Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir Of The Pacific War (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
Here you have a tight, well-wrought first-hand account of a Marine’s experience at the Battle of Okinawa rendered in about 40 pages scattered throughout a nearly-400 page book. But it might be worth it, depending on your interest in the subject. When Manchester sticks to events that actually happened, he is taut and has a knack for turning a good descriptive phrase. As most combat veterans are, Manchester is self-deprecatory, but at his best, this doesn’t seem forced or inauthentic. For instance, here he describes his virtues as a Marine: “To be sure, I was not an inept fighter. I was lean and hard and tough and proud. I had tremendous reserves of stamina. I never bolted. I was a crack shot. I had a shifty, shambling run, and a lovely eye for defilade…coupled with a good sense of direction and a better sense of ground…” (p. 12). Notice how the fairly stock characterizations of a soldier moves to that wonderful “shifty, shambling run.” As a self-assessment, this could come off as bragging, but it doesn’t - it is clear-eyed. Good stuff, when he’s up to it. But what is not so good is an early version of the Greatest Generation shtick that became so prevalent in the 1990s. When his dander is up, Manchester can really lay it on with a trowel: “The United States was a different country then….the thought of demonstrating against the war, had it crossed anyone’s mind, would have been dismissed as absurd. Standards were rigid; everyone was determined to conform to them because the alternatives were unthinkable. Girls who became pregnant, or boys who cheated on examinations, were expelled from school and cast into outer darkness…The bastion of social stability was the family. Children were guided, not by radar beams picking up trends and directions from other children, but by gyroscopes built into their superegos at home….” (pp. 246-247)This sort of third-rate wishful thinking, including botched fragments of Freud and stridently simplistic social commentary, blights the book. Manchester’s disgust with the current culture (the book was written around 1978) is manifest throughout, usually in the form of snide “Pepsi Generation” remarks that make him sound nothing but grouchy and narrow-minded in a 60s-era Generation Gap way. Yes, the World War II Greatest Generation made tremendous sacrifices, and accomplished the overthrow of the Axis. The biggest problem with Greatest Generation Fallacy is the enormous contradictions it is forced to ignore. Manchester often trashes his contemporaries when he is not waxing rhapsodic. For instance, although they were in imminent danger of Japanese invasion, New Zealand dockworkers went on strike just as the Marines were heading to Guadalcanal, forcing the Marines to load their own ships. At the same time, US Merchant fleet also went on strike, refusing to sail supply ships into a combat zone without increased pay. This caused supply shortages for the Marines already ashore. Not so great o’ generation, eh? But these were civilians. Yet Manchester’s contradictions extend to the military as well - the US Army comes in for a real drubbing, especially the 27th Division, which did not live up to Marine expectations on Okinawa, to the point where Marines taught local children to chant “27th Division eats shit!” Well, doggies were part of the Greatest Generation too - “Saving Private Ryan,” anyone? Hell, Manchester doesn’t like Navy nurses either! So what am I supposed to think, stranded here in the post-post-Pepsi generation? It’s as if the Greatest Generation was made up only of Marines. But that is not really the case either, for Manchester describes in great detail a sadistic sergeant and several incompetent Marine officers he served under. The sergeant fell apart during an artillery attack and had to be shipped home with shellshock. So as always, Greatest Generation rhetoric falls apart when it becomes clear it, like any generation, is made up of human beings, which is to say liars, thieves, saints, geniuses, nitwits, slugs, poltroons and heroes. In any case, when it comes to the Greatest Generation’s postwar accomplishments, it could be said they never quite lived up to their early promise. It was actually the FDR-Ike-George C. Marshall generation (born 1880s-1900 or so) that brought about the actual strategic planning, technological miracles, and political will that won World War II. Although the Greatest Generation, because of their youth, bore the terrible burden of having to do almost all of the fighting, it had little to say in how it was conducted in a larger sense. But after the war, as their elders passed from the scene (Eisenhower left office in 1960) started what could be seen as the Big Decline. Vietnam was often ineptly led by Greatest Generation World War II junior officers (Westmoreland), and Greatest Generation veterans from JFK to Gerald Ford ran things in the White House without great distinction, I think it fair to say. Meanwhile, a group of increasingly clueless Greatest Generation bluffers in Detroit scoffed at “Jap” cars and “Kraut” technology and we know where that kind of thinking got us. The 1960s Greatest Generation complaints of the Baby Boomers have been discredited