor of History and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.

Holzer, Harold

Harold Holzer, a frequent contributor and winner of a 2005 Lincoln Prize for Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (Simon & Schuster 2006), has written more than 40 books about the 16th president. He currently chairs The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2008. Holzer, educated at the City University of New York, first worked as a newspaper editor for The Manhattan Tribune, served as a political campaign press secretary for Congresswoman Bella S.

Lukacs, John

John Lukacs served as a Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College from 1947 to 1994, and is the noted author of over 30 books including:Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century, The Legacy of the Second World War and The Future of History in 2011.

Maier, Pauline

Pauline Maier was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at MIT. She primarily wrote on the American Revolution and Early Republic. Her book, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, was named as a top book of 1997 by the New York Times Book Review and was a finalist in General Nonfiction for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Her book Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 won the prestigious George Washington Book Prize in 2010.

McCullough, David

David McCullough is an author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and Francis Parkman Prizes.

McPherson, James M.

James M. McPherson, the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, is perhaps America’s foremost living Civil War scholar. Among his books are his one-volume history of the war, Battle Cry of Freedom, Lincoln and The Second American Revolution, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, winner of the Lincoln Prize in 1998.

Reynolds, David S.

David S. Reynolds is a literary critic and historian who has written fifteen books about American history, literature and culture. These include Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, John Brown, Abolitionist, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson and Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America.

Schlesinger, Arthur

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) was a historian, author, and political adviser who served as Special Assistant to President John Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. Schlesinger won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Age of Jackson. In 1966, Schlesinger won another Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. He was honored with a National Humanities Medal and a Four Freedoms Award before his death in 2007.

Tuchman, Barbara W.

Barbara Tuchman (1912 – 1989) was an American historian and author who first became known for her best-selling book The Guns of August, a history of the prelude to and first month of World War I, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963. She won a second Pulitzer for Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1972).

Watkins, T. H.

One of the foremost chroniclers of the American West, T. H. Watkins was an editor at American Heritage for six years and a long-time contributor. He also served as Editor of Wilderness magazine for fifteen years, and as Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University.

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