in many ways, yet I have to agree with the hippies when they found “plastics” to be an unsatisfactory life goal, the “missile gap” a fraud, Vietnam a catastrophe, and the Cuyahoga River catching on fire an abomination. Okay, I am grossly oversimplifying here. But Manchester simplifies as well and I find it objectionable that he seems to think his generation was the last one to make sacrifices or know how to demonstrate love of country. Believe me when I say I have enormous respect for anybody who had to endure (or die) in a meatgrinder such as Tarawa or Okinawa. But what about Chosin, Tet or Fallujah or Kandahar? What about the Civil War generation? What about the fact that so far at least, the Sesquicentennial is best characterized as not really even happening. Well, the hallowed dead of Shiloh are long dead and let’s face it, mostly forgotten. And yet I don’t hear much by way of fond reminiscences from World War II vets - who are old enough to remember those last few Grand Army of the Republic or Army of Virginia vets sitting around on the courthouse steps. How about a shout-out to the boys in blue and gray who didn’t get to carry styrettes of morphine in their first aid packs or get plasma at the aid station, or penicillin, or the GI Bill…?There are other problems as well. The book consists of Manchester’s actual combat experiences, a general history of the War in the Pacific, and Manchester’s trip to Pacific battlefields in 1978. Sometimes his grim jungle plods with native guides get out of hand and Manchester makes it seem as if he had fought at places where in fact he did not. An author’s note at the end of the book straightens this out, sort of, but a lot of readers have complained about it (there is even a sheepish aside in Manchester’s poorly-constructed Wikipedia page). There seems to be some basic military history factual errors as well. Japanese “knee mortars” could not be fired from the knee, according to everything else I’ve ever read (it’d break your leg if you tried). Even in 1978, vet-captured samurai swords in dusty attics are not worthless junk (if you think so, please let me know and I’ll take them off your hands). When reporting on battles he was not present for, Manchester has a penchant for the combat scenario in which some intrepid Marine shouts something witty (or not perhaps as witty as Manchester seems to think it is) at a charging “Nip” or murmurs something poignant while being cradled in the arms of his gunny just before he dies. It is not that such things never happened, but there are so many such incidents salted throughout the book that it got to the point that I felt I was reading excerpts from the script for “The Sands of Iwo Jima” or some other period movie. A lot of the second-hand events started feeling apocryphal. Again, Manchester best conveys the pity of war when he sticks to his own experiences. This being said, in a couple of places he talks about his first hand experiences with women in such a way that made me cringe. Talk about gory! With a great deal of high-toned self-righteousness, Manchester describes in detail the Greatest Generation ethos of never talking about how far your girlfriend would let you go (Manchester refers to this as “foreplay” although that generally indicates a prelude to actual sex; he seems to be referring to “making out” or what used to be called petting, or getting to third base). He even gives an example of one of his frat brothers who said too much about his steady gal’s makeout techniques and was therefore ostracized by his brothers, apparently for life, a story I found so utterly unbelievable as to be comical (frat guys?). And yet despite his professed scruples, Manchester talks in explicit detail about two women with whom he has botched sexual encounters just before shipping overseas. One was a “nice” college girl he was very fond of but, after ruminating romantically about her for a few pages, feels compelled to mention how he got four fingers into her during a movie. His other sexual encounter is with the alcoholic wife of an Eighth Air Force guy who was already in England - that Manchester vigorously tries to screw her (it doesn’t quite pan out for technical reasons) is sheer hypocrisy on his part, given all the Greatest Generation blather he inflicts on the reader elsewhere. As Manchester describes her, the woman is such a slut that you could do whatever you wanted to with her (ah, the classic Greatest Generation double standard), but what’s worse than screwing the wife of a fellow serviceman? To make the sex stuff even worse, Manchester feels compelled to inform the reader that “I happen to be damned, or blessed, with outsized genitalia.” (p. 124) I think he meant “penis” but perhaps he had big balls too, which is to say that these sexual asides struck me as coarse at best, vulgar at worst and certainly unnecessary. There is one bizarre exception to the awfulness of the smut: Manchester recounts how he immediately masturbated after waking up in a shell hole after the rest of his squad had been obliterated by artillery. He was surrounded by detached limbs and viscera of his platoon and yet had to toss off. This struck me as weirdly apt and human in ways I cannot begin to articulate - that Manchester chose not to expound on the incident beyond merely reporting it is a testament to his occasional good sense. I wish he’d treated his girlfriends with such discretion. It’s not only women who get the Greatest Generation treatment. The sergeant mentioned above who collapsed during combat was later arrested for a homosexual act, illegal then, and sentenced to 85 years prison (standard Marine sentence for a homosexual act), something Manchester reports with gusto. He goes on to make it clear that the Marines were not charging the beaches for homosexual rights, but that, rather, the Greatest Generation was fighting for America. They weren’t fighting for desegregated schools either, I’d bet. Manchester’s attitudes are equally benighted when it comes to non-white people, women, the 27th Infantry Division, the merchant marine, rear echelon troops, and Navy nurses. Because of the horrors of what they endured, I’ll never complain about a PTO vet referring to, as Manchester does, Nips, Japs, buck teeth, bandy legs and “fanatic” (rather than heroic) banzai charges, but I can’t say such references demonstrate any sense of humanity or empathy for fellow, if enemy, combatants. Say what you want about the “Japs” - they were formidable soldiers of astonishing tenacity, discipline, and courage and they were often brilliantly led. Manchester too often seems to still consider them the “vermin” of wartime propaganda - again, I understand, given his combat experiences. But I wish there had been some recognition that such thinking is a product of the horrible experience and not something that is necessarily the best frame of mind to have some forty years later. Manchester is not one of those vets who goes to Tokyo to shake hands with the elderly pilot who shot him down over Luzon in ’44. But even the people Manchester presumably likes are not rendered particularly well in this book. The fullest, fondest portraits he manages are his parents. His father’s World War I experiences are harrowing, worse than his son’s since Bill, Sr. was crippled and died young. Manchester was obviously loved his parents very much, and indeed, they seemed like exceptionally good people. But everyone else is pretty much a blur. Manchester’s description of his platoon - the Raggedy Asses - is remarkably sketchy. He gives brief profiles of his men (he was platoon sergeant) that are occasionally deft and illuminating, but mostly they are an undifferentiated mass or else too much like the “melting pot platoon” featured in so many bad movies - the Jew, the big blonde WASP, the little shifty Italian guy, the Polish surname nobody can pronounce, etc. Towards the end of the book he gives a bullet-point run down of what happened to all of his men (many of them were killed). As poignant as this should’ve been, it felt merely tacked on, almost an afterthought as if Manchester was in a hurry to catch us up on his dead buddies before he rounds out his own grandiloquent, rhetorically incontinent search for personal meaning and peace. This being said, Manchester makes some very shrewd observations on what it means to be a platoon leader with the same training and about the same age (or even younger) than his command. Instant or even grudging obedience to his orders was not something he expected, especially in combat, which was interesting. Terror and lack of confidence in their leaders made Manchester and his fellow Marines somewhat...hesitant. Humoring your men to get them to follow an order was apparently a common strategy for Marine sergeants - hardly the way things were done in “The Sands of Iwo Jima.” The Marines were wise to be balky - their leadership was sometimes homicidally inept. At one point, an officer of Manchester’s acquaintance shows up while Manchester’s squad was pinned down after struggling ashore under fire. This gung-ho lieutenant tries to rally the men into a suicidal Pickett’s Charge frontal assault on Japanese pillboxes. Manchester pleads with him to wait for the flanks to do their job and eliminate these positions. The officer calls him a coward and tries to lead by example, climbing up over the seawall while Manchester and his platoon stay under cover. Within seconds, a Nambu stitches the officer chin to crotch (as Manchester describes it) and he is dead before he hits the ground. A few moments later, the flank assaults succeed in eliminating the pillbox and Manchester’s platoon moves forward safely. The most horrible thing about this story is that new recruits probably would’ve followed the inexperienced Lieutenant and been wiped out. This sort of thing seems to have happened to US forces a lot in World War II. Then there is the problem of Manchester’s prose, which is bafflingly inconsistent. At his best, he can write with concision and force (see that “shifty, shambling run, and a lovely eye for defilade” quoted above). At his worst, Manchester is capable of some of the purplest prose this side of the 19th century: “…Then there are the colors of the underwater rock: amethyst, scarlet, emerald, salmon pink, heliotrope, lilac, all as pale and delicate as those in the wardrobe of an 18th century marchioness. The very air has the sensuous feel of a rich, soft fabric. You sense that you are approaching Eden, or an Eden run amok, a land so incredibly fertile that its first heady scents, as you wade through he restless, lacy surf, have the effect of a hallucinatory drug. (new paragraph, for no apparent reason) The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach in their ordered rows like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses, simpering in the zephyr that never quite dies while sunlight, piercing their leaves with the playful malice of a Persian cat, splashes the ground in ever-changing patterns of light. Inland from the endlessly pounding surf…” (p. 89)“Endlessly pounding headache…” You should thank me for not quoting one of his tropical sunsets! These cloying swatches of purple not bother me as much as his ongoing dogged efforts to find “closure” with his past via the rather unconvincing haggard spectre of the younger Sgt. Manchester that kept making appearances, silently disappointed in the aging civilian Manchester and making significant ghostly gestures. Worse than the grim, ghastly, ghostly sergeant is a sexy, beckoning, decaying Whore of War, a hallucination told in such slathering maggoty crotch-rot detail that Stephen King would blush. Manchester goes on and on about his dreams too, but I mostly skipped that stuff. The problem with “closure” of any sort (Manchester does not use this awful word, only because it hadn’t really been invented (in the contemporary sense) when he was writing this book) is that it too often comes across as forced or unconvincing. And Manchester did not need to go to such efforts and when he does so in this book, it cheapens what he was trying for. His descriptions of his Okinawa experiences, rendered with real force and economy, made it very clear that anyone who has endured such terrible things is never going to find “closure” of any sort, really. After reading the book, I got the definite impression Manchester knew this and I wish he’d just stuck to his story.
William Manchester sounds to be the source of much of today's ambivalent confusion about war, and is writing a fact filled, yet soppy emotional memoir / history of compelling stuff. Writing in 1978 or thereabouts, he illustrates perfectly a Me Generation dream sequence which is absent the conviction of necessity. Manchester writes as if, and clearly you can hear it in his articulation, the war was a great revelation to him and thus to everyone. In this regard he displays a kind of shocked naiveté, as if the two World Wars were something just invented for his father and himself, custom-made to drive him to madness. So he deals with repressed memories, and the shock of being amidst the random chaos and violence, and the amazement of how empty such places were after the war. Manchester plays the role of the callow youth experiencing war, trying to deal with cowardice and bravado, and how neither of these simple expressions of manhood seem to have much to do with who dies and who survives the brutalities of the Pacific theater. A sergeant trying to lead men, who develops through sheer luck, an ability to survive the horrors of jungle warfare on extremely remote inhospitable islands. The book serves as my first look into the complexities and the battles of the Pacific. Ask me yesterday and I might have said, Iwo Jima, Midway and Pearl, but now my understanding has been extended a great deal. Recognizing how close the Japanese came to Australia was a great revelation of the book, as well as the parallel drives northward of McArthur and Nimitz. The change in tactics by the Japanese and their all-consuming drive for victory as Dai Nippon has given me a new appreciation for why they were so hated by the Chinese. The devotion of many Pacific island natives to the Americans was something you never hear about, nor the primitive manner in which they lived and how Dai Nippon forced them into labor. The Solomons, the Marianas. It may be because he also wrote extensively about McArthur and Churchill that his own experience as recounted in this book seems to define so well many of the anti-war sentiments of the a man who clearly absorbed the import of the counterculture in American life. He ends the book describing the traditional values of the America he grew up in as if they were long gone and never to return. He so concludes that he fought for the equivalent of an instinct for his fellow soldiers, all of whom possessed a logic in defense of things that no longer exist in the modern world, which only goes to demonstrate how mashed up in the illusory narrative he became, all the while railing against its ignorance through the book. It is this tension between the personal in the context of Manchester is nothing if not an intelligent and articulate master of languages and betrays the kind of respect for it that makes all of his descriptions of dialect and war era terminology quite a treasure. Terms erased by polite and cowardly conventions spell truths that defy historical revisionism stand out everywhere in Manchester's writing. In reading this book you are submerged in a way of speaking American English that has all dried up into today's yuppy-speak. It's useful just to read the book aloud to experience something genuine. Manchester thus is at war with Hollywood and American ahistorical ignorance as well as with his former self. This book is an absolute necessity.
What do You think about Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir Of The Pacific War (2002)?
Wondering and unfocused best describes this book. The author admits to as much in his notes at the end of the book. This isn't a bad thing entirely, but there are moments where I found myself wondering if he was going to get back on track within the next 10 pages of the book. The book is a cathartic work for Manchester, which explains the wandering nature. It's his purge of emotion that actually makes the book worth reading; he pulls no punches and rounds no rough edges. You get an excellent portrayal of the war in the Pacific. The problem is that he chases explanations of historic matters that are only tangentially related to the topic. I caught myself wondering where the story was headed on multiple occasions. It isn't terrible, but it is distracting. His writing style is very enjoyable, and the book has definite value for anyone interested in understanding this soldiers view of the horror that was the fighting in the Pacific theater of operations in World War II. However, it lacks behind Eugene Sledge's "With the Old Breed," in that regard. Sledge's book, also a cathartic personal work, is one of the greatest books on the true impact of war that I've ever found.
—Doug Mader
This author is nothing short of brilliant in his previous work on General MacArthur "American Caesar". In this book he is clearly trying to ward off the personal demons that had haunted him from the time of his being wounded and finished with war during the Battle for Okinawa. What is interesting is he follows the Second World War in the Pacific by chronologically attending to each major battlefield/island to which American Marines and Army service men fought. With other well written authors of Robert Leckie, and Eugen Sledge, William Manchester brings more information to light. Unlike Leckie and Sledge I did get a sense (or feel)that Manchester had some sexual hangups he never quite got over - this is evident in this book but not in "American Caesar". Later in 2013 I will be reading all three volumes of "Last Lion" as Churchill is a hero to me. This book gets 4 stars because I think people unaccustomed to reading about the PTO during the Second World War will likely find it slightly confusing with all the island hopping (though Manchester does his utmost to alleviate this) and most Americans have more common knowledge of the ETO than they do the PTO. The PTO was a different war all together than what had been fought in Europe.
—Gerry
Except for the part about Okinawa I would have given this a "0." Just terrible--inaccuracy after inaccuracy on every page. It's inconceivable to me that this man is a historian. But more than that, it is filled with fabricated incidents, recounted in great detail, as if the author had participated in them. It's only in a note at the end of the book that the reader learns that the author did not serve on Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Peleliu, or Iwo Jima. He only served on Okinawa--and that's more than enough! And when he writes about the two months in combat he served there before being wounded so severely he was evacuated, his writing becomes intense and sincere. Why did he write all that other crap, leading the reader to believe he served where he didn't and did things he didn't do? It's stupid. And also a huge insult to the reader. The ridiculous LA Times blurb asserts the book "belongs with the best war memoirs ever written." Really LA Times? Really? It was bad enough when I was muttering to myself, no, Roosevelt didn't deliberately lure the Japanese into attacking the US; no, there were no P-40s on Guadalcanal in September, 1942; no, there isn't a village named Nakasoni on Guam; no, Hirohito didn't say "Hell is upon us"--Osami Nagano did; no, improperly field-stripping a BAR will not cause the recoil spring to rip your throat out (I asked!)..., but when I learned that all the detailed descriptions of his experiences were completely fictional--and he just adds it as an "oh, by the way" codicil--for crying out loud. I want my money back. No, more than that, I want my time back, the emotional energy I invested in this book--I want it all back.Even the blurb about the book here in Goodreads says, "Manchester visited those places in the Pacific where as a young Marine he fought the Japanese." No, he didn't. He didn't! He writes as if he did, but buried in a waffling, weaselly 340-word paragraph deep in the Author's Note at the end of the book is the acknowledgement that he only saw combat on Okinawa.It's very rare that I feel a book cheated me, that I get mad at a book...the book's author...but both are true with "Darkness." It's bullshit.And that's a shame because, as I say, the part about Okinawa is really good...assuming it's true. Why, why, why didn't Manchester just stick to that? Post ScriptThe scene in which Manchester describes an observation plane being destroyed by flak during the Okinawa campaign--which I thought was very effective and added to Manchester's quotes--appears in Away All Boats, the 1953 novel by Kenneth M. Dodson. Granted, Dodson writes about it as part of the Kwajalein campaign and Manchester rewrote it some. But it's clearly the same episode, and it seems pretty clear to me that Manchester snagged it from Dodson. So now I don't know whether to believe any of what Manchester wrote about Okinawa. Who else did he crib from? He should have just written a novel in the first place.Incidentally, Dodson's book is amazing.
—Wanda
